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Have Yourself a Merry Indie Christmas Volume III : Line Up Reveal

Wales Arts Review is delighted to reveal the line-up for Have Yourself a Merry Indie Christmas Volume III, as the ultimate alternative Christmas album returns for a final installment, with an introduction by the album’s creator, Kevin McGrath.

I spent 2022 curating Have Yourself a Merry Indie Christmas Volumes I & II, a collection of 108 original Christmas songs, including contributions from Dodgy, Girl Ray, The Lilac Time, Pete Astor, Helen Love, White Town, bis and Suzzy Roche, in order to raise money for the homeless charity Crisis. The albums made a bit of a splash, being played on BBC6 Music, BBC Scotland, BBC Radio Wales (each volume was named an album of the week by Huw Stephens) and on Radio X. Internationally renowned critics John Harris and Pete Paphides endorsed the project, which raised just over £5,800 for Crisis at Christmas.

Have Yourself a Merry Indie Christmas Vol III, the final album in the series, follows the same eclectic mix as its predecessors: a generous sprinkling of celebrated indie names (this time around it’s The Wedding Present that tops the bill), cult combos from across Europe and America and a selection of underground bands that listeners will be thrilled to hear for the first time. All have one thing in common: they’ve each written a distinctive Christmas earworm that will make your Xmas playlists for years to come!

Have Yourself a Merry Indie Christmas III is available from Velindre Bandcamp, priced at £5.00. You can pre-order now, but if you can hold on until December 1st, a ‘bandcamp Friday’, the company waives its commission, raising even more money for Crisis. All of the credit for the compilation’s success goes to the contributing artists, a reflection of their creativity and generosity. As always, I don’t receive a penny.

It’s a thrill to exclusively reveal the line-up for Volume III at Wales Arts Review:

Merry Christmas Joey Ramone – El Sancho

El Sancho is a fast, fun DIY punk rock band from Hawaii. “Merry Christmas Joey Ramone”, taken from the combo’s 2022 cassette release Jollier Than Thou, is carried along on a wave of crunching riffs.

Christmas Was Better in the 80s – The Futureheads

The Futureheads, alongside Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, were part of the “angular movement” of post-punk inspired bands that emerged in the 2000s. This track was originally released in 2010 and there remains a lot to like here, from the song’s affectionate swipe at Xmas nostalgia, to its blockbuster chorus.

Would You – Sunturns

Sunturns are a Norwegian super-group devoted to Xmas, featuring members of Making Marks, Moddi, The Little Hands of Asphalt, Monzano and Einar Stray Orchestra. “Would You” has a cool, distrait vocal that smooths the way to a simply glorious chorus. Taken from their 2nd Xmas album Sunturns II (2015).

Lockdown Holiday – The Brixton Riot

New Jersey’s The Brixton Riot wrote and recorded this especially for Jon Solomon’s 32nd Annual 25-hour Holiday Marathon show on WPRB 103.3 FM. Princeton. A legendary festive broadcast from Princeton University campus.

The Loneliest Time of Year – The Wedding Present

David Gedge has flirted with Xmas songs once or twice before, returning to the subject as part of last year’s 24 Songs album. At the time of release, the singer noted “To be honest, I’ve been one of those ‘bah, humbug’ types ever since I realised that the thing we’re really celebrating on 25th of December is capitalism!”.

It Only Snows at Christmas – Les Bicyclettes de Belsize

Charlie Darling, the one and only member of Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, has a true passion for Xmas songs. This track has a sublime Weather Prophets sheen to it and can be found on the Christmas compilation Dufflecoats and Christmas Cards (2016).

Christmas in the Borough of Our Birth – The Virgin Birds

“Kiss me on the mouth, It’s Christmas Eve”, sings Jon Rooney, helmsman of Seattle’s Virgin of the Birds, in a striking, stream of consciousness lyric that ventures well outside the scope of a traditional seasonal song.

Merry (Christmas) and Me – Toad Venom

Even in the age of social media, there is a dearth of info on Toad Venom. A Swedish band “experimenting in the void between the spaghetti western and psychedelic rock”, this track aims for the stratosphere and damn near gets there. Released in 2021.

C U Christmas Day – Jacklen Ro

The opening lines – ‘I’m on my way to your new apartment/Just down the street from Sunset Boulevard/The neon lights are all shining on me/My mistletoe is always where you are’ – sends a romantic shiver skidding down the spine as LA’s Jackie Giroux & Caelen Perkins trade vocals in heartwarming, heart-on-sleeve fashion.

A Cold Wind – The Ornaments

The ninth intriguing instalment of Christmas music from The Ornaments. Wisconsin’s Mike Behrends and Lance Owens are joined on this twist-in-the-tale seasonal story by Erin Kirby, literally phoning in her part from the airport.

Take it Easy This Christmas – Health and Wellbeing

This beautiful tune is taken from the band’s Christmas Demos EP, released on Xmas Day last year. Despite my best efforts, I haven’t found out too much more about the band, except that there may well be a Welsh connection. A proper Christmas mystery!

Thee Christmas Card Committee – Wake Up And Smell The Sun

Philadelphia’s John Murray, the mainstay of Wake Up And Smell The Sun, has long specialised in Xmas music, so it is a shock to hear from the singer/songwriter that he is renouncing, if that is not too strong a word, the seasonal sub-genre altogether. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The Joy is in the Giving – Lisa Mychols

Lisa Mychols, aka the ‘Queen of power-pop’, founded the cult LA group the Masticators in 1998. More relevant to this project, Lisa worked with Darian Sahanaja & Nick Walusko of the Wondermints (regular backing band for Brian Wilson) on Lost Winter’s Dream (1991), now regarded as a lost Xmas classic. Lisa re-recorded this 2017 track for the album.

Always a Dream – Charlie’s Hand Movements

“Always A Dream” is taken from Lance Keeble and Adam Gardner’s unique compilation album Xmas Singles 2014-18.

Xmas Trip – Run On

New York’s Art-Rock outfit Run On ‘combine a love of pop, rock and the avant-garde’ (Heather Phares). Originally written in 1996, “Xmas Trip” was re-released last year to raise funds for the American Foundation for The Prevention of Suicide.

The Pearlfishers

The Pearlfishers released an Xmas classic (if you like Prefab Sprout and The Beach Boys, that is) in 2004’s A Sunflower at Christmas. The track selected here comes from the expanded edition that the Glaswegian band issued through Germany’s Marina Records five years later.

Can You Hear the Snowfall – The Hannah Barberas

The Hannah Barberas play DIY indie pop loaded with sharp melodies and hooks you could hang your Santa hat on. “Can You Hear the Snowfall?” will be part of a vinyl compilation of B-sides and EP tracks planned for 2024 on the Spinout Nuggets label.

Christmas is Coming (We all Know the Score) – Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard

A rollicking glammed-up track that has a proper pop at the commercialisation of Christmas. Singer Tom Rees declaring this 2020 release a ‘sarcastic song about capitalism’.

The Salvation Army Band Plays – Helen Love

The legendary Helen Love has dabbled with Christmas music on and off, including on their cover of the Ramone’s “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight”). This track, released in 2012, features producer, songwriter and musician Ricardo Autobahn.

Ice and Snow – Red Shoe Diaries

Nottingham’s Red Shoe Diaries has played at Indietracks and Edinburgh Popfest. They previously released music through Fika Recordings, a DIY vinyl and cassette label. This track was released in 2012 and is something of a lost classic.

Fell in Love at Christmas – The Photocopies

Sean Turner, a Londoner based in Michigan, maybe the hardest working person in showbiz. In the last year or so, he has released Pop Trivia a 45-track retrospective and Triple Decker a 39-track follow up on the Subjangle label.

The Sound of Snow – Math and Physics Club

All Music has a nice line on the band, which I can’t top: “Sweet and earnest indie-pop from a group of sweater clad fellows from the Pacific Northwest”. This track can be found on the B-side of “Jimmy Had a Polaroid” and on In This Together: EPs, B-Sides, Rarities and Unreleased Songs 2005-2015.

Christmas Has Come – Man Behind Tree

Berlin’s Hans Forster featured on Volume I in the guise of Hanemoon and he returns here with a track from one of his many other projects, Man Behind Tree. Described by Rolling Stone as purveyors of “sunny Westcoast melancholia”.

Merry, Merry Christmas – El Gato Roboto

Chicago’s El Gato Roboto play a frothy mix of Garage Rock, Power Pop and Space Rock. This track was released back in 2019.

Nadolig, Pwy a Wyr? – Swansea Sound

Swansea Sound kicked off Vol I, so it’s great to have this underground super group (Hue Williams-The Pooh Sticks, Amelia Fletcher-Tallulah Gosh, Rob Pursey-Heavenly & Ian Button-Death in Vegas) back again. The vocal is provided by Catrin Saran James, formally of The Loves.

I Fell in Love on Christmas Day – Caleb Nichols

This ballad is included on It’s Hard to Dance When It’s Cold and There’s no Music: Kill Rock Stars Winter Holiday Album Volume 2 and is also the closing track on Caleb’s 2022 album, Ramon.

Ho Ho It’s Christmas Again – Wicketkeeper

The band makes no secret of how this Xmas ditty came about: “The story is we got asked to demo a tune to pitch for a TV ad. When they didn’t use it (boo, British Telecom), we thought it would be funny to re-record the vocals, add some sleigh bells and plop it down your chimneys”.

Grief of a (Frozen) Sailor – Jetstream Pony

Fronted by Beth Arzy (Trembling Blue Stars and featuring Shaun Charman (The Wedding Present). This track originally appeared as a Snowflake Singles Club (a specialist Dutch Xmas label) selection back in 2020.

All I Got for Christmas Was This Lousy Boy – Bunnygrunt

Missouri’s Bunnygrunt has been around since 1993, although they did take a break between 1998 and 2003. Leading exponents of ‘Cuddlecore’, they were once labelled by All Music as ‘the world’s cutest band’.

I Want New Ramones Songs for Christmas – Vista Blue

Vista Blue is a rock band based in Nashville and rooted in New Orleans. This is one of many festive tunes the band has released and was included in their Keep it all Year EP (2019).

Advent Calendar – Valentina Way

A Charlie Darling composition given an Xmas makeover on the Balham band’s Advent Calendar EP (2022). With five mixes to choose from, I’ve opted for the ‘Candlelight’ version, which should only be played in absolute darkness, save for the lights on your Christmas tree.

Sleep Sound – Bjéar (featuring Ella Ion)

Adelaide’s Bjéar released A Christmas with Friends Vol 1 & Vol II in November last year. A stunning mix of standards and originals, it found favour with the peerless Christmas Underground, who described the mesmerising “Sleep Sound” as a “sonic hug”.

Christmas in Love  –  Euros Childs

Euros Childs, former frontman with the legendary outfit Gorki’s Zygotic Mwnci and current keyboards player with the legendary Teenage Fanclub, released his 20th solo studio album Curries last year. ‘Christmas in Love’ is taken from the album Sweetheart, released in 2015.

Have Yourself a Merry Indie Christmas is available now via Bandcamp.

#Youtube

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DR DEEPTI GURDASANI IN CONVERSATION | COVID IN WALES

Dr Deepti Gurdasani, a senior lecturer in clinical epidemiology at Queen Mary University in London, has in recent months become a vocal critic of the UK Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Welsh Government moves toward the Green phase of its plan to ease out of lockdown, she talked with Kevin McGrath about her concerns that Wales is set to return to pre-lockdown levels of COVID transmission.

You’ve recently completed a study modelling the impact of the UK Government’s measures to ease lockdown in England. What conclusions did you reach about how those measures would impact the level of COVID-19 transmission, and could those outcomes be applied equally to Wales?

Dr Deepti Gurdasani: Many public health experts have noted that the easing of lockdown has been relatively early and rapid in England, despite going into lockdown relatively late. By early, I’m referring to the point in the pandemic, rather than absolute time as levels of cases and deaths in England were very high when we started easing lockdown. We’ve pointed out in our study that easing lockdown at a point where community transmission is relatively high will result in thousands of excess cases and deaths – relative to holding off on easing lockdown until we achieve a near-elimination scenario.

Data from other countries also supports this notion: that suppression, even to relatively low levels, doesn’t really work as a long-term strategy, as community transmission will inevitably increase once we ease the measures that are holding the virus in check.

While Wales has been more cautious with the lifting of lockdown measures, the fact is that without a strategy to really mitigate the impact of easing lockdown, we will likely see a surge in community transmission. We can already see this from the Welsh data, where we have seen a consistent rise in daily infections and daily deaths over the past couple of weeks. We’ve also seen several clusters of transmission emerge in specific settings such as hospitals and local meat processing plants.

What will life in Wales look like over the next six months if we follow the same path as England rather than adopting a zero-COVID strategy similar to that seen in Scotland and Northern Ireland?

Dr Deepti Gurdasani: The Welsh Government’s strategy isn’t clear, but it does appear to be a strategy of suppression rather than elimination, which suggests that a certain level of community infection is seen as ‘tolerable’. Countries that have followed this path have generally all seen increases in infection after easing lockdown and opening borders – and one would expect the same to happen in Wales, unless they commit to a zero-COVID strategy.

There is absolutely no reason to think that easing lockdown will not bring us into the same position as March, as the primary measures holding the virus in check are social distancing and breaking transmission networks through school and workplace closures. It’s clear that we don’t have a working test, trace and isolate strategy, even in Wales, where there have been significant delays in passing on test results to those infected, potentially resulting in delays in identifying contacts and isolating them. Similarly, there isn’t widespread mandatory mask use which may have mitigated the impact of easing lockdown. Studies have also made clear that it is unlikely that there is widespread immunity across populations, and only a small proportion of the population has been infected so far.

Given all this, the only way to control the pandemic is to aggressively try to eliminate the virus, rather than taking a reactive whack-a-mole approach where we need repeated and continuing restrictions to control spread to a given level. Almost all countries that have adopted such an approach have seen surges in infection when restrictions are eased – even with testing and tracing systems that are vastly superior to ours.

How would a zero-COVID strategy work in practice?

Dr Deepti Gurdasani: The idea of a zero-COVID strategy is that we aim to completely eliminate the virus within the community and then prevent the virus being imported from outside using strict quarantine measures. In this setting, life can return to near-normal, as there is no virus spreading in the community. This is different from the current strategy in some European countries and in England and Wales, which is ‘suppression’. Suppression only aims to keep levels of transmission below a certain mark, bringing in restrictions whenever those transmission rise above that mark.

Global experience shows that suppression is difficult to maintain, and as restrictions are eased we’re likely to see surges of virus. Suppression is therefore maintained by monitoring, and imposition of restrictions as and when surges in transmission are seen. This means that we have to continue to maintain measures that control the virus, including social distancing, mask use etc.

An aggressive, multi-pronged public health strategy is needed to eliminate the virus. This strategy may include widespread mask use (in all spaces), aggressive rapid testing of cases, contact tracing and isolation to prevent asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread. It would also require strict maintenance of quarantine for all travellers entering the country. It may require additional measures such as a defined period of stay at home measures and school and business closures for a period of time to break transmission networks. The approach has to be multifaceted, and planned rather than reactive. And be supported by clear and simple public health messaging. The duration of such measures will depend on the baseline level of infection when restrictions are imposed, and the compliance with and the synergistic use of multiple approaches to eliminate infection.

One feature of the Welsh Government’s public health messaging relates to the Chief Medical Officer’s stance on face masks. Throughout the pandemic Dr. Atherton has downplayed the importance of masks, recently claiming that mandating their use ‘would not be proportionate’ given the present levels of transmission. Are lives being put at risk in Wales as a result of his dissenting view on masks?

Dr Deepti Gurdasani: England and Wales have acted late relative to many other countries across the globe with regard to public use of face masks. In Wales, mask wearing is not mandatory in shops. We know that COVID-19 is spread while infected people are asymptomatic, which means that control measures based on symptoms are inadequate. Several studies show efficacy of reduction in infection spread with mask use in different settings, with the level of protection at population level likely to depend on widespread use. While the absolute extent of reduction at population level and the mode of transmission of COVID-19 is not clearly understood, governments have a duty to follow the precautionary principle and encourage widespread mask use. Most public health bodies now recommend this across the globe, and most South East Asian countries that showed early success in COVID-19 control adopted widespread mask use months ago. Critiques of adopting mask use as a public health policy suggest that mask use may result in ‘risk compensation’ behaviours, whereby those wearing masks may feel a false sense of reassurance and take risks that they wouldn’t were they not wearing a mask.

Current evidence does not bear this out in almost any context (e.g. helmet use on bicycles); indeed, there is evidence to suggest that people who engage in one protective behaviour may become more likely, rather than less likely, to engage in related behaviours. The fact is that we cannot wait for large randomised studies of mask use in the middle of a pandemic. Outbreak control is dependent on making the best decisions in the midst of uncertainty. And while there may be uncertainty around the exact efficacy of mask use at population level against a background of different levels of community transmission, there is reasonable evidence to suggest that this measure would reduce transmission if used widely.

As others have said, we would not expect large randomised studies of seatbelt use to prove that people should use seatbelts. Nor do we look at the cost of putting seatbelts into cars to weigh the benefit against preventing deaths due to road traffic accidents, even though road traffic accidents are rare. A similar strategy should be adopted for mask use, given the huge impact of COVID-19 on communities. This is a simple strategy, that if effectively communicated and implemented could have a considerable impact on COVID-19 transmission; it would be negligent not to adopt this, especially given the rising infection rates in England and Wales. In the context of the continuing easing of lockdown restrictions within Wales and rising community spread, mask use is a measure that would be key to curbing spread, alongside aggressive test, trace and isolate measures.

With the new school year fast approaching, what is your understanding of the debate around school safety in Wales?

Dr Deepti Gurdasani: There is rapidly accruing evidence that children get infected, potentially at the same rate as adults. Indeed, a large study from South Korea recently showed that 10–19 year old children may transmit the virus at a higher rate than adults in households. There is no reason to think that children would not be able to transmit in the school setting if they can transmit within households. The ONS survey carried out in the UK suggests that children are as susceptible to COVID-19 as are adults. Serological studies also bear this out. Evidence from a JAMA Pediatrics article is consistent with the idea that infected children harbour virus and carry virus in oral and nasal passages, with younger children actually carrying several fold higher levels of virus than adults. How this translates to transmission is unclear, as the presence of high virus levels doesn’t necessarily correlate with increased transmission.

More recent evidence from emerging clusters of infection in Israel and Georgia suggests that children above 6 years get infected at the same, or higher rates than adults, and do contribute to spread of infection. On the face of it, these recent studies supporting an important role for children in transmission appear to contrast with some earlier evidence from different regions, where often in households during lockdown, children were thought to be less likely to be contributing to spread than adults. Many limitations of these studies are now recognised.

We now know that while children are potentially as likely to get infected as adults, they are less likely to manifest symptoms, or manifest very mild symptoms. This means that they are less likely to be identified as the ‘index case’ (the first person who was infected in a cluster), and primary infection is more likely to be attributed to symptomatic adults within the household. Given that most regions have implemented symptom-based testing, it’s likely that infections in children have been substantially underestimated in previous studies. To really understand the role children play in transmission, we need to implement regular testing in schools, including that of asymptomatic children, as has been done in some parts of Germany. A second limitation of many of these studies is that they were carried out during a period in which schools were closed, which limited our ability to observe child-child transmission.

It is also likely that the increased transmission within schools depends on context, such as baseline community levels of infection. European countries have reported few outbreaks in schools since reopening; however, it is important to consider that schools reopened during a period when community transmission was quite low in many European countries.

The only way to really reduce transmission in schools in the longer term is to reduce or eliminate community transmission. This is another reason to consider adoption of a zero-COVID strategy: to make schools safer for children, and adults and vulnerable people who live with children.

There have been more than a few media reports recently that real progress is being made in the search for a vaccine. Suddenly, the idea has taken hold that we may have a vaccine, at least for health workers and the most vulnerable members of society within six months. Is that a view that you share? 

Dr Deepti Gurdasani: I’m not as optimistic about a vaccine becoming rapidly available as potentially many others are. I’d be very happy to be proven wrong on this.

My view is that a vaccine will take longer. It’s unclear what the efficacy will be in prevention of infection and reducing severity of infection and how long any resulting immunity will actually last. We haven’t been able to create a vaccine for any other coronavirus as yet, and while there are early promising results, we’re still quite far from a safe and effective vaccine that can be administered at population level.

Dr. Deepti Gurdasani is a clinical epidemiologist and statistical geneticist at Queen Mary University of London.

[pardontheglueman]

Everything Solved at Once: Silent Forum

Kevin McGrath reviews the long-awaited debut album, Everything Solved at Once, from Silent Forum which includes tracks such as ‘Robot’.Silent Forum Promotional Image

Two years ago, Silent Forum released Sanctuary+, a cassette-only compilation issued through Oddbox, that collected together a handful of the band’s essential singles and EP’s recorded between 2015-2017. For die-hard followers of Cardiff’s indie-noir outfit this was a sign of progress, proof positive that the band had left some sort of imprint on the capital’s music scene. At the same time, however, it felt like the end of an era too – despite his captivating stage presence, frontman Richard Wiggins (think Ian Curtis, Samuel T. Herring and Marcel Marceau all rolled into one) remained the best-kept secret in Welsh pop; the band still hadn’t secured a conventional record deal and they were largely absent from the nation’s radio stations too. And all this at a time when fellow Cardiff combo Boy Azooga, playing to an audience of millions on Later…with Jools Holland, seemed to have hit the top jackpot on the first spin of the wheel.

The group’s frustration with the Welsh music establishment was evident on “How I Faked The Moon Landing”, a groovy, six-minute epic that railed against the band’s continued underdog status. Indeed, the song’s key line ‘We’re destined to be a local band not on local radio’, while being laugh out loud funny, was a disarmingly honest appraisal of the group’s prospects. There was a delicious irony, then, in events as they unfolded in the summer of 2018 – a song furiously lamenting a lack of radio exposure was suddenly ever-present across the airwaves. Soon enough, DJs, bloggers and music critics were including the track in their ‘best of 2018’ playlists. The frenetic follow-up single “Robot” reinforced the impression that this was a band on the up and an album deal with Libertino was announced before the summer was out.

While it’s entirely predictable that Everything Solved at Once, Silent Forum’s confidently constructed debut album should kick off with the uber-pop of killer single “Robot”, the pair of tracks that follow thrillingly confound expectations*. “Spin” is a hypnotic maelstrom of fractured guitar licks and soaring vocals, while “Safety In Numbers”, an atypical ballad built around interweaving melody lines, overlapping vocals and an intriguing meditation on friendship (the tune drifts to a close with a roll call of band members and a status update as to their well-being), is a stunning track that speaks to the band’s versatility and ambition. Side 1 (the revival of vinyl means that we can write about albums in these terms once again), concludes with “A Great Success”, a number that surges along on a classic indie-noir riff, before climaxing in a stadium-sized chorus, and the curiously-titled “Credit To Mark Sinker” (a music journalist, if you were wondering), which sees Wiggins channelling his inner Robert Lloyd. Despite an intriguing lyric, it’s probably the least effective track on show here.

The title track kicks off a strong second side; “Everything Solved At Once”, a punchy number with a towering chorus, is reminiscent of early-period Editors and has ‘future single’ stamped all over it. “A Pop Act” is a prequel/sequel to “How I Faked The Moon Landing” and offers further surreal commentary on the band’s struggle to punch a hole in the pop stratosphere – ‘Went back to the Swedish furniture company / returned our flat pack songs / I don’t like my music bland… I like it intense and sad’. The album builds to an edgy finish with three outstanding tracks; “Outmoded”, is a brooding, beast of a track built around a mournful base motif and a shrill guitar; “A Kind Of Blue”,  a song which has been a staple of the band’s live shows for some time, usually sparks into life in a live setting thanks to Wiggins’ strange exhortations during the tune’s extended instrumental break. There are no visual aids to cue our emotional responses here, of course, but the song is a triumph nonetheless, thanks to the pitch-perfect production skills of Charlie Francis. Importantly, the album benefits from a coherent feel throughout, despite the unexpected presence of a trumpet and even a burst of canned applause at one point, which is testimony to Francis’ guidance but also, to the chemistry that exists between comrades-in-arms Oli Richards (bass) Dario Ordi (guitar) and Elliot Samphier (drums). The album closes with the delirious, dance-punk of “How I Faked the Moon Landing”, the song building to a triumphant close as Wiggins defiantly positions the band as outliers – “Why would we want to be like them?” he insists over and over again as the music exhausts itself.

Everything Solved at Once is a black-comedy concept album about life on the fringes of the Welsh music biz, which is something of a first for my record collection and, quite possibly, yours. While pop music has a history of self-referential songs, from “Hey, We’re the Monkeys” to the 80’s frippery of “Ant Music”, Silent Forum push this self-obsession to its limit, with over half of their debut LP (as well as a couple of recent B-sides) devoted to the internal machinations of the band. This may seem to be a chronic case of navel-gazing and part of me does indeed yearn for a return to the intense, anxiety-driven songwriting that gave birth to early band classics such as “Limbo”, the emotionally pulverising “Who’s Going to Side With Me?” and the traumatic epic “Hosanna”.  Wiggins has clearly moved on, though, writing with a self-deprecating sense of humour and a sharp eye for a whip-smart one-liner about his band and, in a curious sub-theme, workplace alienation as experienced by a cluster of ‘data cleansing worker bees’.

Everything Solved at Once catapults Silent Forum straight into the top tier of indie-noir, even as they begin to shift their sound into a more dance-punk oriented direction. In common with other trailblazers of the genre, from The Murder Capital and Fontaines DC to the punkier Shame, Silent Forum make music that thrums with the disquietude of the times. While Indie-noir hasn’t delivered an outright classic album post Joy Division, Everything Solved At Once, a claustrophobic, yet cinematic record, may, in time, rank alongside near misses such as Whipping Boy’s Heartworm (1995) Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights (2002), Editors’ The Back Room (2005) or The National’s High Violet (2010).

[pardontheglueman]

Rewatching It's A Wonderful Life

Not a year goes by without a nationwide re-release of Frank Capra’s festive classic It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Over recent years, the film has regularly been screened by mainstream cinema chains in Wales as well as independent venues like Chapter and Tramshed in the capital. This year’s most imaginative showing will take place at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea. With a musical adaptation by Paul McCartney and Lee Hall (Billy Elliott & Rocketman) seemingly set to bring this magical tale to a whole new generation of fans, Kevin McGrath takes a look at the unique story of how a movie that flopped at the Oscars and which barely made a dent at the box office somehow became an enduring part of Christmas for so many.

Frank Capra’s post-war masterpiece It’s A Wonderful Life has rightly gone down in film history as one of the greatest feel-good movies of all time. From its humble beginnings as The Greatest Gift, an unpublished short story that author Philip Van Doren Stern turned into a 24-page pamphlet-come-Christmas card, it has become the most cherished of all movies, regularly figuring in best picture polls either side of the Atlantic. For many in America, Christmas simply isn’t Christmas without the family gathering around the TV to watch this incredibly affecting festive tale. And it was TV, of course, that had rescued the film from relative obscurity when its copyright was allowed to lapse in 1974. By 1984, The Wall Street Journal discovered, 152 public stations and 175 commercial stations had taken up the rights to broadcast the movie).

The reason that It’s A Wonderful Life continues to stand the test of time today must surely be attributed to the flawless filmmaking of its visionary director Frank Capra. Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War (during which he made the exemplary documentary series, Why We Fight), Capra had established himself as one of Hollywood’s premiere directors, with a string of box office smashes to his name. The most notable of which, 1934’s romantic comedy It Happened One Night, became the first film to win all five major Academy Awards picking up Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and, of course, Best Director. Capra had become a master craftsman and a master storyteller, specialising in crowd-pleasing ‘moral fables’ about the honest Joe, the American everyman, who stands up for ‘liberal’ ideals and values against corrupt businessmen and politicians.

Screen giants like James Stewart and Gary Cooper had turned in widely acclaimed performances in Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Meet John Doe respectively, and it was to Stewart, his most trusted actor, that Capra turned when casting the part of quintessential nice-guy George Bailey. Stewart, one of the few major stars to enlist in the war against fascism, had been away from Hollywood for the best part of five years, and was in anguish about resuming his acting career when Capra called to offer him the role, that ultimately, film critics would regard as the finest of his distinguished career. Luckily, the director was able to talk Stewart around, and the rest, as they say, is history!

Stewart’s nuanced portrayal of the decent, unselfish, yet ultimately tormented Bailey, offers us a masterclass in screen acting. It’s as if Stewart had never been away as he plays through a succession of comic, romantic and dramatic scenes with absolute confidence. Stewart is able to convince us of George’s good heart and of his deeply felt moral opposition to scurrilous Banker Henry Potter, whilst also capturing the frustration eating away at his character’s soul as he sees life passing him by and his friends making their own mark on the world. George Bailey is a man desperately divided against himself, as Stewart’s reflective performance gradually makes clear.

Thankfully, his fellow actors are equally as good, with Lionel Barrymore proving to be an inspired piece of casting in the role of Potter, the Dickensian villain who tries to drive the Bailey family business into ruin in his quest to monopolise the wealth of Bedford Falls. (Capra had surely noted Barrymore’s legendary portrayal of Scrooge for the Campbell Playhouse dramatisation of A Christmas Carol, broadcast each Christmas Eve since 1934). And, as the years have gone by, it’s become impossible to imagine anyone other than the whimsical Henry Travers as the very special emissary Clarence Oddbody, whose celestial mission it is to save George Bailey from the tragic fate that awaits him on Christmas Eve.

The movie begins with George’s family and friends frantically seeking divine intervention to help him through a spiritual crisis at Christmas and uses the device of extended flashbacks to tell the tale of a young boy/college student determined to travel the world, all the while threatening to “shake the dust of this crummy little town off my feet”. He subscribes to National Geographic magazine and spends his days dreaming of “going out exploring someday’.  A family tragedy and financial difficulties combine, though, to ensure George’s ambitions are thwarted at every turn, as he finds himself trapped into running the family Building and Loan Company, the only institution in town not owned by slum landlord Potter. George is loved by the whole of Bedford Falls for standing alone against Potter time and again, and, in a crucial scene which illustrates Capra’s humanitarian message, Bailey challenges Potter over his scandalous business practices –

‘Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, this rabble you keep talking about…they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him’.

Stewart is acting out of his straight-laced skin here, violently trembling with anger. For me, it’s one of the most genuinely moving scenes in film history.

Though George has quietly transformed the lives of all those who reside in Bailey Park, he is unable to find consolation in his own achievements. He simply cannot free himself from the resentment he feels, as first his younger brother Harry takes up his place at College, and then as his old friend Sam Wainwright cuts a dash through the business world. Drunk and despairing on Christmas Eve, he wishes he’d never been born.

Throughout the film, Capra remains in complete control of the story. Each scene plays perfectly, the transition between episodes is seamless and the script cohesive from start to finish. This is all the more remarkable given the number of writers involved in developing a screenplay that proved almost impossible to knock into shape. Whilst the final screen credit went to husband and wife screenwriting team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, as well as Capra himself, there were already three fully developed scripts in existence when Capra bought the property from RKO in 1945.

Three of the biggest names in the business had failed spectacularly in adapting Van Doren Stern’s quirky fantasy. Neither Marc Connelly, the Pulitzer winning playwright and fully paid-up member of the Alongquin roundtable, Dalton Trumbo (an Oscar winner for The Brave One) or Clifford Odets, the left-wing firebrand whose work with the Group Theatre had revolutionised Broadway in the thirties, found a way to incorporate the various fantasy/reality elements of the plot into a coherent whole.

While Connolly and Trumbo’s contributions were dismissed out of hand by Capra, some key scenes from the Odets script were retained. According to Jeanine Basinger, curator of the Capra archives, his scripts “bring into focus the elements found in the final movie: the accident on the ice in which Harry nearly drowns; the Gower drug store sequence and George’s marriage to Mary.” It’s worth noting that at this stage the Potter character simply did not exist. The dramatic conflict in each of these scripts was between a good George and an evil George.

None of this turmoil is reflected in the finished movie itself. Capra was able to unfold his story with clarity, balancing the requirements of the plot with his need to convey an uncompromising message to the audience. In the same way that Dickens, who was on a lifelong crusade to improve the conditions of the poor, wrote A Christmas Carol to try and progress social change in Victorian England, so Capra, who was just back from the Second World War, his film cans stuffed with footage of the horrors of the concentration camps, passionately wanted to tell a story that would make a serious statement about the times in which he lived.

Dickens’ plea to his readers was for them to follow the example of a reformed Scrooge when, at the novella’s end, he pledges to “honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all year round”. Capra’s motivation was equally straightforward. He had in mind a reaffirmation of John Donne’s view of the human condition

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”

Still haunted by a war, in which Historians currently estimate, up to 70 million people died, Capra was at pains to point out how one man’s life touches another. His Christmas message was for us all to extend a helping hand to the next fellow.

When I went to see It’s A Wonderful Life at my local cinema, last Christmas, the usherette, on taking my ticket said: “I hope you’ve brought a supply of hankies”. Indeed, I had. I can never get past that early scene in Gower’s drugstore, where the distraught and drunk chemist brutally slaps a young George Bailey around, without breaking down. And, of course, the famous finale with George, having escaped from his nightmare existence in Pottersville, charging joyously through the snowy streets of Bedford Falls on Christmas Eve, wishing everyone and everything a Merry Christmas, has me in floods of tears every time I have the privilege of viewing it.

Watching It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas, making it a part of the ritual and tradition of the festive period means it can be hard to be wholly objective about the film as a work of art. For good or bad the film comes imbued, perhaps even burdened, with our own memories and associations. In the darkness, as the credits begin to roll, we suddenly sense The Ghost of Christmas past sitting next to us in the cheap seats.

For others, Capra is too sentimental and the derogatory term “Capra-corn” applied by some cynics to his films has stuck over the years. Look beyond the joyous, feel-good message at the centre of It’s A Wonderful Life though, and there is a real darkness rooted within the heart of small-town America. Capra, having witnessed at first hand the atrocities of a World War, knew all about the evil ordinary people were capable of but remained an optimist and a believer in the brotherhood of man, nonetheless.

[pardontheglueman]

ADULTS IN THE ROOM / YANIS VAROUFAKIS

Jeremy Corbyn’s radical transformation of the neo-liberal Labour Party, a party which had hit rock bottom when endorsing the Cameron government’s 2015 Welfare Reform Bill, into a progressive, re-energised anti-austerity movement, has allowed Labour to speak about the mass slaughter of council tenants in the Grenfell Tower fire, a tragedy brought about by a savage Conservative cost-cutting agenda, with something approaching moral clarity. David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham who lost a close friend in the fire, spoke for many when he declared ‘If burning in your own home isn’t political, I don’t know what is. It’s a scandal and a crime. Behind all of this, is money and profit. When you go down to West London and look at that building, it’s like looking at a vision of hell. It’s a vision of a burnt out shell and that burnt out shell is where we have got to in terms of austerity in this country’.

It will come as no surprise to the Tory architects of austerity that poor people end up dying as a direct result of their flagship policy. A report into the Department of Work and Pensions’ policy of sanctioning claimants in Salford carried out by The Salford Partnership concluded that ‘strict benefit conditionality, the threat and use of benefit sanctions, causes damage to the wellbeing of vulnerable claimants and can lead to hunger, debt, destitution, self-harm, and suicide’. The DWP response, aided by a compliant media, was to suppress 49 secret reports into claimant deaths for as long as possible (it took more than two years to obtain the reports under the Freedom of Information Act). Furthermore, the DWP’s notorious, target-driven fitness for work tests, administered by private contractors ATOS have regularly declared terminally ill people fit and able to work. A report, in July 2012, entitled Incapacity Benefits: Deaths of Recipients revealed that between 2010 and 2011 a shocking 10,600 people had died while undergoing the DWP assessment process.

The mass panic sweeping over a Tory party which, until now, has been decidedly relaxed about just how many poor people their economic and social policies are killing, is simply because the massacre of men, women, and children at Grenfell Tower has happened right in front of the T.V cameras. This time there are witnesses and plenty of them! We’ve all seen the horror with our own eyes. The Tories won’t be able to commission a report into Grenfell and then steadfastly refuse to release it; no longer will Boris Johnson be able to tell a Labour opponent who dared to question his plans for fire service cuts in London to “get stuffed”; no longer will the Daily Mail be able to wheel out dismal lackeys like Toby Young to pour scorn all over anyone demanding an end to grotesque levels of inequality in Britain. His puerile, poisonous piece attacking Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake was a new low for our rabid tabloid press.

The great Tory austerity swindle is over; Grenfell Tower is a tipping point, the neo-liberal free-for-all that began under Margaret Thatcher and continued unabated through the Tony Blair / Gordon Brown years, incredibly gaining momentum after the de-regulated banks crashed the world economy in an orgy of greed and criminality is surely over now. Nearly forty years on from the rise to power of Thatcher, a reborn labour movement stands on the verge of power, armed with a moral and political mandate to rebuild the welfare state, redistribute wealth in favour of working people and to smash the phony policy of austerity once and for all!  

Set against this turbulent background, Yanis Varoufakis’ Adults in the Room, (a fascinating fly-on-the-wall account of how the Syriza Government of 2015 led the left’s fight against a European Union intent on enforcing a psychotic programme of perpetual austerity), proves to be a timely and instructive read. Varoufakis was teaching economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas when Prime Minister in waiting Alexis Tsipras offered him the high profile post of Finance Minister in the event that the radical coalition of Syriza triumphed in the forthcoming election (Varoufakis had been acting as the party’s unofficial advisor since 2013 and his outspoken opposition to destructive European Union bailouts was beginning to win support for a defiant, unorthodox alternative to austerity).

As whistleblowers go, Varoufakis is surprisingly measured and composed, telling his tale with refreshing good grace, and with a rare capacity to identify and acknowledge his own mistakes. Nevertheless, any 550-page account by a serious economist intent on detailing the considerably thorny subject of his country’s malicious bankruptcy can’t help but get itself enmeshed in a thicket of statistics every once in a while. Some of these bear repeating: unemployment soared from 7% to 27%; national income fell by 28%; healthcare expenditure was cut by 11.1% between 2009 and 2011, while 36% of the population currently lives at risk of poverty and social exclusion.  

Varoufakis, however, guides us ably through the minefield of facts and figures with the same relaxed charm and sense of humour that he displays while reviewing the papers on the Marr Show or on his annual pilgrimage to the Hay Festival (standing ovation guaranteed), and this makes for an engaging and easy read despite the intricacy of the subject matter. The following, somewhat lengthy extract, proves the point -

‘The German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble once told me that my opposition to austerity placed me in a minority of Europeans, citing opinion polls showing support for government expenditure cuts. I replied that, even if that were true, a majority can be wrong about the cause of their malaise. During the Black Death of the fourteenth century, I reminded him, most Europeans believed the plague was caused by sinful living and could be exorcised by bloodletting and self-flagellation. And when bloodletting and self-flagellation did not work, this was taken as evidence that people’s repentance was not sincere enough, that not enough blood had been let, that the flagellation was insufficiently enthusiastic - exactly as now when austerity’s abysmal failure is cited as proof that it has been applied too half-heartedly. If he was amused, Wolfgang did not show it’.

At the heart of his intriguing book, is Varoufakis’ head-on confrontation with the troika: the European Commission; the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, all of whom emerge as essentially duplicitous and anti-democratic institutions in their dealings with the Greek government. Time and again the troikas’ apparatchiks doctored agreed communications or withdrew concessions they had made 24 hours earlier while French ministers routinely engaged in doublespeak, supporting Greece in private only to cow-tow to Germany at Eurogroup meetings. Varoufakis often conceded ground, offering his opponents ingenious and imaginative solutions to a crisis that threatened to tear Europe apart. The troika was never interested, not for a moment. Austerity was the only (crooked) game in town!  Few people emerge from the book with any credit - in Washington, Bernie Sanders tried in vain to pressurise the IMF and, surprisingly perhaps, Emmanuel Macron, then the French economy minister attempted to convince President Hollande to back a more ‘sustainable solution’ to the crisis. Macron even visited Varoufakis after he’d been deposed in order to clarify his support for the beleaguered ex-minister.  

Of more interest, perhaps, to British readers post-Brexit and in light of our forthcoming detachment from Europe’s power brokers, is the other relationship at the heart of the book. From the moment that Varoufakis accepted the toxic post of finance minister, he doubted that Tsipras and his ragbag ‘war cabinet’, suspiciously stuffed with bankers chums, would have the resolve to take on the troika in a fight to the death. Time and again he counseled his wavering colleagues that they could not bluff their way out of economic collapse; they had to commit to a negotiating strategy that sought to convince Angela Merkel and co that Syriza would opt for Grexit rather than accept roll-over bailouts that only served to escalate debt and poverty to stratospheric levels. Only then, argued Varoufakis, would the troika, recoiling from a policy that might lead to the disintegration of their beloved European project, abandon its fateful obsession with austerity and finally agree to meaningful talks on restructuring the massive Greek debt.that austerity had brought crashing down on the poorest members of society.

Yanis and Alexis: Bromance followed by betrayal

The betrayal, when it came, was swift, stunning and incredibly bizarre. Having called for and won a referendum to reaffirm their anti-austerity mandate (an inspirational 61.3% voted in favour of continuing to resist a merciless troika), it gradually dawned on Varoufakis that he was almost the only minister at Maximos Mansions, the Greek prime minister’s official residence, in a celebratory mood. Tsipras and his cabinet, openly despondent at having won the vote, were behaving as if they had been heavily defeated. Even as the results were being announced, Tsipras was firing Varoufakis as finance minister (offering him a token post at the department of culture as a consolation), thereby signaling an irreversible surrender to the troika and an acceptance of punishing austerity*. Returning home, Varoufakis could only tell his partner Danae ‘Tonight we had the curious phenomenon of a government overthrowing its people’.

It’s to Varoufakis’ credit, then, that the book closes with a moving and objective analysis of a leader who betrayed the cause that they had both fought for,

‘Friends and critics criticise me for having seen things in Alexis that were not there. I think they are wrong. His desire to liberate Greece from its vicious cycle was there. His intelligence and capacity to learn quickly were self-evident. His enthusiasm for the deterrent I had proposed and the debt relief I was prioritizing was real. The reason that I had seen all these things in him was that they were there. When he instructed me, on our first day in office, to hand over the keys to our offices to the opposition rather than capitulate, he was not lying. The part of him telling me that was speaking the truth. This is why I was brought to tears by his words. This is why I believed him’.

* On the 15th of June 2017, the latest Greek bailout was agreed to the tune of 8.5 billion Euros. Once again, there was no agreement to cancel Greek debt.

Below is an extract from Yanis Varoufakis’ analysis of the deal

In short, poor pensioners will annually forfeit one of their twelve-monthly pension payments, as a result of a reduction in the threshold above which income tax is withheld. For a country where one in two families have no one working in it, and thus have to survive on some small pension that a grandparent collects, this is a socially devastating cut. Moreover, it will also lead to further small business failures (due to the large multiplier effect of reducing a small pension: when poor families reduce their spending in local shops already on the brink, many of these will go under), the result being more people on the scrapheap of unemployment and fewer contributors to the stressed pension funds.

His article can be read in full here

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2017/06/16/the-annotated-15th-june-2017-eurogroup-statement-on-greece/

Further reading on the statistics quoted above

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/13/suicides-of-benefit-claimants-reveal-dwp-flaws-says-inquiry

http://www.partnersinsalford.org/documents/DWP_Benefit_Conditionality_and_Sanctions_in_Salford_-

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/223050/incap_decd_recips_0712.pdf

[pardontheglueman]

V4VELINDRE UPDATE

A month after it’s release, V4Velindre has passed the £1,500 mark in funds raised. Thank you to everyone that downloaded the album, thanks to all the Indie stations that are playing the album across five continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and North America), thank you to all the blogs and podcasts that have featured the album, and, indeed, granted me interviews to publicise the cause of raising money for Velindre Cancer Centre. And thank you, most of all, to the 50 artists who contributed a song to the album. It’s worth me pointing out how invested in the project many of these artists have been, both in terms of the quality of the tracks donated, but also in their dedication to promoting the album as well.

It has been an incredible, and somewhat surreal, experience to have received the endorsement of  legendary writers John Harris and Pete Paphides as well as national broadcasters John Kennedy and Adrian Goldberg.  In Wales, I would especially like to thank Bill Cummings and God Is In The TV for covering the album before its release and for some badly needed off the record advice and guidance as to how things worked in the world of Bandcamp! Huge thanks to Adam Walton for devoting precious air time to the album on Radio Wales. I had hoped other presenters on the station would support an album that featured 30 Welsh acts, some of whom had created original work especially for V4Velindre, that hasn’t proved to be the case yet, but I will keep trying to enlist their backing.

All of the sales so far have stemmed from contacts made via the internet. The ongoing pandemic, combined with my own health vulnerabilities, has meant that there have been no boots on the ground, so to speak. Ideally, I would have been traipsing around libraries, arts Centres, record stores and music venues putting up posters and handing out leaflets etc. Planning ahead for just such a campaign, I am massively indebted to Wayne “Purple” Pearson for supplying me, free of charge, with a significant number of V4Velindre leaflets and posters. Hopefully, I will be in a position to distribute them sooner rather than later.

The exact amount raised, as of today, is £1, 548.00.

[pardontheglueman]

V4Velindre

We have finalised the 40-track V4Velindre line-up (there still remains the possibility of adding a name or two until we actually “go live”), but now it’s all about drumming up publicity for the album release on Bandcamp Friday in October. To that end, Bill Cummings at https://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/ has kindly volunteered to run a feature exclusively revealing the V4Velindre tracklisting over the course of a few days next week. There have also been offers of support from some of the best known music broadcasters on Radio Wales, and I am now in the throes of contacting over 100 specialist Indie stations in Europe and America to spread the word. It would be a massive help if all the artists contributing can make use of their social media network and their contacts within the music industry to raise the profile of V4Velindre prior to release too. Look out for further updates as we get nearer the big day”.

From the minute that we are born our lives intersect with the National Health Service. We all have stories (happy and sad) of the crucial role the NHS plays in our very existence. Nothing, though, could have prepared us for the sacrifice that NHS staff all over the country made to keep us safe during the COVID pandemic. Just between March 2020 and December 2020 883 NHS staff members died from COVID doing their duty and so much more. As the NHS, and the nation, seeks to rebuild in the wake of the pandemic we need to come together and make our contribution. As Nye Bevan famously said, ‘the NHS will last only as long as there’s folk with faith left to fight for it’. That fight comes in many measures – some will work for the NHS, some will vote for the NHS, some will protest for the NHS, and some will help finance its upkeep through jumble sales and sponsored walks. Please consider purchasing V4Velindre, every single penny of the proceedings that comes to me from the sale of this album will be passed straight to the Velindre Cancer Centre. A huge thank you to the artists involved in V4Velindre who decided to fight for the NHS by creating and donating.  

[pardontheglueman]

The Christmas Message

Three sleeps before Christmas, Leigh found herself startled awake in the middle of the night by the utterly impossible sound of falling snow. Leigh knew that this phenomenon couldn’t really be happening, knew that the sensation she felt deep in her bones was inexplicable, that even a million snowflakes, woven into one unfathomably magical snowfall, could never make so much as a single sliver of noise as they settled upon the face of the earth, knew that even the heaviest snowfall is masked by the infinitesimal ticking of the bedroom clock, as it measures out the slow, circuitous, passage of time. Nevertheless, the fact remained: a midnight snowfall had mysteriously disturbed her rest. 

Leigh lay motionless for the longest while. As she listened to the percussive sound of the snow rap against the misted glass of her bedroom window, she sought to persuade herself that the icy drumbeat might be explained away as a simple hail-storm, or by an angular wind rasping against the treetops or, more imaginatively, as the ricochet of white lightening deflected sharply from the rows of smoke-smudged rooftops opposite. Deep down, though, she sensed that there was nothing to disturb the louring night other than the lonesome murmuring of the moonlit snow.  Leigh tried to calm her breathing, to think beyond the strange turbulence outside. Something about the music of the snow thrumming along the power lines had unnerved her. With her eyes squeezed shut, she imagined a plume of incandescent snow spreading beyond her garden, engulfing the whole of the town before disappearing into the darkling night.                                                                                                 

                                Leigh had always loved snow, loved nothing better than to trek playfully across an unblemished landscape first thing of a winter morning. She delighted in leaving her size five footprints on the newly-minted surface while daydreaming of sledding toward the Pole. She liked to see a hard rind of crusted snow packed tight against the windscreens of parked cars, or blown up against the driveways of the expensively furnished houses on Cardiff Road. She liked rolling stupendously large snowballs just for the sake of it, although she sometimes put her hard work to good use by aiming them at unsuspecting snowmen, congratulating herself with an excited whoop each time she dislodged one of the oddly misshapen heads from its roly-poly body. She studied the greened mountains that turned impossibly white between the closing of her eyes last thing at night and their opening again first thing in the morning.  She even ordered the ranks of Christmas cards on the dining room mantelpiece solely with regard to the amount of snow pictured on them, placing those with idyllic, wintry snapshots, even if they were from obscure aunts she had never met, in front of the cartoonish offerings hand-delivered by her best friends. She liked shaking snow-globes furiously until the mini-blizzards she created seemed ready to shatter the glass in her hand..

Leigh believed that snow brought an air of mystery to her drab old town. She believed in the power of snow, like magic, to deceive the eye, to trick the grubby, littered streets of her estate into becoming a vast, white wilderness ripe for exploration and discovery. She loved snow most of all, though, because her father had loved snow. She remembered a night when he propped a kitchen chair against the back door and sat there for hours on end watching the snow falling from a Christmas sky, determined to remain at his sentry post until the flakes dwindled down to nothing or he simply fell asleep, whichever came first. It hadn’t snowed at Christmas for three years, though, and even then it was little more than thin sleet, late on Boxing Day, that had failed to settle. Her mother had let her stay up late that night to see if the snow amounted to anything. They drank milky coffee together and watched in disappointment as the slivers of sleet turned to unwelcome rain.

‘It just doesn’t snow like it used to when I was a girl’, her Mam had observed, looking wonderingly at an old photo of herself perched on her home-made sled with a smile blossoming on her face as big as the Brecon Beacons itself. ‘The most we get these days is a dusting that’s gone before you know it’. ‘Dad always used to say that snow fell like manna from heaven when he was a boy’, Leigh replied, her voice snagging against the still-raw memory of her father’s voice echoing throughout the house.

Sometimes, she asked her mother to tell her about the great snowfall of 1963, when bakers’ vans got stuck in the snow by the dozen and her Grandfather had stupidly got himself lost in a blizzard on his way for a swift pint in Rhydyfelin Non-Pol. Her Grandfather had a soft spot for snow too, especially if it resulted in a whole fleet of 132’s being marooned in the freezing tundra of Maerdy bus station, leaving him unable to get into work for a day or two!                                                                                                                     Leigh, smiling at the memory of those conversations, reached under her pillow and checked her watch, only to find that Old Father Time had somehow nodded off, or that the world had seemingly snowed itself to a standstill. She lay there a while longer, listening to the cold clacking of the snow while summoning up the courage to look outside. When she eventually pulled back the curtain her room was lit suddenly with the luminous glow from an astonishing snowfall that had somehow drifted all the way up to her bedroom window. She looked up at the sky through a tremulous swirl of flakes that ricocheted against each other in the freezing wind and was surprised to see that Eglwysilan Mountain had disappeared altogether behind a fog of snow.

It was then that she looked down into her garden and saw the strangest sight. Her name had been carved deeply into the brittle snow. She blinked in exaggerated fashion a half-dozen times, then let out a thin whistle and a fat giggle, both at exactly the same time; a neat trick that she had only recently perfected, and of which she was still immensely proud! She stared at her name for the longest time, then cŵtched herself into a ball and watched the blizzard blow for another hour, expecting at any moment that her name would vanish forever under the rushing of the snow. Instead, her name became cemented in the blue ice, shining crystal clear in the snow-light. She imagined God, in his heaven, looking down and reading her name out to the angels. She imagined her father doing the same.

For a while, soon after his passing, Leigh had spent her evenings in her father’s old room, leafing through rows and rows of his books in an attempt to rekindle her memories of him. She was disappointed, though, to find no trace of his daft sense of humour sandwiched between the yellowing pages of ‘The Great Gatsby’ or ‘Tess of The D’Ubervilles’. She felt there was nothing in either book that was revelatory, nothing that offered a new clue to his character, nothing at all that would stop her memories of him from evaporating with the passing years.  

When dawn broke she dressed, sprayed on the last drops of her White Musk perfume and went to stand quietly in the centre of the garden. The snow continued to fall heavily about her and it became impossible to see the sky through the kaleidoscope of snowflakes that dappled the air. Because it was Saturday she’d let her mother lie in and, anyway, she didn’t feel like talking to anyone, not to a single person on earth. She was transfixed by the message in the snow. What could it possibly mean?  There was no rational explanation for it. She had understood that much immediately. 

Nobody, not even the class clown Martin Pryce, who had been nursing a crush on her since primary school, would be crawling around her Antarctic garden in the middle of the night trying to sculpt a declaration of undying love into the freezing snow. For a while, she considered the possibility that the word etched into her garden was supposed to be sleigh and that the letter S had been lost in the drifting snow. However, that seemed an even more ridiculous explanation. It was more magical, more mysterious than that, she was sure of it. What else could explain her name still being preserved there, throughout an endless snow-squall?                                                                     

Leigh decided not to tell her Mam about the bizarre message. Instead, she took refuge in her room, making up an excuse that she was having a Christmas Movie day - a triple-decker of It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and Muppet Christmas Carol. She spent the day, though, mostly watching the unrelenting snowfall, her thoughts drifting off into the dreamy whiteness outside her window. Inexplicably, her name did not vanish but remained firmly embedded in the snow. Exhausted by a mixture of worry and excitement, Leigh fell asleep before supper. 

When the sunlight fizzed between the blinds, catching the girl a glancing blow across the temple she stirred and began, at once, to remember the mystery of the snow. She rolled across the bed and raised the blinds. The snow had continued to fall between the constellations the whole night long and now, in the fresh snow, underneath her name, the words ‘BE MERRY’ had been chiselled into the pallid surface. Someone, somewhere, was sending her a message.  She was unsurprised when she began to cry. She felt a surge of loneliness sweep through her body and lodge squarely behind her eyes. She waited a long while for the redness around her eyes to melt and for her headache to simmer down before attempting breakfast. She picked up a handful of mail, blotted with fresh snow, from the rumpled doormat and yawned her way into the kitchen. She made herself a coffee and a boiled egg. She thought hard about telling her Mam about the message in the garden. She pictured an uneasy smile spreading over her Mam’s face mid-explanation. Her Mam had a lopsided sort of smile that occasionally hung about the corners of her mouth a fraction too long as if it didn’t know where to go when the fleeting moment of happiness that had prompted its surprised appearance had passed. She looked at the boiled egg and grinned, the half-hacked shell dangling over the edges of the eggcup reminded her of one of her mum’s sad, unfinished smiles.

She retreated, instead, to her bedroom with the intention of listening to her father’s favourite festive record, ‘Christmas Greetings with Perry Como’, an album that was played faithfully in the run-up to Christmas each year. She didn’t play the record, though, preferring to sit in silence while watching the crumbling snow slip through the cracks of a gloomy sky.  Eventually, she drifted off to sleep in the pale shadow of the snow, as the pleasant voices of carollers exchanging their Merry Christmas’ carried across the town’s snow-cusped streets. When Leigh went downstairs for her tea she found her mother writing Christmas Cards and listening to “Fairy Tale of New York”. Her mother had a tear in her eye, which she quickly blinked away.

‘Can you believe it’s still snowing?’ her Mam asked. ‘What’s the forecast say, Mam?’ ‘It’s a bit strange, love. They say it’s stopped snowing everywhere, but right here. I can’t really account for it!  It’s raining down the road in Nantgarw, and your Nan says it’s been tipping down in Pentre all day too. It seems that good old Ponty is the only place in the whole of Wales that’s set for a white Christmas this year!’   Leigh sat down by her Mam’s side ‘Mam, were you crying because of Dad?’ Leigh asked, quietly. ‘It’s okay, love, it’s just the time of the year. I should be getting used to it by now’. Leigh gave her mum’s hand a squeeze. There is no getting used to it, though, is there, she thought to herself. ‘Do you remember any of Dad’s Christmas stories, Leigh?’ ‘There were so many, Mam - ‘Rudolph’s Ruined Reputation’, where Rudolph, of all reindeer, got himself lost on another foggy Christmas Eve, ‘The Golden Key’, where the key for the toy factory went missing just as it was time to load up Santa’s sleigh, and then there was ‘Heatwave’, where unusually clement weather threatened Christmas!) They both laughed out loud. ‘The course of Christmas never did run smooth, Mam.’ ‘But there was always a happy ending, Leigh’. Santa always got that sleigh off the ground in the end and there were always presents under the tree. Your Dad cherished his childhood Christmases, he wanted you and your sister to feel the same way’. Leigh gave her Mam a long hug, which was her way of trying to fend off the familiar sadness that clouded over her when she talked about her father. ‘You just missed Louise on the phone. She’ll be arriving around six if the trains are on time’. Leigh was only half-listening to the news of her older sister’s Christmas plans. She was still thinking of her father.

   Her Dad had loved everything about Christmas; from opening the first door of his Advent calendar on the 1st of December to singing Auld Lang Syne at the top of his voice at midnight on the 31st and anything remotely Christmassy that went on in between. Each year his ritual would be the same; re-reading A Christmas Carol on his commute to and from work, decorating the tree to the sound of Perry Como’s “Home For The Holidays”, highlighting his favourite festive films in the bumper edition of the Radio Times, taking us to see Father Christmas switch on the Taff Street lights and even to meet him in person, usually in Caerphilly Garden Centre, or, in later years, when the old gent seemed to be going up in the world, in his very own grotto in Ynysanghard Park!  For Leigh, Christmas simply hadn’t been Christmas since her dad’s passing. For sure, she still liked Christmas, but it was just that she couldn’t bring herself to love it anymore.                                                        

To stop herself from thinking, Leigh went out into the street to inspect the snowmen along her road. Some, it had to be said, were pretty poor specimens, but there they all stood; bellies haphazardly bloated by the whisking snow. She couldn’t help but laugh at their inelegance, clad as they were in ill-fitting Santa hats and threadbare scarves. Most had carroty noses that jutted out from king-sized heads and scraggly branches of uneven length for arms. She watched a family; a mother and father, two girls, one around her own age, and a very small boy move their belongings into the house opposite. As the children carried their small cases back and forth up the snow-chalked driveway she waved in their direction. They gladly returned her gesture, the boy wishing her a Merry Christmas at the top of his voice. She felt cheered and, without noticing, began to murmur a song her Dad would sing to her at Christmas when she was very small -

‘Christmas Day is on its way It’s time for Kris Kringle Through the hush of a starry night You can hear his sleigh bells jingle’

She tried to recollect the rest of the song but could only bring to mind the chorus

‘Good old Santa, Good old Santa Claus What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours You’re a good old Santa Claus’.

She stayed in the street for a very long time because she sensed that the crisp evening air was somehow redolent with the fragrance of Christmas. A change in the direction of the wind blew a puff of snow into her eyes, so she huddled back in the doorway, watching a sluggish convoy of snowploughs wind through the neon-lit lanes, until the wintry night began to close in, and she could see her breath unspool in the starlight.

Louise was only 10 minutes late. She came in carrying a suitcase and a bag of presents, singing “Home for the Holidays” so boisterously that she scared the neighbour’s cat off the relative warmth of the windowsill and out onto the cold lawn. You always knew when Louise was home from University, because the quiet house would suddenly be filled, room by room, with the sound of her enthusiastic singing. Leigh gave her sister a cŵtch and helped her stack the presents under the tree before blurting out, ‘Come and see the garden, college girl’ I’ve seen enough snow for one day, Leigh’ ‘There’s something out there I want to show you’ ‘It’s too cold and I’ve just got these boots off’ joked Louise ‘Okay, come to my bedroom, you can see from the window’ They raced each other upstairs and jumped on the bed. Louise pulled up the blind and waited for Louise’s reaction. ‘Uh, okay, you’ve written your name in the snow. It’s mad, Leigh, you must have frozen out there, How many hours did it take you? ‘I didn’t write it’ ‘Mam then, how long was Mam out there’? ‘Mam doesn’t even know it’s there. It just appeared, overnight. It’s snowed solidly for twenty-four hours but it hasn’t swept the name away. If it snowed for twenty-four days and twenty-four nights, it still wouldn’t. It’s magic, Louise, or a miracle, or something. I heard it fall, too, Louise, that first night the snow actually woke me, me of all people! It’s not ordinary snow. It can’t be’.

Louise felt Leigh’s hand tighten in hers, as they continued to watch clusters of snowflakes quake and tremble in the wind. 

                                                                    Louise lay on the bed and Leigh cŵtched up to her until their mum called them for supper. After Louise had told them, at great length, how rehearsals for ‘A Christmas Carol’ were going - she was playing the part of Fred’s wife (again) - she put on her duffle coat and went into the back garden. The skyline and the snowfall were an indistinguishable grey. The words were still engraved on a slab of settled snow, clear and visible until the streetlights dimmed, one by one, and night fell over the white gardens of the Valley.

In the morning, while Leigh slept, Louise went again to look at the message. The snow still fell in abundance. She looked for the longest time and a tear settled in the corner of her eye. When she went inside she woke her sister gently and brought her a breakfast of tea and toast. ‘There are more words. Look and see’.

Leigh peered through the frosted pane and the glimmering snow falling over the garden. The message had been added to again during the night, but now seemed complete. LEIGH BE MERRY CHRISTMAS AND FOREVER XXXX

Leigh said nothing. She sat at the window, brushing her long, brown hair, while staring out at the marbled garden. A cool riff of wind blew a dusting of flakes from the old, ice-capped, willow trees that rimmed the lawn.       Louise said quietly ‘Come downstairs when you’ve finished, I want to show you something’. When Leigh came down she saw her sister sitting at the dining room table surrounded by a stack of Christmas Cards ‘Louise, it’s too late to be sending cards. It’s Christmas Eve, though we can pop one across to the new family opposite. ‘They seem very nice’.  ‘These cards have already been sent, to you, to me, and to Mam, a long time ago. Come and read them’ Leigh picked up a Christmas card that showed a small cottage in the snow, with a Christmas robin in the foreground. She opened up the card. Inside, in her father’s untidy handwriting, was a declaration to her mum To Karen, Be Merry, Christmas and forever Love, Gary XXXX Louise handed her another card that showed a jolly Santa flying his sleigh through the thickening snow at the pole To my Darling daughter Becky - Leigh BE MERRY Christmas and forever xxxxx Dad P.S, only seventeen days to go!!!!

Leigh sorted through the cards, they were all written by her Dad and they were all signed off the exact same way. Tears burnt her eyes as she read and re-read them, trying to picture her father saying the words ‘Don’t you remember, Leigh, Dad always used to say that ‘Be Merry, Christmas and forever’ ‘It can’t be Dad, Louise. You know it can’t ‘. ‘I’m sure it is. Who else would write it? We should show Mam’. ‘No’, shouted Leigh, and ran upstairs crying. For what seemed an age she stared blankly through the window at the message written in the midst of the immeasurable snow.                                                                   Before lunch, Leigh put on her favourite Christmas jumper (Santa shaking hands with a snowman), her matching hat and scarf and went into the garden. The rooftops remained cloaked in snow, and the sky was shrouded in a frail mist. Snow continued to fall about her as she walked toward the message. Leigh reached down to touch the snow, tracing her hand along the powdered groove of the first letter. As she crumbled the stone-cold snow between her fingers she began to tremble and her heart started to jitterbug crazily inside of her. Visions of her past, present and future went bobsleighing before her big brown eyes and she started to swoon. She fell backward, arms outstretched, into the snow and lay there flat on her back. Her mother happened to glance out of the kitchen window, at precisely the time Leigh crash-landed in the snow. Her mum smiled; making a snow angel was such a cool thing to do she thought as she carried a tray of mince pies toward the oven.

As Leigh lay motionless, visions began to swirl about her like cascading snow; she saw herself first as a child, being raised high by her Dad, to deposit a golden star on the top of their Christmas tree; then she saw her teenage self being chased around the garden by her Uncle, who just happened to be carrying an armful of heavy-duty snowballs. Suddenly, she was walking up the aisle to be married, and at Christmas too! One of her bridesmaids was the girl who had just moved in across the street, the other with bobbed rose-gold hair, was her sister. The groom looked handsome and, indeed, somewhat familiar. Leigh couldn’t entirely dismiss the sickening possibility that it was Martin Pryce, her unrequited Romeo from junior school. A hard-edged breeze jostled snow shavings loose from the overhanging branches and the flakes fell like confetti upon the couple as they walked hand in hand toward their wedding car.

Then she could hear the voices of children, echoing across a snow-frosted mountain. Twin girls, who looked the spit of her sister, and an older boy, were sledding down an alabaster slope. The boy turned toward her and shouted ‘are you watching, Mam?’. She looked carefully at the lively boy as he smiled, and there really was no mistaking that smile. She’d seen it time and again in family albums – it was her father’s smile, the one captured in her most treasured photo of her dad pulling a small dinghy through the green shallows of Tenby’s South Beach, a bountiful smile broadening across his face, frozen forever in time. The small boy, battling his way through the bone-sapping snow had the exact same purposeful smile as his late Grandfather.

‘I’m watching, Ga’, you’re super- brave’.  She heard her answer ferried back on the breeze and felt a cheery glow as the boy responded by thrusting his gloved thumbs up into the whitening air. He held the pose long enough for his mother to document his triumph over Mother Nature and then re-launched himself onto his sled and whooshed back down the snow-flossed slope for the hundredth time. Then she was awake, terribly cold and confused by the sight of her mother and her sister bending over her, trying to lift her gently from the clasp of the snow. She remembered nothing of the flurry of visions, but she was aware of an intense feeling of well-being and the pleasant warmth of absolute happiness spreading over her as she looked into the concerned face of her big sister.                                                                                   That night it had stopped snowing, as she somehow knew in her heart that it must. Soon the snow would start to thaw, gradually thinning into clumps of slush to be kicked haphazardly against the kerbsides by bands of small boys making the streets playable for the traditional Boxing Day footie matches that would spring up out of nowhere. Coal-grey rain would soon resume its routine dominance of the valley landscape, washing away the snow for another year. Leigh woke early on Christmas Day to find that the message had disappeared sometime in her sleep, but she was not saddened by the discovery. As dusk fell, she stood in the garden to better hear the Christmas bells ring out and to look up at the night sky and the braille of bluish stars that divined a pathway through the heavens leading, she felt certain now, from one world to the next.

In the turmoil of the last few days, her memories had become unmoored, had drifted dangerously in the cross-currents between the past and the present. She had, though, discovered a precious secret in that journey between the distant poles of life and death. The becalming knowledge that as we seek to make our way in this world memory can grant us safe passage, and provide us with a place of sanctuary in which to rest until the storms of unimaginable loss finally blow themselves out. 

Leigh knew, then, the true meaning of her father’s Christmas message. Knew, deep down in her soul, that the communion between father and daughter would last forever. Knowing that was so, Leigh fell in love with Christmas and with life all over again.

The End

[pardontheglueman]

Head Noise / Uber - Fantastique

For the best part of 18 months Aberdare’s Electro Art-Punks Head Noise (Mitch Tennant Vocals & Keytar), Wayne Basset (Synths & Guitar) and Jordan Brill (Synths & Guitar) have been working away on their debut album Über-Fantastique, a record which they describe, in typical Head Noise fashion, as a ‘bombastic, electropop fever dream’. In a detailed, track-by-track guide, Mitch Tennant talked to Kevin McGrath about the record they are about to unleash on an unsuspecting Welsh public.

1. KINGDOM OF CROOKED MIRRORS

We had a lively debate at Head Noise HQ over which song to open the album with, either this track or the one that follows. We eventually decided on “Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors” to kick-start the debut as we think it encompasses all things Head Noise and has a great splattering of our influences in a catchy, oddball pop song. The title of the track comes from a 1963 Soviet fairy tale film and is loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”. The song reflects our own mantra for creative passion and is also a look at an outsider’s perspective for abstract art and trying to make sense of the senseless. It’s like Alice In Wonderland without the drug references. Ignore the evils of the world and just let the childlike magic speak for itself. 

2. 200,000 GALLONS OF OIL

I was on my lunch break one day surfing the web and a pop-up article came on-screen about fuel, oil refining and other industrial processes that I had very little interest in. However, the title of the piece "Pipeline Spills 200,000 Gallons of Oil" really jumped out at me. I wrote it down and put it aside with my collection of other alphabetical oddities that I type up on Notepad. A little while after, Wayne sent me an electropop demo with a bouncy, squelchy bass line which I felt matched up to this wording perfectly! The title of the song has some sort of political or eco-warrior ring to it but it's always a surprise to people who question what the song is about, and we say "Uhh... It's just about oil?" What kind of oil do you want it to be? I'll leave that up to you, but here are some suggestions: vegetable oil, or maybe oil to slick back your hair.

3. JAPANESE BATTERIES

One Christmas, my partner gifted me an Otamatone, which is basically a screwed-up Theremin/Stylophone synth-like device that is in the shape of a musical note, however it looks more like a giant sperm! It’s become a popular instrument on Youtube for fashioning unusual sounding covers of songs, such as Boney M’s “Rasputin” and A-ha’s “Take on Me”. I was totally amazed by the packaging - it had a little Japanese man with fluffy hair, the inventor of the instrument, looking off into the distance, not unlike some surreal propaganda poster art. The song is, basically, a homage to this strange instrument, and it’s played on the track, not long after the first chorus, just to show off the unusual noises that it makes.

4. ANATOMICALLY CORRECT SHUFFLE

This is a song where I feel the bassline really helps to give the song a danceable bounce, that’s why the title of the track has "Shuffle" at the end of it. This is the first of the collaborations that we have on the album. Wayne sent me a demo he was working on with some bass being played by his friend "Monkey" (who I still haven't met yet) under the working title "Monkey Jam". When we started putting the album together, we were coming out of that mad scientist stage persona from the Microwave EP run of shows, so I had a whole lot of science stuck in my mind. I thought we'd go gung-ho as a farewell to the bygone days of false nerdy scholarship with a classic Head Noise sound to it. The lyrics for the song are like an amalgamation of a botched surgery, unusual ailments and chronic nightmares. Luckily, we have Brill onboard to give it that fun little jaunty undertone on the synth, to help keep us sane and avoid any potential lobotomies.

5. MYSTERY LIQUID

This is another Notepad scribble title that I just had to make into a song! When you hear songs about drinking, it’s usually either a fun affair (a drunken pub singalong) or a dark, cautionary tale (alcoholism), so we were looking to meet in the middle between jolly and sombre. I was influenced by Spike Jones & His City Slickers and their song “Clink! Clink! Another Drink”, especially for its humorous look at binge drinking from a 1940s perspective. It seems so harmless and funny, but it’s much more morally twisted if you look at it from the outside. With a bassline from our good friend Connor Llewellyn of Math Rock band "Common Spit", the song turned into more of a fast-paced rocker with some added spoken word and Dada inspired lyrics from Cat Daczkowski who also plays in Rock band KASIA. I really liked her vocal style as it reminded me of Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth’s unique and unbothered singing approach, so we NEEDED it on the album somewhere.

6. AIRSTRIKE 4000

When I was young, I used to love my Sega Megadrive games console! I played games like Streets of Rage, Golden Axe and Desert Strike, but I got bored easily with Desert Strike because I wouldn’t always know what to do. I wanted to write lyrics that broke the fourth wall too, so the song starts out as a homage to a made-up Sega game in the style of Desert Strike. Then I get bored about halfway through and changed the theme of the song, just like when I was 8 years old and trying to play the bloody game before turning it off to play Sonic & Knuckles instead. It’s a Lo-fi retro Rock vs Synth song with some amazing guitar wobbles/shrieks from Brill and some wicked retro sounds darted across the duration of the track.  

7. NITRO

When we were lucky enough to support “Public Service Broadcasting” last year at the Muni Arts Centre in Pontypridd, we wanted to go all out with a wacky elaborate stage show. We roped in our good friend Mark Strange to help us put together some surreal extras in the set such as a puppet show and a battle royale with Mark dressed up as a Ninja Turtle. We wanted to create our own little ‘introduction song’ for this show for when we walked onstage akin to Devo’s “Corporate Anthem” instrumental. So, Wayne put together our own track to help introduce the band as Mark walked out dressed in a lab-coat to inspect the equipment before we came on. There isn’t much else I can say about this track really other than performance is key! We decided to give the song a promotion from introduction song to intermission song which now sits about halfway through the album. In fact, that’s why it is called “Nitro”, it’s just an anagram of “intro” but with some dynamite flair! 

8. SHRUNKEN HEAD

We used to open the live set with this song. It’s a song about idiocracy within the musical world, not too far off “Cherub Rock” by Smashing Pumpkins. The song is stacked with surreal imagery, which also includes a reworking of the “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” phrase from Science Fiction writer Harlan Ellison as a pre-chorus. I think it’s important to have passion in what you do creatively, and you shouldn’t allow others to mistake that devotion for egotism. I went to “Ripley’s Believe it Or Not” oddity museum in Blackpool a couple of times over the years and I got to see a real (or ‘real fake’, you be the judge?) shrunken head in a glass case. Rhys Jones plays some cool guitar lines on this track which is like a mix between Egyptian rhumba and the live dissection of a squirrel. It is an interesting song and we like it very much.

9. INTRUDER-ESQUE

Have you ever had those nights when you’ve gone to bed and looked over at the other side of the room in the dark to see the blurred black outline of a wardrobe or a hanging coat? In a sleep-addled state, this can be terrifying and can lead to “sleep paralysis”. I thought it was an interesting subject to pick up on. We gave the outro to Lloyd Markham of Psych-Electro band Deep Hum to use as his personal synth playground and we love it! I think the entire track captures the vibe of uneasiness that you can get in a sleep-deprived state when you don’t entirely feel safe, with an unknown threat lurking in the shadows.  

10. I EAT CANNIBALS

An old friend of mine said the Toto Coelo song “I Eat Cannibals” sounds like something Head Noise would cover, so we just went off and covered it. I think it goes a little hand in hand with “Shrunken Head” and its voodoo vibe. The track features fantastic backing vocals by Miss Cat Southall, singer extraordinaire! I’m a fan of bands who re-work covers to suit their own sound. We always have an unusual cover in our back pocket if things start to go pear-shaped! We’ve previously recorded songs by Sonic Youth and The Bangles.

11. MR. EVERYWHERE

This is a Rocker Wayne had been working on for a little while until we decided to give it more context and “beef” so to speak. It’s basically a punk song that’s been shaved down to a shouty rock song, with a little bit of synth here and there. The song’s lyrics simply reflect how busy we felt after we released the Special Effects EP and how being in a band can be a lot of stress as much as a lot of fun. 

12. NO PHOTO | NO FILM | NO TELEPHONE

On a trip to Venice, I stopped by St Mark's Basilica to see the famed “Horses of Saint Mark”. There was a sign near them saying “No Photo, No Film, No Telephone” which made me laugh. Anyway, the track was inspired by a warning sign, but is about the overuse of modern communication technology and the brief escape that we get from these devices. It’s crazy to see how much the world has changed in 20 years, so we summed it up quickly with a fully Electronic Pop song featuring a fun shout-a-long chorus.

13. COMPLY

Someone said to me recently “music has been intrinsically linked to politics since like forever!” and even though there is some truth in that statement, I refuse to believe that it is the most important reason for someone to enjoy listening to music. This is my own attack against people who like to moan and whine until they get what they want, whether it is logical or not. It’s our own protest song which protests protest songs. We’ve made sure the song is happy and upbeat, because ignorance is bliss, eh? 

14. GAMMA GUTS

The spiritual successor to our single “Microwave”, in fact, it’s a loose sequel of sorts. I have a fear that there isn’t enough science behind the use of microwaves. I imagine that there are some harmful side effects, but it scares me to think that we might not have a clue. The song is split into two parts - the first is a goofy little Electro Rock song about the digestion of nuclear materials and then the second part is an electronic instrumental, orchestrated by the band Massa Circles. There are some beats donated by John Barnes and some shouts by Anthony Price too. The song reminds me of Eric Clapton’s “Layla” because it starts off as a fun Rocker and ends with an emotional instrumental akin to side 2 of David Bowie’s Low album. This is one of our favourite songs to play live at the moment because it gives us free rein to experiment musically.

[pardontheglueman]

Silent Forum / Everything Solved At Once

Two years ago, Silent Forum released Sanctuary+, a cassette-only compilation issued through Oddbox, that collected together a handful of the band’s essential singles and EP’s recorded between 2015-2017. For die-hard followers of the indie-noir outfit, this was a small, though significant, sign of progress. At the same time, however, it felt like the end of an era too; despite his startling stage presence, frontman Richard Wiggins remained the best-kept secret in Welsh pop; the band hadn’t managed to secure themselves a conventional record deal and they were largely absent from the nation’s radio stations too. All this at a time when fellow Cardiff combo Boy Azooga was playing to an audience of millions on Later….with Jools Holland.

The group’s frustration with the Welsh music establishment was evident on “How I Faked the Moon Landing”, a groovy, six-minute epic that railed against the band’s continued underdog status. Indeed, the song's key line “we’re destined to be a local band not on local radio” would have been laugh out loud funny were it not so upsettingly true. There was a delicious irony, then, in events as they unfolded in the Summer of 2018 – a song furiously lamenting the band’s lack of radio exposure was suddenly ever-present across the airwaves. Soon enough, DJs, bloggers and music critics were including the track in their ‘best of 2018’ playlists. The frenetic follow-up single “Robot” reinforced the impression that this was a band on the up and an album deal with Libertino was announced before the summer was out. 

While it’s entirely predictable that Everything Solved at Once, Silent Forum’s confidently constructed debut album should kick off with the uber-pop of killer single “Robot”, the pair of tracks that follow thrillingly confound expectations. “Spin” is a hypnotic descent into a mind-numbing maelstrom of fractured guitar licks and soaring, yearning vocals, while “Safety in Numbers”, an atypical ballad built around interweaving melody lines, overlapping vocals and an intriguing meditation on friendship (the tune drifts to a close with a roll call of band members and a status update as to their well-being), is a stunning track that speaks to the band’s versatility and ambition. Side 1 (the revival of vinyl means that we can write about albums in these terms once again), concludes with “A Great Success”, a number that surges along on a classic indie-noir riff, before climaxing in a stadium-sized chorus, and the curiously-titled “Credit to Mark Sinker” (a well-respected music journalist, if you were wondering?), where Wiggins seems to be channeling the wordsmithery of punk/post-punk legend Robert Lloyd. Despite an intriguing lyric, it’s probably the weakest track on show here.

The title tune kicks off a strong second side; a punchy number with a towering chorus, it’s reminiscent of early-period Editors and has ‘future single’ written all over it. “A Pop Act” is a prequel/sequel to “How I Faked the Moon Landing” and offers further surreal commentary on the band’s struggle to punch a hole in the pop stratosphere - ‘Went back to the Swedish furniture company / returned our flat pack songs / I don’t like my music bland… I like it intense and sad’. The album builds to an edgy finish with three outstanding tracks - “Outmoded”, a last-minute inclusion, is a brooding, beast of a track, built around a mournful base motif and a shrill guitar; “A Kind of Blue”,  a song which has been a staple of the band’s repertoire for some time, usually sparks into life in a live setting thanks to Wiggins’ strange exhortations during the song’s wilfully discordant instrumental break. There are no visual aids to cue our emotional responses here, of course, but the song is a triumph nonetheless, thanks to the pitch-perfect production skills of Charlie Francis. Importantly, Francis ensures that the album benefits from a coherent feel throughout, despite the unexpected presence of a trumpet and a burst of canned applause at one point, which is testimony, also, to the chemistry that exists between comrades-in-arms Oli Richards (bass) Dario Ordi (guitar) and Elliot Samphier (drums). The album closes, as it was absolutely compelled to, with the delirious, dance-punk of “How I Faked the Moon Landing. The momentous track winding to a close with Wiggin’s desperately declaiming his bands uniqueness - “Why would we want to be like them?” - he pleads over and over again until the music exhausts itself. 

Everything Solved at Once is a black-comedy concept album about life on the fringes of the Welsh music biz, which is something of a first for my record collection and, quite possibly, yours? While pop music has a history of self-referential songs, from “Hey, We’re the Monkeys” to the 80’s frippery of “Ant Music”, Silent Forum push this self-obsession to its limit, with over half of their debut LP (as well as a couple of recent B-sides) devoted to the internal machinations of the band. This may seem to be a chronic case of navel-gazing, and part of me does indeed yearn for a return to the intense, angsty songwriting that gave birth to early band classics like the ominous “Limbo” or the pulverising “Whose Going to Side With Me”, but Wiggins approaches his Sisyphean task with a self-deprecating humour and a whip-smart feel for a one-liner that ensures the Silent Forum saga is a soap opera well-worth tuning into.

Everything Solved at Once catapults Silent Forum straight into the top tier of indie-noir bands. In common with other leading groups of the genre - The Murder Capital, Fontaines DC, Shame and Hotel Lux, Silent Forum make music that reflects and echoes the disquietude of the times. While Indie-noir hasn’t delivered an outright classic album post Joy Division, Everything Solved At Once, a claustrophobic, yet cinematic record, may, in time, rank alongside near misses such as Whipping Boy’s Heartworm (1995) Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights (2002), Editors The Back Room (2005) or The National’s High Violet (2010). 

[pardontheglueman]

AN INCONVENIENT DEATH / MILES GOSLETT

Dr David Kelly*, pictured testifying before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee shortly before his death.

Two months after the American-British led invasion of Iraq, a deeply controversial action which had divided the population of the United Kingdom and which International law suggests may well have been illegal (indeed, the Foreign Office lawyer Elizabeth Wilmshurst resigned in protest at the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s last-minute ruling that United Nations’ backing was not required before troops could be sent in), BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan broadcast a report for Radio Four’s Today programme at 6.07am which accused the Labour government of ‘sexing up’ a Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) dossier which it had heavily relied upon when making its case for war to Parliament in the winter of 2002. 

Quoting a ‘senior official’ who had helped draw up Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Assessment of the British Government, Gilligan cast doubt on its notorious claim that Saddam Hussein could have weapons of mass destruction primed and ready for use within forty-five minutes. A claim dutifully ramped up to the nth degree by The Sun in the sensational ‘BRITS 45 MINS FROM DOOM’ headline, which led its 25th of September edition. When Gilligan, following up his scoop with a piece for The Sunday Mail, named Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff Alastair Campbell as the architect of the clandestine plot to manipulate the intelligence services into beating the drum for war, Campbell launched a fierce attack on the British Broadcasting Corporation which, ultimately, claimed the scalps of the BBC’s Chairman Gavyn Davies and its Director-General Greg Dyke as well as the life of Gilligan’s senior source, who was later revealed to be the leading United Nations’ weapons inspector Dr David Kelly. 

Miles Goslett, an award-winning investigative journalist who has written for The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times and The Spectator takes an admirably fastidious approach to his examination of Dr Kelly’s ‘inconvenient’ death. While much of the ground covered here duplicates the work of Norman Baker (a minister in the Cameron/Clegg coalition government) in his 2007 book, The Strange Death of David Kelly, the detailed research evident in Goslett’s work reinforces Baker’s verdict that Dr Kelly’s death should not be ascribed to suicide. 

When news of Dr Kelly’s death broke, Blair immediately feared that the scandal might lead straight to 10 Downing Street and, ultimately, to the end of his tenure as Prime Minister. The disclosure of Dr Kelly as the leaker who threatened the stability of the British government had been green-lighted by Blair, his spin doctor Campbell and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, chiefly because Campbell and Hoon believed it would ‘fuck Gilligan’ if it could be shown that his source was an unknown expert rather than a high-ranking intelligence officer or a leading politician.

Andrew Gilligan - Even now there is doubt as to whether Dr Kelly was the chief source for Gilligan’s sensational scoop.

In reaction to Dr Kelly’s death, Blair and his former flatmate Charlie Falconer, then conveniently serving as both Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State of Constitutional Affairs, quickly decided to set up a public inquiry (even before the body had been formally identified!) under the jurisdiction of Lord Hutton. On the face of it, this seems to have been a principled response, but Goslett is able to prove otherwise. A coroner’s inquest, with the power to compel witnesses to attend, where evidence is given under oath and where a charge of perjury could be preferred against those who are tempted to depart from the truth, would usually have been held to establish the circumstances of an unexplained death. The terms of the Hutton Inquiry, though, offered none of these standards and safeguards because Falconer had decided that Hutton was not going to preside over a formal public inquiry, properly established under the Tribunal Inquiries (Evidence) Act 1921. Time and again contradictory evidence (even on such fundamentals as the position of Dr Kelly’s body) went unchallenged by Hutton, and Goslett’s forensic deconstruction of his lamentable inquiry and his worships seemingly un-enquiring mind is the most fascinating part of this book. 

There simply isn’t space here to recount all the anomalies that Goslett (and, to be fair, Baker before him) have uncovered in the deeply flawed Hutton Inquiry or the many inexplicable details surrounding Dr Kelly’s death, but some of the more troubling include the absence of fingerprints on the pen knife that Hutton supposedly used to slash his wrists; the failure to resolve the discrepancy between the paramedics and the police who attended the scene as to the reported position of the body; the entire pub cribbage team who claimed that Dr Kelly was playing as usual for the Hinds Head on the evening of the 9th of July (a week before his death) and not hiding in fear from a pack of press hounds as had been widely circulated in an attempt to show that Kelly was driven to suicide; Hutton’s refusal to enquire of Dr Kelly’s family why they had waited fully nine hours to report missing a man who had gone out for a thirty-minute walk; the reported theft of Dr Kelly’s dental records at the time he went missing, and their even more mysterious return; Hutton’s refusal to call before him Sgt Simon Morris who lead the initial search for Hutton or the officer in overall charge of the investigation, Chief Inspector Alan Young and the controversy over whether Dr Warner, the local GP, had at any time examined the body of the deceased scientist. These unresolved questions are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to considering the troubling conclusions of the Hutton inquiry, and, indeed, the Attorney General Dominic Grieve’s 2011 review of the case. 

Such was the ineptitude (intentional or otherwise) of Hutton’s labours that he could not even clear up the date of the scientist’s death. Dr Kelly’s death certificate gives the date as the 18th of July, while his headstone states the date as the 17th!  Hutton seemed far more interested in apportioning blame to the BBC, rather than to the government that had appointed him. His verdict, unsurprisingly, was widely regarded as a whitewash and, to compound matters, Lord Hutton then took the utterly incomprehensible decision to make a secret recommendation to the state that all records provided to his inquiry which had not been produced in evidence be closed to the public for thirty years. In addition, he sought permission for all photographs of the body and all medical reports relating to Dr Kelly’s death, including the post-mortem report, to be sealed for seventy years. 

Dr David Halpin, one of the medical signatories to a series of letters** sent to The Guardian disputing the findings of the Hutton Inquiry.

The major difference between Goslett’s and Baker’s books lie in how much time they devote to speculating on why Dr Kelly’s death may not have been suicide at all. While Goslett suggests three alternative scenarios – ‘Either he was murdered, and the scene where he was found was set up to look as if he had taken his life there; or he died of a natural cause, perhaps during an official meeting or interrogation and the ‘suicide scene’ was then created, or he did not die at all, but was disappeared’, the author concludes that ‘it is not the aim of this book to back one of these theories, but to drive forward the case for a full coroner’s inquest’. Baker, on the other hand, devotes the best part of one hundred and fifty pages to such conjecture and uncovers some truly fascinating detail along the way. 

To help explain his grave suspicions, Baker is right to examine Dr Kelly’s secretive and colourful career in minute detail. Dr Kelly began his career in the public sector when he was appointed a senior scientific officer in the Unit of Invertebrate Virology at the National Environment Research Establishment in 1973, after serving there for eleven years he joined the Ministry of Defence as head of what was then the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down (much in the news recently as the possible source of the Novichok used in the assassination attempt on former soviet spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia at nearby Salisbury), where his remit was to enhance the defence of troops who might be subject to biological attack. From 1991, Dr Kelly began his role as an on-site weapons inspector which, in turn, led to his appointment as senior advisor to the United Nations’ Special Commission (UNSCOM) and his secondment to the MOD’s Proliferation and Arms Control Secretariat. During these years, Dr Kelly also advised the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons’ capabilities and briefed both the Defence Intelligence Staff and MI6 on his progress. In this capacity, his Ministry of Defence security clearance allowed him to be copied into ‘top secret’ U.K and US information. 

This is all a matter of public record, less well understood, Baker contends, is Dr Kelly’s work with the Rockingham Cell, described by US weapons inspector Scott Ritter as a ‘secretive intelligence activity’ buried inside the Defence Intelligence Staff and which dealt with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction’. The Sunday Times journalist Nick Rufford has also claimed that Dr Kelly was an ‘undercover man for the intelligence services’. In the concluding part of his book, Baker examines the many enemies that Dr Kelly may have made in his work while divesting Russia and Iraq of their chemical arsenals, his relationship with Mai Pederson, an Arab-American linguist who was thought by both of her ex-husbands to be an intelligence operative and the disturbing case of Dr Jill Dekker an American biodefence expert working for NATO. 

Following a lecture that Dr Dekker gave at an intelligence summit in Florida in March 2007, in which she detailed her concerns that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been smuggled into Syria and in which she also claimed that Syria had been sold a weaponised strain of smallpox by the Soviet Union or North Korea, Dr Dekker claims she was subject to a campaign of harassment and intimidation by the CIA prompting her to notify all her diplomatic friends that she was ‘not suicidal and looking forward to her children growing up and her great career – much like other people who were suddenly found dead in the woods’. Chillingly, David Broucher, a permanent British representative to the Conference of Disarmament in Geneva, informed the inquiry that Dr Kelly had also expressed the fear that if Iraq were to be invaded that he would ’probably be found dead in the woods’. A self-fulfilling prophesy if the Hutton report is to be believed!

Alastair Campbell and Geoff Hoon. Both men, along with Tony Blair, conspired to out Dr David Kelly and set in motion the tragic events that were to lead to his death.

In his conclusion, Goslett recalls a number of other peculiarities that can’t help but fuel speculation that Dr Kelly’s death has yet to be fully explained. Writing in his book The End of the Party, a chronicle of the New Labour years, Andrew Rawnsley, the well-respected and well-connected Observer Journalist recounted how Hoon, furious with his removal as Leader of the House of Commons, told friends that he planned to make a speech about the Kelly affair that could ‘trigger the instant downfall of the Prime Minister’. More recently, in 2010, at the height of the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, Carne Ross, a former British diplomat and the U.K’s Iraq expert at the UN Security Council between 1998 and 2002 was warned by a senior civil servant, just prior to his giving verbal evidence to Chilcot, that if he mentioned Dr Kelly by name he would be asked to leave. The last and most unsavoury oddity involves Alastair Campbell and Cherie Blair. In May 2006 the pair autographed a copy of the Hutton report that was auctioned off for £400 at a Labour Party fundraiser in Mayfair - an act which Gossett regards, and I find it impossible to disagree with him, as ‘tantamount to dancing on Dr Kelly’s grave’. 

Lord Hutton - possessor of the least inquisitive mind in the country!

In the days following Dr Kelly’s death, Blair was confronted by Jonathan Oliver, the deputy political editor of The Mail on Sunday, and asked whether he had ‘blood on his hands’. After reading An Inconvenient Death, it is difficult to conclude from the evidence available that the former Prime Minister was not in some ways culpable for the tragic death of the UNSCOM weapons inspector, even if it was only in his conspicuous failure to reign in an out of control spin doctor, or in his key role in establishing what was clearly a deeply flawed inquiry, one that failed to make even a token attempt to discover the actual cause of Dr Kelly’s death. 

* Note to conspiracy theorists - the fact that Dr Kelly grew up in my hometown of Pontypridd only became known to me during the reading of Goslett’s book. I have never knowingly met Dr Kelly or his family. It’s probably worth adding that although this review is severely critical of leading members of the Labour government I am, in fact, a member of the Labour Party.

**  https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2004/jan/27/guardianletters4

[pardontheglueman]

Yanis Varoufakis: Adults in the Room

Jeremy Corbyn’s radical transformation of a neo-liberal Labour Party, which had hit rock bottom when endorsing the Cameron government’s 2015 Welfare Reform Bill into a progressive, re-energised anti-austerity movement, has allowed Labour to speak about the mass slaughter of council tenants in the Grenfell Tower fire, a tragedy brought about by a savage Conservative cost-cutting agenda, with something approaching moral clarity. David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham who lost a close friend in the fire, spoke for many when he declared ‘If burning in your own home isn’t political, I don’t know what is. It’s a scandal and a crime. Behind all of this, is money and profit. When you go down to West London and look at that building, it’s like looking at a vision of hell. It’s a vision of a burnt out shell and that burnt out shell is where we have got to in terms of austerity in this country’.

It will come as no surprise to the Tory architects of austerity that poor people end up dying as a direct result of their flagship policy. A report into the Department of Work and Pensions’ policy of sanctioning claimants in Salford carried out by The Salford Partnership concluded that ‘strict benefit conditionality, the threat and use of benefit sanctions, causes damage to the wellbeing of vulnerable claimants and can lead to hunger, debt, destitution, self-harm, and suicide’. The DWP response, aided by a compliant media, was to suppress 49 secret reports into claimant deaths for as long as possible (it took more than two years to obtain the reports under the Freedom of Information Act). Furthermore, the DWP’s notorious, target-driven fitness for work tests, administered by private contractors ATOS have regularly declared terminally ill people fit and able to work. A report, in July 2012, entitled Incapacity Benefits: Deaths of Recipients revealed that between 2010 and 2011 a shocking 10,600 people had died while undergoing the DWP assessment process.

The mass panic sweeping over a Tory party which, until now, has been decidedly relaxed about just how many poor people their economic and social policies are killing, is simply because the massacre of men, women, and children at Grenfell Tower has happened right in front of the T.V cameras. This time there are witnesses and plenty of them! We’ve all seen the horror with our own eyes. The Tories won’t be able to commission a report into Grenfell and then steadfastly refuse to release it; no longer will Boris Johnson be able to tell a Labour opponent who dared to question his plans for fire service cuts in London to “get stuffed”; no longer will the Daily Mail be able to wheel out dismal lackeys like Toby Young to pour scorn all over anyone demanding an end to grotesque levels of inequality in Britain. His puerile, poisonous piece attacking Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake was a new low for our rabid tabloid press.

The great Tory austerity swindle is over; Grenfell Tower is a tipping point, the neo-liberal free-for-all that began under Margaret Thatcher and continued unabated through the Tony Blair / Gordon Brown years, incredibly gaining momentum after the de-regulated banks crashed the world economy in an orgy of greed and criminality is surely over now. Nearly forty years on from the rise to power of Thatcher, a reborn labour movement stands on the verge of power, armed with a moral and political mandate to rebuild the welfare state, redistribute wealth in favour of working people and to smash the phony policy of austerity once and for all!  

Set against this turbulent background, Yanis Varoufakis’ Adults in the Room, (a fascinating fly-on-the-wall account of how the Syriza Government of 2015 led the left’s fight against a European Union intent on enforcing a psychotic programme of perpetual austerity), proves to be a timely and instructive read. Varoufakis was teaching economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas when Prime Minister in waiting Alexis Tsipras offered him the high profile post of Finance Minister in the event that the radical coalition of Syriza triumphed in the forthcoming election (Varoufakis had been acting as the party’s unofficial advisor since 2013 and his outspoken opposition to destructive European Union bailouts was beginning to win support for a defiant, unorthodox alternative to austerity).

As whistleblowers go, Varoufakis is surprisingly measured and composed, telling his tale with refreshing good grace, and with a rare capacity to identify and acknowledge his own mistakes. Nevertheless, any 550-page account by a serious economist intent on detailing the considerably thorny subject of his country’s malicious bankruptcy can’t help but get itself enmeshed in a thicket of statistics every once in a while. Some of these bear repeating: unemployment soared from 7% to 27%; national income fell by 28%; healthcare expenditure was cut by 11.1% between 2009 and 2011, while 36% of the population currently lives at risk of poverty and social exclusion.  

Varoufakis, however, guides us ably through the minefield of facts and figures with the same relaxed charm and sense of humour that he displays while reviewing the papers on the Marr Show or on his annual pilgrimage to the Hay Festival (standing ovation guaranteed), and this makes for an engaging and easy read despite the intricacy of the subject matter. The following, somewhat lengthy extract, proves the point -

‘The German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble once told me that my opposition to austerity placed me in a minority of Europeans, citing opinion polls showing support for government expenditure cuts. I replied that, even if that were true, a majority can be wrong about the cause of their malaise. During the Black Death of the fourteenth century, I reminded him, most Europeans believed the plague was caused by sinful living and could be exorcised by bloodletting and self-flagellation. And when bloodletting and self-flagellation did not work, this was taken as evidence that people’s repentance was not sincere enough, that not enough blood had been let, that the flagellation was insufficiently enthusiastic - exactly as now when austerity’s abysmal failure is cited as proof that it has been applied too half-heartedly. If he was amused, Wolfgang did not show it’.

At the heart of his intriguing book, is Varoufakis’ head-on confrontation with the troika: the European Commission; the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, all of whom emerge as essentially duplicitous and anti-democratic institutions in their dealings with the Greek government. Time and again the troikas’ apparatchiks doctored agreed communications or withdrew concessions they had made 24 hours earlier while French ministers routinely engaged in doublespeak, supporting Greece in private only to cow-tow to Germany at Eurogroup meetings. Varoufakis often conceded ground, offering his opponents ingenious and imaginative solutions to a crisis that threatened to tear Europe apart. The troika was never interested, not for a moment. Austerity was the only (crooked) game in town!  Few people emerge from the book with any credit - in Washington, Bernie Sanders tried in vain to pressurise the IMF and, surprisingly perhaps, Emmanuel Macron, then the French economy minister attempted to convince President Hollande to back a more ‘sustainable solution’ to the crisis. Macron even visited Varoufakis after he’d been deposed in order to clarify his support for the beleaguered ex-minister.  

Of more interest, perhaps, to British readers post-Brexit and in light of our forthcoming detachment from Europe’s power brokers, is the other relationship at the heart of the book. From the moment that Varoufakis accepted the toxic post of finance minister, he doubted that Tsipras and his ragbag ‘war cabinet’, suspiciously stuffed with bankers chums, would have the resolve to take on the troika in a fight to the death. Time and again he counseled his wavering colleagues that they could not bluff their way out of economic collapse; they had to commit to a negotiating strategy that sought to convince Angela Merkel and co that Syriza would opt for Grexit rather than accept roll-over bailouts that only served to escalate debt and poverty to stratospheric levels. Only then, argued Varoufakis, would the troika, recoiling from a policy that might lead to the disintegration of their beloved European project, abandon its fateful obsession with austerity and finally agree to meaningful talks on restructuring the massive Greek debt.that austerity had brought crashing down on the poorest members of society.

Yanis and Alexis: Bromance followed by betrayal

The betrayal, when it came, was swift, stunning and incredibly bizarre. Having called for and won a referendum to reaffirm their anti-austerity mandate (an inspirational 61.3% voted in favour of continuing to resist a merciless troika), it gradually dawned on Varoufakis that he was almost the only minister at Maximos Mansions, the Greek prime minister’s official residence, in a celebratory mood. Tsipras and his cabinet, openly despondent at having won the vote, were behaving as if they had been heavily defeated. Even as the results were being announced, Tsipras was firing Varoufakis as finance minister (offering him a token post at the department of culture as a consolation), thereby signaling an irreversible surrender to the troika and an acceptance of punishing austerity*. Returning home, Varoufakis could only tell his partner Danae ‘Tonight we had the curious phenomenon of a government overthrowing its people’.

It’s to Varoufakis’ credit, then, that the book closes with a moving and objective analysis of a leader who betrayed the cause that they had both fought for,

‘Friends and critics criticise me for having seen things in Alexis that were not there. I think they are wrong. His desire to liberate Greece from its vicious cycle was there. His intelligence and capacity to learn quickly were self-evident. His enthusiasm for the deterrent I had proposed and the debt relief I was prioritizing was real. The reason that I had seen all these things in him was that they were there. When he instructed me, on our first day in office, to hand over the keys to our offices to the opposition rather than capitulate, he was not lying. The part of him telling me that was speaking the truth. This is why I was brought to tears by his words. This is why I believed him’.

* On the 15th of June 2017, the latest Greek bailout was agreed to the tune of 8.5 billion Euros. Once again, there was no agreement to cancel Greek debt.

Below is an extract from Yanis Varoufakis’ analysis of the deal

In short, poor pensioners will annually forfeit one of their twelve-monthly pension payments, as a result of a reduction in the threshold above which income tax is withheld. For a country where one in two families have no one working in it, and thus have to survive on some small pension that a grandparent collects, this is a socially devastating cut. Moreover, it will also lead to further small business failures (due to the large multiplier effect of reducing a small pension: when poor families reduce their spending in local shops already on the brink, many of these will go under), the result being more people on the scrapheap of unemployment and fewer contributors to the stressed pension funds.

His article can be read in full here

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2017/06/16/the-annotated-15th-june-2017-eurogroup-statement-on-greece/

Further reading on the statistics quoted above

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/13/suicides-of-benefit-claimants-reveal-dwp-flaws-says-inquiry

http://www.partnersinsalford.org/documents/DWP_Benefit_Conditionality_and_Sanctions_in_Salford_-

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/223050/incap_decd_recips_0712.pdf

_

[pardontheglueman]

CINEMA / THE POST

Tom Hanks, Stephen Spielberg and Meryl Streep team up together for the first time in The Post.

“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed is not a pretty one”. 

Robert McNamara in a memo to President Lyndon Johnson May 19th, 1967.

Any film based on a dramatic and incredibly timely true story, which is directed by the living legend that is Stephen Spielberg and which stars genuine acting royalty in the shape of co-leads Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, comes with a sure-fire guarantee that the movie will do just what it says on the tin; entertain and inform you to a sufficient standard that it is worth hauling yourself off the sofa and down to the local multiplex for a good old-fashioned “Hollywood” history lesson. The Post, a deftly told, fast-paced reconstruction of how the American press, initially in the shape of the New York Times and then the Washington Post faced down the power of an American president prepared to go to any lengths, within and without the law, to silence those determined to hold the actions of the government in Vietnam to public account. In an age and at a time when a clearly unwell and deeply dangerous president is intent on smearing institutions like the NYT, the Post and CNN as “fake news”, while at the same time wishing out loud for increased presidential powers to limit the freedom of the press, there are vital lessons to be learned from this forthright, feel-good retelling of a crucial episode in American history.  

Appropriately enough, the film begins with a short, sharp, brutal scene set in Vietnam designed for the twin purposes of re-establishing the horrific nature of jungle warfare in the viewers’ mind and to introduce us to two of the main protagonists in the real-life events that led to a grave constitutional crisis for the U.S.A. as the Nixon administration sought to undermine the freedom of the press. It is, perhaps, a failing of the film that those two protagonists Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) and Secretary of State for Defence Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) are never really allowed to take centre stage. Though the character of McNamara is used to emphasis the shortcomings of the so-called ‘best and the brightest’ of the Kennedy/Johnson cabal who failed so tragically to untangle the American presence in Vietnam, concealing the unpalatable truth about the war’s escalation and likely outcome from the American people, there is simply not enough screen time devoted to give anything approaching a rounded view of the man, or how he and his colleagues came to make such a grave misjudgement. Whistleblower Ellsberg, who is surely the real hero of this tale, remains a sketchy figure throughout, the motivations for his leaking of the Pentagon Papers, thereby exposing decades of deceit over American foreign policy in Vietnam, is only cursorily examined by Spielberg. Ellsberg, it is worth noting, was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 with offences totalling a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison. Due to illegal evidence gathering, the charges were ultimately dismissed 

Spielberg’s decision to condense the narrative in this way is, of course, understandable in the context of a film that is largely concerned with telling its story through the eyes of the Post’s owner Katharine “Kay” Graham (Streep) and her uncompromising editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks). Graham had become the proprietor/publisher of the Post by default – her husband, Phil, handed the keys to the kingdom by Graham’s father has passed away, leaving Graham in charge of the family business There is an interesting, and once again timely sub-plot, which Spielberg examines at length in which Graham finds the strength within herself to stand up to those in the almost exclusively male environments of the newsroom and the boardroom as they seek to relegate Graham to the role of party hostess and charitable fund-raiser. 

Streep and Hanks are big-hitters for a reason and they are, as you might expect, note-perfect again here. They’re never tempted to so much as nibble at the period-detail scenery, let alone give it a good chewing over. There is no grandstanding, just good, solid film acting and there are some fascinating shots of Graham, where cinematographer Janusz Kaminski studies the owner’s thought processes in series of lengthy close-ups. Streep holds her nerve, resists the temptation to overplay, and the director’s gamble pays off. All in all, Streep is well worth her 21st Oscar nomination in the best actress category, although she is surely destined to lose out this time around to Francis McDormand for her pitch-perfect performance in the otherwise wildly uneven Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri. Hanks didn’t get so much as a nomination - his performance perhaps paling alongside that of Jason Robards whose portrayal of Bradlee in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men landed him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (1976). In fact, Robards swept the board that year, winning the BAFTA, The Golden Globe and the New York Film Critics’ award too!

The Post is one of those films where the viewer knows just how the story ends (assuming that you’ve been paying attention in class, that is), yet dramatic tension is still successfully maintained until the movie’s resolution. Credit should go to screenwriters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer (Spotlight) as well, of course, to Spielberg who brings the inner-workings of the newsroom convincingly to life and who remains firmly and unobtrusively in control of complex material throughout. There is an interesting Coda, with a concluding scene that takes place in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate building on the night of June 17th 1972 ….. but that’s another story!

Ultimately, The Post is a well-crafted, worthy and workmanlike addition to the always intriguing sub-genre of “newspaper pictures”, although even Spielberg’s greatest admirers couldn’t claim a place for it in the top echelons alongside classics like Citizen Kane, His Girl Friday, Ace in the Hole, The Insider and Spotlight.

 * Daniel Ellsberg’s story was told by Rod Holcomb in The Pentagon Papers (2003) starring James Spader.

** David Halberstam wrote the definitive account of American policy in Vietnam in his epic The Best and the Brightest.

[pardontheglueman]

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump / Edited by Bandy Lee

In the week that Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s dirtbag blockbuster on life inside Donald Trump’s dysfunctional White House, detonated without warning on the president’s front lawn, blowing the gaff on, amongst other things, the president’s paranoia over food poisoning, his concern that other people might have been touching his toothbrush, and the revelation that POTUS and the first lady lead separate but equal lives in the boudoir dept, it’s worth noting that an altogether more serious work, documenting major concerns over Trump’s fitness to hold office, was published in the U.S.A. last year with a barely a ripple of interest from the nations’ readers. 

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, edited by Bandy Lee, Assistant Clinical Professor in Law and Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, is a fascinating and terrifying analysis of the mental well-being (or otherwise) of the world’s most powerful man. Within two months of Trump’s inauguration in January of last year, Lee had become so troubled by the former reality T.V. star’s unpredictable behaviour that she set about organising the Yale conference “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn”, which gathered together some of America’s most prominent mental health professionals to debate the ethical case for setting aside the long-standing “Goldwater rule” (1973), which prohibits clinicians from diagnosing public figures unless they have first examined them. The conference formed the basis of this book, in which many of America’s most respected psychiatrists make the case that ‘while a physician’s responsibility is first and foremost to the patient, it extends as well to society’. Some clinicians, in their defence, cite the “Tarasoff doctrine” (1976) a landmark court decision in California which places an obligation on mental health therapists to speak out when they have determined that an individual is dangerous to another person or persons. 

It is to the authors’ credit that they devote a foreword, Our Witness to Malignant Normality, by Robert Jay Lifton, Lecturer in Psychiatry at Columbia University, a prologue, Professions and Politics by Judith Lewis Herman, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard School, and an introduction Our Duty to Warn, by Lee herself, all with the intention of debating the ethical case for overriding the Goldwater rule in the case of a national emergency. It should be noted that many of the contributors here have been impelled to question the continued observance of this commandment by the recent decision of the American Psychiatric Association to double down on its interpretation of the rule, or gag, as some of the writers contend, making it impossible now for any mental health professional to give an opinion, let alone a diagnosis of President Trump, without risking censure. 

Having established, at least to my own satisfaction, that the dedicated professionals who contribute to this book are doing so because they are motivated by genuine concern for the safety of their fellow citizens rather than any partial political expediency, I feel able to read this book with a clear conscience. Of course, many of those writing here are progressives openly opposed to Trump’s populist agenda, so there is no way to depoliticise the book entirely. On balance, then, even though the “patient” under discussion is subjected to an extremely painful public evaluation, I believe this is a book that had to be written. The stakes are simply too high for the profession to have remained silent in the face of the overwhelming evidence detailed here which suggests that the president is demonstrably unwell and a considerable danger to mankind. 

The portrait of President Trump that emerges from over 350 pages of expert testimony won’t come as a surprise to anyone (aside, that is, from the congregation of religious extremists, hard-nut republicans and white supremacists who make up a significant proportion of the Donald’s “base”), but the wide range of serious mental health disorders that seemingly afflict POTUS is simply astonishing and should be cause for the gravest concern. 

The book makes a thoroughly convincing case that Trump is an extreme present hedonist – a person who will say or do anything at anytime for the purpose of self-aggrandisement – also that Trump displays all the traits of a narcissist personality, a disorder which incorporates fantasising about power and attractiveness, feelings of superiority, outbursts of jealousy & a tendency toward lying (in 2015, the fact-checking website Politifact, running it’s “Lie of the Year” contest, checked 77 separate statements by Trump and estimated that 76% of them were false or mostly false). Furthermore, there is evidence of a bullying personality at work too (including sexual, prejudicial and cyberbullying). At this point, you might well feel that you concur with the book’s damning verdict on Trump, after all, as clinical psychologist John D. Gartner states, Donald Trump is so visibly psychologically impaired that it is obvious even to a layman that “something is wrong with him”. However, you may be astonished to know that we are still only in Chapter one!!!  If you are not already in a state of total despair at the thought of this man being in charge of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal then you soon will be. 

Next into the witness box is Lance Dodes, M.D., a retired Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who walks us through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for determining “antisocial personality disorder” or, to put it another way, whether someone might be considered a sociopath. Key traits to look out for, include evidence of deceitfulness and impulsivity, as well as predatory, bullying and dehumanising patterns of behaviour. Factor in an absolute lack of empathy and runaway paranoia and you are ‘severely emotionally ill’. 

Trump’s penchant for paranoid conspiracy theories are also examined in detail by Gartner; before the election, Right Wing Watch listed 58 conspiracies that POTUS had posited were true, these include his well known claim that Obama was born outside of America (“Birtherism”), which Trump has subsequently developed into an accusation that the former president had a Hawaiian government bureaucrat murdered to cover up the “scandal” and also that Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, was involved in the plot to assassinate JFK. Gartner also labels Trump a sadist (another trait equated with malignant narcissism), citing his constant delight in verbally “punching down” on people who are weaker than him, usually women, immigrants or the disabled. 

No respectable psychiatric study of a patient would be complete without reference to its subject’s childhood.  And here, it is possible, if only for a fleeting moment, to feel a sliver of pity for Donald Trump! Leaving aside the small matter of whether Trump’s father, Frederick Christ Trump Snr, was a racist (probably), a Klansman (possibly), Trump’s account of his childhood, as told to biographer Michael D’Antonio, is disturbing enough in its own right. Trump recalls his father “dragging him” around tough neighbourhoods in Brooklyn collecting rents and teaching him a life-lesson that the world was divided into “killers” and “losers”. Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, lawyer to gangsters and the notorious red-baiter Joseph McCarthy, said that when it comes to his feelings for his fellow human beings, Trump “pisses ice water”. Or, as Trump himself puts it, “The world is a vicious and brutal place. Even your friends are out to get you: they want your job, your money and your wife”. 

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is, in fact, an open and shut case.  As worthwhile as this book is, there is no mystery to be solved here. We don’t really need the testimony of twenty-seven expert witnesses to tell us what we can see very well with our own eyes – that President Trump is a seriously ill man, a man who suffers from a whole range of harmful disorders, any one of which might lead him, at any moment, to act in a way that endangers us all. And yet, despite the fact that Trump is a crook, a charlatan, a racist, a sexual predator and so gravely mentally ill that he could conceivably bring life on our planet to an end as a result of a Twitter spat, the GOP saw fit to nominate him for the Republican ticket in the general election of 2017 and continues, to this day, to support him in the face of all the horrifying evidence laid out here. Let’s not forget, either, that this book went to the publishers some months ago and Trump’s many conditions are visibly worsening by the day. None of this matters, though, to the super-wealthy eyeing the prize of another massive tax cut, nor to the evangelists who beef up Trump’s base, the very zealots who championed a suspected paedophile, Alabama’s Roy Moore, in last month’s senate race, and who remain determined that the commander-in-chief stay in office long enough to appoint a bunch of pro-life Judges to sit on the Supreme Court. What, too, of the American voter? Trump may have lost the popular vote, trailing Clinton by 2.9 million votes, despite the best efforts of partners in crime Wikileaks and Russia, but there were still 62,979,879 individual voters prepared to place Donald Trump in charge of America’s nuclear codes! 

On the subject of those that support Trump, the concluding part of the book, The Trump Effect, seeks to place the victory of the new president in the appropriate context by examining the culture that has allowed him to triumph. In an article entitled Trump and the American Collective Psyche, Thomas Singer, a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst practicing in San Francisco, theorises that ‘Donald Trump uncovered a huge sinkhole of dark, raw emotions in the national psyche for all of us to see. Rage, hatred, envy and fear surfaced in a forgotten, despairing, growing white underclass who had little reason to believe that the future would hold the promise of a brighter, life-affirming purpose. Trump tapped into the negative feelings that many Americans have about all the things we are supposed to be compassionate about – ethnic, racial, gender and religious differences…. Trump tapped into the dirty little secret of their loathing of various minorities, even though we may all be minorities now’.   

Where will it end? Dodes, unable to offer us any comfort, warns of what we can expect from Trump in the future, ‘Over time these characteristics will only become worse, either because Mr. Trump will succeed in gaining more power and more grandiosity with less grasp on reality, or because he will engender more criticism, producing more paranoia, more lies and more enraged destruction’. Perhaps that is why Noam Chomsky, in the books epilogue, calls our attention to The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and it's world-renowned Doomsday Clock which estimates how near we are as a species to extinction. If the hands on the clock reach midnight, the jig is up for mankind. Within a week of Trump taking office the hands of the clock were moved to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. That’s the closest we have been to destruction since 1953!

[pardontheglueman]

Houdini Dax / Naughty Nation

Houdini Dax  - Dave Newington, Jack Butler, and Owen Richards

Although Houdini Dax is no more (having surprisingly morphed into Monico Blonde in the summer of 2016), their classic sophomore album Naughty Nation still gets plenty of airplay in these parts. A fine excuse, then, to revisit my album review from August 2015 and to throw in a few videos to celebrate a fab album. Newington, by the way, is currently making waves with the super cool outfit Boy Azooga.

Houdini Dax’s debut album, the irresistible You Belong to Dax Darling, was a thrilling kaleidoscope of harmonious sixties pop, semi-skimmed psychedelica and art-school rock that should, all things being equal, have made the teenagers household names in the Principality. Even though the album failed to make its mark, stalling the group’s career in the process, the power-pop trio still seemed a safe bet to fully realise their ‘band most likely to’ ambitions. No-one, back then, could have envisaged the trials and tribulations the group would have to overcome just to set foot in the recording studio again!

After four years of endless gigging, imaginative fund-raising (playing Christmas Eve concerts in fans homes) and, more latterly, emergency busking (the lads had £10,000 worth of gear stolen from the back of their van in March) the band have, at long last, completed their Herculean task. The £64,000 dollar question, though, has to be asked; was it worth all the back-breaking work, all the heartache, and disappointment, all the tilting at windmills along the way?

The opening track “Apple Tree”, one of the summer’s stand-out singles is evidence aplenty that Houdini Dax remains a very special band indeed!  A giddy, effervescent number, as slick and superficial as a Preston Sturges screenplay, it would have gone triple platinum in the hands of Marc Bolan or XTC. Sometimes, timing is everything! Next up is “Legs” a big-boned pop song that showcases the band’s classy rhythm section - Owen Richards (Bass) and David Newington (drums) as well as singer Jack Butler’s acerbic wordsmithery,  

‘She’s my purple power ranger, she’s my Lara Croft /  She’s my Cameron Diaz before the Botox /  She’s my little Easter bunny, she’s my Christmas elf /  She’s the worst magazine upon the top shelf’.

Butler’s grim kitchen sink vignettes are usually leavened with a dollop of black humour, placing him somewhere between Chris Difford and Alex Turner on the British songwriting spectrum. Indeed, “Found Love at the Dole Office” (based on a young couple witnessed getting a little too close for comfort down at the labour exchange) is as comically touching as anything that Squeeze or the Arctic Monkeys ever recorded,

‘I went down to the Old Arcade / to break up a coin and sip a lemonade /  I saw a girl who misunderstood  /  She was too good looking for her own good / Found love at the Dole Office / I couldn’t get a job, but I got a kiss’.

It’s a neat observational piece, a trick Butler repeats on the colourful character study “Good Old-Fashioned Maniac” about a drug damaged go-getter losing his grip on life  

“Got more get up and go than the Antiques Roadshow  /  Travelling from Tiger Bay down to South Bordeaux /  Takes five steps forward and five steps back  / ’coz he’s a good old-fashioned maniac”.

The harmony-drenched “Let’s Stick Together” is monstrously catchy, as is the guttural “Get Your Goo On”. Long the centrepiece of the band’s live show, thanks to its sledgehammer Mickey Spillane riff, it loses nothing in transition to a studio setting. Any momentum lost with the somewhat laborious “All These Days”, is quickly regained with the groovy instrumental “Crack Dance”. If ever ‘International Man of Mystery’ Austin Powers’ checks himself out of his retirement home for overdressed secret agents this could well be his new theme tune! The rip-roaring “Roll on Up” has the compulsorily addictive chorus we’ve come to expect from the band, however, the title track proves to be something of a slow-burner, meaning the album does end on rather a low key.

As mentioned above, the Dax transitioned into Monico Blonde 

Spot the extra face?  Theo Frangoulis joined Houdini Dax just before the band called it a day.

Newington’s new project Boy Azooga has just one release to its name thus far, but what a track it is!

[pardontheglueman]

Saving Rhydyfelin Library: Craig Oats

I was proud to be a member (along with my two daughters) of Rhydyfelin Library Support Group, which successfully campaigned against the decision of Rhondda Cynon Taf to close our much-loved community library. I’ve blogged about the battle on http://redsoapbox.tumblr.com/, but Craig Oats’ moving documentary is well worth watching in full.

The new library 

[pardontheglueman]

The Man who Invented Christmas

Many of our fellow citizens will spend this Christmas in the death grip of man-made austerity. Rough sleeping, as anyone who’s already ventured into a town or city to do their Christmas shopping can testify, is noticeably on the rise, while the Child Poverty Action Group’s latest figures (Nov 2017) show over four million children now living in poverty, in what is the sixth largest economy in the world. The nation’s shame doesn’t end there, though, as earlier this year a United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disability (CRPD) charged the present Tory government with causing a ‘human catastrophe’ for disabled people in the U.K. Given these facts, any future anthology of British Horror stories should include alongside established pieces like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and M.R.James’ The Stalls of Barchester, the blood-curdling pages from Hansard that document the passage of the Conservatives Welfare Reform Bill through Parliament in 2015. That savage attack on the poor sent child poverty spiralling and would have had Dickens, who wrote A Christmas Carol partly to keep a promise to bring a ‘sledgehammer’ down upon the question of child labour, spinning in his grave.

The current political climate also presents us with a chance, particularly at this time of year, to re-evaluate Dickens’ clarion call for social reform and his personal motivation for writing a novella that requires us to change our ways by keeping ‘Christmas in our hearts’ all the year round. Much of the investigative groundwork has already been done by the likes of Peter Ackroyd (in his definitive biography of Dickens), Les Standiford in the charming book which gives this film its title and, earlier this year, by the rival publication of Lucinda Hawksley’s Dickens and Christmas. It is with excellent timing, then, that Bharat Nalluri’s playful literary biopic of Dickens, The Man Who Invented Christmas, (a happy by-product of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was the subsequent revival of a Christmas spirit that had been in slow decline since Oliver Cromwell and his puritanical coterie passed a law in 1644 declaring Christmas Day to be a day of fasting and repentance), arrives in the local multiplex. As Standiford describes it, Christmas, in Dickens’ Day, ranked well below Easter and roughly on a par with St George’s Day in importance and esteem, ‘there were no Christmas Cards, no Christmas Trees in royal residences, or White Houses, no Christmas turkeys, no department-store Santa, or outpouring of “Yuletide greetings”, no orgy of gift-giving, no holiday lighting extravaganzas and no plethora of midnight services celebrating the birth of a saviour’.

There is a lively debate underway just now as to how much credit Dickens can claim for restoring the fortunes of Christmas, with Standiford being the novelist’s most enthusiastic cheerleader. His positive opinion should, perhaps, be balanced against that of Professor Mark Connelly who challenges the new consensus in Christmas a History, ‘To say that Christmas was a near extinct force by the early nineteenth century seems a gross simplification; the same can be said of the idea Dickens saved it’. Perhaps Ackroyd sums it up best, asserting ‘A Christmas Carol’ to be both a ‘modern fairy story’ and a piece of ‘radical literature’ while acknowledging that Dickens ‘transformed the holiday by suffusing it with his own particular aspirations, memories and fears’. Ackroyd allows, too, that Dickens emphasised Christmas’ ‘cosy conviviality at a time when both Georgian licence and Evangelical dourness were being questioned’, describing the book as perfect “holiday reading”.

So, we come to the question of whether The Man Who Invented Christmas can, if only charitably, be described as perfect “holiday viewing”? I should declare, here, in the interests of full disclosure that A Christmas Carol is the one book that I would take to a desert island (just edging out The Great Gatsby and The Communist Manifesto). It’s a book that I re-read every December, through a veil of tears, and I also happen to adore just about every film version of Dickens’ uplifting tale (although, even I draw the line at the musical adaptation starring Kelsey Grammer and Robert Zemeckis’ dull as ditch water animated version). Readers of this review may wish to bear my confirmed bias in mind, should I feel tempted at any point to proclaim The Man Who Invented Christmas the best piece of cinema to hit the silver screen since Citizen Kane!  

First off, the fundamentals are all in place: Dan Stevens is well cast; fresh from his box-office smash with Beauty and the Beast, he makes for a convincingly passionate young tyro (Dickens was only 31 when he penned his Christmas classic), and there is top-notch support from Christopher Plummer as a suitably sinister Scrooge and Jonathan Pryce as the writer’s dreadfully unreliable father. Nalluri keeps a tight rein on the plot, a more complicated task than you might imagine as the director employs the humorous device of bringing A Christmas Carol’s characters to life in order to chastise or torment the struggling writer – at one point Scrooge taunts Dickens by comparing him to none other than the great Bard; “Shakespeare, now there’s a man who could write” and there is a wonderfully surreal scene where Scrooge, the Cratchits and the Fezziwigs all mope about Dickens’ study grumbling about the celebrity author’s failure to come up with an inspiring ending for his soon to be world-famous festive tale..

Running alongside the writer’s creative struggle with the Carol, is the story of Dickens’ dysfunctional relationship with his ne’er do well father, a profligate who so mismanaged the family income that he spent time in debtors’ prison, thereby condemning the 12- year- old Dickens to a nightmare existence working long shifts in a horrific blacking factory. As Dickens strives to find it in his heart to forgive his own father, he strains, also, to resolve the central question of whether Scrooge can believably redeem himself at the novel’s end. The film examines the relationship between the two seemingly intractable problems that confront the author, suggesting that only by becoming a better man himself can Dickens genuinely bring about Scrooge’s life-affirming change of character. The pacing of the film is just right, too, the camera matching the whirling dervish that is Dickens stride for stride as he scarpers about London at all hours of day and night seeking inspiration for his embryonic tale, while desperately trying to raise the funds to self-publish his seasonal ghost story.

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a thoroughly enjoyable film, albeit one that would have benefited greatly from a closer focus on Dickens the consummate campaigner for social justice given that we, as a society, have resolutely failed to learn the lessons that the Carol seeks to teach us. Instead, rather too much time is devoted to Dickens apparent writer’s block and his ongoing battle to meet his publishing deadline. Still, anyone who cherishes A Christmas Carol will find plenty here to enchant and entertain them, and while the film doesn’t rank anywhere near the top of the tree when it comes to Christmas classics such as It’s a Wonderful Life, the original Miracle on 34th Street and Elf it certainly wouldn’t be out of place alongside respectable holiday fare like The Santa Clause, Get Santa or The Bishop’s Wife.

As a postscript to this review, I would like to nominate Patrick Stewart as the greatest celluloid Scrooge (Woah, watch you don’t choke on your eggnog Alastair Sim fans!). Taking on the role in 1999 for David Jones’ made for T.V. adaptation, which also starred Richard E. Grant (as Bob Cratchit), Stewart turns in a flawless performance as the miserable miser. The highlight of which is the joyous scene where Scrooge awakens on Christmas morn a changed man; for a moment the audience believes that a bewildered Scrooge is having some form of seizure or choking fit, only for us to discover that the newly reformed miser has simply been surprised, astonished and overcome by the unlikely presence of a chuckle forming in his throat, one that violently mutates into the mightiest of belly laughs. Although this faithful version is shown on British T.V. just about every Christmas, it remains a little-known adaptation. Those prepared to trawl the Radio Times each year will be in for a real Christmas treat.