I was staggered to learn at the weekend that if you're prepared to dig around a little, it is now possible to download Shroom illegally for free. Once I'd got over my disbelief that someone could be arsed to digitise a whole book I found I had two conflicting reactions.
On the one hand I was pretty outraged. The book, which took me two years to write, has just crept into profit, and however delightful it is to receive an annual royalty cheque my yearly earnings don't come close to covering a week's rent. It hasn't made me rich in other words, and like most artists, poets and musicians I know, this last year has been pretty tough. I'm not starving in a garret but let's just say I've never worked so hard for so little money. Living hand to mouth, every penny counts, so you can understand why I might feel a bit peeved.
On the other hand, another, possibly wiser, part of me took it as a strange compliment that someone thinks my book so valuable that they wanted to make it freely available. I never bought that guff about 'home taping killing music' and I actively encourage people to share Telling the Bees albums, so why should a book be any different? Like most authors I wasn't motivated to write by money: I wanted people to read what I'd written. In which case the more people that read Shroom the better, however the manuscript falls into their hands.
Whatever my reaction, we are moving towards an internet-based world in which there is an increasing expectation that information, texts, images, films etc will all be freely available. I fully expect that in my lifetime we'll reach a point where you can read or download every book that's ever been published. However utopian and egalitarian such a move might first appear, it will be the small artists who suffer most. If books continue to be physically published at all (and let's face it the industry is in something of a freefall), then they will be increasingly selected by market appeal rather than merit. The benefits of a world in which all information is freely available may very well be offset by the fact that much of that information will not be worth having.
Monday, 29 August 2011
Round House
I spent this Bank Holiday weekend as a guest of the British Druid Order at their hideaway in Shropshire. My brief? To bard about, playing tunes and songs in the valley and round the fire, and to teach the odd Breton dance or two. Robin Williamson (who, to my mind at least, has the greatest claim to being the Chief Bard of Britain, the Nightingale, if such a title existed) was their guest the weekend before. It was an honour to be following in his footsteps. (Indeed, when I began my musical journey and picked up my first instrument, the tin whistle, it was Robin Williamson's warm and encouraging Penny Whistle Book that got me started - he set me on my way and consequently I owe him a lot.)
I was also booked to do a late night set on the Saturday and when I discovered that they'd recently finished building a replica Iron Age Roundhouse there was no choice: I knew that was where I wanted to play.
The building nestles in the woods.
Apart from the doors, which I think are made from reclaimed timber, all the structural materials are local with poles and clay taken from the surrounding woods. The thatch is made from specially sourced ancient varieties of wheat: the BDO volunteers sowed, harvested, threshed and prepared it all themselves. From start to finish the project took about two years to complete.
The round house looks more like a person than a thing.
It's rather dark inside and so hard to take photos, or indeed to capture the atmosphere. But at night with the fire lit, smoke rising up and disappearing through the blackened recesses of the ceiling, and the light just revealing the outlines of the audience, it's hard not to feel time slipping away. A house of the spirits, the air crackles. You are inside and outside all at once (a bit like bardism itself, which begins to make sense in such a place). I felt myself taken as I sang. The room shifted and we were away.
The only problem is that now I want one, not to live in, but to sit and ponder and sleep and dream. There really is no better place to play.
I was also booked to do a late night set on the Saturday and when I discovered that they'd recently finished building a replica Iron Age Roundhouse there was no choice: I knew that was where I wanted to play.
The building nestles in the woods.
Apart from the doors, which I think are made from reclaimed timber, all the structural materials are local with poles and clay taken from the surrounding woods. The thatch is made from specially sourced ancient varieties of wheat: the BDO volunteers sowed, harvested, threshed and prepared it all themselves. From start to finish the project took about two years to complete.
The round house looks more like a person than a thing.
It's rather dark inside and so hard to take photos, or indeed to capture the atmosphere. But at night with the fire lit, smoke rising up and disappearing through the blackened recesses of the ceiling, and the light just revealing the outlines of the audience, it's hard not to feel time slipping away. A house of the spirits, the air crackles. You are inside and outside all at once (a bit like bardism itself, which begins to make sense in such a place). I felt myself taken as I sang. The room shifted and we were away.
The only problem is that now I want one, not to live in, but to sit and ponder and sleep and dream. There really is no better place to play.
Friday, 19 August 2011
Crop Circles
I’m not sure when I saw my first crop circle. I’m guessing it was in the summer of 1991 on one of my annual pilgrimages to Avebury. The circle lay on the slopes of Overton Hill, a short walk from the Avenue and in full view of Silbury Hill. The time and the place seemed auspicious.
I went with an old school friend, Oli, and my then partner, Groovy Su. When we got there a man was dowsing with metal rods, trying to detect the subtle presence of earth energies. I hope we weren't in the way.
Back in 1991 crop formations were still circular enough (just) that they could plausibly have been caused by natural phenomena – wind vortices or ball-lightning or electro-magnetic curlicues –, which is why another amateur investigator was there with a home-built electronic device, brimming with aerials and dials and cables and some kind of audio output. He swept it over the bent corn, adjusting knobs, taking readings and muttering to himself. He reminded me of the scientist from the cult 1970s children’s drama, The Children of the Stones.
Channel 4 arrived (we'd clearly hit rush hour) and conducted an interview with a leading cerealogist, as crop circle investigators rather pompously called themselves. The crew filmed us walking away and we appeared in the subsequent documentary for a full ten seconds, hippies in a cornfield, signifiers of the weird.
A fan not an enthusiast, it’s hard, looking back, to piece together what I actually thought was causing the formations. I’m not sure I ever pinned it down. I know I wasn’t persuaded by alien communications, nor indeed by the idea of natural phenomena (nature doesn’t do straight lines). I think I probably wanted the circles to be upwellings of earth energy, a chthonic communication, a warning, a wake-up call. As the Space Goats sang: ‘look at circles in the corn, what is Mother saying?’ Psychedelics, festivals, rave, stone circles, crop circles, paganism, magick, eco-protests: they all seemed to be related strands of a new paradigm, a richly woven magic carpet that would re-enchant the world with its new ancient wisdom and avert ecogeddon along the way.
My lack of attachment to any one explanation meant that it didn’t come as much of a blow when I learnt that the circles were all human creations. It’s obvious really when you think about it, parsimony and all that. I’ve met circle-makers, heard how they did it, how they vied with each other in an unspoken game of one-upmanship. Some of them wrote a book and very good it is too.
Enthusiasts maintain that, OK, if some circles are manmade then not all of them are; or, invoking Jung, they claim that the circles represent an expression of the collective unconscious, forcing its way up through the makers’ treadle boards and past their conscious intentions. You’ve got to admire the will to believe.
But for me, the circle makers have done us a profound service. Through their cheeky rural graffiti, executed anonymously and at night, these proto-Banksy's created puckish works of exquisite beauty, transient patterns, glyphs and sigils that have activated our imaginations and given us cause to wonder. They created a bit of magic. In an age of Damien Hurst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed we’ve forgotten that that is what Art is supposed to do.
,
I went with an old school friend, Oli, and my then partner, Groovy Su. When we got there a man was dowsing with metal rods, trying to detect the subtle presence of earth energies. I hope we weren't in the way.
Back in 1991 crop formations were still circular enough (just) that they could plausibly have been caused by natural phenomena – wind vortices or ball-lightning or electro-magnetic curlicues –, which is why another amateur investigator was there with a home-built electronic device, brimming with aerials and dials and cables and some kind of audio output. He swept it over the bent corn, adjusting knobs, taking readings and muttering to himself. He reminded me of the scientist from the cult 1970s children’s drama, The Children of the Stones.
Channel 4 arrived (we'd clearly hit rush hour) and conducted an interview with a leading cerealogist, as crop circle investigators rather pompously called themselves. The crew filmed us walking away and we appeared in the subsequent documentary for a full ten seconds, hippies in a cornfield, signifiers of the weird.
A fan not an enthusiast, it’s hard, looking back, to piece together what I actually thought was causing the formations. I’m not sure I ever pinned it down. I know I wasn’t persuaded by alien communications, nor indeed by the idea of natural phenomena (nature doesn’t do straight lines). I think I probably wanted the circles to be upwellings of earth energy, a chthonic communication, a warning, a wake-up call. As the Space Goats sang: ‘look at circles in the corn, what is Mother saying?’ Psychedelics, festivals, rave, stone circles, crop circles, paganism, magick, eco-protests: they all seemed to be related strands of a new paradigm, a richly woven magic carpet that would re-enchant the world with its new ancient wisdom and avert ecogeddon along the way.
My lack of attachment to any one explanation meant that it didn’t come as much of a blow when I learnt that the circles were all human creations. It’s obvious really when you think about it, parsimony and all that. I’ve met circle-makers, heard how they did it, how they vied with each other in an unspoken game of one-upmanship. Some of them wrote a book and very good it is too.
Enthusiasts maintain that, OK, if some circles are manmade then not all of them are; or, invoking Jung, they claim that the circles represent an expression of the collective unconscious, forcing its way up through the makers’ treadle boards and past their conscious intentions. You’ve got to admire the will to believe.
But for me, the circle makers have done us a profound service. Through their cheeky rural graffiti, executed anonymously and at night, these proto-Banksy's created puckish works of exquisite beauty, transient patterns, glyphs and sigils that have activated our imaginations and given us cause to wonder. They created a bit of magic. In an age of Damien Hurst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed we’ve forgotten that that is what Art is supposed to do.
,
Thursday, 4 August 2011
Telling the Bees in Bath!
Telling the Bees will be playing at the legendary Bell pub, Walcot Street, Bath, on Sunday 14th August, from 1pm, as part of the Bath Folk Festival. It's free (donations to magic hat) and last time we played there it was a truly folkgasmic experience for all concerned (we've got the tapes to prove it).
And it'll be a chance to see our spanking new, groovetastic, five piece line-up.
Do come down and add your vibes to what promises to be a most convivial afternoon of post-folk strangery.
And it'll be a chance to see our spanking new, groovetastic, five piece line-up.
Do come down and add your vibes to what promises to be a most convivial afternoon of post-folk strangery.
Alan Garner Season
If radio, theatre and arts venues can do it, then I can do it too. I’ve been having a season. An Alan Garner season.
Unlike many of my friends I didn’t read much Garner in childhood, only Red Shift as a teenager. Even though I’m not sure I understood it all I remember it having a lasting and haunting effect. It was almost as if it had been written for just for me. Garner’s writing has been likened to an onion. It requires peeling back the layers in repeated readings. No expelliarmus here.
But I only came back to him when researching Shroom. ‘What?’, said a friend. ‘You haven’t read Thursbitch? It’s all about magic mushrooms.’
So first I re-read Thursbitch, and while fly-agaric mushrooms (corbel bread, recycled as piddlejuice) feature heavily in the plot, it’s about so much more. I realised quite how much I’d missed the first time. The story unpeeled another layer and the climax had me in tears.
Then I read The Stone Book Quartet, which as an autobiographical piece is the least overtly ‘magical’ of Garner’s ‘adult’ work (quite why he’s labelled as a children’s author is beyond me), but all the more extraordinary for it. In some ways it's my favourite precisely because it's the mundane that's magical. That-which-is-passed-on need not come wrapped in abracadabra. The act of kindness in the last of the four stories also had me in tears.
Next I read Strandloper, based on the, frankly incredible, true story of one William Buckley, who, transported to Australia on trumped up charges, managed to escape, ended up living with the aborigines for some thirty years, before being pardoned and allowed to return home. There are some breathtaking passages – not least about stained glass – but I found I was less able to silence my critic’s voice, particularly in regard to Garner’s treatment of aboriginal worldviews.
Finally I read The Voice That Thunders, a collection of essays that forms the key to unriddling Garner’s intricate lockwork. The last essay of the collection quite answered my doubts about Strandloper, and now I’m rereading it, allowing myself to be fully carried along with the story.
I realise now that my treatment of Garner in Shroom, while fair, was altogether too perfunctory, too thin, for Garner is undoubtedly a master-storyteller. It’s nothing but a pleasure to place yourself in his capable hands. Like all artists, novelists, songwriters and poets he has his themes – landscape, memory, myth, language and how they combine to create a sense of rootedness, one which modernity erodes – but he explores them with an effortless erudition that includes you the reader and draws you in. He manages to plug into the timeless and universal through the local and the particular, that is from the landscape in which he was born and lives and from the people that he shares it with. He is a master craftsman.
And more than that, Garner is, I suppose, an example of what Radio 4 used to call a ‘devout sceptic.’ Without ever compromising the rational he somehow finds space for the mythical, a none-too-easy task in this scientific age. A strandloper himself, he maintains a foot in both worlds. Like the magpie of aboriginal creation myth, he lifts the sky from the earth, propping it up on the pillars of his prodigious learning, but thereby creating a space in which the miraculous can occur.
If I may quote him, from his essay ‘Aback of Beyond’:
‘Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world.
It is a paradox: yet one so important that I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth.’
That’s it! The truth can’t be told but we have to try. Magic, craft and the importance of story. It’s the nearest thing to an artistic manifesto I’ve come across.
Unlike many of my friends I didn’t read much Garner in childhood, only Red Shift as a teenager. Even though I’m not sure I understood it all I remember it having a lasting and haunting effect. It was almost as if it had been written for just for me. Garner’s writing has been likened to an onion. It requires peeling back the layers in repeated readings. No expelliarmus here.
But I only came back to him when researching Shroom. ‘What?’, said a friend. ‘You haven’t read Thursbitch? It’s all about magic mushrooms.’
So first I re-read Thursbitch, and while fly-agaric mushrooms (corbel bread, recycled as piddlejuice) feature heavily in the plot, it’s about so much more. I realised quite how much I’d missed the first time. The story unpeeled another layer and the climax had me in tears.
Then I read The Stone Book Quartet, which as an autobiographical piece is the least overtly ‘magical’ of Garner’s ‘adult’ work (quite why he’s labelled as a children’s author is beyond me), but all the more extraordinary for it. In some ways it's my favourite precisely because it's the mundane that's magical. That-which-is-passed-on need not come wrapped in abracadabra. The act of kindness in the last of the four stories also had me in tears.
Next I read Strandloper, based on the, frankly incredible, true story of one William Buckley, who, transported to Australia on trumped up charges, managed to escape, ended up living with the aborigines for some thirty years, before being pardoned and allowed to return home. There are some breathtaking passages – not least about stained glass – but I found I was less able to silence my critic’s voice, particularly in regard to Garner’s treatment of aboriginal worldviews.
Finally I read The Voice That Thunders, a collection of essays that forms the key to unriddling Garner’s intricate lockwork. The last essay of the collection quite answered my doubts about Strandloper, and now I’m rereading it, allowing myself to be fully carried along with the story.
I realise now that my treatment of Garner in Shroom, while fair, was altogether too perfunctory, too thin, for Garner is undoubtedly a master-storyteller. It’s nothing but a pleasure to place yourself in his capable hands. Like all artists, novelists, songwriters and poets he has his themes – landscape, memory, myth, language and how they combine to create a sense of rootedness, one which modernity erodes – but he explores them with an effortless erudition that includes you the reader and draws you in. He manages to plug into the timeless and universal through the local and the particular, that is from the landscape in which he was born and lives and from the people that he shares it with. He is a master craftsman.
And more than that, Garner is, I suppose, an example of what Radio 4 used to call a ‘devout sceptic.’ Without ever compromising the rational he somehow finds space for the mythical, a none-too-easy task in this scientific age. A strandloper himself, he maintains a foot in both worlds. Like the magpie of aboriginal creation myth, he lifts the sky from the earth, propping it up on the pillars of his prodigious learning, but thereby creating a space in which the miraculous can occur.
If I may quote him, from his essay ‘Aback of Beyond’:
‘Literature exists at every level of experience. It is inclusive, not exclusive. It embraces; it does not reduce, however simply it is expressed. The purpose of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple: to integrate without reduction; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables; we have to tell stories to unriddle the world.
It is a paradox: yet one so important that I must restate it. The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth; but what we feel most deeply cannot be spoken in words. At this level only images connect. And so story becomes symbol; and symbol is myth.’
That’s it! The truth can’t be told but we have to try. Magic, craft and the importance of story. It’s the nearest thing to an artistic manifesto I’ve come across.