Truckstop Cowboys at the Ex-Servicemen's Club

Don Gallardo and Stuart Bond opened What’s Cookin’ on July 9. It was my 50^th birthday. A prime seat in the middle of a large room with a stage at one end and a bar at the other, what was there not to like? The stage was bathed in bordello pink and bedecked with what looked like old illuminated plastic Christmas trees. Polystyrene tiles topped off the ceiling. It was my kind of place.

The venue was upstairs at The Leytonstone Ex-Servicemen’s Club in East London. The gig was part of What’s Cookin’, a bi-weekly showcase of acts often labouring under the moniker “Americana”. It often means country, but not necessarily. At What’s Cookin’ it could equally mean swamp boogie or rock ‘n soul. To be fair, the organisers don’t call it Americana. It’s one of those annoying, catch-all, meaningless labels, just like “World Music”. (Have you ever heard a World Music dj play The Beatles or Bob Marley? Yet they were truly global acts whose songs reflected their (and others’) “roots”.)

Don, and his sidekick for this particular gig Stuart, were strong-voiced, emotionally engaging and played well. This was country straight out of Nashville, minus the western; although they were sporting 10 gallon hats. I was seriously impressed, with the music and the hats.

After a suitable break for more liquid refreshment - the birthday pints were piling up - a married Kansas-based duo, Truckstop Honeymoon, took to the stage. Originally from New Orleans, when Hurricane Katrina hit they relocated. At first the skinny, hippy-haired, dude on banjo and his bespectacled double bass-playing wife didn’t lift the audience like the previous act. But then, somehow, his spoken routine, and the quality of their performance, made me and assorted other revelers warm to them….a lot.

Perhaps these gigs are hard to judge objectively. They take place in a bar and there is no price of admittance (although a bucket is, rightly, passed around).

This though was my fourth outing to a What’s Cookin’ event. I have not yet been disappointed with the quality of the North American or North American-style acts that Stephen Ferguson, the organiser, attracts.

This Sunday (20 July) from midday he’ll be showcasing a whole day of it in Henry Reynolds Gardens as part of the Leytonstone Festival. I’ll be there.

Partrick's adventures in Pepperland

Our "Magical Mystery Tour" was hosted by Holly Johnson’s kid brother, Jay. He suggested that we kick off with some Frankie tunes. We thought that would be fab, falling for the famous Scouse humour. This tourist coach trip could have simply been a mindless milking of the sites memorialised by the Beatles to an endless accompaniment of their sometimes over familiar tunes. Yet Jay Johnson’s humour and knowledge, and our felt connection with at least some parts of the four lads’ back-story, turned the experience into something quite unexpected and, well, magical.

We visited George's two up two down terraced house (see pic below), glimpsed Ringo's place in Toxteth due for demolition along with 400 others, saw Paul's up-market council house run by the National Trust, and marvelled at just how smart and suburban John's home for 17 years actually was. Aunt Mimmie’s middle class mock Tudor pile was brilliantly introduced by Jay after he played a few bars of Lennon’s “Working Class Hero”. Jay’s was a well-honed act. We told him afterwards that he should have stuck on “Two Tribes”. That would be sackable offence, he said, not in jest.

The coach tour had been much more than a Beatles’ nostalgia trip. The gulf between the image and the actual home life of John, the most socially conscious member of the Beatles, was a sociological trip in itself, as was the sight of the boarded-up houses of Ringo’s manor. They have apparently stood in that condition for 15 years as the council dithers over what to do with the only one that they consider has heritage (and potential monetary) value, and believes it cheaper to destroy the rest and build new ones but lacks the funds to do it. Ringo used his local boozer, which still stands at the end of his old street, on the cover of a solo album, "Sentimental Journey", inserting family members into the windows.

As the bus pulled away we heard a snatch of Ringo's cover of the Doris Day song performed in his inimitable tone deaf fashion. Ringo hasn't found enough spare cash to even save his former home, let alone the rest of the area that he was once so sentimental about. Why not fund a tax-deductable refurbishment of the 400 plus homes and hand it over to a housing association, Mr Starkey?

Mathew Street’s Cavern Club is the premier pilgrimage site for many of course. Yet, try as the publicity does to convince you that this is more or less the real thing, it does not succeed, despite being a similarly brick built subterranean venue. Located a few doors down from the original, whose entrance is marked by a life-sized photographic replica, it claims to stand on 75% of the original site and to have been built using many of the original bricks. This is perhaps true in the dryly technical sense, but not even the various displays and the wee stage on which acts perform can quite give it the air of authenticity.

Strangely the Cavern Pub over the road, a fairly recently opened enterprise owned by the same company that owns the club and the Magical Mystery Tours, was a more satisfactory experience. It isn’t pretending to be something it wasn’t, has more interesting displays, and, on the night we visited, the advantage of a first class Beatles tribute act, Two of Us. This sibling duo have so imbibed their John and Paul shtick that they do it as a kind of method act, sounding a lot like, and even looking a bit like, their respective icons, albeit carrying rather more weight than appropriate for a couple of mop-tops (see pic of "John" below). Their version of “Don’t Let Me Down”, performed, like all their Beatles’ covers, to the accompaniment of  just their two acoustic guitars, was a tour de force. And I don’t normally like cover bands.

At the corner of Mathew Street and Whitechapel is an enormous and rather hideous souvenir shop, unimaginatively entitled “The Hard Day’s Night Shop" (to go with the adjacent “Hard Day’s Night Hotel” (sic). The balding, surly looking, bloke behind the counter repeatedly drummed the counter with a pen in a manner bordering on malevolent. He didn’t manage even a grunt when I wished him good morning. Mind you, if you’re not a fan of the Beatles, or even if you are, working in a supermarket selling stuffed Blue Meanies and Ticket to Ride pencil sharpeners, with Beatles’ documentaries playing on endless loop, would almost inevitably render you pretty humourless.

Our hotel was the Britannia Adelphi. Now in its third incarnation and sharing its centenary with World War One, this is a magnificent building located in the very heart of Liverpool and a short stroll from the neo classical late Victorian glory of St George’s Hall. The splendour of some of the hotel rooms is though more fading than others. Our bathroom door had recently been shouldered. However this incredible hotel features superb sitting and conference rooms. When I return to Liverpool I am going to try and book the Sir Harold Wilson Suite, which the former PM and local MP used for constituency business. I don’t know which floor John’s mother Julia worked on as chambermaid.

The Metropolitan (Catholic) Cathedral – this city has two – was stunning. This ultra-modernist wonder was built in 1967, relying in part on local fund raising. The spire depicts a kind of medieval crown, while inside an enormous crown of thorns iron work hangs over the huge central altar. An imaginative use of stain glass in the spire and in several chapels is mesmerising. The Anglican cathedral on the other hand is a routine mock gothic affair dating back 70 odd years. These days it seems to function as a kind of kindergarten cum shopping centre. At least the catholics keep their money changers outside the temple. The two cathedrals face each other at opposite ends of Hope Street

On our final day we inevitably took the Ferry Cross the Mersey. Gerry Marsden (the song’s author and singer) was our tour guide on this occasion, albeit pre-recorded. I am quite a fan of the modest man whose Pacemakers (also managed by Brian Epstein) have two of the greatest pop performances of the 20^th century to their name. Their version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is quite simply the definitive interpretation. Yet no “serious” pop or rock historian ever deems to give them much consideration. We sat on deck, drank in the sun and marvelled at the stories about the former resort of New Brighton and admired the £27bn development at Seaport – a container port and wind farm just down from the city. The latter was a reminder of how this city was once and could yet be again a strategically vital trading hub – the gateway to America, as Gerry called it. As the legend has it, local bands in the 1950s got their hands on US blues and rock n roll records weeks before Londoners as they sourced them straight off the inbound ships.  

Only half a million people live in Liverpool, and it is a relatively compact and therefore quite handlable city. Yet it has over 2000 buildings deemed to be of historic interest, a contributory factor in UNESCO declaring it a city of world heritage in 2008, placing it alongside the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids. Even just at the pop level there is much more to it than the Beatles (or Frankie). Measured by the number of No 1 hit singles it is apparently the most successful city in the world. Its other big name acts are depicted on an Albert Dock sculpture, part of a huge and actually quite tasteful renovation scheme that began after the 1980s riots (take a bow Mr Heseltine). Their names can also be glimpsed alongside non Liverpudlian artists and writers named in stone on the entrance to the beautiful central library.

There was so much more that we never had time to see. A return trip is very much in order. 

Tony Benn - messiah or devil?

Ed Miliband said that Tony Benn was a champion of the powerless, a conviction politician, and somebody of deep principle. In other words all the things that Ed isn’t.

I am sad at Mr Benn’s death. He was the reason why, in 1981, at just 17 years of age, I joined the Labour Party. I was electrified when I heard him speak alongside the open-shirted dockers’ leader, and communist, Jack Dash at the National Museum of Labour Party History.

I also heard him at a Tribune fringe meeting in Brighton shortly after he lost the deputy Labour leadership contest to Dennis Healey. A Bennite sitting two rows behind us shouted “Judas” at Neil Kinnock who had voted for Healey. “Is Benn Christ then?” responded a guy sitting right behind me. That was the atmosphere of the time. He was for some a messianic figure, and if you were young and idealistic this was especially beguiling. For others he was the devil incarnate. I remember a Daily Express cartoon depicting him in a Gestapo uniform. This was a man who served during the war as an RAF pilot. This was not something he ever particularly emphasised, but not because he was ashamed of it. He was a patriot but of a different kind. His pride in British parliamentary democracy made him opposed to the EU, NATO and the influence of the US over UK foreign policy. Like Benn said of the Labour Party, he was "more Methodist than Marxist." 

He had begun his political life as a fan of the then Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, who, whilst a socialist to my mind, was subsequently seen by the hard left as the Tony Blair of his day. Benn’s commitment to democratic socialism hardened in office in the 1970s under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. He never resigned his cabinet post. After 1979 he wielded the knife against the government in which he had just served, and intoned about the great betrayal he had apparently witnessed from the inside.

His followers would demonise anyone insufficiently left-wing and would fellow travel with the enemies of democratic socialism. He does have some responsibility for the departure from the Labour Party of some very able politicians (and Gaitskellites) who founded the SDP in 1981, and especially for the 1983 election manifesto. Despite that devastating electoral defeat, the strength of the Labour left, of whom he remained the unofficial leader, made it hard for Kinnock to criticise what had to be criticised about violence and intimidation in the 1984-5 miners’ strike. After the loss of the 1987 general election, Benn largely became irrelevant to the party’s fortunes.

He could though still be powerful critic of the realism that so many of us went along with. I met him in February 1998 on the eve of an aborted US/UK military build up in the Gulf aimed at Iraq. I muttered what I thought was a relatively inoffensive comment about how the Blair Government was just helping to "shore up" containment. Benn rebuked me sharply with a statement about the moral bankruptcy of what then had been seven years of containment.

Harold Wilson once said that Tony Benn immatured as he grew older. As Benn’s socialism became more and more unfashionable, he ironically became something of a national treasure. However Benn’s radical opposition to the anti-democratic whims of the free market and his criticism of the closeness of some UK governments to Washington have arguably more relevance than ever.  

Meet Ukraine's New Bosses (more or less..) the Same as the Old Bosses

The celebrated, if rather pompous, UK professor of history, Timothy Garton Ash, repeated a now sorrily familiar canard on the BBC World Service on Sunday when he said that what had happened in Ukraine is “definitely a revolution”. The next day I read in the International New York Times that the revolution in Ukraine may need to be “better represented” in the about to be formed interim government.

When analysts comment about Yemen it is sometimes said that the Gulf Arab-backed interim deal that changed the president, and consequently the government, did not represent the “revolutionary forces”. That is perhaps a better formulation.

The “revolution” in Ukraine hasn’t really affected the apparatus of the Ukranian state, even if it has weakened the state’s writ. Despite Yanokovich having something akin to a democratic mandate, the revolution obliged him to depart and has aided the chances that his nemesis Tymoshenko, a failed premier, will take over. In the meantime the speaker of the old parliament keeps the presidential chair warm.

The revolution hasn’t affected the structure and membership of the police, intelligence services and the military, but it has succeeded in giving the interior and defence ministers the sack.

The revolution has seen self-appointed groups enforcing popular justice on the streets of Kiev, but is being actively resisted in the east of the country.

Egypt is going through a comparable (non) revolution. In either case was it the popular will or the shadow state that wrought the change? In Ukraine the oligarchs didn’t like the former president’s method of crowd control, in Egypt the military initiated two changes of president in two years and are about to finish the job by once again assuming the country’s political leadership. However perhaps one of several differences is that, while Egypt cannot control the Sinai, it doesn’t any longer fear the loss of part of itself to a powerful neighbour. 

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.

Muscat's Matra marina - into and out of the blue

Matra, or Mutra, is a 20 minute drive from the centre of Muscat, Oman. Being there just for an afternoon made me feel like a tourist in the Middle East again for the first time since we spent New Year’s Eve 1999 in Tunis. 

Bright blue sky in early February, like an imagined perfect European summer’s day. I strolled along the corniche, stopping periodically to drink in the view. The best part was climbing up coastal watchtowers, or just gazing, transcendent, into the milky white foam as the waves lapped at the shore. Behind me were the dark hills that dominate Muscat, reminiscent, in part, of the Northern Emirates, which used to be Oman anyway, but I have never seen a coastline like this in the Gulf. I mused on past ship journeys as a luxury cruise liner came into view. 

My first ever ship’s journey was more an open-top ferry, carrying me to the overly promised land. My first entry to the region was through the prism of Israel before I hitched to Syria, or at least, unbeknownst to me at the time, that Israeli occupied strip of Syria otherwise known as the Golan Heights. Bowie and Pat Metheny were performing their then current smash, “This is Not America”, on Israel Army Radio in the first vehicle I got into in Haifa. "Nir?" a woman I got chatting to hoped my name was. Her son’s name apparently. No, sorry, its Nee-illl. Oh, she said, disappointed that I was obviously just another goy boy, washed up on any Mediterranean shore that would serve me cheap booze and free love. I certainly went on to drink the kibbutz’ subsidised booze.

My mind blanked again, I wish it had stayed that way, just gazing at the white Omani foam, as the preoccupations of a research trip ebbed away and I felt able to experience the environment. Not the scribbling down of other people’s wisdom, or the aroma of hotel coffee, or the nervous plotting of taxi journeys, or the haggling over fares, or even, sometimes, the renegotiation of apparently agreed fares. Just experiencing; alone, but for the water and the rocks. 

I didn’t want to walk back along the corniche because I knew that that mean the end of the escape. One crow, then several, perched themselves right next to me as I was looking out to sea. One eyed me cautiously, as I did I it. All I could think of was "The Omen" and other tales of the demon bird’s love of eye balls. Obviously a sought after delicacy in the avian world. I decided to meander a bit further long before turning back to town. What I had presumed from a distance to be stray cats playing ahead of me were in fact stray puppies. I had hoped to get among their "unclean" ambiance but they backed away, resentfully.

Back along the path into town I spotted some more of the dying butterflies I had seen earlier. I strange and depressing sight. I do not know what constitutes a butterfly season in Oman, but this one seemed over a little early to me.

A busy day of meetings today after a night of fitful sleep, partly affected by car park revelers as the nightly disco here goes on to 3am. I asked for a room far away from the disco, so I shouldn’t complain. Maybe I should have been at the disco. I get the feeling it would largely be populated by Asian prostitutes, German tourists and the odd curious local. I have seen this movie before. Tomorrow it’s back to storm-damaged Blighty. A mixed bag to contemplate.

The UAE highway to heaven and to hell

This time round, returning to the UAE, our former home, has been an emotional experience, redolent of both the torpor and the pleasure I felt when living here. My research-related meetings have mostly been very useful; and reacquainting myself with some familiar local faces has been very enjoyable. I have also made one key break with the past: I finally took to the road under my own steam. Viewing a fairly large swathe of the northern Emirates when you are driving is a wholly different experience to that of the usual visitor. Normally I bottle it when it comes to driving anywhere in the Gulf, having become inured but not insensitive to the hair-raising escapades of taxi drivers in this part of the world. Did I want really want these guys up my arse (as it were), lights-a-flashing? What is still heavily frowned upon in the UK is perfectly normal driving practice out here. In the end hiring a car became a test of my mettle.

A planned day in Al-Ain at the UAE University had in any case fallen through as a member of the academic staff there apparently decided that he no longer wished to see me but somehow could not summon up the good grace to tell me. Two emails, an attempted phone call and a text seeking to confirm our provisional arrangement brought exactly zero response. I sincerely hope that the next time he tries to arrange a meeting with someone in Britain that they go out of their way to show him the same level of respect.

However Al-Ain’s loss was eastern Sharjah and Fujeirah’s gain. After a while I entered the appropriately named "Wadi Helo", or rather it would be appropriate if the sign writer thought this place was called “Greetings Gorge”. 

The Arabic actually, more or less, means “beautiful gorge” and beautiful it is. This place is a minor (almost) undiscovered gem on the Sharjah-Kalba road. It did lack the more obvious tourist-friendly feature of a café. In fact the only shop in a brand new building designed to house three units did not seem to be used to visitors of any kind. 

Leaving the wadi I drove along incredible twisting roads and, literally, through dark, foreboding, mountains. Going through a tunnel I was reminded both of Dartford and of a transcendent scene from Tarkovsky’s film “Solaris”. From relative darkness and monotony, I emerged into a different world. The damp, shadowy rocks had been turned black by the storm-heavy clouds that in seconds had dominated the horizon.

   

Soon I was in the emirate of Fujeirah, where one very early summer morning we had once hiked up the mountains. However I had always wanted to know that Fujeirah the city was like. I wasn’t disappointed. It really is as awful as I’d imagined, a bit like the less appealing parts of Sharjah proper. One central drag, and, on either side, one tacky-looking poor apology for a Dubai sky scraper after another. The corniche, while not long, is nice enough. It was there that I encountered two guys from the Damascus suburbs, one of whom had had trained in Fujeirah to be a pilot (civilian), but, as he reminded me, this modest emirate lacks an airline to go with its international airport.

On my way back into Dubai in the rush hour, the absurdly false sense of security I had begun to acquire about driving in the UAE hit me like a sledgehammer. This was the most adult driving experience I had ever had. Overtaken on all sides and having to take serious risks in a relatively small and slow car to get on to exits because people not only don’t let you in, but they accelerate toward you when you’re trying to get into their lane. Part of me really enjoyed the thrill of dodgems for grown ups, part of me assumed that my opting for only third party insurance (let alone no health insurance) had been a definite mistake.           

The next day it was with considerable sadness that I left my friends and their beautiful beach-side villa in Dubai to get on the plane to Doha. Whilst this time not slumming it, as is my usual want, my middling but good value Mercure hotel in Musherib is conveniently located next to an enormous building site (of which there are many in a Qatar fast tracking diversification on the back of gas riches). A room with a view indeed. This was sunset as seen from my balcony on Wednesday evening.

My meetings (the actual purpose of my visit) have been pretty thin here, in part as Qataris seem to have taken an informal (and out of character) vow of silence in the face of increasing intra-Gulf tensions over events in Egypt.

A visit to the branch of Georgetown University in Doha reminded me of a sight I had seen when teaching a few years back in Sharjah (see picture below). It seem as if Israeli penetration of the Gulf states really is as deep as some of their Arab detractors claim.