The Boozer Cruiser

Four years, 1,115,880 views and 54,944 subs later…

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 11:38:29 GMT

The Boozer Cruiser began with The Withy in 2020 – now it's one of five videos with more than 100,000 views

Four years ago today, The Boozer Cruiser became a thing in my life that the world could hear about via my YouTube channel . The first lockdown of 2020 helped focus my energies; I stopped thinking, “Poetry is a thing I’d quite like to do” and started thinking, “Poetry is a thing I’m doing.”

I write what I call “ditties” and “epics” – ditties explore an idea briefly, along with some fun with words and structure, and usually take a few weeks to write; epics tend to be stories of fictional or semi-fictional characters, drawn out in luxurious detail, usually with a strong structure to fall back on and with more sequences of less intense wordplay.

The Withy was the first epic. It’s based on Professor Mike Parker Pearson’s suggestion that the community who built Stonehenge were inspired by the thinking of a single person. I found that person a few centuries earlier on Orkney – a scared 10-year-old who saw the world differently than everyone else and wanted to help them see more than they did, only the village shaman had died before completing the boy’s training, and he was left to find a way of explaining the world he saw to people who were under pressure not to understand.

It came to live with the music of award-winning composer and producer Jacob Holm-Lupo. Our connecting was a fluke, to say the least. I’d interviewed him for Prog magazine and we’d kinda clicked, and became friends on Facebook. When I posted a request for any of my musical friends to provide music for me to use as inspiration, Jacob got in touch. The Withy was hard work because it was all new. We were amazed when it reached 10,000 views, then 50,000 and so on. Now it’s passed 157,000.

Jacob and i did a few projects together, each more ambitious and challenging, mainly epics but also the incredibly powerful anti-war ditty No Liars Were Harmed – inspired by the Ukraine invasion and, at one point, being views by thousands of people in Ukraine every day. That was when I realised I had the ability, but also the responsibility, to keep going, to tell stories for people who need them, and who can’t always tell their own. No Liars has 108,000 views for the studio version and 99,000 for the live version – so it’s the most successful piece in terms of making contact with the wider universe.

Our winter ghost story, The Ghost of Terror Bay , languished for a while there; I have no idea why, since it’s powered along by the ghostly (woops, nearly wrote ghastly) vocals of The Blackheart Orchestra’s Chrissy Mostyn. The big question at the end is: who’s really the ghost? And in recent weeks it’s being stacking up the views, reaching 86,000.

The live version of Vellum – we never got round to a studio version – is possibly my favourite ditty. It’s about caring about the art you create, then realising your work and your passion is being used against you for commercial reasons. In this case it’s a monk who creates medieval illuminated manuscripts, discovering that his pages are sold and collected by the rich, and are never seen by the ordinary folk he made them for. It’s done 66,000 views.

After some real struggles to make it land with an audience, the live version of our Halloween ditty The Scavengers Grow Brave finally worked out this year, reaching 101,000 views to date.

The single hardest piece of work I’ve saddled myself with has been The Gilded Silver Boar , an intense and elaborate Shakespearian epic about the person who betrayed Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and how he tries to justify his actions to himself. I also saddled myself with a stupidly elaborate video to go with it – a horrible experience, but once you have the vision for something you can’t just go, “Nah, too difficult.” And it worked: Boar is my single most popular video so far, with 159,000 views. It’s my first collaboration with Laurie Glass, who offered to do it after hearing the demo vocal I’d sent to his dad, Andy Glass, of Solstice.

I did Waves of Nightingales with Andy, a modest success but an incredible thing to do because we jammed it live at a Solstice show and, incredibly, came away with a version worth releasing. I also did a slightly arrogant update of Wilfrid Owen’s striking war poem Anthem For Doomed Youth with visceral guitar growls from Andy, another successful ditty with 60,000 views.

Laurie and I have more work on the way. I have more work than I have time to do it, and some projects have been lying around for two years or more as half-baked ideas whose time has not yet come. Even as a semi-retired boat-dwelling pub explorer, real life can get in the way, and I have calls on my time that keep me out of the creative zone (and the horrible virus that’s going round this year, meaning my voice isn’t working enough to record vocals).

But four years in, at time of writing the channel has 1,115,880 views and 54,944 subscribers. Not bad for a project I wasn’t sure I could make part of my life! Thanks to everyone who’s been part of it so far –– don’t expect to get away with not being dragged in again…

Send the reapers… send the ravens!

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 13:12:53 GMT

Halloween classic horror poem Ravens In A Churchyard At Dusk (live version)

It’s a piece that’s been haunting me for a few years. It seems to have a will of its own and it refuses to do what’s asked of it. Or at least it did …

I was inspired to write Ravens In A Churchyard At Dusk when I saw some ravens in a churchyard at dusk. Sounds obvious – but it was the vibe of the moment that was the inspiration. It was an overcast late autumn evening, very Halloweenesque, and the gloom and silence generated a heavy sense of foreboding.

There were four crows pecking at something on the ground as I approached. Three of them flapped off out of reach, waiting to return to what was left of a vole or something. But the fourth stayed brazenly where it was and glared at me. You know sometimes you wouldn’t be surprised if an animal just spoke to you in clear, expressive English? That crow was quite obviously ready to tell me: “If I had my way, I’d be eating you right now.”

I stepped past it and it kept a calculating eye on me as I moved on, while the other crows rejoined it. The phrase “the scavengers grow brave” was already in my mind, and the rest followed (most of it on a train a few weeks later after I’d been through the same churchyard).

Various versions of Ravens have plied their trade in various formats, most notably the comedic video I made with Kelly Phillips, featuring Hal Sinden as the narrator. It didn’t do particularly well and I’m still not sure why. Perhaps the humour aspect didn’t land?

This live version – from the Light Up Festival in Milton Keynes, England, in November 2022 – is the first time I performed it. Jacob Holm-Lupo ’s wonderful music (as always) really spurred me on to express, nay overdo, the horror aspect, which I think works well. There’s always the argument that no one can interpret a piece like the person who wrote it.

It probably also helped that, just a day or two before, I’d realised that there were some 20-second-plus musical interludes, and there wasn’t time to ask Jacob to reconfigure his music, so I’d better quickly write a few more lines. That’s where the “send the reapers - send the ravens!” stuff came from. Being worried about messing up the unfamiliar bits probably put me on the right kind of edge.

And then there’s that stupidly difficult line, one I’d never have written if I’d known I’d need to perform it: “With cackled caws a clack of claws carve up the carrion soul!” Although I’ll modestly say it’s an excellent line, and that once I’d come up with that on the train, the rest of the piece followed before I’d got to the pub.

You can’t do horror ravens without being linked to Edgar Allan Poe; knowing that, I decided to embrace it, along with all those lovely Hammer House of Horror movies and shameless melodrama.

I think it's behaving now. It’s meant to fun –– fun that makes you think, “Hmmmm” for just a moment.

The exploding talent of my collaborator Laurie Glass: “With each new instrument I learn, I’m introduced to a new style of music”

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 15:03:27 GMT

100k views special: meet the student composer exploring “bad” art to learn everything he can – which I hope isn’t the reason he was inspired to write music for The Gilded Silver Boar

The musical maestro behind The Gilded Silver Boar is Laurie Glass, who came to work with me through one of those accidents of art. I’ve previously worked with his dad, Andy Glass of the neo-prog band Solstice – which also features his mum, Jenny Newman. I sent Andy a rough version of the Boar poem, and he showed it to Laurie, who found inspiration enough to want to write music for it.

I’ve seen Laurie perform on several instruments, and his band, Ocular , are a massively entertaining, inventive jazz-prog-rock-whatever machine. To be honest I wasn’t sure if Boar lent itself to that kind of music, but one of the greatest things I’ve learned in the Boozer Cruiser project is to be open-hearted about collaboration.

Sticking to that instinct paid off. When Laurie sent me part of his opening movement, it moved me. I knew my work was in safe hands. What he went on to do with the rest of the piece was even more life and art-affirming for me. Remember: even when experience tells you to be cautious, try to remain open-hearted anyway. That’s the right thing to do, and if others treat you badly for it, that’s on them and not on you (although yeah, sometimes it hurts).

Laurie is a busy man – he’s currently moving to London to study music composition at a conservatory – so while I’d hoped to mark the 100,000th view of Boar with something more personal, a traditional Q&A is the best we could muster. You can also hear his Boar composition without the vocals below, which I very much recommend.

I hope you’ll enjoy finding out a bit more about him. You’ll definitely be hearing a lot more about him…

• MK: You’re a member of the talented Glass-Newman family and I assume you’ve been surrounded by music, right?

Laurie: I think my earliest memory of music is my third birthday party in Grafton Regis Village Hall, where my parents put together a CD of blues, folk, reggae and ska songs – a lot of which I still enjoy listening to today. Around the same time, my brother first picked up the guitar, inspired by the same blues and rock music we heard around the house. He loved to wear his cycling shades and devil hat while playing!

• When did you start to play?

I was five years old when my mum first encouraged me to have a go at violin. It’s now my first instrument; I’ve also started teaching violin in secondary and primary schools in Milton Keynes – and in London soon.

Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky was the first piece I played when I joined Milton Keynes Youth Orchestra aged 11. I really loved the dark and dissonant sounds that conveyed the Russian folklore behind the music. During my first year in Northampton County Youth Orchestra, I was hugely inspired by another Russian composition, The Iron Foundry by Mosolov – another programmatic piece (depicting a story, object or character) which is even more dissonant and chaotic sounding. It heavily features low brass as well as percussion: someone has to repeatedly hit an anvil with a hammer for several minutes!

• What’s the full list of instruments you play?

In chronological order: violin, trumpet/cornet, ukulele, voice (in my school choir), bass guitar, guitar, piano, flugelhorn, upright bass, mandolin, bouzouki, crumhorn (briefly), drums, viola, oud; and most recently the Irish low D whistle.

• Can you pick a favourite?

No! I’ve always said regarding my main three – violin, trumpet and bass – that I tend to go through phases of preferring one over the other. With each new instrument I learn, I’m introduced to a new style of music. With violin I began by playing folk music with my mum, then I went on to study classical with some of the best teachers in the country – Ruth Gapp, Jan Kaznowsk, Bojan Cicic, Micheal Rose and Simon Cartiledge.

Trumpet introduced me to jazz and coincided with me getting a CD player. I would listen over and over to Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Matthew Halsal, who are still some of my favourite trumpet players to this day. Bass introduced me to all sorts of different types of music including reggae, funk, rock and metal.

Learning a new instrument became a fun new way of coming at music from a new angle. My limiting factor is money and time – as is true for everyone – but if I could, I would try and learn every instrument.

• Is one more natural than another, or anything like that?

String instruments are very comfortable for me – but I think the violin is a very unnatural instrument. The posture, especially if done incorrectly, isn’t natural at all; that’s why so many players end up with injuries. But I feel by learning trumpet early on – which is different from the violin in every way – I have the advantage of understanding the breath control required for wind instruments. That meant picking up the low D whistle wasn’t as difficult as I’d expected.

I believe the instrument that feels most natural or comfortable to you will be the one you spend the most time with.

• How did you come to land on the musical path you’ve taken in recent years?

While studying GCSE and A-Level music at Sponne School, I realised my favourite part of the course was the composition component. After getting a computer with Logic Pro X on it, I began recording and writing original music whenever I had free time. It wasn’t until I started being encouraged to think about what I would do after my A-Levels that I realised it was possible to study for a composition degree.

I also really hated the idea of going to music college to just play one instrument for four years. Doing composition, I wouldn’t have to specialise in a single instrument.

My taste in music would already have been considered eclectic by most, but since I started thinking of myself as a composer, I started listening to music in a different way. I actively seek out new music and styles that the average listener would reject immediately – and in some cases wouldn’t even consider it to be music!

I’ve become increasingly interested in music that sounds ‘bad’ in order to see what I can learn by trying to understand what the artist/composer is trying to say.

• How would you describe what you do?

I would say I’m experimenting with sound. I’m so desperate to explore and learn as much as I can about what I don’t know or understand. Listening is one of the best ways of learning in all areas of life.

• What do you regard as artistic success?

Creating something that you’re happy with.

• Why (on Earth!) did you want to write for The Gilded Silver Boar ?

Outside of music, I’ve been interested in literature, poetry and history for a long time, so it was really up my street. I’d never written music to compliment spoken word before, so I was really excited to attempt the challenge. The opportunity was presented to me early on in my gap year, where I was on the hunt for as many new composition projects as I could find, in order to help me develop as a composer – as well as to add to my portfolio.

• Was there a particular moment you thought, ‘That speaks to me; I can do something with that’?

First I was sent the draft text of the poem, which I read and enjoyed, but when you sent me the recording of you reading it, the character was brought to life! I was inspired by how you conveyed the betrayer’s guilt in the narration of his own story. I feel the majority of my music starts with a feeling, which I try to express as sound.

• What were your main intentions with the piece?

I wanted to mirror what I felt was being conveyed by your words and performance. The sense of this untold historic betrayal gave birth to the opening melody, first heard on the harp. I wanted the focus to be on the words, but still provide enough of an atmosphere to leave an impact. That’s is why I made the decision to open and close that entire piece with that first melody – it establishes a mood or setting and leaves the listener with that atmosphere after they’ve listened… I hope!

• Your piece is built up of several movements. What was the most important thing to keep across all of them?

The thing I tried to maintain as much as possible was the instrumentation, but I also tried to make each movement unique, reflecting what I thought the narrator felt at each moment.

• How do you feel about it now it’s done?

I’m really pleased with the way it turned out and – and its increasingly high viewer count on Youtube is only validating those feelings! That was never my motivation, though. I was happiest at the point when the video was posted; it was so satisfying to see the final product being shared with the world.

The project was also special to me as it’s the first piece I uploaded to my personal Spotify account. Hearing the music without the vocals is a different experience that I hope people enjoy as well – but to me the music is intended to accompany the words.

• Any high points you’d like people to listen out for?

There are a few – one is at the start of the third movement where a bouncing violin bow emulates the galloping of horses and increases the tension of the battle scene being described. Another is in the fifth movement, where the death of Richard III is represented by a monotonously repeated harp note, mimicking a funeral bell.

• What’s next for you?

I’m starting my four-year composition BMus at Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music and Dance. I’m super excited to be in such an inspiring place, being surrounded by like-minded people and having access to the highest standard of composition teaching.

I’m playing in several very different bands and working on lots of very different composition projects, so expect to see nothing but more music coming from me. I would love to work on another of your pieces too!

• You can follow Laurie’s progress via Instagram and Spotify .

I didn’t actually see him but I sensed him: a dark, doubtful character desperate for me to understand him. I always see these people as a photographic negative

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 11:22:47 GMT

An intended quick visit to 1485 left me trapped there for 13 months – but I now know it was worth it

The Ashby de la Zouch Canal is, for the most part, a very beautiful part of the world. The first five miles after you’ve navigated the steep east turn off the Coventry Canal is a bit flat, although not without its charm. Things soon get much, much better.

I wasn’t going to take the turn, but a sudden inspiration hit me – something to do with Richard III was somewhere along there, and it might be interesting. I’m not sure I even remembered it was the site of his death until I Googled later on in the day.

Richard was 14th and last Plantagenet king of England, bringing his house’s 331 years of rule to an end during the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485. He’d ruled for 26 months as the Wars of the Roses continued, and he was the last English monarch to die in battle.

Most people know a little about the controversy that followed, especially once William Shakespeare got involved. Richard is accused of many things, although there’s almost no evidence for any of it. It’s considered more and more likely he was the victim of medieval spin-doctoring, and he was a far more successful and popular king than the winners who wrote history have recorded.

That’s the ‘what,’ ‘where’ and ‘why’ – now we come to the ‘who’ – which led to the demanding and exhausting creation of The Gilded Silver Boar …

The area of the canal known as Duck Bend just outside Stoke Golding is right beside the battlefield; had the land contours been different, it might have cut right through it. It’s difficult to imagine the land without the canal, which has itself been there since the 1790s; but that’s still two centuries after the fight took place.

For many years experts felt that folk memory, which placed the battle there, was wrong. By the time it turned out to be true, the visitor centre had already been built in the wrong place. Since the field is private land, only a certain amount of archaeology has been done there – but in 2009, when the Bosworth Boar was found, and more evidence of battle followed, it’s now certain that the battle took place near Duck Bend, overlooked by Stoke Golding to the south and Dadlington to the north-east.

The Dog & Hedgehog Inn was the perfect place to drink ’n’ think (one of my greatest pleasures) – from there I could look down on where the action took place 538 years ago, and consider the situation as the pints came and went. As Meat Loaf has observed, “Some days it don’t come easy / and some days it don’t come hard / some days it don’t come at all and these are the days that never end.” It’s not that desperate, but I find it to be true. I had to wait for inspiration; but in the beautiful wild lands and friendly pubs of these two villages, there was nothing else making demands on my time.

It eventually happened one overcast afternoon (which was unusual – the weather was mainly great during my stay on the Ashby). I didn’t actually see him, per se; but I sensed him: a dark, doubtful character standing not far into the field on the other side of the canal, desperate for me to understand him. I’m comfortable with people thinking that’s weird; I don’t care. I enjoy it! I’m happy if it’s a real proper ghost and I’m happy if I invented the whole thing myself.

(Interestingly, when I see these people I’m going to write about – or for – I always see them in something of a photographic negative style; there’s something inverted about their appearance.)

While he explained himself to me in a series of wordless visions, the one thing I became concerned about was how I could work out his meaning from so far away – about 400 metres, I think. How could I read his expression, and see the look in his eyes? That was ruining the moment for me.

A couple of days later I cruised along to the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre , about 3km from the battlefield itself. I can’t recommend the place enough: inspiring, thought-provoking, beautifully presented for people of all ages, and staffed by bright, cheery, welcoming people. More then worth a visit – and your ticket lasts a year.

As I was leaving I saw the Bosworth Boar itself… and I have to admit I was underwhelmed. It’s tiny – 29mm long – and I totally understand why it was difficult to present it any more dynamically. I took a quick snap of it, just to log my presence, then went on to spend a silly amount of money in the tourist shop, becuase it was a few days before my birthday so I deserved it.

It was only later that I thought: the badge is broken . My first reaction was to imagine an embarrassed archeologist, accidentally smashing it as it was recovered, and hiding the foreleg section from their colleagues, carrying the shame and guilt to this very day. That made me laugh! Then I thought… why is it broken? And does it have any connection to how the character in the field was able to transmit his meaning to me?

And that’s where it really began to take form. The guy in the field carried the guilt and embarrassment I’d imagined for the archeologist. He needed to explain himself and get rid of the weight he’d carried. And he could communicate with me because he’d used some other form of signalling than close-up conversation… and that kind of long-distance signalling was something to do with why the badge was broken.

With all that loaded into the “story engine” at the back of my mind, the conscious part of me could take a break – and I did, enjoying a wonderful cruise to the top end of the Ashby, enjoying the amazing welcome at the Rising Sun at Shackerstone, then heading back to Duck Bend for a second visit.

I’m an early riser – I like to get whatever work I have done and dusted so I can have a little snooze then take the second part of the day to myself and whatever I’m thinking about. I had no work that summer, so I was able to take advantage of some stunning dawn wanderings. I happened to meet the farmer who owns the actual battlefield, on the occasion of his regular cow inoculation day, which he wasn’t looking forward to because the cows knew what was going on and were nervous. That image of the field being full of anxiety gave me an insight into the morning of the battle.

I can feel it as if I’m about to be sick… it’s coming out, soon … Later that day I took myself back to the Dog & Hedgehog and waited. Sure enough, on another overcast evening, He appeared out there down the hill. Within about two hours almost every word of his story was stored in my phone. And it was damn good too – like a lot of people admit to feeling, I’m not sure I wrote it; I may have just been its conductor. But I don’t care because it was amazing to be part of.

From there, it took a long time to refine the story. Long after I’d left the Ashby and my friends at the Lime Kilns Inn near Burbage behind (now under new managament), and long after the English midlands were behind me, I was still engaged in polishing and tidying the most tiny elements. It took 13 months to bring it to YouTube, although much of that time was trying to make my vision for the video into reality with badly-designed software that left me more than frustrated for weeks on end.

The thing is, that guy stayed with me all those months… I suppose in some way since I’d created him or at least given him a voice, he was my responsibility until I delivered. As a result it was not an easy winter: heavy rain and high winds kept me a prisoner on the boat for much of the season, and being alone with his sense of guilt and doubt – while not being aware of it – added to the negativity.

I do suffer from a bit of seasonal affective disorder, but it’s almost like I was dealing with two dozes. I’m glad to say I don’t remember much of that time, except for the family welcome at the Plough in Galgate. Without those guys, I’m not kidding, the winter might have been literally intolerable.

Things started to lighten after I’d tracked a rough demo of the vocal, and sent it to me old mate Andy Glass (of the eminent prog band Solstice) to see what he thought. He played it to his son, Laurie, who expressed an interest in writing a soundtrack for the piece. Once I’d heard his first four-minute demo, it was like the sun came out. Not only was I beginning to get the spin doctor out of my head – I was beginning to feel it would be an artistically satisfying experience. On top of that, I was now sharing the weight of two consciences, which made the carrying (and carrying on) much easier.

Laurie Glass ’ astounding soundtrack is the icing on this 15th-century cake. I feel he’s captured an energy both of the era and of the character; and somehow – because we didn’t discuss it – he also captured the playfulness I wanted to illustrate in making a very big story seem like a very small one, and sometimes vice-versa.

I’m glad The Gilded Silver Boar is done, and I’m glad I did it. But it wasn’t easy living with the character’s guilt for over a year. I could really have done without that; it affected my real life in ways I’ll never understand, but sometimes sense. And anyway, we never really discover if he’s genuinely sorry over what he did, or whether he just wants to recruit us for another of his dodgy doctorings.

And I’m not joking when I say that if the only good thing that’s come out of it is Laurie’s evocative composition, then it was all worth it. As a bonus, though, more than that has come out of it – as the future will tell…

I’d like to note two additional elements that make me proud… one, that while Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter – five pairs of syllables with the second of each pair carrying emphasis – I added an eleventh syllable at the end of each line in a sort of triple form with the final pair (sometimes known as a femenine ending), just so my guy was one better than Shakespeare… who he may be referring to in his last line of speech: While history will never know my name / and those who follow me will take the blame .

And two, that while no one has ever been able to offer a convincing explanation as to why the Dog & Hedgehog Inn was named such, I can: Henry VII, who won the battle, took a hound as his emblem, while Richard took (of course) a boar. Richard was in his time referred to by enemies as “hedgehog,” being a diminutive of boar; so it’s no big leap to consider calling Henry a “dog” instead of a hound. I propose, then, that the inn was named for all the working people who had to get on with their lives while games of thrones rolled around them, left a giant mess, and rolled away again for ever.

Sadly the inn is now closed, so Bill, the retired owner, will never hear of my rather clever theory. I don’t think he’d have liked it anyway!

The Gilded Silver Boar: I betrayed Richard III

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 16:24:47 GMT

A 13-month adventure in 1485…

A character in crisis

A kingdom in conflict

A clue in the colours

A crowned head condemned

On August 22, 1485, King Richard III of England’s death brought an end to the Battle of Bosworth Field and ushered in the era of the Tudor monarchy. Almost immediately a campaign of misinformation was launched against Richard’s legacy. But who was behind it? And does Bosworth Boar, a small silver-gilt badge found on the field in 2009, have any connection to what happened?

Inspired by and devised on location at Bosworth Field, Stoke Golding and Dadlington

With thanks to Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre; the Dog & Hedgehog Inn; Andy Glass; Murray Foote

Chapter titles…

There’s Many a Gentle Person Made a Jack

And Seem a Saint, When Most I Play the Devil

Thou Cams’t on Earth to Make the Earth My Hell

Bloody Thou Art… Bloody Will Be Thy End

Kings it Makes Gods ~ and Weaker Creatures Kings

Conscience is But a Word that Cowards Use

And Every Tale Condemns Me for a Villain

Anthem For Doomed Youth 2023

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 19:36:05 GMT

After seven years, I've fulfilled my ambition of rewriting a powerful war poem for the 21st century

Wilfred Owen died on November 4, 1919, at the age of 25. He was among the last of 9.7 million military personnel who lost their lives during World War I – a conflict that, in many ways, is still being fought.

Owen’s war poetry was different from the work of his contemporaries. He raged against the wrongs he saw all around him, rather than glorifying the deaths of nearly 20 million people in total. One of his poems, the short-sharp-shock that is Anthem For Doomed Youth , was written in 2017; it was inspired by the the contrast between village church services for fallen soldiers and the way in which most of them died.

I’ve always found it a striking piece of work – not least because he plays with the “rules” of sonnet construction, preferring to focus on how the poem feels rather than how it’s arranged. The great Sean Bean gives a great reading of it here:

When Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016, I found myself thinking of Owen’s Anthem and its theme of the world being left to younger generations. I don’t think any modern concern is more important than that. It’s just horrifying to feel that we live on a planet that values money more than its children. (Even though that’s not entirely the case, of course.)

I began playing about with Anthem , with the vague aim of updating its references. But I could never push it the point where I felt it was worthy of taking Owen’s title in vain. The first version was entirely about Trump and the people who believe his approach to life is the right one. By 2018 it included other global characters as Trumpism encouraged a run on bloodthirsty greed. By 2020, of course, there entered the suggestion that we were living in more than one kind of epidemic.

I don’t know how many versions I’ve done (I’ve only kept a few) but about a week ago, inspiration suddenly struck, and within about 20 minutes I was reading back what I felt the poem should always have been. That inspiration came in the form of Kelly Phillips, a very dear friend who’s going to become a mum in February. I don’t have children, but over the past few months Kelly has been wonderfully honest and open with me about the process of pregnancy – and, importantly, how she feels about the future.

I don’t think it was anything specific; actually I think I just got to the point where I’d absorbed enough (and understood some of it) to visualise the character of someone speaking like Owen would.

As a stubborn sort of a person, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two years trying to avoid being angry at the way things seem to be going. There’s another powerful poem underway that’s been significantly held up by my avoidance of the subject matter - sorry, Matt, I’m on it again!

So here’s Anthem For Doomed Youth 2023 – featuring the heartbeat of Kelly's daughter Ava, who’s due to arrive in February 2024, with music and production by my incredible friend Andy Glass of Solstice.

The current form of society seems to have taken “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” to a brutal extreme, something like “make other people victims to avoid being one yourself.” Too many people are going along with it because it’s easy, and they’ve suspected for a long time that they’re wrong, and they deserve anger. Because they’re making victims of their children, and when you’re deeply hurt when you’re very young, it’s incredibly difficult to forgive those who caused the pain. I know society desperately, urgently needs to change, but that seems like a very tragic and victimising way for it to go.

Maybe a bit of anger now will save us all some serious rage later. Maybe Wilfred Owen would have expanded on that theme if he hadn’t become a victim of people who victimised other people in order to survive a cruel, twisted culture of war.

RoboPub? Happy or not, you’re drinking with me…

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 10:15:33 GMT

A device that serves pints faster at big events is a useful idea. But I bet you someone, somewhere is hoping it could replace bar staff down the local

A lot of businesses use the term “innovation” to avoid innovating – the same kind of companies which try to earn Investors In People Awards so they can treat staff like shit. So the revelation of an automated pint serving machine had me rolling my “here we go again” eyes.

EBar, the company producing the Automated Dispense Kiosk , have dipped deeply and cheerfully into the corporate jargon box (including describing their product as an individual like iPhone, so I won’t.) The ADK*, it’s claimed, has a delivery rate of 200 pints per hour using precision high-pressure filling, with customers able to order, pay for and receive two pints in 30 seconds. “Consumers benefit from an improved event experience,” the creators say, including “shorter waiting times… and novel technology,” while venue operators “benefit from increased sales, reduced costs and high yields.”

(*Here’s a missed chance to exploit another corporate passion: that of inventing an acronym. Instead of Automated Dispense Kiosk (ADK) why not Pint Innovational Serving Solution?)

EBar are very clear about the target market, as the blurb hints. Boss Nick Beeson tells the Guardian he’d identified a “fundamental shortage of people who are skilled at pouring pints,” adding: “We spoke to a couple of the biggest venues and one of them thought they were missing 30 to 40% of their potential sales because they don’t have the staff to meet demand.”

He’s talking about large-scale events like music festivals, sports events and technology shows – places where people aren’t looking for the ideal pub experience. (Have you ever been at one of those kid-on “Queen Vic” places at the corner of a conference centre during a big event? It’s never anything other than pathetic.) They could do well in that environment – and indeed seem to be starting to do just that.

But… BUT. We all know there are some business leaders out there who, for a very long time, have confused management with accountancy. Some of those are high up in the pub industry; very probably working with the kind of breweries which have come to regard themselves as property portfolio owners and not hospitality providers.

The backlash against self-checkouts in supermarkets – it's costing you money, shareholders! – is evidence that people still like to interact with people. Some shop chains have started to reopen manual checkouts for that very reason. It's happened before: countless radio station bosses have hailed full automation as a better deal for music listeners and advertisers alike, so the only human voices between songs are those trying to sell something. The strategy is almost always abandoned because of course it doesn't work.

Bar staff make the pub. In my recent cruises I’ve discovered a number of wonderful 17th-century buildings adorned with ancient decor and too many enticing ales on offer… only for the whole experience to be ruined by staff who – for any number of reasons – detract rather than add to the visit. I begin thinking I’d be better off grabbing a few cans from the village shop and going back to the boat, saving several tenners and my happy mindset at the same time. I’m not the only one, am I? Nick Beeson gets it – note his comment about “people who are skilled at pouring pints.” while there are many under-appreciated talents associated with making sure every drink that’s poured is the best it can be, there’s much more to a bartender’s role than looking after the liquids.

So, while the EBar is a great idea for events when you just want a drink while focusing on other entertainments – and that’s the market it’s aimed at – trust me: someone, somewhere is thinking (unwittingly or otherwise) how to make your trip to the pub cheaper and easier for them, and less worthwhile for you. Some people in the industry actually want pubs to close. Watch out for a bright new branded device appearing in the corner of the local… it’s not a new quiz machine, it’s a very naughty box.

And I’m not even going to consider the concept of later versions of the EBar being fitted with AI bartender software OH FUCK NO I’M CONSIDERING IT

Mellow alert! Summer cruise video for Peter Hemsley's prog-jazz track Breath

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 14:39:20 GMT

I've tried to avoid making it all about the narrowboat… but this is different

One thing I’m keen to avoid is making it all about the narrowboat. There are countless people out there writing blogs and publishing vlogs about the act of day-to-day life is a liveaboard. And to be really honest, it’s not massively interesting to me. Life’s about people, not the method you use to meet them.

But… there is, of course, something intriguing about life on the cut. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone there myself, would I? So when the moment feels right I can live with that. And this moment is most certainly right, because it keeps happening.

I’m not one of those folk who go racing down the canals, desperate to chalk up miles and tick off destinations, moving too fast to stop and enjoy the fruits of a walking-pace lifestyle. And despite my enjoyment of loud music, I try not to inflict my tastes on those I pass. The music of Solstice drummer Pete Hemsley, though, is worth separate consideration. It seems to match the vibe of a day’s cruising so perfectly that I decided to try matching some canal video with one of his tracks, Breath . This is the result:

Now Is Not The Time

Fri, 05 May 2023 13:46:19 GMT

The story of B. Wildered, who wanted to see his king…

I f you live in the UK, you’ll be used to the nearly-outgoing government using the phrase “Now is not the time.” For example, “Now is not the time to reward NHS staff with a pay rise after they saved us all during the pandemic” … “Now is not the time to feed our children” … “Now is not the time to stop the fuel companies profiteering” … “Now is not the time to govern for the people who elected us (even though we’re hoping they’ll do it again).”

Now was not the time to deal with whatever was going through the mind of a man who, a couple of days ago, wandered up to the front of Buckingham Palace amid preparations for the coronation weekend. Allegedly armed, he was soon being walked backwards into a police van, to be detained under the Mental Health Act.

I watched the news reportage on a muted TV in a pub, wondering why the cops were making him walk backward. Was it to protect his identity? Was it to hide a wound or something else on his face? Or even… when you leave the royal court, you’re supposed to walk backwards a few steps so as to show honour to the monarch in his or her presence. Had he asked to do that in a mark of respect?

I’ll probably never know. But I was certain I was watching a very bewildered person in some kind of trauma. And I wondered what his story might be – why he felt it had been important to act.

And this is what I came up with at the bar:

I took my s-word to the palace and asked to see my king

The officer politely said, “You can’t - but what’s that thing?”

I told him: “It’s a weapon - the sharpest I could find

A word that must be spoke aloud to detonate a mind”

And as they walked me backward to the waiting prison van

A cop said “Spike your s-word - it’ll blow apart The Plan.”

This Is A War / Love Versus Fear / We Must Win

Thu, 04 May 2023 12:07:21 GMT

The live version of war poem No Liars Were Harmed, shot 12 minutes into my poetry performance career...

More than a year after having written and released No Liars Were Harmed , I don’t remember much about the process. I never really do anyway. But the poem remains special because of several very clear and powerful moments as it came together.

Firstly, the title that led to the cruel twisted mantra that leads the story: “No liars were harmed in the suppression of this truth / No liars were harmed in the creation of this illustion.” It fell out of my mind as I was walking home from the pub one night, although I don’t remember which pub.

Next, tying it together with the experience of watching a violent incident take place outside a different pub, and becoming involved to the extent of trying to calm a young woman who’d just been through an experience no one would volunteer for. That’s where the opening sequence comes from.

Next, realising the story was about war, or at least my understanding of it as the Ukraine invasion began; and the notion that violence doesn’t have to be physical.

Next, an increasing belief that in the absence of religion, profitmakers will create fake religions to pander to a sense of absence in people’s lives, and convert faith and loyalty to fear and anger. (Some people have argued over the years that humanity invented God through a need to have faith in something – I’d always thought that was kinda nonsense until I began thinking that what’s going on around us is evidence of that in a neo-liberalist fashion.)

Next, realising it needed an angry voice, and therefore an angry character, and realising it was someone like Trump, and coming up with the “I know all about fair - I’m a billionaire” sequence in about 12 minutes in a sunlit field miles from any other human.

Next, Jacob Holm-Lupo’s wonderful composition work once I sent him the vocal performance; and then his equally wonderful production work in assembling everything – especially Kelly Phillips’ haunting imprisoned-angel vocal, which was never part of the plan and had to be scraped from a video outtake. (Listening to a work in progress when it first comes back with Jacob’s music remains my very favourite part of this entire malarkey!)

Next, working on the video in another lonely field with Kelly, as we both realised what we were doing was something notably outside standard experience, and had that certain something. Part of the idea behind the Boozer Cruiser project is to remain a bit haphazard; making videos in fields with only a very vague concept is exactly what I’m after, and I love the way it hints at something a lot bigger than it actually is, and in doing becomes bigger than it is – because that’s how we all live, or should anyway.

Next, the explosion of interest when we launched the completed piece in April 2022, quickly followed by my shock and bewilderment that (at one point) over half the views were coming from Ukraine –– precisely the people I’d been writing for and about. That meant I was a real proper artist, and I spent about two week lost and confused. Be careful what you wish for…

And then, finally, performing No Liars on stage for the first time, as seen in the video below. I’ve done live TV and live radio, and I’ve played hundreds of shows as a drummer, so I wasn’t nervous about that aspect. I should have been nervous of being on stage, alone, in front of an audience who had no idea who I was (or was trying to be) – an audience who’d come for live prog music and were probably wondering why they had to put up with poetry! I simply was not scared in any way, because I was there to present those poems, which exist through me rather than by me. I was there to do what I believe I’m here to do, and I believed in that, and the belief made the whole thing easy.

(So easy that I’m afraid I don’t remember much of it. You’d think a debut performance would be embedded deep, and I can certainly talk about facts around it, but I don’t remember how I felt. I suspect it’s the same way I feel when the lines of poetry start appearing – I’m not really there; I’m just channelling something else, and although I have an idea what it is, I ironically don’t have the words to describe it.)

I’ve never been a big fan of reading, watching or listening to anything I’ve done. But when the video from the show was sent to me I had to take a glance in the hope of learning something. What I learned was, hey, I’m good at this! Or at least good at believing in the material to make the rest of it not worth worrying about. And I’m a massive worrier (of which more another time).

Winter can be difficult on a narrowboat. It begins to feel like you spend the entire season keeping yourself warm and safe, and when you’re not acting on that mission you’re thinking about it. It’s exhausting if your mind works the way mine does. Assembling the No Liars live video was – and I’m not exaggerating – just about the only thing that kept me going as the spring struggled to loosen winter’s grip on the first quarter of this year.

And here is the result. Don’t worry that I forgot to start before the music playback begins. I’m not worried about it! Don’t worry that I got my breathing wrong in the angry section. It doesn’t worry me! Just let it do what it’s meant to do, and see if you think it has as much impact, and art, and truth, about it as I do.

Then, finally, have a think about what the message might be. I’m pretty sure it’ll mean something important to you too.

The making of Vellum (or what I know of it)

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 15:23:47 GMT

The background to a story of art versus business

Vellum is the result of treating and preparing calf skin so it can be used as a paper-like medium. It was used by medieval monks to create wonderful works like the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels – each page took days, weeks or months as the scribe mixed his own inks, laid out a design using pinpricks and score lines, then carefully applied shapes and colours using handmade from goose or swan feathers. Such was the impact of their work that many of the design philosophies they refined are still used today. (When I was hating a shift as a newspaper page designer, I thought back to those monks who could only dream of the speed and accuracy I could apply with just a mouse and a screen.)

The production of vellum itself took weeks or months. Time was different then. I’ve always wanted to own a vellum page but I struggle with the knowledge it’s a long-dead animal. Nevertheless, the concept of vellum means a lot to me.

During the pandemic, visiting pubs was an extremely disappointing experience. You couldn’t stand at the bar, you couldn’t meet people, you couldn’t really do anything except sit and drink, and that was never the point of pubs. So I did a deal with myself – instead of effectively wasting time and money by sitting alone and drinking, if I went to a pub I had to take the laptop and write something.

One night I scrolled through the phone, looking for inspiration, and I found the note: “Write something called Vellum .” That was it. That was all. Somehow or other, five pints later, I was heading back to the boat with the poem more or less written – very little of it has changed since that night. I don’t remember writing it; I’m not even sure which pub I was in or where I was moored. It was almost like I played the role of the paper-like medium and someone else wrote on me…

The storyline will be familiar to anyone who’s ever believed in anything, only to discover your belief has been used to fit other people’s agendas, leaving you angry, hurt and confused over how to continue your relationship with the thing you believe in. Like the monk, it’s primarily about artists and the way business corrupts the art. (“If you’ve never been ripped off, you’ve never been in the music business,” as a dear friend of mine often puts it.)

I have my own opinion on what the monk does once he’s discovered his works of art are being “collected, traded, sold…” but you’re fully entitled to your own!

Vellum appears in my anthology Signal Violet, on sale now in print and ebook versions. While you can purchase it via many online outlets, almost all of them take a bigger cut than they give me from the price. If you buy via Lulu I get the relatively fairest cut. Thank you!

Vellum - A story of art versus business

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 15:11:24 GMT

What you made for love… they sold for profit

Inspired by the experiences of myself and many, many others, Vellum recounts the story of a medieval monk who’s spent years creating beautiful illuminated manuscripts – only to discover that their value is being diverted to suit other peoples’ agendas. What does he do about it? What would you do if it happened to you? What DID you do when it happened to you?

This is my debut performance of Vellum , at the Light Up Festival in Milton Keynes, England, in November. Music once again by my brother in prog-poetry, Jacob Holm Lupo. Photography by Mark Jepson and Adam Dokhan. Produced by Andy Glass.

Vellum appears in my anthology Signal Violet , on sale now in print and ebook versions. While you can purchase it via many online outlets, almost all of them take a bigger cut than they give me from the price. If you buy via Lulu I get the relatively fairest cut. Thank you!

On Hearing Vaughn Williams’ Fantasia in Gloucester Cathedral

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 06:22:25 GMT

I lost this jaw-dropping piece of music many years ago.. I just found it again.

Ever had that thing where you rediscover a piece of music you’d lost long ago, and it’s like reuniting with an old friend? In 1999 I remember being completely torn to bits by the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. I just found it again this morning (December 31).

Inspired by a psalm written by Tallis in 1567, Vaughn Williams wrote the 17-minute piece, specifically for the acoustics of Gloucester Cathedral. He physically arranged the musicians to make the most of the church acoustics for its premiere in 1910. Nearly eight decades later the BBC orchestra – conducted by Andrew Davis – recreated the premiere as accurately as possible. (I remember something about the specific instructions having gone missing before being rediscovered, which made the performance possible, but I might have made that up in my own retelling).

Anyway, relationships, time, house moves and focuses all change, and I lost the overplayed CD version that had come with BBC Music Magazine . I also lost track of the details of the performance, and despite looking for it over the years, couldn’t define it accurately enough to find it among the many other versions Fantasia – one of the most popular English compositions of the 20th century.

When I found the clip on YouTube around 5am today, it all came flooding back. The magic and majesty, of both the music and the setting, plus the intent in staging the performance in the first place. It’s always been a magnificent piece, but to imagine you’re hearing it the way Vaughn Williams himself did, nearly 113 years ago… Well, it’s inspiring, isn’t it?

I wrote this wee poem in about 20 minutes, based on the inspiration of memories of what I'd heard first time, and also perhaps on my understanding of what it’s come to mean to me. Ultimately, I suppose, it doesn’t matter too much; but come on, when a little magic from (just about) half your lifetime ago dances back in, why not indulge the moment?

Our eyes stayed closed and absent

Blank faces to the roof

Till hands, with gentle motion

Called strings to speak the truth…

And with the calmest tremor

Tallis spoke anew:

A tale that last was woven

A hundred years ago

The cathedral filled with colour!

Cascading echoes shone!

Fantasia blazed among us all ~

Ancient notes reborn

And spirits woke from slumber

Beneath the storied floor

Roused by marvellous melody

Remembered from before

Just seventeen, the minutes were

Before it had to end;

Yet never was a saddening shadow

E’er so dark again.

Give it a listen – I dares ya.

Visit Sandøya with Jacob Holm-Lupo

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 18:47:03 GMT

My genius friend releases an album inspired by the soundscape of his island home

I live on water, while Jacob Holm-Lupo lives near it. There’s probably something in the fact that both of us decided to drop out of mainstream society in order to better focus on our artistic pursuits. There’s definitely something in the notion of water being inspiration.

For his first-ever totally solo album, released under his own name, Jacob has created a soundscape of his home, the island of Sandøya in Norway. It’s entitled Entire of Itself and it’s out now – you can have a listen below to the trailer and the full version, and you can buy it here .

I find everything Jacob does to be inspiring; I find something about movement, a direction and a journey, in everything he does. I’m still developing my own thoughts on the new music, but in the meantime here are some of his own thoughts…

“I have no idea what kind of appeal it will have to listeners, if any. It's totally uncharted territory for me, but that's what makes it worth it. This is a sonic document of the island where I live. Field recordings, found sounds, DIY instruments made of things I’ve found here, some of these sounds severely processed, some not, and a sprinkling of guitar as well. A harp made of fish line strung across a buck's antlers. Flutes made from leftover pipes from construction. Percussion made from rocks, wood and corrugated steel. Wind, waves, birds, boats. Everything that makes sound on an island.

“It’s a continous piece of music/sound, but I have tried to make it somewhat episodal. Different sections deal with different events and places on the island. Oriental-sounding plucking denotes the corner of the island where I live – relatively remote from the rest of the island, so the locals call it ‘China.’ A recording of daily kitchen activities is overlaid with Ashra-inspired kraut guitar, because I like to listen to krautrock while working in the kitchen. A storm accompanies fragments of a dramatic story from the war. Stuff like that.”

The rest is up to you – get it into your mind!

Introducing Signal Violet - a book 12 millennia in the making

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 15:20:08 GMT

In 2017 I decided to abandon my life in Glasgow, Scotland, and move onto a narrowboat on the canals of England and Wales. It took me two years to escape the shackles of a media career and city life. Those years were followed by a long period of building a new relationship with the world around me.

This anthology of poems and short stories – several of which have already appeared on the Boozer Cruiser YouTube channel – were written during that period, and reflect the flashpast ideas, recurring suspicions and offset observations that led to the creation of The Boozer Cruiser, my current art project. The title Signal Violet is inspired by my narrowboat home.

I'm the Scottish author of 17 previous books, three of which are in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Permanent Collection. I'm a former newspaper journalist, TV and radio presenter, band manager and musician, and I still dabble with those roles in a semi-retired manner. My current location is unknown, but probably a pub.

Signal Violet is available via a number of online outlets, but when you buy from the links below receive a larger cut of the price you pay:

Print book edition £10 | Ebook edition £5

Book contents

Where Footsteps Slow

Signal Violet

The Dead Winters I: The Winter of Oak

Call Centre Killing Machine

The Ghost of Terror Bay – watch video

The Govan Elvis Begins

The Dead Winters II: The Winter of Birch

Ever On & On – watch video

No Liars Were Harmed – watch video

Can’t Get Back In - watch video

The Dead Winters III: The Winter of Flint

Last Night on Earth

Shop Girl

Evening Snow in Mercia

A Witch at Dusk – read story

Echo Echo – watch video

The Dead Winters IV: The Winter of Dust

Vellum

The Withy – watch video

Ravens in a Churchyard at Dusk – watch video

Common Time

The Govan Elvis Ends - read story

Waves of Nightingales – watch live performance

Just the Dust

Notes (Should you be interested)

Waves of Nightingales - a Solstice collaboration

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 19:44:41 GMT

Performed live at the Light Up Festival, featuring Andy Glass of Solstice

On November 6 I delivered my first Boozer Cruiser performance at the Light Up Festival in Milton Keynes. It couldn’t have gone better, thanks to the support of Andy Glass, leader of headline act Solstice, and the genuine feeling of community among the artists and audience.

Trying to maximise the occasion, I’d begged Andy for a scrap off his table in the form of a piece of music I might write for. He provided me with a beautiful composition on the exotic bulbul tarang (a kind of hurdy-gurdy kind of thing – I don’t know; I call it a psychedelic typewriter).

It was called Waves of Nightingales… a great title for a Solstice vibe, but less so for my stuff, I thought. But I’d been heavily considering the concept of elegance at the time. I asked Robert Fripp (I sometimes get to) for his thoughts and he said elegance was a signal of “inner grace;” and as I considered that, I became certain it would be more elegant to pursue Andy’s nightingales vibe than come up with my own.

One day, while cruising on the Grand Union Canal during the height of summer, I overheard someone talking about the “lions of longing.” What on earth, I wondered, were the “lions of longing?” Turned it the overheard conversation had been about the lions of Longleat Zoo… but that’s how this poetry malarkey works, and I was off! I had soft, gentle nightingales and ferocious, fighting lions; and I had the new-wave hippie vibe of Solstice at the back of my mind. With two new George RR Tolkien TV shows being heavily discussed (I watched neither) the idea of a general dismissing his soldiers after the final battle came into my mind.

As he instructs his faithful men to abandon their weapons and look for the places their lives would have taken them if they’d never had to fight, it became an analysis of how we sometimes forget that parts of our lives are means of getting to another point, rather than ends within themselves – it can be failure to stay somewhere too long, and yet our search for security and comfort means we might rather keep fighting the battles we know than accept the battles are over, and to remember why we’d started fighting in the first place.

Hence, bears wolves and lions – then, finally, nightingales carrying us gently to wherever we were meant to be.

A studio version will follow at some point, but the live version – performed without Andy having heard the construction I’d settled on, which made it even more fun – is pretty sweet. I can’t thank him enough for his support over the past two years, and I hope for a few most scraps off his table if and when they become available.

The Scavengers awake for Halloween!

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 19:41:53 GMT

Melodrama fun is tribute to Edgar Allan Poe and Hammer movies

This one’s been rattling round my mind since it really happened to me a few years ago – except I didn’t die. I was wandering through a churchyard at dusk and three crows were pecking at something on the path ahead of me. Two of them flew off as I approached, but the last fixed me with a clearly evil stare that said, “You have got in my way. I would kill you right now if I could.” And so the idea formed… what if it really could kill me?

It was a slow but fun development as I channelled Edgar Allan Poe and a whole world of long-part melodrama. My old chum Hal SInden (of the noble Sinden acting dynasty) agreed to perform the vocal with suitable drama, leading Jacob Holm-Lupo to compose some very dramatic music that I loved on first listen. Finally, Kelly Phillips brought to life the character of the Demon Bartender, to wrap a bit of ‘70s B-movie vibe into it, and here we are. Suitably old-fashioned – as Prog Magazine noted: “Performance art, irreverent humour and disquieting music combine in an eerie tale that might just send shivers down your spine!"

Here’s Hal’s take: “The pursuit of absolute realism in dramatic performance, while meaning that bodies of work are more relatable on a basic level, has meant that we have lost an immersive element in genres such as horror and fantasy. So much so that now many look back to the ‘golden era’ of British homegrown horror – Hammer, Amicus et al – with a nostalgic view and even mourn its passing. The late heroes of classic horror such as Lee, Cushing and Price used not to shy away from giving otherworldly performances that, rather than alienating their audiences, allowed the viewer a moment’s respite from the modern day and a chance to suspend their disbelief by being presented with a portrayal that was larger than life. Their characterisations commanded attention and trust that their story was worth telling. As a voiceover artist, I can only aspire to touch at the base of the monoliths they left behind.

“Martin's Ravens piece harks back to a sumptuous and evocative period of gothic storytelling. Its unashamed approach to melodrama is what attracted me to the opportunity of narrating it; and I feel that this part of the year is a perfect time to provide a listener with some true escapism. The world is currently harsh enough not to need reminding of that fact at all times of the day – so why not enjoy a moment to explore the whimsical and wantonly esoteric? My only hope is that it is as fun to listen to as it was to perform.”

Not Really Me Not Any More - what does it all mean?

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 13:28:10 GMT

My depiction of a descent into dementia

Every piece of music Jacob Holm-Lupo sends me feels like a journey – not just a musical one, but evocative of a physical one too. When he sent me a piece that was his personal reaction to dealing with dementia, I felt it had an Asian character to it, and the words “Japan journey” jumped into my head. I’d first heard them from David Bull , a Canadian who’s lived in Japan for 40 years and who’s been a major player in preserving the ancient art of Japanese wood block prints via his Mokohankan gallery in Tokyo.

Through David’s YouTube channel I’ve become fascinated by the wood block prints, but also by Japan. I imagined that others might feel the same way, and so the idea of an amateur art collector dealing with his own dementia diagnosis began to form.

Like Jacob and Peter Wass – a bandmate of mine – who plays Patient P in the video, I’d recently been affected by a friend’s dementia diagnosis , and the cruelty the illness casts over the lives of many. I tied that in with the idea of the Eight Views of Omi print series by Hiroshige . The Eight Views or hakkei concept is an old and popular one in Asian art – if you want to illustrate the beauty of a place, you do it by creating each of the standard eight images. (David couldn't explain it better in this fascinating video .)

I reduced their titles into the mantra spoken by Patient P – Evening snow, distant bells, rain at night, ships sail home, clearing skies, harvest moon, glow at dusk, geese at sea – who’s repeating it in an attempt to remember his pictures. It was a significant advantage to me that there’s never been a standard order of the images; coming up with a mantra that rhymed would probably have been impossible if I’d had to keep each title in an official position. That mantra took weeks to get right and there are a number of bartenders who bore witness to my frustration…

I came up with the idea of projecting the images onto Patient P and in my overactive imagination it was going to look much more cinematic than it did – but then I didn’t exactly pay much for the projector, which I was unlikely to use for anything else. As soon as I started shooting with Pete in Shutlanger Village Hall I knew it wasn‘t going to work as I’d envisioned.

Robert Fripp often describes King Crimson as ”a way of doing things,” and as a follower of his thinking (to the extent I understand it!) the Boozer Cruiser art projects is my own way of doing things. That approach kicked in when I realised that the scenes of Patient P could be made to look intentional if made to look like a home video. Victory! When set against the images of Hiroshige’s work and the modern-day scenes from Japan, the visual elements started working together on a completely different level.

There’s a lot going on in the video. Along with following the story, you’re faced with trying to deal with the Eight Views, along with Patient P’s struggles as he tries to remember their titles and also tries to perform magic tricks he’s been doing for years. (Peter is a bit of a genius at that – doing something intentionally wrong when you’ve spent so much time learning to get it right is not easy.) Then there’s the layer of the Boozer Cruiser buying the prints at auction, with the projections over him suggesting a lineage through Hiroshige to Patient P to him. I also wanted to include the standard captions that go with the Eight Views because they’re so evocative, and so I chucked them in too.

If, as some have told me, it’s a bit too complex for a basic music video, then that itself brings two advantages. Firstly, it illustrates the confusion of a dementia patient during the worst moments; and secondly it means you need to watch the video more than once and so it gets more hits – glorious glorious hits that mean more to the corporate art world than the individuals behind each viewing…which means the story may get more attention. Another victory!

The title Not Really Me Not Any More (as you may have guessed) comes from Alan Garner’s magnificent 1973 novel Red Shift, which takes place across three separate time periods. He was inspired to write it after seeing the words “Not really now not any more” scrawled on a railway station wall, and it took him six years to build it into such a powerful story. (I’m two years in with a similar struggle about three murders that take place across three different periods in Ambleside, but that’s for another time – if you see what I did there.)

At the outset I arrogantly tried to place an upbeat overview on the tragedy that is dementia. That, I now know, was stupid. I soon also realised there was something more important to say. Firstly: a positive notion that we all change lives for the better without ever knowing it – Hiroshige never met Patient P and Patient P will never meet the Boozer Cruiser, but all three are part of a line of influence that shoots from the deep past into, probably, the far future.

Secondly, and more harshly: the sensation that dementia, to some, is akin to attending your own funeral. If you could see yourself as others see you, you might well have a happier sense of yourself than you currently do; but not if you have dementia, when all you can see is what it’s doing to you and everyone who loves you. I’m sorry there’s nothing nicer to say about that; but I know from talking to my collaborators on this one, and to the people I showed it to before it was launched, that the idea lands.

If you’ve been affected by the issues in today’s episode, talk about it. One of the biggest things I’ve learned in the ten months or so I’ve been working on the poem is WHY it’s so difficult to discuss dementia. The problem is that it affects so many people so deeply that you risk breaking someone’s confidence or increasing their pain by expressing your own feelings. So people keep their pain locked up, and as we all know that’s never good. I wish I could say I had a solution for that, but of course I don’t. I hope the poem helps – ultimately that’s really what it‘s for.

People need to know more about dementia – the more we front up against the issue, the easier it becomes to deal with, and the sooner we can find a cure. There’s much more information at www.alzheimers.org.uk but here are a few wee facts to get you thinking…

• Dementia is a collective name for brain syndromes which affect memory, thinking, behaviour and emotion

• It’s the leading cause of disability and loss of personal freedom among the elderly

• The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, but there are others

• Over 55 million people live with dementia; and so do their families and friends.

• The figure is expected to double ever 20 years

• One new case develops every 3.2 seconds

• It costs the world two trillion dollars to deal with dementia and its effects on people’s lives

• In some parts of the world 90% of cases go undiagnosed; in others it’s still as bad as 20%

• Early diagnosis is key to managing the disease

We need to talk about dementia

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 14:43:15 GMT

My latest poem was painful but important to write...

I had a friend who, I’ll admit, I wasn’t always looking forward to seeing.

He had dementia , you see, so you never quite knew what you were going to get. On occasion he’d be the soul of wit, with a lifetime of fascinating anecdotes to recount from a lifetime of adventure. But more often, he’d be asking you the same three questions while recounting the same three stories, for hours on end.

Sometimes he wasn’t aware. Sometimes he was, and it was heart-rending to watch. Sometimes it was just achingly frustrating and I’d want to be anywhere else in the world, and then I’d feel guilty about feeling that way, and I’d remain in his company while both of us suffered.

I wasn’t by any means the worst victim of my friend’s dementia. People closer to him, trying to keep him safe (he’d forget how to balance), healthy (he’d forget to eat) and calm (the frustration would lead to massive temper episodes) had it far worse. And that’s not even touching on what it was doing to him.

Dementia is a cruel disease. And it’s difficult to talk about because it’s difficult to identify one’s position within the field of people affected by one instance of it. But we need to talk about it because people feel alone if we don’t, and it’s already lonely enough in a dementia diagnosis.

The second last time I saw my friend he was the centre of attention, funnier, sharper and faster than any of us, leaving us all in tears of laughter and joy. The last time I saw him, the following day, he couldn’t remember the previous night’s fun, and he couldn’t remember my name, and he only vaguely remembered me.

Not Really Me Not Any More .

The making of No Liars Were Harmed

Sun, 15 May 2022 17:21:08 GMT

After 25,000 views it's not a commercial success - but it's certainly an artistic one

Jacob’s music for No Liars Were Harmed came before my story. We were both indirectly affected by World War II – while his grandparents were held under arrest by the Nazis, my grandparents lost their homes in the Clydebank Blitz and wound up having to buy their own furniture back from spivs.

Since Jacob is in Norway, he’s much closer (at least in terms of immediate physical violence) than I am to the Ukraine invasion. He didn’t have the words to express his sadness, but he did have his musical genius; and so I received a track he’d called Sad Sounds. I’d recently witnessed a violent episode outside a pub, in which a young woman had the veil of happy fiction torn away in an extremely crude manner; so I was able to channel terror to complement the music.

It needed something else. And then in around 45 seconds in a beautiful sunny field in the middle of nowhere, the anger came to me in about 45 seconds. The anger of a billionaire – not all billionaires, I stress – who needs his money to protect him from his own fear, and believes everyone else is that same.

Adding Kelly Phillips’ onscreen interpretation resulted in the creation of something incredibly intense. So intense, actually, that all three of us felt a little intimidated by what we’d created. We honestly didn’t think it stood a chance in the flashy, trashy world of modern entertainment; and in strictly commercial terms it doesn’t. But to have passed 25,000 views, with the vast majority in Ukraine and Brazil – two places most obviously affected by the forms of violence I was exploring – is a humbling artistic success and a proud achievement.

To mark the 25,000th view (it’s already several thousand behind us) Kelly and I had a short chat about No Liars and how we put it together. I’m fascinated by other artists’ processes, so it was fun for me to rattle on about my own.

New Prog Poem - 'No Liars'

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 16:59:04 GMT

'No liars were harmed in the suppression of this truth.. no liars were harmed in the building of this illusion"

The Boozer Cruiser has released new prog poem No Liars, in collaboration with White Willow / Donner mastermind Jacob Holm-Lupo, and a video starring actor Kelly Phillips.

Premiered via Prog Magazine and based around the mantra “No liars were harmed in the suppression of this truth; no liars were harmed in the building of this illusion,” the story sets a billionaire against a young woman in an exploration of current events including the Ukraine invasion and the global financial imbalance.

“As ever, I was led by the music of Jacob Holm-Lupo, who composed a piece that explains his feelings about the Ukraine invasion,” Kielty says. “It crystallised for me a wide range of thought-threads I’d been processing for some time into the creation of two characters who can’t admit they’re trapped in a world that scares them.

“No Liars is not just another anti-war expression. It’s an anti-war-structure expression. Our basic survival instinct, powered by fear, has led us into a world where billionaires hide from their fear by exerting it on those of us further down the ladder. Effectively, they’re victims too. I wanted to express that idea in a very personal way.”

The story depicted in the video was inspired by a first-hand experience on a Milton Keynes street recently, Kielty added. “I was witness to a scene of incredible violence and I wound up trying to calm a young woman who’d been one of the victims. It occurred to me I’d never seen genuine terror up close like that before. I felt like she’d suddenly been thrown from a world of TikTok and Strictly into a new, scarier existence; and that, incredibly, it might be the making of her.”

He found the inspiration blended perfectly with a “heartbreaking and melancholy” piece Norwegian-based Holm-Lupo had written to express his feelings about the Ukraine war. “It hits very close to home for him and his family. I felt the need to add some anger – and who’s angrier than the most scared of us? Thus the angry billionaire trying to justify a young woman reeling in terror, interpreted starkly in an intense performance by Kelly Phillips.”

No Liars is the fourth Boozer Cruiser “prog poem” following The Withy , T he Ghost of Terror Bay (featuring Chrissy Mostyn of the Blackheart Orchestra) and Echo Echo . Kielty and Holm-Lupo have several more pieces under development and aim to release a compilation later this year.

The Last Days of the Govan Elvis

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 17:36:11 GMT

An incomplete inspiration

I’m indebted to my old colleague A.C. Frank Morgan for suggesting the idea of the “Govan Elvis.” I’m pretty sure it was him unless it was me, but it was over a pint of Guinness (for me) and a Budvar (the proper Budweiser) in the Solid Rock Cafe in Glasgow.

The story of the Scottish rock star Alex Harvey – a fan of Elvis, born in Govan – is close to me. I was 10 when he died and I never met him, but I managed his band, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band , 20 years later and wrote their official memoir too. Many other writing commissions meant I developed a kind of overarching story for any musician who came out of Glasgow in the 60s and 70s, and I decided to name the character Adie Lennox because I liked the sound of it.

I know what I want to do with it… even thought I haven’t done it yet. It’s going to be as if I was interviewing people who knew Adie, without ever speaking to Adie personally. Along with charting that overarching story, I also want to demonstrate how myths, legends and lies can built a character that may – or may not – resemble the person at the centre of it. How many people can we be? How much of it is our choice?

This is the epilogue. It’s written as a broadsheet newspaper feature and it’s designed to have just a little bit of the smugness that some weekend feature writers seem to express. I know how The Govan Elvis begins and ends, and once I have the lead character, that’s usually all I need to write a story. The struggle with this one, like I say, is that there isn’t a single lead character – there’s just a series of myths, legend and lies about one.

I hope to get there eventually. In the meantime:

He might be the veteran of any number of wars, and this village pub has seen its share of those over the decades. Yet there is something slightly different about his 1000-yard stare, and his fingers keep a delicate, unconscious beat against his glass; for this is the survivor of the war of rock and roll. Adie Lennox is about 300 miles from his birthplace in Glasgow, Scotland, and he won’t say why he chose a village in Country Roscommon, Ireland, as his place of retirement. He also won’t accept “retirement” as his current status. “I’m writing a rock opera,” he tells me, and his soft but mildly threatening accent takes me back to a time when the Adie Lennox Band ruled the world (it seemed). “But I cannae discuss it.”

There’s no doubt he still has plenty of presence, filling more than his share of the tap room as the regulars keep a respectful distance, because he’s told them he’s “daen a newspaper interview.” Does he still sing? “Dae ah still sing, Maguire?” he shouts over to the bartender, who grins in reply. “Only just before ah get kicked oot.”

It can’t be denied that there’s a darker element to his persona – and perhaps that’s not a surprise. The diminutive character who’s drinking whisky with me (there’s much, more more water in mine, though) once commanded audiences of thousands as the Adie Lennox Band screamed through seven successful albums and countless live appearances. “It’s no’ about the albums. It never was,” he tells me. “It was always about that energy from those people.” The band? “No’ them. The audience. The people. We gave them what they wanted, and that’s what we wanted.” Yet he won’t be drawn further on his bandmates, who he famously abandoned on stage at a European rock festival, turning to the fans and saying, “You see those men? Murderers. Every one of them. Murderers,” before walking off and effectively ending his career (an attempt at a comeback, with a different band and different songs, failed badly).

“Ah don’t think about that any more,” Lennox says as he briefly looks me in the eye for the one and only time that day. “I want something else noo. Ah’m writing a rock opera.” So he said. Sadly, there’s not much more that he did say – despite a lengthy telephone conversation in advance of my trip to Ireland, in which we agreed the questions he would answer, he decides not to proceed in that direction. (He asked this paper to agree not to publish his location, and we have stuck to that agreement.) “Ah knew when ah met ye that it wuz the wrong way ti go,” he says of his refusal to address my queries. “Ah think you can really get it –– the same old questions won’t help ye dae that.”

He steps outside for a breather, and I take the opportunity of a return to the bar to ask Maguire about the local hero. Yes, he’s in here most nights. No, he doesn’t talk much about the old days, not even when he’s drunk. Yes, he can get a bit ‘naughty with it’ and he is, indeed, asked to leave several times a month. “But there’s no harm to him,” I’m told by another regular from down the bar. “He’d give you his last penny, so he would, and he has to more of us than he hasn’t.” I sense that Lennox is amongst family, protected, and perhaps that’s what he likes about the place.

He talks warmly about growing up in Glasgow, despite living in the notorious slums of that city, arguing that people were nicer there than they’ve ever been portrayed in the media, because the hard way of life taught them to appreciate love more. “There’s an auld joke that ye didny lock yer doors because ye had nothin’ worth stealin’,” he reflects. “There’s another joke that, if ye left yer money ootside, folk widny steal it – they’d clean it fur ye and give ye it back. That’s closer ti’ the truth.”

He also talks warmly about Elvis Presley. It’s well-known that the pair met in 1960, just for a few seconds, while the American icon waited in a small Scottish airport for his plane to be refuelled as he travelled home from army service in Vietnam. Lennox tells how he took hold of Presley’s coffee cup to replenish it, and for a brief moment both of them were gripping it. “Ye should huv felt the energy,” Lennox recalls, his eyes more alight than I’ve seen them before. “It wuz like a thoosand books from the best library in eternity, all tellin’ me how to become what I wanted to be. I knew what I had to do with mah life from that moment on.” Yet there’s a distinct tone of regret in his voice as he waves to Maguire for another drink. “Ah never met Elvis again. Ah wanted ti, and ah tried ti, but it never happened. Then he died.”

He begins listing people he’s loved who have also died, including his parents, his younger brother, his first wife and some band members (including the notorious Roabie McCulloch, made famous by the ALB track “Roabie Said”). He sings a morose melody to himself that makes me want to get up and leave; as I look around the bar I see expressions on faces that suggest his melody is a well-known message. Maguire absently pushes the whisky bottle we’ve been emptying to an out-of-sight location on the gantry.

I consider making an excuse to leave, but my getting-up motion appears to change his mood. “Come on an’ ah’ll show ye somethin’,” he tells me, suddenly bright again, although still distant. “Ah’ll show ye a wee secret – the standin’ stone!” The bottle retrieved from a relieved Maguire, along with promises to settle his tab in a few days when his next royalty cheque comes in, he ushers me into the late summer evening, where the light is fading but the heat of the day remains. It’s a small village and it runs out quickly, but Lennox wants us to push on; and as we do he tells me: “The stone is the basis of the rock opera, ye know. Ah canny tell ye much, but it’s aw aboot this stone and how it used to be used by wizards, back in the old days, and how they didny realise the stone listened to aw their spells and learned them, and aw it’s gonny take to bring the magic back is someone who can talk ti’ the stone.” It’s impossible not to be energised by his enthusiasm, but it’s also difficult to ignore the fear that it’s all too 1970s for a late-stage career turnaround.

After a few more minutes we pass a crumbling single-storey farmhouse, and just beyond it, as a dirt track is consumed by undergrowth, Lennox points and says: “There it’s – the Stone of Desire! Or at least that’s whit it’s called in the rock opera.” I can’t hide my disappointment: the stone does appear to have some ancient markings on its surface (although they could be recent, for all I can tell), but it’s otherwise unremarkable, with no interesting shape or colour – and it’s only the size of a bedside cabinet.

Lennox catches my expression. “There’s mair o’ it underground, ah’m sure,” he says quickly. “It’s awfy dilapidated, but ah’m startin’ a fund to have it done up again. Ah’ve researched its history. We can huv a wee visitor centre and ah’ll tell people the story, an’ they can buy the album after that.” He seems to be convincing himself. “Aye, a fundraisin’ campaign.” He brightens up again. “Mebbe we’ll get a perspex case, ti protect it frae the elements. People huv said folk won’t like that, but ah always say, ’Stones in glass hooses shouldny throw people!’” He laughs, and so do I, but only in a supportive, encouraging manner. Stone of Desire indeed.

I decide it’s time to say goodbye. On hearing that I’m staying in the pub, he considers returning with me then, wisely, thinks better of it. “Will ye come in for a quick one before ye head aff?” I realise that he lives in the wrecked farmhouse, which, he says, he bought because of the stone. I decline gently, explaining that the traditional image of heavy-drinking journalists has been consigned to the past (like rock operas). He lists a few names of reporters he knew in his heyday, but I haven’t heard of any of them. We shake hands. He goes inside. In honour of the years of pleasure his music gave me, and in honour of the days when he was my hero (you should never meet them), I go back to the stone for a moment, just to see if I can sense anything – anything at all – of some kind of ethereal power. I can’t. A curtain shuffles as I turn away.

Echo Echo: A poem in 38 minutes

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 17:13:32 GMT

Fast fiction or what… do you want fries with that story?

Sometimes you can feel it boiling up inside you… like the certainty of the second-too-many Guinness being due to come back on you. I’m not all that kidding either – in the same way that you get a weird but strong signal that it’s time to get to a toliet, the story engine at the back of my mind will let me know there’s a piece of work on the way.

It starts, of course, with a build-up of ideas that reaches critical mass. In this case it was watching re-runs of the fourth and final season of Blake’s 7. I’d been writing an article about it for UCR , then I decided to sit through the whole thing just for fun. It’s interesting because it was never meant to be made and the production team had destroyed almost everything at the end of season three. Enforced new ships, new characters and new plotlines were assembled with more haste than anyone might have liked. So it’s an exercise in cut-and-shut TV, and fast that it mostly holds together – and its darkness adds a new element to the show is a definite plus.

The wonderful Liberator is gone, replaced with a crock-of-shit Wanderer class planet hopper called Scorpio. (When it arrived on TV in 1981 and I was 9, I thought it was amazing and built a really complex Lego model of it, which I took to school and dropped it. One of the guys who’d bullied me up until then totally felt my pain, helped me pick up the bricks and became a good friend for a while. Ha!0 “Wanderer class” – now that’s interesting. There’s something about trying to enforce a class distinction on someone or something who’s decided not to be defined. I was also struck by how tired the crew must be of constantly ducking and hiding from the evil Federation they came so close to bringing down; there’s an inevitability of losing, and since it was never really their fight in the first place, that must be difficult for the characters.

So you have an eternal inevitability tied with that interesting phrase “Wanderer class.” Those thoughts were flitting around for days (I could hear them sometimes); then I went for a walk one morning because the canal was frozen over and I love that. I followed a path under an aqueduct that led directly to a railway bridge. I saw the word “Listen” scrawled on a wall. It looked nice in the steep sunshine so i took a picture. Then I found the word “Decide” (actually it was “You decide” but I didn’t notice. Next, the word “Echo” on one bridge wall, and the same word repeated on the opposite wall.

Listen. Decide. Echo. Echo. They seemed to suggest an idea of wisdom in that we could probably ALL do with listening more, and being more certain about the decisions that direct our lives. There was also the idea of that expression of wisdom coming from a distance, because of the echo. From space?

I thought of 'Oumuamua , the “first known interstellar object to visit our solar system,” that had kicked out suggestions of a giant spaceship like Arthur C Clarke’s Rama coming to visit Earth. It was almost certainly just a big rock, but don’t let that get in the way of a good story… I now had an idea of something to say, and – most importantly – a character who might say it in 'Oumuamua.

These thoughts assembled as I posted pictures of the four words on Instagram, over a pint of Adnams Ghost Ship . The “you’re going to throw up” signal flashed from the story engine. I grabbed my phone again and opened a new note. I posted the completed poem 38 minutes later. It really did almost write itself: a flow of words and shapes that says something about… well, whatever you want it to, really.

One of the things that’s essential to writing any kind of story is being able to believe it’s has enough strength to stand as a concept on its own. I knew it was strong enough; if it convinces me it’s going to convince others who aren’t likely to be as committed as I am to the story proving itself.

It wasn’t one of those things that needed over-analysed. I say I write epics and ditties, and this was most definitely a ditty – batter it out and get it to fuck! It does happen, but not often. I think walking, and particularly walking in the cold, helps massively. So there we are – a poem in 38 minutes. Do you want fries with that story?

Echo Echo

Wanderer class

warp two from the past

Laser line direct through time

Two dimensions - win or lose

Nothing left to earn or prove

Möbius strip

Spacial flip

Figure eight in a binary state

All has happened and then again

I’ll love you next time round, my friend

Eat, sleep

Believe, repeat

Conceive, create

Construct, delete

Dream, achieve

break hearts, let go

Listen, decide

Echo, echo

Ted McKenna's anniversary

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 17:58:41 GMT

My dear friend Ted McKenna died on January 19, 2019 after a routine medical operation went wrong. I had the difficult job of writing the news report for UCR and, later, the great honour and privilege of writing his obituary for Classic Rock Magazine , although I couldn’t read it back for a while.

As I continue my attempts to focus more on my creative writing rather than my journalism (which I still love), I was surprised and delighted to discover that a poem about Ted was forming while I thought about him over a pint of New World in the Boat Inn , Stoke Bruerne.

It was another ditty rather than an epic and it assembled itself quite quickly, although it was very emotional as it happened and I must apologise to everyone who wondered what was wrong with me. It’s the same that’s always wrong with me!

Anyway, here’s to Ted McKenna, AKA Teddy Toddgrass of the Bromsgrove Five…

He sat within circles

Worked wood with warm hands

Formed patterns we felt

Bur could not understand;

The thinking behind it

Was tales formed from life ~

A kind way of saying:

"This is a fight!"

"Be angry, be loud,

Then stop when it’s time ~

Eyes down, hearts in...

And see what you find."

The echoes are empty

The noise is allayed

The silence is solid:

We hear what he said.

“Heartbeat is a treat;

Do what I did:

Make sure when it’s over

You can say that you lived.”

The Ghost of Terror Bay - the complete story

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 08:12:28 GMT

Read the words brought to life by Chrissy and Jacob

I saw the sole survivor of a war he hadn't won

Cast in sorry shadow by a cold and distant sun

He hugged the frozen foremast of the ship to be his grave –

I turned to give him solitude; he whispered to me: "Stay."

I don't know how he told me, for we had no common tongue;

Yet soon I knew quite clearly of the demon he’d become:

A weather-worn spirit, a water-poisoned soul

Trapped within a broken mind, already in his hell.

An empire’s pride and prejudice had brought him over seas;

A fight against raw nature had brought him to his knees.

And he and all his pale companions slowly lost their lives

And now he envied those already buried in the ice.

Their voyage was to make them rich, immortal and revered

Their queen had blessed their mission, their people waved and cheered

As the great ship left the warmth of home, and sailed towards the snow

Bound in dark defiance for a place no one could go.

An uninvited passenger appeared among their crew:

A delirium of death that bade them do what none should do –

As madness danced among them, they knew they’d sealed their fate

When they took their brothers’ bodies, and butchered them, and ate.

He stopped his story, looked away, and slouched in silent tears;

A shadow of a person, surrendered to his fears.

“Come with me,” I told him, “My folk will keep you safe” –

Although in truth I knew that he did not have long to live.

There came a light upon his face, a memory of man

But all too soon, like summer, it flickered and was gone.

He fought to focus on me through the poison in his head;

And, pleading like a child would, “Don't save me,” he said.

We lived our winters, him and me, each of a different kind;

But in the spring I ventured back, to see what I might find.

The man, the ship, had vanished – I expected nothing less;

A mast that stretched for heaven was all the storms had left.

He haunts me still, that man who gambled more than he could lose –

A palloured ghost who died before his body let him loose.

Rest you well, so I can rest; rest you well below –

May freezing waters drown your cries, and cleanse your chastened soul.

The real ghost of Terror Bay

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 18:04:12 GMT

Inspiration isn't always from a nice place

There were three people who could have been the ghost of Terror Bay, and none of them truly fully exist.

The first candidate is the dying British sailor, who is offered help by an Inuk but offers a tragic refusal in response. He’s almost a zombie when we meet him – fighting for the last sparks of sense out of his broken mind, closer to death than life – and he winds up haunting the Inuk. But he’s not the ghost.

The second candidate is the narrator, who extends the offer of help and somehow comes to understand the sailor’s sad tale. When Chrissy Mostyn did me the great honour of voicing the character*, she transformed it; not just in gender (I’d actually tried to keep it gender neutral so that more readers might find themselves imagining the story happening to them) but in scale. My Inuk was a worldly-wise and weather-beaten tribal leader, sharing his story as a warning. Chrissy gave the world a strong but burdened young girl in the face of a fearsome world. That was fascinating; we actually took opposing views of the storyteller, but it all stitched together wonderfully because Jacob Holm-Lupo’s music blended both painfully lonely and globally epic vibes. And although I love the idea that, if you visit Terror Bay on a harsh stormy night you might hear her whispering her sorry tale in the wind, she’s not the ghost.

(I did actually think she was when I first wrote the poem, and so it originally ended with the line “And, pleading like a child would, ‘Don't save me,’ he said.” I didn’t want to spell out the idea of who was haunting who; then when I worked out that she wasn’t the ghost either, it was more fun to LOOK like it was being spelled out, when it’s not.)

The third candidate is me, and I am the ghost. Of course, we all put some of ourselves into everything we create, because that’s part of the reason for doing it. But this is slightly more literal. You see, I’m one of those people who struggles with severe depressive issues. Severe . Dark, dark, dark deadening. Over the years I’ve developed a toolbox for managing the situation, although the first challenge is to identify when I’m in a depressive episode, and that’s not as easy as it might sound. (Imagine you’re in a room with no windows, and over a period of time the lighting changes from cold white to warm white to a subtle orange colour. You probably won’t notice until something forces a change and you go, “Oh, I’m seeing everything differently!” It can be like that.) The second challenge is being patient about how long the tools take to operate (before I can make the leap to the light switch and reset the colour).

The ghost was the first character to step cautiously out from my story engine (subconscious) just as I recovered from probably the worst depressive attack I’ve ever had. It had taken several weeks to fight off and in the end I’d had no option but to just hide for about a week until it was over. Subsisting patiently until the opportunity to escape that nastily-lit room presented itself. When it did, it was a bright crisp winter day, snow and frost everywhere, the sun low in the sky and not doing much against the bitter north wind. Well, I love days like that and I needed to physically change as well as mentally, so I went out and enjoyed the weather. Inspiration very quickly struck in my mood of elation, relief and sensory joy (it was really cold which emphasised I was really alive). As I wandered down a road near a churchyard, the depression made one final bid to take me back to hell, but I wasn’t having it. The moment passed but it reminded me that, under the elation, relief and joy, there was exhaustion and sadness to follow as I returned to normal. I was, in fact, the sole survivor of a war I hadn’t won, cast in sorry shadow by a cold and distant sun. And that’s who I told myself i was, and it sat on my phone like that until it merged with the Franklin Expedition tragedy and became a personal allegory for my own troubled expeditions.

Yeah, those attacks can be harsh… but I can and do live with them because they make me who I am, andI think I’m kinda good at who I am. Then, when you get to drag a piece as powerful as The Ghost of Terror Bay out of hell with you, it offers hope for the next time hell feels like it’s winning.

(*I would dearly love to be certain that Chrissy agreed to perform the poem because she was blown away by the story. I’m sure she didn’t hate it, but I fear it was more to shut me the fuck up since I’d been trying to find a way to work with her for several years. That may have backfired since I now want to do it again…)

Or did I dream it?

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:04:08 GMT

Searching for truth in a world of facts

The face of John Torrington has inspired more art than might be expected of a 20-year-old Royal Navy coal-shoveller. The sad fact is that he did so nearly 140 years after his death. In 1984 his body was exhumed from its Arctic grave, in a bid to discover what had killed him, and perhaps what had killed all 209 members of the doomed Franklin Expedition to find a Northwest Passage.

The face from 1846 was astonishingly well-preserved, and that’s what made it so inspiring. It looked like John hadn’t long left us, or was maybe even just asleep – once you allowed for the effects of the ice on his features. When I first heard Iron Maiden’s Stranger in a Strange Land (one of my all-time favourite rock songs) I didn’t know it had been inspired by the photos of John. James Taylor wrote his song The Frozen Man about John, and there are a number stories and poems that followed. It’s likely that The Terror wouldn’t have been made had the images of John not captured the public imagination four decades earlier.

Me? Well, I hadn’t actually connected John with The Ghost of Terror Bay when I started writing it. I must have known but forgotten. I came in via the names of the expedition ships – HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. I always wondered who the serious actual fuck would name a ship “Terror,” especially given all the superstition that’s said to accompany maritime life (FYI it doesn’t officially follow onto inland waterways, hence I can change the name of my boat whenever I like, and I will once I can come up with a title I feel i can live with). “Terror” meant just that, and therefore it was a bit dull. But “Erebus” (despite sounding like what a person from Glasgow might say as a mode of public transport approaches) was a much more interesting word. I was always convinced it needed a story – a bit like the way Douglas Adams wrote a book giving new meanings to place names since they were so underused.

I suppose it must have been the discovery of the Terror wreck in 2016 that got me thinking about the Franklin Expedition. Research is always fun – you never know what you’re going to learn, and I soon found myself in deep, dark online archives, reading books published in the decades immediately following the tragedy. In one of those I discovered an account of an Inuk who boarded the Terror at some point before she sank (seems she’d been abandoned then an attempt was made to bring her back into action). The tribesperson told how they’d met one of the crewmen and offered help. But the sailor, who by that time had experienced physical trauma due to the Arctic conditions, emotional trauma after resorting to cannibalism, and mental trauma as a result of metal in his bloodstream from the ship’s water piping, simply looked blankly at the Inuk and turned away.

Which was how The Ghost of Terror Bay came into being. I wanted something classic-sounding, perhaps like a Lakeland poet might have dealt with the story, with an epic vibe to it. It wasn’t one of those that came together quickly, and I think it’s the only time I’ve changed an ending, because I realised I’d misunderstood my own concept, but that actually meant it was a good story.

Problem is, I’ve never again been able to find the Inuk’s account of meeting the sailor. I’ve looked, but it doesn’t seem to be where I thought it was. I mentioned that to Jacob Holm-Lupo while he was finishing off the music, and he wisely said it didn’t really matter. He’s right. As a storyteller I live in a world of truth, not facts – except when I’m back to being a journalist, when it’s the other way round.

Chrissy Mostyn, Jacob Holm-Lupo, Martin Kielty in winter ghost story

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 18:04:03 GMT

The Ghost Of Terror Bay , inspired by the doomed Franklin Expedition, features Blackheart Orchestra and White Willow artists

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Ever On & On

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 08:07:35 GMT

A seriously short poem on the art of leaving

"It's only leaving…" One of the things I've realised about cruising the canals on my narrowboat is that it's incredibly exciting to leave places, having only just touched on the possibility of putting down roots. It's the most opposite thing from "normal life," I think, and perhaps presents the best evidence for whether you're the type of person who'll embrace cruising as part of your everyday existence.

It was written on the Aylesbury Arm of the Grand Union Canal in September 2020 and inspired by the positive experience of my visit to that area. It came to me just after I’d released the mooring lines and moved off – it was almost like the physical link to the town had been severed in that moment, and it felt amazing. I’ve looked forward to that moment ever since, wherever it may take place.

The title (you may have guessed) comes from one of JRR Tolkien's songs sung by the Hobbits of Hobbiton, which begins: "The Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the road has gone – and I must follow, if I can…"

The First Elder

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 09:39:16 GMT

The User’s Guide to Perpetual Motion III : The First Elder

Existence is movement, and even the smallest, seemingly insignificant events can change the direction of a life for ever. The User’s Guide to Perpetual Motion is a series of relatively small incidents – entirely fictional – designed for me to explore character motivations and reactions and for you, hopefully, to enjoy.

Garallion stood on the bridge, watching the waters in the river below rushing away from this accursed place to somewhere better, where there was still hope and future. He briefly considered jumping in, so that he could be taken wherever hope and future existed; but he realised that the current wasn’t strong enough to carry him, and he would only discover whether being wet would make him feel worse. He doubted it.

It had all been too much effort, too much pain, too much time, to come to this. For more years than he cared to count he had been village chief, guiding, leading, coercing and commanding through times of upset and upheaval, hunger, hate and hardship. He had even overseen the building of the bridge, which had changed so much for so many.

And now he stood upon it, watching the river run away from him, seemingly faster and faster. The road back to the village seemed ugly and uninviting. The road away seemed difficult and demanding. And so he remained upon the bridge, following the ebbs and flows of first one leaf on the water’s surface, then another, as each was carried this way and that, with no control over where or how it might end up, wondering if the dizzying displacement said more about life than any of his own beliefs ever had.

They did not want him. They did not care whether they needed him. And so he wanted not to care and not to be needed – even though he had spent most of his years caring and being needed. It all seemed as meaningless as the twists and turns of the river course; because, no matter how much the water pressed and pushed, it could never avoid its eventual disappearance in the oblivion of ocean that awaited it. What had been the point?

Travelek appeared from nowhere, his lithe, easy movement carrying him from the dusk shadows into the last of the day without warning. “For better or worse, it’s done,” he said quietly, his voice suggesting no respect within its confidence.

“Yes, chief,” Garallion replied, skipping over the poison word almost as if he had not said it.

“They voted. They want change. And who’s to say that’s a bad thing?”

“Not I.” His arms remained folded against the side of the bridge, his eyes remained fixed on the racing river, and he resisted the urge to turn away from the younger man.

“I could fight you, if you like,” Trevelek said. “Like the old days.”

“You would win,” Garallion replied flatly.

“Yes.” There was a pause. “Will you come back and eat with me?”

Garallion fought to control a sudden shudder. “Why would I do that?”

“You were chief for a long time. You can teach me so many things I don’t know.”

“It is your job to learn them now.”

“It would be better for the village if you helped.”

Another slight shudder made its way through Garallion’s chest. He felt a flutter of fear, as if he was young again. “They do not want me,” he said quietly, failing to disguise the emotion of the words.

“They think it’s one or the other, night or day, yes or no,” Travalek said, matching the older man’s position against the side of the bridge. “They don’t see the middle ground, the dusk, the maybe.” When Garallion offered no reply, the new chief let the river flow for a time before saying: “And you don’t really want to take the road away.”

“They do not want me!” Garallion suddenly shouted, slamming his fists onto the wall. “And you may be chief, but you do not know what I want! All of my life I worked for all of you. To come to –– this! It is my right to walk away. It is my right to demand my reward and take it with me. Why should I not go?”

“For the same reasons you gave Marek,” said Travelek quietly.

“Marek?” The name had been unspoken for years.

“Right here, all those years ago, on the old bridge that collapsed and left the village cut off.”

“How do you know about that?” Garallion asked, genuinely surprised.

“Because I was here,” Travelek said, turning towards the other and pointing across his gaze. “Fishing, on that rock, although there weren’t so many trees around it then. You wouldn’t have seen me, though. I was always good at hiding. I was always good at listening, too. That day, when the village voted for you instead of Marek, and he came out to the bridge, and you offered to fight him, and then asked him to come back and eat with you.”

“And he did not,” Garallion remembered.

“No, because the village didn’t want him, he said, and you said they thought it was one or another, night or day, yes or no.” Travelek moved closer to Garallion. “We both understant that’s not true. We both know there are hard times ahead. We both know there is still so much you can do for the village.” The next pause was different, full of new meaning. “I’ll create a position for you,” the new chief continued. “You’ll be the elder of the village. An honourable role, where you’ll be consulted for your wisdom and experience, and retain the authority of chief. Well, most of it anyway.”

“I do not feel like an elder.”

“I expect that’s part of the position.”

Travelek waited a moment, then began to move off the bridge towards the village. Garallion continued to watch the river running, its meaningless meanderings achieving nothing except marking time between its existence and its end; and then he recalled how he once loved its singing and playing as it danced for the joy of that existence, regardless of how little or long it might last, and he followed Travelek back to the village.

The Joy of Painting

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:36:19 GMT

The User’s Guide to Perpetual Motion II: The Joy of Painting

“I hope this doesn’t make me late for the community council meeting,” Jack muttered from behind the wheel. “They can’t start without me, you know. Not since I was elected leader.”

“The post office is on the way to your meeting, as well you know,” she replied neutrally. He didn’t mean any harm.

“I’m just saying,” Jack said. “I wouldn’t normally leave this early and the traffic’s still hell.”

“It’s only a couple of minutes difference.”

“A couple of minutes makes all the difference.” Jack glanced in the rearview mirror at the package again. “What is it you’re posting anyway?”

“A painting,” she said.

Jack spluttered a laugh. “Well, I know that, don’t I! I mean, who are you posting it to?”

“The person who bought it,” she said.

“Someone from your church group,” he answered himself. “Why can’t you just give it to them in person?”

“It’s not someone from the church group. It’s someone in America.”

“America? Someone from America bought one of your paintings?”

“It’s going to cost him as much to have it delivered as it cost him to buy it,” she said. She was trying hard, but it was difficult to hide the pride in her voice.

Things had been so quiet since the kids had moved out. Jack had his car repair business, and his community councils, and the yacht club (although he didn’t have a yacht). She had the church group, the choir and those lovely weekend days when the kids and grandkids came to visit. Her boredom had led to the discovery of Bob Ross and his The Joy of Painting TV series (despite that fact that it had finished years earlier).

Jack had looked up from his car boot sale accounts and laughed when she started watching the show from the late 80s and early 90s. He’d looked into the dining room on his way to the garage and laughed when he saw her easel, paints and canvases. He’d looked up from his lunch and laughed as she put on her classic artist’s overall and cap (not realising that that’s what she’d intended).

Jack hadn’t laughed, but sort of snorted instead, when one of her friends in the choir bought one of her landscape oil paintings. He’d snorted when a few more went out the door. He’d snorted a little less when she accompanied him to a car boot sale and sold another one, while more people admired her work than attended to his motor parts stall.

She hadn’t realised she’d ever had any artistic ability. She’d been too busy being a wife and mum to think about it. She’d been delighted to discover a new lease of life, and even more delighted when she began adding her own touches, and disagreeing with Bob on the show, then beginning to create her own imaginary works instead of copying him.

Jack didn’t laugh or snort, but stared curiously when she bought a computer, went to night classes to learn how to work it, and opened her own Etsy account. He stared curiously as the complimentary comments stacked up under the paintings she put up for sale. He stared curiously as more of her friends began to buy her paintings online.

“So, this American… do you know him?” Jack asked curiously.

“No, he’s a complete stranger,” she said, again trying to disguise her pride.

“More money than sense, these Americans,” Jack replied, adding a grunt and a gesture to a driver who’d done nothing wrong on the opposite side of the road.

“It’s only forty pounds,” she said. “It means I can buy more blank canvases. And there’s a new colour I want to try.” She looked in the sun visor mirror in front of her. There was a new colour of hair she wanted to try too, and perhaps a more modern style of glasses. Maybe a little more makeup.

“Forty pounds?” Jack muttered as he pulled over outside the post office. She got out and opened the back door to lift the painting in its brown paper wrapping. “More fool him!”

But under the gruff tone was another tone. A tone she hadn’t heard in years, and a tone she used to lie awake waiting to hear.

Wages Day

Thu, 27 May 2021 09:33:31 GMT

The User's Guide to Perpetual Motion I: Wages Day

It felt like the longest climb in history, but it was only the usual clamber up the close. The same light was out, the same workboots lay behind the same half-open storm doors (“Ye’r no’ bringin’ them in here!”), the same hospital-coloured line, just above eye level, pointed the way to the stairhead. But it all seemed so different; because tonight, it was his turn, and he’d never felt such turmoil.

He remembered the moment Eddie’s turn had come. Eddie had finally stood up after his father hit his mammy one times too many, and booted fuck out his father, and nothing had ever been the same again. He remembered when Dougie’s turn had come. Dougie had jumped into the street fight to protect his da from Vicious Roabie, and they’d both had their heads kicked in. (And in the meantime, Dougie’s wee brother had got a kicking from his pals for crying because his da was hurt. “Ya wee poof.”)

Well, it was his turn to demonstrate to his dad that he was a man now. And there was no way of telling how it would go, and it would have to be done, and it didn’t matter how much he didn’t want to do it.

He’d considered hiding the evidence – banknotes rolled up in a sock at the back of the drawer. He’d thought about asking Hutch to keep hold of it for him, but that would have been asking too much for a lad with his family’s money problems. Although he’d probably have done it. No, it had to be faced. After all, Dad had done everything he could over the years to keep the family warm and fed. He surely wouldn’t refuse the help. Would he?

What made it worse was how the money had been earned. Playing in a fucking band. Standing on a stage, having fun, best mates lined up alongside, a fantasy field of lassies all falling in love down the front. (Literally, in some cases.) The papers all claimed “guitar bands were on the way out,” but the ballrooms across Glasgow told another story.

What made it worse still was that Dad had got the guitar for him on the never-never, and done extra shifts to pay it off. Horrible, awful shifts in the shipyards, the angry industry making a mockery of the mellow music the instrument made from his fingers.

Which only went to demonstrate that it was important to give back. No matter how much it might hurt Dad. Who was sitting in the kitchen, feet near the fire, reading out the most interesting bits from the paper to Mum as she went about her business. “Aw, the rock star’s back!” Dad grinned. “And here’s me thinkin’ you’d be too famous for the likes o’ us. How’d it go?”

He didn’t want to speak. He didn’t want to move. All he could do was look away from Dad’s eyes as he took his hand out of his pocket, the notes welded into his fist. It took the amount of energy needed to launch the HMS Fife from Fairfield’s the previous month to send that fist forward into the river of whatever was about to happen. “Ah got paid,” he rasped, his mouth dry. “Ah’v got digs money fur ye.”

The cash sat in his open hand as all three of them looked at it. There was no need to count it. They all knew that, for less than two hours of singin’ and dancin’, he’d made more than his dad made in a week.

“Aw, son,” Dad said, his eyes filling up. “Aw, son.” Seconds passed like aeons as Mum prepared to deal with any of a dozen next moments. “Aw, son,” Dad said, one more time, shrinking into his chair; and then, suddenly, standing up proudly. “So, ye gonny take me fur a pint?”

Pubcast: Not-so secret drinking dens

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 10:59:27 GMT

A conversation with my former newspaper colleague (and jazz saxophonist) Frank Morgan, based on a chat we once had in the Bon Accord pub in Glasgow. Pub licensing rules in the middle of the 20th century led to the creation of "bothans" – secret drinking dens that, it turned out, weren't all that secret at all.

Pubcast: Sir Donald Sinden's Legacy

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 11:54:09 GMT

Cancel Dave Dawson

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 11:51:12 GMT

A video I hoped I'd never have to publish*

*To our surprise some people appear to have thought I'm serious about Dave Dawson . Just to be clear, we worked on this video together because we thought it would be funny – and we think it is!

What's wrong with him this time

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 10:21:23 GMT

It's what you don't say...

She says he’s got one of those looks on. He probably has. She’s asked him something about their life, now – maybe something about a dentist’s appointment, feeding the cats, whether they need milk, whether he wants a cup of tea.

He can’t answer.

She wants to know what’s wrong this time.

Nothing.

Well, why does he have that look?

He doesn’t.

He does, she says. It’s a different one from last time, but it’s a look.

What can he say? Last time it was in 1689, when he was crouching in undergrowth as he watched the Battle of Killiecrankie unfold, trying to keep out of sight in order to observe two master generals who should have been leading each others’ forces if there hadn’t been so much politics at play. This time it’s about 8000 years ago as he struggles to understand the changes in an island environment where his tribe have been persuaded to settle rather than continuing life on the move.

But he can’t say that, can he?

So he says: I’m writing.

Oh, that again, she says.

Aye. That again.

A witch at dusk

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 07:15:10 GMT

When your eyes can't decide if it's evening or night...

Dusk wasn’t falling, it was plummeting, this far south. But I’d worked out a way to avoid writing a 3000-word chapter by slamming it into 500 words of power dialogue. It’s fewer words but it’s more creative energy and that energy wasn’t here, on the boat. But there was a churchyard I’d discovered at 11pm a few nights back, when it was dark and windy, and the rather intriguing tone of the leading bell had given me to believe that there was an energy worth channeling there.

A circa 1280 build, I estimate, probably replacing a wooden structure from further back. May even have been apsidal at one point. Village in the Domesday Book so almost anything could have been there; and, remarkably, evidence of the long-outdated notion that the far north end of the churchyard wasn’t consecrated ground. Most of it rebuilt between the 15th and 17th centuries, plus significant repairs in the 19th. But anyway, that leading bell – I can’t think it was originally designed that way. I can think that the bellfounder heard something unique in its tone, and believed that, centuries later, after the thunder and ice had taken its toll, literally, that its uniqueness would ring out, literally. If that’s what he thought, he was right, and I’m a witness.

I needed a name for the cop in the witness room, interrogating my main character. (It’s not just a murder novel – I’m a far, far better writer than that. Ha.) Like anyone who’s ever had to name a band, you realise that the struggle is to make the decision, and after that it’s just a label. From out of the sound of that bell, I think, I named the cop after my scary piano teacher, Mr Langley (sorta bell sounding) who knew all the technicalities but almost nothing about the feel, which is probably why he was so angry all his days. He kinda reminded me of that bell – tolling in time, but feeling out of place. I think if he’d heard that bell it might have been the “gonny not be that guy and just be you please” alert I always thought he needed.

The characters in place across the desk of an interview room, I settled myself on the west-facing bench in the churchyard and began bouncing attitudes. It was so, so easy – once I take responsibility for my characters it always is. It wasn’t just me responding to the rapidly deepening darkness: the (what do they call it) environment control systems on my laptop were struggling to dance against the changing light, flickering and basically arguing against five billion years of sunsets, while I ignored its attempts to reassure me that it had been worth the money I’d paid for it.

There came a noise from behind me. A slow, laboured, irritating swishing. There’s around fourteen minutes of dusk where your eyes can’t decide if it’s evening or night, and neither can laptops, and that’s when all the ghosts of the universe have been defined. That’s when I was. I didn’t want to look round in case I broke the moment for whatever it was moving towards me. Then it stopped. Its existence bounced off the ancient, thick walls of the church’s north side to my left. I felt it; I didn’t see it. Then I realised I was sitting in semi-darkness with a brand new £1000 laptop, and wondered if I was going to have to suddenly be Glaswegian at a chancer.

‘Hello,’ she said very quietly.

I put on my most presentably Sunday, TV, meet-the-potential-mum-in-law voice because her caution demanded it. ‘Hello! I’m sorry, am I in your way?’

‘No, no,’ she replied with a tone of something European in her voice. ‘I’m just taking my cat for a walk.’

‘Or is she taking you?’ I sonically smiled too wide.

‘He,’ she said more firmly.

Lots of information there. I closed the laptop; I felt that whatever she needed from the churchyard was much more important than what I needed. But I didn’t put it back in the bag. No idea why.

‘It’s lovely here at dusk,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’

‘Of course not!’ I sonically smiled, with more control. As she turned towards the bench, the dying embers of the day’s sunlight adverted me to a large pair of spectacles, grey hair and an aluminium walking stick. Which amazed me, because the person I’d heard wasn’t as old as the frame I was seeing.

And… we talked. We talked about growing tomatoes; about the grief of losing pets, and how that’s meant to help you with losing humans; about my new adventure on the boat; about her dream of emigrating to Australia or New Zealand; about it doesn’t matter a fuck because we just talked. And as the dusk died and gave way to an ice-crystal blue night, bats flapped their way out of the church tower and circled around us, while her cat made a point of keeping his back towards us and cleaning his paws, ready to jump in if I turned out to be a threat to his best friend.

By the third time she said goodnight it really was time for her to go. She told me: ‘I wish you luck in your ––‘

‘Adventure,’ I cut in.

‘Yes. And I hope it doesn’t ever become boring.’

There was a tone there that I had to pursue. ‘Education never ends. You’re never too old for new adventures,’ I said.

‘No, I’m not,’ she replied with the mettle and metal of someone who’s been through more than twenty minutes in a churchyard at dusk can cover. ‘But,’ she went on, ‘One can only move at the speed of the slowest in your world.’

‘That’s kinda what society is for,’ I replied, wondering why the fuck I was using all my best lock-in lines five hours before the pubs even shut. ‘It’s to make sure as many of us survive as possible. It’s not to make sure we’re happy – it’s to make sure we survive.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘We went to New Zealand for a holiday. He didn’t like it very much.’

By now we could only see each other in silhouette from the lights beyond the churchyard. That probably made it easier. ‘But you’re happy, aren’t you?’ I asked, because I couldn’t ask nothing but I didn’t want this moment to end with anything negative. ‘You’re not just content… you’re happy?’

‘Happy enough,’ she told me with that metal and mettle tone, a sound like the bell, that had become more powerful with years of weathering, and knew what it was above and beyond the slowest in her society. ‘Happy enough. And I love him. Enjoy your adventure!’

She moved away, swishing like those moments earlier when I hadn’t understood her energy. The swishing wasn’t laboured or irritating any more. It knew exactly how it sounded, like her voice, like the bell, and fuck you if you don’t get it. Her cat, who I think had been pretending to stalk his best friend while really keeping a protective watch over her, galloped out from the unconsecrated north end of the yard, stopped in front of me and gave me a stare I couldn’t see, because it was dark and I’m not a cat. But I knew the trick: a blink is a smile. I believe he blinked back, even though I couldn’t see it. Then I winked, one eye followed by the other – that fascinates them because they can’t do it, and they wish they could because a half cat smile is even more mysterious than a full cat smile. Then he raced after his best friend, who was swishing with waves of energy back to where she wanted to be.

I think I met a witch at dusk in an ancient churchyard. If I did, I hope I meet many more.

This pub had regulars before it even opened

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 11:45:15 GMT

An introduction to Bridge 61 at Foxton Locks on the Leicester Line of the Grand Union Canal.

Forgotten John (from The Rule Book)

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 08:49:22 GMT

Just another night in a village inn 80 years ago...

The Rule Book , based on the 300-year history of a Lake District pub called The Golden Rule, contains around 50 anecdotes and mini-adventures, all based in or around the pub, and all either told to me at the bar or discussed there over the years. Here’s Forgotten John , one of my personal favourites – and after it there's a video of me reading it on the boat; and not, sadly, in the pub.

Thursday, January 7, 1954

Old John’s seat had been carried outside the pub, because that’s where Old John wanted it. For more years than anyone could remember, it had been to the right of the fire, where Old John sat as often as he cared to, and others moved out the way each time.

Tall Alan came down the hill from The Struggle, and stopped for a moment by Old John on his seat. ‘Why are you out here?’ he asked. ‘There’s snow on the tops – you’ll catch your death!’

‘Already caught it,’ Old John replied, sipping his ale.

Hillsides Pete came out of the door as Tall Alan went in. ‘You should move indoors, John. This is no night to be outside.’

‘It is for the one as I’m waiting for,’ Old John said.

Young Alfie came up Smithy Brow from the road to Grasmere. ‘Come on inside, John,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a cold one tonight.’

‘Colder for me,’ Old John replied. ‘I’ll soon be following you along that road – in a coffin.’

Inside the pub, the row of regulars stood facing the wall behind the bar. ‘You can’t tell him anything at his age,’ said Big Martin. ‘He knows it all.’

‘Happen he does,’ Butcher Sid agreed. ‘When you’ve lived the years and worked the days he has, you’re entitled to say and do as you want.’

‘What age is he, anyway?’ Alfie asked.

‘Eighty eight,’ said a regular.

‘Ninety four,’ said another.

‘Hundred and two, I make it,’ said a third.

‘God knows,’ sighed a fourth.

‘That’s just what’s getting to him,’ Sid announced. ‘He thinks God doesn’t know. Thinks God’s forgotten him.’

‘I’m going to get him in,’ Alfie said.

‘Might as well take him this,’ Tall Alan told him, handing over a fresh pot of ale.

Outside the temperature had dropped noticeably. There was frost in the high skies and the snow-covered hilltops glowed in silver-blue moonlight, while the first rolls of fog began to billow down The Struggle from Kirkstone.

Alfie waited while Old John finished his ale, then took the empty from him and replaced it with the full. ‘You need to come in, John. God knows how cold it’s going to get.’

‘There’s a lot of things God knows, and a lot of things he seems to have forgotten,’ John replied after a moment. ‘Like me. Here I am, older than the lot of you, and still working my days better than a lot of you. Langholm’s gone, Fazakerley’s gone, Sandy’s gone, my old wife… It’s my turn tonight.’

‘Don’t talk like that!’ Alfie said sharply.

‘I’ll do as I please, at my age,’ Old John muttered. ‘There’s plenty of you and your type have told me how to behave, and I’ve seen you all off. But I’ve had enough. So, tonight ––’ he opened his scarf a little, as if to speed up the process –– ‘Tonight, I’m sitting out here till God remembers me, and takes me with him.’

‘As if he’d have you,’ Alfie said quietly, and received a non-committal grumble in response.

‘I was going to hand in my notice in the morning,’ the old man continued. ‘Hand in my cards. Then I thought, ‘Why bother? Let God do it. He owes me that at least, doesn’t he?’’

Alfie sighed and went back inside. ‘Says God will take him tonight,’ he told the regulars. ‘Opened his scarf up, he did, to let the cold in. Says he’s sick of seeing everyone else to their graves. He was going to hand in his notice ––’

‘He’s been saying that once a month since I met him forty years back,’ Tall Alan bellowed.

‘Well, this time he means it,’ Alfie replied, then, more quietly, added: ‘I really think he means it.’

‘Born to work, that one,’ Sid observed. ‘Started when he was eleven, still doing dawn till dusk on the roads near a hundred years on.’

‘Maybe God has forgotten him,’ Alan suggested.

‘Or maybe God’s waiting for another who has the same good sense about hard work,’ Sid said. ‘There’s not many. Him, and me.’

‘Away!’ Alan cried. ‘You’ll never make a hundred and whatever. You’ll retire the first moment you can, with your sons to run the shop for you.’

Sid ignored him. ‘Work then drop,’ he said into his drink. ‘There’s many who’d call that a life well lived.’

‘Well, not me,’ Alfie said. ‘I’m off to bring him in. I’ll lift him if I have to. Sid, Alan, come on.’ He marched to the door, and the others followed without complaint.

Outside it was colder still. Loughrigg to the west was lost in the fog, with little points of yellow light from the houses on Smithy Brow fading into the ice clouds, which crawled over from above and behind, slowly blotting out the moonlit snow.

And Old John’s seat was empty – except for the ale pot.

‘He’s gone!’ Alfie said. ‘It’s… happened!’

‘Do you think…?’ Alan whispered. ‘Do you really think…?’

‘Don’t be daft!’ Sid bellowed. ‘God doesn’t take you like that!’

‘Someone else might,’ Alan said darkly.

‘Now don’t you –– look!’ Sid abandoned his argument as he pointed up the hill, where the vague pillar of a shadow appeared to be moving, slowly, away from them. Its shape billowed and wove, lit from a streetlight behind, as the freezing fog rolled around it.

‘John! John!’ Sid shouted. ‘Is that you, John?’

The shadow took a different form – it thinned, then vanished, then grew wider, and suddenly taller. ‘Aye, it’s me!’ came a muffled voice wrapped in the depth of night.

‘Are you… are you all right?’ cried Sid.

‘I am that!’ Old John shouted. ‘I can’t be sitting drinking with you all night –– I’m up for work in the morning! Good night!’

He vanished into the mist. Alfie picked up the pot and Danny picked up the seat, while Tall Alan held the door open, and the three went back inside.

The Withy - the full short story

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 14:26:34 GMT

12,000 years ago the idea of Stonehenge forms in a young boy's mind...

I did not know why the trees were dying, and I did not know why the sea was rising. I believe they would have told the Grand Father – perhaps they did – but they would not tell me.

I do not know why I was expected to put the Grand Father’s finger bone in his tomb, once the wilds and the weather had taken away his flesh. I was told that the time had come to forget, to walk among the living and leave the dead behind; but the colours of those words were not right, and there was nothing to believe in them.

If only the Grand Father had lived long enough to teach me what I needed to know. They condemned him, the villagers, for not choosing a Withy earlier, leaving it until it seemed like his last season was upon him. Yet he spoke in the colours of fire about there having been no Withy at all until I was born; and when he spoke in those colours the villagers dared not even look him in the eye.

When his last words faded to the deep blues of night, and he died, they performed his first burial with respect, laying his body in a shallow pit on the beach and covering it loosely in leather. When his flesh was gone they continued their respectful ways, allowing his son – and me – to carry one of his bones. The bone of his finger, which had pointed through the times of alarm and pain towards the times of light and plenty, still glowed with some of his energy, and so I chose it.

Their respect ended when the Grand Father’s son died. Ignoring my presence, they said the time of forgetting had come, since all direct family members were dead, and told me to return the bone to the tomb, for it to be sealed for ever in the second burial. I did not know why, and none could tell me, and so I refused to release the bone (which I still wear on string round my neck); and so began the trying time.

In the absence of a Grand Son, and the presence only of me, a part-tutored Withy, they elected an elder – a man whose words seemed bright but were not, and whose sounds and patterns carried little truth. He could not explain why the trees were dying and the sea was rising, but would only say that I could not explain either, and there the discussion must end. I saw the colours around the villagers changing under the effects of his words –– but what could I do? A child of fewer than forty seasons, lacking the knowledge to understand and direct the sounds and colours, as the Grand Father had done.

No one dared deny me the right to enter any home and partake of whatever I needed; although I near died myself from the fear of attempting to exert the right and being refused. The man with four children was condemned when he asked me to empower his hearth stone, yet every other household had asked the same of me, even the elected elder, and I had done it. (I had done it well, learning and understanding the flow of energy in the same moment, and for the first time beginning to see why the Grand Father had chosen me to replace him.)

I could make no sense of the silence in the trees and the seas, and the colourless words of the village. The only sense I could see was in the slight struggling glow in the finger bone, one of the Grand Father’s own hearth stones within the home he had worn in this life. I realised that, while all other things confounded me, stone did not; and I began to believe that if I could pass the Grand Father’s energy from the small finger bone stone to a larger stone, I might find enough colour to continue my learnings alone.

It took countless days to find the piece I needed. In those days I climbed the cliffs, hoping perhaps that the trees higher up might still talk (they did not) and I stepped along the shore, unable to ignore the signs that the sea was becoming bigger and so our island was becoming smaller; and the sea would not talk, although its colours were changing, as if carrying a message it could not yet explain to itself, and I came to believe that the younger trees high on the cliffs were changing too.

When I believed that I would find the stone I needed at the point where the water meets the land, I found it. It lay flat and had been listening to the life around it for a time I could not count (although I could see it) and its own colours were in balance with the Grand Father’s finger bone. I took it to the quiet place among the silent – but still healthy – trees, and I set it upright. It stood to the height of my knee, almost like a finger from a hand buried deep in the land; and, over time, and with a great effort of belief, I transferred what remained of the Grand Father’s glow from the bone into the stone.

When the movement was complete the first lesson I learned was that I did not have the language to understand everything that was there for me to learn. It took me a little time to believe that I needed other stones, into which I could instil what I knew of other people, so that I could see many words and so expand my language. I found a stone where I placed my memories of my mother; and another where I placed the memories of the guard who lost her life in protecting me from another village’s attack in a dark time; and another where I placed the memory of the woman who had cared for me while the Grand Father taught me. Then I found a stone to act for the trees, and one for the seas, and one – left empty – for myself.

For twelve seasons I simply listened to the colours and watched the sounds, gradually understanding more of each movement, sitting in the centre of the circle of living stones. In time I began to believe that, underneath those movements, I could behold an older, deeper movement of more truth: the language of the stones themselves. For the stone inside us all, like the finger bone, helped me believe that we all originated in stone, and will return to that state, and we always have and always will.

The trees continued to die and the sea continued to rise, and the village entered a darker time than any could remember. The elected elder’s colourless words offered no help, and soon, no hope; and eventually he came to me. He came with his guards, an ever-increasing number of people, none of whom worked for the village’s good, meaning that others had to carry greater weights. He laughed with his guards as he pretended to hold a superior position to me, and the words seeped like cold out of his barely-glowing self; and they did not enter the others, but only seeped through them, leaving them colder and with less of their own glow; and I could see how many seasons it would take to utterly end all their glowing, and that the seeping of cold, forever-death would continue into the world even when the glowing had ended.

The elder could not understand what he saw in the circle of stones. He asked, but I had nearly lost the understanding of the words of the villagers. When he called me Withy and threatened me with pain if I did not explain the secret to how the circle made him feel, I made him believe I had become Grand, and I spoke for the first time with words the colour of flame. The elder was rightly terrified; but then I saw he was more terrified that the artifice he had created would collapse under the energy of my words. So he told his guards to destroy the stone circle. I was Grand, and no longer a Withy, and I had words the colour of flame, but not yet the power of flame itself –– I was yet less than a third of my life in age. I could not prevent being held down as the guards took the stones and broke them, leaving me alone in the quiet place, with just the echoes of all the colours that had surrounded and taught me as they faded into forever.

And then I understood why the trees were dying and why the seas were rising, and why they could not explain the intention behind it to anyone of my sort. Almost immediately I came to believe how long it would take for the wrongs to be righted, how long it would take to push back the seeping cold; and I knew the village had to be left behind as lost.

It took another season to believe in where I had to go. It took that long for me to learn to listen to the distance of the ends of sight, all those countless seasons ago before the village or even the trees or sea existed. As I strained to listen I saw the sounds of the Grand Father’s glow, somewhere to the south – not too far, less than a moon away, or perhaps a little more. (I had come to know the distance of a moon’s travel to be almost nothing.)

As I moved through the village for the last time, I saw the elder had persuaded them to build their own stone circle. Larger, much larger, than my own, but with the wrong stones and no glow of truth at all. There was no meaning or colour to the shapes and sounds the villagers made around it, and the act of my passing near to them caused them to stop and stand in bewilderment, feeling nothing and left with the impossible task of believing in that feeling.

Perhaps, when I arrived at my destination as a new Grand Son, my new stone circle would be larger than the first. Yet more importantly, it would be built of the proper stones, and I would put the proper energy into them, until the time came for me, as a Grand Father, to put my own energy into them; and then, at that moment, there would be thousands of years before the true colours would start to come back.

David Bowie - Blackstar in the night sky

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 09:29:46 GMT

A personal tribute I wrote five years ago, the day after his death.

[Orignally published on January 12, 2016] David Bowie had never been closer to my life than in recent years. His influence had always been there – I don’t think there are many creatives who’ll say otherwise – but always more in the background, even if it loomed larger than I often realised. “And Bowie, of course ,” you’d say when discussing influences. “Of course ,” was the reply.

He became active rather than passive again that morning in 2013. People began muttering online about a new Bowie album that had appeared on iTunes. The Next Day . It had to be a joke. Well, it was in a way – him playing a joke on the world, again – but it was also true.

Recently, m’learned colleague Jo Callis wanted our band Fingerhalo to play a few Bowie songs for a birthday bash. He selected some Ziggy-era material for us. We went, “Och, aye, that’s easy.” It wasn’t easy at all. It felt easy. It played easy. But the process of trying to inject some of that genuine feel, along with our own expressions as musicians (otherwise it would be a note-perfect copycat performance, and who wants that?) took far more energy than anyone, except Jo, realised it would.

So it was with some sense of trepidation that we played a wee set in Edinburgh’s Citrus Club last week (January 8). Those songs – Supermen , John I’m Only Dancing , Ziggy Stardust , Width Of A Circle (oh yes!), Hang On To Yourself and Where Have All The Good Times Gone (by the Kinks, covered by Bowie) – all have lives of their own that are very much more complex than one might realise at first. Just like people with lives of their own.

I think it’s fair to say we’d all like another bash at doing them justice. But the experience of playing Bowie songs live, and experiencing their lives, was a far deeper one than I’d realised it would be.

I was already impressed by Blackstar , the album released just before his death. I’d been writing around and about it for months, obviously. But when I saw the title track video I felt a sense of real joy – for the creation, for the expression, and once again, for the sense of fun that dripped through something that clearly had a darker side. There’s a scene during the section that’s almost a tribute to his 70s and 80s work, where he thumbs his nose at the camera. That summed up the entire piece to me. Still does.

Then, of course, he died. My last interaction with him was publishing his Lazarus video last week. For various reasons I hadn’t got round to watching it properly, but I’d been fascinated by the concept that there were two Bowies going in difference directions in the promo. Now we know what that was about, sadly.

Monday was the first day of my Christmas holiday, since I’d worked throughout the end of December – and of course the death of Motorhead icon Lemmy had been an emotional drain, as well as a series of long shifts at the keyboard. I was still processing the experience of that, and of having played Bowie songs on stage the previous Friday… and of having marked the beginning of my break by staying out far too late and drinking far too much Guinness and whisky.

The entire day, of course, was scunnered. I already had an appointment to shoot a feature for STV Glasgow about the late Gerry Rafferty. Soon I had several requests to talk about Bowie for various news channels – I wound up doing five separate interviews, and the last one was on a TV chat show, by which time I was truly fried.

Just as the floor manager announced ten seconds to going live, the responsibility of the situation hit me. I had my own personal reaction to Bowie’s death, of course. But in a few moments I was going to have to speak on behalf of a lot of people who couldn’t find their own words, and speak on behalf of an artistic – and human – legacy that was far beyond words. And it was the fifth time that day I’d have done it.

I managed it because it’s my job. Same way, as a young whippersnapper, I managed to remain at my newspaper post during the Dunblane massacre, the death of Princess Diana, the Gulf Wars and other events where your training takes over to prevent you breaking down with the weight of emotion.

I managed for long enough because it’s my job. Then I realised that I wasn’t going to manage for much longer. I’d been asked to stay for the end-of-show chat, when the chef serves up dinner-for-a-tenner and the hosts conduct a less structured interview. I knew I couldn’t.

Instead, I bolted out of the studio as quickly as politeness allows. Outside was a wet, dark and imposing cityscape – a bit like the Ziggy Stardust cover art – and I was grateful to hide in it.

I crossed the Squinty Bridge and along the bank of the Clyde, and stopped at the location where most of the action in my novella There’s No’ Been A Murder takes place. It felt like a different world from when I’d last visited. But then, I realised, I’d become a different person since then.

Leading up to the Bowie concert I’d spoken to a few people about how the general sense of excitement drops when you get older. As a youngster you’re energised by the thought of doing something new, and of how it will change you. Later, when you’re all been-there-done-that, you’re pretty certain you know who you’ll be afterwards, and that it’ll be an incremental change rather than a monumental one. A lot of the energy remains, but that additional spark isn’t there.

Well, Bowie showed me. He showed me when the songs really did take on a life of their own, such that it was much more difficult to control them than any of the band had realised it would be. He showed me when the hints I’d taken from Lazarus proved to be much more imposing than I’d realised. He showed me when my reaction to his death was far more attenuated than my reaction to Lemmy’s death, since it entered my life in a completely different manner.

I couldn’t put that into words as I stood in the rain on the Broomielaw. It occurred to me that every single shimmer on the surface of the water, as it came out from the shadow of the Kingston Bridge, was a Bowie idea we’d never get to know about. It wasn’t just the sky that was crying by that point.

His widow Iman had already put it into words for me, although I only read them last night: “Sometimes you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory.”

She’s right, so she is. I’ve had a bastard of a year and I’ve struggled to keep a sense of energy about my work. Just after I had the affrontery to blame the way of the world and the ravages of time for that, Bowie touched my life like he’d never done before, giving me an experience as wide and deep as the Clyde, and with more ideas packed inside than I’ll manage to express in a lifetime of continued storytelling.

And there he is, thumbing his nose at me for the rest of forever, and I’ll spend my share of that (I hope) exploring the true value of the moments he just gave me, as they become memories.

And that , you see, is why in a very real sense David Bowie is still alive – and so are many, many, many others who influence us.

(Fingerhalo had been planning to record a version of John I'm Only Dancing, and we rushed into action after hearing of Bowie's death. We scraped together a rapid-response concept for a video and we were all very proud of how it came out.)

I will write this only once...

Fri, 25 Dec 2020 18:03:54 GMT

Creating The Withy wasn't the hardest job ever

Sometimes it all just comes together. Sometimes you realise that all the false starts and abandoned ideas have been chances to build up your talents so that, when it does all just come together, you can make best use of the opportunity.

I wrote The Withy in one sitting, albeit it several years after the initial inspiration arrived from the story engine (my subconscious). It seems to feel like it too – it feels smooth, articulated and has an elegance of pace that would have been very difficult to install if I’d written it in dribs and drabs. (I’m sure I could have done it though).

There are a few things that help me get into the mode of thinking required to achieve a one-sitting piece. I need zero distraction, so I moor the boat at one of the wilderness locations I’ve collected (after a trip to a village shop somewhere); then I retire to the bedroom of my boat, where the porthole bungs mean it’s almost entirely dark. Candles help too; and finally, for some reason it helps if it’s eight degrees celsius – which is obviously more easy to achieve in the colder months and therefore why most of my best writing is done then too.

The Withy had become quite a complex concept, one that wouldn’t work if it was shoved down the reader’s throats, and one that the Withy himself was being cautious to discuss many years after it had happened. But I knew who he was and how he would speak – slightly aloof, detached, otherworldly, lonely, but determined to record his experience despite the suspicion that no one would understand his meaning.

All that came together once I had the other two things I always need. The first of those always comes first – it’s the character who has a story to tell. The second of those sometimes never comes, which is why I have a folder of over 30 well-developed concepts that may never be written. The second is knowing how the story ends; and I mean almost exactly, within a few words of what I finally write down.

When it works it’s simply brilliant. It’s complete justification of the creative career path I worked so hard to secure (in as much as it can ever be secure). It makes me feel like this is what I’m meant to be doing with my life – creating stories for people is my contribution to the human experience. It’s also, of course, completely exhausting, and there can be strange side-effects: often it’s difficult for me to wake up afterwards and understand I’m on a boat in the twenty-first century, and not on an island 12,000 years ago, just about to become the person who inspired Stonehenge…

As it happens, Jacob Holm-Lupo found himself writing the music for The Withy in one sitting, moments after he heard my brother John’s narrated version for the first time. So you know, we must all have been doing something right.

That’s not my name

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 18:03:51 GMT

Living with 'The Withy' as a title

In the summer of 2014 or thereabouts i was standing on a small footbridge overlooking a small river flowing into Coniston Water in the Lake District. At the time I was head of a small team of hard-working journalists providing a news service for a small company with a giant ambition. I loved it, although it was incredibly stressful, and it was around the point in my life where I’d begun to think about reorganising my priorities.

I suddenly felt like I’d been thrown back through time to a period before modern civilisation – asides from the bridge itself, there was nothing in my sight that couldn’t have been there millennia ago. I moved slightly so that the bridge wasn’t visible to me, and at that point I remembered the question: “Why?”

It had been asked earlier that day by one of those strange characters who wander into my consciousness from the back of my mind (my story engine). I’d been watching an episode of Time Team in which Dr Mike Parker Pearson had explained the idea of a double-burial in prehistoric Britain. When you died, you were left until your flesh had been returned to nature by the elements and the actions of animals. While that process was underway, it was suggested, your close family members carried on of your bones as a memorial. But eventually the “time for forgetting” came, when your remains were buried permanently.

The strange character was a young boy being asked to return his grandfather’s finger bone for interment – and he only wanted to know why he had to give up something so valuable to him. As I remembered him at the river, about 300 miles and 12,000 years away from his life, I knew who he was and how he felt about everything. He was a half-trained village shaman, who’d learned to understand the ways of the seas and the trees and the natural world, but not how to control them; and the death of his grand father, the shaman, meant his training would never be completed.

I also knew he was referred to as the Withy. It was nice: it sounded young, soft and slim – but it was a horrible word, and it already had an official meaning: a thin willow stick. The character was insistent in returning to my thoughts, so I knew I’d write about him one day, although not until I had a better name for him.

Well, it didn’t work out like that. When the continuing archeological exploration of Stonehenge and its surrounding ancient landscape raised the idea that the multi-generational building culture had all been one individual’s idea, I realised I already knew who they meant, and that, regardless of my issue with his name, it was time to tell his story.

There are several hundred notes and several demo chapters lying around, but I haven’t found the right way to tell it yet. I’ve learned to be patient about that kind of problem. In the meantime, I wrote a short test piece, a cross-section of the concept, designed to stand alone. And it was good! I asked my talented actor wee brother John to voice it for me, in the hope I’d learn more about the character (which I did). Then when Jacob Holm-Lupo and I began our accidental, unexpected creative partnership, The Withy was the first piece we worked on.

I happened to mention to Jacob that I’d never been happy with the character’s name. When he reminded me of a fact I’d forgotten, that a willow wand was regarded as something of a magical instrument, and the willow tree itself is often thought of as a force of nature and religion, and a fact I hadn’t considered, that he’s probably best known for his work with the band White Willow… I became very comfortable with the fact that the boy who wandered into my head six years earlier was always meant to known as The Withy .

Martin Kielty, Jacob Holm-Lupo Release The Withy

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 18:03:46 GMT

Prog epic explores the roots of Stonehenge

White Willow, the Opium Cartel and Telepath mastermind Jacob Holm-Lupo has collaborated with Prog news editor Martin Kielty to release a concept work that offers a theory as to how Stonehenge was inspired.

The Withy is set in Orkney 2,000 years before construction began on the famous stone circle, and tells the story of a young boy who has the power to control nature but has had no training because his village shaman died. Realising that the trees on his native island are dying, while the seas are rising, he comes up with a way to understand his abilities before it’s too late. It’s narrated by Kielty’s brother John, an award-winning actor.

“The idea came about watching Time Team ,” Kielty says. “There was a theory that people kept the bone of an ancestor as a memento-mori, but returned it to the grave when the ‘time for forgetting’ came. I thought, ‘What happens if you don’t want to give the bone back?’ Another time it was suggested that the civilisation that started building all those stone structures was inspired by one person. I thought, ‘I know who that guy is!’

Holm-Lupo adds: “Martin sent me the story and asked very gently if I might be interested in contributing some music. I was pretty much overwhelmed with inspiration the second I started listening, so soundtrack was composed on the fly as I was listening for the first time.”

“The only guidance I suggested was that since we have fire on screen, water in the soundtrack and earth as the theme, we could do with air in the music,” Kielty explains. “What he sent back needed nothing done to it.”

Holm Lupo: “With Martin's ‘air’ keyword and the narration, the music pretty much wrote itself. I decided to stick with airy synthesizer pads and mallet-like sounds – mostly from an 80s Oberheim synth – and ritualistic percussion, to create a sound that is not rooted in any particular era yet still builds on certain soundtrack traditions. It was a total joy to work on!”

Holm-Lupo and Kielty hope to develop The Withy into a long-form project. “I’ve been fighting with the concept for nine years,” Kielty says. “There’s a lot more to be told about this little lost boy who changed the world because he had no choice. In times like these, it’s a very inspiring idea.

You Can't Get In

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 11:42:14 GMT

Why do we love pubs?

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 10:27:40 GMT

Interview with the Ghost Detective

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 11:33:13 GMT

Author Adrian Perkins is the person behind the Ghost Detective series of books. I spoke to him about what he does and how he feels about it. Filmed in the Olde Sun , Nether Heyford, Northamptonshire. Directed by Hal Sinden .

Mooring up

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 11:22:24 GMT

With a lockdown imminent, and being aware of how the last one brought supply issues to the cut while people struggled to adjust to the new normal, I decided to book into my old marina for a couple of months. The cruise back was pleasant – with no one around, the sense of increasing tension and doubt was gone.

Mooring up to the berth involved a multi-point turn. It was sort of like a jigsaw puzzle in that I had to fit a certain shape in a certain space, while other shapes got in the way: other boats, the mooring pontoons, the edges of the canal. Like everything else on the cut, it takes a while. But when I posted the clip on Facebook a lot of people commented on the relaxing vibe it seemed to suggest. There was even talk of a much-admired artist's music being attached to the clip for maximum effect. It didn't happen, but perhaps you'll enjoy the clip anyway.

A winter morning in Stoke Bruerne

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 11:12:02 GMT

The Boozer Cruiser

Four years, 1,115,880 views and 54,944 subs later…