Jewel in the Crown

Martin Carthy 
Kings Place London 
16 March

 

He comes out onto the stage; peers out into the audience; says "Hello!"; pauses to re-tune his guitar. And straight into "Come, listen to my story, lads, and hear me tell my tale, how OVER the seas from ENG-LAND, I was condemned to sail". And we're off on another mixture of long, long ballads, give away comic songs, and "The Fall of Paris". At one level, he's a showman, of course he is – the walking onto the stage at the opening of the second set and reciting a Victorian music hall monologue (this time "Me Mother Doesn't Known I'm On the Stage") has been honed over many decades of gigging, of finding out what works and what doesn't. He always opens with Jim Jones because he's found that Jim Jones is the perfect song to open on. But it's still the naturalness which floors me; that sense that he'd be singing these songs even if the audience hadn't turned up.

He does the one about the Blind Harper who stole the kings favourite horse, which is one of three he regularly claims as his favourite; he does Patrick Spens which he says has only recently come back into his repetoire. Everyone jokes about folk songs which go on for ever and ever; but in fact, songs like Sir Patrick really, really gain from being song in full. It takes 25 verses.  (Martin Simpson rattles through in a dozen or so.) Because it's a story, and leaving in all the verses makes it clear and easy to follow; we're in no doubt about why the King needs Patrick to set sail in such a hurry, nor why he has to come back in an equal rush.

He winds up with the best double-whammy you could hope for; the epic Prince Heathen and the silly Feathery Wife; both, in different ways, about love: the evil domineering love of the satanic nobleman for lady Margaret; the devoted love of the nagging wife who comes up with the ruse to free the farmer from his faustian bargain.

I spent some time in this forum earlier in the year trying to answer the question "What is a folk-song, anyway?" Carthy's Prince Heathen could stand as a test-case. It's Carthy who matched the words to the incongruously jolly tune; its also Carthy who adapted Child Ballad 104 (I looked it up) into modern English. 

The Child version has the refrain:


"O bonny may, winna ye greet now?"
"Ye heathenish dog, nae yet for you."


which Carthy freely turns into


"O lady will you weep for me? Lady tell me true"
"Ah, never yet ye heathen dog, and never shall for you!"


Sometimes he's fairly close to the original:


"A drink, a drink, frae Prince Heathen's hand,
Though it were frae yon cauld well strong!"
"O neer a drap, Prince Heathen," said one,
Till ye row up your bonny young son."


becomes


"A drink! A drink! The young girl cried
All from Prince Heathen's hand!"
"Oh never a drop Prince Heathen cried
Til you wrap up your son!" 


But sometimes, he's bringing his own imagination to the printed text:


He's taen her out upon the green,
Where she saw women never ane,
But only him and 's merry young men,
Till she brought hame a bonny young son.


Becomes the horribly brutal:


So he's laid her all on the green
And his merry men stood around
And how they laughed and how they mocked,
As she brought forth a son


But it's recognisably the same story; except, of course, that he's changed the ending: Carthy rightly feels that after the Princess has kidnapped lady Margaret, wiped out her entire family, raped her, and imprisoned her in a dungeon, its unacceptable for Anon to imply that, in the end, his heart was softened and they lived happily every after. Traditional song or new song? For all we know, the anonymous source who submitted the "traditional" version to Mr Child might have interpreted and earlier version just as freely.

A lot of Martin's identiy as a folk-singer continues to depend on the idea of source-singers: for every song reconstructed or re-invented out of a printed source, there is one that he got from an old recording on a wax cylinder. His My Bonny Boy is Young But He's Growing comes off a recording Vaughan Williams made of a pub landlord in 1907. He kisses his fingers to show how beautiful the long dead singer's voice was. (*)


"These songs are the real crown jewels" he says before Prince Heathen "And this is one of the jewels in the crown." His own acoustic guitar is "in hospital" but his guitar maker has leant him a beautiful instrument to use in the interim. At the end of the song, he allows the guitar to take the bow and acknowledge the applause.

(*) You can listen to it here, through the wonders of the internet. In places it sounds uncannily (even disturbingly) like Mr Carthy's version. 

XIII

When you saw Star Wars, you honestly felt that you would give anything to find out what the Clone Wars were and to see Obi Wan Kenobi in the days when he was a hero and all the Jedi Knights had Swords and the Old Republic. 

But that "honestly feeling that you would give anything" is precisely the emotion that made Star Wars the Best Movie Ever, and actually telling you what the Clone War were like removes that "honestly feeling you would give anything" feeling and actually ruins Star Wars forever. Watching a lady not quite taking her clothes off is far more sexy than being on a beach where no one is wearing anything at all. 


The Star Wars prequels were just a very bad idea. As it was, they were a very bad idea  poorly executed but they would have been an equally bad idea even if they had been very well executed indeed. Their one redeeming feature is that they were George Lucas's really, really bad idea. It was George Lucas who created Star Wars to begin with. He didn't just dream it up: he actually thought up the characters and wrote the script and worked with the actors and model makers. So of course I was interested to find out our George Lucas imagined the Jedi Knights at the height of their powers and the Imperial Senate and the pre-lapserian Darth Vader because he created the whole idea of the Jedi Knights and Imperial Senates and Darth Vaders in the first place. If the movie had been made by Some Other Guy then it wouldn't even have had that excuse. I like the Jedi Council scenes because they tell me what George Lucas thinks the Jedi Council should look like. Some Other Guy's version would have exactly the same validity as the version of the Jedi Council that me and Jeffrey made up in the playground of East Barnet Lower school in 1978 with airfix spacemen and toy action figures. (Less. Less.) Even if the films had actually been really rather good. Especially if the films had been actually really rather good. Especially if the films had been actually really rather good and George had specifically said that he thought they were a really, really bad idea.

XIV

Whenever I re-read Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan's very tactful phallus reminds me of the  enormous anatomically correct cock in the movie. Something that I hardly noticed in the comic has become funny, or embarrassing, offensive or whatever the hell the socially approved way of reacting to an enormous blue willy is. 

The movie changed the comic. It did. It just did. 

Read Frankenstein without thinking of Boris Karloff. I dare you.

XV

Does DC comics appalling opportunistic piece of shit corporate Watchmen rip off really matter?

No. In the total scheme of things, of course it doesn't.   

XI

Harry Potter and the Da Vinci code are not reducible to the MSS that J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown submitted to their publisher. This is true even if the published text was very close to those MSS and not, as sometimes happens, co-authored by their editors. At the very least, several hundred people were involved in drawing covers and typesetting and printing and physically manufacturing the object that you bought in Waterstone. And someone else created the marketing campaign; decided that it would be cool for bookshops to open in the middle of the night to sell the first editions; carefully honed the Rowling persona; spotted that a series of school based children's fantasy stories might be the sort of thing that kids would want to read. No-one but JK Rowling could have written Harry Potter but if JK Rowling hadn't written Harry Potter, some other publisher might have identified some very similar author to place at the center of a very similar maelstrom.

It is tempting for a writer to think "It is my words that the Public wants, and all the publisher does is put them in the hands of the reader."

It is equally tempting for a publisher to think "I make beautiful books, and one small part of the process is the artisan who I hire to write the words which go into them."

It is tempting for an actor to think: "I have a special talent: people come to see me act, and the director's job is simply to decide where I should stand so that the audience can hear me declaiming.

It is equally tempting for a director to think: "People have come to see my version of a play, based on my knowledge of literature and stage craft. An actor is simply a skilled individual whose job it is to read the words and perform the gestures that I am tell him to."

Would it therefore be unreasonable for the theatre architect to say "I am in the business of giving people an exquisite evening. You create a beautiful building, and then you hire anyone to sell ice cream, pour drinks, and strut about on the stage?"

XII

You can sometimes get a very small child to eat his greens but arbitrarily declaring that these are special Tellytubby greens. It works better if the person performing the alchemy is Mr Sainsbury: the spinach that was wrapped in official Tellytubby packaging really does taste better than the kind which Mummy says came all the way from Tellytubbyland.

I am sometime told that Peter Jackson's parody of Lord of the Rings has to be judged on it's own terms: it doesn't matter whether or not it is an accurate translation of Prof. Tolkien's book.

It is certainly true that Lord of the Rings works very well as a Hollywood pop corn flick. I would place it almost precisely on  a level with the Pirates of the Caribbean series, full of sound and fury but signifying less and less as it goes along.

This is not to deprecate Lord of the Rings. I like the Pirates of the Caribbean series very much indeed. They provide a huge dollop of cutlasses, cannons and eye patches, wrapped in the illusion of a narrative, and enough macguffins and plot coupons to propel the ships from exotic location to exotic location. They are, in short, exactly what you want from a pirate movie. 

I feel much the same way about Lord of the Rings: it is the Goonies with dragons, ill matched semi competent protagonists dropped into the middle of a story in which far too many precipices collapse underneath them and far to many dragons drop rocks on them for anyone to have any chance to work out what is actually meant to be happening. 

Saying that the Lord of the Rings is to be judged on its own merits is the same as saying that Jackson, having made his big budget cartoon, used the name Lord of the Rings to give it a quite spurious gravitas: that the Lord of the Rings movie is only a Lord of the Rings movie in a manner of speaking, just at the Tellytubby spinach is only Tellytubby spinach in a manner of speaking.

If I say this, I am accursed of snobbery by the meta geeks.  

IX

Can anyone remember who the Ghost Rider was, or what comics he appeared in, or what kind of villains he fought? (It was a rhetorical question, Nick. Please sit down.) I believe he had sold his soul to the devil, as one does. Gary Friedrich didn't dream up the idea of the Faustian Pact: Christopher Marlow did. He didn't come up with the idea of the heroic stunt-cyclist, either: that was Evel Knievel. The not-that-bad-movie did indeed make use of the idea of the stunt cyclist who sold his soul to Beelzebub and then tried to use his evil hell fire powers for good (or something). But what everyone remembers about the character is the guy in biker leathers on the harley davidson with the flaming skull where his head ought to be. It is, how you say, iconic. 

Stan Lee, as everybody knows, believes that comic book characters have an essential, platonic being outside of the actual stories they appear in. He believes that these platonic essences are created in a single, metaphysical, quasi-divine act, which only he has control of. He calls this unified act "dreaming up". Once the "dreaming up" has been done, the character has existence, and any one of a number of different hired hands can do the donkey work of putting it on paper. There's no actual work involved; the demiurge just sits in his armchair and has creations. On this view, the person who came up with the elevator pitch "He's kinda like Dr Faustus, only on a bike" "dreamed up" Ghost Rider, and everything else (drawing the pictures, thinking up villains, making up words for him to say) was just dot-joining that any artisan could have done. I believe that there are sincere differences of opinion about who did the original up-dreaming in this case. 

You might think that 90% of the success of Spider-Man came from Stan Lee's funny speech bubbles, and only 10% from Steve Ditko's design the costume. You might think it was 50/50 or 60/40. No-one apart from Walt Disney's legal department doubts that two people were involved. It seems to me that 100% of the success of Ghost Rider as a comic book and 100% of the reason it was turned into a not-too-bad movie was the physical design of the character: the idea-of-the-Ghost-Rider is the guy on the bike with the flaming head not Satan or Mephisto or Zathros or anything else. In which case, if anyone "created" the Ghost Rider, it was not Mike Friedrich or Roy Thomas but Mike Ploog, who drew the actual pictures.

It will be remembered that in 1969 Stan Lee allowed Cadence Industries to believe that he was sole creator of all the Marvel characters and Ditko and Kirby were merely hired illustrators. This applied even to the Silver Surfer, even though Stan had said over and over again, that Kirby created, and therefore presumably "dreamed up" the character without input from him. It is perfectly true that Stan Lee's inferior 1970s version of the character added lots of elements which had not been part of Kirby's original conception, and that it is this inferior version which still appears in comic books today and was used in the the not-completely-awful Fantastic Four movie. It is also clear that the three Spider-Man movies were based on John Romita's version of Spider-Man, which was inferior to Ditko's tio the point of being parodic. 

It is not to be suggested that Lee had no imput into the creation of the Silver Surfer; only that, by his own arguments, he didn't dream him up. This is not to argue that Steve Ditko was the sole creator of Spider-Man; Mike Ploog the sole creator of Ghost Rider or Jack Kirby the sole creator of everything else; only to argue that the concept of "dreaming up" is palpable bullshit. The idea of Spider-Man, or Ghost Rider doesn't exist apart from actual Spider-Man or Ghost Rider comics: the people who created them are the people who did the hard work of drawing and writing, not whoever it was who happened to have first pitched "What about a guy on a bike with a skull instead of head." 

Sigh. No, I don't think that Marvel Comics should pass 100% of the profit from The Avengers movie to Jack Kirby's estate. 15% would be fair; 5% would be a realistic. 1% would be a nice gesture. At this stage of the game it would count for more if Kirby's grandchildren joined Stan Lee on the red carpet, and if Stan Lee said "Me and your grandpa created these characters together" or even "I suggested this idea to your grandpa, and he created the characters, and I thought up things for them to say" which everyone knows is the truth. But even that can never happen, because Stan Lee's faith-position conveniently matches the legal fiction that characters have essences and those essences are created and owned by corporations and buildings and legal entities, not by human beings with stuff they want to say.

X

What were the Daleks?

Were they

1: A script written by Terry Nation

2: A prop designed by Raymond Cusick

3: Characters in a children's television programme directed by Verity Lambert

4: A cultural phenomenon which began in 1963 and was over by 1968

Once you've framed the question in that way, the answer is pretty obvious. "The Daleks" were an ambience, an atmosphere, a period when, wherever you looked there were Dalek toys and Dalek magazines and Dalek soap and Dalek colouring books. Those of us who came in during Jon Pertwee sometimes feel that we missed "the Daleks". BBC props moving around a quarry just don't have much to do with Daleks. Re-runs of Peter Cushing movies on wet Sunday afternoons and dog-eared Dalek comic books seem to bring us closer. But no collection of ephemera can really recreate the Daleks. We weren't there when they happened.

Similarly, people of my generation have seen The Beatles reduced to 15 very good CDs, 2 very good movies and Magical Mystery Tour. This has practically nothing to do with the Beatles, although Hard Days Night goes some way to telling us what the Beatles would have been like had we been there. The Beatles were a moment when people were wearing particular clothes and watching particular cartoons on TV, and incidentally stopped rationing sweets and hanging people. The fact that John, Paul, George and Ringo also happened also to sing some quite good songs was neither here nor there. People only went to Beatles concerts in order to shout them down. 

Or again, the 12 action figure that were sold in 1977 were not an adjunct to Star Wars. They were Star Wars. Star Wars was a particular summer, which included Star Wars toys (if you had lot of pocket money) Star Wars bubble gum cards (if you didn't) Star Wars comic books...oh and also a film. (Remember, if you are British, Star Wars was a comic first and a film second. One of those big Treasury Editions they don't make them like any more.) You saw the film once, or, if you were particularly sad, five times. You read the comic every day for a month. You played with the toys until you got too old for them. George Lucas's attempts to deny that things like The Star Wars Christmas Special and Christmas In the Stars ever happened represents a blatant falsification of what Star Wars was. Is.


Can you get "Force Blades" on ebay? Not reproductions of lightsabers that actually look like lightsabers -- actual 1970s force blades. The real thing. 

One imagines the Beatles and Star Wars and Spider-Man putting their essential being forth into the surrounding culture until they themselves no-longer exist. (This is a reference to Tolkien. It would take too long to explain.) Everyone knows what Mickey Mouse looks like: hardly anyone has seen an actual Mickey Mouse cartoons. Disney rather discourages it. A strange composite Winnie the Pooh -- definitely not A.A Milne's character but not exactly the the Disney character either -- seems now to have an existence outside of the original stories. It is very common to find young children who are crazy about Spider-Man, but who have never seen a Spider-Man comic or scene a Spider-Man movie.

Spider Man isn't a superhero: he's a lunch box.