The Task: Newton, Cowper and the Civilisation of the West

'This morning buryed a woman slave (No 47) Know not what to say she died of for she has not been properly alive since she first came on board' -- from the diary of John Newton.

                           

February 15th this year, I discovered yesterday, is an important anniversary. It will be 250 years since William Cowper and Mary Unwin moved into the large, imposing house that still looks down over the market square in Olney, Buckinghamshire. Today their home is the site of the Cowper and Newton Museum, a memorial not only to the life of the poet, but also his friendship with the composer of 'Amazing Grace', who as an Anglican clergyman, ministered to the spiritual needs of the parishioners in Olney. Newton had an earthly agenda as well as a heavenly one. He wanted to rid his society of slavery, which he himself had practised before entering into the priesthood; and Cowper, as his friendship with Newton grew, would prove to be a more than capable initiate into the work, testifying against slavery in a series of poems that warned his readers of the inhumanity of a system still accepted as a perfect profession for a gentleman.

But ah! what wish can prosper, or what prayer,
For merchants rich in cargoes of despair,
Who drive a loathsome traffic, gauge, and span,
And buy the muscles and the bones of man?
The tender ties of father, husband, friend,
All bonds of nature in that moment end;
And each endures, while yet he draws his breath,
A stroke as fatal as the scythe of death.
The sable warrior, frantic with regret
Of her he loves, and never can forget,
Loses in tears the far-receding shore,
But not the thought that they must meet no more;
Deprived of her and freedom at a blow,
What has he left that he can yet forego?

William Cowper ‘Charity’ (1782)

It was an unpopular message in a country profiting so handsomely from slavery, and initially, despite his fervent belief in its wickedness, Cowper resisted putting pen to paper on the subject. In the British parliament, MPs laughed when they heard testimony of black bodies being thrown overboard from slave ships as useless cargo. They were among the men making vast sums from the kidnapping and inhumane transport of imprisoned Africans. Our own previous prime minister David Cameron had alleged connections to the trade. His family, many generations ago, made their millions from the murderous exploitation of human souls -- or so it was said. Cameron himself would neither confirm nor deny it.

                                            
                              design by Josiah Wedgewood

Once the requests of friends (you have to imagine Newton among them) had helped Cowper overcome his initial reluctance, he wrote several poems against slavery, describing the horrors of the slave's experience so vividly it was as if he'd lived it himself. Did his lifelong struggle with depression (Cowper's more conservative admirers speak of a tendency to melancholy) give him at least a partial insight into the catastrophic psychological impact of the slave's abduction and torture? Or perhaps it just made him more inclined to empathy? The experience of personal suffering can lead either to great kindness, or great cruelty.

John Newton had left Olney by the time 'Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce', Cowper's most famous anti-slavery poem, was written. A BBC page claims churchgoers in the town were tired of his 'hectoring' sermons. It seems just as probable that someone on an evangelical mission like Newton might have found rural Buckinghamshire a little too far away from the action. He did, after all, exchange Olney for St Mary Woolnoth in London.

In London Newton met again an idealistic young MP, William Wilberforce; he had known him when the latter was a child. Wilberforce took up the abolitionist cause with such a fervour, it came to dominate his life, affect his relationships and take a toll on his health. He was supported in the herculean task of ending slavery by Newton, who became his spiritual and moral guide. But there were many others working for the abolitionist movement. Poet Hannah More was one. Olaudah Equiano was another. The latter wrote 'The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano', which, with its graphic account of the slave trade from an African perspective, was a key text for the movement. The veracity of the text, or at least a part of it, has been debated since, but the power of the narrative can't be argued.

Slavery was abolished, technically, by an Act of Parliament in 1807, once again in February, and Newton lived to see its abolition, despite being almost blind and at the point of death. It continued in the British Empire until the 1830s, at which point all slaves still held were emancipated. Among those compensated by the British government for the loss of income that emancipation represented was the Anglican Church Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which owned sugar plantations. It seems Newton's very fine example was lost on some senior members of his own church, who, I would add, are not cut from the same ideological/ moral cloth as the people who administer Anglicanism today. If they were, you have to hope, they would be driven off the land like thieves.

 Cowper

Cowper never lived to see the fruition of his own work against slavery. He died in 1800 at 61, after the death of his wife Mary left him 'a mental and physical invalid' ('Romanticism' ed. Duncan Wu). Newton died in 1807. He was buried in St Mary Woolnoth; but his mortal remains were disinterred subsequently and returned to Olney, where he now lies in a corner of the graveyard of the church of St Peter and St Paul. His bones rest beneath an impressive monument 'erected by public prescription', his vast contribution to the effort of civilising the Western world finally appreciated by a significant minority, even if the job itself, as Newton would agree, is still woefully unfinished.

Poets and Prisoners: Back Among the Dead in Northampton

I've written about Kingsthorpe Cemetery in Northampton before. It's the graveyard in which James Joyce's daughter Lucia is buried. Near to Lucia is the grave of her friend Violet Gibson, infamous in her lifetime for attempting to assassinate Mussolini in 1926. Lucia and Violet were incarcerated in St. Andrew's Hospital in the town; whether either woman would have been diagnosed with acute mental illness in a less misogynistic age is debatable, but they both died never recovering their liberty.

I walked in the cemetery today, having a little time to spare, and while looking for Lucia's grave I found this:

Laimutis Balys Svalkus. A Lithuanian poet. Who was he, I wondered? The book-like design of the grave and the way his trade as poet is inscribed so prominently into the marble suggest he was more than a hobbyist. That also appears to be a fragment of verse on the right side of the stone. I presume Svalkus is the author, but I don't know. The fact that there is no attribution might tell us the lines would be immediately recognisable to someone informed about Lithuanian poetry.

I did some online research about Svalkus when I got home and couldn't find anything about him written in English. Only what appears to be a list of Svalkus' published books, with their Lithuanian titles, on a very old Lithuanian web page. Amazon has none of his books either. If Suffolk Punch readers are unable to provide more information about Svalkus I'll write to the Lithuanian embassy in London. Someone will know.

Lucia Joyce's grave is a melancholy sight. She is the daughter of the world's most famous twentieth century novelist, but the inscription on her headstone records nothing except the place and year of her birth, and the place and year of her death. There is no awkward verse, no 'she fell asleep on...' and definitely no mention of her family. People passing by the grave might think she had none. 

I don't know what the reason for that is. As Tolstoy wrote, 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' But Lucia has not been forgotten. Some images of her have become iconic, and Alan Moore has called her 'the dancing heart of Northampton', meaning that her 'madness', her free bohemian spirit, far from being destroyed by her decades of imprisonment in St Andrew's, has imbued the town with its magic; Northampton is more creatively liberated, less staid and conservative, because she has been here -- albeit involuntarily.

I buried a symbolic Key of Freedom in the soil in front of Lucia's grave three years ago. Today I found that although it had worked its way up out of the soil, the key was still there. Which meant, I thought delightedly, that whoever visited the grave and took responsibility for keeping it clean might possibly understand. Somebody else had left a tiny snow globe and a miniature rainbow. A gesture of sweetness and empathy that a woman who seems to have been as mistreated as Lucia Joyce surely deserves.

LAIMUTIS BALYS SVALKUS

PARTIAL PUBLICATION LIST

Didžioji auka (1963).

Širdies nuolaužos (1966),

Dienų sūkuriuos (1968),

Gyvastis (1973),

Rudens vėjuose (1985)

Pasakų metai (1993).

The Unknown Life of Ida John

 

When I was born, in the 1960s, birth certificates recorded your mother's name, and your father's name and occupation. It was assumed that your mother wouldn't have a job. Her job was to raise you. (And, it could reasonably be argued, your father.)

That was in the 1960s. When Ida Nettleship was born in 1877 her mother Adaline wasn't even able to vote. Ida would never experience the nominal equality of choosing her MP either, as she died tragically young. But hers was a life as liberated from patriarchal restrictions as it was cruelly circumscribed by them. The liberation is obvious. For the circumscription you have to look a little deeper.

Ida was a painter. She had studied at the Slade, and there she met the soon-to-be-infamous Augustus John. John painted the picture at the top of this post. He was considered a genius not only for his paintings but also for his unruly and selfish behaviour. Ginsberg identified this artistic stereotype in a funny but exasperated sideswipe at Gregory Corso. It's also strongly evident in the myth of Bob Dylan. Combine talent with self-absorption and you have a legend in the making if the artist is a man.

When Ida was almost twenty-four she married John in St Pancras Registry Office in London, and soon thereafter began a pattern that would continue for the remaining six years of her life. Ida developed the conviction that her husband, being the greater artist, needed support rather than the stimulation of creative rivalry, and so she abandoned her art to establish a home environment and a marriage in which this giant spirit could work.

Her will in this regard was soon to be severely tested. Augustus, who we now know was as priapic as any egotistical semi-celebrity, fell in love with Dorelia McNeill, and Ida, in act of heroic self-sacrifice, allowed Dorelia to come and live with them. It pleased Augustus. It kept him working. And with son after son being born, it kept Ida's marriage intact, in its idiosyncratic way. Her letters also suggest, although you can never be certain, that at times Ida liked the defiance of convention inherent in the new arrangement.

The arrangement, of course, was scandalous, and Ida's family struggled to accept it. She chided them all, in her letters. But she also confessed, in less defiant moods, to the anger and resentment she felt towards Augustus. She began to realise, more and more, how selfish he was. You get the sense, as you read, that the really private part of Ida, unknown even to herself perhaps, wished things could have been a little less extraordinary.

She is, however, no victim. Two years before her early death Ida defied conventional unconvention and leaving Augustus in England, moved to Paris with their shared lover Dorelia. She wasn't ending the relationship; but she was bored and depressed in the village where 'Gus' had parked her and she needed stimulation. It's also irresistible not to read into her departure an emphatic message, the kind that you deliver when you're taking back control: You want space? How do you like a few hundred miles?

Augustus, as most men would, followed Ida (and Dorelia) to Paris, although he didn't stay there. In 1907 Ida died of puerperal fever after her son Henry was born. She was only thirty years old. Augustus wrote about the hours after her death, 'I was seized with an uncontrollable elation [...] I could have embraced any passer-by.' More self-absorption? Or grief? According to Wyndham Lewis, John was drunk for three days, so perhaps it's more kind to assume the latter.

John's reputation has been spectacularly diminished by new thinking in art and gender roles. Just knowing that he raped Caitlin Thomas, as she revealed in her memoir, is enough to make any progressive person dismiss him. Ida, however, is restored, by the publication of her letters, as an essential pioneer in the arena of rights for women and sexual identity, not to mention experimental models of social organisation. 

You can read Ida John's letters in 'The Good Bohemian', edited by Rebecca John and Michael Holroyd (Bloomsbury 2017).

The Bookshops of Harborough

Christine's Bookcabin, Market Harborough

My dream for years now has been to open a second-hand bookshop. I love books: I love the look of them, the feel of them and the smell of them, and the older they are, the deeper my love goes. An old yellowing paperback with an inscription by a previous owner inside it is almost a holy relic for me.

But you need money to start a business; and usually a mortgage to obtain a bank loan. Increasingly, books don't seem like a viable business proposition either. Acquaintances who know about my book obsession, and my dream, tell me with a sort of glee that no one reads anymore. 

This is the sort of thing people who don't read themselves tend to say, or people who like to ring their hands about the decay of civilised values in the technological age. The world still reads. But they can buy a greater variety of books at a cheaper price on Amazon. I use that indie-gobbling corporate giant myself, although in my case it's because I have no alternative most of the time, living in Northampton. Here we only have a Waterstone's. I go in occasionally, but I rarely find anything I want to read--at least not for the money I have in my pocket.

The town of Market Harborough, which is literally one footfall over the county line into Leicestershire, turns all the current wisdom about book shopping habits on its head. The last population estimate was 22,000--Northampton dwarfs it at approximately 219,000--and yet Market Harborough has five bookshops (that I could find) to Northampton's one. 

Age UK bookshop, Market Harborough

Two of Harborough's bookshops are run by charities. But they're not the usual high street charity shops where you can also buy clothes, jewellery and picture frames (much as I love those places). In Market Harborough there are Age UK and Oxfam shops dedicated to books, along with film and music, and whenever I'm there they both do healthy business. 

Oxfam Bookstore, Market Harborough, with Michelle

The books are high quality books too. Yesterday I bought Diana Souhami's 'The Trials of Radclyffe Hall', 'The Good Bohemian: The Letters of Ida John', and 'Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan' for a little more than ten pounds. There were many other books I could have bought too, but I had to leave a few quid for lunch in the Sugar Loaf pub up the street (where, by the way, I had the best veggie burger and chips I'd eaten in months).

I've wondered before why this gorgeous little town has more places for book lovers to indulge their passion than places ten times its size. Is it the closeness of a big university? Perhaps, but Harborough also has more bookshops than Leicester, as far as I know; and Northampton has a good university--it should be, the author of this blog is one of its graduates. Is it Harborough's socio-economic make-up? or just tradition? 

Whatever the answer is, I go there as often as I can, and buy as many books as I can find that pique my curiosity. Amazon provides a great service, even if it has a reputation for treating its employees appallingly. Nothing, however, beats the experience of browsing shelves in a bookshop, running your gaze along rows and rows of spines imprinted with some names you know and others you don't, meeting the eyes of other people who've come in for the same reason, looking at the books in their arms and guessing who they are by what they read. I want to support good bookshops and keep the social side of book consumption alive, or even help it to grow again.

It's hard enough to watch councils across the country taking away the libraries that gave us our love of books in the first place.

Poem: Trump's First Year

With no frail ego that needs shoring up

by pulverising those with different views,

no love for money, power, influence,

no wish to be a headline in the news,

taught by my mother that my home was Earth,

that walls were artificial, people real,

loving colour, language and diversity,

preferring not the known, but what we feel,

I sank into a deep gloom watching Trump

campaign to take the White House, then get in.

His first year taught me that the triumph's mine,

since I will never, ever be like him.

The American Resistance: My Heroes of 2017

2017 will be known in history as the Year of Trump. Across the world. The 2016 election of this man, about whom, for me, almost no pejorative is adequate, has sent shock waves -- as well as peals of derisive laughter -- around the world. Surely, we all thought, almost everybody in every country on Earth, America can't be serious. Let's be fair: most of America isn't, and it never was. Not about him. But he got in anyway.

For me, however, the last year hasn't been about Trump. Or, he isn't the lasting memory I choose to take from the year, even though I've spent more than my fair share of it watching the news, wondering when he or his deranged mirror-image in North Korea were going to hurl us all into nuclear war; looking on in exasperation and growing outrage as he sought to delegitimise the media, wrote bigoted executive orders against Muslims, Native Americans and transgender soldiers, did nothing in response to the latest mass shootings except invoke the name of God and invite the NRA to the White House on the anniversary of Sandy Hook. This supposed leader of the free world even retweeted three unverified videos (including one proven to be fake) from my own country's British National Party, an organisation of hooligans in whose name a Labour MP was murdered.

What I choose to take from a year preoccupied with a president who, far from making America great again, who far from restoring respect for America internationally (he craves respect like the stereotype of a Mafia boss), has made his country look bellicose, uncooperative and fifty years behind the global political agenda -- what I take from the year Trump's seemingly ugly heart has dominated, is the rise of an American Resistance which we haven't seen the like of for decades. It makes me feel hope that the Trump victory was an historical aberration which will soon be corrected. And the fact that the Resistance is as much a populist movement as it is a mainstream political movement -- from this distance it seems more about the people on the streets, although there are still good men and women in Washington -- makes it all the more inspiring. I have been loosely involved with grassroots campaigns against government for decades. But most of the times it's hard to get more than twenty people to a rally.

The Resistance isn't one thing; it's a lot of things. Women have found a powerful voice in campaigns against sexual abuse popularised by activist celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan; the discourse is often controversial and divisive, but shouldn't it be? The man running the country is on tape boasting that he can 'grab [women] by the pussy' because he's famous. In Britain, which is far from a perfect democracy, that recording would have ended Trump's political career the moment it was released. We hear of arguments between activist women, and some insist they stop and present a united front. But they overlook that the inevitable consequence of finding your voice is the freedom to use it any way you fucking like. Live with it.

The 'Take a Knee' protests begun by NFL star Colin Kaepernick incensed Trump so much he tweeted and ranted publically about it for weeks. Obama, previously, had told a serviceman in a television studio that Kaepernick was exercising his constitutional right to protest against the treatment of black people in America; Trump told an audience of his own supporters that any NFL player who took a knee during the national anthem was a sonofabitch and he should be fired.

There were clear racist overtones in his comments that anybody who cared to see would see. Trump's racism, however, is not news. After a white supremacist rally resulted in the death of a young woman  protesting their odious presence in Charlottesville, Trump said there was blame on both sides for the fighting and insisted there were good people among the white supremacists. He didn't characterise them that way, of course, but he wouldn't, would he? No politician of even marginal intelligence will use derogatory language about his constituents, however accurate it is.

Trump and the American police force, according to the testimonies I've read and heard, take more credit even than those bold NFL players for imbuing many young Americans with a fierce determination to stop the brutality that makes a black man fair game if he's out on the streets after dark. The President told the cops that he supported them being much harder on the people they arrested. His comments were contradicted the next day by senior and beat officers, but the statistics speak for themselves. Too many young men become known to the world because they died in their car with a bullet in their chest.

Some people I know reject the idea that negative racial profiling is behind the killings and chokings. I think that's naïve and in itself kind of racist. But even if they are right, which seems unlikely, American police officers wouldn't be so jumpy if the country brought its gun laws in line with those of the rest of the Western world. That's not going to happen in this administration, of course, because Trump and the Republican Party are puppets of the NRA. I detect, in my reading, that there may be a grassroots gun control movement slowly growing in America though, as part of this Resistance which has flowered in 2017 on so many fronts. Let's hope that it gathers momentum and some real, positive change occurs. One wealthy lobby group shouldn't hold the safety of all Americans in its hands, any more than one bloated businessman who bought an election by lying to vulnerable people and stealing from almost everyone should be responsible for the fate of the whole world.

The American Resistance exists on other fronts, but I've run out of time to discuss them all today. The women and men taking part in it, and the ones who have died supporting it, are my heroes of 2017. I was almost grief-stricken when the country that gave me most of the books and music I love, and most of the movies I love, and some of the ideals I cherish, elected to its highest office a man I've considered a vainglorious fool for thirty years; but the Resistance showed me that America was the country I presumed all along. And now we British onlookers can organise our calendars to welcome Mr. Trump to London in 2018. It should be quite a party.

The Bishop's Wife

I like old movies. One of my favourite Freeview channels to dip in and out of is Talking Pictures, which rarely shows anything made after the early 1960s. Is my age causing me to retreat into a comfortable, sentimentalised idea of the past when I watch these films? Do I feel I understand the world they represent more than I get the one in which I actually live? Perhaps. But I loved them when I was younger too.

This morning I got up early. It was too dark to read without turning on the light in the living room, and if I turned on the light I would wake up our birds Wild Bill, Calamity Jane and Wyatt Earp. If I did that, everyone in our building would complain. So I turned on the tv instead of the light. What I saw when I scrolled through the viewing options was my favourite Christmas film 'The Bishop's Wife'. I hadn't seen it for at least five years, despite it having been, once, an annual seasonal ritual to watch it, and it had only started a few seconds ago. The next part of the morning was decided.

'The Bishop's Wife' was released in 1947. It's based on a novel I haven't read from 1928 by Robert Nathan, but it has a distinctly post-war feel about it. All of the central characters, from David Niven's Bishop to Monty Woolly's down-at-heel scholar are weary, lost, struggling with faith in some way. (Woolly says that when he passes the graveyard he feels as if he were 'apartment hunting'.)

Into this melancholy group, all of whom are linked by the 

Bishop's wife Julia (Loretta Young), who knows that her husband has lost his way in the pursuit of his ambition, comes the charming, playful, mysterious Dudley, played by Cary Grant. He appears in answer to a prayer to God that Niven makes when he feels that he may not be able to build a magnificent cathedral because of problems he has with a wealthy benefactor. Dudley presents himself to the Bishop as an angel, one who hasn't 'earned his wings yet.'

At first the Bishop struggles to believe him, as most of us would. Once convinced, however, he enlists Dudley's support in securing the funds for the cathedral. But Dudley is distracted by an inappropriate attraction to Julia. In fact, he uses his magical powers to distract and keep the Bishop occupied so that he can woo her.

Ultimately, Dudley confesses his passion and Julia rejects him. But this is not an unhappy resolution because when the Bishop realises he may lose his wife, he rediscovers his own passion for her and declares himself ready to fight even an emissary of Heaven to save his marriage. 

The cathedral is never built. Desiring to complete his mission, Dudley visits the Bishop's benefactor and enables her to confess that she has been so concerned with building a monument to her late husband because she never loved him. Her only love was a young composer who died nearly three decades earlier. She has been haunted by his memory ever since. When the Bishop arrives he finds her utterly changed by her confession, and determined to give her fortune to people in need around the world.

As Dudley has said at another point in the film, it would have seemed a great pity to build such an enormous roof when the money could have been spent building so many smaller ones. 

A message as apparently radical, but actually entirely logical and humane, made sense only two years after a conflict that nearly destroyed the world. But in two or three years, as McCarthyism began to sweep through Hollywood like a California wildfire, such sentiments would have been unconscionable. Political fashions come and go, thankfully, and great art lives on past its creators and detractors.

To quote David Niven in the film, watching 'The Bishop's Wife' gave me 'an inexplicable feeling of happiness' all day. We all need a restoration of our faith sometimes, whether we are Christians, Buddhists, hallucinating mystics or we believe in nothing but football.

Bard at the Beeb

A week or so ago, I went down to Radio Northampton to do an interview about the old Railway Club in Wellingborough. A researcher at the station is putting together something about the history of music and youth culture in the county (I think that's the focus), and after seeing something I wrote here on Suffolk Punch, he invited me to participate.

We could have done it over the phone, or via Skype, if I'd had Skype, but I wanted to have a look inside the station. I'd been passing it every day for years, whenever I was in town, and latterly I'd known several people who'd been in there to talk about poetry, or charity. I don't like to admit it, but I'm occasionally very competitive. I want adventure; and I don't want you to have more adventure than me.

The experience was brief, but I loved it. And hated it. I went into a studio just vacated by the guy on the afternoon show and spoke into a microphone like Willie Nelson on a tour date promo. The young researcher asked me about the club, the bands who'd played there, and the attractions of the rock 'n' roll and rockabilly culture. I said that it was my first experience of anything vaguely adult, and that even the stories about the violence the club attracted were compelling reasons to be there for a naïve kid. I theorised that back then everybody wanted to belong to a gang, and mine was just a nostalgia gang with greasy hair, tight trousers and fluorescent socks. Was it the same these days, I wondered? I didn't know.

Occasionally my voice trembled. His attentive gaze made me nervous. I was afraid I was talking crap, or worse, sounding as old and irrelevant as reminiscing about these things was making me feel. It was a club that had been demolished at least a year ago. And the school I attended when I went there had been turned into a housing estate in the Nineties.

I don't want to go into the archives of history as an ex-Ted, I thought, absurdly, even as I romanticised for my interviewer. But in some way the idea that something, at least, might outlast me for a while was curiously comforting. And it sure as shit won't be my poetry. Those were good times. And the music was excellent.

After about fifteen minutes, the researcher concluded the interview. Is that it? I thought, Geldof-like. I wanted to go on for another half an hour, expanding into new areas, inspiring other programmes.

"That's great," he said. "I can use more of that than I thought."

Are you just being professional, saying that? I wondered, while feeling simultaneously flattered, like a child who'd been praised for cleaning up his toys. Public appearances of any sort open me up like a wound, letting out all of my insecurities. But I have to take him at his word. We'll see when the show airs on February 7th at midday how much of my interview made the cut.

Not that I'll be listening. I'll be out walking in the park while Michelle listens for me and prepares all the reassurances I will, and won't, believe.

The Rabbit in the Moon

The rabbit in the moon appears in Bengali folk tales as well as the Buddhist story I've written about before.

I have seen it, as anyone who listens to my inconsequential ramblings will know. But I won't tell anyone else where it is, because each person must find the rabbit in the moon by him-/herself; it's a test of spiritual perception.

When I saw it, I stood alone on Kettering Road in Northampton and laughed out loud. I must have looked at the moon 100,000 times without noticing it.

As the Buddhist saying goes, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears."

That night a young East-European couple had stopped at the kerb on Churchill Avenue looking up at the sky. The man was pointing at something above their heads and the woman was laughing.

Perhaps he had just seen the rabbit in the moon as well. It must have been a night of magic.

Meet Lew Bear

Lew Bear is a folksinger (at least, that's what I'd call him) making albums and appearing live, when work allows, in and around Northamptonshire. He probably goes further afield, but in keeping with SP's usual commitment to high quality investigative journalism, I don't have that information for you. Have a look at Lew's website and I'm sure there'll be information on gigs.

Like all artists, I imagine Lew has been practising and refining his craft since he was old enough to pick up a guitar; I know I wrote my first novel, a revenge Western called 'Blood Lust', when I was 10 or 11. But the three albums he sent me, which cover 2011 to 2014, show that the process of critical self-appraisal necessary to the creation of good work in any medium, continues with Lew even though he has found the space in which he wants to work.

How is that evidenced? Not necessarily in quantum leaps of improvement, because the first album, 'Done in the Dark', is by no means a bad album; and it's certainly not as bad as Lew told me it was, before he admitted it wasn't wholly atrocious but might have been better as an ep. I like it. It lacks polish, perhaps--at times the songs sound like demos rather than finished recordings--but that's what Springsteen calls, 'not just the sound of music being played, but music being made', and it can be fascinating, like peering undetected through the window at a band rehearsal.

Elements that will feature in the two subsequent albums are already present on 'Done in the Dark', like an intelligent appreciation of the folk tradition, which is to say true folk, the old songs and stories;  tthe wonderful 'Mad Ole Girl' and 'All Roads Meet' lope along like horses loose in a field, and it's not hard to imagine Jack the Bastard getting drunk to either of them by a crackling fire after robbing a coach on the Daventry Road.

The congeniality of Lew's more mature style is present here too. His rich, round voice tells us just to enjoy life's journey on 'All Roads Meet'; and he advises us to greet the world with a friendly 'Hey Ja' on the song of the same name. This year's 'Ripples' opens with an eponymous track reminding us that if we give love we spread love; our actions are our only true heritage. He writes it better and sings it better in 'Ripples'--that song's exquisite--but the seed is there early. I can't think of anyone else who ploughs that sweet, generous, open-hearted furrow (can a furrow be open-hearted?) without sounding trite. But with Lew you can tell that the evenness of his spirit is hard won. 'Echoes of the Past' and 'No Return' on the 'Ripples' album are filled with sharp regret.

Politics shows itself in all three of the albums Lew's recorded since 2011, though you might say the version of Kipling's 'If' on 'Ripples', combined with the title song's call for love, gradually draws politics into something more existential. (What is it with Kipling by the way? That old imperialist seems really popular right now. The Scrumpy Bastards have set one of his to music as well.) 'Land of Hope and Glory' on 'Done in the Dark' is a recession-era call for collective resistance. 'My Son John', I suspect, is another version of the traditional anti-war song 'Mrs McGrath'. But don't quote me on that. Seeing Martin Carthy perform something similar was one of the high points of my gigging life.

If I could only take one of Lew Bear's three albums with me on a rocket ship out of the galaxy, I have to admit it would be the second, 'Down by the Riverside'. It's not necessarily any better than 'Ripples', but it was recorded, as the sleeve states, 'completely live, without overdubs or fx, by the rivers and in the forests and fields of Northamptonshire'. The opening track, 'Slow Lane', a hymn to unhurried, quiet living (that congenial vision again), has wild birds accompanying Lew's vocals, and rushing water for an intro and an outro. I would want that, in space, to remind me how much I loved the county I'd left behind.

Some of Lew's original compositions here appear on the first and third albums, demonstrating what I said before about how committed he is to refining his art.  And the choice of traditionals has clearly been made by an aesthete. 'Cancha Line Em Track' sounds like a very English version of an Alan Lomax field recording; and 'Wild Mountain Thyme' is restored to its original folk beauty after being transformed into a slice of psychedelic pop a few decades ago. Ken Nash has done 'In the Pines' live, or at least during his soundchecks, and everybody remembers the version by Nirvana from their MTV Unplugged. It remains one of the weirdest, greatest, most sinister songs I've ever heard. Strangely, an artist as gentle as Lew has no trouble making its strangeness convincing.

Perhaps there's something more twisted about the affable, extremely gifted Lew Bear than meets the eye.

Kenneth J Nash & Friends at the Pomfret Arms

The Kenneth J Nash & Friends concert tour, which I'm proud to be a part of, landed at the Pomfret Arms in Northampton on Sunday. Playing out in the barn at the back of the building on a windy afternoon, several musicians , one band and two poets performed to a modest but approving audience--which included my friend Martyna's daughter, who can be seen running in and out of shot on at least one of the videos filmed at the show. This tour is growing in style and confidence already, and we've only done two gigs.

I can't single out star performers because I genuinely liked them all. Star moments? Ken Nash performing 'Like A River', the chorus dreamed Coleridge-like by his mother Carol. Jay Jones' song 'White Feathers', which all of us were impressed by. Jono Bell's beautiful ukulele song for lost friends. Chris Browne's exceptional guitar playing. Curtis E. Johnson generally. Sheila Mosley's self-penned song in defence of the NHS (she said she doesn't write many, but if that's any measure of her talent she should). And Bridged, the three-piece rock band from Thrapston. I cadged a free ep from them at the end of their set; I'll write about it here when I have time.

The only poet on the bill this time, other than yours truly, was the Bard of Northampton, Nathan Jones. I invited Nathan to top the bill when I curated the spoken word stage at Woodfest this year because he's a very good performer. His poems mix light and shade in a way that's perfect for performance, and he never strains for the laughs, even though he's funny. The judges at the Picnic made a good choice when he was awarded the big blue cape of Bardage.

Next stop on the tour is the Carpenter's Arms in Irchester on Saturday night. In a month this fabulous band of travelling musicians and poets return to the Pomfret, and between there's a gig at Market Harborough. The line-up varies from time to time so even if you've seen it once, come out again and have another look. Some of the greatest talent locally will be playing for you.

Chris Browne BrowneProject

This is 'Silver Sun' by Chris Browne. He's from Rushden in Northamptonshire and usually he busks on the streets around the county (although lately he's played indoors a few times with the 'Kenneth J. Nash and Friends' travelling show).

Chris has an album out called 'Busker Rhyme', which you can get on iTunes (I think that's how you spell it). And next weekend he's auditioning for 'Britain's Got Talent'. I hope he does well. If there's any justice he should blow the competition out of the room--although he's far too nice a bloke to want to blow anybody anywhere.

Watch this for proof of what I'm saying. He's a hell of a guitar player. And he's singing this one at the audition.

SUN WILL SHINE AGAIN: DUBVOCALIZA AT SUMMER RETREAT

The highlight of the first day of this year's Summer Retreat in Northampton was a great set by Dubvocaliza, from London. Returning for another appearance after storming the festival in 2013, they took to the stage (newly situated in the woods) late in the afternoon and played for what seemed like only ten or fifteen minutes--although it was really much longer than that. When Barrington and the band are at the mic, the vibes are so good you forget time, and yourself as well.

I love Dubvocaliza, if that's not obvious already. So does everybody else who sees them (everybody I've spoken to anyway). It's those classic reggae sounds, the interplay between vocalists, and the sheer stagecraft; Barrington doesn't stand still for a moment, and between songs he talks to the crowd, offering pithy inspirational messages connected to the music. Dubvocaliza are all about positivity, keeping the faith in a world ravaged by 'pirates and vultures' (the title of one of their songs); as another one says, 'the sun will shine again'--and who doesn't need to hear that with war raging all around the globe this year?

The area around the stage rapidly filled with festival goers when Dubvocaliza started their set, and despite the drop in temperature and the lack of booze, many of the audience danced all the way through the show. Even I moved a little bit, and I am the worst, most self-conscious dancer on Earth. I couldn't help it; the reggae spirit moved me. Three hours later, back at home in poetry headquarters, I'm still wondering how it's possible to have so much entertainment without even paying an entrance fee.

This is a good band, my friends. Very, very good. Find them online or go to a show when they visit your town. You'll see I'm not wrong.