Shepherds Arise

A carol from Sussex, collected from the Copper family and sung here by Oak.

Sorry about the pagan  video, but the guy's got taste in music.

A Happy Christmas to one and all from the Laban household ! And don't forget to pray for the Christians of Syria, Nigeria and Egypt.

 

Friday Night Music - Far Away Love

Reggae from a more innocent age - from the Melodians classic "Swing and Dine". A bit of a Western feel to this, clip-clopping along.

The title track's not bad either.

Friday Night Music - Do You Love Me ?

A towering work by an unknown genius - this orchestral take on the Contours' early 60s hit. No idea who it's by, but I'm pretty sure it's not this Deep Feeling.

Friday Night Music - Scottish Honour Killing I

One of the few things I agree with Andy Newman about is his defence of the average Ibrahim in the mosque, when faced with liberal accusations that Muslim culture is homophobic and sexist to a wholly unprecedented and outrageous extent.

After all, Ibrahim's views on homosexuals ('punish them'), adulterers ('punish them'), a woman's place (in the home raising kids), abortion (murder) and 'loose' women from another culture (use them) would have struck a chord with most Brits, and pretty much all male Brits, in "Elder Days Before the Fall" - the Fall being the 60's Cultural Revolution.

Where I differ with Andy is that, like Dave Osler, he sees Muslim immigrants as instruments to fulfil his political ends rather than rational actors with ideas and ends of their own  - the ostensible end in Andy's case being the strengthening of the British working class to the point where the downfall of capitalism is a realistic prospect. How's that project going, Andy? Are the UK working class stronger or weaker than in pre-diverse days?  And how are the capitalists doing relative to the workers - better or worse? Really? How odd. You'd have thought all that diversity would have strengthened the movement no end, wouldn't you? It must just be a coincidence that Andy and the Institute of Directors are of one mind when it comes to the desirability of mass immigration.  

I digress. And I mustn't push the parallel between Muslim immigrants and antediluvian Brits too far. Slaughtering one's daughter for bringing dishonour on the family was never a part of that lost Brit culture. Even the modern leftie slanders against the family whose daughter "got into trouble" turn out to have been greatly exaggerated.

Save perhaps in the one part of the UK, a couple of hundred years back, where the mores of the Punjab (and even more the NW Frontier) would have been quite understood - the Highlands of Scotland before the Forty-Five. As Thomas Macaulay put it :

"He would have found that life was governed by a code of morality and honour widely different from that which is established in peaceful and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a stab in the back, or a shot from behind a fragment of rock, were approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults. He would have heard men relate boastfully how they or their fathers had wreaked on hereditary enemies in a neighbouring valley such vengeance as would have made old soldiers of the Thirty Years' War shudder. He would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honourable. He would have seen, wherever he turned ... that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labour, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of oats.

And yet ... it was true that the Highlander had few scruples about shedding the blood of an enemy: but it was not less true that he had high notions of the duty of observing faith to allies and hospitality to guests."

It may just be a coincidence, but the only traditional British song I know where a daughter is killed for damaging the family honour is from Aberdeenshire. It's also beautifully sung here by the late Ray Fisher :


"Oh, father, mother, sisters all,
Why sae cruel to your Annie?
My heart was broken first by love,
Now my brither's broke my body"

Ray Fisher 1940-2011

One of my great musical loves is gone.



MudCat obit thread; Telegraph obit.

Friday Night Music - Six Days On The Road

Not exactly six days, but a week of 9-hour-plus days (plus three hours drive - 700 miles of commuting) might have something to do with my sparse blogging... nice to be home.

Friday Night Music - "Cold Be My Days In Shipston On Stour"

In 1969, the Bee Gees had split up, and Robin Gibb had retreated to the Warwickshire countryside to get his head together, producing some decidedly "interesting" music.

The LP, "Sing Slowly Sisters" was never released - and these lo-fi cuts seem to be all that I can find - sounding as if it was recorded in a tin can that was simultaneously being whirled round someone's head. A pity, as the title track is really rather lovely.

Friday Night Music

It's a repost, but seems apposite :

Another World

Who says we didn't have diversity in the UK long before the Windrush docked?

Oft have I reflected on the differences, say, twixt the Central Belt of Scotland and a Banffshire or Aberdeenshire village.

I was in Manchester in 1974 on the day Glasgow Rangers played United in a friendly. At Victoria Station, I saw a strange sight - all the United fans, as they got off the trains, took off their scarves and put them in their pockets, or zipped their jackets up to the neck to conceal their United allegiance.

This should have been posted last night really, for the 12th. A small fraction of the Rangers support make their way past (I think) the Arndale Centre in Manchester, taking the pretty route to Old Trafford for the 2008 UEFA Cup final (what a pity Tommy Ducks is no more - I think they'd have liked it). Now there are some pretty wild boys in that city - but this is something else :




Admit it, for good or ill, you don't see a sight like that every day in an English city.

The tune is the mid-70s Fields of Athenry*, the words I think are a Loyalist song called "A Father's Advice", accompanied by disparaging references to the late Bobby Sands. Great drumming. It may be an optical illusion or a piece of dust in my eye, but I could have sworn I saw someone with a "**** Catholic Schools" banner...







* composer Pete St John is also responsible for another instant classic - The Rare Old Times, perhaps the only Irish political song that isn't about the English. You really would think there'd be more, given recent events.

Saturday Night Music - Two Weeks Last Summer

Way back - and in the context of Rugby Union anthems, I noted that in music form can be as important as content.

An illustration follows.

I can't remember if this version of Dave Cousins' song "Two Weeks Last Summer" was recorded in a two-track studio in Tivoli in August 1967, or whether it was done in one of those "make your own record" booths, like the one in 'Brighton Rock' where Pinky records a tender message for his soon to be ex-girlfriend. The speed certainly sounds a little odd. But the whole thing sounds throwaway, a play around, not at all memorable. In fact if you play it, you might spoil the second version.




Three years on, a certain Mr Joe Boyd is in charge of production. What an incredible transformation. Every gabbled phrase from the first version is considered, deliberate - the simple accompaniment is just right, neither understated nor intruding on the wonderful vocals - the whole thing's beautiful. And this wasn't released for 25 years !

You can get the 3-CD box set from whence this comes for only £146 on Amazon. Naturlich, my Youtube version is lowish-fi, that her daughter and grandchildren may benefit. But it's still gorgeous.





While we're on the Divine Ms Denny, here's a little something showing the baleful effects of the cultural revolution on spoken English. Nowt wrong with the London accent, whether Norf or Sarf - and it's sad to see it being replaced by twatois among the young. But why adopt it if it ain't yours? Following the example set by middle-class LSE business studies student Mick Jagger, Sandy goes Mockney.

Sunday Night Music

The guitar's got a bit of Tumbler-era John Martyn about it, the vocals are very Bon Iver, the whole effect is not bad at all. Via my son, Bombay Bicycle Club.

Blogging may be light for the next week or so. A pity, as there's a lot to blog about.

Friday Night Music - Ramblin Man

Ever since I discovered Hank Williams I've been convinced that no one could top his versions of songs like 'Lost Highway' and 'Ramblin Man'.

I don't think his grandson, tattooed alt.country/psychobilly/punk metallist and all-round rude boy Hank III, quite tops it either - something about Hank I's slow, stately, deliberate delivery. But it's a very fine version in itself. Hank III is supported by veteran grungers The Melvins. (Del Shannon's pretty straight take isn't bad either.)

The Call of the Pipes

We're a bit strapped for cash, like so many families, so alas we pulled the mooted summer trip to Iceland, a place I've always wanted to visit and which is still pretty expensive - what must prices have been like before the crisis ? Instead we're going somewhere else I've never been, the Asturias region of northern Spain.

It was Cornwall for the last two years and Gower the year before - Susan insisted we get off the island this year. My suggestion of Arran alas was howled down.

The Spanish probably need what little dosh we have more than the Icelanders anyway. Iceland pulled the plug on its banks, took a big hit on its housing market and currency, but is now recovering rather well. The UK hosed its banks with taxpayer cash, propped up our insane property values, and we're in for a lost decade of stagflation.

Our young people are unemployed or under-employed, graduates are still living at home on £14,000 a year jobs at the age of 28. At the other end of the employment spectrum, fifty-something former project managers have been sat at home for three years, firing off ten CVs a day. Comment in today's Telegraph :

"I don’t know any extended family not supporting a distressed, disillusioned, despairing young person - often with a degree or good qualifications. And maybe sympathising with an older person, desperately jobseeking after redundancy.”

Our children, bar a fortunate few, will not be able to own the roof over their heads, something my and my parents generation could take for granted. We're going back to the days of my grandmother, who lived in rented accommodation all her life.

But compared with the Spanish, we have minor problems. 43% youth unemployment ! When you consider Spain isn't exactly flush with youths since the demographic collapse post-Franco, that's quite an achievement for Mr Zapatero's Socialists aka "the most loathsome government in Europe".

I really am surprised there's not mass civil disobedience. Their 1930s forebears - right or left - wouldn't have stood for it.

Where was I ? Dunno. But in solidarity with the young unemployed of Spain (sort of), we’ve booked a house this summer near the magnificently named Villaviciosa, famed as one of the very last towns to surrender to Franco’s forces, as well as being the birthplace of bagpipe maestro José Ángel Hevia Velasco. Be interesting to test the political waters.

Here's the man himself. Very Celtic - didn't realise the influences in that part of Spain - and it's cider country, too. The massed pipers at the end could be the Men of Lonach. You get a feel for the forebears of the Native Brits, making their way North from the Iberian Refuge as the last Ice Age glaciers retreated before them.

Friday Night Music - Ivan Koslovsky

A year or so back I found a video (which I can no longer find !) of Paul Robeson singing in Moscow in the Fifties alongside the Ukranian tenor Ivan Koslovsky. I thought he sang beautifully, and it was a shame that he could never perform in the West :

Kozlovsky was never allowed to perform in the West because his brother Fedor Kozlovsky, who was also a singer, had left Ukraine to tour Europe with Oleksander Koshetz in 1919. Upon hearing of the Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine he refused to return.

Here he is, singing in Moscow aged 79 singing the Neapolitan 'Fenesta che lucive' - and still ripping the floorboards off the stage - not to mention the scarf off his (much younger) accompanist.

Topical Tunes

I don't know why, but people seem to be linking this old song all over the Web :



While we're on Neil Young, there can surely be fewer finer exponents of the jangly guitar than he.

'Tis 40-plus years since a chap walked into the Lower Sixth Common Room and put on this, by a band we'd never heard of called Crazy Horse.

Friday Night Music - Strangeness and Charm

I've mentioned the glories of Lewis before. On Saturday at dusk not only the park gate is locked, but the swings and roundabouts chained up as well, in case any child should profane the Sabbath. The hospital's doctors have houses scattered across the island, so that remote communities have someone near - and I was told that a female doctor had been visited by a delegation, asking her to refrain from hanging up her washing on the Lord's Day - the washing in question being on an airer in the kitchen, but visible from outside.

On the more worldly side, everyone seems to drink a lot on Saturday night, and in the morning there's a lot of broken glass about in Stornoway. But 'when in Rome' - you respect the locals and on Sunday walk or go to church. If you are invited to a local home, the hospitality is humbling and the tea you get lasts you for the next two days. Small children, not yet school age, can play outside unaccompanied until dark, and I remember coming across a school on a main road, with the children's bicycles all propped against the outside of the school wall, by the road. Try that on the mainland.

And they do have this amazing church music - like nothing else in Britain. Or maybe in Europe.




Moving a little further south :

"The Clan Maxwell fared badly that day. In all, it is said that up to 700 Maxwells were killed, but this may be an exaggerated number. Many were wounded by downward sword strokes known as "Lockerbie Licks." And their chief, Lord Maxwell, who was one of the most powerful people in southern Scotland, was slain in cold blood by the Johnstones when he asked for mercy and offered to surrender. Although Sir Johnstone escaped punishment from the King for his actions, he did not escape the unforgiving hand of the next Lord Maxwell, son of the chief who was killed at Dryfe Sands. In 1608, Lord Maxwell shot Sir Johnstone in the back during a meeting held “under trust,” which rendered him an outlaw. Lord Maxwell was later captured and executed by hanging."

Circles

Perfect pop music - Beach Boy harmonies, jangly guitar, loping bass - and drums the like of which you just don't hear these days.

"Just one thing could kill the pain
Of losing you,
But it gets me so dizzy that I walk right back again,
Back to you"

The other A-side on the EP, 'Disguises', is great as well, although a much darker, almost industrial sound.

Tuesday Night Music - Days Like This Keep Me Warm

Simple, but strangely uplifting. I've said before that the Polyphonic Spree were a Principal Edwards Magic Theatre for the Noughties.

Daddy's Drinkin' Up Our Christmas

A festive cracker - another one by the great Commander Cody (somewhat tasteless video, alas) to escape Norm's Momma 'n' Daddy Collection. Merry Christmas !

Friday Night Country - Mama Hated Diesels

Eureka - a weepie that Norm never found for the Momma 'n' Daddy Collection !

I'm never quite sure that Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen are taking this - or anything else - entirely seriously.

"As the years passed, and I grew older, Mama did too"

Mama Hated Diesels, from "Hot Licks, Cold Steel & Truckers Favorites".