Andy Letcher

Brythonic gyrations

2012-03-05T11:33:00.009Z

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.

Snow and after

2012-02-16T11:00:00.004Z

We did indeed get a dollop of snow last week, about an inch. It disappeared almost as quickly as it came but not before a glorious sunny Saturday, during which we made a five mile stomp through Wytham Woods to Swinford Bridge.

Skaters were out on Port Meadow where the winter floods, only a foot or so deep, were thickly frozen. It looked timeless, like a Dutch master (that's Wytham on the horizon).

The sun was surprisingly warm but once we reached the shade of the woods the air was cool. We had lunch on a fallen trunk but didn't stop long.

We came out of the woods at Swinford Gate and climbed the hill from where you get one of the best (and let's face it, only) views in Oxfordshire.

And from Swinford we got the bus home again. It's one of my favourite local walks.

But by Monday the snow had all gone and just this week, with the return of mild weather, I felt the first tug of spring, the first visceral hint that the spell of winter is starting to crack.

According to medieval folklore, Valentine's day is the moment when the birds start singing again. They've actually been singing for a few weeks already, but as I cycled to work the other morning I heard a song thrush in full voice and my heart did a little skip.

Even scarier

2012-02-09T17:13:00.001Z

Continuing a theme, here's what they do in Sardinia...very scary indeed.

Intimations of spring

2012-02-09T09:00:00.005Z

There were outbreaks of wodulation in Glastonbury last weekend as Wod supported the fabulously funky Green Angels for a French and Breton bal in the town hall. The Angels were celebrating their album launch and the event was timed to coincide with imbolc, the first festival of spring. We played for an hour and then again acoustically at the end, with the dancers pressed all around us, as seems to be becoming traditional. It was a fine night.

We stayed over (thanks again to Mike and Jane) and after a full English breakfast in the Mocha Berry Cafe, made the obligatory ascent up the Tor, the sacred Isle of Avalon. Aside from a one or two clumps of snowdrops there were few intimations of spring. Indeed, the flurries of snow quickly began to settle.

We got home after a somewhat alarming journey through a blizzard to find that a friend, Jessica Abrahams, had sent me a book, a catalogue of an exhibition of a little known Slovenian artist called Boris Zohar that she'd picked up on her travels (I'd normally add a link at this point but Zohar seems to have very little online presence). She thought, what with my interest in folk rites and all, I might find the pictures...interesting...I think his work is incredible and it deserves to be better known.

Zohar's thing is painting the kurent, a figure from Slovenian folklore, which he does somewhat obsessively. The kurenti come out at Easter time and welcome in the spring with dances, cracked whips and enormous bells tied around their midriffs. They're kind of comic and odd all at the same time.

Clearly from the same stable as the krampus the kurent is perhaps not quite as scary, but I still think our spring festivals could take a little inspiration from their European cousins.

In the meantime, with the cold snap continuing and more snow forecast tonight I guess we'll have to settle for hunting woozles in the woods.

Catweazle

2012-02-02T11:18:00.003Z

The Catweazle Club is one of the jewels in Oxford's dreamingly spired crown. Hosted by the incorrigible Matt Sage, it's an open performance space which is 100% acoustic and, thanks to the quality of the listening and the sheer variety of performers, never ceases to be a magic bardic crucible, leaving everyone feeling better than when they came in.

A folk club on acid, I've been playing there now for fifteen years. This recent video captures some of the vibe, and, indeed, a little of my good self, playing a fairly new song, One More Mazurka.

See you down there, perhaps? The best seats are in the front on the floor...

Catweazle 12.01.2012 from notiamobene on Vimeo.

Interview

2012-02-02T11:14:00.004Z

I did an interview for a Pagan radio station, Grove Radio, t'other day and here it is, with an impromptu version of Wood towards the end (bonus points to anyone who spots the continuity error). Sorry about the mess in the background, but, erm, that's how we live...

Locomotion

2012-01-30T10:52:00.005Z

I'm having problems with locomotion. In the last six weeks both my beloved bicycle and my beloved walking boots have finally given up the ghost and had to be replaced. Then a week ago my motor failed its MOT so completely as to make repair uneconomical. And on friday, when I was out on my new bicycle, I got hit by a car.

Not badly. I wasn't hurt. But I was enraged and I swore quite a lot at the driver. He hadn't looked. He pulled out straight into me. If he'd accelerated I'd have been toast. The worst thing was that I could see it all about to happen, like one of those dreams where you're paralysed or moving through treacle. I think I may have croaked out an incredulous 'no no no!' but all I could do was watch.

The mortified driver stopped and checked if I was OK but I was so angry I couldn't face talking to him. I cycled off and it was only a mile later that I realised my back wheel was pringled, a mistake that has cost me forty quid. Not a good day.

But ever since I've been wondering what it all means. Why did my life suddenly and unexpectedly collide with that of a stranger? If I'd dawdled at home for just another thirty seconds it would never have happened. Why did he hit me? Maybe the shock of it (and he looked ashen) will ping his life in a quite unexpected direction. Maybe mine too. Maybe he saved me from the lorry round the corner.

The self-help/new age/pop-psychological habit is to literalise the metaphors. Our worlds collided. He knocked some sense into me, made me question my direction in life. Actually, we all do it but grasping at language in this way has always struck me as rather tenuous.

A mechanistic account would suggest that the collision was inevitable, that it was necessarily laid down in the starting conditions of the universe, that those events played out with rigid determinacy. If we could rewind time and set it all going again then that everything would happen exactly as before. The philosopher Henri Bergson derided such a view a hundred years ago, and I agree with him that it seems absurd.

All mainstream science would say on the subject is that the collision was random, one of those freak events that bedevil an uncertain universe. I can't help it. I find such a view fundamentally unsatisfying. I want to wrest meaning from the world (though, of course, even by saying that such events are random and empty of content the naysayers are still engaged in a process of meaning-making - we can't help ourselves: we make meaning even when we think we're not).

If I have any philosophy of life then surely it is the art of hitch-hiking. The trick of getting a lift is not in persuading someone to stop. It is in being at exactly the right place at the right time such that the person who would give you a lift and is heading your way just happens to be passing. Being in the right place at the right time. The Taoist rule of thumb. Effortless not-doing.

Nothing beats the feeling of flow when lift gives way to lift and you're carried to where you want to be. I got picked up in a stretched limo once. Really.

The hard bit is dealing with the times when it doesn't , when you're stuck by the motorway in the pissing rain and it's getting dark, and someone looks right instead of left and you're left wondering what hit you.

2012 and all that

2012-01-20T10:36:00.004Z

So here we are. We've made it to 2012 and I doubt that anyone can have failed to pick up on the millenarian prophecies for the year. Mayan calendars, fractal timewaves and astronomical alignments all point to a major shift occurring on December 21st. What, exactly, that shift will be remains unclear. Perhaps it will be a radical new form of human consciousness. Perhaps mind will finally extricate itself from matter. Time might collapse or maybe the aliens will finally step out from the shadows and usher us into the galactic citizenship we always knew was out there.

Anyone who's read Shroom will know that - how can I put this? - I'm yet to be convinced by 2012. Indeed, I recently wrote a chapter on the subject for the forthcoming book from David Luke's excellent Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lecture series. It's not that I wouldn't welcome any of those predicted changes - I like sci-fi remember - it's just that it all smacks of Christian millennarianism to me. I find that way of thinking...unhelpful.

It is, of course, a great shame that the two architects of 2012, psychedelic guru Terence McKenna and hotline to the 'Galactic Maya' José Argüelles have both left the building and so won't be there for the great reckoning (though it's probably good prophetic practice to place the end of the world beyond your allotted three score years and ten). McKenna did have the good grace to admit he could very well be wrong, something that sets him apart from his erstwhile, and frankly loopy, partner in time.

But, of course, we should never underestimate the power of the human imagination. If enough people think that something extraordinary is going to happen then perhaps that will set something extraordinary in motion (God knows, we need it). And if all this talk about psychedelics raises their profile again and gets people thinking about them in a more critical way then that can only be a good thing. Perhaps we should harness the power of the zeitgeist and declare 2012 the Year of the Psychedelic. It can't hurt.

On the subject of which, take a look at this latest piece of research by Robin Cahart-Harris, who gave psilocybin to volunteers and looked at their brains using an fMRI scanner. It seems that what psilocybin does is reduce activity in certain parts of the brain, so perhaps Huxley was right after all?

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system...Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of delibrate 'spiritual exercises', or though hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Aldous Huxley The Doors of Perception 1954: 12.

Using fMRI to Investigate the Effects of Psilocybin on Brain Activation and Blood Flow - Robin Carhart-Harris, Ph.D. from MAPS: Psychedelic Science on Vimeo.

Dalla and Wod in Oxford

2012-01-17T09:20:00.002Z

More on Lundy

2012-01-16T18:54:00.003Z

Since being back in Oxford I've had a fairly hefty pile of work to do preparing my teaching for the forthcoming semester, so not much time for thinking or musing or blogging. Sigh. But Monsieur Jacques Centime has just posted this video from our time on Lundy.

On our last day we awoke to the sound of the lighthouse thrumming to a storm force ten. Over a porridge breakfast I recalled a natural history film from the 70s in which presenter Jeffery Boswall attempted to eat a bowl of Rice Krispies in a sandstorm in the Kalahari (I may have made this up entirely for I've yet to find anyone else who remembers it). Suitably inspired, Jacques suggested we recreate this seminal moment in TV history with the following results:

Lundy

2012-01-05T16:35:00.010Z

After a slightly frenetic Christmas shuttling up and down the Michael Line, visiting friends and family in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset, we went to Lundy for New Year. Lundy is a three mile island in the middle of the Bristol Channel. It is difficult to get to, particularly at this time of year. You've got to want to go. Happily this was my fourth visit - I knew it would be worth it.

We were supposed to fly by helicopter from Hartland Point but the weather was against us and we were forced to spend the night in Ilfracombe, about which all I'll say is that it's seen better days.

We had to be at the ferry, the MS Oldenburg, in time to board at 5am.

The wind was blowing a force six and we headed out into pitch blackness against an incoming tide. The boat was knocked about in the swell and with no horizon to steady ourselves it wasn't long before the sea-sickness kicked in, two hours of unremitting hell. The crew were fantastic, however, and they administered to the sick with kindness and good humour. But we arrived with the day and it wasn't too long before we were tucking into a large breakfast at the Marisco Tavern, followed by what was to be the first of many sessions.

We stumbled over to our accommodation in an eighty mile-an-hour mist.

We were staying in Old Light, a nineteenth century light house that was eventually abandoned for being too tall and so quite invisible in fog.

A failure then, but we fell instantly in love with it. We climbed to the top at all times of day and night, playing music in its extraordinary acoustics, or just listening to the ever-present roar of the wind. We felt privileged, as if let in to complete some long-forgotten steampunk experiment.

When the weather cleared Old Light became the landmark it was meant to be.

For New Year we played a short set in the Marisco Tavern, then retreated back to Old Light, where, at midnight, we lit two candles, bringing the old girl back to life. In the gloom the lantern platform looked like a giant mushroom.

It was a reflective moment, a chance to be still after all the rushing around.

Over the next few days we walked the length and breadth of the island, taking perilous paths down to the water's edge.

We saw peregrines and ravens, soay sheep and sika deer. At Brazen Ward sixteen seals came swimming in to watch us, as curious of us as we were of them (apologies for the dreadful photo but you get the idea).

It was over all too soon and alas the force ten gale subsided in time for us to be helicoptered off.

In less than ten minutes we were back on Hartland Point, just where our adventure had started.

But there's a part of me that is still on the island and I'm counting the days until we can go back.

Christmas Customs

2011-12-26T18:48:00.003Z

While searching for a video of the traditional Boxing Day Marshfield Mummer's Play...

...I came across the following video of a krampus festival in the alps. Unlike the (supposedly) benign Santa Claus, the krampus takes naughty children away in his bag and eats them. This is genuinely scary. Makes our English folk customs, however wonderful they are, seem a little, um, tame...

Ho ho ho

2011-12-21T13:03:00.008Z

Of all the myths about magic mushrooms, the one I most wanted to be true was that Father Christmas is secretly and originally a fly-agaric munching shaman from Siberia. Alas, there's very little evidence that he was, and rather a lot to suggest he wasn't, and it turns out this myth was invented by the poet, Robert Graves, in one of his poetic flights of fancy, back in the early 70s.

But while researching Shroom, I discovered something interesting: Santa Claus and Father Christmas are not the same figure at all (see Ronald Hutton's The Stations of the Sun). Saint Nicholas, and the tradition of leaving presents for children on Saint Nicholas' eve, arrived in America with the Dutch, at their colony on Manhatten island. By the time New Amsterdam had become New York, Saint Nicholas had been quite forgotten, that is until he was revived by Washington Irving who transplanted the saint's traditions to Christmas Eve.

Irving inspired others. Most of the imagery associated with Santa (flying reindeer, chimneys and all) comes from one subsequent source, Clement Clark Moore's saccharine poem T'was the night before Christmas: the rest was cooked up by artist Thomas Nast and the advertising executives at a popular fizzy drink manufacturer (who need not be named). In other words, the modern Santa Claus is an American confection.

I've just written about my feelings towards the festive season for Spiral Earth so I shan't repeat them here, but it seems to me that everything that is wrong with Christmas is encapsulated by Santa: the consumption, the excess, the mad rush at a time when we should be still, the shmaltz and pester-power, the pretence that this is all somehow magic.

No wonder people like me need Santa to be something else, something genuinely rooted in the myths and traditions of what is an ancient midwinter festival, one that exists not to sell us stuff, but to heave body and soul through the dark days ahead. If Graves had dug just a little deeper in his quest to find re-enchantment he would have realised that he didn't need to invent a spurious shamanic tradition for Santa: he could just have drawn attention to the English figure that Santa superceded and who is more than fit for purpose - Father Christmas.

According to Hutton, people began to personify Christmas here in the seventeenth century (that's tradition aplenty). There was always something slightly unruly about Sir, Lord or Father Christmas, concerned as he was with feasting, merry-making and adult concerns. As such he appears in various seventeenth century masques and still, today, in Mummers Plays. This photo doesn't depict Father Christmas, but you get the idea...

In my imagination Father Christmas becomes a swarthy figure, crowned with holly, mistletoe and yew, carrying a double-headed axe (with which to sort out Gawain) and a flagon of magic winter solstice brew. No presents. No mad rushing about trying to meet the insatiable demands of children. No ersatz gestures. Just an ancient figure with a story or two, hoying us through the night with a fart, a joke and a twinkle in his eye. High time, then, that we rid ourselves of Santa, the gaudy imposter, and bring back the true spirit of Christmas.

And on that note, have yourselves a happy Yule. Whatever you do, may it work it's ancient magic upon you. Thank you for reading, and I'll be back in the new year for more. See you then.

Time machine

2011-12-13T12:18:00.011Z

On our respective eighth birthdays my father bought me and my brother a camera each, a Kodak Instamatic (we were at that squabblesome age where all presents had to be identical). Here's a photo taken by my brother of me with my parents, somewhere on Dartmoor.

And here's one of the first photos I ever took, of Sandy our new labrador puppy, back in 1976. I know it's 1976 because that was the year of the drought and you can see how dry the ground is.

I still have the camera and for some reason or other I turned it out earlier this autumn.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered there was still a half-finished film inside. I had no idea what could be on it. And then I found out that it's still possible to get film processed, at a price, so we finished it off and took it to the printers.

This is the first picture I saw when I opened the envelope, and immediately I knew where I was.

The year was 1986. I was eighteen and had just left school. This is Susannah, my girlfriend at the time. It was early autumn and we were stomping around the fields behind my childhood home in Devon. Gap years meant we went our separate ways and I haven't seen her since (if you're reading this Susannah - hallo! I hope life did you well).

Looking over my shoulder, the shop assistant was most apologetic about the print quality. "There's dust on the lens, see. It would all look better in black and white." I smiled and said nothing. For me it's the random effects of light, age and chemistry that make these images so compelling.

Here's Susannah again, with our house behind her. Sandy died after eating poison, so that's Pip you can see in the bottom right.

We must have gone to the legendary Friday market in hippy hangout Totnes (a stronger contender for Goblin Market you'll be hard put to find) for here's a character who used to wander round with a parrot on his shoulder (and a streak of guano down his back). Someone told me he's dead now. The jangled colours make him look like a ghost.

Fast forward twenty five years and I am back on Dartmoor, but married now, another chapter of the same story laid out on a single papyral roll of film.

We take photos to help us remember, precisely because our memory is not photographic. It can't be trusted. Colours fade. Events blur. Timings become uncertain (I had quite forgotten that autumn day with Susannah - maybe it was our last together?).

But even photos, with their uncanny ability to freeze time, make ghosts of us all. We are already shades.

Evolution of a classic

2011-12-09T11:18:00.007Z

I was excited after our recent Wod gig in North Wootton when Mike York played me some Turkish sipsi music. The sipsi is a small reedpipe, played using circular breathing, with a wild and thrilling sound. I was immediately captivated by the lumpy nine-time rhythms and mind-boggling technique.

On its own the sipsi can sound a bit naked, which is why it is usually accompanied by other instruments, but this got me thinking about the evolution of the bagpipe. Reedpipes are found all across Europe and the near East, from the Welsh pibgorn to the Rajasthan pungi, and though known in Antiquity are probably much older.

One solution to the thinness of the sound is to play two pipes together. The slight discrepancies in tuning create a chorus effect that is a bit unnerving.

The other possibility is to add a drone pipe, one that plays a constant note and which grounds the melodies and improvisations. The instrument now has its own accompaniment.

While blowing gives you greater control, and means you can gain extra notes in the upper register or use the tongue to produce articulation, it's not very pleasant having two long reeds in your mouth. I wonder who the genius was who, looking at the animal skins used for carrying water and wine, realised they could be used with the reedpipe to create the necessary reservoir of air.

This is not the instrument of Apollo, but of Marsyas the satyr. It's for making us dance, inspiring us to ecstacy with repetitive rhythms, percussive melodies and wonky temperaments.

All these pipes use a single reed, and single-reed pipes are still found in Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Sweden and Wales.

But the final development was the double-reed and the discovery of how to drill out conically-bored chanters. This was probably an Arab innovation.

Thus it was that the double-reeded bagpipe, as we know it in the West, spread up through Western Europe in the Middle Ages, perhaps from Islamic Spain or brought back with crusaders.

It's the kind I play. I love the instrument's ancientness. It's part of the pleasure it brings.

Temporal dysphoria

2011-11-28T12:36:00.009Z

I was at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire this weekend, donning the codpiece and giving it some hey nonny no at their Medieval Fayre. We were spared last year's sub-zero temperatures though there was a bitter wind blowing through my liripipe.

It was while warming ourselves in the green room that conversation turned to the role of bagpipers in history.

It seems that right up until the Early Modern period, every village would hold regular Church Ales, big communal piss ups with all money raised going to help the local poor. Entertainment was, naturally, provided by pipers who, unlike most people, had free license to travel beyond the parish boundaries. There was, in other words, a good living to be made as a bagpiper - their services were in demand, even if they were often disreputable folk.

And in that moment, I had it. I put a name to a feeling I've had all my life, the feeling of being born in the wrong era. We're familiar with gender dysphoria, being born in the wrong body. Perhaps we could talk about temporal dysphoria too?

Freudians would no doubt remind me that life was pretty grim back then and say it's all projection, wish-fulfilment, a neurotic's fantasy.

Jungians would view things more positively and suggest that I need to integrate the archetypal force bubbling up from my unconscious. For medieval minstrel, read trickster. Let him in or find he'll trip you up.

But parsimony has led me to conclude that the transmigration of souls is really the only viable explanation.

When first I picked up a set of pipes I didn't do it because I wanted to be a medieval minstrel. No, I did it because I already knew that's what I was. It's taken twenty years to get over the shock of finding that the world thinks otherwise.

Veni, vidi, Wodi

2011-11-21T15:21:00.005Z

We played our first proper Fez Noz with Wod on Saturday, in the delightful venue of North Wootton village hall down in Somerset, a stone's throw from the Glastonbury festival site. (Many thanks to Sonny for organizing it and playing an exquisite set, Ruth and Kalindi for feeding us with fine curry, Rob for providing lamps and greenery, and Mike and Jane for putting us up afterwards.)

It's always a bit nerve-wracking unleashing a new project: will people come? will they like our tunes? will our tunes work for the dances? and so on and so forth. We needn't have worried, for not long into the first set things started cooking, with whoops of delight from a crowded dance floor.

I suppose our approach to the music is quite uncompromising, in that we think we're there to serve the dance not the dancers. That means we play tunes for a long time (one or two weary looks from the floor suggested not everyone is with us on this). I'm told our Rond de St Vincent went on for nearly 25 minutes. That's one three part tune played over and over for a repetitive stepping dance.

You can feel when the dancers begin to tire - the whole thing begins to wobble a bit - but if you carry on and keep pushing something rather wonderful happens. New energy bubbles up. The dance begins to carry the dancers. They swing with more vigour. Their steps are lighter. The ground loosens its grip.

In rehearsals we jokingly say 'Ah, the Wod was with us' when it's gone well, as if the Wod were some horned thing from ancient times, all bushes and briars and made of hedge. But there's a truth behind the jest. As in Irish mythology, where the heroes of old would start to shudder and shake into warp-spasm before battle, so, when the Wod comes, things get blurry round the edges. We start to play riffs and rivulets we could not imagine. As Jim puts it, we break through the meniscus.

We ended the set with a suite of Hanter Dros played acoustically on the floor. A tight huddle of dancers circled round us, dodging drones and Jane's bow to push us, it, to an exquisite level of intensity. An extraordinary night.

New Telling the Bees EPK

2011-11-16T18:03:00.001Z

The extraordinary Mr Bombadil

2011-11-16T13:51:00.005Z

The other day in Brighton we had a decadent Sunday, lying in our B&B watching the first part of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. It seemed the perfect thing to do on a grey and slightly bleary afternoon.

Somewhat wedded to the book (which I read many times as a nerdy teenager) and the BBC Radio 4 version, I was a slow convert to the films. I've grown to like them in a grumbling, curmudgeonly sort of a way, though the preference for VFX over acting (Wormtongue's hold over Theoden, for example), the interminable, manufactured cliff-hangers (literally in the case of Frodo at Mount Doom), and Legolas' skateboard stunt at Helm's Deep were all unforgiveable in my book.

I find books and radio so much more satisfying than film or TV because they leave you free to do the imagining. But while the star-studded Radio version kept the music, poetry and songs that pepper the book and make it so alive, even it ditched poor old Tom Bombadil in the interests of brevity. I'm sure he never stood a chance in Hollywood. Too camp. Too odd. (The following fine picture is by Alessandra Cimatoribus).

Jim Penny recently reminded me of a crucial fact about Tom Bombadil, one that I'd totally forgotten: when Bombadil tries on the ring it has no effect on him at all. In fact, he makes it disappear, just for a moment, using sleight of hand. Nor can Frodo hide - Bombadil easily spots the otherwise invisible hobbit trying to escape.

Here's a thing. The forces of evil have no effect on this ancient, nature-worshipping, queer-punning, rhyming clown. The holy fool stands outside of it all, untouchable. The last laugh is his (and probably the first too).

Isn't this the key scene in the whole epic saga?

Strange that it's always the first to end up on the cutting room floor.

Day of the Dead

2011-11-05T08:58:00.006Z

As regular readers will know, May Morning is a big occasion here in Oxford, and for a number of years we've been going out with a bunch of fellow bohos and ne'er-do-wells - The Hurly Burly Band - playing rumbustious music at 6am, tickling the crowds and raising the spirit of summer.

Well, good magical practice dictates that whatever you summon up you must put back to bed again, so three years ago we started a new tradition, going out in the evening of November 2nd and playing for the Mexican Day of the Dead, to lay summer to rest.

Hold on a minute, I hear all the Pagans among you cry. Haven't we got our own, perfectly respectable festival of autumn and the dead, Samhain or Halloween? Why import someone else's?

Our reasoning was this: Halloween is hopelessly lost to us. What used to be a rather homely festival of roast chestnuts and ghost stories and apple-bobbing and fires has become just another great festival of consumption, dedicated to the forces of Mammon. I've always despised trick or treat, with its reified, kiddified, candy-coated extortion, and now for grown-ups Halloween is just a big fancy-dress party, another excuse to get mashed in the working week. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for dressing up. It's just that I'm looking for a festival with a bit more meaning. We dare not forget the dead.

So, yes, our Day of the Dead is an appropriation, but it is already something else. It is genuinely our Day of the Dead, and for the time being at least it remains untainted by the forces of capitalism.

And I particularly love the fact that no one is expecting it. We barely advertise, mostly rely on passers by, some of whom stop, join in, dance.

This year the music moved through distinct moods, from a kind of cold austerity, through grief (for many of us, this has been quite a tough year, and I'm sure people were remembering friends and relatives who've passed), and finally into a kind of defiant, upbeat effervescence. We pulled a large crowd and they were dancing. The magic was done. Proper.

(Thanks to Hafiz for this last, evocative photo. Says it all, I think).

Our daily bread

2011-10-28T12:00:00.006+01:00

Earlier this year I met John Letts of the Oxford Bread Group, a campaigner for real bread and a grower of old, endangered varieties of wheat. He drew my attention to the evils of the Chorley Wood Process, the industrial method by which 80% of our bread is constructed. I use that word advisedly - the CWP is so alien to traditional bread making I wonder if its products ought to be called bread at all. Cheap flour, fat, yeast and a cocktail of enzymes are whipped into a blamanche in an industrial vat with little or no time to prove, before being bunged in an oven. No wonder it's so indigestable.

Instead, he persuaded me of the wonders of sourdough. Why not make your own, he said? Well, I did. I am a complete convert.

I followed the River Cottage Method - there's a helpful video too.

Sourdough uses naturally occurring yeast. You create a starter culture by mixing flour and water and waiting for the yeast to do its thing. I helped mine along by adding two scrumped plums to the mix - apparently a stick of rhubarb works just as well. Don't be tempted to use brewers yeast - it's a different species I'm told. You keep the starter in a jar and as long as you keep feeding it more flour it will last forever.

It smells yeasty, tart, a little scary.

The beauty of natural yeast is that it works slowly. I leave my bread to prove all day, and that's when the yeast does its magic, killing off microbes and digesting the gluten. It's wonderful watching this

become this

become this

become this

It tastes delicious.

People often wonder how it is that Amazonian Indians discovered ayahuasca, the strange hallucinogenic brew and mainstay of Amazonian shamanism that requires two very different plants to be mixed together for it to work. How, given all the plants that grow in the rainforest, did they hit on the magic combination?

I find bread just as baffling. Who was it who discovered that adding a fizzy mix of yeast to flour, kneeding it until it works, letting it rise and baking it, produced the wondrous loaf? Was it trial and error? A moment of inspiration? It is a breathtaking piece of human ingenuity, up there with the bicycle and the laptop.

Making my own has connected me to the process, made me more aware of where my food comes from and awakened me to the magic of this humble, taken for granted, staple of Western diet. My digestion has improved too. I shan't be going back to shop-bought.

Why not give it a go?

A trip to Wales

2011-10-28T11:50:00.003+01:00

A sneaky midweek trip to Wales. The fields were quiet(ish) but the hills were alive.

Duotone launch

2011-10-17T19:26:00.004+01:00

Played with Wod at a fantastic gig on Saturday night, to launch the new, stunning, Duotone album. Nomi performed too, along with Colin and Jane from Telling the Bees, and poet and master of ceremonies, Alan Buckley. Happily Kate Raworth was there to catch the event - you can see all her photos here, and some backstage images of mine here. It was as good as it looks - a privilege to know so many talented musicians and performers.

Anniversary

2011-10-14T11:13:00.004+01:00

Managed to get away the other weekend for our first wedding anniversary, a wee trip home to Devon and Dartmoor.

In glorious, warm, unseasonal sunny weather we followed the mossy boulders of the Dart valley, then climbed a granite outcrop.

Then up to Sharp Tor where the view is magnificent and you can almost see all the way to the South Hams, where I grew up.

From there to Yar Tor. You can't see from the photo but someone has made an Andy Goldsworthy-style sculpture, making a large drystone-wall-spiral.

Back to the Dart to dibble our toes and do a little yoga. I seem to remember coming here for one of my childhood birthday parties - nostalgiarama.

Then to Moretonhampstead to our B&B and a slap-up meal at the White Horse.

Proper.

Notes on the noosphere

2011-10-10T10:23:00.009+01:00

It’s about nine months since I went from being a somewhat begrudging blogger to an active and enthusiastic one. Thanks to the persuasive powers of Rima Staines, and not a little competitiveness with my Mrs, I decided to give it a proper go. I made a commitment to myself to post every week and while I haven’t always been able to keep to that, my erratic lifestyle being what it is, I’ve enjoyed the challenge of thinking ahead, of planning what I might say.

I like the pithy form, that blog comment has necessarily to be brief and to the point. I like the fact that blogs give you a voice and, increasingly, an audience (to whom I’d like to say a belated and cheery ‘hello’ – thanks for swinging by). But most of all I like the sense of community the blogosphere provides. Facebook is increasingly trivial and superficial, the online equivalent of a gossip down the Student Union. The connections made through blogging are more substantial and real – more like participating in a motivated tutorial group, to continue the analogy. I check my reading list every morning and relish reading your posts.

Increasingly, everyone from super-cool cultural theorists to psychedelic dreamers are referring to the internet and these kinds of connections as the noosphere. The exact origins of the term are disputed but its popularity is due to the Jesuit Palaeontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who defined it in The Phenomenon of Man as ‘the sphere of human thought’ (nous is Greek for ‘mind’). Just as we have a lithosphere, a hydrosphere, an atmosphere and a biosphere, so, now, we have the noosphere.

What people using the term tend to forget is that it formed a central concept in de Chardin’s attempt to marry Christian theology with evolutionary theory. The emergence of the noosphere, he thought, was just the latest stage in our teleological progression towards the world’s culmination – the Omega Point or Christosphere, at which physical existence would cease – an idea that has found somewhat less purchase in the modern world (though its eschatology appealed to Terence McKenna, who wove it into his Timewave theory and consequent predictions for 2012 - once a Catholic, eh?).

But putting de Chardin’s peculiar theology aside, I still find myself struggling with the image of the noosphere. The whole idea of hard, disconnected spheres is too static, mechanical and Platonic, too reminiscent of medieval cosmology. The online world is, rather, dynamic, responsive, always in flux.

I think a better metaphor is to be found in biology, specifically in the mycelium, the branching, self-organising network of hyphae that constitute the ‘body’ of a fungus. (Indeed I can’t help wondering if the branching network, found everywhere from the structure of trees to the dendritic connections of the human brain, is somehow the fingerprint of life itself – though that’s another story). Just as a mycelium thickens and multiplies and grows towards resources, so a popular site or blog draws hits and connections to itself. A mycelium responds to changing circumstances, just like the emerging connections of the net. And far from being a disconnected, free-floating sphere, a mycelium is rooted in substrate. The same is true of the internet, which, however much it appears otherwise, is necessarily rooted in the world through the humans that use it and the physical resources from which it is made and sustained.

So I prefer to think of it as a noocelium instead, a mycelium of the mind. Yes, the internet is something revolutionary and new, the pinnacle perhaps of human artifice and ingenuity (perhaps more realistically a symptom of our rampant narcissism), but it’s something that rests on and is rooted in the world. Re-imagining it with such an obviously biological metaphor might just remind us that reconnecting with each other, and the world, is about the most important thing we can do right now.

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T09:00:00.003+01:00

I'm saddened by the news today that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers and techno-visionary, has died. I've been using Apple Macs since 1991 and was immediately struck by their elegance and simplicity (not to mention their implicit cool). With Macs there was always a unity of vision, linking processor to operating system to software to peripheries and the wider world. Everything fits together, everything works (unlike PCs, where fix is hammered onto fix and the whole grinds steadily to a halt. The other day I had to borrow a Windows laptop - I kid you not, it took 30 minutes to boot up - even my aged iBook G4, battered and dropped and barely able to cope with the internet performs better than that.) There's no doubt that a Mac is worth every penny.

Like many, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Jobs' charisma has been thoroughly routinized into the company and that it'll continue to excel at making machines that bring the future just a little bit closer.

Faster than the speed of light

2011-09-27T11:34:00.005+01:00

There are a lot of myths about science, not least that it proceeds in an orderly manner, cool, detached and unemotional. In the 1960s, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn rather put the kibosh on that. Scientists, he said, get attached to paradigms, the orthodoxies of their day. When cracks appear, they paper over them, or rather, find ways to make sense of them within the terms of the paradigm. It’s only when the cracks become unsustainably large that a new paradigm emerges, and even then it tends to be the next, younger generation of scientists who accept the change. Science, mired as it is in the messy world of human affairs, proceeds as a series of revolutions, with all the connotations that word implies.

The news that a group of Italian scientists may have measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light seems to have opened the very first crack in the Einsteinian paradigm (in which it is a fundamental truth that nothing travels faster than the speed of light). What I find fascinating is the almost light-speed with which physicists have rushed to defend current orthodoxy. Einstein’s predictions have been proved right time and again, they say. We cannot leap to hasty conclusions. Even the Italian scientists daren’t publish their results, for fear of committing scientific heresy. Instead they’ve invited the scientific community at large to try and find out what they’ve done wrong. Dispassionate? Hardly.

The first cracks in my own faith in science opened while I was still an undergraduate thanks to a brilliantly taught module on its history and philosophy. It heralded my eventual move across the floor to the humanities.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-science. Far from it.

No, my beef is with scientists’ certainty, the swagger with which they typically assume they will eventually understand everything, the confidence that theirs is the one true way. Such hubris, surely, is unfounded by history, in which all scientific theories have eventually been proved if not wrong then not totally right. Neither can it be proved experimentally, by the tools and methods of science. It’s rather a belief, a creed. Science, in spite of its largely (though not exclusively) atheist stance, behaves remarkably like a religion.

Those racing neutrinos may yet prove to be beholden to Einstein’s commandments but I’m sure I’m not alone in willing them across the finish line. If the observations prove correct then we’ll be able to witness first hand the machinations, intrigue and blood-letting of a full blown Kuhnian revolution. And if that injects a little humility into science then so much the better.

Terence McKenna and me

2011-09-22T15:24:00.006+01:00

In 1993, when I was still a whippersnapper in my twenties, I managed to get myself invited to the Secret McKenna Workshop, organised by the late Fraser Clark. The title seemed to imply that Terence would be passing round the DMT or some other exotic drug (not really his style, I know), but in fact it was just a chance to hear him talk about his unorthodox ideas in intimate surroundings. I still feel privileged to have been there.

I wrote about the workshop in Shroom but what I hadn't realised until just the other day was that I'd recorded it in my diary. At the risk of exposing my inner Adrian Mole, I thought I'd share what I'd written here (OK, with the really embarrassing bits taken out). Over the intervening years I'd forgotten quite a lot of the detail. Here goes, my comments in square brackets:

"Feb 10th: On Tuesday night we got a strange phonecall from Fraser Clark of Evolution Records no less, inviting us to a McKenna workshop (by recommendation only!) Apparently he'd seen us on the video of the Shamanarchy in the UK launch party at Whirl-y-gig and that was recommendation enough. I initially said no (£30 each!) but when you get a personal invite, you have to go, don't you?

"It was held in this bizarre, acid-test-like, squatted veggie restaurant, Fungus Mungus, on London's Battersea park Road, and I met some cosmic people there [I think I probably meant this as a compliment]. One guy was the first person in the UK to be busted for hash in the 60s. He then founded International Times. Far out. There was Martyn, a healer who told me about how we make ourselves ill; the band Tribal Drift; Matthew aka Boris and his Bolshy Balalaika; and of course, Fraser - what a love [he proved slightly less amorous after reading Shroom...].

"McKenna just blew my mind. Whilst I accept but don't relish his ideas of the apocalypse, I really 'dig' the idea of reconnecting to Planetary Mind, the Goddess Earth. Perhaps the apocalypse could be when all minds are plugged in together to form the one?

"We crashed the night [not, I recall, without considerable blagging on our behalf] and met a lovely guy the next day called Cicero who made us a cup of tea. All in all a most excellent adventure."

If the self-consciously hippy language now grates, then I'm relieved to see that it was always the more earthly aspects of McKenna's ideas that resonated with me. As you can probably guess, I'm no longer a fan of the timewave and 2012, regarding them as extensions of Christian apocalyptic thinking (chapter coming out next year). But leaving aside the fact that it was an unacknowledged rehash of Mircea Eliade and therefore not unproblematic in itself, I still respond to McKenna's call for an archaic revival. Then, as now, it was the possibility of connection that excited me.

McKenna's hope was that a return to psychedelic shamanism might help redirect our attention away from ourselves (just for a moment!) and towards the other-than-human persons with whom we share our home. Almost twenty years, and a lot of head-scratching later, I'm still with him.

Taking the Piss: Reindeer and Fly Agaric

2011-09-17T10:25:00.005+01:00

One of the more persistent myths about the fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, the familiar red and white-spotted mushrooms of fairy-tale, the uber-shroom, is this: that in the Arctic, where there is a history of intentional fly-agaric use, people wait to find a reindeer intoxicated on the mushrooms, then collect and drink its urine to get high.

While it's true that the active ingredients of the fly-agaric, ibotenic acid and muscimol, are excreted unmetabolised, that human urine can be, and is, thusly consumed, and that reindeer do get off on the mushroom, the reindeer-urine part of the story always seemed to me to be a little far-fetched, a confabulation. When researching Shroom I could find no evidence for it. I mean, think about it - how would you actually collect urine from a bemushroomed reindeer staggering about the tundra?

Well, it turns out I was wrong.

This week I made my annual visit to the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance and there I met a reindeer herder, with herds in both Britain and Scandinavia. We got chatting and I asked him whether it was true that reindeer have a taste for human urine. Quite true. They'll lap it up from the snow. And then, unprompted, he told me the following story.

Once, while living amongst the Saami, his hosts started feeding reindeer with fly-agarics, which the deer consumed with some relish. Waiting for nature to take its course, the fruits of micturition were collected in a bucket (strapped to the animals' flanks perhaps?), boiled up in a pot (I'm guessing to concentrate the brew or perhaps to make it more potable) and shared round.

"I don't drink and I've never taken any drugs" he told me. "But I took some when they passed it round. Well, you have to, don't you? They expect it. Anyway, I was high as a kite I was, high as a kite. There was an old eighty year old grandmother with us, and I fancied her, that's how high I was. High as a bloody kite!"

So there you have it. A report from a credible witness that some Saami do drink fly-agaric-imbued reindeer urine and that the effects are palpable. I stand corrected.

The Lie of the Land

2011-09-17T10:06:00.003+01:00

I'm delighted to have been asked to write a seasonal column for the ever more wonderful Spiral Earth, increasingly the hub for all things folk-related. It's called The Lie of the Land: Folk, Folklore and Other Curiosities and you can now read my first article, musings on the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance.

St Giles Fair

2011-09-13T17:50:00.004+01:00

Not long after the August Bank Holiday, when the last lingering sunshine slinks away and the chilly morning air smells of back to school, my adopted home of Oxford grinds to a halt. The great milling throngs of tourists who clog the streets like knot-weed have for the most part gone; the students are not yet back in their college play-pens. For two brief days Oxford town breathes out, sharpens its elbows and reasserts itself with a shonky swagger. St Giles, the broad and busy thoroughfare that leads to Woodstock and Banbury in the North, is shut off and becomes home to a fair: St Giles fair, one of the most famous in Britain.

The fair itself is a miracle of planning. Somehow, amidst the signs and traffic islands and public toilets and trees the rides are jockeyed in, levered into place, chocked up on wood-blocks. Each unfurls from its truck like a flower, garishly airbrushed in Athena pinks and blues, pushing hydraulics and taste to the limit. Alongside the traditional favourites – carousels, dodgems, a waltzer and a helter-skelter – there are more modern hair-raisers. Storm whirls crates of people around on a sixty foot propeller. Mega Drop winches people eighty foot up a metal scaffold and then plummets them to within feet of the pavement. Rock Rage is a giant’s claw that pendulums people nearly to the top storey of a Georgian terrace, spinning them with more degrees of freedom than a charmed atomic particle.

The gaps between the rides are crammed with burger bars, hooplas, shies, shooting parlours and a genuine gypsy fortune teller.

Excitable teenage girls flit by self-consciously, arm in arm, chewing Wrigleys and puffing Marlboros. Anxious North Oxford parents chaperone their children past sweet stalls, inappropriate rides, and Barton boys, all bling and baseball caps and bow-legged cool. Bored security guards in outsized fluorescent jackets amble about while coppers in shirt-sleeves wear candyfloss smiles. Just beneath the grinding rattle of the generators you can make out the ever-present thrum of danger.

At night the tempo becomes even more frenetic. A jostling whirl of people are out for thrills. Every ride blasts out thumping eighties disco, as if Stock, Aitken and Waterman were the final word in pop. The showmen, calling you to part with your cash for three minutes dalliance with gravity, skip about in an edgy two-step shuffle, oblivious to the perils of the grinding machinery just feet behind them.

It’s a bustling, throbbing, cacophonous bedlam, two glorious days and nights where the world is turned momentarily upside down and Oxford comes out to play. I love the noise and the smells and the crowds and the excitment. I love the inconvenience of it. I love that somewhere a Health and Safety Officer's blood pressure is going through the roof. I love that it's unstoppable.

And come 6 am on the Wednesday morning it’s all gone, vanished as quickly as it came. Only the jolly Green Man grotesque, peering down from St John’s College with a tipsy grin, gives you the slightest hint that anything out of the ordinary happened at all.

More on Peter Aziz

2011-09-06T10:05:00.003+01:00

On the matter of Peter Aziz, had a letter published in the Guardian today, alongside one by Dr Ben Sessa (one of the organisers of Breaking Convention). A beautiful pincer movement, it couldn't have worked better if we'd planned it...

Up yon spiritual mountain

2011-09-04T16:28:00.006+01:00

One of my favourite textbooks, that I refer to again and again, is New Religions: A Guide edited by Christopher Partridge. Apart from an, ahem, outstanding entry on eco-paganism it contains informative and unbiased entries on over two hundred New Religious Movements (NRMs), from Ananda Marga to the Temple of the Vampire.

While scholars argue about the numerical and social significance of NRMS, I like the book because it demonstrates that contrary to the expectations of secularism, and whatever its origins, the religious impulse is not just alive but positively thriving. I find the sheer breadth of human ingenuity in response to the matter of meaning oddly comforting. We just won’t give up.

Of course, when presented with so many religions, each with its own ideas about what makes a spiritual life and each convinced that theirs offers the only way (else what would be the point?), it becomes hard to privilege one’s own set of preferences (in my case a sort of non-aligned, ad hoc, shamanistic, animistic, psychedelic paganism). Why mine and not yours? The kind of atheist who cares about this sort of thing (and is therefore, paradoxically, as likely to be as fervent as the most zealous religionist) could easily seize upon the sheer diversity of religions as evidence for their collective falsehood. Religions can’t all be right so obviously they are all wrong.

Myself, as I’ve wobbled between belief and disbelief, acceptance and despair, I’ve actually reached a rather similar conclusion – that all religions are equally wrong (if we can leave the Aztecs & Co. aside for simplicity’s sake). For me this is a profoundly optimistic position.

On a good day, like today, I think that there is a sacred or divine or spiritual or self-organising or transcendent or whatever-you-want-to-call-it dimension to the world (the truth of which cannot be proved or disproved but must be accepted or rejected on faith) but the act of so-naming it reduces it to that which it is not. Every worldview (and yes, I include science here) touches a facet but cannot grasp the whole. Language is simply not equipped to do so. (In case you’re interested I’ve arrived at this position from Henri Bergson’s writings about time and Ian McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain, about which I’ll say more at some stage).

What religions do, therefore, is provide a set of metaphors and extended metaphors (rituals, prayers, myths, hymns, gestures, dispositions, techniques – all the stuff that makes a religion a religion) by which the Other might be apprehended, indirectly, from the side, as it were. So I call myself a pagan because nature and the sherds of certain pre-Christian religions provide me with effective and personally resonant metaphors that literally ‘carry me over’.

My position is a kind of revision of the perennialism advocated by Aldous Huxley and others. Far from being different paths up the same spiritual mountain I see religions as different mountains, whose peaks offer a unique but limited perspective on what there is to see.

Accepting that all religions are equally wrong encourages humility in oneself and tolerance of others. For while it will jar with those, atheists or religionists, whose need for certainty is paramount, a position in which all religions have something to say means, at the very least, we ought to do them the courtesy of listening. Chris Partridge’s book provides an excellent place from which to begin.

Good things, bad things

2011-09-04T10:25:00.004+01:00

The news that our nominal spiritual leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, is not only a big fan of the Incredible String Band but is regularly to be seen at Robin Williamson gigs, tapping his foot in the front row, strikes me as a thoroughly good thing. I've always admired Williams' thoughtful approach to the moral questions of the day and the way he steadfastedly refuses to make simplistic judgements on complex matters. That he finds the ISB's music holy makes me like him all the more.

Less good is the news that shaman Peter Aziz is facing a fifteen month stretch for holding an ayahuasca ceremony in Somerset. How long, I wonder, until the powers that be take a more thoughtful approach to the matter of psychedelics and come to regard them as holy?

Spirit of the Beehive

2011-09-02T09:11:00.003+01:00

This programme, Spirit of the Beehive by Nina Perry who made the excellent radio documentary about Oxford's Catweazle Club, looks like a must-listen.

Piracy

2011-08-29T16:11:00.005+01:00

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.

Round House

2011-08-29T11:41:00.005+01:00

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.

Telling the Bees 'The Wytham Harvest'

2011-08-29T11:19:00.002+01:00

Crop Circles

2011-08-19T12:05:00.006+01:00

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.
,

Telling the Bees in Bath!

2011-08-04T23:47:00.000+01:00

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.

Alan Garner Season

2011-08-04T16:44:00.004+01:00

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.

Under the weather

2011-07-25T12:05:00.003+01:00

A few weekends ago I was sat round a fire in Devon chatting to a warm and fascinating couple who, it transpired, are training to be graniceros, which is to say, weather shamans. A Mexican, Huichol, tradition, this requires you to pay particular attention to the weather and to perform a small (and secret) ritual whenever it changes. To become a granicero, you have to be chosen by the weather gods, and the usual sign is that you’ve been struck by lightning.

I’m no weather shaman and I’ve certainly no desire to be at the receiving end of a thunderbolt (indeed, the couple’s story put me in mind of Lady Bracknell: for one of you to be struck by lightning may be regarded as a misfortune; for both looks like carelessness.) But it’s true to say that I do try and notice the weather. Not the forecast. The weather. It’s an interest I’ve picked up from my father, who cannot pass a barometer without peering at it down his nose and giving it a helpful tap or two. I’ve always wanted to be one of those bluff country coves who, derided for wearing a mac when the sky is blue, has the last laugh when the heavens open.

From folk sayings to shepherd’s almanacs, prognostication has a poor track record, which is why we have the science of meteorology. But a small measure of my success is that when I travel elsewhere – to Cornwall or the Lakes, say – I can’t read the weather at all. I couldn’t say whether it will rain or not, or whether the mist will lift or roll in more thickly from the sea.

At home, however, I can usually tell just by looking out the window whether I need to pack my cagoule. Whereas my father trusts in his daily readings of temperature and precipitation, I prefer to look and listen. I think it’s possible to know the weather in a qualitative way, quite apart from occluded fronts and isobars and thermal inclines. I think it’s something you can learn to feel.

And though today is bright and sunny, with a few high mare’s tails and a gentle north westerly, I can’t escape the feeling that something is wrong. It’s not just the extreme events – the flash floods or the baking hot days in April or the droughts or the fact that the blackberries are already ripening and it’s not even August – it’s the creeping sense that the weather is changing. We don’t seem to get a summer anymore. April showers have moved to June where they linger till August. The summer has become a rainy season, with endless jets of cool wet air sucked in from the west. The clouds look troubled and scour the land with the weight of a millstone.

We live on a small island off the North West coast of Europe where the gulf stream keeps us warm and makes our weather ever changeable and unpredictable. I know. It’s so very British to talk about the weather. But, forgive me, I think this is different. It’s almost like we’re at the opening of some sci-fi novel: the signs were there, if only we’d noticed. (And if you don't trust me, have a listen to what indigenous people are saying around the globe.)

I try and lead a low-carbon lifestyle (as much as that is possible). I worry about Kyoto and Copenhagen and politicians’ abject failure to address the most pressing problem there is. But I think climate change is already with us. I think we crossed the event horizon decades ago. I have no idea what that means.

Talk of graniceros has prompted me to go out each day, to smell the air and rub the sky with a new intensity. For most of us in the cities and towns the weather is just something that happens to us, something inconvenient, an impediment. Perhaps we should pay it more attention. My hunch is that we might just need those country skills, and, with all respect to the Huichol, we probably shouldn’t wait for a bolt from the blue.

The Selva Pascuala mushroom mural. Or not.

2011-07-19T13:50:00.004+01:00

In case you’re not a regular subscriber to Economic Botany, and to my shame I’m not, you mightn’t have read the following recently published paper: Brian P. Akers, Juan Francisco Ruiz, Alan Piper and Carl P. Ruck 2011. ‘A Prehistoric Mural in Spain Depicting Neurotropic Psilocybe Mushrooms?’ Economic Botany (XX)X: 1-8.

The global psychedelic community is certainly all atwitter about its findings, which seem to suggest that some Neolithic rock paintings found in a rock shelter at what is now the Villar del Humo cultural site in Cuenca, Spain, depict psilocybin mushrooms and would indicate, therefore, that the shamanistic use of psychedelic fungi, the so-called magic mushrooms, is venerable and ancient.

Well, despite the authors’ welcome caveats that theirs is a suggestion only, the news has already gone viral. The textbooks will certainly be revised and photos of the Selva Pascuala mural will appear for ever more on blogs and album covers as proof of the ancientness of psychonautical exploration. But before this happens, I feel I have to make a Cnut-like stand against the inevitable tide and urge caution, for there are some serious problems with this interpretation.

I’m no artist but were I to doodle a closed semicircle on a stick, you’d recognise at once that I’d drawn a mushroom. Of course, what I’d drawn would only bear a passing resemblance to the fruiting body of an actual carpophore; rather, it would depict a culturally-agreed symbol or ‘sign’ (to use the correct semiotic term) for a mushroom, a visual language we pick up in kindergarten (I’m grateful to Nomi, my wife, who is an artist and a stunning draughtswoman, for pointing this out – it’s blindingly obvious when you think about it, but it had never occurred to me until she did). Just because a semicircle or a triangle or something in-between, placed on a stick, all scream ‘mushroom’ to us doesn’t mean that they necessarily did to our prehistoric ancestors. The sign may have meant something else entirely to the Selva Pascuala artist(s), or could have been a mindless doodle for all we know. So here is problem number one:

Not everything that looks like a mushroom is a mushroom.

The so-called ‘mushrooms’ appear on the rock face with some rather stunning, beautifully drawn animals – an ox and a deer. These are from another, much earlier, naturalistic period of rock-art; the ‘mushrooms’ were painted later, at a time when the art was more ‘schematized’, which is to say, the creators did not value naturalistic accuracy. Here then is problem number two: the pictures are so vague that, even assuming that they are indeed mushrooms, the idea that they are accurate enough to facilitate an accurate species identification is pretty far-fetched (any first-timers wanting to use the murals as a mushroom-picking guide will be sorely disappointed).

The authors do not consider what other similar-looking, non-psychoactive mushrooms, might also fit the bill as presumably there are so many that their argument would founder (had they done so, we could at least have put a probability on these being psilocybin mushrooms – my guess is less than 1 in 500, the images are that vague). Indeed, the psychoactive contender they proffer, Psilocybe hispanica, is a species they admit has neither been found in the Selva Pascuala region nor at such a low altitude (they simply infer its presence by analogy with other species).

Not everything that is a mushroom is a magic mushroom.

The idea that some rock art may originate in hallucinogenic experiences has been put forward by David Lewis Williams and others, and while popular outside the academy, is far from accepted within the archaeological community (I summarise the debates in Shroom). The authors, however, assume that the Selva Pascuala mural, by its proximity to depictions of animals, must be shamanistic in origin, which in turn corroborates their identifying the mushrooms as Psilocybe hispanica (a coprophilic species).

But this is to get lost in circularity: the art is shamanistic therefore the mushrooms are psychedelic; the mushrooms are psychedelic therefore the art is shamanistic. There are many ways that people consume magic mushrooms, not least recreationally, and to imagine that the only prehistoric context for mushroom consumption is shamanism is simplistic, essentializes and univeralizes shamanism (another of my bugbears, but I’ll save that for another time) and simply back-projects our aspirations onto the past. The paper is not assisted here by some allusions to classical Greece: quite what they have to do with Neolithic Spain is unclear.

Just because they’re magic mushrooms doesn’t mean we can infer intentional, ritualistic, religious or shamanistic usage.

Every step of the argument – that they are mushrooms, that they are magic mushrooms, that they were used intentionally for shamanism – requires an inferential step, steps which, in the absence of further, independent, triangulating evidence, can only be speculative. Had psilocybin mushrooms turned up in a nearby Neolithic grave, say, or if there were a naturalistic picture of someone eating a mushroom or of the mushroom itself, or if Psilocybe hispanica grew everywhere and abundantly around Selva Pascuala, then we’d be on much firmer ground. But like most writers on the subject, the authors start from the position that psilocybin mushrooms must have been used in prehistory, and then attempt to establish that this were the case. They put the cart before the horse.

Rock art, here, is not unlike a Rorschach inkblot test, in that we see what we want to see, and back-project our own world view onto the distant past. Who knows how wide of the mark we are? The approach favoured by a new generation of archaeologists and historians is to look at all the evidence and then see what interpretations it supports. The chances are, many, with little or no way to determine which is correct. But, as David J. Hufford wrote in his excellent essay, Reflexivity and the Role of the Researcher:

“We must learn to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity, while holding the reduction of uncertainty and ambiguity in our knowledge as primary goals (always sought, never completely achieved). That is not a contradiction or a paradox. It is a fact of life.”

It’s a shame, too, that the authors didn’t see fit to submit their paper to an archaeological journal where it could have received a proper hearing by experts in rock art interpretation. Doubtless Economic Botany have the highest standards when it comes to matters plant-related, but I’m doubtful that their referees are up to speed with the finer debates of petroglyphology.

When pointing out these kinds of weaknesses, in Shroom and elsewhere, I’ve often met considerable resistance. The question I always ask of people struggling to match the evidence with what they want to believe, is this: ‘why does it matter to you so much? Why do you need the past to be like this?’ The answer, I think, is that it’s intoxicating knowing that you’re part of an ancient psychedelic tradition, something hidden and secretive, something transgressive and oppressed, but which professes to have the keys to truth. Establishing that there is a venerable tradition seems to provide justification for our psychedelic practices, practices which mainstream society deems unacceptable. I’m not unsympathetic to that need at all – God knows I’ve wanted it to be true – it’s just that for myself I can’t abandon reason, and reason makes belief in such a tradition very difficult to sustain. (In practice, tradition provides a very weak form of justification: war, rape and homophobia are three traditions we could happily do without).

Critics might easily turn the question around and ask why it matters so much to me to disprove these kinds of claims. Good question. Well, I’m not an iconoclast for the sake of it. I just want to see psychedelic prehistory supported by the evidence and not simply bent into the service of wish-fulfilment. Perhaps counter-intuitively, if we do so then we strengthen our case.

I happen to think that psychedelic shamanism matters. If used with correct intent, psychedelics have the potential to offer us profound psychological insights, healing even, and to help us bridge the ever-widening the gap between nature and culture. Their contemporary reflorescence could not be more timely, just at the point where we’re looking towards a very uncertain future driven by climate change.

Only this weekend in The Guardian, the super-fashionable intellectual Slavoj Zizek was quoted as calling anyone who thinks we have lost contact with nature a newage bullshitter. That’s what we’re up against. As I’ve argued before, to stand up for psychedelic shamanism to is be considered mad. We’re nutters or bullshitters, and by abandoning reason, we leave ourselves wide open to that kind of discursive labelling. They don’t even have to try and take us seriously. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

My ongoing project is, rather, to try and tackle academia head on, on its own terms, using reason, philosophy and argument to try and establish a case for psychedelic shamanism in such a way that it has to be taken seriously. The risk is that we might have to lose some of our cherished truths but I think that is a small price to pay. And hey, isn’t that why we’re psychedelic explorers in the first place, because we’re unsatisfied with old certainties? We're like the sea-captains of old who, when told they were nearing the rim of the world ordered the mainsail hosited and the spinnaker raised so they could go see for themselves. Here be dragons? Nonsense! (Though, er, actually...)

There’s a danger here that if we don’t question ourselves we’ll end up ossifying into a kind of entheogism, replete with its own mythology, founding fathers, saints, orthodoxies and cherished truths. I’m with the brothers McKenna: it behoves us to question.

So, to restate my position: that these strange, daubed figures might indeed depict psilocybin mushrooms, used within a shamanistic context, remains a possibility but one that is far from proven and which rests on several unsupported assertions.

I’m happy to live with the uncertainty of not knowing what, exactly, these figures were but I can feel my feet are getting wet and the tide is coming in fast so I’m going to go dry off with a nice cup of tea.

The Newbury Bypass

2011-07-12T14:31:00.008+01:00

Fifteen years ago, like many people in Oxford and indeed up and down the country, I took part in the Newbury Bypass anti-roads campaign. I was there with my bardic hat on, playing tunes and songs to inspire those with a better head for heights than me fend off the bailiffs. I tend not to dwell on those days much but it remains one of the great turning points of my life, a rite of passage that left me changed (and quite for the better). It's one of the things I've done of which I'm most proud.

The other week Jamie of Kinokast video, and the man behind the excellent short film Road to Ruin, came and interviewed me for a longer film he's making about the Newbury Bypass campaign and how it affected the people involved (incidentally, he's amassed about sixty hours of video footage, but if you have more, do get in touch with him). Inevitably it stirred up old memories and I dug up some old photos.

After three months of living in a tent I plucked up the courage to learn to climb, and this is me at the bottom of my tree.

Various people helped build me a treehouse, and this was it, a bardic home at the edge of the village. I lived there for three months.

The only way up was to prussock up a rope, the only way down was to abseil.

As far as I could tell, treehouses were held up by polyprop and charm. Somehow our rudimentary lashing held through snow and gale, long enough to last until the eviction.

When not up in the trees, there was plenty of time for music and just being in the woods.

Our camp, Skyward Camp, was evicted in March 1996 (I forget the exact date). This is what it looked like from the trees.

I chose not to resist when the bailiffs came for me but I went for a symbolic protest and played 'Amazing Grace' on my pipes until they pulled me down. It got a headline in the Guardian: 'Man plays Amazing Grace on his Spanish bagpipes as a chorus of bulldozers churn the earth around him.'

The ending was inevitable - the road got built, but we effectively put an end to the road building programme instigated by the Tories. History has proved us right too: traffic levels in Newbury are now greater than before the bypass was built and the bypass is reaching full capacity, twelve years earlier than expected.

Being a bard I felt I needed to write a song to remember the bravery of what people did at Newbury (and at the other road protests). It's named after the book by Jim Hindle, Nine Miles and it's dedicated to anyone who takes a stand for what they believe to be right. Yip yip!

Nine Miles by andyletcher

Summer Solstice

2011-06-30T10:56:00.011+01:00

I've just started reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, and though I'm only a few pages in, already I'm gripped. It's rightly seen as a classic piece of travel literature, detailing a young man's journey by foot to Istanbul (then, still, Constantinople) along the Rhine, just at the moment that Hitler came to power. Scary. Not dissimilar in style to Laurie Lee, but far less schmaltzy, it's beautifully written and speaks of an era that is long past.

Journeys are very much on my mind as we've not long been back from a 42 mile walk - a pilgrimage I suppose - along the Ridgeway to Avebury for the Summer Solstice (readers of the Telling the Bees blog will know that this is an annual trip for me, though this is the first time I've done it all on foot).

In retrospect it was a rewarding, even transforming experience, though at the time it was gruelling and challenging and more than once I cursed my folly in saying yes to this stupid adventure. We do a lot of walking, but usually of ten miles or less and with day packs, not full camping provisions. My legs aren't as lithe as the last time I made the journey back in my twenties, and even though my walking boots are so broken in they're almost broken out, I got some spectacular blisters.

The group was made up of old friends from road-protesting days, and new friends from previous Solstices. We all met up at Goring station and set off from there. Other friends occasionally turned up and walked bits of the journey with us.

Some travelled lighter than others - fine when the weather was good, but a bit drafty when wet.

We took instruments, a proper troupe of travelling minstrels, so there was time for a little music along the way.

We walked fifteen miles on the first day, seventeen on the second, and by the time we made camp I was in a kind of delirium of fatigue. I can't remember the last time I felt so tired.

Oddly I awoke on day three full of energy, and leapt up the hill past Barbury Castle like a gazelle. An easy five miles took us to Avebury, or at least to the spot in the Avebury environs where we go for Solstice. We felt triumphant.

It rained heavily on Solstice eve, but we retreated to our tents and caught some kip. The night was damp, cloudy, but free of rain, and there was much music-making around the fire. It was a night of perranzabulations, just as it should be.

Sunrise was grey and in spite of some promising lightening of the clouds, we didn't see the sun. Not that it matters. It's keeping the vigil that counts. And there was more music. And chocolate, courtesy of Graham Harvey (who took many of these photos.)

We crashed out shortly after sunrise, in what you can see was a rather damp tent!

We woke mid-morning by which point the sun was shining and a stiff wind was blowing up from the southwest. There was time for a short excursion to the upper world...

Graham, who is looking ever more the sage Druid, got out his bullroarer and let it thunder in the wind.

And we climbed up to the hill to look out on what is an extraordinary, and to me very sacred, landscape. It felt like we'd done solstice well.

The hardest bit with any journey, actually, is the coming back. And though I've been writing an exciting new course module on 'Festivals in Religion and Culture', for the Religious Studies department up at Oxford Brookes University, it's been hard work, for my heart is still up on the Downs, watching hares dart across the fields to the ever-present sound of skylarks.

Which is why I might just go and lose myself in another ten pages of Fermor's wonderful book...

Bounder and Hillage

2011-06-16T21:03:00.003+01:00

It's not every day that you get a whole podcast dedicated to you, but my friend Matthew Watkins has done just that with episode 8 of his ever-wonderful Canterbury Soundwaves. Much obliged to you sir. It's devoted to the music of Steve Hillage and I can confirm that I remain a big Hillage fan.

I've also just discovered the joys of Bounder moustache wax. Doubtless you'll be seeing the results of my facial topiary here soon.

The Bagpipe Society

2011-06-16T20:09:00.007+01:00

I spent last weekend at the Blowout, the annual gathering of the Bagpipe Society. I was hoping to regale you with photos of what was an excellent festival, but I was having such a good time that I didn't take any - that's how good it was.

Anyone who used to read Asterix will surely remember how Getafix disappeared off to the annual conference of the druids in the forest of Carnutes, and once there indulged in a frenzy of badinage, in-jokes and bad puns. Well, the Blowout is a bit like that. With bagpipes instead of druids. And it's not in a forest. But you get the idea. It's good to be among like minds.

There were great concerts (Paul Martin (Border pipes) and Belgian piper Remi Decker), some brilliant talks (bet you never knew how important bagpipes were at the Tudor court revels - nope, neither did I), and a rocking band for the Saturday night bal, Mister Klof, all the way from Montpelier. I was teaching rather than performing, but I did end up playing till 3am in a late night session.

One of the things I've been up to lately - in my guise as Publicity Officer - is redesigning and rewriting the Bagpipe Society website (along with techie virtuoso Joe Wass, the man behind Folktunefinder) and I'm pleased to say it went live this week. I've been enjoying the challenge of writing for the web - saying what you mean in as concise and as welcoming a manner as possible. And it's been fun sorting through hundreds of photos trying to pick the choicest images. So do come and check it out.

And what's more, we have a fantastic new logo commissioned from none other than Rima Staines.

Rima also came up with this extraordinary image, a vignette for the website. I actually staggered backwards across the room when I opened up the file for the first time. Here he is, the spirit of the bagpipes, the Green Man piper.

And if you ever wanted to know why I play the pipes, why I am so obsessed with this ancient, honking, parping beast of an instrument, half plant, half animal, a wild, untamed, horned thing, well, this image says it all. Lord of the dance indeed. Play on.

Syd Arthur

2011-06-09T15:14:00.007+01:00

Can I let you into a secret? Really? OK then. Here goes. Barring the occasional song I've never liked indie-rock.

I know, I know. We're all supposed to love it (hell, I live in Oxford, home of Ride, Supergrass, the Mystics, the Foals, not forgetting the 'head - I used to see that Johnny Greenwood in Londis, don't you know? - and in OX4, indie-rock just oozes up through the pavements.) If the rock press are to be believed, when you reach a certain age all the tribal loyalties of youth drop away, and you're supposed to look back on the history of rock with a wistful sigh, one seamless vinyl progression of sweat and rebellion.

Bollocks. I've never been able to deal with the haircuts and attitude. I like my rock boot-cut and wrapped in an Afghan. If it ain't got moog, mellotron or preferably a VCS3, don't waste my time.

So imagine my delight to discover Syd Arthur (geddit?), four hideously talented twenty somethings, playing the music they love. And that happens to be prog, informed by the psychedelic music that poured out of their home town, Canterbury, in the late sixties and seventies. No hair cuts. No cool. Just exquisite musicianship, played from the heart.

They did a storming set in the Chai Wallahs tent at Sunrise, and have just released an EP, Moving World, which you can buy from their website. You can also hear an interview with them on the ever-excellent Canterbury Soundwaves podcast. I can hear traces of Caravan, Hatfield and the North, Yes and Jethro Tull in their choppy chords and funny time signatures, but the music is all their own, never derivative, and Liam Magill's distinctive vocals give it all a contemporary feel. They're virtuosic, but I was particularly struck by Raven Bush's rock mandolin. Things get wild and hairy when Joel Magill puts his bass through the fuzz box, tripped along by Fred Rother's tight drumming, but really it's all trouser-widening stuff.

They've made prog cool again and I think they're gonna be big. My tip is to catch them soon before they start filling stadiums.

Sunrise and the Rollright Fayre

2011-06-09T14:20:00.009+01:00

It's been a week parenthesized by festivals, one of which was quite unexpected. The weekend before last we went walking in North Oxfordshire, where, incidentally, we found this beautiful fallen oak, looking for all the world like the skeleton of a beached kraken.

Someone quite obviously goes there to eat, for tucked underneath were piles of crow and magpie feathers, a pheasant's wing, and a lamb's scapula. I'm hoping that someone was a fox. Whoever it was, the place felt spooky. We sat in the branches and Nomi couldn't resist a dangle.

Suddenly a text from Annie - come to the Rollright stones! So we did. It was only down the road. (They have to keep them fenced off, I'm told. Something to do with excessive amounts of telluric energy. Lord only knows what would happen if we actually touched them).

What's this? A festival! The Rollright Fayre. A small but perfectly formed gathering, with all the tell-tale signs of a good night had - zombie eyes and puckered lips. We weren't equipped for staying over, but the gatekeepers kindly let us in to have a wander and to taste our first chai of the season. How perfect. The Rollrights simply require a fayre.

And then it was off to Sunrise, possibly my favourite festival of all. None of your boutique-shmoutique, off-the-peg insta-fest here. No, Sunrise is cut from the cloth of hippiedom, pure and simple. Small enough not to need your psychic shields, large enough to go large, Sunrise has it all: a beautiful site with expansive views over the Eastern Mendips, rollicking festival folk music, plenty of dub and prog, a dollop of eco-agitation, good chai, a chance to reconnect with old friends and psychedelic adventurers, and, not least, some banging techno.

And - thank goodness - a nice cup of tea!

The main stage looked like one of Kubla Khan's pleasure domes. We just caught the tail end of what was clearly a mighty set by Zubzub.

I was there with my Shroom hat on, talking about the history of the magic mushroom and academic approaches to the matter of psychedelic experience. Thanks, as ever, to the Portal for the Immortal for having me.

Thanks to Runic John's aptly-named 'Miracle' potion, Saturday night down at the Eartheart Cafe was a blinder (no, I don't know what's in it - he won't tell me - but it does what it says on the tin).

We were dressed up for 'Steampunk night' but, frankly, I recommend a suit at a festival. I mean, sartorial standards have just slipped too far...

And yes, we were both rehatted thanks to the rather wonderful Vintage Relics stall (coming to a festival near you). As the, ahem, old bardic triad has it: three things a man should have: a hat, a pipe and a library. Well quite.

Terry Gilliam's Faust

2011-05-29T09:19:00.007+01:00

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)

2011-05-24T06:50:00.006+01:00

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

2011-05-16T11:08:00.006+01:00

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

2011-05-04T19:26:00.007+01:00

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.

The Eve of May

2011-04-30T12:14:00.007+01:00

It is the Eve of May, Beltane, one of the Holy Days in my calendar, and I'm getting myself ready for tomorrow, Oxford's May Morning. As usual I'll be leading out a band of artists, poets, dreamers and ne'er-do-wells - The Hurly Burly Whirly, by Christ it's Early, got you by the Short and Curlies, Band - to bring in the May with bagpipes, fiddles, drums and effrontery, at 6am, from the steps of the Clarendon Building on Broad Street. Do come along.

Here's one of Nomi's photos from last year. I've used it here before but it brilliantly captures the revellious spirit of what we do.

There will be May celebrations up and down the land (try and stop us if you dare Mr Cameron), most famously in Padstow, where they dance two Obby Osses through the streets all day, and which by all accounts is a wild and magical affair. We're getting there.

Padstow has its May Song, sung by one and all, and I'd been thinking for some years now that Oxford needed something comparable. A few May Mornings ago a tune arrived, and last year, the words. So here is my May song, an offering to the city I love, for the day when I love it the most. If you like it too then do sing it tomorrow.

Oxford May Song by andyletcher

It was also at this time of year, a couple of years back, that I heard a bird singing at dusk out on Burgess Fields, by Port Meadow. Its song was like nothing I'd ever heard: rich, plunging, inventive, ever changing, as if it had its hands on some vintage analogue synthesizer and had patched in strange loops and filter sweeps. I was transfixed, agog.

The hard thing about learning birdsong is remembering what you've heard until you can get home to compare it to a recording. In any case, I was fair twongled that night, which perhaps contributed to the magic of what I'd heard. But I couldn't help wondering if it weren't a nightingale. No way, said the birders. Not in Oxford. Too rare. You're imagining things. Almost certainly a song thrush.

Well, I know my thrushes and a song thrush it wasn't. So a mystery.

Anyway, the other night we were on Jim's boat having a Wod rehearsal when he announce with delight that he'd heard a nightingale singing in the scrub not far from where his boat is moored (he should know - he used to live feral in France where he heard them regularly). Sure enough, at 10.30pm sharp, we cocked our ears and heard the distant, unmistakeable sound.

Last night I went out with Nomi, sound recorder in hand. Stealthily, we managed to get right up to the tree from which this virtuoso sings. It was every bit as enchanting as the Romantic poets keep banging on about, but hey, I'll let you decide for yourselves.

Nightingale edit by andyletcher

I have a fantasy about the past, that the ancient Bards graded themselves according to their progress through the rigorous training, and named those grades after the thrustle family. You began as a Wren, progressed to Blackbird, and finally, to Song Thrush. A woeful Bard would be lambasted as a Mistle Thrush (beautiful bird but a dismal singer, the karaoke crooner of the family). And the highest grade of all, the Chief Bard? Why, Nightingale of course.

They are so rare these days that to hear one in the lea of a major road, on the edge of Oxford, on the Eve of May, is what I count as a blessing.

Et in Arcadia ego

2011-04-27T13:31:00.007+01:00

I spent the Easter weekend in Devon, a long-overdue visit to my parents, who live an hour apart, not far from where I grew up. Just as I remember childhood summers, the weather was hot, unseasonably so, more like June than April.

With my dad we poked around Totnes' legendary market, and everywhere the air smelt musky. Hmm. Good to see civic pride rubbing off on the young.

The Devon hills are as round and inviting as a dollop of clotted cream. They draw the eye, and encourage you to explore their secrets.

Treasures await those prepared to walk.

I don't know why I try and photograph bluebells. Photos don't ever come close to capturing their exquisite beauty, the shimmering layers of purple then green. They can't convey the smell or the accompanying birdsong or the feeling of being there, the relief of having made it through another winter. But every year I go ahead and do it anyway in the hope that it'll be different this time.

And even there in the woods, bursting with spring, a reminder of transience and of how quickly everything is forgotten. Et in Arcadia ego.

Before leaving for Oxford, I took a spontaneous detour to Dartmoor. Picked a place on the map, somewhere I'd never been before, parked the car and found a footpath. Was pixie-led up through a wood jammed with granite boulders, every one a forgotten shrine.

At the top of the hill I emerged again into bright, hazy sunshine. A hidden wooded valley on the other side, burnished with the cascade song of warblers. Buzzards circled and ravens crawed.

And sitting on a granite promontory I heard the true herald of spring, a cuckoo, my first of the year. How strange. His call descends a major third, the happiest of musical intervals - cuck-oo, cuck-oo - but it bugles in an annual rite of suberfuge and murder, a sacrificial act of the most primitive kind, the genetic urge to live no matter what the cost. Darkness at the very heart of light.

Castaneda documentary

2011-04-27T13:29:00.000+01:00

He doesn't fare well, I'm afraid.

Ethometric museum

2011-04-21T22:10:00.004+01:00

More delights at Oxford's Museum of the History of Science, this time a sound installation - The Ethometric Museum. Consisting of rare and antique ethometric devices (that's analogue circuits to you and me, but couched in a parallel steampunk universe from where they might have been crafted by Nikola Tesla himself), and played by artist Ray Lee, the created soundscape is beautiful, while the working of the instruments is fascinating. With its haunting textures and sonic oddness it reminded me of early Tangerine Dream.

It's on till the end of April, but be sure to pay to go and see one of the performances, all held in the basement of the museum, otherwise you won't hear the instruments being played.

The Great Elf Debate

2011-04-20T11:48:00.006+01:00

At short notice I went down to London yesterday to take part in The Great Elf Debate, a session organised by the tireless Dr David Luke (one of the brains behind Breaking Convention), as part of his excellent Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness series at the October Gallery.

There are numerous trip reports from people taking indole tryptamine hallucinogens - DMT, ayahuasca, psilocybin, iboga etc - of encounters with entities, tricksy discarnate spirits who seem to possess agency and are eager to communicate with us. In short, elves. The $64 million question is, of course, what is their ontological status? Are they objectively real, conjurations of the mind, or simply symptoms of insanity?

During my last, large, excursion into the psilosphere, and rather to my annoyance given my sceptical approach to the matter, I had the distinct impression of being observed by alien intelligences, who were poised to welcome humanity into some kind of galactic citizenship, should we merit the transition - the 'full McKenna' as it's called. Bollocks! I stood dumbfounded, thinking perhaps that all the psy-fi stuff I'd read about was true.

In the half-light of dawn I watched a strange light dance back and forwards across the downs, almost within reach. Bollocks again, I thought! Fairies! That is, until the light resolved itself into the headlights of a car, commuting through the early hours along the A4. Double blast and bollocks! Someone was playing games with me...

Back in the October Gallery, David gave an erudite summary of elves in folklore and psychedelia, illuminated with his own otherworldly encounters. I spoke briefly about how difficult it is to ground elvish contact in objective reality (which is not to say that they are figments of the imagination, just that it's very difficult to say with any certainty what they are), while James Kent skyped in from Seattle with the view that elves exist only in the mind. That his elves have been unable to say anything useful, beyond mischievously returning his every question, seems strongly to support his case.

Two ideas occurred to me during the evening. The first is that elves might be some gestalt creation of the mind. Occasionally, during that hypnagogic half-awake phase, song lyrics come tumbling out of me and, what's more, they rhyme and scan perfectly while the images they evoke elide together into unexpected metaphors. It's as if with my conscious brain distracted, my unconscious mind can work freely such that the lyrics arrive in one glorious and unexpected gestalt: almost as if they were presented to me. Perhaps the same is true of the elves, that under the influence of certain hallucinogens, the mind gestalts beings - in truth, extensions of itself - that appear autonomous. Maybe.

The second came from thinking about that most seasonal of birds, the cuckoo. The cuckoo doesn't rear its own young but lays its eggs in other birds' nests, and fools them into rearing its monstrous, parasitical chicks. Is there a parallel with our relationship to plants? It takes a lot of energy to maintain a brain capable of consciously acting, so perhaps, in evolutionary terms, certain plants have saved themselves the bother by simply producing molecules by which they can hijack that of a passing mammal. By affecting the parts of the brain to do with language, vision, and people-recognition, the molecules create avatars of themselves which appear to us as other-than-human-persons, to use Irving Hallowell's phrase. So, if this were the case, the elves would literally be plants talking to us.

There are two problems with this Cuckoo hypothesis. First, beyond encouraging us to become Johnny Appleseeds, it is not entirely clear what a plant would get out of the bargain. If we could establish beyond doubt that the elves had some kind of consistent message for us, which is not culturally-bound, then that would certainly lend some support to the idea, but I'm not sure this can be done. Second, it requires that humans and hallucinogenic plants have had a long evolutionary relationship (symbiotic or parasitical - take your pick) , and, as readers of Shroom will know, evidence for this is, at least in the case of psilocybin mushrooms, is questionable. Perhaps the Cuckoo hypothesis is simply cuckoo.

To return to my dancing light - was it a fairy or a car headlight, or both? Trust a denizen of the otherworld to leave me utterly bewildered...

Bulbul Tarang

2011-04-18T18:11:00.003+01:00

Ever on the lookout for strange and unusual instruments I was excited to discover the bulbul tarang , or (misleadingly named) Indian banjo, a strange cross between an Appalachian dulcimer and a typewriter.

According to sources on the interweb, the name means waves of nightingales. The instrument was invented in Japan in 1912 by Goro Morita but on reaching the Subcontinent has become thoroughly Indianified. It consists of melody and drone strings, strummed with a plectrum by the right hand, and a set of piano or typewriter keys, played with the left, that stop the strings. No toy, some players have become virtuosic as this clip demonstrates.

They come in all shapes and sizes, acoustic and electric, and I want one!

I find the process by which instruments and their music migrate from place to place, changing as they go, endlessly fascinating.

Here's another instrument in the process of change. When the British Empire collapsed, the British Army left both highland bagpipes and marching bands behind them in India, Nepal, Pakistan and North Africa. Here's a marching band from the Punjab that sounds anything but Scottish. I wish I could be around in a hundred years to see how the tradition has evolved.

What is folk?

2011-04-18T11:04:00.006+01:00

It's been a busy week with two pub sessions, two gigs, one Wod rehearsal, a late night jam in a hotel bar and a tune sesh with a cream tea. The cream tea was in honour of Colin's birthday (bassist with Telling the Bees), and we duly ate cake and scones in his honour, on a warm and sunny afternoon by the canal at Pigeon's Lock (it's a tough life). Josie (cello, TtB) made it out too, and we got to coo at her beautiful new baby, Rueben, born on tuesday.

Friday saw me down in London, playing with Raagnagrok at the ICA, another intensely enjoyable improvised set (during which I discovered a new fingering for a tricky note on the pipes, and that you can achieve a slight chorus effect by waving the chanter rhythmically around the mike). Also playing were Alexander Tucker's Decomposed Orchestra - deep drone textures on cello, violin, sax and drums - and the frankly extraordinary Amal Gamal Ensemble who blasted on stage with their thrilling and uncompromising electronic weirdness. Here's a video clip of a recent gig of theirs to give you a flavour.

My other gig was with Telling the Bees, at Loughborough University, as part of an academic conference on English and Welsh diasporas. Our first with Mr Barney Morse-Brown on cello, we played a tight set, with enough primary material to keep our intellectual audience in papers for a year.

Afterwards we attempted the impossible, trying to inject some soul into the featureless ghetto of the hotel (where even the staff were made of MDF) by playing tunes in the bar, together with Ceri Rhys Matthews and Christine Cooper. Both fabulous musicians, I met them a few years ago at the English Acoustic Collective summer school. I particularly like Ceri's take on tradition, which is that it is a resource to be used, not something to be preserved in aspic. Here they are, playing fiddle and Welsh pibgorn pipes. I'm always awed by their ability to extemporise around the tune with such grace and fluidity.

At about 1 o'clock in the morning, one of the academics still in the bar leant across and asked the dreaded question: so what is folk music, exactly? Needless to say this led to a spirited discussion. Colin's take is that 'folk' is a category of economic, not stylistic, necessity. In other words, as soon as you're paid for it, it is no longer folk. Ceri, who danced around the argument with the nimble dexterity of a flyweight pugilist, refused to be pinned down, saying that each of us would define folk differently.

Me? I think of myself as an artist who works within the forms of traditional music. I still call myself a folk musician, but given the week I've had, and the gigs and music that I'm involved with, this may be inaccurate. At the very least, I'm probably an atypical folk musician, but then as a liminal vagabond, that's just how I like it.

Liminal vagabonds

2011-04-11T14:35:00.007+01:00

Rima and Tom (not forgetting their otherwordly companion, Macha the lurcher) came to visit us this weekend and a fine time was had by all. They brought a bit of Devon (our homeland and source of much longing) with them - some mead, fudge and cheese - and we showed them some of the delights of Oxford, starting with the canal, which is currently fringed with hedge garlic, freshly leaved willows and birdsong.

Oxford is a beautiful place to live, but after a while you get a bit jaded and stop seeing. Guests make you look again. There are treasures everywhere. On the rooftops:

In the museums (an Indian 'map' of the cosmos, since you asked):

And especially in the Pitt Rivers museum, (a Noh mask that forms a salutory warning to us all):

In the evening we went out to a secret spot nearby. Nomi hung up some bunting and lit lanterns in the trees.

A waxing moon lit the gloaming.

And we did what you are supposed to do around a fire. We played music, homegrown and other: Breton, Balkan, and the occasional bhajan. Rima and Tom delighted us with Eastern Gypsy tunes from Russia and Poland. Nothing captures the beautiful ache of outsiderness as much as an accordion and clarinet, played in the small hours round a well-tended fire. We were liminal vagabonds, aesthetic pilgrims, children of the hedge.

In this modern, consumer world of ours, they haven't just papered over the cracks, they've grouted them in. There's so little space to be. They've made it harder and harder for anyone to live as artists: you know, old fashioned romantics who make music or poetry or art from a sense of calling. Because we have to no matter what comes of it. The worth of what we do can't be measured or quantified or assessed but it matters nonetheless. The agelasts don't know it but they need us.

Liminal vagabondage is a tough path to tread. It brings riches beyond compare, though scarcely any money. But there never was a choice. What a gift to be reminded of this by such wonderful friends and in such a wonderful place.

Breaking Convention

2011-04-04T11:02:00.007+01:00

Just back from an exciting weekend at the Breaking Convention conference, which covered all aspects of psychedelic drugs: scientific, therapeutic, anthropological, phenomenological, legal, historical and cultural. The flywheels of my brain were cranked to the max, leaving me sleepless with ideas.

My highlights included: Skype presentations from Ram Dass and Stan Grof; a showing of the film DMT: The Spirit Molecule; some ethnographic films of shamanism in Siberia; a panel on ayahuasca and ayahuasca religions in South America; and, of course, the chance to network with some extraordinary people, all experts in their field.

My own paper, 'Notes towards a minimal theory of psychedelic consciousness', seemed to go down well and generated helpful feedback - a great relief.

Mike Jay gave an excellent paper on the history of nitrous oxide and mescaline use in Britain. I was captivated by William Rowlandson's comparisons of McKenna and Borges, by Charlotte Walsh's legal arguments for cognitive liberty, and by Roland Griffiths' research into psilocybin and mysticism. Ras Binghi Congo-Nyah gave the most cogent explanation I've heard for why Rastafarianism honours the Emperor Haile Selassie, while Cameron Adams drew our attention to the way certain psychonauts describe their experiences through the language of healing.

What I found most exciting was the sense that the psychedelic movement is starting to reflect back on itself, to question its assumptions and to unsettle old certainties. In other words, it is coming of age. Of course there are tensions between the old-guard modernists and the newer, more critically informed, generation of post-modernist scholars, but the willingness of all sides to engage in dialogue is heartening.

Thinking or writing about psychedelics can feel a lonely business but to be in an environment where the subject can be talked about openly, without the usual titters, discomfort or embarrassed glances, is simply invigorating. Whatever the politicians and media would want to be the case, psychedelics haven't gone away. In fact, psychedelic use has become normalised. There is therefore a pressing need for the subject to be addressed openly by the academy. In that, the conference could not have been more timely. My only complaint: that I couldn't be in two places at once and consequently missed out on many enticing papers. Ho hum.

There were some nice artistic touches too: the posters were all beautifully designed, our name badges were printed on acid blotters (fake, I hasten to add), and we were all given flowers as we arrived on the Saturday morning. It gave the conference an almost festival feel.

Another highlight for me was an invitation to play pipes with ambient doom drone raag terrorists, Raagnagrok. I've played with them once before, at the Green Man festival a few years ago - one of my all time top gigs. As then, our Saturday night set was entirely improvised: electric sitar jamming over analogue synth drones and textures, with me adding pipe shenanigans over the top. No idea what the audience made of it, but it was liberating to play without the worry of falling off a tune or making unfortunate reed-squawk. Deeply psychedelic, and apparently our gig marked the fortieth anniversary of Soft Machine playing the same building. Nice.

I'm playing with them again on April 15th at London's ICA, so do come along. Folk it ain't. Here's a vid of what they do.

Then, after all that excitement, we retired to Matthew Watkins' gaff, a caravan just ten minutes walk away, where we sat round his wood burner drinking tea and chewing the fat. A perfect weekend.

A trip to Brighton

2011-03-29T15:10:00.010+01:00

It's always refreshing to visit Brighton, Britain's pleasure capital by the sea, where the vibe is so funky you can cut it with a knife and have it on toast, and the atmosphere so tolerant that every kind of queer identity can just hang out and be.

All things trashy and kitsch are served up with an ooh la la twinkle in shops that specialize in turning the detritus of yesteryear into the hippest of gold for today. We saw chocolate eggs so big they made the eyes water and vibrators that looked like modernist sculptures (or was it the other way around?).

Where else to feast on a succulent cream tea with homemade scones, proper doilies and a double helping of chinz?

Brighton is made for idling, for sitting in a cafe in the North Laines and watching the people parade by. The carnival is in perpetual motion and everyone is on the look. Trouser-flapping techno spills from the shops and clashes with buskers' skanky bluegrass. Above the din, an almost blackbird: a man selling bird whistles, ersatz like everything else.

We squandered pockets full of two pence pieces on the sliding, grinding slot machines, easily succumbing to a gambler's greed and feeding our occasional winnings straight back in again. We sat on the beach and listened to the sea.

Back in Oxford, calm. The first dead nettles of spring were shaking out their foppish cuffs, a ruddy sun set through the haze, and out on Port Meadow the blackbirds sang so loudly that they almost drowned out the distant burr of traffic.

Spring shamans

2011-03-21T11:10:00.008Z

This is the view from where I live, a rented flat above a shop, and you can see that the spring is well and truly under way. Oxford is justly famous for its architecture, its dreaming spires, but it has some remarkable green spaces too.

Just a couple of minutes away from where I live is the canal, a green corridor that runs through the north of the city and out through Oxfordshire. Many of my friends live on canal boats (though I need the luxury of central heating to get me through the dank days of winter).

Cross the canal and follow Aristotle Lane and it takes you over a railway bridge, where graffiti and the council's ugly anti-graffiti compete. It's an ever-changing work of art, a modern palimpsest.

This is what you see as you reach the other side.

The path leads down to Port Meadow, a great stretch of grassland bordered by the Thames (the Isis) on one side, and the railway on the other. It has never been ploughed. There is buried archaeological evidence suggesting Bronze Age occupation, and the remains of an old round barrow, called Round Hill. I walk here almost everyday. A place to breathe and think and, if you time it right, be alone.

Every autumn the meadow floods, bringing with it a diverse range of birdlife and waterfowl (lapwing, golden plover, widgeon, pochard, teal, black headed gulls, little egrets and the occasional rarity). It's a good place to spot bird watchers too.

It's one of the great joys of living in Oxford: that in five minutes on my bike I can be in the city centre, but in five minutes walking I can be here, on the meadow.

Elsewhere, I went to Dorchester-on-Thames the other weekend, to visit the abbey, with it's Tolkeinesque doors and medieval frescoes.

I've also been lucky enough to spend a day in the company of Hipolito Peralta Ccama, a Quechuan Paqo (healer/shaman) over for the Conversations with the Earth festival that has been running in Oxford this last week. Gentle, humble and wise, it was a treat to meet him and his translator, Maya, and I learnt a little more about indigenous Peruvian spirituality. He led a small but powerful ceremony for us, down at Celtic Chris's gaff, in honour of the ancestors. He encouraged us to pray to, and with, coca leaves, some of which we chewed, some of which we burned. Here we are at one of our ancestral sites, Wayland's Smithy, where Hipolito was intrigued by my bagpipes.

And here is Chris with his lurcher, Bear, inside the tomb.

And then, to the woods with my beloved, listening to the birds, watching the signs of spring everywhere, and quietly observing the deer nonchalantly browsing through the trees.

Wod

2011-03-13T11:05:00.008Z

At last I'm able to give you a bit more information about my new musical project, Wod, about which I've been a bit hesitant to say much as I've been waiting for a chance to grab some audio.

We're a trio, made up of Jane Griffiths ( Telling the Bees) on fiddle, Jim Penny (Red Dog Green Dog) on anglo-concertina, and myself on English bagpipes. Wod is an Old English word meaning furious, mad, or possessed by a god. It shares a common Indo-European root with the Latin vatis, from which the modern druidic ovate stems (photos by Kate Raworth).

We play new and traditional music for Breton and French - or what I prefer to call Brythonic - dancing (the 'Brythonic languages' being Cornish, Welsh and Breton). As the old saying goes, love and music need no passports, and though we are playing a style of music that has come to these shores from elsewhere, it has already become something else, played on different instruments and infused with the all the influences that have shaped us as musicians here. Calling it Brythonic rather than Breton acknowledges this: we are not trying to copy or emulate another culture, but to re-find something of our own through the invigorating effect that such musical cross-fertilization provides.

So far, apart from a few pub sessions and a brief appearance at the Wytham Winter Warmer, we've just tucked ourself away on Jim's narrowboat, stoked the fire, and played. Tunes can last for twenty minutes or more as we explore their inner structure and start to get carried by the trancey wodulations that emerge. I tend to pin the tune down, playing with different ornaments and subtle variations; Jane finds soaring lines or mines the deep harmonic under-layers; Jim adds clusters and cascades of notes, often sending the tune in surprising directions, but always keeping the funk. It's an honour to play with such exceptional musicians, and the grins on our faces as we do say it all.

Here's a couple of tunes, recorded during rehearsal this week. The first set consists of a pair of Hanter Dros written by me; the second a trad tune (I think) for a type of Breton dance called a 'tour'. Recorded straight onto my Zoom with only a bit of compression, the pipes are a little high in the mix but, well, you'll get the idea.

The Golden Plover/ The King's Barrows by andyletcher

Tours by andyletcher

We're not actually in a hurry to go out in the world but gigs are starting to come in. We'll be playing in the bar of the Isis pub, Iffley Village, for the Catweazle Equinox bash on March 19th.

Lyric clouds

2011-03-10T09:38:00.006Z

Having worried in an earlier post about overusing the words sun, moon, silver and gold in my song-writing, I thought it would be interesting to see exactly which words I do use. So last night I pasted the lyrics from both Telling the Bees albums into Wordle, and came up with the following word cloud.

I'm happy to see bees and wood right there in the middle, but oh and cos expose a certain laziness. Die, lurking there at the bottom but still catching the eye, reveals my major lyrical obsession - as if you didn't know. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions but, given that I am an old hobbit, I must confess to rather liking the preponderance of nature imagery. Scanning across, I find that new lyrics almost start to fall out - I'm wondering about using lyric clouds as a kind of cut-up technique (something that intrigues me but which I've never yet tried). So, for example: 'wonderful raging outside song'. Hmm.

The unstoppable spring is working its strange voodoo upon me. Including Astrolabe, I have now written four new songs - finished one last night while another landed in my head as I watched the room get light this morning. Like the blackbird, winter is dead to me, but now I can't stop singing.

Asclepius

2011-03-07T10:41:00.004Z

One of the great inventions of the West has to be musical notation. That something as fleeting, abstract and intangible as music can be written down always strikes me as rather incredible. It's just that when it comes to orally-transmitted music - which most of the world's music is - Western notation is a very blunt instrument indeed. There's so much rhythmic and melodic subtlety that falls through its grid. It tries to make music static, fixed, unchanging, to fit it to the norms and conventions of classical music. But folk music is very much alive.

The Romantic-era Master Piper, William Dixon, 'prick'd' his tunes down, an image which suggests a collection of butterflies pinned in a drawer. The analogy is a good one. The art of the folk musician is to bring these dead notes back to life again, to let them take flight.

Over the years I've just about taught myself to read and write folk tunes (I find learning by ear so much easier) and I'll not deny it's very useful. Here's a bagpipe tune of mine, Asclepius (a schottische in G in one of my favourite scales) as I 'prick'd it down' in my tunebook.

But of course, this isn't how I play it. The musicians I most admire, and the ones I try and emulate, are those who seem effortlessly able to weave around a tune, embellishing it with a harmony here, a variation there, extemporising to keep the tune surprising and therefore alive. Tunes don't just stop at the end of the bar - there's a space, an inbreath, where, with a turn or a roll, you can keep dancers' feet off the ground, maintain the suspense, before releasing back into the melody again.

Western notation gives the impression that a tune is like a set of train tracks - you hop on and away you go, the same every time. Nowadays I think of a tune more as a set of cairns or waymarkers on a fell walk. Touching the cairns stops you from sliding off the tune entirely (all too easily done on the pipes), but so long as you do, the way you reach them is entirely up to you.

Over the years you start to build up a repertoire of variations for a particular tune, but new ideas always emerge in the playing, from the chemistry, the push and pull, of what the other players are doing. A good tune will show you the way.

So here's Asclepius (who, incidentally, was the Greek god of healing - the seriously esoteric will also know that the Asclepius is one of the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum), as I played it a couple of summer's ago with Cliff Stapleton on hurdy-gurdy. The very last variation on the A-part just seemed to emerge simultaneously.

And here it is as I played it a couple of days ago in my bedroom, mistakes, squeaks 'n all. Different again. It doesn't stand still.

Asclepius by andyletcher

Astrolabes

2011-02-27T15:00:00.009Z

Following a tip off from Rima Staines, I went to see the Al-Mizan exhibition at Oxford's Museum of the History of Science yesterday. It's basically a collection of astrolabes, those extraordinary devices, in use from the Middle Ages right through to the Early Modern period, that are part star map, part compass, part clock, part work of art, part science, part magic. They are exquisitely beautiful and reveal a phenomenal understanding of maths and astronomy (not forgetting astrology too).

There's an online exhibition for those who can't get to Oxford, but if you're anywhere near, then I recommend you visit.

Since speaking to Rima astrolabes must have been on my mind, for they feature in a new song that I finished this week. Though there's been much hammering and bending in my tune-smithy of late, I haven't written a song for nearly a year - sometimes the creative coffers are just empty. I've learned not to try and force a song to come, though during the lean times it's hard to trust that the muse will ever return.

Most of my songs begin with my secreting myself away, lighting a candle or two and noodling on the mandolin for a few hours. I try chords at random, leave one or two or more strings open to act as drones, let my ears guide me. Occasionally it is as if the instrument leads my fingers to new patterns that I couldn't consciously have discovered - most mysterious.

When I have a set of chord sequences that work, I play them over and over and start to sing nonsense over the top until I have a melody that I'm happy with. Like most people when they start writing songs, my melodies used to be simple and horizontal - now, as my melodic sense has improved, they are more vertical, with ever longer curls and tails.

I find that the chords present images to me - once I have the chords I already know what the song is to be about. The tricky part is writing the lyrics, taking these opaque images and feelings and trying to convey them with words that fit the melodic and rhyming scheme, but which aren't hideously cliched. I am all too aware that sun, moon, silver and gold are my most overused words (and, of course, moon appears in the song)!

Sometimes a complete line will occur to me as I wake up - I find the hypnagogic morning state to be most productive: though it may look as if I'm lazing in bed, my mind is active as can be. So one morning I woke with the opening line: 'Last night I saw Rachel turn into a bird.' Lovely! But the rest required a lot more work as you can see from the amount of scribbling in this photo (though please don't look too closely at this work-in-progress).

Once I have most of the words pinned down I have to make sure that they 'work' - the written word sounds very different when spoken or sung. I 'sing' the song in my head as I walk or cycle around Oxford. Changes and improvements occur to me. Eventually everything settles.

It's through the writing of the song that I find out what it's about. This one began as a farewell song to a dear friend who, in a sense, is moving away. By the end it had become a song about change and mutability, about how we are constantly in a process of metamorphosis and about how, if we try and hold on to the past we simply hasten the end (the keen-eared among you will also pick up some classical references that managed to find their way in: to Orpheus, Syrinx and Heraclitus).

So here it is, Astrolabe (I hate having to say this, but I'd probably better - Copyright © Andy Letcher 2011), recorded with my beloved by candlelight in our front room, warts and all. If you listen carefully you might be able to hear the fridge in the background. Perhaps one day it will become a Telling the Bees song and you'll be able to hear how it changes in the playing.

Astrolabe by andyletcher

The drugs do work, apparently

2011-02-24T11:18:00.003Z

With its pages stuffed full of the gurning faces of the fashionably wasted, I've always steered clear of Mixmag. But I picked up the latest copy when my eyes were drawn by the results of their annual drugs survey.

Theirs is not a scientific study of drug use in the UK. Rather it gives a picture of what mostly twenty-something, white, middle class lads-who-go-clubbing are imbibing, snorting, swallowing and smoking.

Unsurprisingly MDMA comes in at number two, behind that old ego-mangler, alcohol. Cocaine is still alarmingly high in the list (62.7% of respondents said they'd used it in the last year), as is ketamine.

Just under half of respondents had tried mushrooms but only about 16% had used them in the last year - a finding that is consistent with other studies. Those who return to mushrooms more than about five times remain a minority. The lower ranks of the list are filled with 'designer' drugs from outlaw chemists exploiting the Shulgin cookbook and the loopholes of legality. I mean, WTF is Benzo fury?

You know you're middle aged when the kids are doing drugs you don't understand, but I couldn't help feeling a tug of nostalgia for the days when people took psychedelics for philosophical, psychological and - dare I say it - spiritual insight. The prevailing youth culture is one where excessive and demonstrative polydrug use is the norm - what? you mean you've only tried MDMA? - and where the weekend's exploits are turned rapidly into cultural capital around the water-cooler. We've been given the keys to sweety shop and boy are we gonna gorge.

Certainly, those of us for whom the archaic revival was all about reaching out - to each other, to the land and the shamanic realms - rather than cutting off and pulling the plug, have much to do to overcome the fact that such a view now appears hopelessly out of fashion.

Canterbury Soundwaves

2011-02-21T10:44:00.007Z

Like most hippies, I spent much of my twenties in a fug of hashish, losing myself in fantasy fiction and listening to prog-rock. One of my favourite albums was this, Caravan's third (and I think greatest), In the Land of the Grey and Pink.

It's fair to say that I know every note. Never ones to invest too much thought into their lyric-writing - 'standing on a golf course, dressed in PVC, I chanced upon a golf girl, selling cups of tea' - the music nevertheless conjures extraordinary images, with Dave Sinclair's fluid organ riffs and solos carrying the imagination into far off times and places, and always staying the right side of self-indulgent prog-noodling. I'm sure I've unconsciously incorporated many of their harmonic ideas into my own songwriting.

Another band that I couldn't get enough off back then was Gong, who I've blogged about before. Hard to say which of theirs was my favourite, but on balance it has to be Angel's Egg.

Psychedelic guitars, jazz dischords, spacey textures and Daevid Allen's surreal but allegorical Planet Gong mythology add up to an album that is as beautiful as it is unpredictable. Hard to imagine that anything this good could be made in today's climate of bland conformity to X-factor, market-driven dross.

What both bands have in common is that they were part of the so-called Canterbury Scene, a loose agglomeration of bands and artists that emerged out of this small Kent city from the late 1960s through to the mid 1970s, and which also included Soft Machine, Egg, Kevin Ayres, The Wylde Flowers, Matching Mole, Robert Wyatt, and so on and so forth.

Something must have been in the ether for the Canterbury Scene seems to have produced some of the most inventive, unusual, odd, occasionally silly, and out there music of the psych-prog era. Record companies were just happy to put musicians into a studio, leave them to it and see what they came up with. Heady days. It's a rich seam that is very definitely worth mining.

Happily, my friend Matt Watkins (author of the most excellent Secrets of Creation) is producing a monthly podcast covering the music of this period. Lovingly produced from - get this - his caravan in Canterbury, it is full of interesting anecdotes, obscure and hard to find gems, and many long lost rarities (not least, in episode three, a live recording of Frank Zappa jamming with Caravan). So do check out Canterbury Soundwaves. An excellent podcast dealing with a vital and exciting chapter in the history of British Psych music.

BBC Folk Awards 2011

2011-02-14T10:51:00.004Z

The BBC Folk Awards were announced last Monday and there were some worthy winners. James Fagan and Nancy Kerr richly deserved Best Duo - you're unlikely to meet a more generous and hard-working pair of musicians - while Chris Wood's 'Hollow Point' (Best Original Song) is everything a folk song should be - rooted in tradition but addressing contemporary issues with effortless musicianship, craft and political punch.

But I can't help feeling that there's a weary sense of predictability about the winners. All award ceremonies have to negotiate the tension between the genuine desire to reward artistic accomplishment and the demands of the marketplace. The Folk Awards are no exception (indeed, this is just one of many tensions that folk music in general is faced with - some, after all, might question why a musical genre that is 'of the people' needs an award ceremony in the first place).

But the danger is that with festival organization, CD distribution and band promotion all controlled by an ever narrower set of individuals and agents, and with the gongs apparently rotated around a similarly narrow set of artists, year in year out, the Folk Awards start to look a bit too cosy, driven by the market and not merit. The lifetime achievement award seems to go to anyone from the sixties that the general public might have heard of, irrespective of whether they've done anything in the last twenty years.

The Folk Awards, for all their faults, are undoubtedly good for folk music. But if it's innovation that you're after then head to the Spiral Earth Awards. Who else would pit Sam Sweeney versus the godlike Johnny Kalsi in the Best Musician category? Or include Dreadzone in Best Live Act (after seeing their set at Glastonbury 2010, I can confirm it's an award they thoroughly deserve)?

The Spirals are decided by public vote and there's still time to make your opinion count - voting closes on 21st Feb. Whatever you think about their choices, and the ultimate winners, at least you can be sure that the Spirals are created by fans for fans, and, free of the pressures of the market, they offer a much more balanced picture of what is currently a thriving but diverse music scene.

Truck Store opens

2011-02-10T19:23:00.006Z

In an age when record shops are shutting even faster than pubs, HMV is teetering on the brink and the Vigin Megastore is but a footnote in the history of rock, it takes a certain chutzpah to open an independent store.

But Joe and Robin Bennett, the boys that bring you Truck and Wood festivals, may just be the people to pull it off with their Truck Store, conveniently placed on Oxford's liveliest street, the infamous Cowley Road.

I popped in to the grand opening this evening. Glad to report that it was rammed, so I didn't really get a proper opportunity to look at the stock, but it looks like a healthy selection of CDs and vinyl drawn from the kind of Indie and Folk bands that comprise the Truck stable, with local Oxford bands getting a good showing, some eye-catching oddities and a range of comics too. New stock is arriving all the time so be sure to go in for a browse.

Nothing compares with being able to rummage through racks of CDs, with finding the unexpected gem you never knew you wanted. It's a dying art. iTunes just can't compare.

So, long may Truck Store continue. I wish it every success.

Folk Trance

2011-02-07T10:59:00.004Z

Folk music has many associations, not all of them good, most of them bad. English folk music in particular has a reputation for being lumpy, twee, parochial and terminally uncool, all beards and tankards and nit-picking over the finer points of tradition. We tend to think of folk as something conservative, something that holds and constricts, not something Dionysian and un-tame, that liberates and releases. And yet it is the trancey austerity of folk tunes that drew me to them in the first place (I discovered folk at the same time as I discovered rave). They have the power to elicit a curious atavistic feeling, to facilitate an undoing.

A good tune needs to be repeated many times. Not for me the Irish way of playing a tune twice then hopping to the next and the next. I want thickness and depth.

Like a mantra there is a delicious pleasure in hearing a tune again and again, a delight that unfolds from the tightly structured narrative of the 32 bar form: tension-release, tension-release, statement-development-resolution. A good tune is like a story. You never tire of hearing it even though you know the ending. And when skilled musicians extemporise, weaving variations and harmonies around the warp, their embroidery makes it something exceptional, a unique piece of folk art. There should be a sadness when it ends.

The bagpipes lend themselves to repetition. Their traditional role was not marching people into battle, but leading people into the dance. All across Europe, since the Middle Ages and probably from Antiquity, people have leapt and stepped in time to reed pipes, the textured layers of the drone and the rich timbres of the chanter carrying them onwards, urging them upwards. And when musicians and dancers start to forget themselves, lose themselves to the crowd and the groove and the tune and the repetition, something wonderful starts to happen. An intensity. A feeling of flow, that things are cooking, that this could happily go on forever.

There's magic in the music. Bagpipes are the original trance instrument - a design classic, still in use after 700 years.

To illustrate what I mean, here are some musicians playing on the Greek island of Karpathos. The bagpipe is a tsabouna, an unusual instrument in that you can only play 6 notes on it. The art is to play it almost as a percussion instrument. I also like the bells on the lyra player's bow which give his playing an extra bite. Art music this ain't. Listen right to the end and you'll hear that things go up a notch. Something starts to change. Somewhere a goat-footed god is starting to jig.

Sketch

2011-02-01T15:49:00.002Z

And here's a sketch that one Merlin Porter made of me while I was performing at Catweazle the other night. He finished it in about four minutes flat, which is how long it takes to sing my song, Star Gazey Pie (all about sons, fathers, ancestry and Cornwall) - not bad!

Facelift

2011-02-01T15:03:00.003Z

As you can see, over the last few days I've been giving this blog a bit of a facelift. Previously I was blogging music related posts over at Telling the Bees and keeping this site for my writing and academic work.

But it must be conceded that the life of a writer is not that exciting - I spend hours with my face screwed up in front of the computer, my nose in a book, or plodding about with my eyes fixed upon the middle distance. Apart from advertising my periodic public or festival appearances, I've struggled to think of what I could possibly blog about that might be of interest. And after a day of squeezing out words onto the page, the last thing I've wanted to do was write more. My word pile was getting dangerously low.

While considering opening up the focus I remembered that Renaissance magicians thought scholars (and I suppose, by extension, writers) to be ruled by the planet Saturn (grayscale planet of restriction, dessication and death, in astrological terms at least) and hence prone to melancholy. Certainly, writing requires a Saturn-like narrowing of focus, a kind of self-absorption or looking inwards, too much of which leads to a gloomy outlook, a subtle pessimism that I think has been reflected here. It's all been a bit austere.

So in a new spirit of Jupiter-like expansiveness, of reaching out into the world, I've decided to make this blog about my life as a writer and as a musician, and, especially, as someone who plays the little known but very much alive English bagpipes. Music remains a large and indispensible part of my life and I'd like to share that here.

The new header photo shows me performing in a 2009 dance piece called Common Dance, choreographed by Rosemary Lee and with an exquisite and specially composed score by Terry Mann. A site-specific work for fifty dancers of mixed ethnicity, age and formal ability, it took place in Greenwich Borough Hall. You can see more photos here - I understand a DVD is in the making. It was as beautiful and extraordinary as it looks.

My role was small but significant - 'the piper' shamanistically marking the transition between the three acts (birth, life and death), starting my journey in the bowels of the building and ending it right up in the gods.

Let's just say that it was a role that suited me well.

Writing

2011-01-29T14:52:00.003Z

A bit quiet on the blogging front but I've not been idle. I've taken on a new load of teaching this semester - a module in 'Research Communication' for the degree in Communication, Media and Culture, and 'Issues in Contemporary Religion' for Religion and Theology. With lecture writing there never seems to a point where you feel the job is done - always another book to read or another perpective to acquire.

On top of that I've finished two fairly substantial pieces of writing. There's 'Close to the Hedge: Critical Recollections of Psychedelics, Animism and Spirituality' which is my contribution to the forthcoming Handbook of Animism, being edited by my old mentor, Graham Harvey. The chapter discusses British 'tribedelica' and employs the philosophy of Henri Bergson to argue the case for the return of a critical study of psychedelics into the academy (and more besides).

Then there's 'Folk Music and British Paganism', a chapter for another forthcoming book, Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music, to be edited by Andy Bennett and Donna Weston. Here I challenge the popular belief that folk music has pagan origins, but also look at how that assumption has affected British folk in the post-war period.

I'm just about to start writing my contribution to the book of the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness series of lectures, a critical look at the whole psychedelic 2012 phenomenon. After that I've a piece to write for an exciting collection called Archaeology and Ancestors - a book looking at the views of Pagans, archaeologists, heritage managers and anthropologists concerning the dead and the reburial of human remains. Then I've got to start my paper - 'Notes towards a minimal theory of psychedelic action' - for the Breaking Convention conference at the University of Kent, which is shaping up to be one of the most exciting events of the spring.

Oh, and not forgetting the on-going project of 'the difficult second book' - work is progressing but I ain't gonna say nuffink right now.

Busy busy.

What is a drug?

2011-01-08T19:56:00.002Z

My next appearance will be at the Wellcome Collection, on London's Euston Road, on Jan 20th 2011, speaking as part of a panel on the subject of 'What is a drug?', a tie in talk with their 'excellent 'High Society' exhibition and book.

It's free, so why not come on down?

Brain secret history

2011-01-08T19:04:00.001Z

Still time to watch this - shows presenter Michael Mosely taking psilocybin in controlled experiment using a brain scanner, with surprisingly positive results.

Wedding

2010-10-09T14:07:00.003+01:00

Sorry I've been a bit quiet here of late but I've been preoccupied with the not inconsiderable task of getting married. It was a gorgeous day and we're both deliriously happy.

Edinburgh talk

2010-10-06T17:59:00.003+01:00

I shall be speaking at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, this coming Monday 11th October, talk entitled Mushrooms and Myth. It forms part of their 'From Another Kingdom' exhibition. Advanced booking recommended!

Secrets of Creation

2010-08-04T15:01:00.006+01:00

Secrets of Creation Volume One: The Mystery of the Prime Numbers. Matt Watkins with illustrations by Matt Tweed. The Inamorata Press. ISBN: 978-0-9564879-0-2

I must admit that I rather enjoyed maths at school but I clearly remember the horror of learning Calculus. Our teacher began the lesson with a stern warning: what was to follow would form the foundation of the entire year so we’d better all concentrate and pay careful attention. Ah, I tried, but my daydreaming kite of a mind spiralled out into the sky, and when eventually I reeled it back the board was covered in arcane symbols and we were being given impossible exercises to do. Nightmare! If only I’d had Matthew Watkins to guide me.

Matt is a mathematician and an old friend with whom I’ve shared many illuminating nights, playing improvised space folk and discussing all manner of ‘out there’ ideas. His passion is numbers and the extraordinary patterns that fall out of them, most notably the distribution of the primes. Now, together with another old friend, illustrator Matt Tweed, he has produced a gem of a book – part textbook, part graphic novel, part philosophical tract, part detective story – that explains some pretty high level maths in terms that anyone (and I mean anyone) can understand.

Eschewing all but the most necessary equations (purists will find more conventional mathematical proofs in the appendices), Matt employs ladybirds, elastic ropes, rope bridges, beans and building blocks to lead the reader ever deeper into the mathematical mysteries. He explains logarithms ingeniously using spirals and, unafraid to inject a little poetry in what is usually a fairly dry subject, coins the name ‘spiral waves’ for the elusive structures that lie beneath the woodwork of prime number distribution. The illustrations are a delight and, I’m told, full of mathematical in-jokes, but on a purely visual level the golfing sprite had me laughing out loud.

Along the way, and most unusually for a mathematician, Matt challenges us to question our cultural assumptions about maths, numbers and pattern. Why do we expect prime numbers to conform to a pattern anyway? What are the implications of our ever-greater reliance on quantity (targets, quotas, aptitude tests, digital technology etc) at the expense of quality? Why don’t we pay any attention to the qualitative, cultural side of numbers? All provocative stuff.

By the end of the book I was impatient for more and happily there are a further two volumes to come. The Mystery of the Prime Numbers is destined to become a cult-classic but it deserves a much broader readership than that. If someone had shown me that the mathematical universe is as profoundly odd as it is strangely beautiful, or even that excursions into its nether regions can be thrilling, then Calculus would have been a doddle and my imagination would never have had cause to flee the confines of the classroom.

Horizons tickets on sale

2010-07-30T11:19:00.003+01:00

As you know, I spoke at the wonderful Horizons - Perspectives on Psychedelics conference in New York City last year. It was a fantastic occasion in a beautiful venue, and I was struck by how enagaged with the subject people were, both speakers and punters, how willing they were to ask critical questions. Once again it struck me how far behind we are, here in the UK, and what a long way to go we have before we have a genuine, interdisciplinary Psy-Crit (Critical Psychedelic Studies). Horizons raises the bar.

Well, the line-up has been announced and tickets are on sale and I'm very sorry I shan't be there (this scholar-gypsy lifestyle don't pay the rent, let alone air-fares). But if you're anywhere in the vicinity, I heartily recommend you go.

Inception

2010-07-29T10:06:00.000+01:00

I went to see Inception last night and, apart from being as good as everyone says it is, one thought struck me as I negotiated the complex layers of plot and subplot, of dreams within dreams: that psychology, and not science or religion, provides the universal mythology of our time.

Not that there was any doubt. The psyche and its contents, the ego and unconscious, are as real to us as Olympus and Hades were to the Ancient Greeks. We are so fluent with these concepts that the premise of Inception needs hardly any explanation in the script. We know how to access the unconscious – through dreams or imagination; where it is – downwards or below; what we’ll find down there – fathers, mothers, lovers, children – angels and demons all; and that redemption will be found if only we have the courage to open the scary bunker at the bottom of the basement.

Were it possible to whisk some great mind from the past to show them the film, some Dickens or Twain who could ride the culture shock of the intervening years with a curious glee, Inception would nevertheless make no sense to them whatsoever. We stand on the other side of an unbridgeable ontological shift. As W.H. Auden observed, we are all Freudians now.

Or are we? In keeping with one of the film’s themes – that of standing up to, and finding resolution with the father – it is the Jungian version that has the upper hand. Jung famously and irrevocably broke with his mentor, Freud, and like Fischer, the film’s unwitting protagonist, tore down his ‘father’s’ empire and rebuilt it afresh. In the process he saved the gods from science, and Freud, by giving them new life in the interiority of the self. It proved his masterstroke, and a gift to Hollywood.

Had they been given a special screening, these two rivals – there’s a biopic here, surely? – would have reacted quite differently. Jung, nodding sagely, would have greeted the film with that wry smile of his, safe in the knowledge that ‘his work here was done’. Freud would have stormed out in a rage.

For if the monster in the basement had turned out to be Freudian, Inception would have been as shocking as it is gripping. As the bogeyman’s bogeyman, Oedipus remains as horrific to us today as ever he was in those far off days before psychology reigned.

Electro Swing is the thing

2010-07-26T14:41:00.000+01:00

Rave’s refusal to die must rank as one of the great imponderables of our time. We, the rave generation, are now in our forties, our children are growing up fast, and yet still the beat goes on. And on. And on.

Hippiedom lasted a good ten years before being ritually put to death by punk. Punk, in its turn, drowned in a pool of its own bile, until rave bounded along like a puppy with its infectious doof doof, had us all bouncing in baggy trousers and dayglo t-shirts, gurning to the rising sun. As a rule of thumb youth movements last about ten years before the next generation finds a new way of pissing off their immediate elders. But if rave began in 1987 (give or take) then it was still going strong in 1997 and again in 2007. It looks set fair to be with us in 2017.

This remarkable longevity must have something to do with its Dr Who-like powers of regeneration. Detroit techno became British acid house, which morphed into jungle, drum and bass, gabba, hardcore, happy, handbag, progressive, dubstep, hubcap, Pugh, Pugh, Barney Mcgrew and a million other genres, separated by a hair’s breadth, gone as quick as the flightiest will-o-the-wisp. But with its latest manifestation, electro swing – 20s and 30s jazz and swing, cut up to a skip dap diddly doo wap beat that is simply the cat’s meow – all pretensions that this was ever a spiritual movement have now evaporated once and for all.

Rave’s most pernicious and ghastly manifestation, its Sylvester McCoy moment (to continue the Doctor Who theme), was surely goa trance. Never has there been a musical genre so overwrought, so pregnant with over-signification and self-satisfaction. Each squiggling synth line, cosmic drone and Indian vocal sample mawkishly proclaimed that gap year shenanigans on a tropical beach somehow added up to a karma-cleansing direct line to nirvana. Goa trance is about as tantric as a grope in a hot tub. Electro swing is refreshingly honest about its hedonism. It is good, old fashioned, head down party music, a divinely decadent mashed up mash up.

But apart from loving this new/old music (I dare you to try keeping still, go on, just try), I think this deliberate harking back to time when music, dancing, sex and drugs combined into a subculture of forbidden pleasures (didn’t the 1920s give us the word ‘rave’ in the first place?) tells us something about rave’s longevity. Swing, jazz, speakeasies, burlesque, illicit moonshine: they were all the product of prohibition, the mother of all ill-conceived, self-defeating drug policies. The harder the authorities clamped down on alcohol, the harder people partied. The logic of prohibition still obtains today: what is the entire global rave-festival scene if not its creation?

Any thinking person knows that the way to reduce the harm that drugs cause (however much you or I might use them sensibly) is to abolish prohibition. I like to think that intelligent life can still be found amongst the political classes, in which case perhaps the present situation suits them rather well. If the masses spend the weekends of a long, hot summer, kettled into festival sites, partying towards the edge of oblivion, then sure as hell they won’t be marching on the streets, burning banks or throwing well-aimed bricks at the offices of BP.

Perhaps the recession, austerity culture and the return of the Daleks, sorry the Tories, will foment a new radicalism, but in the meantime I'd be lying if I said that electro swing wasn't such awfully good fun. A snifter? Don't mind if I do. Crank up the gramophone Jeeves!

John Aubrey exhibition

2010-06-01T18:56:00.000+01:00

Thanks to my lifelong love of Avebury stone circle, I've been a fan of John Aubrey, the seventeenth century antiquarian who first put it on the map. Natural philosopher, lover of magick and the unexplained, gossip and wit, it's hard not to like this disorganised polymath. There's a small but rather wonderful exhibition about Aubrey at Oxford's Bodleian library at the moment and I went to see it this afternoon.

Highlights were: a handwritten grimoire, containing a spell for trapping a spirit in a crystal; a camera obscura, with a fine view of the Bodleian quadrangle; some of Aubrey's original drawings of Avebury; and an edition of the first ever science fiction novel, Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), in which the hero flies to the moon using a kite pulled by geese!

It's free and runs till the 31st October.

Festivals

2010-05-26T11:45:00.001+01:00

Summer is finally upon us and I am gearing up for a few festival appearances. I'm going to be speaking at Sunrise Festival next week (my 'Reading the Codex' paper) and then at Pilton (that's Glastonbury Festival to non-locals) towards the end of the month ('Avatar, Shamanism and the problem with Magic Mushrooms'). In both cases I'll be in the Ancient Futures area. Very excited about going to Glasto again - haven't been for eleven long years. I can join the ranks of people wandering around, tutting, and saying 'It's not like it used to be'...

Hope to catch you there.

Meanwhile, here's a photo of me, out on a very pokey barrow near Wittenham Clumps, looking for clues for how to build an Ancient Future. I'll let you know when I've got the answer...

Snake Charmer

2010-03-27T14:11:00.000Z

I've been a fan of Indian Snake Charmer music for some time, a part of my general interest in bagpipes and bagpipe-like instruments from around the world. I find drone music inherently psychedelic, and perhaps you'll agree from this video of massed pungi players in Delhi...