Fun Boy Three, the 1980s and all that....

It's been a while - my blog has been sadly neglected during a very busy term, which is thankfully now over.

Yesterday I found myself in a strangely 1980s musical mood. I started off listening to Arcade Fire but was then overcome with an overwhelming urge to listen to the Fun Boy Three, Madness, The Jam, Iggy Pop, The Style Council and Eurythmics. I'm not ashamed - I enjoyed it and it's not even my favourite 80s music. The Fun Boy Three are great though, they look very dated if you watch their videos but they wrote great lyrics - I think Terry Hall is one of the most underated lyricists of our time.

There is something about 80s music - it must be the influence of the era. I sometimes wonder if the way I am is because I was a teen in the 80s - it has left me slightly cynical and a bit of a pessimist. Friends who were teens in the 70s seem to have a different outlook on life. The 80s was a bleak time especially politically. On the one hand there was a lot of frivolous stuff going on - lightweight music like Duran Duran and Wham, there were some ridicolous fashions (big hair, the bubble skirt!) and some people were getting rich quick. But on the other side of the coin there was the miners strike, race riots, the National Front were getting big, there was The Falklands War, mass privatisation, The Peace Convoy and the way they were hounded and finally beaten by the police in the infamous Battle of the Beanfield. It was a bleak time for young people too - there was massively high unemployment which was why some people went on the road - or like me went to live in a commune.

Out of this however did come some really great music, which wouldn't have existed without the backdrop of those times - UB40, The Specials, Fun Boy Three, Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Beat etc.

I saw a piece of graffitti recently that read "there's no point in voting, if it changed anything it would be illegal." I understood the sentiment, but I disagree - anyone who lived through the 1980s will tell you - things could be a lot worse.

The Surreal Life of Jelly Babies

When I was a child I had a very wierd book called "Peter Puffer's Fun Book" - it was great and I loved it - a bit like taking an acid trip - although of course I didn't know that at the time. One of the strories was about a family of jelly babies whose mum takes them to visit some relatives on an island by the sea. She tells them not to get their feet wet - but of course because their cousins (who I believe were sea anemones!) were and because the island was about a foot across they couldn't resist it and did - and that is why jelly babies have their feet stuck together. I have no idea why I was thinking about that story today except that I have been stuck at home with a sore throat and a cold. Feeling to groggy to even read a novel I had to resort to DVDs (Fleetwood Mac) and thinking about children's literature.

Paring down Poetry

Can you pare down poetry too much?

George Szirtes taught me to cut some of the superfluous words from my poems and I can see that he was right. After the initial shock last year of seeing my poetry with words, lines and even stanzas crossed out I looked again and was able to immediately see that without a doubt my poetry is better for it. It is stronger, clearer, more direct, it speaks in its own voice without getting bogged down in ands and buts and explanatory lines.

Minimal poetry is also the kind of poetry that I prefer to read myself - poets like Lorca and Neruda. Poetry that appears simple yet the beauty of the language can bring tears to your eyes and make your heart sing with joy.

What I find myself wondering though is whether poetry can become too refined? Does the constant paring down mean that you might lose some essence of the original poem? Will I keep obsessively paring down my words until each line is but a single word? Will my poem eventually be simply a blank page?

There is without a doubt great beauty in silence, but in the silence of choice not that of procrastination.

The Future is the Past...

It is very seldom that I watch a film that I know that I will want to see again, and even rarer to see one that will watch again within a week (pretty much unheard of actually!)

The Future is Unwritten is one of those films. I had been really looking forward to watching it as I have been an unashamedly huge fan of The Clash for years, but thsi film far exceeded all my expectations.

Once you get used to the quirkiness of the filming it is riveting viewing. Temple has filmed a bunch of Strummer's friends and peershanging out around a campfire on what looks like the banks of the River Thames. They are listening to a recording of Strummer's radio show that he made for the BBC World Service. One of the most striking and original things about the film is that the narration is largely the voice of Strummer himself talking about his musical life. This is interspersed with anecdotes supplied by his friends and is run over video and photo footage of Strummer's life plus anamated drawings.

One of the great things about this film is that it covers the whole of Joe Strummer's life not just the period of time when he was in The Clash. I found it fascinating to learn about his childhood, his time as a hippy living in a London squat as well as what happened to him after The Clash disbanded. I am ashamed to say that I was such a huge Clash fan in my teens and twenties that I never really came to terms with their split and so didn't follow their subsequent musical careers. This was definitely my loss - The Mescaleros produced some brilliant music and I am just left wishing that I had given them a chance when Strummer was still alive.

I would highly recommend this brilliant/funny/sad film and would suggest that while you watch it you might want to keep a pen and notepad handy as Joe plays some excellent tracks on his radio show that you will undoubtedly want to hear again.

Recommended tracks:

Johnny Appleseed - Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros

Coma Girl - Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros

Blitzreig Bop - The Ramones

1977 - The Clash

Corrina, Corrina - Bob Dylan

To Love Somebody - Nina Simone

This is Not a Lovesong - Public Image Limited

Greek Poets

A few days ago I bought a book in a tiny Greek bookshop called "Modern Greek Poetry". Modern though, seems to me a bit of a misnomer as there is nothing in there from beyond the 1960s and most of the poetry is from the early part of the twentieth century. There was one poet in the book who I particularly liked - Nikos Engonopoulos. WhenI looked at his biography I was surprised to find that he was first and foremost a famous Greek Surrealist painter. Sadly he doesn't seem to have written that many poems.

Another Greek Salad

I'm sitting here like a geek in an internet cafe whilst outside the hot sun is beating down and my stomach is telling me that it is time to eat lunch - maybe another Greek salad....

Murdering Music

We heard an interesting radio station whilst drinking our coffee in a Greek cafe this week. The station's playlist seemed to be made up entirely of cover versions of classic English songs. During our coffee we heard versions of Eurythmic's "Sweet Dreams" and other numbers originally performed by Radiohead, The Beatles and John Lennon amongst others (sorry track titles elude me right now - or else I have blanked them out). Sadly every number played was truly awful - now I know what they mean when they talk about murdering a song!