Terry Gilliam's Faust

On Friday we went to London, to go to the opera, to see Terry Gilliam's version of Berlioz' The Damnation of Faust, performed by the ENO.


I've never been one of those nerdish Python heads but I'm definitely a Gilliam fan (I once gave a worse-for-wear Terry Jones a lift to a hotel, though that's another story). I've seen all Gilliam's films (with the exception of the execrable The Brothers Grimm, which I abandoned halfway), many several times. I know Jabberwocky back to front. Not uncontroversially I still think Baron Muchausen is his best, though perhaps that's because it arrived at a time when its 'pro-imagination' message particularly spoke to me. Don't get me wrong. I'm not uncritical. All his films are flawed - it's what makes them so watchable.


I was a little disappointed to see that so few people had dressed up. I'm not sure what I was expecting. Cigar smoking gentlemen in tailcoats and cravats, perhaps. Courtesans in whalebone corsets, fanning themselves and looking on disdainfully. Frottage in the boxes. Maybe I've seen too many Gilliam films.




If the audience were disappointing, the production was not. It had everything you'd want from Gilliam: stunning costumes, ingenious sets, tricks of lighting and perspective, mockery of Nazis, breathtaking projections and imagery (Faust's damnation and Margarite's ascension), and emotional punches too.

But the opera? Oh my. I could just about cope with Berlioz' plot, which made little sense (remember, I'm a Gilliam fan), and the turgid, endless music. But - and maybe this is because I am steeped in the naturalism and narrative conventions of film - opera is just ridiculous. Haven't they heard of character development? Backstory? Storytelling? I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them, but opera stretches credulity too far.

Example. Margarite discovers that Faust, her love from afar, is hiding behind the curtain in her bedroom. Is she just a teensy bit freaked? Nope. She starts singing that if he leaves her she will die.

'Someone's coming I must go!'

'If you go I will die'

'I have to go, don't die'

'They are coming. You must go. I will die.'

Jesus.

And that, I suppose, is opera's problem. In it's day it was powerful, revolutionary, relevant, sexy, the best immersion in sound and light and drama that money could buy. But it's been totally eclipsed by cinema (which, if some commentators are to be believed, is just about to be eclipsed by computer games). Sure, it still looks stunning, and when the soprano is at full tilt and the chorus belting it out, yeah, it's pretty electrifying. But I never once cared about Faust and his woes, which, given the archetypal nature of the story takes some doing.

So, classic Gilliam. Impeccably flawed.

How wonderful is Wood (festival)

I awoke at 5am this morning, new song lyrics working their way through my system, so here I am blogging at an unfeasibly early hour. The muse is with me as I'm still coming down from the weekend, which saw the new Telling the Bees line up play a late night set at Wood festival, just down the road from Oxford.

Wood is what they call a boutique festival, homespun and folkie. Only a thousand or so tickets, two small stages, no sound systems, extraordinary food, plenty of workshops, hundreds of children, no deranged crazies with eyes like cupcakes, lovely relaxed vibe. I suppose where once families would go to the seaside, or caravaning, for their summer holidays, now they go to a festival. It seemed like half of alternative Oxford had upped sticks and decamped down to Braziers Park.

All the time I was there, two red kites traced lazy helixes in the sky. Chiff chaffs chorused in the hedges and (at the risk of sounding preposterously bucolic) I was woken by the bleating of lambs in the next field along. You don't get that at Glastonbury (all photos by Nomi).




The first festival of the season is like waking up from winter. Packing is a nightmare: I'm not yet on autopilot. But once there, the festival vibe tickles your fuzzy bits. You slow down and remember what's important in life. Drinking tea and watching the world go by is more than enough.

They're not just an escape from the humdrum. Something important happens at festivals.

And though I say it myself, Telling the Bees played a blinder. I can't begin to tell you what a joy it is to see people up on their feet dancing, smiling, singing along to your words. It's humbling. Everything seems worthwhile.

Mayfly

It's been a trying week with over a hundred student essays to mark - payback time. One poor chap let the following howler get through, invoking the little known theory of interactional shitwork (which, on a bad day, feels like the perfect description of higher education and is why, perhaps, I can only bring myself to do it part-time.)

On the musical front, Jim Penny has now also joined the Telling the Bees line up, and you can hear some recordings of our first rehearsal here, on the Bees blog. The magic is most definitely there. On Saturday, me and Jim did a stripped down set at the Truck Store, as part of the warm up for Wood festival. Seemed to go down very well. And then we retired to Jim's boat for a glorious session with Jo (Red Dog Green Dog), Mikey (just about every band in Brighton), Dave (Nature Boy) and Colin and Jane from the Bees. The beatific smile on Jo's face as she squeezed out perfect chord after perfect chord said it all. The best music in the world will never be heard by critics or promoters or journos or punters. It happens spontaneously, when musicians get together and play for themselves. I have to pinch myself sometimes. I can't believe I'm there, a part of it. Such a privilege.

And on the way home, at one in the morning, the nightingale was in full voice, more punchy and inventive than ever. Such stamina.

Yesterday me and Nomi went to church, which is to say we went on our habitual long Sunday walk, this time a loop around the village of Stonesfield. In comparison to Devon, Oxfordshire seems pretty flat and uninspiring. And yet there's a gentle magic to the land here that has rubbed off on me over the years. It's fair to say that I've fallen in love with it.

As we ate our sandwiches, a cuckoo piped up in the distance, his voice blown this way and that on the wind, while a flurry of House Martens snickered above, almost in reach.




And then, one of those rare marvels. As we walked back along the Evenlode, the sky was filled with insects. We'd chanced upon the one day of the year that the Mayflies emerge. After a year living on the river bottom, they crawl up reeds, pupate and take wing. All on the same day. How do they know?



In the air they fly upwards, a metre or so, then hang-glide down again, up and down, up and down. They land on your hands and clothes. Close up they look like little steampunk flying machines, air-galleons of wood and brass and steam.




A small flock of Black-Headed gulls plucked them from the air as easily and as greedily as someone tucking into the tasters at the supermarket deli.

The adult Mayflies have one purpose - to mate and lay eggs - after which they die. They only live for a day.

And that, I suppose, is the art. Being in the right place at the right time. Wonderful when it happens.

The Bosky Man

So another Oxford May Morning has been and gone, and a fine day it was. As usual I took on the role of the Bosky Man, a character one half traditional, one half out of the story books of my childhood, and one half pure invention (yup, that's three halves). Bosky is a late sixteenth century word meaning full of bushes or thickets, or fuddled with drink.

Here I am with Nomi, looking a bit bleary as it's 5.30am and we've already been up for an hour, ready to take to the streets (you'll have to ask Nomi who her character is, but yes, that is a raven's claw about her neck).


Look at British folk customs, and you'll often see someone dressed in tailcoat, top hat, flowers and feathers, with a painted face. It's important to remember that when it comes to dressing up and folk rites, there's never been one single, overarching meaning. Things change. Border Morris sides explain that they black their faces as a form of disguise, and true enough there's a riotous tradition of popular, rural rebellion that has seen people going out costumed, dressed in drag as 'Rebecca' or as the notorious 'Captain Swing'.

Then again, many folk rites such as the Jack-in-the-Green are of nineteenth century origin, created by chimney sweeps to earn a bit of cash as their work dried up in the spring - blacked faces being the mark of their profession. But we also have to accept that 'blacking up' has occasionally been done for less palatable reasons, and I think as folk artists we have to own up to a past we now find distasteful: to do so is to accept that 'the folk' are not necessarily the repository of progressive attitudes, or, as some have argued, 'the common sense'. By acknowledging the elephant in the room, folk artistry can distance itself from any taint of bigotry and make itself relevant again.

The mask I wear is half black, half white and I'll leave you to read your own meanings into that, but it is also meant to be just a little scary - once I made a small child cry - no one said that ritual should be nice.

This year the Hurly-Burly Band were not only well-rehearsed but we were also joined by Mano, a gaita player from Gallicia, who brought the weight of his tradition to the proceedings (photos by Kate Raworth). With four pipers and a host of others we made a glorious wall of sound.





The crowd was large, as usual, and by the end of our set, when the sun rises above Hertford College, and bathes us in warm morning light, most people were dancing.



On the bank holiday Monday, a small, post-MayDay possee set off on what has now become a traditional walk, the five miles from our flat, through Wytham Woods to Eynsham, stopping off for a picnic on the way. With impeccable timing we heard a cuckoo as we came down through the woods.


We go to Eynsham, not just because it is a lovely walk, but also to see Eynsham Morris do their thing, on their day of dance. They are the real deal. Their tradition is unique to the village - indeed you have to have lived in the village, or preferably to have been born there, to dance. They were one of the first sides to be discovered by Cecil Sharp, and what I like about them is that they dance with a wild gusto, ripping the piss from one another as they do, trying to trip one another up. Proper. No wanky-having here. Oddly, they dance right outside our flat on May 1st, but of course we always miss them. So to Eynsham we go. Some of the men have been dancing since they were children. One man's grandfather was buried in his kit. Most of the men look as if they are made of blackthorn and briar, as if they've sprung from the hedgerows of Oxfordshire.


Like many traditional Morris sides they've been worried that the next generation won't take an interest, but to general relief they've recruited some village lads who've all learned the dances and seem thoroughly to enjoy themselves.



I asked about the feathers and the top hats. All to cock a snook at the aristocracy. The pheasant feathers say, hey, we're poaching your pheasants; the top hats say, we can wear top hats too. Two fingers to authority. Bosky men indeed.