The Crooked Path

The pressure of marking about 170 undergraduate essays has kept me distracted from blogging but aside from work pressures it's been a strange week. The weather has been sunny and beautiful making it a spring to remember, but there's something quite unseasonable about it. It feels wrong to be walking about in shorts in March. The new moon has been exquisitely beautiful, dancing around the western sky with an almost conjunct Venus and Jupiter, but Mars has also made his baleful presence felt in the East.

Most of my friends are having a tough time, financially or emotionally or with poor health. I suppose it makes sense that artists and ne'er-do-wells are likely to feel the pinch first of all, but being the sensitive types that we are I think we're also picking up the prevailing mood of the country. The Tories are back to their old tricks again, flogging off the family silver, blaming the country's ills on those most disenfranchised by the system, and lining their pockets as they go. The cuts are biting. Art is valued by its economic worth. The mood is glum.

But all is not doom and gloom. For one thing I've been watching this fantastic talk by my latest hero, graphic novelist Alan Moore. You could do worse than sit back for 90 minutes and listen to this amiable raconteur and skeptical psychedelic adventurer explain how he came to worship Glycon, a glove-puppet snake god from late Antiquity. I've yet to find a more cogent exposition of the arts magical.

Alan Moore from Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness on Vimeo.

Last week I went to the Revelatory Experiences conference at Kings College Hospital in London. It brought together theologians, neuroscientists, historians, psychiatrists and anthropologists in a day of exciting dialogue. Amongst other things I learned that so-called delusional experiences are extremely common amongst the populace, not least amongst members of new religious movements. The reason why these people haven't all been sectioned is that they have a positive framework within which to make sense of their experiences - ie religion - evidence, perhaps, that Jung was correct in thinking religion necessary for our mental health (the link to the paper is here, though it may not work if you aren't reading this on a University network).

Then I went to see old friend Matthew Watkins give a talk about the extraordinary (and extremely psychedelic) patterns underlying the distribution of the prime numbers for the Ibn Arabi Society. I had never heard of medieval Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, nor did I know he had his own dedicated society, based here in Oxford: delightful discoveries both. Volume two of Dr Matt's Secrets of Creation trilogy is now out - I shall review it here once it's risen to the top of my book pile. After all this erudition we retired to Jim's canal boat where we indulged in some hardcore drone-based space-folk improv. Nice.

And then to London again last night to see the ever-wonderful Spiro on their album launch tour. They were on glorious form and their intricate, spiraling technoid folk elicited paroxysms of pleasure in the audience, who whooped and cheered with all the fervour of a revivalist meeting.



So, strange times, but we on the crooked path stride boldly onwards.

A mention in the Guardian

Good news in a week tarnished by a mountain of essays to mark, and a rather unpleasant stomach bug - Telling the Bees got mention in the Guardian. Woo hoo!

Read it here.

International Bagpipe Day

Tomorrow, Saturday March 10th, will be the first ever International Bagpipe Day.


There are events happening up and down the UK, from concerts and dances to a big International Bagpipe Conference at SOAS in London organised by the wonderful Cassandre Balosso-Bordin. There will be speakers from Sweden, Portugal, Gallicia and even a paper on the bagpipes of Rajasthan.


And I've heard of things happening as far away as America and Athens. The idea seems really to have taken off and is generating some not-inconsiderable media interest (I think Cassandre will be on Breakfast TV tomorrow too).


I'm going to be helping out at the conference tomorrow, but in case you're not as spoddy as I am and, ahem, won't be there, I thought I'd share my introduction to the programme notes.

Up the bagpipes! Vive la cornamuse!

In June 2010 I was driving home from the Bagpipe Society’s annual festival, the Blowout, when I hit a traffic jam on the motorway. I’d just been elected Publicity Officer, and as I stopped and started down the middle lane my mind turned to the question of how to get more people involved. Just before the traffic cleared I had it - an annual bagpipe day!

Initially I was thinking of a purely English affair but this quickly struck me as far too parochial. Since its revival in the late 70s, English piping has gone from strength to strength but there are correspondingly exciting things happening in Wales and Cornwall, not to mention the already thriving scenes in Scotland and Northumbria.

Furthermore, even a cursory look on Youtube demonstrates that all over Europe, North Africa and the Near East, people are championing their indigenous bagpiping traditions with renewed vigour and enthusiasm. Here in the twenty-first century, the bagpipe, in all its glorious diversity, seems more popular than ever. It deserved an event that was truly international.

I am delighted that thanks to modern technology so many people around the world have seized upon the idea, not least Cassandre for organising this conference, our flagship UK event. It will, I hope, be the first of many more International Bagpipe Days to come, so do keep the second Saturday of March clear in your diaries and think of events that you might organise next time.

Today promises to be both exciting and groundbreaking, and here in London we have a unique opportunity for diverse makers, players, enthusiasts and scholars to mingle, share ideas and forge new connections. And that, after all, has always been the point of bagpipes – to bring people together, whatever their differences, in an effervescent spirit of fellowship. That they have been doing so since ancient times, as part of our common heritage, is surely something worth celebrating.

Telling the Bees at Green Note

We played down at the Green Note cafe in Camden on Sunday night to a packed and enthusiastic house. Here's a video of 'Wood' - I'll try and get more up when I can.




The Green Note is my kind of cafe, intimate, welcoming and offering fine food. When we arrived in the afternoon a rebetiko band was playing to hushed audience of, I'm guessing, the Greek and Italian diaspora. The atmosphere was intense, heady even, and I immediately felt at home. Many, many thanks to fRoots for hosting us. It's the kind of gig we dream of.

Brythonic gyrations

I have a new musical hero, the Breton fluter Jean-Michel Veillon who was in London to teach a workshop and was lured to Oxford to do a solo gig. Here he is, captured in a pub session, presumably in Brittany. What I love about his playing is the way he constantly weaves around the tune - in fact at times it's quite hard to hear where the tune begins and ends, so nimble are his fingers. He's one of those players who see a tune as a possibility, playing it an exploration. Listen right to the end and hear how the whole set is one exquisitely unfolding extemporization, silk reeled from the cocoon.



Apart from his exceptional musicianship and his extraordinary Breton-Irish accent, two things struck me at the gig. First, he was very clear that the function of Breton music and dance is to induce trance; as such it arises out of biological necessity. This is something that I've always suspected about the Breton thing so it's nice to hear it from the horse's mouth. 'We're very lucky to have it' he said. 'Something incredible happens when you are playing and thousands of people are dancing the same dance together in a line or circle.' I see Breton dances as a kind of bhajan. They are about losing yourself to something greater. We forget the Dionysian at our peril.

And second, I had no idea that until the 1970s there was no flute tradition in Brittany. The music was played on bombarde and biniou, occasionally fife, but never flute. He was too modest to say so, but the Breton flute is his creation, his invention. He took his inspiration from Irish players and then adapted their style to the Breton music he'd grown up with (you can read more about how he did it here). And to my ear at least, there's a strong Indian influence too.

Love and music need no passports, goes the old adage, and I felt a kind of affirmation in what he was saying of what we're trying to do here in Britain, with Wod and all the other bands. In our quest to find an indigenous trance music we are looking to Brittany just as he once looked to Ireland, not to ape or to imitate, but to find or rediscover something of ourselves. That's as tradition should be.