Echoes of a Past Present

To most people, February 14th was Valentine's Day, or St Valentine's if you are more religiously aware. For Fr Thesis and other good Anglo-Catholics it was the Feast of SS Cyril & Methodius, while to Professor Purplepen it was the Eve of Lupercalia. My chief observance of the day, however, was the anniversary of the release of Let England Shake. As dedicated Pollywatchers await the publication in April of her collection of poetry, Orlam, telling the story of a young girl growing up in the Dorset countryside - which the publishers Picador rather ambitiously claim will 'renew English poetry' - we are sure the maestra is preparing new music, as she has had herself photographed for Instagram with a guitar and a variety of what knowledgable souls say are very weird pedals. Perhaps it even relates to the poetry. But for now we must content ourselves with the old stuff.

War, the bloody meat of Let England Shake, never goes out of fashion, and the album's dense lyrical tapestry of references from Flanders Fields and Gallipoli, Jamaica and Kurdistan, Ireland and the Peninsular War, that both locate and dislocate the history of human conflict, are as relevant now as ever. The past flows through us all, and on into the future. The last song is 'The Colour of the Earth', taken from the words of an Antipodean soldier remembering a fallen comrade. PJH wanted Mick Harvey to sing it - she joins in later - and only after the recording did he tell her that his own grandfather had been at Gallipoli:

Louis was my dearest friend

fighting in the ANZAC trench

Louis ran forward from the line

I never saw him again

Yesterday, after listening to the album again, I found myself looking up the video on Youtube, one of the ones shot by Seamus Murphy. At first PJH, Mick Harvey, John Parish and Jean-Marc Butty sing the song a capella in the lane near Eype Church where the recording was done, followed by the album version accompanied by Murphy's images. 

In the comments I found this:

PJH's music continues to have - sadly - a terrifying contemporary resonance. We can only hope that Mr Putin is a rational kind of crook and that his administration is not secretly as chaotic and makeshift as the Johnson one seems to be, because powers with the capacity to destroy civilisation shouldn't mess about with one another. Slips and miscalculations just might lead to more human damage than just that of a small and nasty war.