PJ Proby pisses all over Gary Numan

Death disco

I was partying with myself in the new vinyl room last night when the news broke that Bobby Keys was dead, and then it was Ian Maclagan. Both men were around 70, and may not have been in the best of health. Keys was the 5^th or 6^th Rolling Stone, playing rock sax, but with feeling, on their most memorable albums including ‘Exile on Main Street’ and 'Sticky Fingers’. Maclagan, a  keyboardist, was one of the Small Faces before joining the Faces with Rod Stewart. Songs were played in his honour on BBC 6 Music. The Small Faces never sounded better, in part because the DJ avoided the kitsch singles in favour of maturer album tracks.

Pensioner rock

At the Congress Theatre, Eastbourne last month I had a great seat among the wrinklies to witness the spectacle of a ‘60s Gold Night’. We had got tickets primarily because Gerry and the Pacemakers were headlining. Gerry can do no wrong in my book for his take on ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and for writing and singing ‘Ferry Across the Mersey’. Gerry was ill. Fortunately his Pacemakers actually did live up to their name and were a comparatively spritely house band for much of the evening. Spencer Davis was there. He was without Stevie or Muff (a-huh) Winwood, but, backed by the Pacemakers, the old guy almost sounded urgent at times. The Searchers were in great form. Altogether now… “Needles and Pinzzahh…”  Yeah.

PJ Proby stole the show though. 76 and looking and sounding every bit like a performer in a club scene from a John Walters or David Lynch film. His hit version of ‘Somewhere’ became alt-cabaret as he strained to stay in tune but was no less moving for it. What a star.

Gazza’s glitter fades

I attended an alternative disco for overgrown school kids at Hammersmith Odeon last Friday. It was billed as a Gary Numan gig. Gaza was ill. After a few numbers I wished he had cancelled. Middle-aged women tousled their hair, Gazza fashion, and routinely pointed at the bewildering object of their desires. One particularly bovine fan shunted me aside in her desperate urge to shake her ass in time to the flu-stunted posturing of her diminutive idol. His routine, if I can call it that, was a one-trick affair of one hand on mic stand, incline head and shake vigorously. 

Gazza has been recording with Nine Inch Nails apparently. They have if anything compounded the cabaret feel. A succession of indistinguishable alt-dance numbers were pumped out by his bland band. At times he didn’t need to be on the stage. From the seat that I eventually retired to he was barely visible anyway. I only came for the hits. ‘Cars’ was OK, but, like everything else, was somehow made soulless on the night. Perhaps my experience would have been improved if his male fans weren’t essentially balding overweight morons with more interest in beer and bogs that Gary’s collected oeuvre. Thank God I left before the ‘Are Friends Electric?’ encore and the nauseating spectacle of Gary parading his kids like a winner of Sports ‘Personality’ of the Year.

The support was Gang of Four. Now they were good. Roy Jenkins was always more interesting than Tubeway Army anyway. They looked and sounded great; and by playing first they could be enjoyed before the army of beer spillers and would-be groupies moved in. 

1984 at the Almeida... but where are the proles?

Without poring over every word of George Orwell’s dystopian novel it is hard to be sure of how far the theatrical interpretation of 1984 currently showing at the Almeida in London has gone in updating the message. However the word “prole” has definitely been expunged from the contemporary NewSpeak dictionary used by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan in putting this production together. Orwell, I recall, wasn’t afraid to liberally pepper his text with it, mindful that “The Party” that he was partly satirising would alternately ideologically deify the working class, and exploit them as revolutionary cannon fodder. It was the Soviet Union after all that gave us that wonderful Newspeak neologism “Proletkult”: the term for the state’s promotion of what they imagined to be “true” working class culture.

In one of the most telling moments in the book, Orwell, through his anti-hero Winston Smith, says on hearing a woman sing an old East End pre-revolutionary tune, “if there is any hope, it lies with the proles.” In this attitude Orwell partly betrays the superior attitude of what he famously defined as his lower upper middle class roots. But he was also underlining the disconnect between the particular class in whose name the totalitarianism of the left was enforced, and that class “in and of itself” (as Marx famously prophesied it would one day become).

The Almeida version of 1984 has Smith talking rather more than I recall his original self doing about the common bonds between us all, and the need to end the suffering imposed across a global system. This was a more liberal internationalist message than Orwell was making when he wrote the book in 1948. He was, it is true, warning of the dangers of the illiberal trends with which he was personally familiar in a post-war Britain that was rebuilding the state machine and constructing a new (Soviet) enemy at breakneck speed, and, as this production also underlines, he was warning of our unthinking complicity in the destruction of freedom. However his particular venom in his later years was directed at the central model of the book: the Soviet system and its international fellow travellers, including those in the UK then were very prominent in literary circles, who would merrily trot out the latest Moscow line. This play begins where the book ends, a meeting of a book club set way into the future, who, cleverly, are talking rather more about the fate of Orwell and his warnings than they are the diary of Winston Smith that Orwell actually has them discussing. What use was it if it didn’t change anything, and, anyway, it was the vision of a dying man, they lament.

Women don’t fare too well in this production (contrast the indifferent Julia as played by Hara Yannas at the Almeida with the powerful performance by Suzanna Hamilton in the 1980s film version), but  in practically the final lines of the play, a woman member of the reading group fumbles her way to the opinion that the reason they don’t know when The Party lost power was because …maybe …it hadn’t.

Trite, but that’s the update I guess, and one, whilst not irrelevant to Orwell’s worldview, that is, ironically, a little too devoid of historical context. It was Smith after all who spent his days helping to destroy history to suit The Party. O’Brien, the high party official played by Tim Dutton, in the best scene in the play and of the book, says to a gruesomely tortured Smith (played by Mark Arends) that you think your idea of truth can save the world, but we control what is true because we control the past and, therefore, the future.

There are perhaps parallels to be made with the fast changing received wisdom of the contemporary era. History is not so much made by the victors as systematically disregarded in the pursuit of an understanding forged through the equality of instant exchange on social media. Orwell could not foresee this. For him what was in real life only the nascent technology of the “telescreen” was likely to become an instrument of state control. In a loaded contemporary media spin the play has us watching Winston and Julia in bed – we are all Big Brother. On social media we are the complicit destroyers of history, instantly creating new realities, all of us equally worthy of our say. We are now global citizens, fighting for freedom against the global Big Brother. 

Orwell had a word for that. Doublethink.

Shaw’s Major Barbara at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin

“Major Barbara”, currently showing at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, is not a must-see performance. However it has some very good performances, and, despite being over 100 years old, many still relevant themes.

In a moment of almost childlike Marxist didacticism, Paul McGann, playing the splendidly saturnine arms manufacturer Mr Undershaft, tells the audience that European governments do his bidding. Written less than 10 years before World War 1, the play’s author, Irishman George Bernard Shaw, is celebrated for his apparent power of prophecy.

Yet GBS’ more telling, and more pertinent observations for today's audience, concerns liberals self-righteously raging at the world’s many inequities. Undershaft, a man born of East End poverty who married into an Earl’s family, is the play’s only morally uncompromised character. GBS enjoys giving him many of the play’s wittiest and most perceptive lines. Undershaft’s morality is based on a gospel of material salvation that only money can bring. Socialists of the time scared this businessman by also preaching material solutions to soulless drudgery. However his daughter, “Major” Barbara, played by Claire Dunn, is rather less threatening. She sees the Salvation Army as the surest solution to want: bread and treacle in exchange for a (declared) devotion to God.

The least satisfying part of the play is Barbara’s naive, soul-searching, purity amidst more worldly compromises. At times hammy in actualisation, the difficulties of her role are only compounded. Sadly, but inevitably, it is Barbara’s declamations that end the play. Her “realism” has led her to embrace the pragmatic (or cynical) Adolpus, her fiancé, in his apparently reluctant decision to agree to run (and one day inherit) Undershaft’s business. Her reasoning is that she can then focus on converting less materially-needy souls at his factory. This version of changing the system from within smacks of the same simple-minded wisdom that Lady Britomart (Barbara’s mother, wonderfully played by Eleanor Methven)  elsewhere dismisses as typifying the insights of The Times newspaper.

The most witty, incisive, and electric dialogue is that between Undershaft and Adolphus in the second act. The former, ironically perhaps, often carries the audience in his deployment of well-informed cynicism against the almost puritan pleadings of his soon to be son in law whose version of changing the system from within leads him to imagine that he can make the arms trade more moral. The final line of the play is Undershaft saying to Adolphus, a man of normally more leisurely hours, that he will see him at the factory at 6 am.

Undershaft’s signature claim that only a willingness to kill can change anything, whereas voting only changes the names of cabinet members, suggests a utilitarian use for arms. Eleven years after this play was written, WB Yeats observed that in Ireland a terrible beauty had been born. In Egypt a willingness to kill, or more likely be killed, is convulsing that country, although the most likely outcome is regressive.

This is an antidote, perhaps, to Undershaft’s contempt for the naïve parliamentarianism expressed by his son, Stephen. Either way, “Major Barbara” speaks straightforwardly and often entertainingly to many complex and still contemporary issues.