The Spiritual Bounds of Satire

Lately, Death stalks the halls of Euterpe: Ozzy Osbourne, Cleo Laine, Connie Francis, and now Tom Lehrer. I was introduced to the oeuvre of Mr Lehrer at university by Comrade Tankengine; 35 years after that, and up to 70 after the songs were written, I think I can appreciate their bold savagery more than ever. Far from being blunted by time, they get sharper as you can perceive how they must have landed at the time. Drug-taking, pornography, venereal disease, nuclear annihilation, inter-community prejudice, and cruelty to animals: no target is beyond their scope, all wrapped up in razor-sharp and inventive rhyme and meter. For a slightly less sulphurous way of making the point, listen to Lehrer’s introduction, and his audience’s reaction, to ‘The Vatican Rag’, a 1965 song about the Second Vatican Council. His phrases about the Church becoming more ‘commercial’ and ‘selling the product’ sound shocking (as I think they should be) rather than the commonplace cliches they now are; once the song begins, as it converts solemn ritual into absurd pantomime without any actual, definite abuse, the audience responds with whoops and gasps, simply unable to believe that anyone is saying this stuff.

And you wonder whether anyone would say it now. On the one hand, Tom Lehrer was always the first to point out that satire changed nothing: ‘it’s not even preaching to the converted, it’s titillating the converted’, he believed. On the other, just a little bit further down the road of eroding the rule of law we currently travel, and the ivory-fingering academic would surely run the risk of being shot up against a wall. Tyrants have notoriously poor senses of humour, even if the joke doesn’t really threaten them. In The Libertine John Malkovich’s Charles II watches in fury as Johnny Depp’s Earl of Rochester savages him theatrically as King Bolloxinion: ‘This is very funny’, says a beaming French ambassador to the King, ‘if this was Paris, the playwright would already be dead by now’. Thank heavens for the Civil War.

But does satire do us any spiritual good? Back in Oxford days I collaborated with Comrade Tankengine and others in a gossipy weekly political newsletter which was occasionally witty and always scabrous, directed at the University society we belonged to. For me, it was a kind of continuation of some of the things I’d done, or, more often, imagined doing, at school. We told ourselves that it was all about catharsis, about carving out a space for ourselves and those who felt similarly alienated which at least kept us within the bounds of the Party. But we couldn’t half be cruel sometimes. There is a strain of self-congratulation and contempt even in the best of satire – and you can argue Tom Lehrer’s is that, as it’s the cleverest. ‘If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while’, he said. The Roman Catholic Church was given lenient treatment in the light of that.

I will still flick to Lehrer on my creaking, steam-powered iPod from time to time, but part of me will always feel I should apologise to the Lord. And I will not visit the park to poison a single pigeon.

O For A Thousand Tongues

Continuing the Rowan Williams theme, Dr Abacus does me a great service in pointing me to an article from The Times I would have to pay to consult myself, in which the former ABC opines about the plight of modern hymn-singing. Absent anything more than the vaguest knowledge of religious music on the part of the general public, he says, people asking for hymns at funerals or weddings are driven back to ‘primary-school level’ songs. It’s worse that that, I would think: every clergyperson despairs at having to sing ‘All Things B&B’ again, but that’s the ‘primary school level’ of 50 years ago or more. This is not just a random outburst from Dr Williams, as he is president of the Hymn Society of Great Britain & Ireland, but it does edge in the direction of grumpy-old-priest-ism. He pleads for priests ‘to encourage children at local schools to do more hymn-singing’ (I will do my best and we’ll see how that goes) and it’s left to the Society’s secretary, Fr Richard Cranham, to offer thanks that people still know 'All Things B&B' even if they’re ignorant of everything else. 'Apart from Away In a Manger', probably.

When we used to get together to plan the monthly Family Service (RIP) at Swanvale Halt, Edgar (RIP) could usually be relied on to argue that we needed to strive to include modern hymns that non-churchgoers knew. "But Edgar", I would say, knowing that what he meant was something written in the 1970s, "the problem is that people now don’t know any hymns. We can’t just restrict ourselves to the half-a-dozen that they might possibly have heard of" (especially when that includes the aforementioned 'Away In a Manger'). My main reflection is that, quite apart from any spiritual deficit that might result, the lack of hymn-knowledge is a tremendous cultural impoverishment. Lots of traditional hymns are nothing very special, but some are stunning. Anyone who thinks that trad church music is boring should have been at our evening mass last Sunday when we sang 'O For A Thousand Tongues' to the tune Lyngham. As I told the congregation, it’s a good 18^th-century hymn tune so for the bit where you repeat lines you can basically sing the words you want and whatever notes you want and provided we all come together at the end it will be all right. And it was sensationally uplifting. As for schools, the usual fare at our Infant School – apart from the songs the children sing, which tend to be seasonal rather than religious – we troop into assembly to the worship songs the head teacher is familiar with from her own place of worship, but I remember the day when she instead decided to play 'Eternal Father Strong to Save', which is one of my favourites, rigorous in its theology and incomparably powerful in its emotion. I definitely got a lump in my throat. And yet, although I think many people would probably recognise this song if it was put in front of them, they probably aren’t aware enough of it, or many, many more like it, to remember it otherwise.

What we do about this is another matter. Once upon a time we had a thing called ‘Sunday Sing’ which was simply a group of us gathering one Sunday evening a month to sing hymns that might be coming up in worship in the next couple of months, with tea afterwards. But only the usual suspects ever came, not the souls who could have benefited most from singing them. Still, I’ve often wondered whether hymns are, potentially, a bridge to unchurched people.

Perhaps the Goth-inflected Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, Bambie Thug, has some knowledge of hymns, though they show no overt sign of it and Roman Catholics aren’t all that used to singing compared to Anglicans. Following the usual Goth strategy of turning negative emotions and experiences into something positive and active – victimhood to autonomy – the artist’s witchy imagery of candles, pentangles, and baths full of flower petals and coloured dye, provokes Irish priests to outbursts that read more like an old bloke ranting in the pub than a sermon, but although I’m sympathetic I don’t warm to it a lot either. I understand what’s going on, but these occult mechanisms of blessings and hexings are either a way of talking to and animating elements within yourself – a form of meditation – or an attempt to make things happen in the real and concrete world by bargaining with forces that in fact aren’t there – a form of magic. Either way, they're a spiritual dead end. Mx Thug would be far better off, ultimately, getting to know a few hymns: I can't help feeling that they, and the great majority of people, are missing out terribly.

What A Difference A Year Makes

It is the time of Christmas concerts at the church - schools, choirs, councils, all doing roughly the same thing and getting lots of people through the door, although the GCSE music students from Widelake Secondary doing Bohemian Rhapsody was moderately unusual fare. The latest of these events came from the Hornington Singers. I left last year's concert midway through the first half, not because I had other things I absolutely needed to do or because I was any tireder than usual, but because it was an aesthetically challenging experience and I couldn't help concluding that putting up with it was an Advent penance I could manage without. When anyone talked about the concert I managed to come up with circumlocutions which obscured how bad I thought it had been.

This year they have a new director and instantly you could tell matters were very different: two hours later and they were understandably a bit tired, but even then it was OK for a bunch of amateur singers. Today I've had a couple of conversations with people who were there. Typically my interlocutor has opened with 'It was good last night, wasn't it?' and I have ventured a cautious 'Yes, and a bit improved on last year I thought', and then it all comes pouring out, the sense that this person has waited for twelve months for someone (presumably someone they don't live with anyway) to share how dreadful an experience it was. How much of life is like that, he says in 'Thought For The Day' mode. 

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Goth: A History' by Lol Tolhurst (Quercus, 2023)

It’s only at the very end of his second book – his first, Cured (2016), described how The Cure came into being, what he did in the band, and how he crashed out of it – that Lol Tolhurst lets us in on the plan. At first he thought of writing an encyclopaedia, he says, before concluding that he wasn’t up to it and that nobody would be satisfied by anything he might produce, and so, instead, he wrote a memoir. But its subject isn’t ‘my time in The Cure’ – the earlier volume covered that – rather it tells how music, literature and aesthetics have fed into Mr Tolhurst’s sense of who he is and how he looks at the world. You do get a thirty-page account of the life and times of The Cure, but you also get encounters with other great names in the post-punk and Goth world, the bands Messrs Smith, Tolhurst et al saw perform, met, or worked with. Sometimes the connection is a bit oblique: a discussion of Depeche Mode begins with the author describing how he bumped into Andy Fletcher when they were both being treated at The Priory, and I can’t see any overlap that justifies two pages on the Sisters of Mercy at all, but along the way Mr Tolhurst addresses exactly the kind of questions other works haven't tackled. What was it like being a teenage music fan in the 1970s? He outlines the importance of John Peel, the music press and local record shops. What led proto-Goth young people to start playing music in the first place? He describes the drabness of his and Robert Smith’s Crawley surroundings and how their first visit to Salford revealed exactly why Joy Division sounded like they did; he relates Julianne Regan of All About Eve’s similar feelings about the landscape she grew up in, and David J of Bauhaus’s about Northampton. During an account of The Cure’s tour supporting the Banshees in 1979, he ponders the differences between London and the suburbs, laments the grotty venues they often played, and marvels at Siouxsie’s brisk methods of dealing with the unenlightened males who gave her grief at concerts. Why did musicians keep going? Mr Tolhurst tells us how making new music with French group The Bonapartes made him feel better after the stresses of his own band; David J describes performing as ‘an exorcism’ of negative feelings; Julianne Regan confesses that making music was a compensation for a decidedly unromantic existence. The chapter on the poetry that’s meant something to the author, and the concluding section on wider Goth culture, are there, again, to stress his sense of being part of something bigger than just one Goth band at one moment, something that ultimately brought him meaning.

You will look in vain here for Lol Tolhurst saying a single bad word about anyone. The closest he gets to being personally critical is in an account of The Cure’s first trip to California in 1981 when they find themselves staying in the same ‘kitschy motel’ as Joe Jackson: ‘Joe represented the new wave movement. Oh dear’. And that’s it. For all the gloomth of the Goth world, this book is overwhelmingly positive. It’s kind, humane and humble, conversationally-written and easy to read, and there is nothing else like it at the moment. Take off the odd paper half-jacket around the cover, and it’s even rather beautiful, bearing an embossed black raven against a cloud on the front and a feather on the back, with a neutral grey background, a bit like a children’s adventure book from the 1950s. Lol Tolhurst’s girlfriend in 1977, when the book starts, was a black-clad girl with straight black hair he calls The Raven; and we know that, in the dark, All Cats Are Grey.

A Vocal Vocation

All the profiles of Sinéad O’Connor after her death drew attention to a song I thought among the least interesting in her output: ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ is a basically schmaltzy piece of work lent dignity and emotion by the power and passion she puts into it, though it made sense to hang her off it for a general public most likely to have known her through her biggest hit, rather than the eerie gothic of ‘Jackie’ or the operatics of ‘Troy’ – for instance.

It was good to read and hear proper acknowledgement of O’Connor’s religion – for this most religious of performers – including from Christian commentators. This is someone who claimed her contract made with the Holy Spirit before she began performing was far more important than any agreed with a record company. In fact that reviewer of O’Connor’s memoir from 2021, Jessica Mesman, I see, makes the good point that religious is a much better word for the singer than spiritual. Religion, the word, relates to a Latin root meaning ‘to bind’, and O’Connor’s pursuit of faith resulted in her exactly binding herself to religious tradition, to successive religious traditions, with a passion that’s a long, long way from the self-centred and dilletante sampling we too often associate with the idea of spirituality. She gave herself to them, even when it invited ridicule. Fundamentally, she wasn’t looking for something that made her feel better, that ‘worked for her’, something experiential that put her at the centre: she was following where (she felt) the Spirit led her, seeking to make sense out of what had happened to her, Ireland, and the world. She admitted she was crazy, but beneath the craziness was a basic unity of purpose that held together a woman who could come on stage as a Christian priest – properly if irregularly ordained – and then a few years later as a Muslim in a hijab. None of it was done for effect. Well, it was: but the effect was not focused on herself, but on the eternal.

Prophets are uncomfortable presences, and O’Connor, like the even less amenable Diamanda Galás, was definitely that, proclaiming to the Church its own corruption and falsehood. The Church will always be corrupt and false, and in a week when the Bishop of Newcastle decides to refuse Lord Sentamu Permission To Officiate on the grounds of his response to being criticised in a safeguarding report, you needn’t think the Church of England differs that much from the Church of Rome.

Of course, she was wrong about the Church, though right enough about the caricature of itself which it so regularly holds up for the admiration of human beings. The Church, it seems to me, exists only to do two things, to state definitely and dauntlessly the reality and nature of God and what he has done, and to demonstrate that we don’t live the spiritual life alone, even when we are alone; that we need one another. That’s why you can’t be ordained without a Christian community to be ordained into, to live out that vocation with: vocation isn’t a solitary matter, and I don’t think O’Connor ever really considered the possibility of taking assemblies in an infant school or talking to old ladies about their hip operations over tea after Bishop Michael Brown laid hands on her. But the Church itself forgets that, and assumes a role God never envisaged for it.

Part of me looks at O’Connor’s religious life and wonders what might have happened if she had found it possible to stay concertedly in one Christian tradition. My instinct is to see people fixed: say the Office and go to Mass, I’d have said, settle and listen and you'll find some healing. But perhaps prophets have to stay broken and difficult to remain true to their calling; perhaps God might sometimes want a priest to turn into a Muslim. The Church can’t dare to say so much, but it ought dare to think it.

PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023)

The first reaction to PJ Harvey’s latest studio album, seven years in the waiting for those of us who were (notwithstanding her soundtrack projects for All About Eve, The Virtues or Bad Sisters), must be astonishment that thirty years into their career an artist can still produce something so radically distinct from what’s come before. There are, almost inevitably, hints and echoes of the past, but they are merely that, just as the blushes of other artists – Patti Smith’s ‘Ghost Dance’ on the title track, for instance, rhythms that call to mind Kylie Minogue at her best or vocals mimicking Siouxsie when she still had a voice – amount to nothing more than a drop or two of flavour added to the mix.

It's also necessary to say that this isn’t ‘Orlam put to music’, even though every song derives from a lyric in that book. I’ve said how I found Orlam a baleful and horrible work notwithstanding its brilliance; the album runs with the folklore, flora and fauna, and the personal mythology of the book, but excises the rapes and menace to favour something far less definite and monstrous. It’s weird, but dreamy-weird rather than bloody-weird. Structurally, the poems are bent and reshaped into songs, in the same way Harvey refashioned elements of The Hollow of the Hand into Hope Six. This means that the recording isn’t telling the same story as the book, even when it begins where the book does with ‘Prayer at the Gate’. The twelve tracks don’t follow the year the way Orlam does, but leap around the months, leaving us somewhere toward the end of summer. Mind you, there’s a slight feel of the early 1970s about ‘Autumn Term’ and ‘Seem an I’, or the witchy folk-horror sensibility of ‘A Child’s Question: July’, just the time Harvey was growing up and when Orlam is imagined.

The narrative indeterminacy is intensified by techniques Harvey has never used before, especially sampling found sounds - the children playing on ‘Autumn Term’ or the birds and insects on ‘Noiseless Noise’ - or the rhythmic distortion of her voice (‘The Nether-Edge’). None of it is obvious or clear: the sampled noises are not straightforward scene-setting like the seagulls on Uh Huh Her, but cut into tiny fragments and looped, often placed so low in the mix that you’re not sure what you’re hearing. This means they are not intrusions of the real world into that of the album, but parts of the real world captured and transformed, a bit like a human hair used in a magic spell. Are there church bells close to the end of ‘I Inside the Old I Dying’? And what’s the scraping noise repeated through the first half of ‘August’? Sometimes you fasten onto a sound or aural shape, only to find it disappearing. This is a recording which you absolutely need to listen to on headphones or a high-quality sound system, else most of its subtleties will escape you.

The album in Harvey’s oeuvre closest to the atmosphere of I Inside the Old Year Dying is 1998’s Is This Desire?, a similarly enclosed, dreamy series of soundscapes; but the earlier record’s intense tales were models of clarity and comprensibility compared to this, so internal and hazy. The final track, ‘A Noiseless Noise’, finishes with the plea ‘Come away, love, and leave your wandering’, as though addressing someone emerging from a strange reverie, and perhaps, in the previous forty minutes, that’s just where we’ve been. 

The Welcome Mat

It was, of course, a great privilege to be able to host Paula’s Civic Service as Mayor of the Borough, but I’m glad it’s behind us. We were working out the choreography until just before we started, and deciding which of our organist and the Town Band (twenty of them!) was going to play what piece of music. Thankfully both of them were extremely flexible and understanding, and I came away with a respect for the organist’s sense of diplomacy which is not a quality you always associate with church musicians. Mayoral chains of various local authorities glittered around the pews. The centrepiece of this sort of event is an exchange of commitments rather like a wedding, when the Mayor promises to do their best and everyone else promises to support them. Afterwards I blessed the Mayor’s cake, and a gentleman visitor told me how as a young man in South Africa he’d seen a Roman Catholic priest in Soweto blessing a popcorn machine (it was intended to raise money for the Society of St Vincent de Paul, apparently).

As usual whenever I lead a service where I can expect the congregation will include people of a variety of different opinions, I began by acknowledging the possibility that some might not want to say some Christian things, but if so they should just keep Paula in mind; and in my homily – which was about the ambiguities and sacrifices implied in the idea of ‘community’ – I referred to the different ways Christians and non-believers might think about and describe the process of learning to live with diversity and conflict. A young woman who works for one of the charities Paula is supporting during her year as Mayor came up to me after the service, and told me ‘I was quite emotional during the service because as a humanist it’s the first time I can ever remember being specifically included in a religious event. Normally I expect just to let it all go past me, but this time I felt I was welcome’.

How affirming that was! Until I opened my bible this morning and read 1Thessalonians 2.4, ‘we speak not to please mortals, but to please God, who tests our hearts’. I do have an intense dislike of making people sad. If I was challenged to name my strongest motivation in life, I would say that I wanted everyone to be happy. I know they can’t be because some end up wanting things that are incompatible with the happiness of others, and many of us fallen souls wrap ourselves in delusions which need to be eroded before we find happiness; but is it a reprehensible thing to aim at? It might be, if my true instinct is less to avoid pain for others, than too avoid the pain I experience by causing it to them. I suppose my only security is that it is indeed God who tests my heart. Nor can you be confident that a course of action which brings people unhappiness is ipso facto pleasing to the Lord.

I became a believer in 1995, and nearly thirty years later still don’t know with any clarity where the boundary lies between the saved and the lost, or which side of it the young woman who spoke to me yesterday falls; or where I do, for that matter. I leave it to God, and throw myself and others on his mercy. What else can I do?

The Church has never before really faced a situation in which a previously believing culture decides that Christianity is something it wants to turn away from. The first apostles preached to Jews, and the task was to convince them that Jesus of Nazareth was the fulfilment of what they already believed; and to Gentile pagans, for whom ‘God’ was another deity like the ones they already knew. The Scriptures really give us very little clue as to how to approach a world which has judged the Church and found it wanting, or judged Christianity and found it unconvincing, nor do they tell us what God thinks about such a situation.

As the Church of England sacks the ‘independent’ safeguarding advisors it employed to hold it to account precisely because it didn’t agree with the way they were holding it to account, it seems that the Church’s desire for power and security still hasn’t been sufficiently burned out of it, and there is more disciplining yet to go. I increasingly feel that the task of this generation’s believers is to begin, just begin, the work of convincing the world that Christians are not monsters, made monstrous by belief in a monstrous God. A modest aim, but one we will struggle with enough.

Stay-at-Home

This Autumn PJ Harvey tours her soon-to-be-released album I Inside the Old Year Dying, which lifts off from the poems of Orlam. There are two London dates (so far), and I have decided not to go. This isn’t primarily because of the cost: the whole evening including travel and so on will edge towards £100, but that wouldn’t matter if I could be sure the experience would be worthwhile, and I’m not convinced it will be.

When I saw Harvey at the Albert Hall back in 2011 she was, mainly, performing Let England Shake interspersed with some songs from White Chalk and a couple of old favourites. It was an intense, but static experience, somehow eroding both the ethereal strangeness of White Chalk and the shimmering beauty – which contrasts with the bloody subject-matter – of Let England Shake, and making both more ordinary. Catching PJH at the Brixton Academy during the Hope Six tour in 2016 was a different matter. The Hope Six Demolition Project was an uneven work as a recording: it truly came alive in performance, with a bigger band than Harvey had ever worked with, the volume turned up to drown out whatever doubts there might have been about the music. The concerts were deliberately theatrical, intricately planned, and grand: it was big music making big statements about human society and global citizenship.

To judge by the first two pieces of music from the album that have been released, I think I Inside the Old Year Dying live will be more a 2011 experience than 2016, and this time I would be not sat relatively comfortably in the Albert Hall but standing for two hours in a hot and crowded Camden Roundhouse. So I will listen to the record, and enter into the strange world of the new album, which seems so much more suited to smallness and intimacy, at home, and summon the Maestra into my garden, perhaps, rather than glimpse her across a sea of heads. 

'Art of Darkness', by John Robb (Louder Than War, 2023)

It is not, I think, an easy matter to write well about popular music. It is often very, very hard to account for the appeal of a particular artist, album or track, even if you feel it yourself. You’re tempted to grandiloquise, or you find yourself falling back on clichés and, if you have even the remotest degree of self-awareness, you then try to avoid those clichés and end up producing text that reads like a thesaurus. What you write stands in constant danger of collapse into meaningless sentences, pretentious metaphors, and, if you don’t check back properly, repetition.

Art of Darkness drops straight into all these traps and rarely clambers out, to the extent that I find a lot of it actually hard to read. The Blogging Goth has already given this long-awaited and much-heralded book a detailed and dreadful review, so I won’t dwell on the typos, maladroit expressions and strange lacunae which scatter almost every page, mainly because a reader can also easily appreciate the colossal work and commitment the author has put into it. Instead, there are deeper problems which relate to Art of Darkness’s aims and methods, and I will talk about them.

The Blogging Goth takes Mr Robb to task for, to all appearances, having no awareness of the extensive academic work on Goth culture and subculture, and he is right: the early chapters of the book unnecessarily rehearse what is now a very familiar story of Gothic art across the centuries. But it is a different book which haunts Art of Darkness, one more directly relevant to the subject: Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again, the 2005 history of post-punk which, for all its controversies, still stands as the baseline for anyone wanting to tackle the topic. Reynolds’s chapter on early Goth in Rip It Up tells the same story in twenty pages that John Robb covers in 530; it’s an account with plenty to contest or at least expand on, so the point must be whether Art of Darkness answers any of the questions Reynolds skates past in his breezy and vigorous prose. I would expect any ‘history of Goth’, especially one claiming to be ‘The history of Goth’, to have a go; but a passing reference in an interview with Andrew Eldritch is the only sign that Rip It Up or the questions it begs features at all in Mr Robb’s mental landscape. The biggest of those questions is how is it that we recognise as ‘Goth’ all these completely disparate forms of music?

Chapters 6 to 12 are intended to highlight the ‘dark’ elements of glam, mainstream rock, and the like which helped to produce what we know think of as ‘Goth’, but only occasionally do we get any insight into how this happened. Interviewees in the book repeatedly state that the importance of David Bowie, for instance, to the post-punks who started bands lay less in anything he wrote as such, but in his presentation of possibility, of non-mainstream models of sexuality, of drama and pretence; and that the role of punk was to open up a space in which young musicians felt they could create with minimal resources. We don’t actually need lots of information about Bowie, glam, or punk, to make any of these points. Once we pass beyond the early Goth bands whose members Mr Robb has interviewed so diligently we are promised an account of ‘How dark energy infected Indie’ (chapter 33), but what we get is a list of Goth-ish artists, not an examination of how this came about. Incidentally, you would expect me to look for a mention of PJ Harvey, and here she is, featured in three paragraphs across which Mr Robb manages to get wrong the year when she got going as an independent artist, mangles the title of her breakthrough album, and adapts his most striking statement, unacknowledged, from Andrew Collins’s famous NME review of Dry in 1992. If that’s the case with an artist I know something about, what reliance can I place on the rest?

The substantial worth of Art of Darkness lies in its interviews with musicians, but even more with the accounts of clubs, retailers and Goth experience beyond the membership of bands. The first chapter begins with a nice re-imagining of a night at an alternative club; there’s a breathless list of regional clubs on p.11, any and each of which could do with a write-up of its own; and the descriptions of venues across the country in chapters 19, 25 and 28, of the way they focused musical life, of what it was like to attend them and the risks you took to do so – club manager Doreen Allen eventually provided a bus so her clientele at Planet X in Liverpool could get home without being beaten up – are easily the most valuable elements of the book. They’re also some of the easier to read: the description of Pete Burns holding court at Probe Records in Liverpool during the late ‘70s is a hoot (p.399).

And it’s in the experience of these early Goth clubbers that we might find the beginnings of an answer to the question of how all this stuff comes to be thought of as Goth at all: that certainly can’t come from the interviewees, who, almost to a soul, scorn the word. There’s a ‘history of Goth’ to be told that wrests itself free from bands and is instead organised around the consumers of Goth culture: it’s their active filtering and processing of the fare offered to them that actually settles what is or is not Goth. John Robb continually approaches this idea and then backs away from it, but his book does provide lots of material for anyone who might want to pursue it in the future.

Art of Darkness’s last few pages enter very interesting territory, though it’s mainly through the words of the Goth academics Mr Robb has asked for help, Claire Nally of Northumbria University and freelancer Kate Cherrell, and the passionate paragraph by Kai Asmaa from Morocco describing being a Gothic person in a conservative Muslim culture. There are books waiting to be written around Nally and Cherrell’s suggestions about the interaction between Goth online and in real life: perhaps they will do so. It’s on the very penultimate page that John Robb suggests he might actually understand more than he seems to, with the statement that ‘Goth itself had no manifesto. It was … a retrospective term for something already happening’. That’s the key to its history which, for the most part, he has left unused.

The Anchoress, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 20.5.23

Given the excitement of the Spring Fair that I knew was going to occupy so much of Saturday, responding to The Anchoress's email on Friday evening alerting me to the late availability of a handful of tickets for her concert on the South Bank would have been foolish in the extreme, so naturally I did. I cooked a dinner I could take with me, and calculated that if everything worked out I would be able to catch a train that would get me into London well in time (rather than just in time). So it proved, and I was able to take part in an evening of energetic and passionate music, without the slight fragility that sometimes characterises The Anchoress's recorded work. I didn't know about her until relatively recently, thanks as usual to Radio 4, though she's been about for ten years or more. Despite all the seats being sold according to the South Bank website, there were nine seats around me vacant; two rows ahead were a couple I know from Swanvale Halt.

Two Out Of Three

My shoes were, I think, the only brogues in the tiny, tiny downstairs performance area at the Hope & Anchor in Islington on Monday night. It's a long time since I've seen or rather heard any music live, the timings that evening seemed to fit, and I knew one member of one act and the partner of another, so I decided to go. Madame Morbidfrog's husband (I ought not to call him Mr Romeburns, as that isn't his musical outlet at the moment) had the cheek to come on on time and so I missed his entire set ('I'm sure you can catch it on Youtube', he reassured me), but I did manage to see the others. I liked Last July most, and will look up some of their stuff. 
Since when did Goth acts (a more suitable word than 'bands' when you're only talking about a single person) record all their keyboard and percussion work at home and then play live with just a guitar and vocals with the recording accompanying them? My goodness!

There, Gone: A G-String

By far the most contentious item at this week's PCC meeting was the potential acquisition of a baby-grand piano which is being offered to the church, free of charge, by another local body. It was contentious I think because the two poles of opinion were both based around perfectly true propositions: first, 'this is a nice bit of kit we aren't having to pay for', and second 'this is something we don't strictly need'. Only personal taste could bring one down on one side or the other.

Ironically Saturday's music exams began with a terrible keyboard-related crisis. Being an Associated Board of Royal School of Music exam centre is beneficial to us in several ways - it's a service to the community, it gets people into the church who might otherwise never come near it, and we earn some helpful cash. The great majority of examinees are pianists, though on Saturday we had a real-life bassoonist with a real-life bassoon, and that doesn't happen very often. There is an elderly upright piano available for them to practice on, but yesterday it became clear very quickly that middle G wasn't working. A brief examination revealed that the hammer had come loose, and we need to investigate how this happened. It was a serendipitous stroke that Doug, the husband of Jean the sacristan, was stewarding at the exams and had an electric keyboard at home, which he collected and installed in the church. We can keep it as long as we need, he said. How lucky we are to have such lovely people to hand. It meant the candidates didn't have to sing G whenever they wanted to use it.

Passiontide Devotion

Yesterday evening our 'augmented' choir (all the singers we can muster from ourselves, plus the odd soul dragged in from other churches) laid on their musical offering for Passiontide, this year for reasons of convenience on Passion Sunday rather than Palm Sunday. In the past I have moaned a bit about the music, and the form, alternating between examples of what I can't help but regard as somewhat turgid and uninvolving Victorian fare. This year was very different, a selection of readings, anthems, and congregational hymns, along the same pattern as our Advent and Christmas carol services, and I liked that much more: it was less of a performance and more of a service, and though that might make it harder to market beyond the church, the takers for the previous version, if they weren't already church members, were family and friends of the singers anyway. 

Delving into old service registers as I am at the moment has shown how common this kind of musical event in the days leading up to Easter was at one time. Lots of churches seem to have put on a similar kind of devotion, performance, or whatever, on a Sunday evening at the end of Lent, and I wonder whether this reflects the paucity of official Anglican liturgical provision for the season. Until Lent, Holy Week and Easter was published as late as 1984, if you wanted to do anything beyond what was available in the Prayer Book you had to borrow from Roman sources. Of course plenty did, even if they weren't all-out Roman Rite churches, but these musical offerings may have been part of the same attempt to add something appropriate to the diet.

'To Bring You My Love' at 28

A nicer anniversary falling today (as well as being Lady Arlen and Madame Morbidfrog's birthdays) is that PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love was released on February 27th in 1995. Many moons ago now I told you about my first encounter with it. For lots of souls it was the moment they first met the Corscombe conjuror-of-storms, wrapped in red silk or her shocking-pink catsuit or whatever costume she might have been wearing at the time, and it has lost none of its haunting power over subsequent years. At the time, reviewers gulped at the inconceivable about-face the album represented, as its author seemed completely to junk everything she'd done up to that point; some hated it, Time awarding it their title of worst recording of the year, a 'hopelessly mannered CD' produced by an 'utterly graceless singer'. Nicholas Barber for The Independent, though, thought he could sum it up in six inspired words: 'imagine "Siouxsie and the Bad Seeds"'. 

In view of subsequent events, TBYML did seem a bit like PJH's audition for the job of Nick Cave's girlfriend, and many commentators were keen to draw the comparison at the time. But though it and the output of the Bad Seeds at the time seem to share an imaginative universe, they aren't very close together in it. If we think of TBYML as pastiche Americana, we are reading into it settings that aren't there, as its lyrics are marked by distinct unspecificity; and, with the possible exception of 'Working For the Man', Harvey sings for women characters, while the women on Cave's records are usually the victims of the characters he voices. And it was a good dozen years after the album was released that the maestra told Gary Crowley on BBC Radio London about a much more important consideration in her mind at the time, the writing of Flannery O'Connor. In 2020 she posted a picture on Instagram showing her with a copy of O'Connor's Wise Blood, taken, she said, around the time TBYML was being composed - though more recently she told Rolling Stone that she was already reading the American's work in her late teens (I'm not sure she isn't misremembering that, she is not always careful about dates).

Flannery O'Connor was an artist thought little of for many years, who seems to have ascended to general acclaim just at the point that aspects of her work - and, even more, her person, if the two can be separated - start to become unacceptable to those who decide what to celebrate and what to denigrate, aspects which shouldn't really be news. O'Connor was only 39 when she died in 1964 of systemic lupus, the same disabling disease that killed her father - a sardonic, thoughtful writer of morality tales with a taste for the violent, her attitudes drawn deep from Catholic Christianity, and yet an author who refused to proselytise, instead depicting her characters engaged almost unawares in the battle for goodness and transcendence the Faith outlined; and one who also resisted any attempt to locate good and evil in simple, obvious places. O'Connor's is a fallen world penetrated with grace. 

Harvey says that O'Connor's work taught her about storytelling: it 'was also shaping the way that my third-person narrative was becoming in the whole record'. Now, the curious thing about this is that, like most of her music, TBYML's songs don't embody stories. It's only really on her subsequent record, 1998's Is This Desire?, that she turns to such structures, and some of the tracks on that record do have specific lift-off points in tales by O'Connor. The protagonists of TBYML give you glimpses into their history - the obsessive of the title track who was born in the desert and has crossed wasted landscapes to meet the listener, the murderous mother of 'Down By the Water', 'The Dancer's' desperate abandoned lover on her deathbed. But each is speaking from a single moment, rather than laying out a narrative as Nick Cave's characters from around the same time do.

If Flannery O'Connor has sketched the landscape TBYML inhabits, what it takes from her writing isn't the third-person device which Harvey doesn't adopt until a few years later; and, while you can see the same interests in both artists, Harvey's music dealt with religion, violence, and extremity right from the start. Instead, what O'Connor seems to have provided her with is the permission to bolt them all together, to imagine characters whose lives move around religion and sometimes lead them in violent directions. And, as always, Harvey's imagination takes her deeper and wilder than virtually anyone else.

Singing All of the Wrong Notes

Weston House is the other care home in the parish, as well as Widelake at its other end. In fact it isn't quite in the parish, but just within the Hornington boundary. However many Swanvale Halt people find their way there, and it's in the area that doesn't really feel like Hornington, being just north of the meadows that delineate the northern edge of the town. There used to be monthly communion services at Weston, led by one of the Hornington pastoral assistants, in which Paula, one of ours, participated: they used reserved sacrament from Hornington church. Naturally all that stopped in the pandemic and, just as we recently started going into Widelake again, the staff at Weston asked if we might be able to hold a service there before Christmas. Canon Jim who is looking after Hornington was extremely content for us to take it on, so we did. In fact Paula - despite now being a local councillor at three different levels! - said it was one of the things she missed most from the pandemic time and would be very happy to lead a service on her own once we'd relaid the ground, so yesterday we went in to do a complete communion service.

I wanted to have an Advent carol and then a Christmas one. I inherited a list of about thirty hymns used at the remote services, mostly copied from the New English Hymnal. Arthur used to come and play the piano for us at Widelake, but again that arrangement has come to an end, so now I have a CD bodged from recordings lifted from Youtube. As far as Advent songs go, the thirty include 'Lo he comes with clouds descending', and 'The Lord will come and will not be slow'. I am always a bit wary of the former because of the bit about gazing on Jesus's glorious scars which I think is somewhat strong meat for those not used to it, so yesterday I went for 'The Lord will come'. Barely anyone in our pretty elderly congregation knew it. I have sometimes wondered how long it will be before what are pretty familiar hymns to anyone who has much to do with ordinary English church life drop out of general knowledge and we're left with 'The Lord is my shepherd' and 'Away in a manger'. There might be some other Advent hymns that would work - 'Long ago prophets knew' is pretty easy to pick up even if you aren't that familiar with it - but there's no time to make the change before we go back to Widelake tomorrow. At least they ought to know 'O little town of Bethlehem'!

'The Music of Gothic' at the Wallace Collection, 28th October

Oh dear, I should have posted about my trip to London on Friday 28th to attend this event: a combined lecture-cum-recital hosted by Dr Emma McEvoy at the Wallace Collection, discussing, and illustrating, 'The Music of Gothic'. Dr McEvoy's case is that Gothic literature is full of music, and stage adaptations of Gothic works are too - but at first such orchestration was quite lighthearted, drawing on the conventions of comic opera. It was only from about 1820 that melodrama took over and 'The Music of Gothic' started to turn into 'Gothic Music'. A chamber ensemble conducted by the organist of St Cuthbert's Philbeach Gardens played a variety of pieces by now-forgotten composers to make her point. Funnily enough I have been reading a book about Henry Purcell at the moment - I say 'reading', but there are quite a few bits which I have no greater chance of understanding than I would a programming manual, so I skipped over them - and that mentions a number of pieces from his theatre work that would seem to go against Dr McEvoy's case, but she is, of course, planning a book, which will doubtless deal with all of that. I can't promise I'll be prepared to take out the loan necessary to buy it!

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.

United

It only takes a moment to volunteer for something as a generous gesture and then with it comes a tidal surge of worry. I can't remember what led me to say to the executive of Churches Together in Hornington that Yes, we could have the annual United Service at Swanvale Halt. Last year, of course, it was all online, but we wanted to do it in person this time, and so towards the end of last year I began trying to assign roles to various people, attempting to ensure a good mix of church communities, male and female voices, and things like that. 

In past years the music provision has constituted a knotty issue. Customarily a group of musicians from churches across the town has 'emerged' and wanted a degree of input into what ends up being used in the service; a negotiation has ensued between them and whoever is organising the event until a consensus has been reached. Some years it's harder than others. This year I was assured that there were musicians out there, but nobody felt they were in a position to organise them, so in the end I fell back on the boring but reliable option of using one of our organists.

We do the service this time of year because it falls within the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Churches Together in Britain and Ireland issues a set of liturgical resources which this year were devised by the Council of Churches of the Middle East. You can't use the whole lot because you'd be there all morning, but they help. I decided to project an appropriate image of the Visit of the Magi rather than get our Crib back out of the loft again, and thought it would be nice to play St Ephrem's Hymn to the Divine Light from the Syriac liturgy, one of the pieces included: that would help us reflect on the circumstances and experiences of the ancient Christian Churches of the Middle East. Nice ideas but requiring fiddling with laptops, projectors, screens and iPods: these are antique tech these days but do the trick provided they work. And there's the rub.

It was all fine. Lots of people came, Simon the organist caused me more nail-biting by uncharacteristically only turning up ten minutes before kick-off but he was there, Revd Alan from the United Reformed Church preached movingly on 'Light from the East', and nothing went wrong. That's all one can hope for at the moment.

Hac in Anni Ianua

A topsy-turvy New Year for me as I am off on New Year's Eve and at work on New Year's Day: I had a funeral yesterday on what would normally be my day off. That was unusual, too: a graveside ceremony for someone relatively well-known in the community (though not to me directly), assisted by the Council who provided a PA system and music, and with sloe gin to toast the departed. Seeing people line up outside the cemetery (a rather nice spot, our little local godsacre) was very moving and seemed much more pleasing than being at the Crem., or even, dare I say, in church. Today I have largely spent ordering books and managing to avoid employing the Evil Empire of Amazon to do so, and downloading music ranging from the orchestral accompaniment to the Golden Parade of the Pharoahs back in July, to early-1980s feminist punk, to 1940s Chinese jazz. This has a name, shidaiqu, so don't say you don't learn anything here, unless you knew it before.

I get slightly peeved when people I know speak as though calendar years have personalities, and it's both a mystery and a shock when one turns out unusually horrible, but I also get peeved when other people I know get very superior about not doing that. It's a natural if loose way of thinking. The annual ticking-over of one digit to another gives us a way of framing our outlook and perhaps amending our behaviour, though whatever life may presently be throwing at us pays no attention to it, of course. 

People ask me whether I think the pandemic will ever be over and I say, Yes I do, because human beings have been through this experience umpteen times and it has always followed, overall, the same trajectory. Pandemics never end with diseases eradicated: we've only ever managed that twice, with smallpox and one sort of polio. Instead successive waves of infection sweep across continents, or the world, and they get milder as resistance builds up among their survivors. What's different this time is twofold: first, we have far more information than ever before, and can analyse what's happening with the virus in a way we never could in the past, and secondly we are tackling this disease not predominately with natural infection, but with vaccines. We are not just shrugging our shoulders and letting lots of people die. That's a degree of progress.

I think it will all be all right, and it may all be all right sooner than we fear. Not everything will be. Democracy and freedom seem to me very fragile indeed - more fragile than they always are - and of course we're still heading, more likely than not, for the collapse of our civilisation and everything we love and value before the end of the century. You might have noticed this is the warmest New Year on record. That may well not be all right at all. But this will be. In a couple of hours time I will drink a small toast to it!

Things That Go Bump

Like many other things, ghost stories are a Christmas tradition. When Radio 4's podcast The Battersea Poltergeist came out at the start of the year I was wary of its promised mixture of 'drama and documentary', but having dipped into presenter Danny Robins's other offering, Uncanny, I gave it a go and somewhat against my better judgement was drawn into the narrative. The hook is the prospect of finding something that will prove conclusively what's going on in this 'paranormal cold case' from 1956, in which a working-class family in southwest London is tormented by a manifestation which - it was eventually claimed - was the Dauphin Louis Charles, the lost heir to the French crown. It will not spoil the fun too much to reveal that nothing is mentioned in the podcast which proves anyone's point of view. It's vanishingly unlikely that Louis Charles was smuggled into England, rather than dying, as history has recorded, sick, maltreated and neglected, in the Tower of the Paris Temple in 1795, so whatever the poltergeist the family called 'Donald' was, he wasn't that. Yet while there are possible normal explanations for much of what happened in no.63 Wycliffe Road, it's hard to account for the rappings, bangings, and other weirdness that followed Shirley Hitchings, the 15-year-old at the centre of the phenomena, to distant places, including the studios of the BBC where she was interviewed by Cliff Michelmore for the Highlight programme, an event that clearly unsettled Michelmore enough for him to refer to it years later. Mr Robins has two resident consultants to epitomise the different approaches listeners might take to the story - writer on the paranormal Evelyn Hollow, who is a bit of a Goth, and 'arch-sceptic' academic psychologist Ciaran O'Keeffe, who isn't. They bat about the possibilities between them and neither inflicts a killer blow, as it were.  With skilful artifice, the show draws every atom of energy from this indeterminacy: but in truth, although Mr Robins often mentions using a mysterious cardboard box of papers left by the paranormal investigator Harold Chibbett, who worked on the case at the time, and having interviewed Shirley Hitchings, James Clark, who wrote the whole thing up in The Poltergeist Prince of London in 2013, did both too. The podcast adds a few new nuggets of information: for instance, a graphologist decides that the  mysterious letters from Donald are almost certainly in the same hand as Shirley's. But ultimately the only way a listener will be able to decide is to have decided already, long before they hear the story. 

What do I think about it? In the end I wouldn't see much to dissent from in sceptic Deborah Hyde's assessment that Donald was 'a story with many authors, created communally, both consciously and unconsciously, according to a script that's readily available to everyone in that culture'. There's a lot in the Battersea Poltergeist narrative that doesn't add up, but at this distance in time it's almost impossible to disentangle what might have happened regarding any reported phenomenon in the case. As the priest who took our classes on this stuff at theological college said, 'There's about two hundred things a thing can be'.

My experience is that people often have a somewhat unhealthy interest in this kind of weirdness and so I am wary of feeding the fire: the Church as a whole has also been very, very reticent about this in the past after some loose practice resulted in terrible cases of abuse or malpractice in the name of 'the ministry of deliverance' (I wrote about a film based on one fairly recent incident in Romania). But the situation when I arrived in the Guildford diocese where people were reluctant even to mention who the Advisor on Deliverance was does seem a bit extreme, and in fact there's now a relevant page on the diocesan website. In fact such stuff comes my way pretty infrequently, amounting to only half a dozen cases in sixteen years, and most of them so vague and uncertain that it wasn't clear any lay beyond the normal bounds of psychology. As a priest I am of course committed to the idea that there is a non-material aspect to human life, but also to a scepticism about any particular incident that presents itself, and I'm always grateful that I seem to be completely insensitive to 'atmospheres' and the like. I don't know anyone even remotely inclined to go in all-guns-blazing with holy water, lighted candles and the Major Exorcism of Persons and Places at the first hint of paranormal events. The last such incident I dealt with was someone who had become convinced there was a 'presence' in their home and who'd been unsettled by a medium friend claiming they could detect the spirit of a young woman who'd lived in a large house on the site of the block of flats that was there currently, who had died after a pregnancy and been illicitly buried in the garden. After some discussion we agreed that in fact nothing needed to be done apart from praying for this soul, if soul it was, to be assured of God's mercy and justice. We did so, and the manifestation, such as it was, stopped. Make of that what you will. 

Make what you will, too, of the only time anything weird has ever come my way personally. I went to visit a mother and adult daughter who lived on a new estate built on an old site. The daughter had done some low-level mediumship in the past and was now, she said, afflicted by unwelcome presences that seemed to be linked to the history of the place: she (and others) heard voices, and she experienced a sense of oppression. I arrived at the house, and spoke to the mother in the kitchen, with my bag (containing all my kit - Bible, stole, water and anointing oil, just in case) on the table beside me. I could see the daughter appear on the stairs out of the corner of my eye but was still in mid-sentence so I didn’t turn to her for a few seconds. When we moved to go to the living room, I checked my bag and found a lipstick and hair grip in it. As I got them out, the daughter said they were hers. Both she and her mother seemed bewildered at how they got there. We left them on the table and said no more about it. After I left the house, I sat in the car for a few moments and said, ‘If there are any of you here, I want to make it absolutely clear that you must stay here where you belong. You’re not coming back with me!' On getting home I thought I’d go to church to say Evening Prayer and went through my bag to get my stole and the oil to take back. Right at the bottom, under my Bible, notebook and other things, I found a bulky car key and battery fob with two keyrings. This turned out to be the daughter's too. It's possible that she could have placed the objects in my bag in those few seconds when she wasn’t completely in my field of vision, though she would need a Magic Circle-level of expertise to do it without me seeing her move, or hearing the keys rattle. She certainly couldn’t have done so without her mother seeing so if there was deception it was done by both of them. Despite my prayers and those of others - it turned out the couple had been talking to various other people as well as me - the manifestations didn't seem to stop completely. I still have no idea what any of that was really about.

Don't, as the wonderful theme song to Uncanny by Lanterns on the Lake insists, have nightmares!