when compared to the fathomless joy

When Compared to the Fathomless JoyCarl Halling

Book One Hypo or the Journal of a Hypothyroid Male Introduction Hypo or The Journal of a Hypothyroid Male was compiled in 2014 - and subsequently extensively edited - from various sources, mostly emails, on the internet and elsewhere, and could have been a lot longer, given the near-plethoric wealth of these same sources, and so may - or may not - merely be the first of a series of such journals. Part One A Pre-Diagnosis Journal To a Christian Source Pre-diagnosis 31/03/2010

I seem to have been given a bit of a bashing by the Enemy, and I can't shake off negative thoughts once they come into my head; they seem to lodge themselves in there. Which makes socialising difficult. I'd so appreciate your prayers. God willing I'll give you a call very soon. Thanks again. God Bless You. To a Medical Source Pre-diagnosis24/05/2010

Sorry to bother you, but I recently had some tests at my local clinic and was told that my prostate was mildly enlarged. I was also told I had slightly raised liver enzymes. Another medical specialist told me I should look further into this, which is why I'm contacting you, although you may not be able to help me; I thought of having some further tests privately: I feel my local NHS clinic have done all they can; they assured me I was pretty well and that nothing was even remotely serious. But for myself, I'd like to probe further. I was wondering how much it might be for a preliminary appointment, if that is on the cards. I look forward to hearing from you. To a Friend Pre-diagnosis06/07/2010

Extreme intelligence can make you introvert; because you see through things. This is not noticeable in youth; but in age, that intelligence becomes more sharp, brittle, penetrating: this can result in withdrawal from life and its thudding banalities. To a Friend Pre-diagnosis09/07/2010

...the writing won't come...the energy won't come...the sleep won't come...the work won't come... To a Christian Source Pre-diagnosis26/10/2010

I love your site; it's so powerful. I'm so glad David Wilkerson gave you his prophetic prayer/blessing; I'm such an admirer of his. Glad to see the Wesleyan Revival given its due in The Final Curse; also the early Church; God bless it! I'm still haunted by my pre-Christian past: I endlessly weep over my mistakes, not just those of my past, but of the past week...I'm so glad you say God can and does free people of their pasts: I'd love to be free. I'm going to keep reading at your site. Wow! Such exciting material. Thank you. God bless you. Part Two A Post-Diagnosis Journal 2011 To a Christian Source17/10/2011

Thank you so much for your e-mail regarding my prayer request, and for praying for me, I was very sick for a while, and I feel I am slowly recovering now, and being delivered from the terrifying feelings of faintness and dizziness. I re-read your e-mail today; and it's amazing to me to read that you rebuked the Spirit of Fear in the name of Jesus, because I myself prayed against fear this afternoon. And I feel fear may have been significantly at the bottom of my condition. Thank you so much for such a truly wonderful, powerful prayer. To a Christian Source13/11/11 Dear friends, please pray for me. Until recently, I was reasonably well, but I've been diagnosed with low thyroid production (hypothyroidism), and am suffering faintness and dizziness. Also I've a slightly enlarged prostate. I've been suffering sleep difficulties; and even recently, breathing difficulties. Please pray for a miracle of healing for me. Thank you and may the Lord bless you. To a Christian Source16/11/11 Thank you for agreeing to pray for me. For some strange reason, I'm unusually sensitive, one might say telepathic: this may be a legacy of past occult involvement. The upshot is that I've ended up sick, with thyroid deficiency, and other complications including faintness and shortness of breath. I'm seeing a physician about it - of course - but I'd love to think I might be healed by God, and would be very grateful if you'd pray for me, as I'm not taking this sickness well. I'd very much appreciate your prayers. Thank you and bless you. To a Christian Source17/11/11 Thanks once again for reaching out to me; and with some wonderfully encouraging Biblical passages, you have no idea what it's meant to me during this period. You are right, I tend to underestimate the sheer depth of God's love and imagine he will cut me off for offending him: I have worried about the Unforgivable Sin and was fretting about a cut off point, as in “My spirit shall not always strive with man.” I've done and said some awful things since becoming a Christian, and yet by experience I know I've always been forgiven; so I shall try to accept that. I've said thank you to God for forgiving me; and thank you Jesus. Sometimes I just can't comprehend the depth of such love, but then I'm only mortal. Thanks again...I am very grateful to you for all your help. You've been very kind. God bless you. To a Christian Source18/11/11 Hi, and thank you for your e-mail, which was most gratefully received. I'd say the anger was very significantly a question of not being able to accept and forgive myself for becoming sick with a burned out thyroid; so I took it out on the world. At my worse, I can give in to uncontrollable emotions. But this anger has died right down in the last day or so. It's hard to credit the kind of love you describe as coming from God: I tend to be of the mindset that if I offend God enough, his spirit shall not always strive with me, and I will have crossed a line into unforgivable sin territory. I've never thought that telepathy can be a gift from God; and yet looking at my gift, for the most part it's been a positive thing. I've received communications in dreams of people in distress, and been able to prepare myself to comfort them. I've also received what I consider to be portends of possible trouble. I'm grateful to you for making me realise that telepathy is not necessarily a negative thing; I'd never thought of it that way. I don't have any occult books left in my house, in fact I destroyed all of them when I became a Christian 18 years ago; although I have a lot of Rock recordings, which may have a negative influence. Although none of the artists are overtly dark. But I'm still discovering pieces of paper from my past which are scrawled with occult symbols, although I think they are few now. But I could have one last purge. But I have done some self-deliverance in the past and renounced all my past occult involvement. I'm still I admit struggling with God forgiving me; but I hope that will change in due course of time. Thank you so much for writing to me; you have no idea how much it means at this time. I pray the Lord blesses you for it. God bless you. To a Christian Source18/11/2011 As I said in my last e-mail, I've started on a very low dosage of a drug called L-thyroxine for my hypothyroidism. I'm not sure what effect it's having on me, because it's so low, but I did feel it boost my system somewhat, a little like a lot of caffeine; but no bad side effects, praise God. But I'm still suffering from the faintness and dizziness and sense of unreality which I see as part of a general breakdown of my health. Again, thank you and bless you for reaching out to me at my time of need, I so appreciate it. I look forward to hearing from you tomorrow. God bless you. To a Christian Source

19/11/11 Dear friends. Please pray for me for a miracle of healing. My thyroid has ceased functioning, and I'm on medication. Also, I'm suffering from panic disorder, faintness, dizziness, and shortness of breath. Can the Lord help me or is it His will not to heal me? I've begged and prayed. Thank you and bless you. To a Christian Source19/11/2011 For some strange reason, I'm unusually sensitive, one might say telepathic: this may be a legacy of past occult involvement. The upshot is I've ended up sick, with thyroid deficiency (I'm on medication for that), and other complications including faintness, dizziness, shortness of breath, sense of unreality, sense of numbness. I'm seeing a physician about it - of course - but I'd love to think I might be healed by God, and would be very grateful if you'd pray for me: is there any way of prophetically discovering what might be amiss and what might be the solution because apart from the thyroid deficiency, tests have revealed me healthy. Thank you and bless you. To a Christian Source23/11/11 Dear friends. I've been praying incessantly for help, but I'm still plagued by hypothyroidism, dizziness, faintness, panic, nightmares, anxiety, fear of dying. All I've been diagnosed with though is hypothyroidism. Can anything be done for me? Please help. To a Christian SourceCa. 23/11/11 Hi friends; I'm too sick to get into a service right now; but would welcome prayer for hypothyroidism, anxiety, panic, terror, terror of dying, faintness and dizziness. As soon as I'm well enough I want to come in and receive some prayer in person. In the meantime, I'd be so very grateful for some prayer. Thank you. God bless you. To a Christian SourceCa. 28/11/11 I'm pleased to read that healing is still for today. I've prayed a lot to be healed myself, and asked others to pray for me to be healed of diagnosed hypothyroidism and panic disorder, and subsequent dizziness, faintness, sense of unreality, fear of unconsciousness and death, fear of going out, and public places; but so far I remain unhealed. Please could you pray for me to be healed, and I'll receive it by faith. I'd be most grateful. Thank you and bless you. To a Christian SourceCa. 30/11/11 Please pray for me. For about two months now I've been suffering from panic attacks, dizziness, faintness, sense of unreality, terror of unconsciousness/death, all probably related to the hypothyroidism I was recently diagnosed with. I'm on medication (Levothyroxine), and in constant touch with doctors; but the symptoms remain, and I'm so desperate, given that I've barely been ill in all my 56 years; and I've prayed and prayed, but remain housebound, unable to seek healing or even work, struggling every day to the supermarket in order to eat but barely able to buy anything so fierce is the dizziness. I'm longing for a miracle of healing. I'd be so grateful for your prayers. God bless you. To a Christian Source7/12/11 Hi, could you pray for me for a miracle of healing please, because I've reached a crisis. First (about 2 months ago) I was diagnosed with panic disorder, then an underactive thyroid. I suffer panic, dizziness, faintness, weakness, weeping despair almost every day, so much so I've become housebound and can no longer even seek work or attend church, and there seems to be little or nothing that can be done for me. My physician says the panic and faintness are not associated with my thyroid. But I've prayed and prayed for healing, but nothing has occurred and I just don't know why; I feel as if I'm in a hellish halfway house between life and oblivion. God bless you. To a Christian Source7/12/11 Hi! I haven't been able to make it in for some time due to having been afflicted by various illnesses, first being diagnosed with panic (syndrome, I think); then an underactive thyroid (hypothyroidism), the consequence being that

I've been suffering from panic; dizziness; faintness; sense of unreality; and occasionally also, tightness of chest, laboured breathing; breathlessness; palpitations. I was wondering if anyone can pray for me for a healing miracle. What I'd really love is to receive hands on healing prayer; but so far I'm not up to making it in to church. I look forward to hearing from you. God Bless You. To a Christian Source15/12/11 I'm in Surrey, although quite a way from you. But were it possible I'd arrange for an appointment for some Christian counselling. I'm a born again Christian of 56 years old, and a few months ago after feeling more or less fit and fine and healthy and productive for years, I started suffering panic attacks and was diagnosed with panic disorder. Then I was diagnosed with low thyroid production. And recently, with an anxiety disorder. The latter is really debilitating, and involves poor sleep, frequent sense of unreality/panic, which is scary, and a fear of collapse or worse in public places, which makes it almost impossible for me to be outside. So I've been more or less housebound for over two months. I've been wanting to get into church, because I believe in the gift of hands on healing; but that is not possible as things stand either. Also...when/if I ever get well enough I feel I could benefit from some Christian counselling, that is of course, if you feel I could too. My doctor is convinced to the nth letter it's a psychological disorder; not a physical one. What I'm worried about is...never getting better...being stuck in this twilight world forever. It's a scary thought. I was just wondering what your opinion might be? I'd be very interested in hearing what you think. Best Wishes and God bless. To a Christian Source18/12/11 I used to attend a Vineyard church, back in the mid 1990s, in Whitton, Middlesex; I was still very young in the faith then, and it was an amazing time with so much happening. I was especially impressed by your bold assertion of the continuance of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit; and the vital importance of healing the sick, caring for the broken and so on. The main reason being I'm pretty sick and broken myself right now, and feel I could greatly benefit from some hands on healing prayer. What happened is that a few months ago, I started suffering from severe panic attacks, and was diagnosed with panic (disorder); and then, low thyroid production (hypothyroidism), and an anxiety disorder, possibly Generalised Anxiety Disorder. Recently, I've been feeling utterly hopeless, feeling I'll never be well again, and have been spending large amounts of time in bed sleeping and reading. I'm unemployed; but I desperately need to make money; and have not been to a church service in months. I've had a lot of prayer by e-mail and telephone, but the sense of faintness/unreality, and fear and panic remain. I feel what I need - if I can summon the strength and courage to rouse myself - is some face to face hands on healing prayer, and was wondering if you could help me in this respect, and let me know (if it's possible) where/when I might be able to receive some. I'd be very grateful. Sorry to send you such a long and bleak message, but I'm desperate, and what I read at your site gave me some real hope in my hopelessness. I look forward to hearing from you. God bless you. To a Christian Source18/12/11 I hope you don't mind me writing to you, but I was very excited by what I read of KGC for the very first time today, and wanted to get in touch, especially as some years ago, I visited the London Church international, and was very impressed by what I saw. I'm intending to come along to a service possibly in the new year if I'm well enough. The problem being some 3 months ago or so I started suffering from frightening and debilitating panic attacks, and was diagnosed with panic (disorder); and then, low thyroid production (hypothyroidism), and an anxiety disorder, possibly generalised anxiety disorder. I've had a lot of prayer by e-mail and telephone, but have not felt better yet; and am more or less housebound with panic, sense of unreality and so on. I feel certain KGC maintains, as I do, that Healing is in the Atonement, and feel I might benefit from some face to face hands on healing prayer, the Lord willing, and was wondering when might be a good time to receive some through KGC. I'd be very grateful for all counsel. God bless you. Part Three A Post-Diagnosis Journal 2012 To a Christian Source4/1/12 My dear friends in Christ. Please pray for me for healing from thyroid disease (hypothyroidism), anxiety disorder including light-headedness, fear of blacking out, general fear and low spirits, poor sleep and nightmares, social avoidance, and consequent inability to work and earn money. Thank you and bless you. To a Christian Source8/1/12

I was wondering if you could pray for me to be miraculously healed by the Holy Spirit of several afflictions, including low thyroid production, poor sleep, social avoidance, anxiety/panic, constant light-headedness and sense of unreality. Could you please? I hope so because I'm pretty desperate and weak. Thanking you in advance. God bless you. To a Medical Source11/1/12 The filling is doing well; I forgot all about it within hours; so thanks so much for that. The antibiotics are keeping the abscess at bay, although I feel they have a fight on their hands as it were. But there's no pain at all, thank goodness. Hopefully by the end of the week, the swelling will go right down, if not, I guess I might have to keep taking the antibiotics. God willing, I'll call towards the end of the week about that; and the possible appointment for the root canal treatment we discussed. All the very best and hopefully speak to you soon. Best Wishes. To a Christian Source23/3/12 Hi, I was looking at your web site regarding the Unforgivable Sin. And I was moved to write. I've been through a terribly hard time now for about six months. I'm a 56 year old born again Christian male who's barely been sick in their entire existence, and who - fit and slim - looks about 15 years younger than their age. But prior to becoming a Christian, I was an alcoholic, and had bad experiences with alcohol and prescription drugs. It began with me suffering feelings of faintness and panic last September 2011, and fearing I'd die. It got so bad I could barely make it to the supermarket and back. My doctor diagnosed Panic, and suggested I take a blood test. This revealed a thyroid disorder (hypothyroidism), and I was put on Thyroxine. I still struggled with the faintness which was variously accompanied by tightness of chest, shortness of breath, palpitations. I thought I was getting ready to get heart trouble and shuffle off this mortal coil, for real. My doc also later suggested I was suffering from an anxiety disorder. My suffering has been compounded at various times by abscessed gum, toothache, sore tongue, mouth ulcer, and medication issues. I've honestly felt at times I was crumbling to pieces, and have struggled to eat, especially as I've five top teeth missing as it is. But these issues have all more or less cleared up by the Grace of God, and the faintness has also receded. Other good news is that my thyroid has levelled out, and my health is otherwise pretty good, with my blood pressure normal to low. But my problems have taken their toll. I'm sleeping poorly, and I've barely been to church in 6 months because of my issues. I feel terrible guilt about this. And recently, while I was putting the final touches to an extraordinarily fiddly task on the computer at home, something went horribly wrong, and I feared weeks of work would be ruined. I'm volatile at best, and inclined to wild mood swings, but this sent me almost berserk, and I said some awful things. I've been so miserable, fearing I've crossed a line with God. I couldn't repeat what I said because I'm so ashamed of it. I just can't believe God could forgive me this time...especially as I feel He's been warning me about staying away from church, and getting too deeply involved with worldly activities. I feel that had I been in better spiritual shape I'd not have spoken as I did. I do this repeatedly, and God forgives me each time, but I've never spoken as I did this time...and fear that I've finally gone too far. Is there any hope for me? I'd be so grateful for any words of comfort to me...God bless you. To a Medical SourceCa. 7/12 Thank you so much for writing to me in response to my enquiry about Levothyroxine, As to why I prefer taking 4x25 mcg, as opposed to 1x100 mcg, I'm not certain. It may be that I got used to taking the four, and my system didn't like the adjustment to the 1x100 mcg; or it may be simply psychosomatic. From what I understand though, to be happy with Levothyroxine, the balance is quite delicate, and has to be gotten just right, so that a single 100 mcg tablet may vary very slightly with regard to 4x25 mcg. But then I'm just guessing. Again, thank so much for writing back to me, I appreciate it.

Part Four A Post-Diagnosis Journal 2013 To a Christian Source4/4/13 Please, please pray for me for thyroid disease (hypothyroidism); severe sleeping difficulties; depressive issues; sporadic low spirits, tiredness, lack of energy, lightheadedness/dizziness; possible raised blood sugar levels; enlarged prostate and related issues; skin problems (rash/tinea cruris). Thank you and bless you. To a Friend03/10/2013 I'm just emerging from a horrific experience involving an allergic reaction (to what I have no idea), which caused my left forearm to burn a deep red; at one point it seemed like I was itching virtually from head to toe, it was maddening. I

was originally prescribed anti-histamines. Then the arm swelled, and I was told some infection had set in, and was put on antibiotics, with a steroid cream helping to heal the burning skin. The arm is starting to respond at long last; so as I say I may be fine for the 7th; but another Monday would be safer. I'm so sorry. I seem to be beset by health crises don't I after about a half century of near-unbroken good health. I do feel a certain sense of not being terribly robust; and it may be my past catching up on me at last. So...I was just wondering if next Monday has been confirmed or not; of course it all depends on how quickly I heal, which God willing I will... To a Christian Source5/11/2013 Dear friends, I'm struggling with the concept of God's forgiveness; and sometimes feel I'm too “bad” to be forgiven (until proven otherwise): Indeed I'm writing this in a mood of concern for my recent behaviour. For some time now I've had many problems. Including health problems such as - occurring at various times - hypothyroidism and probable attendant symptoms such as depression, mood swings, lack of energy, lightheadedness and debilitating sleep difficulties, suspected enlarged prostate and attendant discomfort, skin problems including discoid eczema, itchy allergic hives-like skin complaint, including at one stage infection requiring antibiotics, tinea cruris. I also suffer from social withdrawal, and consequent financial difficulties. I'm periodically prone to moods of deep regret and even at times desperation over my health difficulties, and perceived lack of success in life. Yet strangely for the most part, I'm subject to cheerful hopefulness, gaining enormous strength from my Christian faith, and can be bouncy and happy go lucky for absolutely ages. While these moods are prominent, I'm also prone to sudden changes of mood, and descents into melancholia...often occasioned by ill health. I struggle to stay well, being subject to all manner of minor issues, stemming from insomnia, anxiety and other setbacks, and can often feel run down, sickly and fluey, even weak and shivery. At times such as these I fear terribly for my health; I can be a terrible baby and coward. I can cry out in rage and despair; not to anyone, just out into the air as it were. And afterwards, I feel so desperately and deeply saddened that time and time again despite not meaning to, I take it out on God, the person most likely to be hurt by transports of rage and pain. My question is: Can God forgive? I so often feel no; that I've gone too far, and these feeling occasion me sorrow; so: does repentance truly bring forgiveness? Or can a person become too “bad” for hope. Thank you. To a Christian Source6/11/13 Regarding your essay on negative thoughts, it barely occurred to me that it was a common Christian problem; I've always felt so guilty about them, and solitary. I find myself struggling with my thoughts, and being in some sense dominated by them. It's not uncommon for a negative and destructive thought to slip into my mind, although I immediately regret and disown it. I might have a thousand positive thoughts, but it's this one negative one that will prevail. Try as hard as I might, I'm unable to neutralise it, and it seems to assume a force all of its own; so that I have a sense I'm no longer in control of my eyes. I claim responsibility for the situation, even though I've gone to colossal lengths to deny, refute the thought, as well as the fleeting feelings behind it. This situation isn't rare, but incredibly common, and it's contributed to a strong reclusive tendency in my case. I feel it's the Enemy behind this “thought question” of mine, and although I endlessly pray for it to be resolved, it remains a source of torment for me. It seems I can't help but be destructive, even while the most well-meaning of men, and yet one endlessly harassed by - if not negative thoughts - then the possibility of their appearing, and assuming a life of their own. It feels reassuring to realise the extent of the battle for our thoughts. And that there might be a solution. To a Christian Source17/12/2013 1.Dear Pastor, I'm struggling with the concept of God's forgiveness; and sometimes feel I'm too “bad” to be forgiven (until proven otherwise): Indeed I'm writing this in a mood of concern for my recent behaviour. For some time now I've had many problems. Including health problems such as - occurring at various times - hypothyroidism and probable attendant symptoms such as lack of energy, light-headedness and debilitating sleep difficulties, suspected enlarged prostate and attendant discomfort, skin problems including discoid eczema, itchy allergic hives-like skin complaint, including at one stage infection requiring antibiotics, tinea cruris, and most recently, a long drawn out cold. Yet strangely for the most part, I'm subject to cheerful hopefulness, gaining enormous strength from my Christian faith. Yet, if I was honest, I have a drastically limited capacity for physical suffering: I can cry out in rage and despair when sick; I take it out on God, the person most likely to be hurt, and say awful things. My question is: Can God forgive? I so often feel no; that I've gone too far: does repentance truly bring forgiveness? Or can a person become too “bad” for hope, I mean in the light of such concepts as the Unforgivable Sin. Thank you. 2.

Thanks so much for your reply to my question, I really appreciate it, it's a joy to hear from you. I'm delighted you've seen my Face Book and Blogster pages, and have enjoyed them. I'll definitely be taking a look at your Blog, and Face Book page; and a closer look at your main site too. Re. being too “bad” to be forgiven, I feel that way sometimes, and it's more often than not related to the physical conditions I mentioned in my last email. You make a very interesting indeed fascinating point about the connection between my health problems and my behaviour: I've often thought that maybe the main source of my health problems, my thyroid disease, has at least partly come about as a result of my behaviour. I had many warning signs about losing self-control and so on, but I ignored them and have paid the price. But I do believe God can heal. Yes, taking it out on God comes as a result of my sufferings. I have a very weak capacity for physical suffering, and get mad at God when it gets particularly bad. I seem to have become obsessed by them, and made some kind of idol out of trying to stay physically well. Which isn't good. But I feel very cheered by what you say about repentance, that it's never too late to repent. So this is what I'll do; and trust that God will forgive me, although sometimes I wonder how He can. You've been a great help, believe me, it's always a joy when a fellow Christian takes the trouble to reach out: many Christians today are isolated what with the internet and so on, as well as physical sickness &c., and I believe online prayer, fellowship and so on to be a very precious ministry. Thanks again, God bless.

Part Five A Post-Diagnosis 2014 To a Christian Source03/01/2014 1. Hi. Ever since I became a Christian over 20 years ago, I've had an easy ride I'll admit it; good health, minimal persecution, and so on. But in the last three years, I've undergone what could be called character-testing perhaps recalling that which once characterised Job. It all began with a flare-up of the skin disease tinea cruris...hardly serious. This being succeeded by prostate issues, suspected benign prostatic hyperplasia to be precise. Then I started suffering severe panic attacks, which may have been an indicator of hypothyroidism, with which I was diagnosed, and placed on daily medication. And there followed a host of symptoms possibly related to this condition, including at various times, palpitations; breathlessness; night panics; a general sense of sickness; intermittent panic/light-headedness, as I struggled to get my medication just right. And thanks to God, this is indeed the case, although I have to stick to my routine, or I can be out of sorts for months, which has been the case a good few times. But my ordeal didn't end there. For several years now, I've experienced severe sleep difficulties. And I've also suffered serious dental problems including an abscess; and an infection at the root, both requiring root canal treatment. As well as skin problems, including the previously mentioned tinea cruris; together with discoid eczema of the lower legs; and more recently, acute urticaria or hives, which at one point resulted in an infection requiring antibiotics, and afflicting at various times, my shoulders, back/lower back, groin, and both arms. As if to make matters worse, I recently suffered a viral infection which lasted several weeks, and which was especially tough to bear combined with the skin issues. All this said, I could be a lot worse off, and none of what I've suffered has been truly life-threatening. But...I have been sorely tested; and in my view, not reacted well. I've in fact demonstrated to myself just how weak my character is. But the fact remains, I've no capacity for physical suffering whatsoever, and have an appalling temper issue, as well as a dread of death. And I'm wondering if God can forgive me for all this; or whether I've been weighed and found wanting. Does the Bible indicate God always forgives when there is genuine repentance, or is there a point when God says: “My Spirit shall not always strive with man”, and even if a person repents with tears as Esau once did, God will not listen? 2. Firstly, thank you so much for your most encouraging and compassionate reply to my message. Yes, I make positive remarks about my condition, although of course when I was at my most desperate about it, I saw little positive in it. But on reflection, I realise there are those far worse off than me, who have suffered, and still suffer, far more silently and bravely than me. But I'm delighted and encouraged you are amazed by such positivity. I see what you mean about the guilt; but the fact remains I still feel great guilt about my lack of self-control; not just in terms of how I reacted, but of how I might react in the future, knowing what I do about the weakness of character I mentioned. But I'm pleased to think David and Job might feel similarly to me. In truth though it wasn't in prayer I expressed my anger, so much as in anguished crying out and so on. I'm still disgusted by it. But I'm encouraged to believe/hope my repentance is genuine, unlike that of Esau, who may have merely been upset about the worldly consequence of losing his inheritance. Pretty futile, given the brevity of life. I'm also encouraged to believe/hope that I can develop more character so when affliction comes again I can exercise more self-control. I prayed the prayer right along with you...thank you so much for that, and I paid particular attention to the fact that we are “called according to his purpose.” So nothing we say or do takes God by surprise! I believe I can be healed, and that process has already started, in so far as my skin condition is being slowly brought under control thanks to the help of the doctors of my local clinic; and my viral condition has cleared up; God be praised. So I'm feeling a lot better generally. Thank you again for your reply to my message; I'm working to get closer to God again, and praying I be forgiven for my recent behaviour. Most gratefully.

Book Two

From Dame Janet Baker to Eric Liddell: Twenty Four Treasures of Albion 1. From Dame Janet Baker to Jack Wild: Ten Musical Treasures of Albion Dame Janet Baker, born Yorkshire, 1933, retired mezzo-soprano who specialised in the works of Elgar, Mahler, and Britten, as well as sacred music, and Classical and pre-Classical opera, but who was also a surpassing interpretor of French melodies, the songs of Berlioz, Faure, Duparc, Chausson, Debussy, Ravel, being surely among the - if not the - most perfect ever composed. Al Bowlly (1899-1941), born Mozambique of Greek and Lebanese parentage, and raised in South Africa, Albion's first great vocal stylist. Very much England's answer to Bing Crosby and other seminal American crooners, he possessed a truly beautiful and charming soft-baritone voice, which, matched by the Mediterranean good looks of a matinee idol caused him to be known as The Swoon of the Thirties, adored and pursued in equal measure. He made his London debut as a singer in 1931 and was killed ten years later at the height of the London blitz by the explosion of a parachute mine outside his apartment. Gary Clark, born Dundee, Scotland, 1961, singer-songwriter with a crooner-style baritone voice - one of the finest in Rock history - that is arguably every inch the equal of Scott Walker's, and former leader of the desperately undervalued trio, Danny Wilson, who produced two hyper-melodic masterpieces in Meet Danny Wilson (1987) and Bebop Moptop (1989), before dissolving at the height of their artistic powers. Whereupon Clark embarked upon a career as a solo artist, and songwriter and music producer for other artists. Nicky Holland, born Hertfordshire, 1965, pianist, composer and singer-songwriter who studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and who, after co-writing songs with Roland Orzabal for '80s superstars Tears for Fears' final album, Seeds of Love (1989), and for American soul singer Oleta Adams' Circle of One (1990), released her self-titled first album, a beautiful work whose mournful and passionate songs of endless romantic desideration demonstrated a very rare creative gift, in 1991. Her second, Sense and Sensuality, being released six years later in 1997. Paddy McAloon, born County Durham, 1957, front man and kingpin of Prefab Sprout, the legendary Indie band that achieved so much so soon, with five albums in just a little over six and a half years, namely Swoon from '84, Steve McQueen, '85, From Langley Park to Memphis, '88, Protest Songs, '89 and Jordan: The Comeback, '90, all of which gave testament to a compositional gift that place him among the greatest songwriters Albion ever sired. A further five, including the largely instrumental McAloon solo work, I Trawl the Megahertz, and late-flowering masterpiece, Crimson/Red, being released in the succeeding quarter century or so. Ken Moule (1926-1987), born Barking, east London, pianist, composer, conductor, and arranger, whose works include Toad at Toad Hall, and the Adam's Rib Suite, an innovative yet shockingly overlooked Jazz suite recorded in 1970 by the London Jazz Chamber group featuring the Patrick Halling String Quartet, and Jazz Legends Kenny Wheeler, Roy Willox, Louis Stewart, Lennie Bush, Ronnie Stephenson and Moule himself, and characterised by infectiously rhythmical Smooth Jazz pieces alternating with slower semi-classical passages of a melodic richness reminiscent of Debussy or Ravel. Gilbert O'Sullivan, born Raymond O'Sullivan in Waterford, Ireland, 1947, but raised from the age of 11 in the highly urbanised Wiltshire town of Swindon, brilliantly original singer-songwriter, discovered playing in a wine bar by impresario Gordon Mills of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck renown. Massive worldwide success ensued, including in the US, with such exemplars of the songwriting craft as Alone Again (Naturally), Clair, and Out of the Question, as well as the albums, notably his masterly debut, Himself, and while his superstar status may have ultimately faltered, the songs never did, neither in quantity, nor quality. Brian Protheroe, born Salisbury, Wiltshire, 1944, actor and singer-songwriter, who secured a UK hit record in 1974 with the haunting and languorous Pinball, taken from the flawless masterwork of the same name, the first of several albums bespeaking quite transcendent melodic and lyrical gifts. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), England's greatest ever composer, and yet still undervalued compared to other Romantic and late Romantic composers. A simple man of a genially rustic demeanour, he was far too self-effacingly English to value his own work, which had a detrimental effect on his reputation as a great composer. Renowned for exquisite pastoral music based on English folk songs, including Fantasia on Greensleeves and the sublime The Lark Ascending, but there was far more to his genius than those supremely English pieces: he composed nine symphonies

that are still under-appreciated, as well as oratorios, operas, concertos, chamber music, songs etc. Yet, Albion's own beloved Vaughan Williams was recently voted number 30 on the list of the 100 Greatest Classical Composers. Jack Wild (1952-2006), born Royton, Greater Manchester, cherub-faced actor and singer. Played Jack Dawkins the Artful Dodger to absolute perfection in the 1968 film version of Lionel Bart's Oliver based on Dickens' Oliver Twist, arguably the greatest film musical of the last five decades, before becoming a millionaire superstar and teen idol through the cult comedy series, H.R. Pufnstuff. With immense and touching fortitude, he successfully battled both alcoholism and cancer, to become a happily married Born Again Christian man in his early 50s, only to succumb to mouth cancer aged just 52. 2. From Anthony Andrews to Gerry Sundquist: Ten Histrionic Treasures of Albion Anthony Andrews, born Finchley, London, 1949, award-winning actor perhaps best known for having delivered what was arguably the finest and most hauntingly powerful performance ever in a British television drama series as the tragic Catholic aristocrat Lord Sebastian Flyte. This in the masterful 1981 TV film version of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, adapted by John Mortimer, and directed by Michael Lindsay Hogg and Charles Sturridge. And more recently for having played Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in the Oscar-winning 2010 historical drama, The King's Speech. Peter Finch (1916-1976), born West London, underrated British-Australian actor of immense charm and sensitivity, most famous for having won a posthumous Academy Award for Best Actor in Sidney Lumet's Network (1976), while his finest work remains comparatively obscure, such as the haunted, exquisitely modulated performances he gave in Ken Hughes' The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and John Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). Dame Celia Johnson (1908-1984), born Richmond, Surrey, actress of unconventional sad-eyed beauty, whose performance in David Lean's Brief Encounter, one of the most romantic films ever engendered by the melancholy isle of Albion, is a masterpiece of repressed Anglo-Saxon passion. Primarily a stage actress, she was knighted for her services to the British theatre in 1981. Kevin Lloyd (1949-1998) born Derby, Derbyshire, actor brother of the television journalist Terry Lloyd,killed in Iraq in 2003. Best known for the role of portly moustachioed detective DC Tosh Lynes in Britain's longest running police drama series, Thames Television's The Bill, he began his career as a strikingly attractive stage actor in Joe Orton's What the What the Butler Saw, and with the Bristol Old Vic and RSC, following his tenure at the East 15 drama school. Tragically, he lost a long battle with alcoholism in 1998, predeceasing his brother by almost exactly five years. Gerry Sundquist (1955-1993), born Manchester, one-time histrionic wunderkind whose screen credits include Alexandria... Why?, directed by Youssef Chahine, and the British Saturday Night Fever, Ian Sharp's The Music Machine, both from 1979, and who for television played Michael Radlet in the 1979–80 adaptation of Catherine Cookson's The Mallens, and Pip in Great Expectations, directed by Julian Amyes in 1981, among other major roles. It could be said that circa 1977, Sundquist was, in much the same way perhaps as fellow northerner Peter Firth, the quintessence of the gilded young actor of infinite promise. And as such was conceivably foremost among the forerunners of later generations of English actors of beauty and brilliance when they themselves stood on the brink of glittering international acting careers. Although he was operating in an era in which the latter arguably didn't enjoy the kind of high profile they do today in Hollywood, and so was perhaps prophetic of things to come. While being symbolic of a deeply tragic aspect existent within the nature of actorly aspiration insofar as the degree of success presaged by his early career failed to materialize as it might have done, while befalling so many of his successors. 3. From John Wesley to Eric Liddell: Four Christian Treasures of Albion John Wesley (1703-1791), born Epworth, Lincolnshire, co-founder of the Methodist movement, who while never disassociating himself from either The Church of England nor the Reformed tradition, went against the grain of both in certain extremely vital respects. His emphasis on personal Holiness went on to exert a colossal influence on the evolution of Pentecostalism, and of course the Holiness movements that preceded it. These included the Salvation Army, and the lesser known Church of the Nazarene. Both are spiritually Wesleyan in so far as they uphold such doctrines as Conditional Salvation, or the ability of the Believer to make a shipwreck of his faith and so lose his or her salvation...which runs contrary to traditional Reformed or Protestant theology; and by Wesleyan, I mean Arminian, after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. And few men in history have done more for the Arminian cause than England's own beloved John Wesley. But rather than any lukewarm variant, Wesley's was a truly Biblical Arminianism with a powerful emphasis on personal Holiness, the very type, in fact, that was bequeathed to several generations of churches up to and including the early Pentecostals. It lives on to this day among Classical Pentecostals of every stripe, not least those of the Alliance of Biblical Pentecostals...as well as various fundamental Arminian groups including the Fundamentalist Wesleyan Society, and the Society of Evangelical Arminians. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885), born London, missionary, philanthropist and social

reformer. Ceaselessly, selflessly and tirelessly campaigned on behalf of the mentally ill, mill workers, mine workers, women labourers, climbing boys (apprentice chimney sweeps), even brute beasts, such was the extent and depth of his compassion for the exploited and marginalised of Victorian Britain.

David Livingstone (1813-1873), born Blantyre, Scotland, missionary, explorer and sworn enemy of slavery. Sought to make the Western World aware of Africa, and to expose the Slave Trade as "the open sore of the world". On one occasion, such was the passion and power of his sense of rightness and justice, Livingstone cut some cruelly bound slaves free after having single handedly chased a horde of traders away. Died on his knees in prayer by his bed aged 60 in northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). His devoted African friends accorded him the longest funeral procession in history. Eric Liddell (1902-1945), born Tianjin, China, Chinese-born Scottish missionary and Olympic running champion, beautifully portrayed by Ian Charleson in Hugh Hudson's Academy Award-winning 1981 movie, Chariots of Fire. As depicted in Chariots, he refused to take part during the Paris Olympics of 1924 in the heats for the 100 metres, and the 4x100, and 4x400 relay races, which were his best events, as they fell on Sunday and doing so would have conflicted with his deeply felt belief as a Christian that Sunday is a sacred day set aside for God. But he went on to win a Gold medal for Britain in the 400 meters, breaking the world record in the process. Almost two decades later while serving as a missionary in his beloved China, Liddell entered a Japanese internment camp where he died soon after his 43rd birthday in January 1945.

Book Three

Rock and Roll and the Youth Tribes of Albion

That Totemic Year

Again and again, 1955 is cited by cultural commentators as the year in which things started to change in America and the West.

When it comes to Britain, there seems to be no doubt that within the space of a mere two generations, a spectacular rise in criminal violence from the low rates of at least the previous two centuries, occurred from about 1955. This same rise

coincided with increasingly large-scale denigration of such traditionally sanctified Christian institutions as marriage, pre-marital purity and the two-parent family, which had always been seen as the enemy by various revolutionary

tendencies within art and politics, while being respected by the majority, and affected every industrial nation apart from Japan.

The truth is that far from being a unique historical event devoid of precedents and precursors, the post-war cultural revolution, whose repercussions continue to be felt throughout a tragic broken West could boast historical roots

reaching at least as far back as the European Enlightenment. Since that time, the Western World has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judaeo-Christian moral fabric, and the Counterculture of the 1960s was simply the

culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since the First World War.

Thence by the time of the Hippie revolution, much of the groundwork had already been done, not least during the two immediate post-war decades.

During this brief 20-year period, the Existentialists, Lettrists and Beats became international icons of revolt...Britain's first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Edwardians or Teddy Boys...a cinema of youthful discontent

flourished as never before, fuelling a desire among many young people to be identified as rebels and wild ones...and Rock and Roll took over the world with Elvis Presley as its first true superstar.

Even the Beatles Themselves

In the still relatively innocent Britain of early 1963, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five -

even the Beatles themselves - were quaint and wholesome figures. They fitted in well in a nation of Norman Wisdom pictures and the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, sweet

shops and tuppeny chews. But it wouldn't be long before the Rolling Stones, the band with the outlaw image that contrasted so violently with that of the four lovable moptops, started threatening the Beatles' position as Britain's

number one Pop Group.

Pop Transmuted into an Art Form

Rock was Pop transmuted into an art form, while somehow including Pop as its less intellectual counterpart. It included both Soft and Hard Rock, as well as the sophisticated Art Rock of acts and artists as diverse as the Beatles,

Frank Zappa and the Doors, and the out and out Progressive Rock of Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

For Rock was split into two categories...Underground and Commercial. The latter being pure Pop, whose domain in the UK was the hit parade featured weekly on the long-running TV programme, Top of the Pops.

The Underground, on the other hand, was composed of acts and artists who made music largely for the growing album market. And there were those among them, such as Led Zeppelin, who never graced the singles chart despite earning

fortunes through concerts and album sales. But it was Frank Zappa (and the Mothers of Invention) who arguably more than any other artist

originated the genre; although the notion of Rock as art had evolved by degrees in both Britain and America, with both the Beatles and Bob Dylan being especially influential in this respect.

Yet while both Britain and America served as the cradles of Art Rock, Prog was characteristically British, with King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Gentle Giant and Genesis going to serve as early exemplars. And in keeping with its position within the rebel music of Rock, its lyrics often inclined to a darkness of tone which was characteristic

of much of the musical Underground of the late 1960s. Speaking of which, from about 1972, Prog set about returning to the Underground whence it emerged. And from there,

set about influencing acts and artists within a vast diversity of genres, including Glam, Jazz Rock, New Wave, Post-Punk, and Alternative, in fact, one might go so far as to say it's been ubiquitous ever since.

But a new Rock revolution was underway in the shape of a heterogeneous mix of Rock and Pop allied to an outrageous androgynous image. Ultimately known as Glam Rock, it had begun to infiltrate the British charts as early as '71, while

making little impact on the US, despite the fact that several of its pioneers were American.

During the Glam Rock Epoch

The mid to late sixties witnessed an extraordinary explosion of androgyny on the part of the Western male, which served to pave for the way for the Glam Rock movement, pioneers including the Rolling Stones, the band that

effectively invented the genre, the Kinks, Barrett era Pink Floyd, early Soft Machine, and Alice Cooper.While 1972 could be said to be the year in which the androgynous seventies really began, as the excitement surrounding the Alternative Society and its happenings and be-ins and love-ins and free festivals and so on started to fade into recent

history.

What a time it was, a time of constant, frenetic change in the wake of a social revolution that had been all but bloodlessly waged only a few years before.

In the UK, Glam swept a host of musicians who'd been striving for major success since the early '60s to fresh levels of stardom. Such as David Bowie, Elton John and Rod Stewart. For all three had first appeared on record as part of the

British Blues Boom...Bowie and Stewart in '64, and John in '65; and despite being idolised at the height of Glam, they continued to be admired as serious album artists.

What a time it was, a time of constant, frenetic change in the wake of a social revolution that had been all but

bloodlessly waged only a few years before.

For there were two major strands of Glam in its heyday of ca. 1971- 73, one being allied to the consciously artistic tradition of Progressive Rock, the other, to the purest pure Pop. And among those acts and artists affiliated to the former were David Bowie, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band; while the latter embraced T. Rex, the Sweet, Gary Glitter, Slade and Wizzard. While there were many more who either flirted with the genre from

within the confines of Prog, such as the Strawbs, or existed on its fringes, such as Silverhead.


As to stateside Glam, pioneered primarily by Alice Cooper, it went on to include such cult icons as Iggy Pop, Lou Reed,

the New York Dolls, Jobriath and Brett Smiley; as well as singer-songwriter, Todd Rundgren, a serious candidate for the most gifted Rock artist of all time. While several major acts were briefly touched by it; such as Aerosmith and Kiss,

but it would not be until the 1980s that Glam entered the American mainstream in the shape of Glam Metal.


Glam had been carried into the UK mainstream by one Marc Bolan, ne Feld, who had been featured in 1962 in a

magazine called Town, as one of the Faces, or leading Mods, of the Stamford Hill area of North East London. Although by then he'd moved with his family to a council house in Summerstown near Wimbledon. He went on to achieve major success as one half of the acoustic duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex; the other being multi-instrumentalist Steve Peregrin Took

who, like Bolan, was a leading figure of London's Hippie Underground centred on Ladbroke Grove.



But In 1970, Took was replaced by percussionist Mickey Finn, who shared Bolan's love of old-time Rock and Roll. And as T. Rex, they had their first top 5 hit in the shape of Ride a White Swan. And by the time of their first number one the following year, T. Rex were a four-piece band, with Bolan the biggest British teen sensation since the Beatles. While the Bolan phenomenon was dubbed T. Rextasy by the British press...and all throughout the land, bedroom walls were

adorned with Bolan's fascinating elfin face.


The cult of androgyny was a powerful force in Britain in the early '70s, having been incubated first by Mod and then

Flower Child culture, as well as Rock acts such as the Stones, the Kinks, Alice Cooper, T. Rex and David Bowie. Furthermore, it was reinforced in the cinema by several movies featuring angelically beautiful men. And yet, you still took your life into your own hands if you chose to parade around like a Glam Rock star in the mean streets of London

or any other major British city - to say nothing of the countryside - and therefore few did.


There were popular songs by acts such as Slade and Gary Glitter that were like football chants set to a stomping beat; while even former skinheads were now sporting shoulder length hair. The golden age of the long-haired boot boy had

lately come to pass. It was as if the spirit of Weimar Berlin with its unholy mix of violence and decadence had been resurrected in stuffy old

England.


As the '70s proceeded apace, Glam receded in terms of influence, although it would be revived in the '80s through

American Glam Metal, and the British Goth and New Romantic movements; and still exists to this day. However, given the extent to which the West has become inured to outrage, its power to shock has been reduced to zero.



A Languid Cafe and Cabaret Culture

When such Glam acts and artists as David Bowie and the Sweet had first appeared on British television in full make up around 1972, doubtless there were those undilutedly masculine British males who were moved to revulsion and rage.

Yet by about '74, Glam could be said to have shed much of its revolutionary potency. But by the time it had done so, it had effectuated a minor sexual upheaval by making male androgyny more acceptable than ever before. And it did so in

defiance of the Bible's strict delineation of the sexual roles, and prohibition of any form of cross dressing. But while it had entered the mainstream as Teenybop Pop, an avant-garde form persisted, and there were those artists

around 1974–76 who appeared to share a love affair with the languid cafe and cabaret culture of the continent's immediate past.

Among these were established acts such as David Bowie and Roxy Music, and newer stars such as Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel; and Ron and Russell Mael of strikingly original LA Band, Sparks.

Some of Roxy's followers even went so far as to sport the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures indeed in mid-seventies London.

And the persona Bowie adopted in 1976, and which he enigmatically dubbed The Thin White Duke could be said to have been the apotheosis of this romantic Europhilia.

The Legacy of the Soul Boys

The Soul Boys' love of black dance music was a legacy of the Mods and Skins that preceded them.

While the Soul Boys themselves were largely working class dandies, some were in fact not Soul Boys at all, so much as elegant trendies with a penchant for floppy college boy fringes, plaid shirts worn over white tee-shirts, straight leg

jeans, and winklepickers. And these were the kind to be found at such sumptuous places as the Sombrero on Kensington High Street ca. 1977.

The Soul Boys also favoured the wedge haircut, which could be worn with streaks of blond or red or even green, brightly-coloured peg-top trousers and winklepickers or plastic beach sandals. Speaking of the wedge, it was taken up at

some point in the late 1970s by a faction of Liverpool football fans who'd developed a taste for European designer

sportswear while travelling on the continent for away matches. Thence, the Casual subculture was spawned, and the passion for designer sports and casual wear that was characteristic of its eighties adherents persists to this day among

British working class youth in urban areas and towns and shopping malls large and small all throughout the land.

The Violent Irruption of Punk

1977 was marked by the violent irruption into the British cultural mainstream of Punk. From its London axis, it spread like a raging plague throughout that landmark year, even infecting the most genteel suburbs with an extreme and often

horrifying sartorial eccentricity, which, fused with a defiant DIY ethic and brutal back-to-basics Rock produced something utterly unique even by the standards of the time.

It was genuinely dangerous being a Punk in the late '70s, and you lived in constant fear of attack or abuse if you chose to dress like one. After all, Punk's culture of insolence and outrage was extreme even by the standards of previous

British youth cults such as the Teds, the Rockers, the Mods, the Greasers, the Skins, the Suedeheads and the Smoothies.

Britain in those days was a country still dominated to some degree by pre-war moral values which were Victorian in essence; and so that in the year of Punk, some kind of cultural war was fought for the soul of the nation that Punks

constituted a cultural avant-garde in a way that would be impossible today; and that this fact goes some way towards explaining the incredible hostility Punks attracted from some members of the general public throughout '77.

However, no sooner had Punk taken off, than it was slyly supplemented with those very elements it was reacting against; as a generation of musicians sought to fuse the attitude of Punk with the artistry of Prog. And so the New Wave was born in the shape of a vast variety of acts and artists who while progressive in the truest sense, were content to ride

the Punk bandwagon all the way into the Pop charts. While New Wave threatened to supplant Punk at its crudest, other genres competed with it for the hearts and souls of

the sybaritic young. Such as Reggae, which was Punk's most serious rival as the music of choice for Punks themselves; and Electronica, which had been pioneered all throughout the 70s mainly by so-called Kraut Rock acts such as Can,

Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. But that Soul mutation, Disco, was its true competitor.

You Knew New Wave

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

Perhaps you became a Rockabilly Rebel for a time, inspired by some contemporary Hep Cat act such as the Stray Cats, who fused classic Rockabilly with a New Wave attitude, or embraced the Mod Revival pioneered by Franc Roddam's

film version of the Who's concept album Quadrophenia.

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

However, seminal New Wave band the Jam continued to fly the flag for the Mod Revival until 1982, when chief

songwriter Paul Weller formed The Style Council, who would not have been seen as New Wave in the UK, although they would have done in the US, but what precisely does it mean?

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le

bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

Well in Britain, it was used to describe a form of music which while flaunting a Punk Rock attitude was marked by a relative virtuosity perhaps intended to ensure its longevity.

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le


And given that such New Wave acts and artists as Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, XTC and the Police enjoy classic status, it was a canny development.

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le


The New Romantics - Post-Punk Dandies

The New Romantics were an initially nameless youth movement whose origins lay in the late 1970s, largely among discontented ex-Punks, but who were eventually dubbed Futurists; although it was the New Romantic tag that stuck.

Their music of preference included the kind of synthesized Art Rock pioneered by German collectives such as

Kraftwerk and Can, as well as the highbrow Glam of David Bowie and Roxy Music. All of these elements went on to inform the music of Spandau Ballet and Visage, who emerged from the original scene at the Blitz Club in Covent

Garden, and Ultravox, a former New Wave band of some renown whose fortunes revived with the coming of the New Romantics.

The name probably arose as a result of their impassioned devotion to past eras perceived to be romantic, whether relatively recent ones such as the '20s or '40s, or more distant historical ones such as the Medieval or Elizabethan.

Ruffs, veils, frills, kilts and so on were common among them, but then so were forties-style suits. Several of the cult's more outlandish trendsetters went on to become famous names within the worlds of art and fashion.

They stood in some contrast to more harder-edged young dandies such as the Kemp Brothers from working class Islington. Their Spandau Ballet began life as the hippest band in London, famously introduced as such at the Scala

cinema by writer and broadcaster Robert Elms in May 1980. In time, though, they mutated into a chart-friendly band with a penchant for soulful Pop songs such as the international smash hit, True.

Yet, despite its florid decadence, it was always far more mainstream than several other musical movements which arose at the same time in the wake of Punk, such as Post-Punk and Goth. For this reason, several of its keys acts went on to become part of the New Wave, whose mixture of complex tunes and telegenic Glam image partly inspired the Second British Invasion of the American charts. This occurred thanks largely to a desperate need on the part of the newly arrived Music Television for striking videos, and went on to exert a colossal influence on the development of

music and fashion throughout the eighties.

The New Bohemianism of the 1990s

The new bohemianism of the 1990s was simply a revival of the adversary values of the sixties. For far from vanishing around '73, these values had merely gone back underground, where they set about fertilising new anti-establishment

clans such as the Anarcho-Punks and the New Age Travellers, who quietly flourished throughout the '80s. And around '92, some kind of amalgam between these tribes and the growing Rave-Dance movement could be said to have taken

place.

Aspects of the Rock Revolution

As of the mid 2010s, Rock and Roll, once universally seen as a music of youth, can, at some sixty years old, be enjoyed by all ages, from those who witnessed its birth and rise to prominence in the mid 1950s, and on into the '60s and '70s,

embracing Beat, Blues, Acid, Heavy, Progressive, Glam, Punk and so on, onwards.

But then is that not its final victory?

Today in Britain as well as every other nation on earth, aspects of the Rock revolution can be seen and heard at any time by anyone of any age on the internet. And Rock...surely the most revolutionary music form in history, could be said it has been tamed at long last. And quietly taken its place alongside Classical, Jazz and Folk as just another facet of the

teeming Babel that is the entertainment industry, provoking no more resistance from an exhausted culture than old film footage of Sesame Street.


Whatever the truth, Rock no longer represents the dark side of popular music, being just one of its many faces with very

little ability left to shock. Yet, Western society has been irrevocably altered by the socio-sexual revolution it led.


Rock and Roll as a Religion

Young people still worship at the altar of romantic rebellion as they've done since time immemorial, but not to the same

extent as the generation that came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the tail-spinning nineteen sixties, and who can say what effect it had on them, this music...tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred

gratification.

Some cultural critics have even gone so far as to describe Rock and Roll as a religion.

Rock was ever more than another mere music form to them…being a total art involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that…a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation.


Clearly more than just another form of Pop, Rock was a way of life of life almost from the outset, a philosophy, an immensely influential international subculture of varying artistic and intellectual substance, one of whose prime

components was rebellion against the traditional Christian moral values of the West.


Yet, in the modern sense of the word, Pop is intrinsically tied to Rock, or rather was...until about 20 years ago, when the latter started to decline as the leading voice of youthful rebellion, to be slowly replaced as such by other forms of

popular music such as Hip Hop, Contemporary R&B, and more recently, the incursion into the American mainstream of Electronic Dance Music.

Has this Electronica replaced Rock as the supreme music of youth? Or is it itself just another form of Rock?


What is certain is that rock has possessed an intellectual dimension since the 1960s. And many would point to one-time Folk singer Bob Dylan as the artist who more than any other helped to invest mere Pop music with genuine intellectual

substance. And since Dylan lent his poetic genius to a Rock scene that had been significantly reinvigorated by the Beatles and the

Rolling Stones, certain artists operating within Rock and Roll have looked for inspiration beyond the confines of contemporary Pop to past movements within the sphere of artistic Modernism, such as Romanticism, Symbolism,

Dadaism, Surrealism, Beat, Situationism, and so on, as well as the zeitgeists which birthed them.


It could be said that Rock has been the principle repository of the avant garde impulse in the West since the late sixties, with all concomitant rebelliousness and negativity, although it would be false to say that rock has been uniformly

negative, when much of it has been positive and uplifting, as well as artistically exalted. And yet the fact remains that rock has helped to disseminate a culture of instant gratification throughout the Western World in the last fifty years thereby significantly contributing to the alteration of its moral fabric, for in addition to an intellectual dimension, Rock is also distinguished by a powerful spiritual one. And there are those who'd consider it to

be a religion, nothing less. For all its wonders, no art form in history has been quite so associated as Rock with rebellion, transgression,

licentiousness, intoxication and death-worship, nor been so influential as such.


There are those who who'd insist that far fewer young people are enthralled by the time-honoured avant gardist exaltation of self-destructive genius than in previous rock eras. How true this is it is difficult to say, but what is certain

is the worldview still exists, and may be set to explode once again, as it has done periodically since the late '60s by which time the golden age of youth and pop and had started to reveal a far more solemn visage with hard rock as its

new soundtrack.

Some cultural critics have even gone so far as to describe Rock and Roll as a religion...

...a religion, nothing less. Book Three Everything to Prove to the World Something: Selected Verse and Lyrics A Cambridge Lamentation This place is always a little lonely At the weekends...no noise and life;I like solitude, But not in places Where's there's recently been A lot of people.Reclusiveness protects you From nostalgia, And you can be as nostalgic In relation to what happened

Half an hour ago, As half a century ago, in fact more so. I went to the Xmas party. I danced, And generally lived it up. I went to bed sad though. Discos exacerbate My sense of solitude.My capacity for social warmth, Excessive social dependence,And romantic zeal, Can be practically deranging; It's no wonder I feel the need To escape... Escape from my own Drastic social emotivity,And devastating capacityFor loneliness. I feel trapped here;There's no Outlet for my talents. In such a state as this, I could fall in love with anyone. The night before last I went to the ball, Couples filing out, I wanted to be half of every one, But I didn't want to lose ***. I'll get over how I feel now, And very soon. Gradually I'll freeze again, Even assuming an extra layer of snow. I have to get out of here.

All the Rivers of Tears

I feel at one with sweetheartsThrough the years,With the wartime loversWho went overseas,All the shattered hearts,All the rivers of tears,I feel them all.

Verses of love,Lovers who must part,Portraits of loveWorn so very close to the heart,All the lovers lost,Loves that never even start,I feel them all. A Multitude of Woes As a young man,I was always obsessedBy melancholy.I saw deep sadness,The quality That so tormented my heroes,

Such as Arthur Rimbaud, And Montgomery Clift,As glamorous and romantic,But it’s not…It’s not remotely romantic,When you yourself are adrift,And weighed down,By a multitude of woes. An Actor Arrives at the Bristol Old Vic I remember the grey slithers of rain,The jocular driverAs I boarded the busAt Temple Meads,And the friendly lady who told meWhen we had arrived at the city centre.I remember the little pub on King Street,With its quiet maritime atmosphere. I remember tramping Along Park Street,Whiteladies Road and Blackboy Hill,My arms and hands aching from my bags,To the little cottage where I had decided to stayAnd relax between rehearsals,Reading, writing, listening to music.I remember my landlady, tall, timid and beautiful. Babycham Deers and Romantic Lands South Pacific, Jiminy Cricket,This worldI tried to gain access,I tried to writeA bookThat would captureAll my happiness, Full of romance,Life that was enhancedBy beauty and love,Carousel and Disneyland,Babycham deersAnd romantic lands,These patterns I wove.

The Girl Who Said Hello the First

If I wasn’t sureOf all the nostalgia I’d endure,I would wish to exploreSome of those moments again.

How your mummy, she knew mine,They’d been friends For a little time,Like the time that you explained,Your first name, it was Jane.

I really loved you, Jane,

Though you only gave me pain,You were the girlWho said hello the first,But it only ended for the worse.

In our local swimming pool,I swam so close to you,Did you smirk To your bob-haired friend,Between the deep and shallow end?

So I just shyly slinked away,Feeling such a fool that day,Pet Clark reinforced My bitter woe,Singing My Love on the radio.

I really loved you, Jane,Though you only gave me pain,You were the girlWho said hello the first,But it only ended for the worse.

The Compensatory Man Par Excellence

I seldom indulge in letter writing Because I consider it To be a cold and illusory Means of communication. I will only send someone a letter If I'm certain it's going to serve A definite functional purpose, Such as that which I'm Scrupulously concocting at present Indisputably does.It's not that I incline Towards excessive premeditation; Its rather that I have to subject My thoughts and emotions To quasi-military discipline, As pandemonium is the sole alternative. I'm the compensatory man par excellence. Deliberation, in my case, Is a means to an end, But scarcely by any means, An end in itself. This letter possesses not one, But two, designs. On one hand, its aim is edification. Besides that, I plan to include it In the literary project upon which I'm presently engaged, With your permission of course.Contrary to what you have suspected In the past, I never intend to trivialise intimacy By distilling it into art. On the contrary, I seek To apotheosise the same. You see...I lack the necessary Emotional vitality to do justice

To people and events That are precious to me; I am forced, therefore, To at a later date call On emotive reserves Contained within my unconscious In order to transform The aforesaid into literary monuments.You once said that my feelings Had been interred under six feet Of lifeless abstractions; As true as this might be, The abstractions in question Come from without Rather than within me: My youthful spontaneity Many mistrustfully identified With self-satisfied inconsiderateness(A standard case of fallacious reasoning), And I was consequently The frequent victim Of somewhat draconic cerebrations. I tremble now In the face of hyperconsciousness. I've manufactured a mentality, Riddled with deliberation, Cankerous with irony; Still, in its fragility, Not to say, artificiality, It can, with supreme facility, Be wrenched aside to expose The touch-paper tenderness within. With characteristic extremism, I've taken ratiocination To its very limits, But I've acquainted myself with, Nay, embraced my antagonist Only in order to more effectively throttle him. Being a survivor of the protracted passage Through the morass of nihilism, Found deep within "the hell of my inner being,"I am more than qualified to say this: There is no way out Of the prison of ceaseless sophistry.There are many things I have left to say, But I shall only have begun to exist in earnest When these are far behind me, In fact, so far as to be all but imperceptible. I long for the time When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction. I never desired intellectuality; it was thrust upon me. Everything I ever dreaded being, I've becomeEverything I ever desired to be, I've become. I'm the sum total of a lifetime's Fears and fantasies, Both wish-fulfillment And dread-consummation incarnate.I long for the time When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction.

I never desired intellectuality; it was thrust upon me. I'm the sum total of a lifetime's Fears and fantasies, Both wish-fulfillment And dread-consummation incarnate.I'm the compensatory man par excellence. Ethanol Thief of Youth**

Auto-annihilation is stupid,It breaks hearts.And ruins lives,I hate that I was ever self-destructive,I rue the day I became entrancedBy its shadowy charisma, While alcohol spoiled my life:Poor Jo-Jo was rightTo warn her cherished daughterOf its insidious malignancy.I was one of the felicitous onesIn that it didn’t entirely destroy me, But despite its lack of glamour,In comparison toother more romanticised intoxicants,It’s among the most lethiferous of drugsThat stole from meWhat remained of my gorgeous youth. Or Happier At Least

I was happy,TV nightly,As a family, Simple pleasures,Any Umbrellas,Family holidays, I was happy,Perhaps the world was happy,Or happier at least. For a Long Lost Espanya O howRuefully I pineFor a long lost Espanya,What I wouldn't give,To be young again...And happy as I was back then... Maria, full of peace, Do you rememberFrancis AlbertSing songs of Tom JobimThat mournful afternoon...Happy as you were back then... O forThat wide-eyedImpression of yours,

Paquita La de MurciaOf your beloved Marilyn...Happy as you were back then... O howRuefully I pineFor a long lostEspanya,What I wouldn't give,To be young again...And happy as I was back then...

For Something I'd Done*

I was in a tawdry bar,Or public house,Being threatened,For something I’d done.

Darting furiously…Through city streets,Running, running,For something I’d done.

My companion hailed,And stopped a bus,Its metal doors flew open,For something I’d done.

Had to get to them,Had to get through them,Under furious pursuance,For something I’d done. From the Labyrinthine Metro* my paris begins with those early days as a conscious flaneur i recall the couple seated opposite me on the metro when i was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexity slim pretty white girl clad head to toe in denim smiling wistfully while her muscular black beau stared through me with fathomless orbs and one of them spoke almost in a whisper qu'est-ce-que t'en pense and it dawned on me yes the young parisienne with the distant desirous eyes was no less male than me dismal movies in the forum des halles being screamed at in pigalle and then howled at again by some kind of madman

or vagrant who told me to go to the bois de boulogne to meet what he saw as my destiny menaced by a sinister skinhead for trying on tessa's wide-brimmed hat getting soused in les halles with sara who'd just seen dillon as rusty james and was walking in a daze sara again with jade at the caveau de la huchette jazz cellar cash squandered on a gold tootbrush two tone shoes from close by to the place d'italie portrait sketched at the place du tertre paperback books by symbolist poets but second hand volumes by trakl and deleve and a leather jacket from the marche aux puces porte de clignancourt losing gary's address scrawled on a page of musset's confession walking the length and breadth of the rue st denis, what an artist's paradise (as juliette once wrote me).

I Let You Go

What was I thinking,I let you go,I wasn't drinking, still I let you go,Where was my head at to Let you go,I can't accept that I just Let you go. I wish I could make Amends,So we could at least Be friends,I have no real Reason why,I let you Say goodbye. Did I confuse you when I let you go, Such a fool to have Let you go,

You were so precious, still I let you go,Worth more than jewels, still I let you go. I wish we could Start again,I'd be quite A different man,I've learned quite a lot Since then,I know how To keep a friend. We could meet up in the Centre of town,And I'd explain my motivations, About how I came To let you down, And all those other Explanations, And crazy complications. I'm not asking for Romance, Just give me half A chance, I’ve come to haveA good, kind heart,So how about A brand new start.

What was I thinking,I let you go,I wasn't drinking, still I let you go,Where was my head at to Let you go,I can't accept that I just Let you go. In Hamburg I Loved a Strange Girl* In Hamburg I loved A strange girl,She put my whole beingIn a whirl, She spurned everybody But me,I made her happy,In Hamburg. But if she hadSpurned me,I'd have looked her in the eye,And run away, And in my room,I would have cried,I might even have died,In Hamburg.

It was my evening, that'sFor sure - "Its your aura"For sure - At last I'm goodAt something."Spot the Equity card!""When are you goingTo be a superstar?"Said Sarah.That seemed to be The question On everyone's lips. At last, at last, at lastI'm good at something.

I Spoke of the Spells of Calm

And so the party...ZoeCalled me...I listenedTo her problems;ReferencesTo my innocent face.Linda said:"Sally seems elusiveBut is in fact,Accessible;You're the opposite - You give to everyoneBut are incapableOf giving in particular."

Madeleine was comparing meTo June Miller;Descriptions by Nin:"She does not dareTo be herself..."Everything I'd alwaysWanted to be, I now am."...She livesOn the reflectionsOf herself in the eyesOf others...There is no JuneTo grasp and know."

I kept getting up to danceSally said: "I'm afraid;You're inscrutable;You're not justBlaseAre you?"I spokeOf the spells of calm,And the hystericalReactions,Psychic exhaustion, Then anxious elation.

Incident in St. Christopher's Place

Dear, I haven't been in touchFor a long time. Sorry.The last time I saw youWas in St. Christopher's Place.It was a lovely evening...When I knocked that chair over.I am sorry. Since then,I've had not a few accidentsOf that kind. Just three days ago,I slipped out in a gardenAt a friend's house...And keeled over, not once,Not twice, but three times,Like a log...clonking my nutSo violently that people heard meIn the sitting room.What's more,I can't remember a single sentenceSpoken all evening. The problem is...

In Puerto Rican Skies* Kind faces smiling,Nodding politely at wordsThey don’t seem to understand.Show me picturesShowing the richness ofA faraway distant land.Multicoloured motor cars,Brown apartments rising highIn Puerto Rican skies.

In Search of the Perfect Clime

Love, you've left me once again,Gone to catch an early plane,Where you gonna fly this time,In search of the perfect clime?

I am the one you leave behind,Worried out of my tiny mind,I was the one who saw you through,I need your care and loving too.

Love, you've left the happy home,You've pledged your solemn word you'll phone,But I would rather you were here,You've no conception of my fear.

Halfway across a crazy world,Is no place for such an unknowing child,If only you could see me cry,Then maybe you'd stop to wonder why.

I Think the World of She

She's precious as can be,She means so much to me,

So much to me.She spells generosity,And she's always beenA friend in need.Been so many yearsSince that weFirst met in our heyday,So young and so free,Sun-soaked days,No tears, no cares,Back in our heady heyday,What I'm trying to say,Is I think the world of she.

She's tender as can be,Her kindness is for real,So real for me, She sends her warmth to me,Like gentle poetry That I can feel.Been so many yearsSince that weFirst met in our heyday,So young and so free,Sun-soaked days,No tears, no cares,Back in our heady heyday,What I'm trying to say,Is I think the world of she.

Like All the Moonstruck Do

If I fell in love with you,I would like to Make my dreams come true,You could fulfil all yours too,So come on, honey,Just one look will do,I'll lose my heart to you, Like all the moonstruck do. We could go all round the world, Just like other Moonstruck boys and girls,So come on, honey, don't be scared,We are only young once,Say the word,I'll lose my heart to you,Like all the moonstruck do. Bali, Frisco, Rio, or whereverYou may choose,The world's our oyster, honey,There'll be no more bad news,We could leave tomorrow,I tell you we can't lose,We will soon be Saying bye bye to those blues. If I fell in love with you,I would like to Make my dreams come true,

You could fulfil all yours too,So come on, honey,Just one look will do,I'll lose my heart to you, Like all the moonstruck do. London as the Lieu Until recently, I had the impressionOf decayingAlong with the moral standards Of contemporary Europe, With London as the lieu To which all Autoroutes lead. In my room, I was surroundedBy debrisOf my existence,Lacking the will even to clearThe carpet, whose colour,Incidentally I came to forget. I ceaselessly tampered with my hair,Growing it long,Having it cropped, hennaing it red,Dyeing it blue-black, bleaching it near-white;It fell out in bunches,Desiccated and exhausted. My face grew sallow and haggard,With bloodshot, inflamed,Glazed, blue-ringed orbs, And bitten, bloated, ravaged lips.My body lost its athletic aspect,And became shapeless and emaciated. Lone Birthday Boy Dancing Yesterday for my birthday,I started offwith a bottle of wine...I took the traininto town...I had half a bitterat the Cafe de Piafin Waterloo...I went to workfor a couple of hours or so;I had a pint after work;I went for an audition;after the audition,I had another pintand a half;I had another half,before meeting my mates,for my b'day celebrations;we had a pint together;we went intothe night club,where we had champagne(I had three glasses);I had a furtherglass of vino,

by which time,I was so gonethat I drew an audienceof about thirtyby performing a solodancing spotin the middleof the disco floor...We all piled off to the pubafter that,where I had another drink(I can't rememberwhat it was)...I then made my way home,took the bus from Surbiton,but ended upin the wilds of Surrey;I took another bus home,and watched some telly,and had something to eatbefore crashing out...I really, really enjoyedthe eve, but today,I've been walking aroundlike a zomb;I've had only one drink today,an early morningrestorative effort;I spent the day working,then I went to a bookshop,where, like a monk,I go for a day'sdrying out session...Drying out is really awful;you jump at every shadow;you feel dizzy,you notice everything;very often,I don't follow through.

Lovelorn in London Town From morn to friendless night,He tramps the streets,Just in case he mightCome across her, he's a tragic sight,But he doesn’t care,Love gives him might,He haunts the cafes and the discosAnd the bars, so lovelorn. He knows that he won't find her,But he's got to keep on trying,It gives some meaning To his life,It gives some substance To his time,It is his motive, and his project,And his plan, so lovelorn. He only met her once,But it changed his life,And it changed his type,

And it changed his mind,And he threw it all up,As if he'd gone insane,And he took to the streets,And another man was born. They say love comes but onceFor some, but when it does,It's like a mightyAtom bomb inside,A disease that seizesA gentle soul,And if it comes for you,You'd better try to hide. From morn to friendless night,He tramps the streetsJust in case he mightCome across her, he's a tragic sight,But he doesn't care,Love gives him might,He haunts the cafes and the discosAnd the bars, so lovelorn.

My Past in Peace

One day I'd like to go In search of my past, Of all the memories Of my youth. I cry for all my souvenirs, I dream of a beautiful future,

Where I can atone For all the follies Of my existence, And where I might Contemplate my past In peace at long last. My Travels My travels start Right here Deep in my mindMy travels take me just whereI please I don't have To leave my warm room My travels start Sixteen sunBeating downSinatra's crooning JobimAnd I'm just dreaming of myGreat romance to come I don't need a little ticketTells me I can take the trainI don't even to risk it There's no blistering sun Or driving rainAnd it's here that I remain

My travels end With a sweet And peaceful timeI've found such sense deep withinNo more will I feel The need to go travelling again. My Life Story my life story is littered with the ghosts of golden opportunities gone. Oblivion in Recession The legs started going,Howlings In my head.Thought I'd go,Kept awake with water,Breathing,Arrogantly telling myselfI'd stay straight.Drank gin and wine,Went out,Tried to buy more,Unshaven,Filthy white shorts,Lost, rolling on lawn,Somehow got home.Monday, waiting for offie,Looked like death,Fear in eyesOf passers-by,Waiting for drink,Drink relieved me.Drank all day,Collapsed, wept;"Don't Die on Me."Next day,Double brandyJust about settled me,Drank some more,Thought constantlyI'd collapse;Then what?Fit? Coronary?Insanity? Worse?Took a Heminevrin,Paced the houseAll night,Pain in chest,Weak legs,Lack of feelingIn extremities,Visions of darkness.Drank waterTo keep theLife functions going,Played devotional music,Dedicated my life

To God,Prayed constantly,Renounced evil.Next day,Two ValiumsHelped me sleep.By eve,I started to feel better.Suddenly,All is clearer,Taste, sounds,I feel human again.I made my choice,And oblivion has receded,And shall disappear. Or Happier At Least I was happy,TV nightly,As a family, Simple pleasures,Any Umbrellas,Family holidays, I was happy,Perhaps the world was happy,Or happier at least.

See That the Summer’s Come Babe, where's your smile,Don't be a melancholy child,Can't you see That the summer's come? Stuck in your roomWith your winter curtains drawn,While the suburbsAre all bathed in sun. No more winter time lows,Only joy now becauseWe can shake off the blues,Babe, there's no time to lose. We can go for a cruiseDown the Thames Or down the Ouse,Or just snooze under summer's sun, Find a village green,Watch some cricket, Take some tea, as you please,Summer's made for fun. Get some sweet summer air,Feel the breeze in your hair,Forget that sad old affair,He's not worth all the tears. Babe, where's your smile,

Don't be a melancholy child,Can't you see That the summer's come?

Sense of Me in the Past

I was sad today; Because you begged me To think of your good points, And I never told you any.

Rest assured there are many, Very many, I would have liked To have told you them There and then.

I tell you so much about my past; Quite a lot of which is conflictive, As if several mes Were struggling for supremacy.

Much of the time,There was a pretty normal me; Oh don't get me wrong, I was always an attention-seeker,

But I really do genuinely struggle To make sense,I really do genuinely struggleTo make sense of me in the past. She Dear One Who Followed Me It was she, bless her,who followed me...she’d been crying...she’s too good for me,that’s for sure...“Your friendsare too good to you...it makes me sickto see them...you don’t really give...you indulge in conversation,but your mindis always elsewhere,ticking over.You could hurt me,you know...You are a Don Juan,so much.Like him, you haveno desires...I think you havedeep fears...There’s something so...so...in your look.It’s not thatyou’re empty...but that there isan omnipresent sadnessabout you, a fatality...”

Some Perverse Will I'm a restless manI am neverStillI'm always spurred onBy some perverseWillThe grass is neverGreenNo peace hereTo findSome demonOf motion'sAt work within myMindNo bed is too softThat I won'tAbandonIts sweet calmAnd comfortFor a softerOneI'm a restless manI am neverStillI'm always spurred onBy some perverse will.

Some Sad Dark Secret

"Temper your enthusiasm,"She said, "The extremes of your reactions;You should have A more conventional frameOn which to hang Your unconventionality.""Don't push people,"She said,"You make yourself vulnerable."

She told me not to rhapsodise,That it would be difficult,Impossible, perhaps,For me to harness my dynamism.The tone of my work,She said, Is often a little dubious.She said She thought That there was something wrong.

That I'm hiding Some sad Dark secret from the world."Temper your enthusiasm,"She said, "The extremes of your reactions;You should have A more conventional frameOn which to hang

Your unconventionality." Spark of Youth Long Gone Two days ago, I decided To realise Some cherished memories Of my beloved little pueblo; So I drank about five glasses Of Monteviejo In preparation for The rediscovery of The town of my heart.Firstly, I sat in the bar Where I used to meet All my friends, And was assaulted By the prices of the drinks And the volume of the music. I searched the place With my eyes For the innocence and laughter Of yesteryear, but in vain.The young people are forced Into tight little groups, So atmosphereIs ponderous and alienating. Where is the fun? The wild and foolish socialising? The comic local music? All gone. I could cry. Oh, these nerves, this living death. I am so full of fear, Lethargy and fury, I can hardly function.There's a lack of innocenceOf simplicityAnd is this changeFrom deep within me?The freedom,The spark of youthIs gone, Or have I merely lost it?Sophistication spoils, The city ravages, Senses refinedBy knowledge and wine.

Strange Coldness Perplexing the catholic nurseall sensitivecaring noticingeverythingwhat can she thinkof my hot/cold torment

always near blowing itliving in the fast laneso friendly kindthe girlsdewy eyedwanda abandoned me

bolton is in my hands

and yet my coldnesshurtsthe more emotionalthey staytrying to find a reasonfor my ice-like suspicionfish eyescoldly indifferent eyessuspect everything that moves

socialising just to be loudcompensate for coldlack of essential trustwarmthi love themdespite myselfmy desire to loveis unconscious and gigantesque

i never knowwhen i'm going to miss someonestrange coldness perplexingi've got to work to get devotionbut once i get iti really get people on my sidethere are my peoplewho can survivemy shark-like coldnessand there are thosewho want somethingmore personali can be very devoted to thosewho can stay the course

my soul is achingfor an impartial love of peoplei'm at war with myself.

Such a Short Space of Time*

I love, not just thoseI knew back then,But thoseWho were youngBack then,But who've sinceCome to grief, who,Having soared so high,Found theConsequent descentToo dreadful to bear,With my youth itself,Which was onlyYesterday,No, even less time,A mere moment ago,How couldSuch a short spaceOf timeCause such devastation?

Tales of a Paris Flaneur Early days as a flaneur;I recall the couple On the MetroWhen I was still innocent Of its labyrinthine complexities;Slim pretty white girl,Clad head to toe In new blue denim, Wistfully smilingWhile her muscular black beau Stared straight through me With fathomless, fulgorous orbs;And one of them spoke (Almost in a whisper):"Qu'est-ce que t'en pense?"Then it dawned on me...The slender young Parisienne With the distant desirous eyesWas no less male than I. Being screamed at in Pigalle, And then howled at again By some kind of wild-eyed Drifter who told me to go To the Bois de Boulogne to seek What he clearly saw as my destiny;Getting soused in Les HallesWith SaraWho'd just seen Dillon asRusty James,And was walking around in a daze;Sara again with JadeAt the Caveau de la Huchette. Cash squandered On a cheap gold-plated toothbrush, Portrait sketched at the Place du Tertre,Paperback books By Symbolist poets,Second hand volumes By Trakl and Deleve,And a leather jacket from The flea marketAt the Porte de Clignancourt. Metro taken to Montparnasse, Where I slowly sippedA demi blondeIn one of those brasseries(Perhaps)Immortalised by Brassai;Bewhiskered old manIn a naval officer's cap,His table bestrewnWith empty wine bottlesAnd cigarette butts,Repeatedly screeched the name"Phillippe!" until a bartenderWith patent leather hair,Filled his wineglass to the brim,With a mock-obsequious:

"Voila, mon Captaine!" I cut into the Rue du Bac,Traversed the Pont Royal,Briefly beheldSaint-Germain-l'Auxerrois,With its gothic tower,Constructed only latterly,In order thatThe 6th Century churchMight complementThe style of the remainderOf the 1er Arrondissement,Before steering for thePlace du Chatelet,And onwards...Les Halles!

There Was Once a Long-Vanished England There was once a long vanished England;Of well-spoken presenters Of the BBC Home Service,Light Service, and Children’s Favourites, Of coppers and tanners, and ten bob notes; And jolly shopkeepers, and window cleaners.

I remember my cherished Wolf Cub pack, How I loved those Wednesday evenings, The games, the pomp and seriousness of the camps, The different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair During the mass meetings, The solemnity of my enrolment,

Being helped up a tree by an older boy, Baloo, or Kim, or someone, To win my Athletics badge, Winning my first star, my two year badge, And my swimming badge With its frog symbol, the kindness of the older boys.

Toilers of the Sea

Come away with meTo toil upon the sea,Come away and seeHow sweet sea life can be,I'll sing Bonnie DundeeOff the coast of Old Guernsey, you and me As toilers of the sea, as toilers of the sea. Help me put that wreckedRomance away from me,Help me understandHow it was lost at sea,It wasn't destined to be,She belonged to another not me,What’ll be will be,For toilers of the sea, for toilers of the sea. I can stand it if you'reThere with me,For the solitary life at sea

Is enough to make youSea crazy,With the whales And gulls for company,For toilers of the sea, for toilers of the sea. We can ponder onThe ocean's mysteries,I'll unveil a few ofMy old sea stories,You'll see how kind a tar can be,I promise you'll be safe with me,When we're out at seaAs toilers of the sea, as toilers of the sea.

To See You at Every Time of Day*

To see you in the morning,Be with you in the evening,To see you hereAt every time of day,Such a simple prayer,To see you at every time of day. To hold you when you're laughing,Console you when you're crying,Take care of youAt every time of day,Such a simple prayerTo see you at every time of day. So tell me why you push me away,When I've sworn to be Forever true,When I've pledged My pure and simple heart to you?How can you be so cruel? To see you in the morning,Be with you in the evening,To see you hereAt every time of day,Such a simple prayer,To see you at every time of day.

Under Blue Berkshire Skies*

Stevie, we were free,Stevie, you and me,On that golden day,Was it '68?The decade's last few days,The whole wild world was crazed,But where we were was peace,For you and me at least. If I stop for a moment,I dream groves and country paths,Green's Albatross is playingIn this our past,Whole empires were falling,The old ways were fading fast,Things never last,

But you and I found peace at last.

We weren't friends for long,Things began so strong,We were far from home,Together less alone, We drifted far apart,We grew up oh so fast,We had so far to fall,Four years took their toll. We walked and talked For many hours,Safe under blue Berkshire skies. The Wanderer of Golders Green I awake each morningWith fresh hopeAnd tranquility;I might go for a saunterDown quiet London backstreets...Soon my aimlessnessDepresses me,And I realiseI'd been deceiving myselfAs to my abilityTo relax as others do. I decided on a Special BBefore the eve.I bought a lagerAt the barAnd chatted to Gaye.Then RayBought me another.I appreciated the factThat he rememberedThe time he,His gal Chris,And Cary downedAn entire bottleOf Jack DanielsIn a Paris-bound train. A tanned catBought me a (large) half,Then another half.My fatal eyesAre my downfall.I drank yet another half... My head was spinningWhen it hit the pillow;I awokeWith a terrible headacheAround one o'clock.I prayed it would depart. I slowly got dressed.I was as chatty as everBefore the exam...French/English translation.

Periodically I put my faceIn my hands or groanedOr sighed -My stomachwas burning me inside. I finished my paperIn 1 hour and a half.As I walked outI caught various eyesAmanda's, Jade's (quizzical) etc.I went to bed;Slept 'till five;Read O'Neill until 7ish...Got dressed,And strolled downTo Golders Green,In order to reliveA few memories.I sang to myself -A few memoriesFlashed into my mind,But not as manyas I'd have liked -It wasn't the same.It wasn't the same. Singing songs broughtVoluptuous tears.I snuck into McDonald'sWhere I felt at home,Anonymous, alone.I bought a few things,Toothpaste and pick,Chocolate, yoghurts,Sweets, cigarettesAnd fruit juice. Took a sentimental journeyBack to Powis Gardens,RichnessAnd intensity,RomanticAnd attractive,Sad, suspicious and strange.I sat up until 3am,Reading O'Neill,Or writing (inept) poetry.Awoke at 10,But didn't leaveMy room till 12,Lost my wayTo Swiss Cottage,Lost my happiness.Oh so consciousOf my failure,And after a fashion,Enjoying this knowledge. West London in the Sun* West London in the sun,Last summer of the millennium,

We were in loveAnd having fun,But fun wouldn’t last too long,Love didn’t have too long to run. You, a Dance kidOf sweet nineteen,Your record collection wasRock and Roll free,Me, a relicFrom a bygone scene, We had nothing we could talk about,All you ever did was shout,About the DJs you’d seen,In Ibiza and Berlin,In the Babylons of Dance,I didn’t stand a chance… West London in the sunLast summer of the millennium,We were in loveAnd having fun,But fun wouldn’t last too long,Love didn’t have too long to run.

Who Lives in My Perfect Love

Perhaps she livesIn our dreams alone,She whose face isIlluminedBy the raysOf the sun,While the dansette playsSome romantic melody,O how I loveThe oneWho lives in my perfect love.

It's so strange,The morning comes,And there are tears in my eyes;My dream has disappeared,Lost in the wind of time;She who looked at meWith such tenderness,While the dansette playedSome romantic melodyO how I love the oneWho lives in my perfect love.

Memories leave me in peace,O my past,Where did you flee,My golden youth,All squandered,All gone,My thoughts torment me,Precious faith, pleaseComfort me,For what is my lifeWithout you.

Perhaps she livesIn our dreams alone,She whose face isIlluminedBy the raysOf the sun,While the dansette playsSome romantic melody,O how I loveThe oneWho lives in my perfect love. Wicked Cahoots*

When he madehis first personal appearancein the dirty alleyon someone else's rusty bike,screaming alongin a cloud of dust,it rendered us allspeechless and motionless.But I was amazedthat despite his grey-faced surliness,he was very affable with us...the bully with a naiveand sentimental heart.He was so happyto hear that I liked his dad,or that my mum liked him,and he was welcometo come to teawith us at five twenty five...Our adventures were spectacular:chasing after other bikesters,screaming at the topof our lungsinto blocks of flats,and then runningas our echoed waves of terrorblended with incoherent threats..."I'll call the Police, I'll..."Wicked cahoots. The Woodville Hall Soul Boys Soon after I'd paidMy sixtyOr seventy pence,I found myselfIn what I thoughtWas a miniature London.I saw girlsIn chandelier earrings,In stiletto heels,Wearing eveningDresses,Which contrasted withThe bizarreHair coloursThey favoured:Jet black

Or bleach blonde,With flashes ofRed, purpleOr green.Some wore largeBow ties,Others unceremoniouslyHangedTheir school tiesRound theirNecks.Eye make-upWas exaggerated.The boys all hadShort hair,Wore mohair sweaters,Thin ties,Baggy,Peg-top trousersAnd winklepicker shoes.A band playingRaw street rockAt a frantic speedCame to a sudden,Violent climax...Melodic, rhythmic,Highly dancableSoul musicWas now beginningTo fill the hall,With another groupOf short-haired youths...Smoother, more elegant,Less menacingThan the previous ones.These well-dressedStreet boysWore well-pressed pegsOf red or blue...They pirouettedAnd posed...Pirouetted and posed. The World from the Shadowlands i'm not seeking an end to this sorrow, because i feel that feeling as sad, broken, remorseful as i am might propel me to doing something about changing my existence for the better, not temporarily, but permanently. i want this summer to be the summer whereby i effectuate this change, effectively return to the world from the shadowlands in which i've existed for so long.

Your Beautiful Lethal Life

Shooting starWith a quicksilver mind, You deserve to go so far,Can't someone stop youBefore you ruin your soul,With irreversible harm? Drinking all day, Every single day, Out of your head on booze, Is this the life, Is this the way, A gifted child should choose? Your beautiful lethal lifeMy friend,Has sent you around the bend,Your foolish defiantDecadent danceCould soon be at an end. But you don't care Do you, shooting star?As you drift in your blissful dream.

Notes. A Cambridge Lamentation centres on my brief stay at a teacher training college contained within the University of Cambridge, with its campus at Hills Road just outside the city centre. A fusion of previously published pieces, it was primarily adapted, some years ago now, from an unfinished and unsent letter, penned just before Christmas 1986, but never sent. A Multitude of Woes, recently versified, was based on diary notes dating from 19/3/14. The origins of An Actor Arrives at the Bristol Old Vic lie in the barest elements of a story started but never finished in early 1980, while I was working at the Bristol Old Vic playing the minute part of Mustardseed in a much praised production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was originally rescued in 2006 from a battered notebook in which I habitually scribbled during spare moments offstage while clad in my costume and covered in blue body make-up and silvery glitter. And while doing so, some of the glitter was transferred from the pages with which they were stained more than a quarter of a century previously onto my hands...an eerie experience indeed. Babycham Deers and Romantic Lands was recently versified, having been reproduced verbatim from a song written when I was ca. 19 years old. For a Long Lost Espanya, recently versified, was based on diary notes dating from 28/3/14. For Something I’d Done was taken from diary notes from 15/9/14, but inspired by a dream. From the Labyrinthine Metro Oblivion in Recession first existed as a series of rough notes scrawled on a piece of scrap paper in the dying days of January 1993, although I can't for the life of me recall any howlings in my head. London as the Lieu first existed in prose form in the 1980s as part of an absurd - which is to say entirely fictional - unfinished story. Wicked Cahoots stems from a story written when I was in my early20s; first seeing the light of day in versified form in 2006. The World from the Shadowlands was adapted from diary notes dating from 16/3/14 and 17/3/14. West London in the Sun was written as a song lyric in 1999.

Or Happier At Least dates from 2014. My Travels, originally a lyric, was written in 2003 as part of a series of songs, currently available to hear on You Tube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u22_oHNVgAU. Lone Birthday Boy Dancing, which was almost certainly drafted on 8 October 1992, or perhaps a year earlier - serves to evoke a twilight mood, with the birthday boy performing his Dionysian solo dance in defiance of the wholesale ruin of mind, body and soul he's so obviously invoking. Tales of a Paris Flaneur is a relatively new work in its present form, having been based partly on a story written in about 1987 (and subsequently destroyed), and partly on material written specifically for what became the autobiographical novel, Rescue of a rock and Roll Child. Spark of Youth Long Gone was based on an unfinished story written either in the late '70s or early '80s, in the spirit of the would-be "tortured artist", absurd, melodramatic. The Wanderer of Golders Green existed in its original form as the melodramatic diary notes of a would-be tortured artist diary notes dating from the early 1980s; ultimately becoming part of the memoir, Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child. She Dear One Who Followed Me first existed as a series of scrawled notes based on several conversations I enjoyed with the dear one of the title, in 1982 or '83. In Hamburg I Loved a Strange Girl was recently quite faithfully adapted from a song written when I was ca. 18 years old. Some Perverse Will dates from about 1980, and how much of it is reflective of my mind in that year, I can't say, as I no longer identify with its sentiments to any degree; but I may have been at least partially straining for effect. My Life Story was adapted - as I recall - from an email sent to a friend, possibly around 2010.

Some Sad Dark Secret was inspired by words spoken to me by a former tutor and mentor of mine at university around 1982 to ’83, as well as my own reflections of them from the same era.

The Compensatory Man Par Excellence possessed some kind of autobiographical novel written around 1987, and whose ultimate fate remains a mystery, as its starting point.

Your Beautiful Lethal Life was partly inspired by lyrics freshly written for the song a friend, who’d already written his own, around 1992.

I Spoke of the Spells of Calm, also known as Gallant Festivities was based on two pages of informal diary notes dating from 1982 to ’83.

Under Blue Berkshire Skies, also known as Stevie B and Me was written in 2003 in praise of a friendship enjoyed several decades before.

Left Me Once Again was written as a song in 2003, but never recorded, having been inspired by the true life adventures of a beautiful young English backpacker of the mid 2000s.

Incident in St. Christopher’s Place is also known as A Letter Unsent, because it was based precisely on that, a letter, written to a close friend, almost certainly in the early 1990s, but never sent.

All the Shattered Hearts was originally part of the coda of a song written in ca. 1999.

The Compensatory Man Par Excellence possessed some kind of autobiographical novel written around 1987, and whose ultimate fate was, so I recall, to be destroyed with only a handful of scraps remaining, as its starting point.

Strange Coldness Perplexing was forged using notes scrawled onto seven sides of an ancient now coverless notebook, possibly late at night following an evening's carousal, and in a state of serene intoxication. The original notes were based on experiences I underwent while serving as a teacher in a highly successful central London school of English, which I did between what I believe to have been the spring, or summer, of '88 and the summer of 1990.

I Think the World of She first saw the light of day in the shape of a song composed for a close friend in what I believe to

have been 2002, perhaps ’01.

Like Under Blue Berkshire Skies, I Let You Go, Like all the Moonstruck Do, Lovelorn in London Town , See That the Summer’s Come To See You at Every Time of Day were adapted from a series of songs, some new, some reworkings of ancient tunes, recorded in 2003.

The Girl Who Said Hello the First existed in its original form as a song written when I was around 19 in memory of an early love of mine, an especially painful case of young or calf love suffered during swimming classes in West London as I remember it, before being reworked in 2003, and then again in 2015.

Such a Short Space of Time was based on a few pages of some kind of story or kindred piece of writing I briefly worked on sometime in the 1990s, perhaps 1995, or later, I can’t be sure.

Who Lives in My Perfect Love is a pretty accurate translation of a song I wrote, in French as Mon Parfait Amour, when I was about 19; although verse three is a recent addition.

Sense of Me in the Past originally emerged from what I think was an email sent to a friend, being ultimately turned into a piece of writing, which only emerged in definitive form today, which is to say, 3/10/15.

Book Four Something I Tried Too Hard To Do: Selected Tales and Essays

The Coming of the Absaloms Introduction

When it comes to the key events that helped to create the society that emerged in the American/Western World in the wake of the Second World War - arguably the most traumatic event in history - many would be inclined to cite the 1950s as the fulcrumic decade, and according to Charles Ealy, author of the article Seeds of Change Sown in 1955, published in Nov. 2005 in The Dallas Morning News, that's especially true of its midpoint. For all that, though, it's the mythic 1960s, with its Rock-Youth culture, and quasi-religious worship of sexual abandon and the use of mind-expanding drugs, that tends to be credited as the true decade of change, and with the reader's permission, I'd like to trace the evolution of the most revolutionary decade of the 20th Century, by briefly depicting the culture whence it sprang, and then - and at greater length - the decade that both preceded and birthed it, with special emphasis on its central year of '55. And all opinions are just that, opinions, but expressed as in the cases of all four discourses, in a spirit of Christian truth and integrity, to the best of my ability. The Coming of the Absaloms Were they really so staid and conformist, those much treasured mom-and-apple-pie fifties? We've already established that they weren't, and that they didn't yield as if by magic to the wild, Dionysian 1960s. The truth is that far from being a sudden, unexpected event, the post-war cultural revolution, whose repercussions continue to be felt throughout a tragic broken West could boast historical roots reaching at least as far back as the European Enlightenment. Since that time, the Western World has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judeo-Christian moral fabric, and what happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the celebrated American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having "a bombastic atonality and dissonance" was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools. Moving to the totemic year of '55, I begin with a day marked by an event which had a colossal if still largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of American and Western culture, that being the 7th of October, on which five major 20th Century figures, namely, Elijah Muhammad, R.D. Laing, Ulrike Meinhof, Oliver North and Vladimir Putin, attained the ages of 58, 28, 21, 14 and 3 respectively. It was on that day that - at San Francisco's Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street - about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went on to be leading artists of the Beat Generation, a term which first saw the light of day in a 1952 article entitled This Is the Beat Generation, written for The New York Times by John Clellon Holmes, author of the 1952 proto-Beat novel, Go. Holmes had allegedly coined the term following conversations he'd had with Jack Kerouac in 1948 with regard to the disillusioned generation that had emerged in America in the wake of the Second World War. Kerouac, the - purportedly self-styled - "shy Canuck" from Lowell, Massachusetts, also attended this epochal clarion

cry to the Counterculture, but didn't read, preferring to cheerlead instead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. However, his roman a clef, On the Road (1957), which centres on the mid-century wanderings he undertook in America and Mexico - largely with his muse and close friend Neal Cassady - remains Beat's defining work. After the reading, the Beat movement, which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to gradually mutate into an international craze, so that by the end of the decade, the Beatnik had taken his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater, sandals &c. '55 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others. Although it's Richard Brook's film version of Evan Hunter's semi-autobiographical novel, Blackboard Jungle, which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock and Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. And it did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets' Rock Around the Clock over the opening credits and beyond. For unlike an initial far Jazzier outing by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley's version was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency; and so ensured the world would never be the same again following its inclusion in Blackboard Jungle. Then in August, Sun Records of Memphis, Tennessee, released Mystery Train, written - and first recorded - by Blues musician Junior Parker some two years previously, a semi-mythical 45rpm by Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill featuring the so-called King of Western Bop who went on to become Rock's single most influential figure apart from the Beatles. On the 30th of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motor accident aged 24 after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, emerged about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion picture industry's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s. However, Dean himself had been powerfully influenced by Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, arguably the two foremost pioneers of the Stanislavski Method within the Motion Picture industry, who'd honed their craft in the late '40s at the celebrated Actors Studio in New York City. The screen personas of Clift, Brando and Dean, in which vulnerability and defiance were fused to luminously magnetic effect arguably served as prototypes of the neurotic and narcissistic individualism that went on to exert such a seismic influence on the evolution of the sixties Counterculture in era-defining movies such as George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951), Stanley Kramer's The Wild One (1953), and Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1954). Their mixture of incandescent beauty and sullen defiance was hardly new though, having been a feature of Romantic rebels again and again at least since the heyday of Byron and Shelley; and it could be said that their true spiritual ancestor was none other than King David's much loved yet fatally rebellious son Absalom, of whom it was written in 2 Samuel 14:25: "But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him." Again and again, 1955 is cited by cultural commentators as the year in which things started to change in America and the West. When it comes to Britain, there seems to be no doubt that within the space of a mere two generations, a spectacular rise in criminal violence from the low rates of at least the previous two centuries, occurred from about 1955. This same rise coincided with increasingly large-scale denigration of such traditionally sanctified Christian institutions as marriage, pre-marital purity and the two-parent family, which had always been seen as the enemy by various revolutionary tendencies within art and politics, while being respected by the majority, and affected every industrial nation apart from Japan. As in Britain, so in the US, but given America's far greater size and complexity, the situation has of necessity been more extreme. Take a remarkable article written in the Fall of 1955 for the Trotskyist Fourth International, entitled Youth in a Delinquent Society: Its author, Joyce Cowley, was at pains to emphasize the general conformity of American youth in the mid 1950s, while also making it clear that cautious conservatism was far from being the total picture, and that there'd been a sharp rise in crime since the onset of the decade. She also stated something to the effect that the nature of the crimes committed during this period were of a shocking gravity that had been relatively uncommon in the US in more recent decades. To support her point, she alluded to various phenomena which are all too familiar to those of us who came to maturity in the '60s and beyond, including the abuse of narcotics, and acts of gratuitous cruelty and violence, from teen gang rumbles to the senseless sacrifice of innocents. But does all this mean that civilisation, not just in the US and the West, but as a whole, is irrevocably doomed? Many Christians are indeed of the belief that these are the final days prior to the return of the Lord, of which He speaks in Matthew 24:37: "But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be." They may indeed be right, and there are many indications that this is the case. However, in the verse immediately preceding the one just quoted, Jesus makes it clear that when it comes to the precise day of the Second Coming, only God the Father knows: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." Thence, it may well be that if the nations of the West return to the Judeo-Christian values on which they were founded, not half-heartedly...but with the kind of uncompromising passion for God that provoked the great revivals of history, like prodigals, broken and contrite in spirit, our great civilisation may yet survive.

Book Four Something I Tried Too Hard To Do: First Selected Tales and Essays

Adversary and the Birth of the Beats It would be false, indeed absurd, to suggest that the Counterculture of the 1960s was a unique historical event devoid of precedents and precursors. In fact, by the time of the Hippie revolution, much of the groundwork had already been done, not least during the two immediate post-war decades. During this brief 20-year period, the Existentialists, Lettrists and Beats became international icons of revolt...Britain's first major youth cult surfaced in the shape of the Edwardians or Teddy Boys...a cinema of youthful discontent flourished as never before, fuelling a desire among many young people to be identified as rebels and wild ones...and Rock and Roll took over the world with Elvis Presley as its first true superstar. But it was the Beats who were the true precursors of the Hippies. Few today are aware of the existence of the Lettrists, that scandalous band of avant garde agitators who thrived in post-war Paris under the leadership of Isidore Isou, but their contemporaries the Beats continue to enjoy an exceptionally high profile. This may be the result of Paris plausibly ceding her time-honoured role as the world epicentre of the avant garde to New York City in the late 1940s, but whatever the truth, the Lettrists have been all but forgotten while the Beats are still hot. It had been earlier in the decade...around 1943, in fact...that a disparate group of would-be poets and authors of Bohemian inclination had coalesced around a brilliant angel-faced young Columbia University undergraduate by the name of Lucien Carr. The first to gravitate towards Carr was a fellow Columbia student from nearby New Jersey by the name of Allen Ginsberg. Through Carr, Ginsberg was introduced to Arthur Rimbaud, the quintessential post-Romantic bad boy poet whose terrible yet beautiful visionary verse and frenzied rebellious rage has exerted an influence on the development of the adversary culture of the post-Romantic West that is second to none or close to it. Rimbaud went on to significantly inform the evolution of Ginsberg's own poetic vision. Also through Carr, the bookish-looking poet met the boyfriend of future Beat biographer Edie Parker, who was another of Carr's Columbia friends. This was Jean-Louis Kerouac, known as Jack, who, from a French Canadian family from Lowell, Massachusetts, had until recently been a Football player of enormous promise. But soon after gaining a scholarship to Columbia, things had started to go awry for him. First, he cracked his tibia during a game; and then he clashed with the coach Lou Little, and was - apparently - repeatedly benched. The upshot was that he left Columbia in his sophomore year, and ended up drifting in New York City, where he met the two men - both through Lucien Carr - with whom he went on to form the nucleus of the Beat Generation, these being the aforesaid Ginsberg, and a friend of Carr's from St Louis, the patrician William Seward Burroughs II. In 1957, Kerouac emerged as the movement's undisputed leader with the publication of On the Road, a fictionalised account of the cross-country wanderings he undertook between 1947 and 1950 with his close friend Neal Cassady...famously named Dean Moriarty in the novel. Cassady, who somewhat resembled iconic movie star Paul Newman, was the son of an alcoholic whose early life had included the early loss of his mother, a childhood spent on Denver's skid row, a spell in reform school, and eleven months imprisonment for theft. So while Kerouac was the genius behind Beat's defining work, Cassady provided the inspiration as the Beat par excellence. Oddly perhaps, Lucien Carr himself never went on to write anything of note, preferring to father a family and pursue a long career with the venerable news agency United Press International. It fell to his son Caleb, author of Casing the Promised Land, The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, Killing Time, The Italian Secretary and The Legend of Broken, among other works, to be the novelist of the family...but his place in literary history is secure. As Allen Ginsberg once put it, "Lou was the glue" of the entire Beat Generation, itself the most significant avant garde movement of the 20th Century, as the primary impulse behind the '60s Counterculture. It was in about '64, in fact, that Beat started to shift imperceptibly into the Hippie movement. '64 was also the year the Beatles conquered America...but away from the mainstream, a certain Colorado farmer's son and former Stanford University student called Ken Kesey set off on his legendary trip from California to New York on a psychedelic school bus he named Further, with one Neal Cassady doing most of the driving. He did so in the company of a band of Counterculture pioneers, writers, artists, students &c., known as the Merry Pranksters. Once in the Big Apple, they met up with the New York Beats including Jack Kerouac who, deeply patriotic and a devout Catholic at heart, was allegedly repelled by the Pranksters' outlandish dress and appearance, and took no part in the coming psychedelic revolution, unlike Allen Ginsberg, who embraced it wholeheartedly. The first of the infamous Acid Tests occurred a short time later in 1965, and during these LSD-fuelled events, there'd be slide and/or light shows and experiments with cutting edge sound technology, and bands such as the Warlocks - later the Grateful Dead - or Kesey's own Psychedelic Symphonette would regale the crowds with proto-psychedelic Rock. Two years later, the Hippie, wild child of the Beat Generation, became an international media obsession, before setting about the piecemeal infiltration of mainstream society. This slow co-option by the mainstream of many of the key values of the '60s Adversary Culture could be said to be the

ultimate triumph of the Beat Generation, and all the avant gardes that preceded her...but were Kerouac alive today...you can't help but think he might be weeping at the thought of it. For it's as if he came to deeply regret the culture he'd helped to foment; and yet felt powerless to control. And, instead of forgiving himself, effectuated a flight into the alcoholism that ultimately led to his dying at his mother's home from cirrhosis of the liver at just 47 years old. And while he was ten years older than his hero Thomas Wolfe, another in a long line of writers of great and original genius destroyed by the thirsty muse, he was yet far too young to suffer such a terrible and painful death. While any Christian worthy of the name must surely weep at the thought of any sorrow that leads not to repentance and salvation, but the endless night of fathomless desperation.

Alfred de Musset (Blessed with Every Great Gift) It was in the glittering Paris of the 1830s that a certain French Romantic poet, playwright and novelist of noble birth by the name of Alfred Charles de Musset-Pathay came close to having the exorbitant ambition of one who didn't want to write unless to aspire to the greatness of a Shakespeare or a Schiller. But then as the son and grandson of writers he'd been an outstanding student; and one who'd published both his first poem and a translation of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater when he was just 16 years old. And he entered that decade blessed with every great gift a gilded young genius might hope to possess. Being tender as well as elegant, beautiful as well as brilliant, and an irresistible enthusiast...brimful with passion and sensibility. But he'd have to wait a few years before real artistic success came his way. And his was the era in which the Romantic movement came into full flower in France, and he revelled in it, this prince of youth, his sphere, the mondain cafe society of the Parisian Right Bank, his closest friend, fellow dandy Alfred Tattet. And yet for all his dandyism, his relationship with fellow Romantic George Sand arguably had much of the Bohemian about it in terms of its turbulence and debauchery. It impelled the former golden boy of French letters to pen his hyper-emotional The Confession of a Child of the Century, which was as much about his failed love affair with Sand as the disenchantment of the generation that had come to maturity in the wake of the Revolutionary Age. Sand, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin in Paris in 1804, was clearly a woman of quite extraordinary magnetic power...and by the time of her affair with Musset, she was a divorcee with two young children, and a baroness to boot, even though her own roots were only partly aristocratic. For her effect on Musset was little short of cataclysmic, inspiring much of his finest work; and not just the Confession. For the famous series of poems known as Les Nuits, composed between 1835 and '37, also spring from his unhappy relationship with Sand, and they are rightly considered to be among the unimpeachable masterpieces of French Romanticism. Indeed of French literature as a whole. Yet it could be argued that Musset is best known for his theatrical writings, which began as early as 1830 with La Nuit Venitienne. And of which Lorenzaccio from 1833, and On ne badine pas avec l'amour from '34 are among the most celebrated. Having said that, it's the Confession, as well as the true life romance at its heart, that appear to most inspire contemporary creators. And certainly it's a glamorous tale; while Musset's life itself is the stuff of legend. Yet despite the fact that like Gautier, he became a deeply respectable figure in late middle age, receiving the National Order of the Legion of Honour in 1845, before being elected to the French Academy in '52, his was an ultimately tragic life, blighted by alcoholism. Which together with the condition known as aortic insufficiency, brought about his demise from heart failure at just 46 years old. An age which appears to be a common one for the deaths of great poets whose flaming, beautiful youths were garlanded with the most magnificent promise imaginable. For as well as Musset...Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde died at 46, and together they might serve as a testimony to the awful truth of the brevity of even the most glorious of youths. As well as the ruinous nature of youthful self-indulgence which so often leads ultimately to what is described in 2 Corinthians 7:10 as "the sorrow of the world," and of which Musset's own heartbreaking poem, Tristesse, is a pre-eminent expression. As opposed, that is to "godly sorrow," which "worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of."

Born in a Cabin in Cuyahoga County

James Abram Garfield may be less spoken of today in comparison to many of those who have held the office of President of the United States, but the 20th man to do so led an extraordinary and brilliant life despite the most humble beginnings. Indeed, he was born in a log cabin in Cuyahoga County, Ohio on the 19th of November 1831 into a family affiliated to the Disciples of Christ denomination, also known as the Christian Church. His father, Abram Garfield, died when he was less than two years old and he was subsequently raised by his French-American mother Eliza Ballou. As well as French, he was of Welsh ancestry, and English by dint of being a descendant of Mayflower passenger and convicted murderer John Billington. Aged 16, he worked for six weeks as a canal driver near the big city of Cleveland, before illness forced him home

where, at the Geauga Academy, he discovered a taste for academia, which led to his being offered a teaching post in 1849, which he accepted. A year later, he returned to churchgoing, which he had neglected for some years, and he was subsequently baptised. From 1851 to '54, he was a student at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute - now known as Hiram College - founded by the Disciples of Christ in Hiram, Ohio, where he developed a special interest in Greek and Latin, and ended up teaching there, while serving as a preacher in local churches, then at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, from which he graduated in 1856. But he decided against preaching as a vocation, returning instead to the Eclectic Institute, where he taught Classical languages. Then, while still only in his mid-twenties, he was elected principal in 1857, a position he held until 1860. By this time, he'd been married for a short time to Lucretia Rudolph, one of his more brilliant Greek pupils, who went on to bear him seven children, and had begun the study of Law, being admitted to the Ohio bar in 1860. This took place soon after he'd entered politics for the first time, becoming elected an Ohio state senator in 1859, and serving as such for two years. When the Civil War began in April 1861, he was still under thirty years old, despite an already incredibly full professional life. He subsequently joined the Union Army, and was given command of the 42cnd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. On January 11th 1862, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier, and in that same year was elected by the Republicans to the United States House of Representatives. By the time he resigned his commission to take his seat in congress, he'd been promoted to major general. He was elected the 20th president of the United States in March 1881, an office he held for only a matter of months before being shot by a one-time lawyer and political office seeker by the name of Charles J. Guiteau. Garfield survived the attempt on his life, and was bedridden for several weeks in the White House, before being moved to the Atlantic Coast of New Jersey in September in the hope that the fresh air might provoke a recovery, but this was not to be and he died on the 19th of that month from what may have been a heart attack exacerbated by blood poisoning and bronchial pneumonia. It could be said that James A. Garfield lacks the legendary status of a Lincoln or a Kennedy, but by any standards known to man, he was remarkable in achievement and courage. Born in a log cabin, he rose to the highest political office in the world, becoming the only serving church minister to do so. As well as a preacher, he was a fighter for justice, and vocal opponent of slavery. And he was still only 49 when he died, with so much potential yet unfulfilled.

8. Tribute to a Paisley Troubadour

The deeply talented Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty (1947-2011) remains best known for his signature tune, Baker Street (1978), as well as a series of hits he enjoyed as one half, along with Joe Egan, of the duo Stealers Wheel, the most famous of which was Stuck in the Middle With You from 1972. He was born - the son of a coal miner and truck driver of Irish extraction, and a Scottish mother - in Paisley in the west central Lowlands of Scotland on the 16th of April 1947. In 1963 he left school, whereupon he is believed to have worked first in a butcher's shop, and then as a clerical worker, while in the midst of the most mythologized decade of recent times he'd play in a Rock band called the Mavericks with former schoolfriend Joe Egan. At some point, evidently inspired by both the Irish and Scottish folk songs he heard as a boy, and the iconic music of sixties legends the Beatles and Bob Dylan, he began writing his own songs. In '66, at a time when Rock was arguably seeking emancipation from Pop, Rafferty was a member of the band the Fifth Column, again with Egan, releasing a single which failed to set the Pop charts on fire. Three years later, he hooked up with future comedy legend and actor Billy Connolly and Tam Harvey in a folk band called the Humblebums, recording two well received albums with Connolly alone for Transatlantic Records, but they split in 1970. Rafferty then went on to the first phase of his solo career. While enjoying critical acclaim with the first album released under his own name, Can I Have My Money Back?, in 1971, commercial success continued to elude him. That is, until 1972, when he joined up with his old friend Joe Egan in Stealers Wheel, who had a hit on both sides of the Atlantic - number 8 in the UK and 6 on the US Billboard Hot 100 - with Stuck in the Middle With You, featuring a lead vocal by Egan that seemed to fuse the talents of both Bob Dylan and John Lennon; while Rafferty supplied the harmony. Stuck in the Middle was followed by two further hits in the shape of Everyone's Agreed That Everything Will Turn Out Fine (1973), and the gorgeously melodic Star (1974), featuring stunning harmony work by Rafferty and Egan. But for all their success, they disbanded in 1975, after having only recorded three albums, Stealers Wheel from 1972, Ferguslie Park from '74 and Right or Wrong from '75. They reformed without Rafferty or Egan in 2008. Three years later, Rafferty enjoyed his biggest ever hit with the autobiographical Baker Street, widely considered to be a masterpiece and for good reasons, not least the memorable sax solo - written by Rafferty himself - by Raphael Ravenscroft, and Rafferty's own sweetly mournful vocal, to say nothing of touching lyrics evoking both restlessness and hope. It was a massive worldwide success, reaching number 3 on the UK charts, and number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album from which it was taken, City to City, sold over 5.5 million copies, ousting the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever from the American top spot on the 8th of July 1978, and turning Rafferty into a major star in the process. Further hits from the album followed in the shape of Right Down the Line and Home and Dry, which reached no. 12

and 28 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100. Despite his purported discomfort with his new found star status, Rafferty enjoyed further success with the album Night Owl (1979), which yielded several hit singles in both the UK and US, although subsequent albums were less successful, a situation which may have been exacerbated by Rafferty's alleged dislike of performing live. His final album Life Goes On was released in 2009. He was married to Carla Ventilla between 1970 and 1990, while his later years were marked by a struggle with both depression and alcoholism. In late 2008, he checked himself into St Thomas' Hospital, London, suffering from a chronic liver condition; and some two years later, was admitted to the Royal Bournemouth Hospital, passing away at home on the 4th of January 2011 of liver failure. He is survived by his brother Jim, daughter Martha, and granddaughter Celia. Speaking as a former problem drinker myself who has nonetheless barely touched a drop of alcohol since 1993, the year I came to saving faith in Jesus Christ, I feel a very special compassion towards those, such as Gerry Rafferty, who've not been so fortunate as I in terms of conquering a dependence on a drug which is still widely seen as the most dangerous of all. Such a tragic end; but as in the cases of all gifted artists of renown, Gerry Rafferty's work lives on, with Baker Street especially continuing to serve as intensely poignant testimony of the terrible sense of isolation city life is capable of producing in those who find themselves in London or any other big city, and yet who long to be somewhere else...somewhere they call home.

The Coming of the Absaloms Introduction

When it comes to the key events that helped to create the society that emerged in the American/Western World in the wake of the Second World War - arguably the most traumatic event in history - many would be inclined to cite the 1950s as the fulcrumic decade, and according to Charles Ealy, author of the article Seeds of Change Sown in 1955, published in Nov. 2005 in The Dallas Morning News, that's especially true of its midpoint. For all that, though, it's the mythic 1960s, with its Rock-Youth culture, and quasi-religious worship of sexual abandon and the use of mind-expanding drugs, that tends to be credited as the true decade of change, and with the reader's permission, I'd like to trace the evolution of the most revolutionary decade of the 20th Century, by briefly depicting the culture whence it sprang, and then - and at greater length - the decade that both preceded and birthed it, with special emphasis on its central year of '55. And all opinions are just that, opinions, but expressed as in the cases of all four discourses, in a spirit of Christian truth and integrity, to the best of my ability. The Coming of the Absaloms Were they really so staid and conformist, those much treasured mom-and-apple-pie fifties? We've already established that they weren't, and that they didn't yield as if by magic to the wild, Dionysian 1960s. The truth is that far from being a sudden, unexpected event, the post-war cultural revolution, whose repercussions continue to be felt throughout a tragic broken West could boast historical roots reaching at least as far back as the European Enlightenment. Since that time, the Western World has been consistently assailed by tendencies hostile to its Judeo-Christian moral fabric, and what happened in the 1960s was simply the culmination of many decades of activity on the part of revolutionaries and avant-gardists, especially since the First World War. Even Rock, a music which the celebrated American evangelist John MacArthur once described as having "a bombastic atonality and dissonance" was foreshadowed at its most experimental by the emancipation of the dissonant brought about by Classical composers of various Modernist schools. Moving to the totemic year of '55, I begin with a day marked by an event which had a colossal if still largely unrecognised influence on the evolution of American and Western culture, that being the 7th of October, on which five major 20th Century figures, namely, Elijah Muhammad, R.D. Laing, Ulrike Meinhof, Oliver North and Vladimir Putin, attained the ages of 58, 28, 21, 14 and 3 respectively. It was on that day that - at San Francisco's Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street - about 150 people gathered to witness readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder. All went on to be leading artists of the Beat Generation, a term which first saw the light of day in a 1952 article entitled This Is the Beat Generation, written for The New York Times by John Clellon Holmes, author of the 1952 proto-Beat novel, Go. Holmes had allegedly coined the term following conversations he'd had with Jack Kerouac in 1948 with regard to the disillusioned generation that had emerged in America in the wake of the Second World War. Kerouac, the - purportedly self-styled - "shy Canuck" from Lowell, Massachusetts, also attended this epochal clarion cry to the Counterculture, but didn't read, preferring to cheerlead instead in a state of ecstatic inebriation. However, his roman a clef, On the Road (1957), which centres on the mid-century wanderings he undertook in America and Mexico - largely with his muse and close friend Neal Cassady - remains Beat's defining work. After the reading, the Beat movement, which had existed in embryonic form since about 1944, left the underground to gradually mutate into an international craze, so that by the end of the decade, the Beatnik had taken his place as a universally recognised icon with his beret, goatee beard, turtle-neck sweater, sandals &c.

'55 was also the year in which Rock and Roll assaulted the mainstream thanks to hits by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and others. Although it's Richard Brook's film version of Evan Hunter's semi-autobiographical novel, Blackboard Jungle, which, released on the 20th of March, is widely credited with igniting the Rock and Roll revolution, indeed late 20th Century teenage rebellion as a whole. And it did so by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets' Rock Around the Clock over the opening credits and beyond. For unlike an initial far Jazzier outing by Sonny Dae and his Knights, Haley's version was remarkable for its earth-shaking sense of urgency; and so ensured the world would never be the same again following its inclusion in Blackboard Jungle. Then in August, Sun Records of Memphis, Tennessee, released Mystery Train, written - and first recorded - by Blues musician Junior Parker some two years previously, a semi-mythical 45rpm by Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill featuring the so-called King of Western Bop who went on to become Rock's single most influential figure apart from the Beatles. On the 30th of September, James Dean died in hospital following a motor accident aged 24 after having made only three films, the greatest of which, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, emerged about a month afterwards. It could be said to be the motion picture industry's defining elegy to the sensitivity and rebelliousness of youth, with Dean its most beautiful and tortured icon ever. As such his image has never dated, nor been surpassed. The modern cult of youth was born in the mid 1950s. However, Dean himself had been powerfully influenced by Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, arguably the two foremost pioneers of the Stanislavski Method within the Motion Picture industry, who'd honed their craft in the late '40s at the celebrated Actors Studio in New York City. The screen personas of Clift, Brando and Dean, in which vulnerability and defiance were fused to luminously magnetic effect arguably served as prototypes of the neurotic and narcissistic individualism that went on to exert such a seismic influence on the evolution of the sixties Counterculture in era-defining movies such as George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951), Stanley Kramer's The Wild One (1953), and Elia Kazan's East of Eden (1954). Their mixture of incandescent beauty and sullen defiance was hardly new though, having been a feature of Romantic rebels again and again at least since the heyday of Byron and Shelley; and it could be said that their true spiritual ancestor was none other than King David's much loved yet fatally rebellious son Absalom, of whom it was written in 2 Samuel 14:25: "But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him." Again and again, 1955 is cited by cultural commentators as the year in which things started to change in America and the West. When it comes to Britain, there seems to be no doubt that within the space of a mere two generations, a spectacular rise in criminal violence from the low rates of at least the previous two centuries, occurred from about 1955. This same rise coincided with increasingly large-scale denigration of such traditionally sanctified Christian institutions as marriage, pre-marital purity and the two-parent family, which had always been seen as the enemy by various revolutionary tendencies within art and politics, while being respected by the majority, and affected every industrial nation apart from Japan. As in Britain, so in the US, but given America's far greater size and complexity, the situation has of necessity been more extreme. Take a remarkable article written in the Fall of 1955 for the Trotskyist Fourth International, entitled Youth in a Delinquent Society: Its author, Joyce Cowley, was at pains to emphasize the general conformity of American youth in the mid 1950s, while also making it clear that cautious conservatism was far from being the total picture, and that there'd been a sharp rise in crime since the onset of the decade. She also stated something to the effect that the nature of the crimes committed during this period were of a shocking gravity that had been relatively uncommon in the US in more recent decades. To support her point, she alluded to various phenomena which are all too familiar to those of us who came to maturity in the '60s and beyond, including the abuse of narcotics, and acts of gratuitous cruelty and violence, from teen gang rumbles to the senseless sacrifice of innocents. But does all this mean that civilisation, not just in the US and the West, but as a whole, is irrevocably doomed? Many Christians are indeed of the belief that these are the final days prior to the return of the Lord, of which He speaks in Matthew 24:37: "But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be." They may indeed be right, and there are many indications that this is the case. However, in the verse immediately preceding the one just quoted, Jesus makes it clear that when it comes to the precise day of the Second Coming, only God the Father knows: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." Thence, it may well be that if the nations of the West return to the Judeo-Christian values on which they were founded, not half-heartedly...but with the kind of uncompromising passion for God that provoked the great revivals of history, like prodigals, broken and contrite in spirit, our great civilisation may yet survive.

Darling Fan (For the Love of Prunella Ransome) Prunella Ransome was a fey and hauntingly vulnerable redheaded beauty who only made a handful of feature films, and never achieved the major stardom she so richly deserved. However, she was absolutely unforgettable as the pathetic Fanny Robin, abandoned by her sweetheart Sergeant Troy - played by '60s icon Terence Stamp - for having mistakenly jilted him on their wedding day in John Schlesinger's masterful 1967 adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, a writer of genius whose works were replete with Biblical allusions.

And yet could it be said the tragic nature of so much of his art is predicated on the fact he never came to saving faith, despite an early attraction to Evangelical Christianity? Only God knows the answer; but the tragedy is beyond dispute, not least in Madding Crowd, whose saddest character of all is surely Troy's pure-hearted "Darling Fan". Her father, Jimmy Ransome, was the headmaster of West Hill Park, a private school for boys aged 7 to 13 located in Titchfield in Hampshire, from 1952 to 1959; and she was born on the 18th of January 1943 in Croydon in Surrey, a massive suburban area to the south of London which, in demographic terms, could not be more mixed, including as it does many tough multicultural districts, such as West Croydon and Thornton Heath, the largest council estate in Europe in the shape of New Addington, and wealthy middle class enclaves such as Sanderstead. Her career began in earnest in 1967 with a television series, Kenilworth, based on the historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, in which she had the vital role of Amy Robsart, first wife of Lord Robert Dudley, who met her death by falling down a flight of stairs. Although, as early as 1959, she'd allegedly danced in the long-running summer show, Twinkle, which first saw the light of day in 1921, courtesy of the comedian and pantomime dame, Clarkson Rose. On the back of this major role, she made her incredible debut as Fanny Robin, for which she was deservedly nominated for the 1967 Golden Globe for best supporting actress, only to lose out to Carol Channing for the role of Muzzy Van Hossmere in Thoroughly Modern Millie. While Crowd was not a major box office success despite some critical acclaim, it has come to be viewed by many as an unsung masterpiece. Despite this extraordinary early burst of success, she wasn't to appear onscreen for a full two years, when she featured opposite another idol of the swinging sixties, David Hemmings, in Alfred the Great, directed by Clive Donner, as Alfred's love interest, Aelhswith. A good deal of British television work followed, until she landed her third and final major film role in 1971, as Grace Bass, wife of Zachary Bass - played by Richard Harris - a character loosely based on American frontiersman, Hugh Glass, in the action western, Man in the Wilderness, directed by Richard C. Sarafian. From '76 to '84, she worked pretty solidly for TV, and among the programmes in which she had important roles during this period were Crime and Punishment (1979), directed by Michael Darlow, and featuring John Hurt as Raskolnikov, and Sorrell and Son (1984), based on the novel by Warwick Deeping, and directed by Derek Bennett. After this, though, she vanished from British television screens for a full eight years, and was only to appear in a further three more productions, the last one being in 1996. And she died in 2002 in Suffolk, East Anglia, although some internet websites give the date of her death as '03. For my part, I'll treasure those few moments she graced the screen in Far from the Madding Crowd, and especially the fathomless anguish in her face as she watches her beloved Sergeant Troy walk out of her life forever, but for a final reunion so heartbreaking it destroyed both their lives, Fanny's within a few hours, Troy's after a period wandering the earth as a soul in torment.

Far Beyond the Borderlands of Scotia As in the case of all the information I provide in my writings, that contained within the piece that follows stems from what I've come to believe is true according to my research, and is at no point intended to mislead. But it's been estimated that some 27 million Americans are of Scots-Irish descent, making it one of the largest ethnic groups in the country, although the vast majority of these would consider themselves simply to be ethnically American. And among those sons and daughter of the US able to boast of Scots-Irish origins have been many of the nation's most legendary figures. Such as, reputably, Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Edgar Allan Poe, Kit Carson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Andrew W. Mellon, George S. Patton, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Jackson Pollock, Ava Gardner, Audie Murphy, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, Robert Redford, and Kurt Cobain. But that does not necessarily mean that all these illustrious individuals possess Caledonian – or for that matter Hibernian - roots. For Scots-Irish is a term which, almost exclusively American, tends to refer to those one-time immigrants to the US from Ireland who were of Protestant ancestry, together with their descendants. And thence theoretically just as likely to be originally from England as Scotland; and more likely to be of Anglo-Saxon, rather than Celtic, lineage. Again, according to theory. Perhaps given they are of alleged Anglo-Scottish stock for the most part, with probable Irish, Flemish, French and German admixtures a far apter description would be British Irish; or Ulster British. However, Scots-Irish is the name by which they are most famous, so from this point on, they will mainly be referred to as such. In addition to the US, people of Scots-Irish descent are to be found in all other parts of the Anglosphere, including Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, and of course Britain. Indeed, the people whence they directly emerged are still to be found in Northern Ireland and other parts of the United Kingdom. While living Britons of Scots Irish, or more correctly Ulster Irish, lineage include the much-praised actor and director Kenneth Branagh, Rock virtuoso Matt Bellamy, and film and stage actor Daniel Radcliffe. As well as all those Northern Irish men and women who identify as British, of which there are allegedly 37%. Although it's not certain whether the first-named, who has referred to himself as Irish, is among them. To say nothing of your humble author, who, while proud of his Scots Irishness, nonetheless maintains that there is no justification for claims of superiority on the part of any ethnic group, given we are each of us subject to sin from birth. This is a concept which will hold great appeal to many of those of Scots-Irish extraction, given their longstanding affiliation to that form of Christianity which is predicated on a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, and which has become known as Fundamentalism. As I've already stated with respect to their ethnicity, the Scots-Irish are neither strictly Scottish nor Irish. In fact, their

origins as a distinct group lie in what are known as the Ulster Plantations, which came into existence in 1609, in the wake of the Nine Years War, a bloody conflict fought largely in the province of Ulster, Ireland, between its chieftains and their Catholic allies, on one hand, and the forces of Elizabethan England on the other. The latter's decisive victory led to the end of the Gaelic Clan system, and the colonization of Ulster by English and Scottish Protestants; hence, the Ulster Plantations. Many of these planters had been inhabitants of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands, and so, hailing from Northern English counties such as Cumberland, Westmoreland, Northumberland, Yorkshire and Lancashire, and counties of the Scottish Lowlands, such as Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire, Roxburghshire, Berwickshire and Wigtownshire. According to many sources, Lowlanders are distinct from their Highland counterparts by being of Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic ethnicity, although how true this is it's impossible to say. Certainly, the region straddling the Scottish Lowlands and Anglo-Scottish Borderlands is one traditionally perceived by Highlanders as Sassenach, which is the Gaelic term for a person of Anglo-Saxon origin. Whatever the truth, the sensible view is that their bloodline contains a variety of kindred strains including - as well as Anglo-Saxon - Gaelic, Pictish, Norman and so on, depending on the exact region. Moreover, all Caucasian inhabitants of the British Isles partake of a fairly homogeneous ancestry, which certain contemporary experts are claiming to be more Iberian than anything else. Again, this is open to conjecture. These Ulster Scots emigrated to the US in the 1600s, and their descendants are to be found all throughout the country, but most famously perhaps in those regions which are culturally Southern, which is to say those states situated beneath the Mason-Dixon Line. Indeed most of the original European settlers of the Deep and Upland South are widely believed to have been of British, and especially English and Ulster-Scots, origin. Today, many of them describe themselves as merely "American", while others continue to claim either English or Ulster-Scots descent. In the early 1700s, some 50,000 Scots-Irish men and women left the ports of Belfast, Larne and Londonderry for the New World. They came as a fiercely independent people, complete with Bible and musket, and mostly as skilled workers, filled to the brim with the Protestant work ethic, and desperate for religious freedom. Having had a negative experience of gentry-dominated societies in both Britain and Ireland, the freshly arrived Scots-Irish were understandably keen to steer clear of similar regimes in the US. So at first, they avoided Virginia, which had been settled during the English Civil War and its aftermath by Royalist Cavaliers of gentle birth, as well as the Carolinas, as all were under the sway of the plantation system and the Church of England; while Maryland had been established for the Catholic nobility. Their first part of call was the Pennsylvanian backcountry, and from there, they moved further down into the Southern hinterland, to Virginia and the Carolinas; and following the war of independence, and together with fresh immigrants, they set about the population of Kentucky, Georgia and Tennessee, and so the rest of the South. At the same time, many remained in Pennsylvania and surrounding areas, while others moved further west, so that parts of Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma went on to become culturally Anglo-Celtic, and specifically Scots-Irish. The same could be said of the southernmost parts of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. They formed the dominant culture of the Appalachian mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and featured strongly among those who tamed the West in the wake of the American War of Independence. In time, they largely forsook their Calvinist roots to adopt the fervid Evangelicalism for which they are renowned throughout the world, as they are for their unyielding allegiance to God, nation and family. Their influence grew to the extent that they became part of America's ruling elite, with no less than a third of all American presidents having ancestral links to Ulster, these reputedly including FDR, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, both Bushes and Obama. Thence, this remarkable little race made the voyage all the way from the borderlands of Scotland, where they existed as the lowliest and most oppressed of peoples, to the highest political office in the world.

From Avant Garde to Global Village Introduction It could justifiably be stated that we are currently living in a Western World whose moral world view owes much to values which until recently were associated with progressives operating within the arts, politics, philosophy, religion etc., and that this morality remains more or less constant, affecting everything from top to bottom in our society, despite sporadic shifts of power from the political left to the right. At the same time, traditional morality - founded on the West's Judeo-Christian heritage - is being increasingly seen as harsh and exclusivist, where once it held almost total sway. In order to come to some sort of conclusion as to how this situation came about, as good a starting point as any would be the early 19th Century, at a time when the Romantic Movement was birthing the concept of an artistic avant-garde on the cutting edge of innovation, not just in terms of creativity, but societal change. Plausibly, the avant-garde worldview was the scion of a greater revolutionary spirit that had been impacting the West at least since the dawn of the Enlightenment, the great European move towards greater Rationalism regarding the key issues of life. The Age of Reason began towards the end of the 18th Century, lasting until about 1789, the year of the French Revolution, which was one if its earliest fruits. Many theories exist as to what - or who - was the main driving force behind this spirit, but it's not the aim of this essay to attempt to unmask these, so much as to trace the course of the avant-garde throughout history, and so speculate on

how so humble a tendency might ultimately have come to alter the entire fabric of Western civilisation through a process known as Modernism. From Avant Garde to Global Village It may have been the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who, by asserting that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," was the first major artist to give expression to the concept of an avant-garde on the cutting edge of creative innovation. That said, the first actual use of the term in an artistic rather than military sense was probably made in 1825 by the early Socialist theorist Henri de Saint-Simon in his Literary, Philosophical and Industrial Opinions. Whatever the truth, it's a recent development, fostered by the early, and especially German and English, Romantics, whose influence on the development of the notion of the Artist as Rebel cannot be underestimated. Yet, it arguably found its first spiritual home in post-revolutionary Paris. It's impossible to say precisely why, of course, but what is beyond dispute is that of all the nations of Europe, few could lay greater claim to national genius than France...and that this genius is most encapsulated in her ever-enchanting capital city. More particularly, though, by the 1830s, and following a long series of national traumas including the Revolutionary War itself, Paris had - I think it's fair to say - become the leading world incubator of the most charismatic originality of thought and behaviour. It was a uniqueness, moreover, that has tended ever since to verge on the downright bizarre when manifested by certain of her most gifted citizens...such as her celebrated accursed poets - so-called, of course, for even the most malefic among us are capable of coming to faith in Christ - who have long been the ultimate apostles of the avant-garde. It could be said that the first generation of these were numbered among the young men who - in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 - congregated about such wild and brilliant youth as Petrus Borel and Theophile Gautier, two writers of the so-called frenetic school of late Romantics. They did so with the purpose of enforcing the Romantic worldview in the face of widespread censure on the part of the despised respectable middle classes. To the Gautier of the mid 1830s, this censure constituted a veritable Christian moral resurgence, which he rails against in the famous preface to his 1836 novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, the first known manifesto of the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. These seminal avant-gardists have become known as the Bouzingos, although little distinguished them from the earlier Jeunes-France. They were originally members of the Petit Cenacle, a Romantic clique allegedly founded by the sculptor Jehan du Seigneur, whose role in the infamous Battle of Hernani at the Comedie-Francaise theatre in February 1830 was paramount. This took place on the opening night of Hugo's play, Hernani, and was marked by violent scenes involving defenders of the Classical tradition, and Hugo's supporters, who flaunted long hair and flamboyant costumes in defiance of everything the former held dear. In addition to Gautier, Borel and Seigneur, they included Gerard de Nerval, Philothee O'Neddy and Augustus MacKeat, all of whom went on to be numbered among the Jeunes-France. According to one theory, while the first Bouzingos were a band of political agitators who took part in the July Revolution in wide-brimmed leather hats, their artistic counterparts were wrongly named by the press following a night of riotous boozing which saw some of them end up in prison for the night. They too embraced radical political views, because for the most part, the artistic avant-garde has inclined to the left, while containing an ultra-conservative element. Needless to say perhaps, they owed an enormous debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, who did much - or so it's been asserted - to promulgate the myth of the tormented artist ever-existent on the fringes of respectable society...which later came to be known as Bohemia. Akin to the bohemian was the dandy; and of the purported accursed poets of mid 19th Century Paris, several were both bohemians and dandies, depending on their circumstances at the time. They included Charles Baudelaire, whose 1863 essay The Dandy is one of the defining works on the subject. The great Parisian Bohemias of the 19th Century were the Left Bank of the Seine as a whole - including the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse - and Montmartre, which exploded on an international scale towards the century's end; while the first literary work to officially celebrate the Bohemian way was Henri Murger's Scenes of Bohemian Life. Later Bohemias included London's Chelsea, and New York's Greenwich Village, but Paris remains Bohemia's true and eternal spiritual capital. The first waves of the avant-garde, and the Bohemias in which they thrived, ultimately produced the Decadent movement of the 1870s and '80s, and a multitude of minor sects, such as the Zutistes of the early '70s, which for a time included Verlaine and Rimbaud, and the later Hirsutes and Hydropathes, and finally, the great Symbolist Movement in the arts. However, the spirit of the avant-garde could be said to have triumphed as never before in the shape of the massively influential and truly international artistic and cultural phenomenon known as Modernism. In an artistic sense, she existed at her point of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930, producing such earth-shaking works as Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913), T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Mention must also be made of such Modernist schools as the previously mentioned Symbolism, as well as Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. It could be said that she represented the triumph of the avant-garde, anticipating her future at the very heart of the cultural mainstream.

Furthermore, whenever Modernism is discussed with regard to the arts, parallel iconoclastic developments by figures such as Marx in politics, Nietzsche in philosophy, Freud in psychology, and Darwin in science must surely be taken into consideration. They all served to fuel the Modernist agenda, which - according to certain cultural critics - is intrinsically anti-Christian...and there is substance to their argument, although several major Modernist figures have been professing Christians. Taking things further, it could be averred that rather than emerging from the avant-garde, Modernism actually predated it, that is, as a spirit rather than a movement as such, having roots further back into the depths of Western history, beyond the Age of Reason, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity. She seemed to undergo a falling away in terms of intensity in the years leading up to the Second World War, while the immediate post-war age brought renewed activity through the Existentialists and Lettrists of Paris, but more especially through the Beat Generation, born in the city which had recently become the cultural capital of the world: New York. Together, they helped to usher in what could be called an age of Mass-Modernism, although they weren't operating alone, because by the early '50s, the Modern had formed a strong alliance with the popular arts. In fact, this had occurred some half century earlier with the genesis of Pop Culture, which gave rise to the cinema, and one of the first true Pop music genres in the shape of Ragtime. However, these were minor developments in comparison to the cataclysmic events of the '60s. Possibly the single most powerful weapon in the Modernist armoury has been Pop Culture, and in terms of its evolution, the influence of the Beat Generation was enormous. That is especially true of its role as the begetter of the Hippie uprising, which took place between about 1965, with San Francisco as its centrifugal city, and 1967 when it peaked, before ceding to the year of revolutions, which was 1968. One of the keynotes of late Modernism and the social revolution it provoked, most notably in the 1960s, has been the progressive acceptance by mass culture of beliefs once seen as the preserve of bohemians and avant-gardists, the most obvious being the so-called "free love" once promoted so forcefully by angel-faced atheist, Percy Bysshe Shelley. This process was considerably facilitated by the Rock revolution which, after having begun around 1955-'56, segued into the sentimental Pop music that reached its apogee with the Beatles. It then underwent a further quickening at the hands of harder, earthier bands such as those of the first British Blues boom; and so evolve into Rock pure and simple. By the end of the '60s, Rock had become a truly versatile music, running the gamut from the most infantile hit parade ditties to musically and lyrically complex compositions owing as much to Classical music and Jazz as Rock and Roll. As such, it was an international language, with the power to disseminate values hostile to traditional Western morality as no other artistic movement before it, while the most powerful Rock stars attained - if only fleetingly - through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within high culture could only dream of. Yet, as the ultimate manifestation of what might be termed Mass-Modernism, Rock has not functioned alone; in fact, from the outset, it was impelled by the cinema of youthful discontent of the early 1950s, whose magnetic icons, including Monty Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean, could be said to have been Rock stars before their time. Furthermore, as the Rock revolution proceeded apace throughout the '70s, it was buttressed and enabled by a cinema finally freed from the shackles of the Motion Picture Production Code, which had been in force since 1930 but which was finally jettisoned in 1967, after at least a decade of declining efficacy. At some point in its recent history, Modernism's unrelenting drive towards permanent societal change arguably reached a logical conclusion, as the classic values of the avant-garde had begun to wholly dominate the cultural mainstream; and so the West entered a Postmodern phase. When this occurred is open to conjecture, but 1980 has been put forward as a likely date. Certainly, after 1980, it became impossible for artists to scandalise the bourgeoisie as they'd once done; and even when they strained to shock a public all but impervious to outrage, originality eluded them. Others have insisted Postmodernism began as early as 1950, on the eve of the television and Pop Music revolutions. What is certain is that things have changed beyond all measure in the West in the last half century or so to the extent that in the 2010s, the age-old dream of political and artistic radicals, and their allies within the realms of religion, philosophy, psychology, science etc., of a world united by humanitarian values could be closer to becoming a reality than has ever been possible up to this point in time. In the meantime, the old world, the Judeo-Christian one bound by love of God, love of country, and love of family, has to all intents and purposes been cast out into the wilderness, as if there can be no place for its ancient certainties in the paradise about to be born.

Linton (The Weaker Heathcliff)

The Gothic tendency within literature pre-existed the great Romantic movement in the arts and literature, pre-eminently in the shape of the Gothic Novel. And the latter introduced a type of brooding anti-hero, such as Montoni from Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), who would go on to be identified as Byronic after the great English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). But the Byronic hero could be said to have attained its literary apogee in the shape of a brace of anti-heroes featuring in the works of two literary sisters born to an Anglican minister in the county of Yorkshire towards the beginning of the 19th Century, Emily and Charlotte Bronte. These being Rochester, from Charlotte's Jane Eyre, and Heathcliff, from Emily's Wuthering Heights, both novels being first published in 1847. The latter, perhaps the most celebrated Gothic Romantic novel in literary history, has as one of

its central features the introduction of the aforesaid Heathcliff into the prosperous Earnshaw family of Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse situated on the Moors of Yorkshire. This occurs in consequence of a trip made by the master of the house to the city of Liverpool, where he encounters a homeless Romany boy whom he decides to adopt as his own son, despite the fact that he already has a son, Hindley, as well as a daughter Catherine. And while Hindley goes on to experience deep resentment of his adoptive brother, his sister comes to care for him, and it's this powerful attachment that ultimately blossoms into the all-consuming love between Cathy and Heathcliff that is the novel's central theme. In young adulthood, Heathcliff is the quintessential Romantic hero, in so far as he is fatally dark and handsome, and motivated by a nature so passionate that it threatens to destroy everything it comes into contact with including its possessor. And one rendered especially dangerous by virtue of Cathy's status-seeking marriage to his love rival, Edgar Linton, and his own new-found prosperity. Following Cathy's death, the remainder of the novel depicts his ruinous effect on all forced to co-exist with him, including his sickly and ineffectual son, Linton. And one can't help thinking that the latter's short life in some way incarnates the tragedy of sons born to strong and successful men, and how they so often spend their lives in restless and troubled pursuit of not just their father's approval, but their power. Linton is the unfortunate offspring of the marriage between Heathcliff and Isabella, sister of Edgar Linton, whom Heathcliff weds merely as a means of taking his revenge on his detested brother in law. And Linton inherits none of his father's swarthiness and manifest manliness, being very much a Linton in appearance, blond and blue-eyed, but unlike his uncle he is something of a milksop, with a spoiled and peevish nature. But contrary to what might be expected for one so fragile, he enjoys the sufferings of the weak and powerless. One might be tempted to see in this cruelty the revenge of one excluded from societal power by virtue of lack of manly character. Indeed, Wuthering Heights as a whole has been described as a meditation on the nature of power, with certain characters representing its purest form by dint of advantages of birth and gender fused with lofty character; while others enjoy only relative power. And among these might be included Cathy and Heathcliff, who, despite being strong alpha figures, are excluded from true power by dint of gender and lowly origins respectively, a fact which ultimately secures their shared ruination through Cathy's marriage to Edgar Linton, a man for whom she feels only limited passion. Linton Heathcliff, on the other hand, is very much an omega male, petrified of his powerful father, who ultimately forces him into marrying Cathy's daughter with Edgar Linton, also called Cathy, soon after which he dies, never having truly lived in effect. Yet he is an intriguing character despite his pathetic failure to make his mark on the world, and one can't help thinking that had he been born into an environment more suited to his fragile and sensitive nature, he might have amounted to something in the end. Perhaps the coming century's end would have been more congenial, and he'd have thrived as a poet in the aesthetic tradition.

Luke the Drifter and the Secrets of Country Luke the Drifter and the Birth of Country It's widely accepted that singer and songwriter Hank Williams is Country Music's single most revered figure, and among the most influential popular musicians of the 20th Century. And as such he incarnated many of the key elements of this most American of arts, having been born poor in the rural South of the United States, for notwithstanding its Canadian and Australian variants, Country is quintessentially the music of the working people of the American South. These allegedly originally consisting of southern English emigrants from rural East Anglia, Kent and the West Country, who settled largely on the coastal regions, but had reached the Appalachian Mountains by the 18th Century. While Appalachia and the Piedmont were both significantly colonised by Northern English and Lowland Scottish peoples, as well as the Protestant Scots-Irish from Ireland's Ulster province. And the great majority of white Southerners continue to be of English and Scots-Irish origin, notwithstanding the sizeable amounts of Southerners who don't share these ancestries. Such as the French Americans of Louisiana for example; and the Irish Americans of South Georgia; as well as the German Americans of the Texas Hill Country and borderland areas of the upland South. But Hank Williams was of English-American ancestry, like so many of those who bequeathed the South its distinctive culture, which includes its famous conservatism and patriotism, themselves the result of deep-rooted Christian foundations. And a culture of honour...born perhaps of the clannishness of herders from Western and Northern England, Lowland Scotland and Ireland's Ulster province...and resultant fiery sense of protectiveness. As well as the time-honoured mistrust existent between the rural poor and wealthy elite, such as those of the coastal areas, who were traditionally of English Episcopalian origin. While those of the hill country were mainly of mixed English and Scots-Irish ancestry. And of course its music...and while it's known as Country today, this has not always been the case. For its roots lie in the Folk Music of emigrants from Britain and Ireland, as do the Square and Clog dancing that flourished alongside it; although while the fiddle came from the British Isles, the banjo was African-American in origin. While the Mountain Dulcimer was native to the Appalachians.

Known today as Old Time music, it was first commercially recorded in the early 1920s. While among the earliest acts considered Country per se were Jimmie Rodgers from Mississippi; and the Carter Family from Virginia, whose music was marked by the Evangelical fervour that would go on to be one of the defining hallmarks of early Country. And other early superstars included Uncle Dave Macon, son of a Confederate Captain, Country Gospel pioneer Roy Claxton Acuff, and harmonica master DeFord Bailey, self-styled purveyor of Black Hillbilly music. For at the time, Country was still described as such, with Acuff being known as the King of the Hillbillies (some time before he became The Backwoods Sinatra). All three were early performers at the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly stage event instituted in 1925 in Nashville, Tennessee, which has since become established as the spiritual capital of Country Music. But which was originally but a one-hour barn dance featured on local radio. And if Acuff represented the family values that have always been part and parcel of Country, then Western Swing, a fusion of Country and Swing which took root in Texas and Oklahoma in the late 1920s, was infinitely less spiritual. Although by contemporary standards, it was the soul of romantic innocence. And in time it mutated into Honky-Tonk, which was variously fuelled by Country fiddle and steel and electric guitars, as well as the Boogie Woogie piano style of artists such as Moon Mullican. While Ernest Tubb's Walking the Floor Over You is widely considered to have launched the genre in 1941, which at the hands of Floyd Tillman, produced songs of great beauty which inclined as much to Traditional Pop as Country. While Mullican's music was incredibly influential, providing much of the groundwork not just for Rockabilly, but Rock and Roll itself. Although its dominance was seriously challenged by the birth of Bluegrass, which harked back to the classic Folk of yore, its founding father, Bill Monroe from the Bluegrass State itself. While other masterful acts within the tradition included the Stanley and Louvin Brothers. If Honky-Tonk provided the essence of modern Country, then Bluegrass was the keeper of the classical tradition; and it could conceivably be said that Hank Williams stood at the crossroads of both. That is, if his dual inclination to the spiritual fervour of Southern Gospel and the out and out hedonism of Honky-Tonk were anything to go by. And perhaps it's partly because he was such a divided spirit that he stands as Country's single most revered figure, and not just in terms of his music - Country of course having served as one of the prime components of primordial Rock and Roll - but his wild and colourful lifestyle. For there are those who'd insist this was perfectly in keeping with the Rock and Roll ethos that came in the wake of his untimely death in 1953. Although such a theory can only be partially true at best. For far from being some kind of conscienceless libertine, there's evidence he was conscious of the necessity of repentance all throughout his life. And in this respect, anticipated the tortured relationship with Christ enjoyed by several of his progeny within Rock and Roll, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis himself. There's also evidence he made his peace with his Saviour immediately prior to his terrible lonely demise, which while indisputably hastened by long-term alcohol abuse, was ultimately the result of a heart attack. While mention must be made of the morphine and chloral hydrate he'd been latterly taking as a means of controlling his chronic back pain. And could it be said his longstanding pain was ultimately spiritual, as well as physical...born of a conviction on his part he'd neglected the kind of faith that inspired several of his early songs, such as Wealth Won't Save Your Soul from '47, and I Saw the Light from a year later? And that he'd allowed himself to be blinded by worldly ambition? Whatever the truth, it seems apparent this failed to provide him with any true long-lasting happiness. Or indeed the mainstream success for which he clearly so longed for a time. But if he died a saved man, in the final analysis, was this really such a great loss?

Luke the Drifter and the Life of Hank Williams

He was born Hiram King Williams in Mount Olive in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, on the 17th of September 1923, to Elonzo Williams, a World War One veteran of English ancestry known as Lon, and his wife Jessie Lillybelle Williams - nee Skipper - known as Lillie. Lon Williams' working career had included time spent as a waterboy on logging camps, while he was ultimately destined to ascend to the lofty status of engineer for a prestigious logging company. But he'd more recently opened a small store with his wife adjacent to their cabin in Mount Olive. And their first child, Irene, had been born on the 8th of August 1922. Young Hiram was a frail and slender boy seemingly bound for a lifetime of suffering, and most of all from a mild undiagnosed case of the spinal disorder, spina bifida occulta. Then, in 1930, when he was only seven years old, his father was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm related to a fall he'd suffered during his wartime service, and he was hospitalised for eight years. Which resulted in a lengthy peripatetic period for the Williams family, with Lillie finding work wherever she could. And it was during a brief sojourn in Georgiana that Williams' musical career is believed to have come about, when Blues musician Rufus Payne, known as Tee Tot, provided the young Hank with guitar lessons in exchange for meals prepared by his mother. The upshot being he came to develop a unique musical style consisting of elements of Country, Folk and Blues which presaged the eventual birth of Rock and Roll. And while still only a teenager he was already hosting his own show on a local radio station in Montgomery, Alabama,

as the Singing Kid, while touring beer joints and other venues with his band, which he dubbed the Drifting Cowboys. So that by the early '40s he was a regional star attraction, coming to the attention as such of various influential members of the music business, even while seeking the alcoholic self-medication that took a serious toll on his reputation for reliability. And then, with America's entry into World War II in 1941, the band was virtually decimated, although Williams himself was exempted from active service by dint of his medical condition. Two years later, he met Audrey Mae Sheppard, a beautiful divorcee from a farming family from Banks, Alabama, and they wasted little time in getting married, with Audrey becoming his manager a short time before their wedding. And in 1946, he and Audrey visited Nashville with a view to meeting music publisher Fred Rose, one of the heads of Acuff-Rose Publishing with one of Hank's idols, Roy Acuff. He promptly went on to record two successful singles, which resulted in his signing a contract with MGM Records with Rose as his manager and producer. Move It On Over, released in 1947 was Williams' first single for MGM, and while it went to number four on the Billboard Country Singles chart, it failed to make a dent on the Pop mainstream. Although its uncanny resemblance to Rock Around the Clock makes it one of the most influential records of the 20th Century. However, by this time, his problems with alcohol were in constant danger of sabotaging his ascent to national celebrity. And far from contributing to these, it's believed Audrey was indefatigable in her efforts to keep him from the booze and encourage his rise to the top, notwithstanding the turbulence of their relationship. But these were such that Fred Rose, who evidently loved him as his own son, gave up on him in despair, while in April 1948, Audrey filed for divorce. However, after having reconciled with both his manager and the love of his life, his career was once more on track. And in August, he appeared on the Louisiana Hayride radio show, which would play host to one Elvis Presley just a little over a half dozen years down the line. Then in 1949, his son Randall Hank Williams - who would go on to great success in his own right as Hank Williams Jr. - was born on the 26th of May. While his cover of Lovesick Blues, a Tin Pan Alley song written by Cliff Friend and Irving Mills in 1922, became his first number one on the Country chart, while crossing over into the Top 25 at number 24. And when he performed it at the Grand Ole Opry in June, he received no less than six encores, which was unprecedented at the time, and had the effect of turning him into a true star at long last. With success came the creative freedom to create an enigmatic alter ego, which he did in 1950. And under the name of Luke the Drifter, he recorded a series of recitation-based recordings of a marked spiritual inclination. But 1951 was a year of terrible trial for Hiram King, and his final separation from Audrey came in May when they were divorced for a second time. While in August, his uncontrolled alcoholism saw him fired from the Grand Ole Opry. Although his career proceeded apace, and he placed no less than five singles in the Country top ten in that year, including two number ones in the shape of Hey Good Lookin'; and Cold, Cold Heart, which the great vocal stylist Tony Bennett took to number one on the national chart. But in the fall, he suffered an accident during a hunting trip on his Tennessee farm which exacerbated his already chronic back problems, while allegedly causing him to resort to a variety of painkillers including morphine. While in '52, he scored as many successes as the previous year, including Jambalaya (On the Bayou), which reached number 20 on the national chart, making it his greatest ever hit. His personal life received a shot of good fortune in October when he married another Southern beauty Billie Jean Jones in Minden, Louisiana. And it's she who has publicly testified to his reconciliation with Jesus shortly before his death on New Year's Day 1953, while it behoves all Christian men and women to maintain its sincerity. For when all's said and done, a person's salvation is in the hands of the Creator, and the Creator alone. What is certain is that his death came some time after midnight on the 1st of January 1953, in the back of a Cadillac convertible in which he was being driven to a series of concerts by a college student called Charles Carr, and was in consequence of a heart attack. And it's been called the first great tragedy of Rock and Roll. But were it still up to Williams, would he truly care to be identified with such an ecstatically sensual music form? That is, in the light of the Luke the Drifter recordings; and his professed belief in the vital importance of repentance, as expressed through several of his earliest songs. To say nothing of the high poetic quality of his lyrics, which have caused him to be dubbed the Hillbilly Shakespeare. Although to be fair, Rock wasted little time in becoming a bona fide art form, with Bob Dylan injecting voluminous quantities of high culture into the music once he'd crossed over from Folk in 1965. While the Beatles were among the first of the initial wave of sixties Rock groups to be powerfully influenced by the fledgling art form's first true intellectual. And would it be too fanciful to suggest that Williams' considerable poetic gifts partially anticipated this development? For Dylan has included him among his foremost artistic mentors. While his musical progeny have also included the greatest Rock star of them all, Elvis Presley...the man who effectively birthed an entire era. Albeit unwittingly. For Elvis was initially seen as a Country artist, performing on the Grand Ole Opry for the first and only time on 2 October 1954, and on the Louisiana Hayride a fortnight after that; and then all throughout the following year. Although in truth, his music subsumed the rougher elements of both Country and Rhythm and Blues to create an entirely new music genre, Rock and Roll. And seminal Rock and Roll inclined more to Country or R&B depending on the artist creating it at any given time.

But whatever it was known as, it took the Pop world by storm around 1955, while fomenting a cultural and moral revolution whose repercussions continue to be felt in the West and beyond to this day.

Luke the Drifter and the Future of Country

It could conceivably be said that the means by which Country survived the Rock and Roll revolution was to distance itself from the very earthiness that had inspired it. And which was pre-eminently associated with Country music's single most revered figure, Hank Williams, who is also among the most influential popular musicians of the 20th Century. So while the smooth musical genres of Soul and Tamla Motown emerged from the far rougher sound of primal R&B, the Nashville Sound was born from a co-mingling of Country and Tin Pan Alley style Pop in the city that tendered it its name. While its earliest proponents included Jim Reeves, who sang with the finesse of a great song stylist...a Sinatra or a Como...and Patsy Cline, who had something of the Jazz chanteuse about her. But while the Nashville Sound saved Country Music in commercial terms in around 1958, a major creative backlash came courtesy of the Southern Diaspora city of Bakersfield, whose Bakersfield Sound, forged in the mid 1950s, started infiltrating the mainstream a few years later. For during the Dust Bowl period of the early 1930s, this small conservative town in California's San Joaquin Valley had been subject to a massive influx of migrants from several southern states including Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas. And when they came, they brought their music and culture with them, with the result that Bakersfield became a Southern city in all but name. And if the Nashville Sound was born of a harmonious merger between Country and Tin Pan Alley, that of Bakersfield harked back to the pre-Rock age, while ultimately co-opting several key ingredients of this upstart art, its first major figure the Texan Buck Owens, who settled in the town in 1951. While his first number one, Act Naturally, from 1963, was later covered by the most successful Pop act of all time, the Beatles...who were allegedly influenced by the Bakersfield Sound; and certainly the distinctive twang of many of their earliest recordings has a powerful Country feel about it. Although unlike the superstars of the Nashville Sound, Owens never had a top ten record on the Billboard Hot 100. While Country Pop thrived throughout the '60s in the shape of such massive crossover hits as Jim Reeves' He'll Have to Go from '59, I'm Sorry by Brenda Lee from '60, Make the World Go Away by Eddie Arnold from '65, and the poignant Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell from the year of non-stop protest, 1968. But it was also in the '60s, or rather the late 1960s at a time when Rock was in the midst of its Golden Age, that new earthier forms of Country could be said to have set about the task of challenging the Nashville mainstream. Such as the first major Bluegrass Revival; as well as the increasing popularity of Progressive Bluegrass. While Country Rock became an international sensation thanks to such albums as the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, spearheaded in '68 by tragic golden boy, Gram Parsons, who more than anyone was responsible for introducing the Rolling Stones to his beloved music. Although Bob Dylan had perhaps been its foremost pioneer by power of incorporating elements of Country into his ground-breaking 1966 double album, Blonde on Blonde, with John Wesley Harding from '67, and Nashville Skyline from '69, serving to further consolidate the Country Rock revolution. But it wasn't until the '70s that the genre truly came into its own, when the Eagles emerged as the most successful Country Rock act of all time. Although their powerfully melodic sound was indebted to a classic Pop sensibility. And specifically that of the Beatles, whose Beatles for Sale from 1964 showed a marked Country influence. Among the other artists successfully operating within the Country Rock genre in the '70s were Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris and John Fogerty, whose Creedence Clearwater Revival had been instrumental in bringing about the birth of Southern Rock in the late 1960s. This a form of music forged from elements of Rock and Roll, Country and Blues, whose most beloved exponents remain Southern legends the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynrd. While concurrently with the coming of Country and Southern Rock, Outlaw Country, inspired by the spirit of Hank Williams, started making modest inroads into the mainstream. And it was Willie Nelson, ironically responsible for one of the most beautiful crossover ballads in Country Music history in the shape of Patsy Cline's Crazy, who stood at its centre. But he was aided and abetted in this respect by other veterans from the '50s, such as Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. While younger more troubled outlaws came in the shape of Townes Van Zandt, very much part of the pantheon of tortured prodigies that reached an apogee with Hank Williams, as well as Williams' own son, Hank Jr. Although Country Pop with its roots in the Nashville Sound continued to dominate the Pop charts in the '70s, providing such diverse figures as Anne Murray, Olivia Newton John, John Denver, Glen Campbell, Kenny Rogers, and Dolly Parton with massive crossover hits. Even if by the mid 1980s, it had begun to be challenged by the New Traditional and Alternative schools, with Lyle Lovett widely considered to be the supreme pioneer of what has become known variously as Alt-Country and Americana. While in the '90s and '00s, mainstream Country music experienced an explosion of popularity which propelled certain figures to levels of international pre-eminence previously unprecedented for Country artists. And these included Billy Ray Cyrus, Shania Twain, Faith Hill and the Dixie Chicks, but most of all, Garth Brooks,

who stands as the third most successful act in the history of recorded music in America. Even if in terms of international record sales, he is nowhere near as prolific as his closest rivals, the Beatles and Elvis Presley. And if mainstream Country in the new millennium is closer to Teenybop Pop than ever before, then there are those who'd insist that much contemporary alternative Country is Rock in all but name, with little of pure Country remaining. But if this is so, then at its most progressive, its produced some truly exalted art. Such as from native New Yorker, Gillian Welch, who more than anyone since the end of the last millennium has forged fresh territory for Country Music, by fusing Old-Time music not just to the sombre mysteries of Alternative Rock, but the beautiful melodies of Classical Pop. While Hiram King Williams' own grandson, Hank Williams III, serves to disprove the notion that the spirit of traditional Country has been entirely lost to the upstart art of Rock. Even if his lyrics are informed by such quintessential Rock and Roll subspecies as Heavy Metal and Punk. And what would his granddaddy, Country Music's single most revered figure, and among the most influential popular musicians of the 20th Century, have to say about the state of Country Music were he in a position to say anything at all? One can't help thinking he'd be urging those with the requisite talent to return to songs of repentance pure and simple. And that wherever he may be now...he'd be devoutly wishing he devoted more of his life and career to songs bespeaking the seeing of the light and the subsequent preparedness for a time about which he once so fervidly sang, When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels.

Pinteresque (A Controversial Artistic Legacy)

Introduction

Harold Pinter is a serious candidate for the greatest British playwright of the last two centuries. And that he was also a proficient poet, composer of short stories, screen writer, director, and actor can only serve to enhance his already enviable reputation. He even lent his name to an adjective, Pinteresque, implying typical of his style. A style which while indebted to several traditions existent within the literary avant-garde prior to his initial success, yet remains enormously distinctive. And among those traditions one might include the Dadaist, Surrealist and Absurdist movements in the arts, all of which were birthed in Paris. But these were preceded by a kind of snickering nihilistic humour that thrived in Parisian avant garde circles towards the end of the 19th Century, and which has been termed "L'Esprit fumiste", of which Alfred Jarry, author of the infamous King Ubu (1896) was perhaps the quintessence. Although even this spirit didn't just spring out of nowhere; having been arguably evident, for example, in the defiantly anti-bourgeois attitudes of the Bousingots, a band of extreme Romantics that came together in the Paris of the 1830s. Just as these turbulent young rebels passed the baton to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Jarry, Artaud and so on...all the way to the Theatre of the Absurd of the late 1950s, which is widely considered to include Pinter. And which was perforce an outgrowth of Absurdist fiction, which could be said to have reached an apogee in two works by Camus, namely The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, both from 1942. So, what does Pinteresque - a term Pinter himself found altogether meaningless - actually signify? In providing a response to this question, mention could be made of the almost high poetic inventiveness and verbal virtuosity lurking beneath a veneer of banality. As well as the rich dark surreal wit laced with a constant sense of impending violence characteristic of his earliest plays of the so-called "Comedy of Menace". But doing so does little to elucidate precisely what it is that makes his work so unique. So perhaps a return to his early years might be in order.

Pinteresque (A Controversial Artistic Legacy)

Harold Pinter was born - in October 1930 - in Hackney, East London, to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, and first attempted to make his way in life on the stage, learning his trade both at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and the Central School of Speech and Drama...and as a jobbing actor in the early to mid 1950s. But an initial step towards success as a dramatist came in 1957 when his play The Room was performed at Bristol University in the South West of England under the directorship of his close childhood friend Henry Woolf. By this time he'd been married for a year to the young Yorkshire-born actress Vivien Merchant (1929-1982), who would go on to illumine some of his most famous productions for television with a uniquely attractive screen presence. The following year, their son Daniel was born. While his second play The Birthday Party was produced at the Lyric Studio in the West London district of Hammersmith, and was both a critical and financial failure, closing after only a handful of performances. And yet, once it had done so, it received a review in The Sunday Times by drama critic Harold Hobson, who described Pinter as possessing "the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London", which all but salvaged his career. He followed The Birthday Party with The Hothouse, which would not be seen on the London stage until 1980, and The Dumb Waiter, which was produced as part of a double bill with The Room. But it would take The Caretaker to make Pinter's name in Britain on the eve of the most feted decade since the twenties, during which he became increasingly involved with television and the cinema. While The Collection followed a year later.

And the first of his works to be broadcast on TV was the one-act play A Night Out, featuring himself and his wife Vivien, to be followed by Night School, both being televised in 1960, while The Lover was broadcast in March 1963, the totemic year the Beatles ascended to fame in the UK, and in which the '60s could truly be said to have begun in a cultural sense. It featured Alan Badel and Vivien Merchant as a suburban couple seeking to spice up a stale marriage with role-playing games. And although it was tame by contemporary standards, it chimed perfectly with the times, and thence could be said to be part of the first stirrings of the Swinging Sixties social revolution, together with the Pop explosion spearheaded by the Beatles, the first Bond movies, and such trendily sophisticated TV series' as The Avengers. In that same year, Pinter wrote the screenplay for the film version of Robin Maugham's The Servant, which kick-started a lasting artistic relationship with director Joseph Losey. Starring matinee idol Dirk Bogarde in the titular role, its themes of darkness and decadence, which were becoming increasingly prevalent in the cinema at the time, still have the power to astound and disturb today. Also in this year of Beatlemania and the first stirrings of Swinging London as the world's cultural epicentre, a celluloid version of The Caretaker was produced under the direction of Clive Donner, and starring Alan Bates, Donald Pleasance and Robert Shaw. While in '64, the year of the Beatles' invasion of America, Pinter provided a screenplay for a second seminal sixties movie after The Servant, which is to say The Pumpkin Eater, directed by Jack Clayton from the novel by Penelope Mortimer, and starring Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft. While a third would emerge two years later in the form of The Quiller Memorandum, directed by Michael Anderson. And the following year of '65, it could be said that Rock started to seek an independent existence apart from Pop...while the Sixties' more innocent phase came to a close; and Tea Party, based on one of Pinter's short stories, was broadcast on TV under the direction of Charles Jarrott, and again featuring his wife Vivien in the lead female role. Vivien also featured in Accident, whose screenplay was the second Pinter wrote for Joseph Losey, this time from the novel by Nicholas Mosley, and again starring Dirk Bogarde. And in the same year - of 1967 - Peter Hall's production of The Collection reached Broadway, winning four Tony awards in the process, and turning Pinter into an international celebrity. Also in '67, The Basement had its premiere on BBC TV, again directed by Jarrott; and the following year, American director William Friedkin made a film version of The Birthday Party, featuring Robert Shaw in the lead role of the beleaguered Stanley. While Pinter himself moved beyond the Comedy of Menace to the so-called Memory Plays of 1968-1982, which went on to include Landscape (1968), Silence (1969), Night (1969), Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975), The Proust Screenplay (1977), Betrayal (1978), Family Voices (1981), Victoria Station (1982) and A Kind of Alaska (1982). 1970 saw Pinter produce a screenplay for yet another classic British movie in the shape of The Go-Between. Based on the novel by L.P Hartley, and starring sixties beautiful people Julie Christie and Alan Bates, as well as a youthful Dominic Guard in the title role, it was the last of his fruitful three-picture collaboration with Joseph Losey. And further into the decade, 1973 to be precise, Peter Hall directed a film version of the 1964 play The Homecoming. While in '76, a second Scott Fitzgerald novel was made into a movie, this time with a screenplay by Pinter. Yet while Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby (1974) was a box office success despite receiving merely average reviews, Elia Kazan's The Last Tycoon was a commercial failure, despite being considered an artistic triumph by some critics. A year later, with Punk Rock raging through Britain, another television version of The Lover appeared as a visitor from an earlier more innocent age with Patrick Allen replacing Alan Badel as the eponymous Lover; while Vivien Merchant reprised her original role as The Mistress. While in '78, a television version of the original Old Vic production of No Man's Land, directed by Sir Peter Hall and featuring theatrical giants Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson was broadcast by the BBC. In 1980, Pinter married his second wife, the historian and novelist Lady Antonia Fraser, with whom he'd remain for the rest of his life. And a year later, he produced what was perhaps his most famous ever screenplay for The French Lieutenant's Woman, directed by Karel Reisz from the novel by John Fowles, and featuring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in star-making performances. In 1983, another Pinter screenplay was made into a major motion picture, which was the critically acclaimed Betrayal, based on his own play under the directorship of David Hugh Jones, and starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge. By this time, Pinter was moving into the final phase of his writing career, during which his plays would become more flagrantly critical of injustice and repression. While this period would be preceded by the revival of The Hothouse (once allegedly shelved for being too political) in 1980, its first full fruit was One for the Road, which premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith in 1984 under the directorship of Pinter himself. It would be succeeded by - among other works - Mountain Language (1988), Party Time (1991), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996), and his final play, Celebration, from the first year of the new millennium. At the same time, his screenwriting life proceeded apace, and he'd continue producing notable work for the cinema, such as his 1990 screenplays for The Handmaid's Tale, directed by Volker Schlondorff and The Comfort of Strangers, directed by Paul Schrader, both dark and disturbing pieces based on highly acclaimed contemporary novels, by Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan respectively. While his final contribution to the cinema came in 2007, when the celebrated British actor Jude Law commissioned him to write a screenplay for a second movie version of Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth to be directed by Kenneth Branagh, and starring Law and Michael Caine.

By this time Pinter had been involved in political issues for some fifteen years at the very least, having forcefully opposed the Gulf War of 1991; as well as the Kosovo Conflict of 1998-'99, the 2001 War in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. By the time he died in December 2008, Harold Pinter had left a quite phenomenal - if controversial - artistic legacy, which ensured he was liberally garlanded with multiple awards, including the CBE in 1966, and the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1995; although he refused a knighthood in 1996. And enthusiasm for his work shows no signs of abating, despite the fact that it could be seen as very much of its time by virtue of its admirable lack of what could be termed flagrant outrageousness, in comparison, that is, to so much of the theatre produced in the wake of his breakthrough as a playwright in 1957...when the West stood on the brink of a cultural revolution which would see it changed arguably beyond all recognition.

Afterword: Descent into the Hothouse

In September 1994, I successfully auditioned for a newly formed fringe theatre group called Grip based at the Rose and Crown pub in Kingston for the role of Roote in Harold Pinter's then relatively unknown play, The Hothouse. Written in 1958, it wasn't performed until 1980, when it was directed by Pinter himself for London's Hampstead and Ambassador Theatres. From the auditions onwards, I gelled with the director because while most of those I'd attended up to this point had hinged on the time-honoured method of the actor performing a piece from memory before a panel of interviewers, he had us reading from the play in small groups, which enabled us to attain a basic sense of character, and so feel like we were actually acting rather than coldly reciting. For me, this is the only way to audition. Once he'd told me the part of Roote was mine, I devoted myself to his vision of a pompous yet deranged director of an unnamed English psychiatric hospital: the Hothouse of the title. He demanded of me an interpretation of Roote which was deeply at odds with my usual highly Method-oriented, subtle, intense, introspective and yet somehow also emotionally vehement approach to acting, but his directorial instincts were spot-on, as his production went on to receive spectacular reviews not just in the local press, but in the international listings magazine Time Out. An amazing triumph for a humble fringe show. I'd become a Christian the previous January, so struggled a little with the play's darker aspects, despite the fact that by contemporary standards, it's mild indeed. Yet in later years there was nothing even remotely mild about Pinter in terms of his political beliefs, which were distinguished by an intensity of conviction which stood in marked contrast to the restraint he manifested as an artist. And I've no desire to discuss the source of this intensity, nor whether I believe it to have been justified or otherwise. But what I will say is that as a Christian, I believe the only true lasting solution to the evils of the world lies not in art or philosophy, science or politics, or whatever other field of human endeavour one might care to consider, but a change of heart, or repentance, born of faith in Christ, and faith in Christ alone. And until such a change occurs, the world may seem a place of total absurdity to those whose extreme intellectual brilliance draws them inexorably towards examining it with a laser-like eye, an eye which can produce such magnificent works of art as Camus' The Stranger, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and the earliest plays of Harold Pinter...all unassailable masterpieces of Absurdism...and yet all ultimately so tragic as such. At least how I see it. Thomas Stearns' Pilgrimage to East Coker The great Anglo-American Modernist poet T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) had strong links to the East Coast, and specifically New England, that most spiritually English of American regions, a distinction it shares with the South, with which Eliot was linked through his mother, the poet Charlotte Champe Stearns, originally from Baltimore in Maryland. Although he was actually born in St Louis, a Midwestern city in which it could be said that the wildly divergent cultures of the North and South, Midwest and East Coast are somehow mysteriously fused. He was a scion of the famous Eliots, a family of Brahmins, or top families of largely Anglo-Saxon extraction, based in Boston, but originally from the little Somerset village of East Coker, subject of one of Eliot's most famous poems, and who came to dominate the American education system. And after graduating from the exclusive Milton Academy, Eliot himself attended Harvard between 1906 and 1909, earning his B.A. in what may have been Comparative Literature by his third year and his M.A., in English, by his fourth. He also discovered Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced him to the French Symbolists and Decadents, such as Verlaine, Rimbaud and Laforgue, all of whom went on to exert a profound impact on his work, as did Symbolist founding father Charles Baudelaire, more of whom later. After Harvard, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he attended lectures by Henri Bergson, to whose philosophical ideas he was drawn, as he was to those of the ultra-conservative writer Charles Maurras. And he came to know Alain-Fournier, ill-fated author of a single much loved novel, Le Grand Meaulnes, and Jean Verdenal, a brilliant medical student with whom he forged an exceptionally close friendship, cut short by the latter's death in the First World War. But it was when he was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford in 1914 that his artistic life could be said to have truly begun, almost as if, by arriving in England, he came home in a spiritual sense. Yet he quit Oxford after only a

year, and this academic restlessness persisted into 1916, when after having completed a PhD dissertation for Harvard, he failed to return to the college to defend it; and so never received his doctorate. However, by this time, he was already a published poet, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock having been published in Chicago in 1915 at the behest of his soon-to-be mentor, fellow Modernist titan Ezra Pound, and dedicated to Verdenal. Prufrock has been cited as the point where modern poetry begins, and its famous third line, in which the night sky is likened to "a patient etherised on a table," remains a startling and even disturbing image to this day. However, the literature of shock was hardly new in 1914, possessing as it did multiple precedents among the French Symbolist and Decadents, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Lautreamont foremost among them. Eliot had a special admiration for Baudelaire...Symbolist forefather and first great poet of the modern urban landscape...as he did for Rimbaud, the angel-faced enfant terrible whose ferociously beautiful free form verse contained in his last two volumes, Une Saison en Enfer and Illuminations, exerted an influence on the evolution of 20th Century poetry that exceeds even that of Eliot. While their ecstatic, visionary quality is an obvious precursor of Eliot's own poetic vision. However, with its doleful emphasis on regret and frustration, failure, exhaustion and decay, Prufrock could be said to have to some degree anticipated Camus' theory of the Absurd, as well as the theatre that came in its wake, which attained its possible apotheosis in the shape of Beckett's Waiting for Godot from 1955. Although needless to say, the Absurd was nothing new, having pre-existed for example in French literature in the shape of the vast array of Decadent sects that proliferated in the second half of the 19th Century. He was also a married man, having wed the attractive and vivacious Vivienne Haigh Wood in June 1915, a move which evidently dismayed his family, who expected him to make an imminent return to the US in order that he might take up his rightful place as a Harvard professor. Instead, after a brief period spent teaching at various academic institutions, he embarked upon a successful eight-year career as a banker for Lloyds of London, working on foreign accounts. And it was during his tenure at Lloyds that he wrote some of the most earth-shaking poems of the 20th Century, which have caused his name to become almost synonymous with Modernism, which prompts the question, what precisely is Modernism? One possible definition of Modernism is the avant-garde, but the avant-garde translated into a worldwide artistic movement of some half century's duration, lasting from ca. 1880-1930. However, there are those cultural critics who'd insist that Modernism is far more than a mere artistic phenomenon, is in fact a spirit, with roots in the Enlightenment, the great 18th Century movement which saw age-old conceptions, specifically related to the Divine origins of Creation, being questioned as never before. For them, the Modern embraces all aspects of human endeavour: the arts, religion, philosophy, science, politics; while others would assert that the Modern lives on, confounding the notion of a Post Modern age in which the pursuit of the absolutely modern has exhausted itself beyond recovery. But whatever the truth, few would disagree that of all the masters of literary Modernism, Eliot remains the most famous and most quoted. And all thanks to a mere handful of masterpieces, starting with Prufrock, which in 1917 became the title piece of Prufrock and Other Observations. And going on to include Gerontion, which contains one of Eliot's most famous and desolate lines in the shape of "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" which has been sporadically referred to since by writers seeking to convey the utter enormity of Man's inhumanity to Man. While the third of these, The Waste Land, was published in 1922, a year which has been cited by at least one cultural critic as the very acme of the Modern, as it produced not just Eliot's obra maestra, but James Joyce's equally seismic Ulysses. It was received by the youth of the inter-war years as some kind of clarion call to arms...a cry to the young to rise; and as such, could be likened to Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which ignited the Beat Generation in 1955, that totemic year in which Rock started to make serious inroads into the mainstream for the first time. And James Dean took his place as the prototype of youth in revolt for the entire late 20th Century simply by dying while still young and beautiful at the flaming height of his fame. While the following year of '56 witnessed the onset of Britain's Angry Young Men, led by playwright John Osborne, and among whose manifestos could be said to have been The Outsider by Colin Wilson, which included several quotations from Eliot's poetry. And Eliot himself was perceived as "wild" according to fellow poet Stephen Spender, which of course could not have been further from the truth, for all throughout the '20s, he faithfully worked from 9 to 5 as if he were the very epitome of middle class propriety. Yet, he became an idol to a wild generation of gilded privileged youth...sonnenkinder such as Harold Acton, who famously declaimed The Waste Land from the balcony of his room at Christ Church, Oxford, an incident which Evelyn Waugh included in his much loved elegy to his own generation at Oxford, Brideshead Revisited. However, according to Waugh, the novel's chief aesthete, Anthony Blanche, was based not on Acton, but another of Waugh's contemporaries at Oxford, that Bright Young Thing par excellence, Brian Howard, whose single published volume of verse revealed exceptional poetic gifts. Although unlike Eliot, he remained in decorous obscurity. As a poem, The Waste Land remains quite inscrutable, although rightly or wrongly, it conveys a powerful sense of disgust with the Established Order latterly responsible for sending millions of young men to their deaths in a pointless

conflict, with its unforgettable opening lines starting with "April is the cruellest month." Eliot's next major poetic work, The Hollow Men, was from 1925, also the year of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the quintessential Jazz Age novel, which serves as an exquisitely wrought evocation of the despair that underlay its frenzied hedonism. Little wonder that Eliot admired it so much. Hollow Men contains lines which are if anything even more mythically desolate than those of The Waste Land, such as "We are the Hollow Men / We are the Stuffed Men," which opens the poem, and "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper," which closes it. Many are familiar with the former through their inclusion in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam-era version of Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, in which they are recited by the character of Captain Kurtz, which is apt, given that Eliot's original poem was prefaced by a quotation from Conrad's novel, "Mistah Kurtz - he Dead." But this is just one of the seemingly endless allusions to The Hollow Men that have haunted the arts and popular culture since the midpoint of what Fitzgerald famously called "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." In fact, references to the poem, not just in literature, but music, the cinema, television, even video gaming, etc., are so numerous as to verge on the plethoric. Yet, it boggles the mind that the most influential poet of modern times was such an unlikely revolutionary, was in fact the most impeccably respectable of men. For also in '25, he left Lloyds of London to begin a new career as a publisher for Faber and Gwyer - later Faber and Faber - where he remained for the rest of his professional life, eventually becoming one if its directors. Two year later, he joined the Anglo-Catholic communion, so that thereafter, his work was informed by his deep Christian faith, and he became a British citizen in the same year, ultimately declaring himself to be "classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion." His next major work was his first long poem published since his conversion, Ash Wednesday (1930), which while being almost entirely devoid of the darkness and cynicism of its better-known predecessors, deals with the struggle of one who, hitherto lacking faith, strives to move closer to God. Also published that year were Eliot's contributions to Faber and Gwyer's Ariel Poems, a series of pamphlets containing illustrated poems by Eliot and several other poets. But after 1930, rather than the poetry that made his name, he'd devote himself to a sporadic succession of plays, from The Rock, which was first performed for churches of the diocese of London in 1934, to his final play, The Elder Statesman from 1959, via Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), and The Confidential Clerk (1953). In 1932, he accepted the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932-'33 academic year that had been offered him by Harvard, and when he returned he formally separated from his wife. In 1938, she was committed to the Northumberland House mental hospital, Stoke Newington, where she died at the tragically early age of 58 in 1947. A year later, a collection of comical poems about cats written by Eliot throughout the decade was published under the title Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, while also in '39, he contributed two poems to The Queen's Book of the Red Cross, sponsored by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Consort, these being The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs, and Billy M'Caw: The Remarkable Parrot. To say nothing of The Idea of a Christian Society; for Eliot's greatness was tripartite, being rooted not just in his poetry and his plays, but his essays and other non-fiction works, of which he published many between 1920 and 1957, with one being published posthumously. And together with Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, it sets forth Eliot's conservative Christian world view, which while unfashionable among intellectuals at the time, is even more so today and on a far wider scale. For to Eliot, modern Britain was what could be termed Laodicean, or lukewarm, a society which while tolerant of Christian principles, yet fell lamentably short when it came to living by them, and if that was true in 1939, it's even more so today. By the beginning of the Second World War, Eliot had already begun work on his final poetic masterpiece, Four Quartets, another markedly Christian work centring on various phenomena related to Eliot's belief in the necessity of Christian faith. The first of these, Burnt Norton, was named after a manor house in the Cotswolds, and published as part of his Collected Poems 1909-1935 in 1936. The second, East Coker, took its name from the little Somerset village whence Eliot's ancestors, a father and son named Andrew Eliot, emigrated to Beverly, Massachusetts, between 1668 and 1670, and was published in The New English Weekly. As was the third, The Dry Salvages, written in 1941 at the height of the Blitz on London, and named after a rock formation known to Eliot. While the fourth, Little Gidding, owes its title to a former Anglican community in Huntingdonshire established by the scholar and courtier Nicholas Ferrar. And the remainder of Eliot's life saw him being showered with honours for his services to literature, such as the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, the Legion of Honour in '51, the Hanseatic Goethe Prize in '55, the Dante Medal in '59, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in '64, as well as honorary doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and nine other universities. On the 10th of January 1957, at the age of 68, he married the 32 year old Esme Valerie Fletcher, his secretary at Faber and Faber since 1949, and the marriage brought him much happiness, lasting until his death from emphysema in 1965. Since that totemic year, in which Pop music started to mutate piecemeal into Rock and disseminate the Modernist

world view throughout the world as never before, a development one can't help thinking would have appalled the ultra-conservative Eliot, Valerie Eliot has devoted herself to her husband's legacy, which, by any standards known to Man, has been phenomenal. For Eliot has haunted contemporary culture to a degree surely unparalleled by any other 20th Century poet. Yet, some would argue that Dylan Thomas is the supreme poet of our age, and while he's undoubtedly a more colourful figure than Eliot, his cultural influence is surely but a fraction of Eliot's, and the same could be said of Sylvia Plath...although many would disagree. And there seems to be no end to its depths, leading one to come to the conclusion that he's one of the greatest icons of our culture, taking his place as "the poet" alongside fellow giants...such as Charlie Chaplin, Frank Sinatra, JFK, Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Michael Jackson and Princess Diana. But what would Eliot make of such a list? One can't be certain...but after surveying it, he might have wondered, "Where's Groucho?" For if the portraits on the wall of his London home were anything to go by, there were few icons Eliot himself rated higher than his beloved Groucho Marx, the only man Eliot ever deemed worthy enough to ask for his autograph. Ridiculous? Not to Thomas Stearns Eliot, it wasn't.

Weimar Shadow of Future Things Introduction

Many cultures have made monumental contributions to the development of our great Western Judeo-Christian civilisation, not least that of Germany, one of the most purely artistic, poetic, musical and spiritual nations in modern history. Yet it could be said that the greatest and most blessed nations are those most liable to decadence, a word which seems to suggest both moral decline and a dark, sinister glamour; and few societies have been more associated with this latter quality than that of Germany between the wars, and that's especially true of its then capital city of Berlin. The Weimar era, which came into being in 1919 and lasted until Hitler's ascent to the Chancellorship in 1933, has been likened by some cultural critics to the contemporary West. Indeed, it could be said that much of what's happened to the West since the end of the second world war was to some degree presaged by the Berlin of the 1920s, familiar to millions through Bob Fosse's movie version of the Kander and Ebb musical, Cabaret, itself a descendant of one of Christopher Isherwood's two Berlin stories, Goodbye to Berlin, penned in 1933, but referring to incidents that took place between six to eight years earlier. Needless to say, the Weimar era was no isolated historical instance of a society in decline, having been significantly shaped by the culture which birthed it. Germany was of course the birthplace of Luther, and the great Protestant Reformation that has exerted such a monumental influence on the evolution of Biblical Christianity. At the same time, by the dawn of the Weimar Republic in 1919, it had long been associated with myriad revolutionary and esoteric ideas. For example, more than any other nation in the late 18th and early 19th Century, Germany had played host to Higher Criticism, a school of Biblical criticism which flagrantly attacked the authenticity of the Scriptures. Moreover, late 19th century Europe had witnessed a significant occult revival and of all its great nations, it was arguably Germany that had been most affected by this, even more so perhaps than France and Britain, and to the obvious detriment of Biblical Christianity, even while modernity thrived. Thence, the legendary hedonism of the so-called Golden Twenties could be said to have arisen as much - if not more - from her spiritual legacy as the more immediate source of a long and terrible war and its aftermath, but it's this latter that we turn to now. Weimar Shadow of Future Things Despite the fact that the bona fide Weimar era was set to dawn in all its gaudy decadent glory in early 1923, Germany was yet a terribly ravaged and traumatised land as a result of a long series of crises leading back to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and military defeat in the First World War. Following on from the armistice, she was subject to still more bloody conflict in the shape of the German Revolution, which culminated in the Spartacist Uprising of January 1919, during which the Spartacist League and other leftist factions rose up in revolt in Berlin, only to be put down by paramilitary Freikorps consisting of volunteer soldiers, many of them on the extreme right. The liberal democratic Weimar Republic was established soon afterwards, but Germany's post-war miseries had only just begun. During the debates in Weimar, a Soviet Republic was declared in Munich which was crushed by the Freikorps, resulting in the proliferation of far right movements throughout Bavaria. One of these was the German Workers' Party, and several of its key founding members went on to exert a powerful influence on a young war hero by the name of Corporal Adolf Hitler with their shadowy brand of nationalism. To further compound the nation's woes, The Treaty of Versailles was signed on the 28th of June 1919. Of its many provisions, one of the most vital required her to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and so to agree to drastic military restrictions, as well as a good many territorial concessions including the surrendering of all her overseas

colonies. She also had to pay heavy war reparations, the total cost of which came to 132 billion marks, or 6.6 billion pounds sterling. The following month, while still in the army, Hitler was sent as a police spy by German Army Intelligence to infiltrate the ranks of the previously mentioned German Workers' Party in the mistaken belief that it was Socialist in ideology. The German currency was relatively stable during the first half of this year, but May brought the harsh London Ultimatum, which demanded reparations paid in gold or foreign currency, as well as 26% of the value of Germany's foreign exports. Hyper-inflation followed soon afterwards, which resulted in the Mark becoming all but worthless. By January 1923, defaults on payments had grown so serious that French and Belgian forces felt compelled to invade the heavily industrialised Ruhr Valley close to the Franco-German border, where they set about securing reparations in the shape of coal and other commodities. Many Germans, including skilled workers, started working for the bare minimum necessary for the sustenance of life, as the nation started to become increasingly afflicted by unemployment, poverty, hunger, and even malnutrition, leading to widespread bitter unrest and resentment, one of whose expressions was the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of 8-9 November 1923. This was an attempt by Hitler's National German Workers' Party, including paramilitary storm troopers under the leadership of Ernst Roehm, as well as future leading Nazis, Hess, Goering and Rosenberg, at a revolution modelled on the Fascist March on Rome of the previous October. Of all the putschists, it was World War I hero General Ludendorff who demonstrated the greatest courage under fire, but he was to subsequently disown Hitler. As to the latter, he spent just a little over a month in Landsberg Prison after the putsch was decisively put down by the Army, where he dictated his memoirs, Mein Kampf, to his friend and fellow inmate, Rudolf Hess. Somehow, however, total economic collapse was halted under the chancellorship of Gustav Stresemann - who was both charismatic and democratic, at a time when such politicians were in desperate need in Germany - by the replacement of the worthless Papiermark with the new Rentenmark, which was introduced on the 19th of November 1923. Stresemann had earlier sought peace with Germany's enemies by calling off all passive resistance of striking German workers in the Ruhr Valley, an act which while having a beneficial effect on the economy, served also to fan the flames of nationalist rage. Millions of middle class Germans had been left ruined and embittered by the period of hyperinflation, with the result that they became susceptible to extreme right wing propaganda, while many workers turned to Communism. For the time being, though, Germany, and specifically Berlin, feasibly became the supreme world epicentre of Modernism, of creative and intellectual foment not just in the fields of literature, architecture, music, dance, drama, cinema, and the visual arts, but of science as well. While she'd been a cradle of the Modern Impulse for centuries - a distinction she shared with several other Western nations including her closest European intimates, France and Britain - it could be asserted that never before had she been quite so fiercely inclined in a cultural sense towards the radical and left-leaning, the experimental, the iconoclastic, the frankly scandalous, nor on so large a scale, as in the Weimar era. Artistic innovation wildly thrived in Berlin in the years 1924-'29 in the shape of, among other phenomena, the artists of the New Objectivity, such as Beckmann, Dix and Grosz, Berg's ground-breaking opera, Wozzeck (1925), as well as the staccato cabaret-style music of Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang's dystopian Metropolis (1927), the spectacles of cabaret queen Anita Berber, and so on. The same applies to that lost city's notorious sexual liberalism, which still has the power to shock as seen in pictorial and photographic depictions of her cabarets and night clubs in which license and intoxication flourished unabated. So much of what has become familiar to the West and beyond in the last half-century, from the philosophies that have dominated our academia for decades, such as Critical Theory and Deconstruction, all the way to the theatre of outrage that is the essence of Rock music pre-existed in some form in the Golden Twenties. But beneath the glittering carapace she carried within her the seeds of her own ruin, for despite the genius that flourished alongside the licentiousness, she was operating largely in defiance of the Judeo-Christian moral values that have long formed the basis of Western society. Given that several other European and American cities were hardly less hysterically dissolute than Berlin, it's little wonder that this key Modernist decade has been described by some critics as the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. In its wake came the Great Depression, the ineffable horrors of the Second World War, and the collapse of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, all of which were succeeded in turn by the Sixties social revolution. Since the inception of the latter, many of its core values have progressively infiltrated the Western cultural mainstream at the expense of the previously mentioned traditional Judeo-Christian ones; and for some this might raise the question: Could a time be coming when the disasters that befell the once glorious Weimar Republic will appear to those of us still alive in the contemporary West to be little more than a dress rehearsal in comparison? For my part, I hope this will not be the case, but needless to say the future's not in my hands.

Werther and the Rise of Romantic Melancholia Most students of world literature would surely agree that Goethe's famous epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, has exerted a quite incalculable influence on the evolution of the Western mind from the date of its publication in 1774. And that it did so principally through Romanticism, that great movement in the arts of which it was a prime antecedent, would be disputed by few. And while the notion that melancholy is a feature of sensitive and creative youth was not new at the height of Romanticism, it attained a credence within it that was possibly unprecedented, at least in its intensity. The name Weltschmerz, which can be translated as world pain, becoming attached to it.

Such a development can be at least partly attributed to Werther, whose forlorn hero has served as the forefather of succeeding generations of melancholy youth. And then there are the countless scions of Romanticism within the Decadent and Symbolist Movements, Expressionism and Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism and the Beat and Rock Generations, who by pursuing tragic, tormented existences and dying while yet young and preferably beautiful, have become the favoured artists of the Modern Age. Surely, all who remain unconvinced by the romantic and avant-garde persuasions will view this development as not just tragic but horrifying. For while old age is all too often a source of deep regret for follies past, youth, precious youth, provides a person with almost unlimited opportunities for the eradication of this outcome. Which is not to mitigate genuine depression, of which there are sufferers in all age brackets, and to which youth can be singularly susceptible. For to do so would be not just cruel but dangerous. But most people in the privileged West, no matter how exorbitantly romantic in youth, yet survive into late middle age. And all that remains for them to do is find a place for themselves in the world, but without the advantages of youth and beauty and endless reserves of time. So, what precisely was it that possessed Goethe to write a novel that at least partially caused an entire movement in the arts to be birthed in its wake. And what was it about the work that was so inflammatory? In order to answer this question, it's necessary to examine certain events from Goethe's own young manhood. For in 1770, at the tender age of 20, Goethe found himself in Strasbourg in order to complete a law degree he'd previously abandoned while at Leipzig. And while there, became a close friend of future fellow polymath Johann Gottfried von Herder, who introduced him to Shakespeare, then allegedly barely known in the German speaking world. And by the following year, he was working as a licensee in Frankfurt, although he soon lost his position, at which point he set about attempting to make his living as a writer for the first time, publishing the drama, Goetz von Berlichingen, in 1773. By so doing, he'd provided the first classic of the Storm and Stress movement, which also included his one-time mentor Herder. As well as - in the shape of the drama's eponymous hero - an example of the Daemonic as Goethe conceived it. Which is to say as a type of genius typically possessed by a charismatic individual of overpowering will and energy who could to some degree be said to be a precursor of the Byronic Hero. And in this, he was powerfully influenced by Shakespeare, whose age he evidently saw as being in marked contrast to late 18th Century Germany in all its sedate respectability. In 1772, he resumed his legal career in Wetzlar on the River Lahn, and it was in that city state that he met the woman who would inspire him to write what remains his most famous work apart from his masterpiece, Faust. The woman in question was Charlotte Buff, who by rejecting Goethe in favour of the civil servant Joha nn Christian Kestner provided the model for Lotte, heroine of Werther. Yet while he suffered from her repeated rejections of his love, his friendship with Charlotte was far less intense than the novel suggested. While the titular hero himself was based not just on the youthful Goethe, but the German-Jewish philosopher, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who committed suicide following an unhappy love affair. Werther perfectly captured a nascent restlessness and passionate extremism among the youth of Europe in the later years of the Enlightenment that would ultimately culminate in the Romantic revolution. In fact so much so that in some quarters its depiction of suicidal despair was condemned for flouting the traditionally Christian view of the sanctity of human life. Although to be fair, it was hardly new, having played its part in tragic literature since time immemorial. And there is no hard and fast evidence for the existence of the so-called Werther Effect of copy cat suicides. But the fact remains that Werther helped to develop the notion of the hero as rebel against all constraints. And Werther's rebellion even extends to his dress, which is to say the famous blue coat and yellow breeches, which were inappropriately proletarian for the bourgeois society of the day. And which serve to make him a remarkably contemporary figure, for in the days leading up to the sartorial revolution of the '60s, male clothing had been of a near-universal drabness for several decades. While at the height of the Swinging Sixties, hordes of young middle class men on both sides of the Atlantic elected to grow their hair; and sport dandified outfits like the Rock acts and artists who were seen as vulgar and low class by many from among their parents' generation. Other facets of Werther's rebellious uniqueness include his emotionalism, seen at the time as ill-befitting an educated male, but which went on to become an important part of the artistic armoury in a brave new aeon in which the Artist served as High Priest. Or to paraphrase Shelley, the unacknowledged legislator of the world. And a certain wandering quality which results in his accepting a mission to go in search of a family legacy, and then feel no overwhelming desire to either return home or seek a job in the rural region to which he has been sent. An idleness in other words...possibly born of a rebellious distaste for the puritan work ethic that has long been one of the key foundations of European bourgeois society. A distaste which has persisted since among Bohemian artists, but which is usually transcended beyond a certain age, as in the case of Goethe, who mutated into the most industrious of men. But Werther never matures beyond a state of infantile dependence, and for a time is content to do little other than socialise with the local peasant folk, or read Homer beneath the linden trees. And when he does finally find himself in work, his employer's fastidiousness drive him to distraction, and he quits in disgust, only to drift to the nearby town of Wahlheim in search of a local girl by the name of Charlotte, with whom he'd earlier become infatuated.

This despite the fact that Lotte is as good as engaged to be married to an older man called Albert, who befriends the lad, so that a kind of love triangle comes into being. And it could be said that Lotte is tempted by Werther, as the essence of proto-Romantic Bohemianism. However, Werther ultimately leaves Wahlheim to find work, only to return after quitting his job; while Albert and Lotte have since married and settled into domestic contentment. Yet Werther is warmly welcomed by the couple in his new capacity as a family friend. But he becomes increasingly de trop until Lotte is forced to become firm with him and tell him to stay away until Christmas Eve at which point, he reveals his true feelings to her. Not that she'd ever been in doubt about these. But of course, she rejects him, and the following day, Werther kills himself by shooting himself through the head. And so...after Werther, the deluge of the Romantic Revolution; although it would be unjust to suggest that his creator and partial role model, Goethe, was its only forefather. For Goethe himself was responding to revolutionary ideas that were already very much in existence, such as those of Rousseau for example. And it would be equally unjust to over-emphasize the movement's negative aspects. For it could be said that Romanticism was a reaction to the stultifying rationalism of the Enlightenment, and thence in some respects a step in the right direction in terms of renewing interest in the spiritual side of life. But at the same time, it ushered in this notion of the artist as set apart from the common run, and inclined to all manner of excess in terms of intuition and sensibility, of seditiousness and eccentricity, of mental and emotional instability, which is surely absurd. Or rather should be seen as such by anyone of a responsible cast of mind. For in its wake there arose a series of artistic movements or avant-gardes which fostered the most aberrant behaviour on the part of some of its participants. And presumably they acted as they did because they felt they had the right to as artists. And yet it could be said they were more inclined to do so than previous generations by virtue of the tenor of the times. Which is to say an age in which the Judeo-Christian values on which the West had ever relied on for its foundations had already begun to decline following the Enlightenment, and so given birth to a spirit which has come to be known as Modernism. But it would be altogether wrong to suggest that Werther was responsible not just for Romanticism but its protracted decadence...which could with some justification be said to still be in operation. For there were many Romantic precursors, and in comparison to some of these, Goethe's breakthrough novel was the soul of innocence. And what's more, in the wake of its phenomenal success, its author distanced himself from the nascent Romantic movement which caught fire first in Germany and then in Britain. And he did so for the sake of a form of Neoclassicism which has become known as Weimar Classicism, whose minute number of participants included, in addition to Goethe himself, his close friends Schiller and Herder, as well as the poet and novelist Christoph Martin Wieland. Yet, some half century after the publication of the book that made him world famous, Germany's greatest poet, and the equal as such of his one-time idol Shakespeare, looked back on the time of Werther's sensational impact on a restless, passionate generation of youth. And he described it as "a spring, when everything was budding and shooting, when more than one tree was yet bare, while others were already full of leaves. All that in the year 1775!" One can't help thinking there are many of the so-called Baby Boomer generation who view such totemic years as 1965, or '67, or perhaps even '77, in much the same way as Goethe when he was inspired to pen these lines. But then is that not the way for all generations of youth now grown old? Of course...but then perhaps it's especially true for the generation who didn't so much invent the madness of youth, as incarnate it as never before within living memory. And for my part, without sacrificing a tithe of what I've learned and achieved up to this point, I'd dearly love to make a return to a time when life seemed like some kind of eternal spring when everything was possible, nothing too much trouble. And this time around, youth would not be wasted on me, no not one delicious drop of it.

Book Five

The Man Who Came from Contact for Christ and Other Christian Writings

One The Man Who Came from Contact for Christ

Sometime in early 1993, while still attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, I received a call from a man who told me he was from an organisation by the name of Contact for Christ based in the South London suburb of Selsdon near Croydon in Surrey. He'd got in touch with me in consequence of a card I'd filled in on a British Rail train some months previously. I tried to put him off as I recall but somehow he got round me and before I knew it, he was at my door, a neat, dapper man called Denver Cashe with a large salt and pepper moustache and gently penetrating deep brown eyes, whose youthfully slender frame belied the fact that he was probably already in his 70s, although looking at least ten years younger. He wanted to pray with me, so I ushered him into my bedroom, where we prayed together at length. At some point, perhaps that very afternoon, in fact, he invited me to his home for further counselling, with the result that shortly after our first meeting, I found myself as a guest at his large house deep in the south western suburbs where

he asked me to make a list of sins past requiring deep repentance. Once I'd done this we spent a few hours in his living room praying over each and every one of the sins I made a note of, and there were a good few, and any one of them would have seen me damned to hell for eternity had I never come to saving faith. It transpired that Denver was a Pentecostal of long standing, Pentecostals being those Evangelical Christians who - along with the Neo-Pentecostals of the Charismatic and Apostolic movements - maintain that the more supernatural Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still available to Believers. In this capacity, he introduced me to the magazine Prophecy Today, then edited by the Reverend Dr Clifford Hill, through which I came to be in contact with another contributor, the late Frank Wren of Trumpet Sounds Ministries. I wrote to Frank soon afterwards concerning various issues including my spiritual condition. The upshot being that in the summer of 1995, he invited me to his home in the little Devon village of Crediton for what is known as Deliverance Ministry, which he felt I might benefit from. Denver also introduced me to the conspiratorial view of history through his recommendation of the works of the late New Zealand Evangelist and writer, Barry Smith, and specifically, Final Notice by Smith, which I subsequently bought. I should say he re-introduced me, because I'd already learned something of the conspiratorial weltanschauung through my reading of various books purchased in the years immediately prior to my becoming a Christian. Indeed, during this period, I was actively, not to say, contemptuously opposed to Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and other aspects of the then Religious Right, especially when it embraced theories concerning the End Times, or Last Days prior to the Second Coming of Christ. In this respect - as a rabid persecutor of the Saints - I was somewhat in the mould of Saul prior to undergoing a Road to Damascus conversion and having the scales fall from my eyes. But I'd have to wait until 2003 before fully exploring the labyrinthine world of conspiracy theories. How long these have proliferated within contemporary Christianity and elsewhere I'm not qualified to say but what is undeniable is that it wasn't until the internet revolution that they started disclosing their secrets to countless millions of hitherto unsuspecting web users. Despite the fact that - as I see it - they vary wildly in terms of credibility and are subject to enormous distortion and disinformation, I'd nonetheless be slow to automatically discount every single conspiracy theory, although I have no further desire to investigate them in search of an absolute truth that is of necessity unattainable. It also transpired that Denver was a member of the Guildford branch of the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International, founded by Armenian-American Demos Shakarian in 1952. Shakarian had left his native country in 1905 as part of a small group of Armenian believers, and arrived in Los Angeles a full year prior to the famous Azuza Street Revival which ignited the worldwide Pentecostal movement. They'd done so in response to an 1852 prophecy on the part of a godly child of Russian origin by the name of Efim Gerasemovitch Klubniken, which warned of a coming cataclysm for the Armenian people, and when Klubniken warned that the latter was imminent in 1905, many left Armenia for Los Angeles. Shakarian founded the FGBMFI a full century after the original prophecy with only 20 fellow believers, by which time he was working as a dairy farmer, and yet today, it's active in some 150 countries across the world, and can even boast a rival organisation, which came into being following Demos' death in 1993, at which point his son Richard took over as leader. This being the Business Men's Fellowship. The Full Gospel is that upheld by Christians within the Pentecostal family of churches which includes the Charismatics, in the understanding that the Gospel is made more complete through emphasis on the more overtly supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit. One of the family's forefathers was the famous English divine John Wesley, who while never disassociating himself from either The Church of England nor the Reformed tradition, went against the grain of both in certain extremely vital respects. His emphasis on personal Holiness went on to exert a colossal influence on the evolution of Pentecostalism, and of course the Holiness movements that preceded it. These included the Salvation Army, and the lesser known Church of the Nazarene. Both are spiritually Wesleyan in so far as they uphold such doctrines as Conditional Salvation, or the ability of the Believer to make a shipwreck of his faith and so lose his or her salvation...which runs contrary to traditional Reformed or Protestant theology; and by Wesleyan, I mean Arminian, after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. And few men in history have done more for the Arminian cause than England's own beloved John Wesley. But rather than any lukewarm variant, Wesley's was a truly Biblical Arminianism with a powerful emphasis on personal Holiness, the very type, in fact, that was bequeathed to several generations of churches up to and including the early Pentecostals. It lives on to this day among Classical Pentecostals of every stripe, not least those of the Alliance of Biblical Pentecostals...as well as various fundamental Arminian groups including the Fundamentalist Wesleyan Society, and the Society of Evangelical Arminians. At the same time, like Arminius, John Wesley never saw himself as anything other than Reformed, a word now almost completely associated with Calvinist Christians, which is to say whose who've traditionally subscribed to what is known as the Doctrines of Grace - or Five Points of Calvinism - which stem from the Protestant Reformation. And according to which God predestined a limited Elect of men and women to be saved and that this election is unconditional, given Man's total inability to respond to the Gospel without Grace, which is irresistible, and that salvation is irrevocable. In terms of my health, I was in fairly good shape throughout the early part of '93, although if my memory serves me

well, there was a distinct lack of sensation in my legs, and for a time I was subject to terrifying panic attacks which seemed to me to anticipate impending unconsciousness and even death, and which would be triggered simply by leaving the confines of my house. I controlled these with Diazepam. When I suddenly and for no good reason switched from the latter to a powerful sedative known as Heminevrin within a few weeks of attaining sobriety, I felt quite inconceivably awful for a few hours and seriously thought I might collapse at any moment and die, but in time these deathly sensations subsided. Soon after weaning myself off the Valium, I lost my taste for cigarettes, with the result that I've barely smoked since the mid 1990s. Was it a coincidence that one of the issues addressed during my initial prayer time with Denver was my continuing addiction to nicotine? Perhaps not. Denver wanted me to join himself and his wife Rose at their little family church in West Byfleet, but realising that it would probably be too far for me to travel to each Sunday, he gave his blessing to one based in nearby Esher, also in Surrey. This was Cornerstone Bible Church, affiliated to the famous Word of Faith movement, and specifically Ray McCauley's Rhema Bible Church based in South Africa, which has since been renamed Cornerstone The Church. But by '96, I'd moved from Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship at the behest of a passing acquaintance who'd spoken highly of the level of spiritual giftedness found therein. I was still something of a baby Christian, and so relatively naive in Christian terms, despite what I'd read up until this date; although this innocence received a further blow in 2002. This being the year I underwent a long voyage into the heart of the faith, as well as the myriad conspiracy theories flourishing at the time both within Christianity and beyond, significantly perhaps as a result of the proliferation of knowledge and information occasioned by the rise and rise of the World Wide Web. It was in the summer months of that year, when, suffering from quite extraordinarily low levels of energy, I started visiting multiple Christian websites, only to discover for the first time since my conversion that some believers see themselves as Calvinists or Arminians, while others still refuse all such labels. I also discovered that while some Christians subscribe to Covenant Theology, others incline to Dispensationalism, and that while some are convinced the Saints will be caught up in the air with Christ prior to what is known as the Great Tribulation, others are convinced this event will succeed the tribulation. And are thence believers in the Post-Tribulation Rapture, and so on. In terms of the aforesaid conspiratorial worldview, in a message posted some time ago by a listener to the Sermon Audio website regarding a study by erstwhile broadcaster Scott A. Johnson, he described one aspect of Conspiracy Theory related to the identity of the Antichrist as a mind trap. And while I'm inclined to agree with him to a degree, as so much contradiction, misinformation and plain absurdity exists as I see it within its tortuous confines, I'd in no wise automatically discount every conspiracy theory, given that the Bible clearly states that in the Last Days, perilous times will come. And there is sufficient evidence in terms of contemporary world events for me to propose the possibility that these are indeed the last days prior to the Second Coming of Christ. What's more, among those Believers currently endorsing a conspiratorial view of history and culture from a Biblical perspective, there are many for whom I have the greatest regard. For instance, I greatly admire those who have been called to be Watchmen in these perilous times, although I do not consider myself to be sufficiently mature in a spiritual sense to be named among them. What's more, in consequence of internet research related to the origins of both the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, I decided to explore churches existent beyond the latter's confines; although by the end of the year I'd returned to the fold, determined to start attending services at my local Church of God. This was in consequence of several e-mail conversations I'd enjoyed with an ordained minister of the Pentecostal Church of God (Cleveland) whose online ministry is committed to discernment in a dangerous age. And in my view, his is one of the soundest of the many Discernment Ministries I encountered during that year of non-stop research. Although sadly, I never made it to my local Church of God. Instead, I bounced from one church to another, beginning in '03 with Bethel Baptist Church, situated in Wimbledon, West London, and affiliated to the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement, which I came across through the Sermon Audio website, and specifically Pastor David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries. I didn't officially become a member of any church, however, until early 2009, when I was granted membership of Duke Street Church, a Grace Baptist fellowship situated close to Richmond Green in the picturesque south western suburb of Richmond-on-Thames. The Grace Baptists, who are quite generously represented in the affluent suburbs of South West London such as Richmond, Twickenham and Teddington, subscribe to the Five Points of Calvinism, unlike their Independent Fundamentalist counterparts, who tend to be passionately opposed to Calvinism, while refuting the Arminian label. And justly so, given that a key IFB tenet is a belief in Eternal Security which doesn't square up with classical Arminianism. Yet, by the time of the completion of a purported definitive draft of this piece in 2012, I'd been attending services at a large Evangelical Anglican church in East Twickenham in London for several years, having initially explored the possibility of membership some half decade or so ago; and I've no intention of straying. All I have to do now is work towards losing my taste for near-total anonymity, which, in a fellowship as vast as mine, with its three to four services each Sunday, is pre-eminently possible, although part of me suspects my dreams are forlorn, for I'm neither as young - nor as well - as I once was. I still find myself planning some kind of escape from my present sequestered existence...and one through which I might

go so way towards compensating for my past; and all the stupidity and mistakes, the sheer criminal waste, I associate with it, despite the fact that for much of it I was, I think it's fair to say, perfectly happy. And yet, for all that, my soul's truest, deepest desires have already been fulfilled.

Two In Defence of Bible-Based Conservatism

Conservatism doesn't make any sense, does it? Not unless it's compassionate it doesn't, no, and for me this means Biblical. Personally I know little of the roots of Conservatism and its many forms, but I have read of a type that has been variously described as Classical and compassionate. But it's “tough” on the surface in its uncompromising exaltation of faith, tradition, family, nation and region, which would make it controversial in the eyes of its critics. Which are of course many. Yet, compassionate Conservatism has also been likened to Classical Liberalism in the latter's purported affiliation with the Wesleyan-Holiness Social Gospel of active care for the most vulnerable members of society. And in keeping with its Biblical roots, this must include “the stranger among us.” And its equally uncompromising belief in Non-interventionism, which is still another feature of Classical Conservatism according to some of its adherents, could be said to be “soft” at the centre, which is to say, “meek and humble of heart.” And if it truly aspires to be Biblical, it must be these things, for the Bible commands all professing Christians to seek Holiness: 1 Peter 1: 16: “Because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am holy.” One possible root of Conservative Non-interventionism as I see it is God's deliberate dispersal of the nations in the Book of Genesis in the wake of Man's first attempt at a united One-World empire known as Babylon, and presided over by Nimrod, who is described as “a mighty hunter before the Lord.” Could it thence be that certain Conservatives honour God's decision to disseminate the nations, in the belief it's in Man's interest to operate not in unity, but as a series of sovereign nations...for power to be decentralised? This one certainly does. But again, I know little of politics and the history of Conservatism, nor its different varieties. But as I see it, the truest Conservatism accommodates Man's connate competitive and hierarchical instincts though the most successful economic system in human history, Capitalism, while recognising that without a strong moral underpinning, this degenerates into the pernicious doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest, which should be anathema to all Biblical Conservatives.

Book Six

A Triad of Short Musical Essays

The Blues, Chicago, and the Genesis of Rock

7 million black people emigrated from the South to the North, Midwest and West during the period 1910 to 1970 known as the Great Migration. In terms of their music, their most famous port of call was surely the great Midwestern city of Chicago, where the Chicago Blues was born in the 1940s, this being a version of the original Country Blues enhanced by new developments in amplification. It went on to significantly inform the development of Rock and Roll, which was equally influenced by Country music, and most especially the variant known as Rockabilly. The most influential Rock phenomenon of all time, the Beatles, were not overly influenced by the Chicago Blues, unlike their closest rivals the Rolling Stones. They looked to Rock and Roll, and other more recent and commercial trends in Popular music, such as the music which eventually became known as Soul - and which was plausibly a fusion of Rhythm and Blues and Traditional Pop with elements of Gospel - for inspiration. As such they were the chief architects of Pop Music which went on to form the basis of Pop Culture and the entire Swinging Sixties scene. In this respect they differed from the prime movers of the British Blues Boom, who largely ignored Rock and Roll in favour of the Blues, and specifically the Delta and Chicago Blues. Out of this British Blues Boom, Rock was born although it would not be called this until well into the sixties. Many of these Blues groups jumped onto the Pop bandwagon created by the Beatles to form part of the British Invasion of the US Pop charts. They included the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Who. In time, they all became known as Rock groups, whether British or American, although Pop survived as an alternative generic description. Today, however, Pop is viewed rather as a strain within Rock or a sub-genre, or as a different form of music altogether. From the grafting of anti-establishment values onto a music that seemed like little more than noise to many members of the older generation, a massively successful commercial phenomenon with millions of followers worldwide came into being. Its effect on the fabric of the Christian West cannot be underestimated.

Classically English - A Brief Homage to Nick Drake

The much-loved singer-songwriter Nick Drake was not so much handsome as beautiful in what could be called a classically English, soft, wistful, romantic, Shelleyan fashion, with seemingly perfect skin, full lips and a head of cascading curls.

And in some of his many photos, he bears an uncanny resemblance to the former Doors front man Jim Morrison; and like Morrison, he was a poet as much as a musician. But the likeness ends there, for while Morrison was able to conquer his natural shyness and become a wildly charismatic showman, Drake never mastered the art of Rock performance. However, blessed with a precocious musical genius, he secured a recording contract with the Island label while still only twenty years old and at Cambridge University. On the surface of things, he was destined for a long and happy life, but unlike his near-double, was unable to translate his enormous gifts into commercial success. And he became very seriously depressed as a result, dying mysteriously at the age of just 26, after having released only three albums in his lifetime. Looking back from the vantage point of the early 2010s, one can't help thinking that in any era other than that ushered in by the Rock revolution, Drake would have pursued a career more suited to his background and temperament. As opposed to one which, while ensuring his immortality, clearly caused him an inestimable amount of pain. And he came to maturity in a Britain whose young were in active rebellion against the Judeo-Christian value system on which the nation had been founded. So was perforce affected by the spiritual chaos of the times, which propelled him towards the endless night of worldly philosophy, deadly for a mind as litmus-paper sensitive as his. For despite the fact that the vast majority of those who pass through the British public school system go on to lead full and successful lives entirely free from melancholy, social advantage can clearly be a heavy burden to bear for some. Such as Nick Drake who sang so devastatingly of “falling so far on a silver spoon” in the dark pastorale, Parasite.

Refugees from the Underground/You Knew New Wave

a) Refugees from the Underground

In '67 the Hippie phenomenon entered the mainstream to became an international obsession...and it was in that very year I harried my mother into making me a psychedelic paisley shirt which I went on to wear with a peaked Dylan cap and possibly also purple corduroy jeans. By the end of the decade though, the relative innocence of my infatuation with the Hippie dandies I witnessed each Thursday night on Top of the Pops and other frothy Pop programmes had mutated into a passion for actual social revolution, whose apologists I read about and viewed with awe. As for the commercial chart Pop of the early '70s...it was the music from a world I no longer even barely acknowledged as existing. Strangely enough though, it was a world that produced several hits in 1970 by a band known as CCS which had been masterminded by Mickey Most and John Cameron, and fronted by no less a figure than Alexis Korner, including the top 5 smash, Tap Turns on the Water. It also produced Glam Rock, a heterogeneous mixture of Pop and Rock allied to an outrageous androgynous image, which started to infiltrate the British charts for the first time around 1971. The Glam Rock era of ca. 1971-'73 was to some extent a revival of the sartorial flashiness - and musical simplicity - of early Rock and Roll...and one which swept a host of gifted young musicians who'd been striving for major success since the early 1960s to fresh levels of stardom in the UK and elsewhere. Yet, despite the Pop star status they enjoyed in the UK, several of these were viewed as serious album artists as well as TV idols. They included - in addition to the aforesaid Marc Bolan - David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Elton John, all of whom had been previously involved in some form or another with Art, or Progressive Rock...refugees from the Underground in other words. Thanks in some measure to their efforts, Pop underwent something of a rehabilitation in Britain from about 1971 or '72, and they strutted around on TV in flashy attire and stack-heeled boots, while assailing the Pop charts with intelligent and imaginative singles in the Glam genre which harked back to the golden age of the mid-sixties. For my part, though, I remained indurate, viewing the effeminate antics of T.Rex and the Sweet with all the horror of a typical macho adolescent male. But that was soon to change.

b) You Knew New Wave

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it. Perhaps you became a Rockabilly Rebel for a time, inspired by some contemporary Hepcat act such as the Stray Cats, who fused classic Rockabilly with a New Wave attitude, or you embraced the Mod Revival pioneered by Franc Roddam's film version of the Who's concept album Quadrophenia, although as I recall, that had all but faded by the onset of the new decade. You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it. However, seminal New Wave band the Jam continued to fly the flag for the Mod Revival until 1982, when chief songwriter Paul Weller formed The Style Council, who would not have been seen as New Wave in the UK, although they would have done in the US, but what precisely does it mean?

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it. Well in Britain, it was used to describe a form of music which while flaunting a Punk Rock attitude was marked by a relative virtuosity perhaps intended to ensure its longevity. You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it. And given that such New Wave acts and artists as Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, XTC and the Police enjoy classic status, it was a canny development. You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it. Oh how electric with rebellion I was...but then rebellion was omnipresent throughout Britain in the '80s, fuelled by Post-Punk, Goth, Indie and so on. You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it. A degree of nonconformism is of course natural to the young of every age, but since around '55, rebellion has grown at such a furious rate in Britain that language and behaviour that would have have been widely perceived as iniquitous only a few decades ago now leaves most people indifferent. You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it. You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

Book Seven

The Gloaming of a Golden Era

Introduction

As in the cases of all my autobiographical writings, names of people have been changed, or modified, to the best of my ability in the name of privacy, while dialogue is approximate.

The Gloaming of a Golden Era

In the summer of 1979, Mark was, at the wonderful age of 23, a golden-headed extrovert. He was also almost textbook pretty in the manner of the modern Pop or movie idol, with long-lashed eyes of the deepest blue and cupid 's bow lips so finely wrought that many a woman might muse they were wasted on a man. It had been in the early '70s that Mark and his brother Jim started to be noticed by the local youth of Santiago de la Ribera, a beautiful former fishing village by the Mar Menor on Murcia's Costa Calida where the family had been vacationing every year since the late 1960s, so that a large ever-evolving group attained a closeness of quite extraordinary intensity that lasted for several summers running until it was fatally compromised by Mark's absence. This occurred in consequence of his having been persuaded by his family to work as a sailing teacher in Palamos on the Costa Brava; and while he lost his job after only a few weeks, he'd already established strong emotional ties with the town, and so stayed on until the end of the summer. A similar thing occurred the following year when he was despatched to the Andalusian town of Fuengirola with the purpose of setting up a sailing school. And while this plan fell through, he somehow fell into the position of lead singer for a four-piece band playing nightly at a local night club. He stayed loyal to the band even once the original guitarist had been replaced by a gifted young Frenchman, but due to loss of strong leadership, things were never the same after his departure. And when it finally became clear to him the band had run out of steam, he made the trek to La Ribera to find her magical ambience yet intact, and his presence much anticipated. But he himself had changed, not least in his style of dressing, which was coarser than in previous years, having been influenced by the London Punk movement, and he was prone to prima donna outbursts exacerbated by months of hard living, which may have alienated more than he realised at the time. One thing is certain is that by the time he arrived in La Ribera a year after that, his network of friends had entirely dispersed but for a handful of die-hards, while the town itself seemed somehow different in his eyes. In fact, for want of a better word, it had become Westernised, so that every bar was chockfull of Pop music played at ear-splitting volume, while its youthful patrons seemed to Mark to be infinitely more sophisticated than they'd been only a handful of years theretofore. The upshot was that La Ribera was no longer a place he could stroll through as if it were his personal principality knowing full well that sooner or later someone would be hailing him from a nearby window, street corner or roaring mobylette, situation which he viewed with a terrible sadness born of guilt.

For he was used to being the centre of attention, a state he achieved with ease either through his looks, or a flamboyant, furiously social personality which could at times verge on the obnoxious, and which had ensured him a lifetime of clashes with authority. And he'd already prematurely quit an astonishingly lengthy series of institutions for someone of such tender years. Indeed, there was something almost feverish, one might say pathological, about his incessant need for attention, which typically extended to his attire which at times betokened out and out exhibitionism. Yet, stronger personalities had the power to intimidate him with ease, and he was painfully aware of his lack of substance. But then, perhaps he wasn't so shallow after all. For there was an ineffable tenderness to him that was enormously appealing to women, while alienating more conventionally masculine males, the majority of his friends being arty mavericks such as himself. And he could be quite extraordinarily sentimental…a true romantic in the classic sense of the word. Yet any profundity on Mark's part had yet to manifest itself to any degree, although it could be said it was divined by the hyper-receptive. Within a few days of Mark's arrival in La Ribera, a large party arrived at the Alaska discotheque on the edge of town. This included Mark and Jim and best Spanish friend Fred, an ethnic Frenchman raised in Spain, similar to Mark in so far as he was blond and strikingly good-looking, and therefore enormously popular with the fair sex. Yet while he was also extrovert, he was more socialised than Mark, who had a lifelong history of unaccountable perverseness and provocation of authority. But Fred was deeply and genuinely fond of the Europhile Englishman, and vice versa. Mark hit the dance floor to be surrounded by fellow dancers as he always was. For it was as if there was an aura of the constant possibility of impending excitement about him, and one that would ultimately yield him the fame he so clearly desired as many saw it; and they clearly wanted to bask in it, in the hope perhaps that some of it would rub off on them. Yet it wouldn't be too long before he found the burden of his mysterious magnetic enchantment too heavy to bear, as if it were in danger of crushing him; in fact, perhaps this was already the case. At the same time, he wouldn 't have traded it for the world, and he clung to it greedily, gloating as his party swelled, to be supplanted by Fred and his brother Armand, and other old friends of his from the golden days of La Ribera. Such as Toto, a perpetually smiling Madrileno who'd been close to Mark and Jim for at least five years; and gentle Isabel, also from Madrid, and so placid that in company she barely uttered a word, preferring to look on with her enormous dark brown eyes, while occasionally flashing a shyly mysterious smile. Soon after the party had returned to La Ribera, Mark suggested that rather than bring the night to a close, a small group of them hold an impromptu gathering on one of the wooden bathing facilities projecting out into the Mar Menor known as balnearios. When they agreed, Mark went briefly back to his apartment to retrieve a cassette tape recorder complete with pre-recorded cassettes, and his old acoustic guitar after which he, Fred, Toto and Isabel set out for the balneario. And passing amorous couples and several clustered groups of rowdy revellers, they soon settled under Costa Calida skies with the music of Frank Sinatra singing songs of Tom Jobim, which Mark's parents purchased on cassette specially for what may have been their first ever holiday to La Ribera in the summer of 1969. “Joue la guitare, Bowie,” said Fred, deploying such a nickname by virtue of Mark's apparent favouring of David Bowie. Although he also resembled Sting of the internationally successful New Wave band the Police, and there was one instance of a kid repeatedly calling to him in the back streets of La Ribera, “Oye, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting”, although entirely without menace. For in those days, the youth of Spain were remarkable for their sweetness of disposition and almost total lack of aggression. “Qu'est-ce que tu veux que je joue?” Mark replied. “I don't know,” said Fred, “something romantic perhaps?” Toto passed him his guitar, and he set about entertaining his small audience with rudimentary guitar skills which in those days extended to a host of rockers, and one or two simple love ballads such as Francis Lai 's theme to A Man and a Woman. But people seemed to like it when he played, because he had a fine singing voice a little reminiscent of Frank Sinatra's. In time, the party elected to return to their respective apartments, so Mark collected his paraphernalia before joining his friends in the short walk back to The beach. But no sooner had he done so than he fell into a large crack in the balneario, which caused his guitar to come crashing down with a loud discordant twang, and his tape recorder to follow suit, with several cassettes littering about his prostrate person. Luckily he was unhurt, but his new imitation leather jeans were badly torn, and Sinatra sounded as he 'd had one too many straight bourbons when played back on Mark's freshly injured cassette player, although the cassette itself was perfect; and would remain so thereafter, a testament to fine workmanship. Mark's friends helped him out of the gaping fissure that had caused his humiliating plight while Mark himself burst into incredulous laughter at his ill fortune, which caused their concerned expressions to dissolve into smiles of relief. And before long, they were bidding each other goodbye for the night before setting off for their respective sanctuaries. Much of the remainder of his vacation was spent in a chaos of activity with his family and friends, and once it was over, he returned to London to seek work as an actor, finding a degree of success as such until a fallow period two years later saw him return to La Ribera. And this despite the fact that there was little for him there that remained, but it was as if he was trying to make up for having forsaken his beloved town at the height of her golden age. But after one further visit two years after that, and then a final one at the end of the '80s, the La Ribera era was definitively put to sleep. And by this time, its participants had already long settled into adult life, in terms of professions, families, children and so on. But Mark never did.

Instead, he continued to extenuate his gilded youth until it came crashing down around him…came crashing down around him…as his guitar had done on the balneario all those summers ago.

when compared to the fathomless joy

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