Saturday, January 21, 2012

THE MONTYS

Welcome to this years Montpelier Station Music Awards (affectionately know as The Montys) in which a panel of judge, chosen from a short list of blogger living in big pink houses right near Montpelier Station selects its favourite musical moments of 2011.

And now without further ado: please pass me the plain brown envelope. 

That appears to be letter from the gas company, threatening to take the tenant who left in 2005 without leaving a forwarding address to court. 

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Is Tolkien Actually Any Good?

Did Gandalf Torture Gollum? 

Did Susan Pevensie Go To Hell? 

Who Wrote The Poems of C.S. Lewis?

Do Balrogs have wings?

Andrew Rilstone answers thirteen important questions about C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien -- their lives, their books and their worlds. 

Reviews and critiques of books, plays and those god-awful movies

Every Inklings-related word that Andrew has published since 1999. 

Never-before published material, including

* a detailed response to Planet Narnia
* thoughts on Jack's Life and Lenten Lands
* a new, definitive essay on the trillemma
* a commentary on the internet furore which engulfed my essay Is Tolkien Actually Any Good

Lost Usenet essays and other rare fragments of Rilstonia.  

Thirteen or so years in the making
About 300 pages
Around 100,000 words

Available from Amazon and in E-Book format in due course.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Public service anouncement

To the person who googled "Woody Guthrie one eyed banker story" and landed on this page, it goes like this:

There was once a one eyed banker, who went to the finest optometrist in the country, and paid him a small fortune to make the best glass eye money could buy. He was incredibly pleased with it. The next day, a poor farmer came to the bank to ask for an extension on his loan. Before getting down to business, the one eyed banker said "I bet you a dollar you can't tell which is my glass eye". 

"The left one" says the farmer. 

"How could you tell" said the banker, very disapointed. 

"Because that's the one with a tiny glint of human compassion in it" replied the farmer.

To the person who googled "Cuddling your father's willy" and ended up on this page: please go somewhere else. 

Personally I prefer the one about the two rabbits.  






Friday, January 06, 2012

An Unearthly Child





Teach me how to grow in goodness,
Daily as I go;
Thou hast been a child, and surely
Thou dost know.



So. Folk songs about the childhood of Jesus. Subversive, heretical stories; alternative Jesuses; hidden, suppressed traditions; lost spiritualities that the church doesn't want you to know about; hints from which we can reassemble long lost truths about the lost boyhood of Christ.

Well, no, obviously not. Pious folk in the olden days read the New Testament and wondered what was happening "off stage". When did Joseph propose to Mary? How did he find that she was pregnant? What did they do in Egypt? What happened when they go home? The four Gospels didn't tell them. So they made stuff up. Out of their heads. And the stuff that they made up is, in some cases, so off-the-wall that we read it and think: :"Were they reading the same Bible us we are?"

But they were. And that's what makes it so interesting. 

*

Think of one of the more familiar songs. Think of Once In Royal David's City. We've heard the song so many times that we've probably never listened to it. Cecil Frances Alexander (Mrs) evidently also had a bunch of questions about little baby Jesus, and also found that the Bible didn't answer them, so she also made stuff up. Out of her head. And her made up stuff is actually a good deal less convincing than the off-the-wall stuff in the "apocryphal" sources. "And through all his wondrous childhood / He would honour and obey / Love and watch the lowly maiden / In whose gentle arms he lay." Never mind that the one actually canonical story about the boy Jesus shows Mary practically loosing her blessed temper with him ("Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?") "Christian children all must be / Mild, obedient, good as he." We know that this is what the boy Jesus was like, because this is what the boy Jesus must have been like. It doesn't occur to us that it no more comes out of the Bible than do the stories about Psycho Jesus bringing toys to life and striking playmates dead. We know that Mary and Joseph were the poorest of the poor, and that there was a donkey and an innkeeper and a stable. But if a different set of pious legends had taken root, we'd know that Mary was rich -- a Queen or Princess who lived in the Temple and had taken a vow of celibacy. And that Jesus was born in a cave. 

*

Stephen Green (a lunatic) pretended to be very offended by the dramatised retelling of the story of the birth of Jesus that the BBC did last year. I don't think he'd actually seen it. Lunatics never go and see things before they get offended by them. It looked to me as if the Nasty Mail phoned him up and said "The BBC's new Nativity film insinuates that Mary was raped, what do you think of that?" and he replied "That's just typical of the BBC. All part of a Communist plot to undermine the Christians basis of our civilisation I shouldn't wonder." 

In Tony Jordan's actual script, Joseph is shocked to find out that Mary is pregnant. Mary says "It was not my doing". Joseph replies, in horror "You were raped?" He's not slandering Mary, but trying to make excuses for her.

One wonders how Christian Voice would have reacted to the dramatised retelling of the story of the birth of Jesus that the craft guilds of Chester used to present during the fourteenth century. In that version, one of the two women who Joseph has found to take care of his wife and his new baby decides to test the claim that Mary is physically a virgin. The stage directions don't leave anything to the imagination. "Tunc Salome tentabit tangere Mariam in sexu secreto" they say: "Then Salome tries to touch Mary's private parts". Salome's hand is struck with leprosy as punishment; but she says sorry to the newborn Jesus and it gets better. 

Obviously, there is not a word about this in the Bible, but it's a very ancient legend. What would an ordinary human midwife have done if she'd been told that the lady who'd just given birth was literally a virgin? What would a pious man have thought if his absolutely trustworthy wife returned from a visit to her cousin obviously pregnant? It isn't only 21st century soap opera writers who ask these sorts of questions.

x

So. In the first of our folk-songs, Mary, the Queen of Galilee, is walking in an orchard with her elderly husband Joseph. She asks him to pick her some fruit: "Go and fetch me some cherries Joseph, for I am with child." This seems to be the first he knows about the baby, because he snaps back "Let he pluck you the cherries that brought you now with child." That's the lovely thing about these old songs. It starts out being pious and beautiful and rather courtly -- we're surely supposed to imagine a medieval lady and her lord perambulating through a beautiful English orchard -- and suddenly we hear the voice of a medieval carpenter saying just what a medieval carpenter would say if he thought his wife had been cheating on him. The unborn Baby Jesus immediately says "Bow down then, tall cherry tree, for my mother to have some." The tree does so; Mary picks the cherry; and Joseph is sorry for having doubted her. 

At one level, its a simple miracle story: how did Joseph come to find out that the Mary had a supernatural baby? Because he performed a miracle even before he was born. But for those able to see it, there's also a hidden meaning: if we believe in the Trinity, then God is both the father of the Baby, and the Baby itself. So Joseph's words come true literally, though he presumably doesn't know it yet. 

It is rather hard to see where this incident would fit into the story of Jesus birth in Matthew and Luke's gospels. The Bible doesn't tell us how or when Joseph finds out about Mary's baby: it just says that it happened after they were engaged, but before they were married. [*] I suppose she might have blurted it out while they were taking a walk in a cherry orchard. The Bible says that Joseph subsequently had a dream in which an angel told him that Mary was, in fact, still a virgin. He would have to have been quite obtuse to have needed an angelic messenger after he'd seen local trees worshipping Mary's unborn son. He'd have to have been positively perverse to still be sulking after he'd had his chat with Gabriel. So when does the story happen? Doubtless, you could harmonise it with the original story if you really wanted to. We Doctor Who fans are good at coming up with post-hoc rationalisations of blatant contradictions. But if you'd pointed out to Anon that his song contradicted the Bible, I think he would have said the medieval equivalent of "Duh -- hello! It's a song. I made it up for the wassailers to sing."

Or possibly, he didn't care very much about "the Bible". Possibly, he couldn't read, or couldn't read Latin. Possibly, he knew about Joseph and Mary and Baby Jesus only as stories: stories told by the priests, acted out in mystery plays, sung in vernacular songs. Possibly, he thought that "making up a new story about Joseph and Mary" was no odder than "making up a new story about Robin Hood." Or perhaps not exactly "making up": telling the same story in a new way. His story isn't that different from the Biblical one after all: Joseph is cross; because he thinks Mary had been cheating on him; something supernatural happens; he starts believing. They aren't characters in a soap opera where one thing leads to the next thing which leads to the next thing: they are characters from the land of Story where everything is always happening over and over again for the first time. Possibly, when the Bible got translated into English and someone invented the printing press, people like Anon stopped thinking of it as a body of stories, and started thinking of it as a big black book. Perhaps they didn't feel as free to make stuff up about stories in a big black book. Nowadays, when people make stuff up, like the Three Kings and the Stable and the Innkeepers Wife and Family Values, they pretend that it is really in the Bible, and get very cross, or pretend to get very cross, if you point out that it isn't.  Because once you have a big scary black book on your shelf, the last thing you are going to do is actually read it.


*


"But Andrew...Anon wasn't really making stuff up out of his head, was he? There were other written down lives of Jesus apart from the four 'official' ones, weren't there. And some of those included stories about his wondrous childhood, didn't they? But the Church wouldn't put those in her big black book because they were heretical and feminist and gnostic and contained the secret whereabouts of the Holy Grail. Anon was working from that hidden tradition. The carols show us a secret Jesus that the Church would rather we didn't find out about."

Well, up to a point.

The Cherry Tree Carol doesn't appear to have been drawn directly from any of the so-called apocryphal gospels. There an old book purporting to be St Matthew's long lost prequel to his Gospel (which it certainly isn't) as translated by St Jerome (which it almost certainly wasn't). That book includes a story in which the Holy Family are hiding from King Herod in Egypt. Mary fancies some figs from a very tall fig palm. Joseph says he's more worried about water. So Baby Jesus make the tree bend down, and where it touches the ground, a magic spring pops up. Mary gets her figs, Joseph gets his water, and Baby Jesus says that to commemorate this, people who win competitions will be given palms as prizes from now on. 

I'm not making this up. But somebody clearly was. 

It is quite possible that Anon was familiar with the fake Matthew book. But he evidently didn't regard it as an authentic alternative tradition, to be handed down from master to apprentice and thus concealed from the Big Bad Church. It looks more like he read it and thought "Magic fruit true...cool idea, but I could have put it to much better dramatic use."

M.R. James, who knew about this kind of thing, thought that the fake Matthew prequel might be as early as the 9th century: that puts it as close to the real historical Jesus as Errol Flynn was to the real historical Robin Hood. Granted, most of the text (though not the fig tree incident) comes from the books of James and Thomas, which  are much older. M.R James thought they were from around the turn of the 3rd / 4th centuries --about as close to the events as we are to Bonny Prince Charlie. [**] You only have to read them to see that they are not independent alternatives to Matthew and Luke: they are written by people who had read Matthew and Luke over and over and written their own stories to expand them. They are, in fact, nothing more or less than fan-fiction. "James" is a prequel about how Mary and Joseph got married, and the details of Jesus birth. (It introduces a midwife called Salome, but doesn't say she molested Mary.) "Thomas" is about Jesus "missing years". It starts with the boy Jesus in Nazareth making clay sparrows and bringing them to life; it ends with him being taken to the temple at the age of twelve. That's an obvious hallmark of fan fiction. The official text is indeed completely silent about the period between the flight into Egypt and the trip to Jerusalem, so the fanfic writer feels justified in inventing something to plug the gaps. Luke's story of the boy Jesus giving his parents the slip so he can spend more time showing off to the rabbis in the temple finishes by saying that he went back to Nazareth and obeyed his parents from then on. So a story about a teenage Jesus getting into trouble would contradict established continuity. A story about an eight year old Jesus being a naughty little deity is just about permissible.


Which brings us to the second of our folk songs. In this one, you will recall, Jesus goes out to play ball with some rich kids, who poke fun at him and make insinuations about his mother. So he performs a miracle: he makes a magic beam of light across the river, walks across it, and asks the other kids to follow him. They do, but not being Sons of God, they fall through the invisible bridge and drown. When Mary hears about this, she smacks Jesus three times with a stick. (Which seems pretty lenient for murder: Mickey Harrington got six for riding his Raleigh bike across the cricket pitch.) In the same way that he blessed the date palm, Jesus curses the stick he was hit with.

Maddy Prior, who knows a thing or two about folk songs, thought that Anon was offering an alternative to orthodox dogma: "This story of the boy Jesus portrays him as all too human, and does not accord with the given Bible Image. It strikes me as a parable concerning power and the need for everyone to learn how to use it."  Possibly she also had access to a missing verse in which Joseph tells Jesus that in this life with great power must also come great responsibility. 


Jesus is not the Tot of Steel. He isn't even Harry Potter. He is a little boy who is also God. And that is something which it is completely impossible to get your head round. So the fan fiction writers don't even try to get their heads round it. They don't offer clever explanations of the paradox. They don't explain to us that since the second person of the Trinity and a human being were combined into a single person, there is no problem with saying that Jesus both knew everything there was to know and had to go back to school and learn stuff. They run with the paradox. It's the illogicality they find delightful. They tell us that when Jesus started school, he told his teacher "I am ALPHA and OMEGA so how dare you try to teach me the alphabet". He got slapped for that as well.

Some people are tempted to describe this stuff as "gnostic", in the sense of "weird". ("Gnostic", as a wise man once said, is a word used to describe any passage in the Bible which the present writer doesn't understand.) Cecil Sharp, who also knew a thing or two about folk songs, mentions another carol called The Holy Well. In that version, some kids are horrible to Jesus, and Mary Mild encourages him to punish them. But he won't, because he's not that kind of Messiah. "From this" explains Mr Sharp "We may conclude that the Holy Well is a comparatively modern recension of the Bitter Withy, modified so that it shall the better accord with a truer conception of the character of Jesus." People in the olden days thought that Jesus might have stuck the bullies dead, but we Victorians know what he must have really been like.
 
But in fact, it's all perfectly orthodox. There's is nothing theologically odder about the old song in which Jesus has to go across his mother's knee for a smack than the newer one in which he always honours and obeys the lowly maiden in whose gentle arms he lay. The idea that God who made the universe does whatever Mary tells him to is no odder than the idea that God who made the universe doesn't always do what Mary tells him. Maybe it seems odd to us that Mary Mild would correct Jesus harshly, but then Mary Mild is another thing we made up out of our heads. The Mary of the Bible is anything but mild. She's into casting down the mighty from their seats and exalting the humble, which is like, commie talk. The idea that Mary has to say "mind you don't get into any trouble" to Jesus only strikes us as odd because we were raised with the Victorian toy-doll version of Jesus. Of course Jesus won't get into trouble. He's Jesus. 

But we wouldn't, I think, be nearly as freaked out by a story in which Joseph had to say "No, lad, if you carve your dove-tale joint like that, the whole wardrobe will collapse". (Or maybe we would. Charles Dickens, who didn't really believe that Jesus was God, still thought the Milias' painting of Christ in the Carpenter's shop was almost too disgusting to be exhibited.) If learning stuff is part of being a child and Jesus was really a child, then Jesus must have really had to learn stuff. If learning to be good is part of growing up and teaching your child to be good is part of being a good parent, then there must have been times when Mary had to, in the jargon, teach Jesus the difference between right and wrong.  



*

Or maybe not. St Augustine, god bless him, says that if an adult were to scream for his food and cry if he doesn't get it, we'd say that he was being selfish; and that we try to stop children from being selfish as soon as they are old enough to teach. It follows that a crying baby is, in a technical sense, "sinning"; a perfect, un-fallen baby in the Garden of Eden would not have behaved like that. So if, theologically, Jesus represents what human beings would have been like if not for the Fall then maybe it follows that the boy Jesus would never have tripped, or disobeyed, or accidentally injured his hand with one of Joseph's tools -- and baby Jesus would never have cried. In which case, we would have to say that Jesus and Mary are literally unimaginable alien beings, and the question "What would Jesus do?" is hardly worth asking. 
And perhaps hymns like Away in a Manger and Once In Royal David's City are delighted by that side of the paradox: the utterly unimaginable un-fallen human baby. And maybe we need to hear both sides of the story. But Away in a Manger is the one which flirts with heresy. Because if you believe in little-Lord-Jesus-no-crying-he-makes, you are in danger of thinking "God didn't really become a baby -- he just pretended to."

One day, I intend to read St Augustine. But not yet.

If Mary never needs to say "Mind you aren't naughty" to the creator of the Universe and if the creator of the Universe never wanted to play catch then he wasn't a human, he was just a holy spook temporarily animating a child shaped zombie. But that's what the folk tale has such fun with. In so far as a he is a child, it's natural for him to go out playing, and be bullied by other kids. In so far as he is God then it's natural for him to strike people who blaspheme against him dead. In so far as he is a Boy, its natural for him to get punished for being naughty. In so far as he is God, its natural for him to put a curse on the naughty step. By showing a small child behaving like God and God being treated like a small child, we are being encouraged to get our heads around the idea of the god-child. Or to entirely fail to do so, which is the best we can manage.

*

"That's all very well. But wasn't it rather hard luck on the other kids, who didn't know who it was that they were taking the mickey out of? Getting drowned seems like an awfully harsh punishment for bad manners."

"I thought we'd already covered this. No children were harmed in the composition of this song. Because, it's like a song. I made it up. Couldn't you tell?"

Mind you, if you were a poor medieval dude in a tavern, not being quite sure where your next turnip was coming from, then it would probably have forgivable to laugh at three rich snobs getting thrown in the river because they didn't understand that you shouldn't mess with baby Jesus. And people in Merrie England with it's infant mortality and bubonic plague and what not probably found it easier to believe that God had a bit of a temper than we do.

Actually, I can think of three other possible theological readings of the Bitter Withy song, all based around the fact that the drowned children didn't know who they were taunting. But if I  start down that path we'll still be here next Epiphany. Let's just say that Anon really does fit an astonishing number of levels of meaning into his songs. He's very nearly as good as Dylan. [***] 

*

If any biologists have read this far, I know well enough what they will say. "Well, there you are then. The nasty church decided that from June 325, Christians would have to believe two completely inconsistent things and Christians have had to twist their heads into all sorts of silly contortions before breakfast every morning ever since. When they use words like 'paradox' they really mean that they know its all a load of rubbish but are pretending that it isn't. Sky-fairy! Sky-fairy! Sky-fairy!" 

So it is probably worth noting that the moment at which I personally stopped thinking of the story of Baby Jesus as one of those dull fables that grown ups went on and on about and started to think of it as something exciting and fascinating was precisely the moment at which I perceived that the paradox was a paradox. 

Another little lyric by Anon sticks in my mind.


A God, and yet a man? 
A mayde, and yet a mother? 
Witt wonders what witt can 
Conceave this or the other.


A God, and can he die? 
A dead man, can he live? 
What witt can well replie? 
What reason reason give?


God, truth it selfe doth teache it; 
Mans witt sinkes too farr under 
By reasons power to reach it 
Beleeve, and leave to wonder!



[*] In the BBC film, Mary's condition is obvious to Joseph when she comes back from her three month long visit to Elizabeth. I think that is probably implicit in Luke's Gospel, actually.

[**] If Matthew's Gospel is from AD 100 then its as close to the real events as we are to the First World War: plenty of time for myths to develop, but the last eye-witnesses have just died off.

[***] a: It's an allegory of the last judgement b: It's an allegory of the atonement c: It's a rather nasty example of the "blood libel.". 

Thursday, January 05, 2012

....AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!


(possibly my favourite new record of 2011, and a fine New Year's resolution for us all)

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

I think that in retrospect, everybody could see that Tom Baker was just too good. He wasn’t necessarily the best actor to play the Doctor. He wasn’t the first to think he owned the role, or even to get himself and the character mixed up. But he was the most charismatic incumbent. His ad libbing made him a de-facto co-writer. The credited writers naturally played up to his sense of humour. They wrote Tom-lines, and the audience tuned in to see Tom in a way they never had to see Jon or Pat or Bill. The TARDIS became less and less a fictitious space craft; and more and more a stage set or a TV studio. When Tom was discovered learning oil painting or playing chess with K-9, it didn’t occur to us to ask why, or what he was doing before, or what he did the rest of the time. It would have been like asking what Geoffery and Bungle did in the Rainbow House when they weren't singing songs or reading stories or making finger paintings. We understood, from a very early age, that people like Tom Baker and Rolf Harris and Zippy didn’t exist when the camera wasn’t pointed at them. Tom’s bundle of mannerisms and surrealism and jokes and gestures and one liners held the series together as the narrative around it became less and less coherent; less and less relevant; until it all but ceased to exist. You could have dropped Jon Pertwee into Web of Fear or Wheel in Space, or Pat Troughton into Silurians or Curse of Peladon, and very little about the story would have changed. Horns of Nimon or Nightmare of Eden or Armageddon Factor couldn’t be imagined without Tom Baker at the center. “Story” had become nothing more than a series of corridors to run along, monsters to offer jelly babies to, villains to deliver hammy speeches to. And it was all wonderful because Tom was wonderful but once Tom wasn’t there being wonderful any more it all started to fall apart: not because Peter Davison was a poor actor, but because Peter Davison was only an actor, and he could only deliver the lines he was given, in the script that was written. Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee were leading men in mostly well crafted costume dramas and thrillers; Davison, Baker II and McCoy floundered around in a star vehicle without a star. (McCoy could, in fact, have saved the series. But he didn't.)


*

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.” As a wise man once said: “Piece of shit. Walk away.”




If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of The Viewers Tale or Fish Custard which collect all my writings about Doctor Who to date.

Alternatively, please consider making a donation of £1 for each essay you have enjoyed.



Three French Horns

Thursday, December 01, 2011

Not As Good As Bellowhead


Blackbeard's Tea Party
The Croft, Bristol
26 Nov 2011


Blackbeard's Tea Party are not as good as Bellowhead.

On the other hand, Bellowhead do not play in the back rooms of pubs at the bottom of my street (while young people play speedcore in the front bar). Although, come to think of it, I did hear Mr Spiers and Mr Boden perform on this very stage back in 2007. And Mr Carthy. Still, it's the least folkie venue ever. All the young people were in black. I was in my floral waistcoat. The pub was smashed up during the pretend riots last July. I think they thought I was a hippy bouncer.

As I was saying: Blackbeard's Tea Party are not as good as Bellowhead. But they generate an energy, a physicality, a sense of musical theatre (completely improvised, I think) and a spontaneous response from the audience which I have never seen any folk band apart from Bellowhead come within a hundred miles of.

They do, in pretty much every conceivable respect, rock.

They came onto the stage at 9.40, after the usual local support who we will tactfully pass over. Stu the singer – not the singer on the albums, a new singer who has joined the band in the last month --  asks if there are any miners in the audience. Someone is related to one. He launches into "I can hew" . ("And when I die boys know full well / I’m not bound for heaven, I am bound for hell / My pick and shovel Old Nick he will admire / and he’ll setting be hewing coal for his hell-fire”). There is a thumping drumbeat and  an electric guitar which, I shouldn’t wonder goes up to 11. And Stu, I swear, doesn't stop moving for the rest of the evening. He encourages the audience to pogo dance by leaping three feet off the ground. He gesticulates in the narrative bits. He nips back stage at one point and re-emerges in sun glasses and pink tie-dye shirt. The whole band follows him into the physical space. Yom Hardy the cajun drummer bangs his head in time with the rhythm so his long black hair flaps up and down like a muppet. When Martin Coumbe the guitarist does a solo, the band get down on their knees to worship him.

The sound mix, I have to say, is perfect: too often in this kind of thing I have said "I believe that there may have been a folk song going on somewhere, but all I could hear was the drum". Tonight you could hear every one of Stu's words. The songs are stories or jokes played with a camp twinkle in his eye. Folk rock with the emphasis firmly on the folk.


Oh, and there was rappa dancing. In a pub. At the bottom of my street.

I now need to tread carefully. One of the many excellences about the Tea Party's first E.P (Heavens To Betsy) was the nuanced vocals of Paul Young. Young credits his Barrack Street (version # 94 of the story about the sailor being robbed by the prostitute) to the singing of Nic Jones, and it was a close match in vocal style. If you are going to swipe, swipe from the best, said I. Paul Young appears on the new album and he remains excellent. The album version of Stan Rogers Barrat's Privateers (sadly not in the live set) is quite stunning. He tones down the "roar" from the original recording, plays it as a ballad, not a shanty, tells the story, while the group weave in and out and all round the tune, even interjecting hornpipes a couple of times. But I note that Paul claims to have learned two of the lighter and more raucous pieces on the album from Stuart and there is a perhaps a sense that Paul isn’t fully comfortable with them. Not as loud and mad as Stuart is on stage at any rate. But that may just be me being wise after the event.

Landlord Fill the Flowing Glass is a venerable English drinking song with lyrics that get progressively filthier in each stanza.“I wish I had another brick to build my chimney higher /Stop the neighbours pussy cat from pissing in the fire”. It’s quite lovely how Blackbeard’s Tea Party stay close to the basic beauty of the melody and then put the heavy stuff behind it without the one swamping out the other. Too often this kind of thing is done with a nod and a wink; isn’t it funny that we’re singing “thee” and “thou” while the electric guitar is drowning us out? But this just seemed to just be a song. The drunken Landlord is followed by the endlessly sobering Chicken On Raft, possibly my favourite song about egg on toast. ("I sing "woo-woo" and you sing "chicken on a raft": and then I sing "aaa-aa" and you sing "chicken on a raft" and then I sing "woo-woo" and you sing...")

I never saw the original line up live and it may be that their stage act was always this extreme. It may be that audiences in York are holding placards saying "Bring back Paul". When I first heard the album I said that their musical arrangements were reminiscent of Mawkin and it strikes me that Stuart’s manner is not a million miles away from Jim Causley. (Actually he's like the the bastard offspring of Jim Causley and Jon Boden.)


I wish Paul Young all the best; I hope he left to pursue a brilliant solo career and not (say) because of a quarrel about who took the last slice of cheesecake. And it would be reckless to start saying "gig of the year" in a year which has included Alisdair Roberts and Show of Hands. And that old American man who sings Bob Dylan songs. But it looks to me that the addition of Stuart has propelled a band I was already very excited about into orbit.  

That's not a metaphor. He really does jump that high.

Blackbeard's Tea Party. Not as good as Bellowhead. Yet.