66.66

My parents, Esther and Arthur Dodd, both taught maths. Although I never studied maths beyond O-Levels, I have always taken pleasure in the beauty of numbers – and mathematics and music, of course, have a great symbiotic relationship. I am very fond of and the Golden Number, the Fibonacci sequence and palindromic numbers and dates (20:02 on 20/02/2002 was a personal highlight). So rather than commemorate a ‘significant’ birthday, I thought it would be more fun to celebrate a beautiful palindromic number.

On Thursday 25th July 2024 I turned 66.66 RECURRING , or two thirds of a century. And since 2024 is a leap year I could specifically divide those 366 days by ⅔ . I decided to mark it with a selection of my writings from the age of six onwards, including books, journalism, lyrics, copywriting, essays, poems, limericks, speeches and one-liners... An anthology if you like: a word from the Greek word for a ‘flower-gathering’, so herewith a fragrant – I hope –bouquet including, alongside my favourite freesias, some lexical lilies, textual tulips, verbal violets, poetic peonies and maybe even a few rhetorical roses...

There’s an extremely good reason why the earliest, youthful works of writers, artists and composers are known as juvenilia : they are usually and embarrassingly juvenile in the extreme and – ooh, here’s a couple of very good words – jejune and inchoate. I can precisely date my first attempt at writing a book, thanks to my mother carefully preserving a biography of Winston Churchill that I published in February 1965, aged seven, while at Rushmere Hall Primary School in Ipswich. The great man had just died and I produced a book(let) complete with chapters, photos and captions. The die was cast. Throughout my early years and teens, I created family-only newsletters and magazines. Sadly, my mother never kept any issues of the BLE (short for Barjac Lot Expedition ) Journal , dedicated entirely to summer visits to our favourite campsite in the Lozère department of France, including one thunderously incandescent editorial about the decision not to go back there one year... I’ve also included some lyrics for my teenage rock band, Fritz, and, thankfully for all concerned, only a very few poems.

My earliest extant piece of writing, Class 1 at Rushmere Hall Primary School, Ipswich. Movie rights are available, although the Native American nations might not be too thrilled. And below, my first ever press cutting (it was a clearly a slow news day at the Ipswich Evening Star that January of 1963.

Again from Rushmere Hall School, a piece about a solo piano competition in 1964. The adjudicator, Kathleen Long, I have since discovered, was an extremely talented pianist, who’d studied with Ravel and taught Imogen Holst. She was clearly a woman of huge discernment.

RUSHMERE HALL PRIMARY SCHOOL, IPSWICH

Once upon a time there was a squirrel Marcetety. Now Marcetety was 19 and very big for his age. He wanted to marry a squirrel called Dainmayter who was very pretty. Marcetety wanted to be a traveller and he made up his mind to be one. He waited till the next year then he went to her house singing this song I am a traveller. I am going to cowboy land. I will hear them singing yippy yippy yand. Wagy wand. Or shall I go to Venice. And came to the bottom of Italy (that was where he lived) where he saw a boat going to America. So he payed 1/9 to go on the ship. They sailed for 4 nights and 5 days till they came to America. Then Marcetety hoped of the ship not knowing there were natives lurking there. Soon he saw a band of horrible natives coming towards him with knifes and spears. He was looking so much at the natives that he did not see one sneaking up behind him with a knife in his hand. Then bang he fell to the ground. He was dead. So that was the end of the famous traveller.

The Music Festival

On Wednesday the 6th of May I went to the Suffolk Music Festival at Bury St Edmunds. It was at a school in Grove Road called St Edmundsbury School. There was 16 children in my group. We were playing Hurdy Gurdy. We each had our turn at playing on the piano. Everyone clapped when we got off the stool. At the end of it a lady called Mrs Kathleen Long came up to tell us how many marks we had got. She was the Adjudicator. She said two girls names then she said there’s another little girl but I cant find her name. Oh no it’s a boy Philip Dodd. What a surprise I had when she said it. So after it I went to get my Certificate.

Written shortly after the great man’s funeral. My little book had a cover – I’m glad to see I added the obligatory author credit! –chapters, page numbers, and picture captions.

The Story Of Winston Spencer Churchill 1874-1965

Chapter 5: Inbetween The Two Wars

Churchill was the Chancellor of the Exchequer for a few years. But he was an ordinary M.P. for most of the time. When King Edward VIII wanted to marry Mrs Simpson and give up his throne, Sir Winston was on the Kings side. Sir Winston went round telling people that Hitler the German leader was going to start another war, some people belived him but some people didn’t belive him. Winston was right, another war started in 1939.

ROYAL GRAMMAR SCHOOL, HIGH WYCOMBE

A Visit To My Grandparents JANUARY 1971

I walked up the small paved path in the small front garden of a house in Cardiff. To my right was a park, for the Avenue was a cul-de-sac and at the end was the park gate. The Avenue ran down the hill straight from the gate to the main road which led to the centre. I knocked at the door and a few minutes later my father’s parents had rushed me inside their house with all the customary greetings. As soon as I entered I could smell the air polluted by my grandfather’s cigarettes. My father and I had arrived just before lunch, so a meal was hastily prepared.

While the four of us sat round the table eating tongue, my grandmother recounted the news of my uncles and families, in a soft Welsh accent. My grandfather didn’t say much, partly because he is stone deaf in his left ear, and also because we weren’t talking about the Welsh national sport – rugby. While my grandmother washed up with my Dad, I talked to him about the sport, and he took interest at once. He told me all about his adventures – how he broke his collar-bone in an Army game and was carried off in agony, or how they played

in such muddy conditions one day, that they jumped in an adjoining swimming pool at half-time!? His one other great hobby is jigsaws – round ones, square ones, long ones, old ones, historic ones, massive ones – and so we settled done to try and finish a round jigsaw before I left. We did.

My grandmother came bustling into the room, rosy and sparkling but rather thin, and we set off shopping, for although they are almost 90, they still manage to get out and about, maintain a very large house (four bedrooms) for them, and as my grandfather said during a game, “Not many men of eighty can still play cricket”. That is the difference, I think, because normally old people are cooped up and never go out at all.

After shopping we settled down to watch their television, and one of my uncles, who still lives in Cardiff, visited us. Everything was cosy, cheerful and friendly, and that night I relaxed in plush rich blankets and a wonderfully soft mattress and stared up into the dark sky through the window.

In Thompson’s Park, Cardiff, with my father, brother Andrew, my grandparents, Auntie Margaret & cousins Catherine and Ian

Recollections Of Early Childhood MOCK O LEVEL

ENGLISH LANGUAGE, JANUARY 1973

I look back on my early childhood with a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction; my recollections appear to me like scenes captured by a Victorian photographer – slightly out of focus at the edges. The first years of my life were spent in the pleasant atmosphere of an East Anglian county town, and the things I remember are the countryside – we lived on the very outskirts of this town – and the nearby sea.

The smell of hay under a hot sun, the butterflies flitting among the prolific abundance of flowers are some of my fondest memories. Perhaps we might chance upon a slow and stately stream where tadpoles could be caught by the dozen and grown at home before being released. And always the sun shone, or seemed to shine forever, whether it was on fields burnt to stubble after a harvest, or just onto the garden where many happy hours were spent.

There were frequent trips to the seaside, ten or so miles away, and the two rivers nearby. These were something not to be missed: the flutter of sails, the waves lapping at the bank, sailors mending their boats and everywhere bustling with activity, just as when Arthur Ransome wrote about the very same place in the 1930s.

But my best recollection is of a visit to a place called Johnny-All-Alone. It is not so much a definite spot as an enigmatic area on a map. After a fairly long walk and once over a dyke it was like a paradise. No humans were to be seen, no sounds to be heard other than those of the birds. A slight breeze blew over the myriad of small islands in the bay and the smell of the river, the mud and the salt from the sea were quite overpowering. On a recent visit, I returned to the spot after ten years, wondering if it would be different, but it was just the same, as timeless as a place can be.

By chance a couple of years later, as part of Oxbridge entrance preparation, I was set this essay title, ‘Childhood is a time of horror not of bliss’.

Not all my recollections are happy, although I wish they were. My first day at school, when I refused to enter of my own free will and then did not want to leave because I had discovered a sandpit, is one I prefer to forget. The time I crossed the road on an icy day and woke up in an ambulance, my two small boots beside me, is another. But of course, one cannot expect life to be a long strong of happiness; it has its ups and downs and one must take it as it comes.

So these are some of my early childhood recollections, the best of my life other than a few idyllic days in a small village in the South of France. Strange to say, the farthest back that I can remember is not a walk in the countryside, not a sail on a yacht on the River Deben, not even those peaceful hours at Johnny-All-Alone, but in the house where I was born, when I was standing in the living-room and looking out through the French windows on to the well-kept flowerbeds flourishing under, of course, a shining sun high in the clear blue sky. I would change my early childhood for nothing in the world and hope to remember it fondly for many years to come.

It is rare for an author to admit that childhood is painful, is traumatic (and is a wonderful time of life too). I can remember vividly many painful events of my younger days, particularly when faced with an impersonal world I could not comprehend and which did not seem to understand me or my needs. Everything was enlarged, blown up to a distorted degree and in this almost unreal, fantasy world I found myself bouncing like a rubber ball, hitting walls of new experience and floors of new attitudes. Sometimes I absorbed the shock with an inherent resilience, yet at times I reeled staggering from the blow.

For some reason we took ‘World Studies’ rather than History and Geography. This was part of the coursework. I’m glad to say I credited the cartoonist who drew the schoolboy Marx: Richard Yeend, who is still active in graphic novels

The Teenage Revolutionaries: May 1968

WORLD STUDIES PROJECT, 1973

The sight of schoolchildren, let alone students and workers, revolting is a phenomenon to make any government tremble, because it is a rejection by the rising generation of the political institutions and values of its parents.

May 1968 was the first time in history that schoolchildren had picketed, gone on strike and occupied their schools. Workers had revolted, so had students, but never teenage school children. If the leaders of the young rebels were in their twenties, then the ‘infantry’ mainly came from schools – the lycées of Paris. The revolutionary ideas of May captured thousands of teenagers in a way that had never happened before in any other European country.

Fifteen-year-old boys became leaders of the pupils: needing to be able to think on their feet; to be excellent orators; to chair a debate; to control an angry mob and to be expert military technicians. For the world of student politics at that time was a savage place to be and to survive called for great skills and talents. Surprisingly, perhaps, the youths had these gifts and used them to great effect.

The children’s parents were slow to realise what was happening to little Pierre or Marie; they imagined that their children were bent over their homework, working towards the fearsome baccalauréat exam, instead of being rebels. One mother of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl cried in horror, “I thought it was a club!” when she learnt that her daughter had been a revolutionary Communist for six months.

With apologies, here’s some poetry – ‘The Trees Flew Too High’ did appear in an issue of The Wycombiensian, the magazine of the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. There was a (very minor) outcry when the follow-up, ‘These Same Fingers’, now sadly lost, was banned by the teacher in charge.

PAPILLON

Miss Papillon, please hold still a little longer

Swaying in a breeze

I want to catch you and keep you

Before you flit off

Among the arabis and the sweet williams

But you never stay

Never rest awhile to let me watch

Or memorise your markings

Gold on blue on aquamarine on crimson

A moving beauty

Swept onto someone else’s flowers

SOMEWHERE A LOVE-SONG SINGS

Somewhere a love-song sings

Drifting turning hanging

In honeysuckle-scented air

Cool on closed eyes

The melody lingers

As I run my fingers through your hair

UNTITLED

lift that child to your lips

mister music man, rip the sky with that firework phrase –the Asymmetrical Abracadabra

THE TREES FLEW TOO HIGH

The trees flew too high – even the lowest branches escaped my grasp as the wind stole them away

As I sat

wondering what went wrong a dove, grey as winter fell to the ground and lay stunned Its tiny heart beating so fierce its fragile frame must surely burst

Later, it died, slipped from its grasp on life and I felt a new halo replace my old and rusty one – I picked the nearest cloud and stepped aboard.

APHRODITE, WHEN YOU SMILE

Aphrodite, when you smile A thousand angels glide me by On heady clouds of charm And sweep my senses spinning to distant shores Of magic lakes –I stand disarmed Stay close, and smile some more.

I am eternally grateful to my dear friend Frédérique Bavouzet, who played me ‘Money’ off Dark Side Of The Moon one hot afternoon in Pierrefiche, near Barjac, in the summer of 1973. I went back to school that autumn and immediately formed a band. A few versions later came Fritz, a High Wycombe supergroup: my school friend Dave Suckling and I worked on Saturdays in Percy Prior’s music shop and so were able to ‘audition’ all the local kids and handpick our drummer, bassist and stonkingly good lead guitarist Chris Dennis

WET ROADS HOME NOVEMBER 1974

Another sleepless night

In another roadside town

One-night stands are all I’ve got

And they’re really getting me down

Working for a quid or two

Never knowing what to do

I’ve been on the road for far too long

I think it’s time that I was gone

I’m gonna to take those Wet Roads Home

To the place where I should stay

Gonna take those Wet Roads Home

Get down wanderin’ days

Living out of dustbins

Grubbing round the streets

Been sleeping in cold doorways

And now I’ve got cold feet

I thought I was gonna be free

Never guessed how it would be

I’m gonna turn my footsteps back

Go and get the things I lack

HAPPY VALLEY JANUARY 1976

I got booked for walking loose

On the streets with no excuse They took my name and sent me on The game was up, my lines were gone So set me up a triple too ‘Cause I’m just back from Xanadu

What’s the racket? What’s the reason?

Should I come here out of season?

Find the exit, make a dash

Pay the fines in ready cash

Oh Arnie, you’re waiting

You’ll get that money back

When the Happy Valley starts to crack

The faceless crowd peers through the glass

I’m out of breath, I think I’ll pass

And ask the man who made the deal He says that nothing is for real So give me back my two-way plan I’ve had enough of Superman

We took the route along the coast

Told the guests to lose their host And headed off into the night

A mirrorful of flashing lights

So let me go to Santa Fe

I’ll be a hero for a day

I’ve never been very good at conforming. Maybe my Methodist baptism left its mark, but I have always been doggedly averse to obediently following rules, regulations and other people’s orders. I instinctively tend to do the opposite, or more often simply create my own thing from scratch. So when I went up to Jesus College, Oxford to read French and Spanish, and discovered there was a university magazine, Isis, established in 1892, I simply decided in my first summer break to take Isis head on. And so vague , based in particular on Andy Warhol’s Interview, was born: vague but with style, we thought, or like Vogue but a lot less focused. I learned a lot, mainly through the mistakes, and still use all that experience today. In 1980 we picked up a Guardian National Student press award, and many Vague staffers went on to careers in journalism and advertising. We were mainly state school kids, so we took great delight when Vague became the darling of the Christ Church & Bullingdon Club chaps and chapesses.

Before Vague , there was Intone , which I set up in the summer of 1977, as an all-music magazine, covering every genre of music. It lasted one issue before Vague took over my life.

INTONE Performance Reviews

Summer is distinctly present. Eights Week was a bonanza, and something of that carefree, relaxed, joyous atmosphere was retained in Jesus Second Quad during 6th Week. What I did hear loud and clear was the Oxcentrics’ performance. Somehow they’d always avoided being in the same place at the same time as me, moving one step ahead of my vain attempts to see them. The wait was worth it. Surely I must be one of the last to get to hear this troupe of performing minstrels who live by two creeds: STYLE and SHOWMANSHIP. Every move, every note, every solo had a stamp of class that was almost uncanny. Made great by the pure WHACKINESS of their fez-topped, be-sunglassed (?) singer/composer/water pistol marksman.

Jazz: Midnight Ramblings

I was originally going to write about Art Tatum, but it all proved too complicated. What does it mean to the man in the quad to read that ‘listening to the devastating accuracy of his runs and arpeggios, it is difficult to imagine anyone, even sighted, having the ability to control their fingers with such precision’. Tatum was blind, a genius, the greatest ever... Fats Waller was playing a club in Chicago when in strolled Tatum. Waller stopped in mid-flow and announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I play piano, but God is in the house tonight.’ God Is In The House is the title of a superb compilation of songs recorded ‘after hours’ in New York bars in the 40s, which Tatum frequented; informal, amongst his fellow musicians, his talent shines so bright, it hurts your eyes.

Extracts from Vague, which came out seasonally: the first issue was Winter 77/78, the last appeared in Winter 1981. The logo was essentially my handwritten version of the title...A Visit To My Grandpa

VAGUE

Super d’Huppert SUMMER 78

My old history master used to tell us, with the sort of gleeful regularity that suggested a traumatic experience in Montmartre, that the French had not won a major battle since before Waterloo. However on a good day, he would admit that France had, once in a while, produced some ‘great men’. A race of extremes, the French. Maybe it’s something to do with the geography of the place, stretching out between Northern phlegmatism and Mediterranean choler, a mixture of humours which has created a people capable of gross ineptitude and flashes of blinding genius, but seemingly nothing inbetween. The same goes for their cinema.

You might remember this year’s Eurovision Song Contest from Paris (so you did watch it after all!), in which case you will recall Terry Wogan’s wistful observations on the French technicians – lounging backstage, unshaven, flicking their Gauloises at the oncoming Eurostars. Much the same kind of professional attitude pervades most French films: under the impressive title of ‘cinéma vérité’, film-makers set up the cameras, leave them rolling and record an incredibly dull day in the dull life of a Parisian nobody. In the Godard film Weekend most of the first half hour consists of a couple driving past the French equivalent of a Bank Holiday traffic jam, past car after car after car... probably great art but BORING.

Wait, though, there’s hope in sight. Three young French actresses have been spearheading a determined attack. In the last few months we have been blessed with Isabelle Adjani in The Story Of Adèle H and Marie-France Pisier in Cousin, Cousine and Céline And Julie Go Boating. But best of all, and with the most tantalising promise is Isabelle Huppert.

The storyline of the Claude Goretta film The Lacemaker concerns a passive hairdresser’s assistant who leads an extremely dull life, as sterile as her coiffeuse’s gown. Huppert as the pathetic Pomme managed to create a success for the film in the US usually only granted to Sensurround epics containing UFOs, sharks and blowjobs. And she was billed above the film’s title, an honour even in Hollywood. “Je ne comprends pas les choses difficiles,” whimpers

Huppert alias Pomme, after a party held in the flat of her boyfriend, a Parisian student she meets on holiday at (yes, you guessed it) an incredibly dull Northern French resort. At first he seems to offer her so much, but his world is so far removed from hers that she never has any chance to reach it. At Gerard’s parents she is sick; when he and his friends are discussing Marx, she whispers, “Qu’est-ce que c’est la dialectique?” Her remark falls on deaf ears, and the affair falls on stony ground.

Throughout Isabelle Huppert presents us with an inscrutable face; she gives nothing away; and in the last scene, sitting blankly in the recreation room of the sanatorium she has finally ended up in, her eyes look as steadily into nothingness as they have always done. It is a disturbing, tragic, but above all a gripping performance.

Even better than all this is the news that somewhere in France they are making a new film on the lives of the Brontë sisters. And the stars? Isabelle Adjani (Emily), Marie-France Pisier (Charlotte) and Isabelle Huppert (Anne). Magnifique. Yet one small doubt remains. Anne was the quiet one who died. If Isabelle Huppert is going to get typecast as the wideeyed virgin, an image which in real life she definitely does not project (she recently told an interviewer that she was off to France to “murder her mother and father”) then we might just lose another genuine talent to commercialism.

Ronnie Scott SUMMER 78

Frith Street W1 – on the fringes of Soho’s seedy debauchery, it rides above vulgarity by keeping an aura worth of Milleresque Montmartre: a sensual glow more inviting than repellent. A milieu perfect as a backdrop for jazz. It’s also the home of Ronnie Scott’s, now one of the chic nightspots in town, no longer just a meeting place for ardent jazz freaks. The decor looks plush, at least from what I can see; well, Princess Margaret has been known to drop in once in a while. I’d like to get a better look but the bouncer doesn’t seem to believe I’ve got an interview fixed up with his boss. Somehow the clientele dressed to kill, the slick lighting and the smoothly gleaming staff seem out of keeping with the honesty and adventure of jazz music. Plus I’ve only ever seen Ronnie Scott from on the other side of the footlights, and folk tell me he does not suffer fools (ie interviewers) gladly. I’m getting uneasy.

He saunters out, totally at home but at variance with the surroundings. It’s reassuring to see somebody else wearing denims. He’s very cool, his humour very dry. On first impression a jazz cat in the old style... until I met him I thought people stopped saying ‘the bee’s knees’ when they put the zoot suits back in the wardrobe. Ensconced in his dressing room, drinks at hand, fan whirring in the corner and Carmen McRae’s backing band warming up out in the club, it’s a bit more like the atmosphere of the twenty-five pounds a week Gerrard Street basement – I knew the landlord and we rented it. We just painted it and bought an old piano and some chairs down from the East End.

Kennedy SUMMER 79

Nick Newman, stalwart friend and writing partner of Ian Hislop, was one of Vague ’s first cartoonists.

Washington wits will tell you that Senator Edward Kennedy rings his family every week. Just to let them know he hasn’t been shot. It may be an apocryphal story, but it illustrates a fear that may well dissuade him from running for President in 1980.

He has baulked at the gate three times already, and guessing what he’ll do this time is currently America’s most popular indoor sport, due to a growing belief that a decisive rift has grown between this last surviving Kennedy brother and the incumbent President. Relations between the two have become more and more stormy – one of Carter’s close advisers has colourfully declared that “Jimmy’s had a bellyful of Kennedy”.

Pierre Salinger suggests we play it cool though. He should know: long time associate and friend of all three Kennedy brothers, his is the definitive opinion on anything that concerns them. Befriended by Bobby Kennedy at the end of the 50s (“he put organisation and motivation into my life”), Salinger went on to hold down the key job of Press Secretary to JFK during his White House residency. After a brief spell as Democratic Senator for California, he returned to journalism: first to the French weekly L’Express, then ABC-TV in Paris, where I met him to try and clarify the Ted Kennedy situation. Unashamedly partisan and fully aware of his debt to the Kennedys (a connection he calls “one hell of a calling card”), he is nonetheless able to rely on an objective journalistic temperament. This, with his inside knowledge, makes his views indispensable.

Pierre Salinger believes that Ted Kennedy won’t run. “If I were a betting man I’d say he’d not be a candidate in 1980. I assume that Carter will be a candidate to re-elect himself, unless some tragedy overtakes him that you can’t see in advance.” 84? “Ever since the events of 63 and 68 I hate to think that far ahead – it would seem logical that he might be a candidate in 84, but where the hell will we all be, where will the world be in 1984?”

Whereas most interviews for Vague were secured by good old patient and persistent coldcalling, the one with Peter Grimsditch, the launch editor of the Daily Star , was via the Lycée J.P. Timbaud in Brétigny-sur-Orge just southeast of Paris, where I was an English assistant for the 1978-79 school year. One of the staff there surprised me when she told me that her brother-in-law was a newspaper editor in the UK, but indeed he was.

We knew we were doing something right when Tributary , one of the other Oxford magazines started taking the mick...

Star Quality AUTUMN 79

Peter Grimsditch, editor of the Daily Star , is on the phone discussing a particularly newsworthy young lady –“the fact that she’s blond, pretty and has big tits never entered my mind.” I can’t help remembering the quote credited to Express editor Derek Jamieson on the occasion of the Star’s first issue, a year ago this November: “It’ll be all tits, bums, QPR and roll your own fags.” Whether Jamieson ever uttered those words or not, Peter Grimsditch would probably not disagree with them as a summary of the initial issues. “For the first three months,” he says, “We varied between the quite interesting and the bloody awful... We used every sex and rape case available.”

Mind you, he and his staff had only five weeks in which to transform an idea on a memorandum into a functional daily paper – the first few weeks were little more than a glorified dummy run. It is unfortunate that many people only recall those early copies, in which the Star joined battle with the Sun in the bloody War of the Boobs, a conflict finally clinched by the Star with its secret weapon, the weekly full-page, full-colour Starbird. There is more to the Manchester-based paper than bristols. Peter Grimsditch cites a simple rule of thumb: “Cheer them up on the right-hand page, tell them what’s happening on the left.”

Recently he has been concentrating on the left-hand page: a five-month campaign against the torture of animals in Research Centre has been pursued with rigid determination. “What possible good does it do anyone to pump cleaning fluid through a sheep’s veins? I will not give up,” he says, and this time he’s not joking.

That neatly pre-empts my next question. What’s a nice Oriel graduate doing running the country’s most tabloid tabloid? “You know, I would say you have to be as good, if not a better journalist to put together a tabloid than the Times.” In addition, and perhaps more importantly, “I am the freest national daily editor in the land.”

Amazingly, somewhere between Intone, Vague, the Philip Dodd Quartet, rowing for the Jesus 2nd VIII, being on the Ball Committee and generally having a good time, I did actually do some academic work... Here’s the start of an essay on François Mauriac from November 1979, in my final year – nice use of the pluperfect subjunctive by Mauriac in one of the quotes.

Discuss the role of Catholicism in the work of François Mauriac

François Mauriac was born a Catholic. As he points out in ‘Dieu et Mammon’, there are many who quit that faith almost immediately; but for Mauriac it was an integral, indestructible element in his personality, in the fabric of his life. “Pour moi,” he writes, “j’appartiens à la race de ceux qui, nés dans le catholicisme, ont compris, à peine l’âge d’homme atteint, qu’ils ne pourraient jamais plus s’en évader.”

That Mauriac did not undergo a conversion is important. (One cannot really see the crisis of confidence he experienced at the end of the 1920s and its subsequent resolution as a conversion within the faith – more a reaffirmation.) It is important because he did not feel the need to indulge in the didacticism and evangelical ranting that so often accompanies a sudden conversion, although the tendency to ‘édifier’ is one of the major problems that a Catholic writer must try to overcome. Rather, the solid foundation of Catholicism, of which Mauriac was continually aware, and to which he realised he was forever bound (“fuir [l’Eglise] c’eût été aussi fou que de prétendre changer de planète”) allowed him to question it.

It is possible to elicit Mauriac’s awareness of the difficulties of writing as a determined Catholic from his three illuminating essays – but however aware he was, he found it difficult to resolve the central problem: that the vocation of writer clashes with that of the Catholic, the one dealing with corrupt humanity and the gamut of human passions, the other with the revealed truth of the Catholic faith. Or as Stratford suggests, “the problem... was how to introduce Grace into his fallen fictional universe without quitting reality.”

This is intimately bound up with the problems of the novelist per se. Since Mauriac does not want to manipulate his characters by having Grace clumsily intervene. Indeed as he stresses in ‘Le Roman’, he respects their individuality. Promoting as an example the work of Dostoevsky, he insists that a writer should avoid imposing a ‘passion dominante’ on his characters and instead seek to reveal “l’illogisme, l’indétermination, la complexité des êtres vivants”, an idea he picks up again in ‘Dieu et Mammon’ – “l’ambition du romancier moderne est en effet d’appréhender l’homme tout entier avec ses contradictions et avec ses remous.” But the problems in achieving that are manifold.

Mei Mae & Wan Mae at Malagar, François Mauriac’s house in the Gironde.

Ian Irvine, who was Arts Editor on Vogue , asked me in the summer after finals to write a piece for the magazine. it never got published in the end, but I still like it...

Letter from Oxford

This year I spent the whole long and sullen summer in Oxford. It is a strangely unnerving existence. The quads, which in June were seething with the euphoria of post-Finals celebrations, have emptied. And into the vacuum created by the undergraduate diaspora (overland by Magic Bus to Ithaca, most likely) swarm persistent droves of tourists and foreign language students. For three months the Cornmarket is more like the Casbah.

The city is in a state of siege. An atmosphere of intense camaraderie, reminiscent of Rorke’s Drift, grows up amongst those of us left behind, a thin red (or dark blue) line of survivors clustering in the GCR and wondering if the beleaguered college buildings will hold out against the onslaught from across the channel.

A beautiful shot of the wisteria in the Second Quad of Jesus College, taken by Bev Saunders, who is the wife of the Principal, Sir Nigel Shadbolt. I spent my final year on Second Quad in a suite of rooms which, appropriately for this book, were Staircase 6, Room 6, or 6.6.

The only way to stay sane is to remember that, come October, all will return to normal. Three thousand new students will have the effect of a plasma transfusion, revitalising the city. For life in Oxford repeats itself with the unhurried, unbroken rhythm of an undergraduate cycling up Norham Gardens.

Each year is immutably fixed in the tradition of the last six hundred years. There is a basic fabric which never changes, a background against which faces, names, types and characters become indistinguishable, swathed in the anonymity of sub-fusc. After a sabbatical year in Paris (a garden of delight equally overgrown with myth and preconception) I returned to Oxford for my final year anticipating a feeling of alienation. On the contrary, it was as if time had stood still and my year off had never existed. I stepped out of the Tardis and straight back into the routine.

But there is change. Last October almost all the remaining single-sex colleges accepted a mixed intake. This denial of the past was enough to make any self-respecting Oriel don choke on his after-dinner glass of port. The idea of women at Keble was inconceivable, the prospect of men at LMH simply preposterous. Yet the Apocalypse did not arrive. The Gods outside the Sheldonian did not weep as they had done for Zuleika Dobson. Life carried on as before.

Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer, told me that the Floyd never threw anything away, any noodlings in the studio could find another life. That was true of the photographs I took of Helen Mirren for the first issue of Vague in 1978. When in 2007 it was pretty obvious she was a shoo-in for Best Actress Oscar for The Queen , I knew exactly where the grainy black and white negs were. My agent at the time, Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown, got a deal with The Mail On Sunday if I could produce 1500 words in 48 hours, so I did (with invaluable input from Christine Whelan, now Michael, who’d done the original interview with me in 1977). Here’s the text that ran in the paper the following Sunday. Moral: never throw anything important away. It’s just knowing what’s important that’s the tricky bit .

‘Soho tart Helen Mirren awaiting her next client!’

MAIL ON SUNDAY 4TH MARCH 2007

Helen Mirren emerged from the bedroom wearing an iridescent silk kimono. She hesitated for a moment, then sighed. ‘No, no, this won’t do. I can’t think what to wear.’ She disappeared back into the shadows. When she sauntered out again, she was wearing black, pencil-seamed stockings, dominatrix-style black platforms and a tan mac – what used to be called a dirty old man’s coat. Her hair was scraped severely back from her forehead. She gave me a level gaze and announced: ‘Soho tart Helen Mirren, awaiting her next client.’

It was January 1978. I was a 20-year-old student and enamoured of the actress, like most other young males of the era. But although this scene happened exactly as I’ve written, the reality (sadly for me) was not that of a callow youth being invited into the intimate boudoir of a sex symbol.

I was interviewing and photographing Helen for an Oxford magazine I’d recently set up called Vague. The staff liked to think it was a cross between some of the groovier publications around at the time –such as Andy Warhol’s Interview and Ritz, run by photographer David Bailey – or as close as we could cobble together on what seemed like a pocket-money budget.

For the launch issue, we wanted a hot list of interviewees. Mirren, then aged 33 and already a star, was right at the top of mine. Now that she is Dame Helen Mirren and has just won an Oscar for her role in The Queen, it’s easy to forget she was defiantly never an Establishment figure. Helen was an Essex girl who had spent time working on fairground attractions in Southend before making her stage debut playing the Egyptian queen in a 1965 production of Antony and Cleopatra.

But it was her portrayal of a raunchy, boozed-up singer in David Hare’s play Teeth ‘N’ Smiles in 1974 that had given her a profile in music papers such as Melody Maker. She had unsettling reddish hair and a sexuality that suited the decade: she was not afraid to strip on stage and was nicknamed ‘the Sex Queen of the RSC’.

Having obtained a telephone number for Helen’s agent, I rang it from the Jesus College phone booth, feeding liberal quantities of 10p pieces into the slot. I received an instant rebuff – no, Miss Mirren would not be interested in an interview for Vague.

I could hardly blame them. It must have seemed like an unnecessary waste of time for them even to consider the request.

But I had already learned a basic rule of reaching interview subjects: dogged persistence mixed with the right blend of respectful but not awestruck politeness paid off.

Over the following weeks I phoned the agency regularly to see if she had changed her mind. The answer was always no. Then one day I got lucky. Someone in the office, possibly a temp, told me: ‘Well, she couldn’t talk to you anyway. She’s at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford.’ I didn’t need any more help. With another bag of coins, I was on the line to the theatre.

‘Oh yes,’ a stagehand told me helpfully. ‘I’ll just go and get her.’ Seconds later, I was speaking to the actress. I didn’t even have to spend

too long persuading her to agree to the interview. ‘Of course I’d love to talk to you. Why don’t you come over to my flat in London?’ Helen said. Now that, as you can imagine, was what I called an invitation. However, any fantasies I might have been entertaining were quickly extinguished. Christine, my girlfriend at the time, also worked for Vague and insisted on coming with me to do the interview. She had a formidable personality and I didn’t dare argue.

On the day, the weather was menacing. As neither Christine nor I could drive, another friend, Kate, volunteered to take us to Helen’s flat in West London, instantly doubling my chaperone quota. Those ferocious, buffeting crossword you sometime get on the M40 were doing their damnedest to blow us off course. The rain was slanting down. We’d also heard that Helen had a reputation for being touch on vacuous journalists and we were feeling a little edgy.

When we reached her flat, she set us at ease immediately, opening the door with a broad smile. She had a welcoming, make-up-free face and was dressed in jeans and a jumper. She launched straight into a description of her household chores – she had spent the morning scrubbing the floors – and led us into the kitchen. The ground-floor flat where she lived with fashion photographer James Wedge felt bohemian, almost student-like: in the kitchen were a pine table, patterned mugs and an Indian print shawl thrown over a pew-like bench, with some folksy art on the walls.

She was flirtatious in the way that some performers can manage to flirt with anyone they meet, or rather make everyone – male or female – feel that have been gently flirted with. Mick Jagger, who I’ve met since, has the same effect. The presence of my girlfriend at the table was reminder enough that this was not for my personal benefit, but it was enjoyable just the same.

Helen talked openly for almost two hours, although there were few clues to her future career path. At that point, she was still a stage actress – she was doing her best to avoid television roles, thinking it would be like working in a factory. ‘It must be very soul-destroying,’ Helen told me, although she didn’t rule it out. ‘I’m very curious about all forms of theatre, and very curious about investigating them.’

Curiosity was a theme of the conversation. She related a story about working with director Peter Brook in Africa. During the tour, the company were in the Sahara when Helen noticed a rock with a ‘strange, dark hole’. Instinctively she stuck her finger into the hole, only for Peter Brook to snatch her finger away. ‘Don’t do it,’ he told her. ‘You don’t know what might be in there.’ For Helen, that summer up her personality. ‘I go rushing into situations where it would be much more sensible

to stay cool and reserved,’ she told me, explaining her love of the unexpected. ‘I remember once doing a performance of Macbeth at Stratford, which we did very, very dark. In the middle of the show, the computer went wrong. Every single light in the whole auditorium went on full blast and the stage was suddenly exposed in this extraordinary terrifying white light. And I thought, “Great!”’

She also talked about her approach to acting. Alec Guinness had been an early role model. His ability to take on a disguise had impressed her, but she said: ‘I don’t feel the same any more. I don’t like disguises at all now. I just like to find whatever the character is within myself. I try to find that, rather than just putting on lots of funny noses and hats.’ Or course she did eventually change her mind on this – hats in particular being a rather necessary accessory for her Oscar-winning performance.

As the interview came to an end she asked us about the new magazine. We said we wanted all our interview subjects to get involved in their own article. At this point I suggested she might want to help with the photos, and off she went to style herself. The idea of dressing up for the photos was Helen’s. She could have simply posed for a standard mug shot and packed us on our way. There was no need to her to make more than the minimum effort. But something had piqued her interest and she clearly had something in mind.

I shot the photos as she crouched below the kitchen table, only her kohled eyes visible (and what wonderful eyes), sitting demurely at the table, then jumping up on to it, giving a gentle flash of that mac. Her enthusiasm and generosity of spirit had presented us with a great lead interview for the magazine.

Before we left, I’d asked her about a quote from a journalist who had thought that she really wanted to be a busty movie queen rather than a theatre actress. ‘I’d much rather be a rock’n’roll star.’ she replied. Although cinema was not yet on the agenda, she was ambitious. Another story concerned her childhood in Southend. For a stage show she was dressed as a blackbird in black crepe, stuck in a pie, while some pudgy rival glittered as the princess. The six-year-old Mirren fumed, determined to be the princess.

The me, the session with Mirren offered a brief glimpse of the woman, clearly a transient moment. But when I saw the photos she’d allowed to be taken of herself last week, eating a burger, dressed in Christian Lacroix and with her freshly presented Oscar to had, it didn’t surprise me at all.

Long before she became the queen of the cinema, she was a funky, feisty rock’n’roll princess – and all the honours in the world haven’t taken that away.

After Oxford, I thought I’d breeze straight into working on magazines, but although a contact at IPC helped deliver some interviews, no job offers ensued. Then an ad for an editorial position at Vacation Work, a small specialist book publishing company in Oxford, offered a neat sidestep into a profession where I felt immediately at home, and I relished the longer, more considered gestation period of books – as opposed to the hurly-burly of daily newspapers or even monthly magazines. Moving to the august Longman Group, with its wonderful London office on Bentinck Street, complete with full-time chef, secured my commitment. I became Chairman of the SYP, the Society of Young Publishers, allowing me to pick up the phone to the great and the good of the book world (and to be a founder member of the Groucho Club). A year with the funkily creative book packager Campbell Rawkins provided a stepping-stone to Paul Hamlyn’s Octopus Group based in the glorious art deco Michelin Building, with its oyster bar, on Fulham Road, and thence to Virgin’s book division.

While I was at Longman, I became Chairman of the SYP, the Society of Young Publishers, founded in 1932, which represented publishing staff under 35. There were two great advantages for me: since Longman was based out in Harlow in Essex, I could get plugged into the London publishing scene, and as Chairman phone pretty well anyone in UK publishing, and beyond. I created new branding, with a logo featuring my very own squiggle, and revamped the magazine, Inprint , with a chance to pontificate in a monthly editorial and occasional articles.

SYP

Getting in shape FEBRUARY 1984

A new look magazine for this New SYP Year: change in style reflecting something of the mood prevailing in publishing at the start of 1984. ‘A damn good year for the future of books,’ wrote Publishing News, and the massed gurus and pundits of the profession nodded their assent.

Their predictions were cautiously optimistic, if not bullish and even buoyant. Aggressive marketing and selling techniques are bringing rewards in rising sales. And in the home computer boom, publishers are not just surviving, they are prospering.

Book sales were boosted by the new technology craze (computer titles started to outstrip cookery books) and the publishing industry showed alacrity and nerve in entering the volatile software market and establishing themselves as a solid and successful presence.

The general buoyancy is rightly tempered though by an awareness that there could be a shakedown in both software and computer books and there there are plenty of struggles left in the book market.

Survival of the fittest and the most resilient is still the order of the day. It is a pity that nearly all those wideranging training schemes run by publishing companies have disappeared at a time when breadth of experience is much needed.

Robert McCrum, the Editorial Director of Faber & Faber was, as one guest at that month’s meeting observed, the ‘cover star’ of the Oxtober 1984 issue.

Way back when, there was no such beast as the literary agent; publisher and author fought out their battles in close combat, a contest the publisher inevitably won. The agent came into being as a champion of the wordsmiths, using business and legal savvy to protect authors from greedy publishers... and were resented for butting in on a cozy relationship (cosy for the publisher, that is).

Nowadays, the three-cornered set-up is generally accepted, of course, but new tensions arise. The agent has become an accomplished powerbroker, able to jangle publishers’ nerves by including or excluding them from auctions for titles from major authors.

Publishers may also feel threatened as agents take on a substantial editorial role. Publishing companies have been forced to streamline their staff and editors have developed a tendency to chop and change houses – long gone are the times when Max Perkins worked for Scribner’s in New York for thirty-odd years. As a result, the agent is increasingly the most constant editorial factor.

The Jack Lang Show APRIL 1984

François Mitterand made it clear from the very start. “Socialism,” he said shortly after his presidential victory, “is first and foremost a cultural project.” Within a year of taking office, his government doubled the allowance for cultural activities (a bitter contrast to our own recent Arts Council cuts), and the man he chose to lead this cultural rebirth had already made a deep and lasting impact.

Minister of Culture Jack Lang is a flamboyant character. He has been described as a socialist in a pink jacket – a reference to his sartorial exuberance – and his image of a slightly jaded film star leads many to dismiss him as a Bohemian upstart.

He does little to help that image when he delivers the kind of rhetoric which might make even a South Bank Show

Nick Newman created some great cartoons for Inprint ,, including this one for a meeting about Instant Books, prompted by the birth of Prince Harry in September 1984. It was also a chance to feature work by the likes of Will Hill for the Annual Conference, Geoff Wingate on Science Fiction (previous page), Andrew McConville showing young publishers at play, as well as great photos by Chris Lawson.

editor think twice. Amongst his utterances: “I would like to be the Minister of Desire! Culture is the dream part of us all... It is not the property of a single type of art-learned art. Nothing is more cultural than bread broken together or a gathering round the same fire.”

But these pronouncements belie the dynamism and enthusiasm which typified his rise (through the theatre world) and which have galvanised the cultural scene in France. Certainly his ideas, his initiatives and his involvement continue to stir up the world of French publishing, and his presence seems to permeate every nook and cranny of the trade.

Book Works JUNE 1984

Just to one side of London Bridge , Southwark Cathedral seems to lie in a hollow patch of ground, as if reticent to assert itself. The effect is illusory. The cathedral appears sunken merely in comparison to the thrusting, soaring Victorian railway flyover which scythes past the sacred stonework. It is a stark reminder of how a blinkered loyalty to commercial expediency is often only achieved at the expense of aesthetics.

The setting is significant, for in one of the arches which cluster beneath the sweep of the railway line, a new gallery called Book Works has opened: a gallery with the intention of re-asserting the individual quality of The Book, at a time when that quality is in danger of being submerged by a flood of mass-market, high volume (and maybe soon to be pulped) paperbacks.

Two of the organisers behind Book Works: Pella ErskineTulloch and Vanessa Marshall (their enthusiasm undimmed despite the affliction of unseasonably heavy colds) expanded on the nature of that rather hermetic term ‘book arts’.

The genre with two heads JULY 1984

It is not easy to define science fiction. In The Complete Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists, Maxim Jakubowski and Malcolm Edwards suggest that this is precisely because SF is “an open invitation for the imagination to run wild... it knows no bounds”. Undaunted, they list 20 definitions; some attempt the impossible: “that branch of fiction that deals with the possible effects of an altered technology or social system on mankind in an imagined future, altered present or alternative past” (Barry N. Malzberg). others, defeated, merely propose that “science fiction is anything published as science fiction.”

We all have our perception and preconceptions of science fiction, and part of the problem is that many people still see SF only in terms of bug-eyed monsters, the Thing with Two Heads from Outer Space, and the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (a 1978 blockbuster vegetable SF movie). SF is dismissed as trivial, unliterary (even by some SF writers) and its supports as a clannish, almost masonic, cult. While SF people seem to relish their group identity (fostered by the proliferation of fanzines and in-jokes), the strength of the genre is that this element co-exists with and does nothing to diminish the massive popular appeal of sci-fi: Star Wars and co. happily gross hundreds of millions of dollars.

I was an Editor, Senior Editor and then Publisher at Longman, as well as taking on a sales role when they entered the exciting world of Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 home computing software in 1983. Writing blurbs for books is great training for getting key information over quickly and engagingly.

LONGMAN 1982-1987

The Jazz Handbook JUNE 1987

This is from the first book I ever commissioned, Barry McRae’s The Jazz Handbook, the lead title in a series of performing arts guides (Opera and Dance came next).

Approaching and appreciating jazz can be an extremely frustrating task, particularly for anyone whose interest in the music has only recently been aroused. Sampling the full spread of available jazz styles may turn into a long, often erratic process. The Jazz Handbook has been written and compiled to ease the way, and to provide signposts and landmarks for reference.

Those points of reference are the two hundred major musicians and groups which form the core of the Handbook. Each entry provides essential biographical details, and gives a succinct appraisal of the impact and importance of the musician (or musicians) on the development of jazz.

Suggested listening is tied in directly to that critique, so that the Handbook always has a reason for selecting a particular album or track, rather than presenting a bland, uninformative discography. At the heart of each entry lies the Lineage section which redirects you to other musicians with immediate links or common influences.

A Databank at the end of the book gives pointers for further exploration of jazz (through magazines, festivals and information sources) plus a rundown on significant jazz record labels, books and vocabulary.

Illustrated throughout by splendid photography (principally by David Redfern and William Gottlieb), The Jazz Handbook is meant to be used – it is an active reference book for anybody who is inspired by jazz.

Wanting to move away from the primarily educational publishing of Longman – although it gave me a terrific training –I tried a number of routes. These paragraphs are from a letter I wrote as a follow-up to meeting with John Brown, the MD at Virgin Books. It didn’t lead to a job then, but I did eventually join Virgin in 1992. My target audience description seems to be a pretty good summary of the Boomer generation.

Letter to John Brown, Virgin Books NOVEMBER 1986

The target market: the 20-40 age group who grew up post-war, for whom television, rock’n’roll and a youth culture are givens, who are educated and literate, who have disposable cash to spend, and who are attuned to expect quality in whatever they buy. It is a group which has already been successfully identified and reached by other media industries – record, film, TV/radio, magazine, advertising – but few publishing houses (and Virgin are certainly one of those few) have created a list that caters consistently for their needs.

I think that the people who read these books often have a solid, sometimes obsessive, knowledge already, and will not be fobbed off by a charlatan; balancing the frontlist and backlist appeal of the list; creating a new stable of non-fiction writers who have more than one book in them; above all the search for the mix of soul and profitability that keeps you coming back for me.

My exit strategy came via the packaging company Campbell Rawkins – packagers were creative companies who sold on ideas to publishers who took on the printing and distribution. Christy Campbell and Sue Rawkins were very much into popular culture – I first worked with them when at a meeting I suggested a book title, The A-Z Of Street Cred , which they developed and sold to Corgi; I wrote some of the entries. Later they hired me as Creative Director.

CAMPBELL RAWKINS 1987-1988

The A-Z Of Street Cred 1987 - Jazz

For a long long time , a perversion practised by the initiated away from the public gaze, something to do with dark rooms and strange languages. After the 1958 Newport Festival – forever captured in Jazz On A Summer’s Day, jazz rarely penetrated the mass consciousness and was considered a slightly odd habit, like drinking lager. Jazz-rock was a hopeless curate’s egg, but the late ’seventies acoustic revolution led by Keith Jarrett made it all cool again and the ’eighties saw a re-discovery by the media. However it was always difficult to know where style started and music began. Worth it though for bringing Lee Morgan’s ‘The Sidewinder’ onto turntables once again.

At the 1987 Frankfurt Book Fair, Campbell Rawkins had no actual books on display, just a series of ‘product cards’: Giles O’Bryen, writing in The Guardian, noted that ‘The more trend-setting publishers have dispensed with the distraction of books and authors altogether, and their stands now resemble the reception area at Ewing Oil. One stand was hung with hessian and glass shelves; weirdly beautiful images dangled from lengths of twisted wire. ‘What are these?’ inquired one puzzled visitor. ‘Whatever you want them to be.’ came the mysterious reply.” Yep, that was Campbell Rawkins. We did actually sell Lensology to the prestigious Victor Gollancz, but that publishing house closed down before it ever came out.

LENSOLOGY

From The Guardian 15th August 1987: REAGAN AIR

MISS INQUIRY “The pilot of the light aircraft which had a near-miss with President Reagan’s helicopter said he had lost a contact lens before the incident. He had had trouble with his contact lenses and handed one to his passenger, who dropped it. His aircraft strayed into restricted air space around the presidential ranch.”

From an interview with George Michael in The Face: “The worst thing about contact lenses is when you decide to go home with somebody and then when you’ve done whatever you’re going to do with this person, you suddenly realise you haven’t got your contact lens case. I have actually had to lay there all night with my eyes glued open.”

Whether on the brink of causing an international crisis, or just inducing megastar insomnia, the contact lens is a remarkable object. This minuscule, almost invisible, apparently innocuous little piece of plastic can reduce macho men to tears, has become a cult conversation piece and encourages total strangers to crawl around city streets in a concerted ritual.

Lensology is the first compilation of the bizarre myths and mystique surrounding the contact lens: a cool style manual for those weary wearers who have earned instant membership of an exclusive club with its own rules and regulations and a common language of pain, loss and irritation. Lensology is not a dry how-to ophthalmic tome, but a clear-eyed celebration of the camaraderie of lens people worldwide.

Campbell Rawkins in 1977. Left to right: PD, Sue Rawkins, Chris Sessions, Christy Campbell & Melanie Moon.

My short time at Campbell Rawkins allowed me to segue to Paul Hamlyn and Pyramid, where finally I got to create and commission mainstream general non-fiction, initially as Publishing Manager in Sports & Leisure, then Publisher of Reference and finally Deputy Publisher of the whole, merged Illustrated Publishing division (after surviving an initial long night of the knives).

OCTOPUS PUBLISHING 1987-1988

The Hendrix Experience SEPTEMBER 1990

Jimi Hendrix – guitarist extraordinaire , charismatic performer, symbol of a generation. His short life has become the stuff of legend. But what was he really like and what actually took place in those brief but explosive years? Many books have been published in an attempt to answer these questions, very few written by people who really knew Jimi. Myths and distortions have resulted. Now for the first time, in an attempt to set the record straight, Jimi’s friend and collaborator, Mitch Mitchell, who was the Experience drummer throughout the years of fame, tells his story. No one knew Jimi better than Mitch over the whole period – from day one of the Experience to Jimi’s death in 1970. Mitch conjures up a lost era, with all its highs and lows, frustrations and breakthroughs, humour and tragedies – from the tiny clubs of London’s Soho to the legendary festivals of Monterey and Woodstock. It’s an incredible saga, filled with outrageous stories and unlikely characters. Myths are debunked; new anecdotes are told for the first time.

Creating a book about Jimi Hendrix allowed me to spend time with his bass player Noel Redding out in Clonakilty, County Cork (playing some R&B in a local pub with him) and then once Mitch Mitchell came on board, to perform in a great band at a launch party at the Hard Rock Café on Piccadilly, including Screaming Lord Sutch on vocals, Dave of Chas & Dave on bass, and Mitch on drums. He was originally a jazz drummer and he clocked every right hand dab of mine with his cymbals. Both were phenomenal musicians.

The NME Rock’n’Roll Years 1990

The NME Rock’n’Roll Years is the most readable and entertaining reference work ever produced on the history of rock’n’roll. Written in a lively, newsy style it is lavishly illustrated with over 1400 of the best photographs from each era as it recreates the exciting and turbulent history of the most potent cultural force of the 20th century. The many millions who have grown up with rock’n’roll as a constant presence in their lives can now relive those golden moments, month by month, page by page through a text crammed with facts, faces, news and views. Put together by a team of leading tock writers, The NME Rock’n’Roll Years charts the history of rock from the advent of Bill Haley and the shocking, hipswinging impact of Elvis, through to the huge international industry it has become today. On the way, we witness events sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but always full of poignant memory for any true rock fan. We experience the Merseybeat and the first British invasion of the UK charts, the emergence of ‘flower power’, the West Coast sound and songs of protest. We see the growth of the ‘super groups’ and ‘megabands’, outbreaks of guitar smashing and hotel wrecking, and later, outbreaks of compassion, exemplified by Live Aid, that spanned continents and traversed the world by satellite.

When I joined Virgin Publishing in the Autumn of 1992, as the Publisher for Illustrated Books, I had the chance to put into place the list I had wanted to do for Virgin six years earlier. Created in conjunction with the Design Museum, The Electric Guitar also allowed me to work with Chronicle Books in San Francisco, another long-cherished aim.

VIRGIN PUBLISHING 1992-1997

The Electric Guitar OCTOBER 1993 “Guitarmen, wake up and pluck – wire for sound, let ‘em hear you play!” The day an electric pickup was placed on top of an acoustic guitar, a musical revolution took place. With the power to cut through a rhythm section, and at a price any young person could afford, the electric guitar was destined to unleash rock’n’roll on an unsuspecting world.

The Electric Guitar captures the power, the history and the looks of the great guitars – the Teles, Strats, Les Pauls, and Flying Vs – as well as the latest prototypes. The story of the ultimate rock’n’roll and blues instrument is told by a team of expert writers alongside specially photographed profiles of the key guitars with quotes and anecdotes from the musicians who swear by them.

U2 FARAWAY SO CLOSE SEPTEMBER 1994

Welcome to the world of U2 Faraway So Close, a roller coaster of a rock’n’roll alongside the planet’s biggest, most successful band, and in the witty, mercurial company of Mr BP Fallon, ‘guru, viber and DJ’ – according to his Zoo TV tour credentials.

Invited to ride shotgun with the band on tour, BP Fallon had a dream ticket.

U2 Faraway So Close brings together his extraordinary, lyrical, poignant, ballsy writing about the whole experience, and the very best of the thousands of photographs he took.

The result: a spinning mirrorball that reflects and refracts U2 through astute anecdote, wicked observation and unexpected moments of peace and calm. Bono outrageously camping it up as MacPhisto in Rome, Adam out on the town

in Florida, Edge serene in a Japanese garden, Larry belting out Karaoke. BP’s text is enhanced by his photos, unguarded, unposed, un-selfconscious. All wrapped up in the dazzling visuals of U2’s design team.

U2 Faraway So Close is a journey, a creative journey which travels from the energy and the effort of songwriting in industrious studios through the rigours of rehearsal to the majesty and power of a live performance that can still move hardened music business professionals.

It’s a geographical journey, from the backstreets, friends and relatives of Dublin to the raunch of Mexico nightlife, from the edginess of Times Square to the beaches of Sellafield. Along the way, watching, listening, taking part – BP is an active participant, not some mute notetaker – we meet the ordinary people who come into contact with U2, the fans who desperately want to, and the members of the music industry’s own aristocracy.

For above all this is a rock’n’roll journey, where U2 and BP encounter some of the talents who helped create its turbulent history: legendary bluesmen, gospel greats, the spirit of Elvis, Phil Spector, Keef, the Velvets, Led Zep, Public Enemy – and the young bloods, Pearl Jam, Primal Scream, Björk.

Sometimes faraway. Sometimes close. This is an intimate, authentic book, laced with warmth and humour and magic, which reveals something special about the heart and soul of rock’n’roll.

U2 Faraway So Close was art directed by the brilliant Steve Averill, the designer of all of U2’s iconic album covers. BP signed the contract in the Gresham Hotel, Dublin.

SPORTS

For Feierabend Verlag/Hayden Publishing

MAY 2004

Higher

What bliss it is to shrug off the weighty shackles of gravity. When Bob Beamon hung and hung and hung – forever it felt like – in the night sky of Mexico City, you truly believed that a man could fly. One pole-vaulter described his first jump as a near-religious experience. Well, heaven-bound, certainly. To soar up, up and away for your support is the very essence of striving for improvement, for perfection, for victory. And clearing a demanding set of obstacles, as both equine and human hurdlers or steeplechasers must do: what more perfect symbol for the challenges of sporting endeavour. Mountaineers attempt to conquer the world’s great peaks just because they’re there, driven upwards by the euphoria of finding themselves high above the clouds, or dangling halfway up a sheer cliff face clinging on with nothing more than stubborn fingers and agile toes. At the top, it is probably salutary, so long as you don’t loosen your grip, to look back down and remember the slippery slope that can follow the highest of achievements. After highs come inevitable lows, and soul-destroying, or characterforming, landings to bring you back down to earth with a bump.

From my earliest days in publishing, I also made time – as a useful source of extra income – to do some journalism and copywriting . On a trip to Norway in May 1981, four months into my first job, I blagged my way into Talent Studios in Oslo, where Keith Jarrett had recorded the sublime album My Song . I told the studio I was writing an article for a UK music magazine, and as luck would have it, International Musician urgently needed a Studio of the Month feature, my first paid writing gig. I also started learning the skills of copywriting for Myles Pinfold (who I’d met on my second day at Longman) and his Leeds-based design group WPA Pinfold.

Forty years on we’re still working together, on clients ranging from brewers - major concerns like Carlsberg Tetley, and tiny independent companies - to plumbing manufacturers. Peglers, the latter, were based in Doncaster. One day, passing through the town on a train heading north I was amazed to see my strapline, ‘A watertight guarantee of quality’, displayed in gigantic letters the length of their warehouse wall.

For my third year at college, I was teaching at a school in Brétignysur-Orge, just south-east of Paris. The son of one of the senior staff worked for a magazine called Jeune Afriqu e, and asked me to write a piece about Archie Shepp, the sax player who turned me onto jazz. Sadly it never ran, put I did enjoy writing it in French...

JEUNE AFRIQUE JANUARY 1979

A écouter Archie Shepp en pleine improvisation, on dirait le cri plaintif d’un muezzin. Quand il se dresse pour jouer, tout le monde l’écoute. Car Archie est l’un des plus éloquents des jazzmen, tant au saxophone que par la parole, ce qu’on a pu apprécier au cours d’une suite de concerts donnés recemment à Paris par le quatuor de ce grand musicien noir. Poète, dramaturge, professeur à l’université de Massachusetts, il est reconnu comme porte-parole du monde du jazz, et d’ailleurs comme très engagé pour la lutte des noirs américains: on sait bien que le jazz a toujours été leur musique à eux, l’expression de leur propre existence à une époque où d’autres moyens de s’exprimer leur étaient interdits ou supprimés par la censure blanche.

Hearing Archie Shepp in the full flow of improvisation is like listening to the plaintive cry of a muezzin. When he gets up to play, everyone listens. Because Archie is one of the most eloquent of jazz musicians, either playing the saxophone or speaking, something that was easy to appreciate during a series of concerts given recently by this great black musician’s quartet. Poet, playwright, professor at the University of Massachusetts, he is recognised as a spokesman for the world of jazz, as well as being extremely engaged in the struggle for black Americans: jazz has always been their own music, the expression of their own existence during a time when other modes of expression were either banned or suppressed by white censure.

After Vague won the Guardian:NUS Student Press Award in the autumn of 1980, I was invited to work on the NUS newspaper , National Student , for a week. It was good training in meeting tight deadlines, and finding the story. This is one of the pieces I wrote that week.

NATIONAL STUDENT DECEMBER 1980

Row over ‘Reclaim the Night’ report

Cherwell, the Oxford University newspaper, has been under bitter attack from local feminists and the student union. The row was sparked off by a report on a ‘Reclaim the Night’ which ended an Oxford Women’s Week.

Lesley Riddoch, Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) President, found a front-page article, editorial and two photo captions all “offensive”.

The editorial, picking up on the march slogan “every man is a potential racist”, ran: “Another blow has been struck for the supremacy of the perfect female over the thin weaselfaced legions of would-be rapists”.

What roused most controversy was the caption under a photograph of NUS national secretary Fiona Mactaggart, which read, “Could you rape this woman?” She said: “At first I didn’t believe it. I really thought this sort of thing never happened.” Oxford feminists took direct action to protest about the issue. On the next layout night, thirty women invaded the Cherwell offices and refused to leave until they had extracted various concessions. Cherwell printed a full apology in their next issue and have allotted the members of Rape Crisis a full page in which to explain their views.

However, Lesley Riddoch said, “They can complain until they’re blue in the face. They are not sorry for the right reasons”. Reaction to the incident was widespread – four Junior Common Rooms (college unions) passed motions banning Cherwell. Many others censured the paper and mandated committee members to write letters of complaint.

My first piece of paid professional writing was for International Musician , a magazine aimed at music industry professionals, especially sound and recording engineers. In Oslo on holiday, I’dtalked my way into Talent Studios, where Keith Jarrett and co. recorded, saying I was writing a piece for an English magazine. Luckily, back home, I was able to place it.

INTERNATIONAL MUSICIAN JULY 1981

Norway might seem an unlikely, out of the way location for a successful recording studio with an international reputation, but since its launch in Autumn 1975 the Oslobased Talent Studios has built up an impressive track record which dispels the myth that Norwegians do little else but knit sweaters and jog.

Talent owes much of its renown outside Norway to a close link with Manfred Eicher’s ECM record label. From its headquarters in Munich ECM handles the very best in contemporary jazz (eg Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Jack de Johnette) and has become a byword for perfection, both in presentation and recording quality. Each year ECM record up to a dozen sessions at Talent: proof that the studio is consistently able to meet their very high standards.

A mile or so east of the centre of Oslo, the Talent Studios building has the low-slung look of an engineering works, which is precisely what it was before Managing Director Rarve Figvaldsen took it over in 1974 and set about converting a vast empty shell into a fully functional studio.

The day-to-day organisation of the studio is in the capable hands of Petter Hox, Studio Manager at Talent since January 1979. We met in reception, where an old HMVtype phonogram (the Talent Studios motif) stands in ironic contrast to the sophisticated techniques used inside.

My second commission from International Musician came when I suggested that their ‘P.A. Column’ which usually featured huge rock gigs could look at a jazz event, which meant that with my drummer Will Awdry, we got to go to the Bracknell Jazz Festival and listen to the brilliant Miroslav Vitous Quartet and Will could meet one of his musical heroes, Keith Jarrett’s drummer Jon Christensen.

Petter’s description of the studio as “The Whale” puzzled me – until I saw the size of the place. The studio area is 270 square metres, in the form of an L-shape fitting round the control room. The main area is six metres high – clearly designed for large ensemble work, whereas the smaller part of the L has a much lower ceiling. This is where ECM place their musicians as it gives the whole session a much more live feel.

Pride of place instrumentally goes to the magnificent Steinway A grand piano; reputedly Keith Jarrett has fallen completely in love with it.

P.A. COLUMN SEPTEMBER 1981

For three days at the beginning of July each year, the South Hill Park in Bracknell is the setting for a varied and often intriguing weekend of jazz performances. This year, for example, the music ranged from the light jazz/funk of the Morrissey-Mullen band through to the Gil Evans Orchestra’s full ensemble sound, by way of this month’s featured band, the Miroslav Vitous Quartet. The whole extravaganza was helped along by the irreverent and idiosyncratic contributions of regular compere Lol Coxhill.

Paul Sparrow believes that rock sound engineering is a science, in the sense that an engineer learns how to achieve a certain guitar or vocal sound which is then added to the notes produced on stage, whereas in jazz the individual sound must be faithfully reproduced: each musician has his or her particular style with which the engineer should interfere as little as possible. His experience revealed itself as he worked throughout the set to build a rich ensemble sound, balancing Surman’s powerful set with Taylor’s spare piano work, Vitous’ lyrical bass and Christensen’s shimmering cymbal sound –and gradually the vivid dynamics that had caused so much trouble at the mixing desk came into their own, building to an emotional climax in ‘You Make Me So Happy’, which brought a full and long standing ovation.

Through the SYP I got to write some piece for one of the trade magazines, Publishing News. This is a column I wrote after I was selected to attend the 1985 Jerusalem International Book Fair as an Editorial Fellow.

PUBLISHING NEWS MAY 1985

By the end of this year’s Jerusalem International Book Fair, the city’s omnipresent mayor, Teddy Kollek, had declared it the best so far. No one would dispute its success as a publishing event, but it was difficult to sense that, in terms of straight business and rights deals, the fair has yet made the big league.

There was none of the persistent, constant hustle of Frankfurt. But then, who goes to Frankfurt to see the sights? The competition from the temptations of a city and a country gloriously rich in culture and history is a problem for the Fair (if a delight for the visitor).

The Jerusalem prize, awarded to the author whose writing best expresses the idea of the freedom of the individual in society, went to Milan Kundera. In a flower-bedecked hall, Kundera reminded us that, in the words of an old Jewish proverb, “when man thinks, God laughs”, and concluded that “if European culture seems to me under threat today, then, in my opinion, that precious essence of European individualism is held safe in a treasure chest in the wisdom of the novel.”

There were symposia. Symposia on encouraging reading, on Israeli publishing, not to mention the Sixth Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter. The central forum of the week was organised by the Aspen Institute, a New York-based centre for humanistic studies, which had gathered together some 26 luminaries of the publishing international to discuss – for nine hours over three days – the Editorial Vision in Today’s Marketplace.

With a brief like that, the fact that the forum took place on the 5th floor of the Convention Centre was not the sole reason for a somewhat rarefied atmosphere.

Panelist David Godine (of the eponymous Boston publishing house) said he felt like a member of the Sanhedrin, the supreme council dissecting and reinterpreting the laws. Peter Mayer, George Weidenfeld, Philippa Harrison and David Godwin were the British contingent on the panel. On the third day, the panel of elders was reinforced by the inclusion of five of the young editors from Britain, the US and France who had been flown over to participate in the fair, and to add their own rejuvenating shot of reality.

The best story of the week came from Asher Weill, the British-born Israeli publisher. When he first arrived in Israel in 1958, he declared proudly to the passport officer his profession, publisher; in Hebrew, mol. Unfortunately his pronunciation was a little off target, and the entry on his passport was transmogrified to mohel. It was some time before Asher discovered that mohel is the Hebrew for ‘ritual circumciser’.

As an Israeli publisher commented, being a mohel might be a better job. “You don’t get much pay, but at least you get to keep the tips.”

TO COME

When I left Virgin Publishing in 1997, I carried on working for them as a consultant. This is a piece I wrote for The Guardian about a range of books I was putting together for them.

The Big Eight THE GUARDIAN, JULY 1997

It was a tall order. A disparate bunch of editors, sales gurus and writers had gathered at Virgin Publishing, the book end of the Branson empire, to accept the challenge of selecting just eight musicians from nigh-on 45 years of rock’n’roll who deserved to become a Virgin Modern Icon. We were then to launch a series of books designed to capture the essence of them – a task that felt marginally less critical than electing the next Pope.

The first step was to set the ground rule. As any selfrespecting high court judge might ask: who or what is an icon?

There was no room here for personal passion or prejudice. This was not about the seminal moments in our lives when a particular piece of vinyl, tape or compact disc had touched a nerve, captured a turning point or marked a rite of passage. We were looking for acts who had fired the imagination of audiences and musicians throughout the years, setting a standard and bequeathing a legacy to the bands who came 10, 20, 30 years later. Not only were the proposed books meant to trigger a nostalgic glow among people who were there the first time round, they had to provide an insight for a new crop of fans.

It felt easier to define who was not an icon and why. Madonna, we thought, was not. She’d shifted bundles of singles, albums, videos, books and concert tickets. She’d been a role model for teenage girls (who’d probably deny it now even under extreme duress). She was an international superstar but never an icon. She was essentially a one-off and had spawned no obvious emulation

Many superstars failed the test. Michael Jackson, Elton John: entertainers who sold to millions, but touched the souls of few. In contrast, Iggy Pop – with and without the Stooges – had frequently delivered disappointing album sales,

but represented an attitude, a personality that had a huge impact. Bowie, too, failed the icon test. The guy’s a genius, no question. A songwriter of vision. But not an icon. The sheer chameleon-like quality of his image ch-ch-ch-changes meant he couldn’t provide a stable point of reference. It seemed that an icon, like a patron saint, had to be identified with one immutable formula, the definitive representation of a sound, a mood – and above all an image.

They were brand names in a way. A name that everyone who’d ever listened to popular music would know. Bob Marley: dreadlocks, ‘No Woman, No Cry’, early death. Marc Bolan: glitter on his face, some twaddle about a white swan, early death (not that premature demise was a pre-requisite). But really, you knew relatively little about these artists.

Who did we choose in the end? From a longish shortlist of 40 possibles, we picked the first four titles to reflect different genres and different generations. The Kinks had created an attitude, an Englishness, a lyrical wryness that re-surfaced through the songs of Squeeze, the Smiths and Damon Albarn, and had influenced an awful lot of people en route. Led Zeppelin had set the benchmark for blues-driven hard rock, no messing. The Jam were the quintessential singles act of the late 1970s, tight, action-packed packages of teenage angst. And Marc Bolan took a little Elvis, a bit of Hendrix, a hint of Dylan and a lot of camp to create his androgynous role model. Hot on their heels are Iggy Pop, The Clash and Bob Marley. Oh, and Kiss: love ’em or loathe ’em, they’re unmatchable, from Gene Simmons’s tongue to the merchandising cheek that out-spiced Geri and Co two decades before – the grand panjandrums of heavy metal theatrics.

So Kiss are a great icon of rock’n’roll? Those clowns? You many not agree, indeed the Virgin Modern Icon series may make you argue furiously – but that’s the whole point...

From my earliest days in publishing, I was also copywriting, primarily for Myles Pinfold, whose design company WPA Pinfold, based in Leeds, is still going very strong indeed. I’ve been writing copy for them and their clients for over 40 years.

COPYWRITING

The Rhode Island Diner, Derby 1983

Most people are only aware of Rhode Island as the breedingground of the famous red chicken, but birds of a somewhat different feather flocked to Rhode Island at the end of the last century. In the years following the Civil War, rich vacationers discovered the delights of the smallest state in the Union. Every summer, the glittering sailing resort of Newport played host to America’s wealthy elite. In grandiose mansions (ironically known as cottages) they enjoyed an extravagant series of dinner parties, clambakes and barbecues. The food provided was based on local New England cooking, spiced with a generous measure of luxury. Today, the Rhode Island Diner is proud to preserve that blend of elegance, excellence and tradition.

The Newport Diner, Solihull 1983

Most people are now aware of Newport’s reputation as the sailing capital of the world. Since the 1930s, rival yachts have intermittently criss-crossed the waters offshore to contest the America’s Cup, and Newport has played host to the glittering international yachting circus. In fact, glamorous sea-borne visitors have long been calling in, since the days last century when rich Southern planters and Yankee entrepreneurs arrived by steamboat. So enraptured with the place were they, that they built a string of sumptuous mansions and threw legendary banquets, where guests could savour local New England specialities between sips of champagne. Today, the Newport Diner is one port of call which still harbours a love for good traditional cooking with a certain elegant panache.

This was very cutting edge at the time, well before CDs became prevalent. Now of course they seem quaintly retro, and vinyl has had a resurgence.

Sharp compact discs 1986

Welcome to the world of digital. The Sharp compact disc player is a forerunner of the new era of audio excellence, setting new standards of sound quality, ease of use and durability. If you are serious about the music you listen to, then you will need to be serious about the compact disc, and the purity of reproduction that has brought real changes to the nature of leisure listening. Forget the scratched records and hissing tapes of yesteryear; forget crackle, hiss, static and fluff on the stylus. Those days are now gone. This is music the way it was meant to be heard.

With WPA Pinfold we created a range of promotional items, especially for Christmas. These are a couple of horoscope items I wrote for their 1987 Christmas Almanack, which reflect the tone of voice we used.

Leo

Leo the Lion was obviously the ancient astrologers’ mane man: crammed with the qualities of leadership, generosity, regal dignity and charm. All this bestowed on a kid who’s put its mother through labour at the hottest time of the year. Unfair or what? The truth is that Leos can be unbearably conceited and pompous; you get minions to pull your Christmas crackers and humble lackeys to open you presents. The rest of us can get our own back by accosting Leos in the pub, asking them if they enjoy giving orders, and when the response is positive, saying ‘Mine’s a double’.

Sagittarius

Half-man, half-horse , half-mathematician (uh?), the sign of Sagittarius is like the arrow poised in the centaur’s bow: straining upwards, seeking freedom, highly targeted. Generous, optimistic, open-handed, spontaneous. Don’t believe those spoilsports who say you are tactless, extravagant and reckless. It’s all lies. This is a totally unbiased opinion written by a Sagittarian. Those reckless, erratic qualities may emerge most clearly as you try to negotiate the tricky path from the festive table to the sofa after too much brandy butter.

One of WPA Pinfold’s core sectors is the brewery business. This is from a report on cask ale produced for Carlsberg Tetley.

Cask ale report 1994

Cask Ale, also known as cask-conditioned, handpump, handpull or real ale, is a draught beer brewed from traditional ingredients, but most importantly it enjoys a secondary fermentation in the actual cask and in the cellar from which it is served for drinking. That’s what makes it so special, so idiosyncratic, so rich in flavour and rich in tradition.

A cask ale is a living, breathing creation. The live yeast it contains, and the secondary fermentation and maturation is undergoes in the cask are the essence of the brewing process. That’s what generates the richness of taste, the depth and variety of character. Although the industry prefers the term cask or cask-conditioned all to real ale, ‘real’ does nonetheless convey precisely the right degree of authenticity. If two brewers set out to create a brew using identical varieties of malt, hops and spring water, then the beers they produce may be quite different – not least because of the choice of yeast strain – and will reflect the individual brewer’s talent.

Lawless PURITY BREWING CO.2014

Lawless respects the rules, just as long as they are our rules! This is brewing with an irreverent, individual mindset… We may be mavericks but we do know our brewing history. Lager was being brewed in the UK in the 19th century, long, long before all the lagers from Europe came flooding in. So we were inspired to create our own craft version of lager by drawing on the best of those traditions. Bavarian lagers follow strict laws – the Reinheitsgebot, no less, or the ‘German Beer Purity Law. Our brewer, the delightfully offbeat Flo, used them as his starting point, but improvised around them using all his idiosyncratic flair. And then, without telling a soul, he slipped in a bunch of extra hops just as the kegs were being filled. We couldn’t understand why Lawless had quite so much flavour, until Flo fessed up to his sleight of hand. We’re glad he did. Go with the Flo!

I also wrote lots of promotional copy for the PR company Lawson Dodd, founded by Belinda Lawson and one Joanna Dodd...

Lawson Dodd – open for business 2001

At a time when opportunities for conveying messages about your company and its brands are proliferating like wildfire, it is more vital than ever before that you are confident in the service you are being offered by your communications consultants. The days are long gone when PR companies could bamboozle clients with the mystique of the work they were actually carrying out. The world, thank goodness, is a more sophisticated place. At Lawson Dodd we strive to be as open as we can about every aspect of the services we provide so you can trust us to do the right job for you. That means no hidden extras. And no hidden agendas. We will go out of our way to understand the environment you operate in, so that every idea and every strategy we present is focused and relevant to what you and your business are trying to achieve. Most importantly, we can tell you why they are relevant. And we have the experience and confidence to pass on a few hard truths when necessary, but also to enjoy our shared successes. Being business-like doesn’t mean you can’t work in a friendly atmosphere. Lawson Dodd – what you see is what you get. And that’s a lot.

... and then for its successor the Rochester PR Group, including a cute booklet of information and advice about doing business in the UK for overseas companies - here talking about black cab drivers and their humour.

Ready for business in the UK ROCHESTER PR, 2020

When it comes to getting around London, the iconic black taxi cab is still the classic way to travel, but in fairness we also opened this question up to cover Uber drivers or any other private taxis. Whilst we didn’t get an answer from everyone on this – using public transport or going on foot is still popular – we loved the typical London humour... From the practical to the gossipy, cab drivers are the fount of all knowledge. One recently told us that he thought of himself and his fellow cabbies as ‘Ambassadors for London’. They like to impart the knowledge they have gleaned over years of conversation. Talk to them, enjoy the banter, and you might just pick up a useful insight for your business along the way.

Of course, whenever I was thinking about coming up with new book ideas, or considering potential projects, I was naturally drawn towards any that touched on my personal interests. music has been a part of my life for as long as can remember. The piano since... well, forever, all those classical grades and soloist competitions, then listening to truly talented pianists at the Aldeburgh Festival and elsewhere. In my teens I formed rock’n’roll bands at school – think Steely Dan meets Free – which later allowed me to play with both the (then) surviving members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, glorious moments. And at college, it was all about the jazz: the PDQ, the Philip Dodd Quartet, first performed in the Music Room on top of Staircase XVIII in Jesus, floating high above the spires. Forty-umpteen years later, the four of us are still playing together. And most recently I added another level, by composing chamber/choral music for Rochester Cathedral. Thanks to publishing I got to edit, publish and then write books about it all.

It was a particular pleasure to co-author one of the classic Collins Gem series, writing concise nuggets of information about the whole range of musical instruments.

Rushmere Hall Primary School, Ipswich

Once upon a time there was a little boy and it was his birthday the next day and he couldn’t stop dreaming of his birthday. He wanted the record Light Cavalry. Jane Winter has got Light Cavalry. One day we played Jane’s record for us to hear. When I went to David’s party I heard Light Cavalry. I like the horses galloping best. When I am a man I am going to buy a gramophone and I am going to buy some records. We have got Light Cavalry at school.

Viola

FROM MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS, COLLINS GEM, 2000, WITH IAN POWLING

The viola has been described as the Cinderella of the string section, frequently ignored and derided as something of a makeweight.

However its rich, mellow sound is a treat for the cognoscenti, who appreciate its value as a gastronome might savour a particularly exquisite truffle – indeed, woody and nutty are adjectives often applied to its tone.

Of all the strings, it is the one that bears the Italian name for the whole family – but by the end of the sixteenth century it had specifically come to mean the alto partner of the violin, tuned a fifth below its showier cousin.

To correspond to that drop in pitch, it should be half as long again as the violin, making playing under the chin impractical; a compromise was reached, but even so the size of the instrument makes it difficult to hold.

Just as the double bass originally tended to echo the cello line, the viola had much the same role, shadowing the violins or even the bass; there are still few concertos or sonatas for the viola – which is something of a shame when you learn that many great composers were violists, including Mozart and J.S. Bach.

The Book Of Rock was a key moment for me: my first big book as a writer, for Pavilion in 2002. It was one of the last titles commissioned by Colin Webb, who’d founded Pavilion with Tim Rice and Michael Parkinson, both of whom also crossed my path over the years. This was the rock’n’roll equivalent of Phaidon’s Book Of Art, and like that book it was completely democratic.Each of the 500 musicians or bands featured (and choosing them was half the fun) had a single page, whether they were the Beatles or the Butthole Surfers, Elvis or Everything But The Girl.

The Book Of Rock PAVILION, 2001

Introduction

The Book Of Rock is a gallery of saints, sinners, martyrs and magicians. Each of them has left their mark on the halfcentury (and rising) of musical history we know as rock’n’roll. They may have cast a lengthy shadow from the heights of legend over all that followed. Or they may have added, for one brief shining or sullied moment, a flavour, a colour or a sound that was in tune with the mood of the times. Whatever their contribution, in this book democracy is everything. The aristocrats of rock rub shoulders with its journeymen and artisans, they jostle with crazed guitar heroes, introverted songwriters and cult artists barely known outside a circle of fiercely loyal and protective fans. Here are the flamboyant and the reclusive, the sensitive and the outrageous. The hip, the hyper, the OTT, the AOR and the DOR. Together they represent the performers of a maverick circus.

Catatonia

Cerys Matthews’ voice dripped South Wales: as distinctive as laver bread, as powerful as the Pontypool front row, and with a gravelly tone not heard since Bonnie ‘Lost In France’ Tyler. Catatonia proudly picked up the banner of Welsh rock’n’roll – for years forlornly paraded by Man and later the Manics – and suddenly you couldn’t move for bands for the Principality: “Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I’m Welsh,” as Cerys sang. Although media attention, Blondie-style, inevitably tended to gravitate towards the exploits of their brassy, boozing, be-ringed vocalist, the strength of Catatonia’s 1998 album International Velvet was in the ensemble around her, and the passion of songs like ‘Mulder And Scully’ and ‘Road Rage’. But fame and partying took its toll on Cerys – just as the band should have been moving up a gear. Catatonia collapsed in 2001 when she required rehab for “anxiety and exhaustion”.

Eddie Cochran

Cradling his beloved Gretsch 6120, Eddie Cochran banged out – in the space of twelve months between the Septembers of 1958 and 1959 – three of the all-time youth anthems: ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘C’mon Everybody’ and ‘Somethin’ Else’. On the first two he multi-tracked all the parts, Stevie Wonder-style; this was no Elvis copyist, though he had great looks. And where Elvis was a country boy, Cochran crystallised the disaffection and hedonism of the urban teenager through simple, but sublime, riffs and straight from the hip lyrics. Deeply affected by the death of Buddy Holly, he tried to avoid flying, but relented for a major tour of the UK with Gene Vincent in early 1960: racing back to London to catch a flight back to the States, their taxi crashed into a lamp-post. Cochran died sixteen hours later, ghoulishly survived by his posthumous UK Number One, ‘Three Steps To Heaven’.

John Lennon

When John Lennon was felled by Mark Chapman, he was clutching a tape in his hand – Yoko Ono’s ‘Walking On Thin Ice’. For the last twelve years of his life she had been a constant companion (apart from one brief split when he went AWOL in LA), despite being reviled as the Oriental demon who broke up the Fab Four – “I was a scapegoat for other things,” was her view. An established performance artist when they first met – she handed him a card that simply said ‘Breathe’ – she stuck by him as he stripped away the Scouse banter to reveal a complex Everyman: sad anger towards Paul on ‘How Do You Sleep?’, the visceral pain of ‘Mother’, the parental love of ‘Beautiful Boy’. Although many of his 1970s songs seemed like simplistic sloganeering, their power has grown with time. Lennon was once asked what he and Ono would be doing ‘When They Were 64’. “We’re a nice old couple,” he replied, “living off the coast of Ireland, looking at our scrapbook of madness.” Just imagine.

Mötley Crüe

Testosterone warning: the salty dogs of Mötley Crüe are on the loose. Not content with fuelling the wet dreams of hormonally rampant adolescents with albums like 1987’s Girls, Girls, Girls, the band went one stage further and gave their fans’ fantasies vicarious reality. Mick Mars married ex-Prince girlfriend Vanity, Nikki Sixx wed centrefold Brandi Brandt and drummer Tommy Lee not only famously persuaded both Heather Lockyear and Pamela Anderson to tie the knot, but also inadvertently provided video evidence of his and Pammy’s deep love. And they lived up to their bad boy image. Vocalist Vince Neil served time for his involvement in a car crash which killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Nick Dingley, and Nikki Sixx was announced clinically dead for two minutes during one massive bender. The crueller commentators said that their music, a Kiss-Aerosmith mongrel, had been lifeless much longer, but the Crüe could care less – their albums invariably went platinum. As for their lasting musical heritage, well, the jüry’s still öut.

Sex Pistols

It was all a rock’n’roll swindle. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” was Johnny Rotten’s sneering envoi at the Sex Pistols’ final gig. Malcolm McLaren, after unsuccessfully trying to rescue the New York Dolls, had found his new muse when John Lydon strolled into SEX sporting his ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt. The Pistols sound was not that new – primitive garage wiv a London accent – but a Britain still in transition to the late 20th century was ripe for shocking. Johnny’s attitude was perfect: he poured scorn on everyone – other punk bands like the Damned and the Clash (“they make me cringe”), even McLaren (“the man was just a collector of ideas”). When it all went wrong and Rotten walked out in January 1978, the sham was revealed – Sid Vicious a pathetic junkie, the Ronnie Biggs episode simply ridiculous. And yet. And yet. The Sex Pistols changed rock music totally, definitively. End of story.

On According To The Rolling Stones and Nick Mason’s Inside Out: A Personal History Of Pink Floyd, I had editor rather than writer credits. For a book blending the voices of the creative team behind Mamma Mia! and the inimitable Benny and Björn, I was credited as interviewer, but I did get an introduction to play with...

Mamma Mia! How Can I Resist You?

WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, 2006

Introduction

Nonchalantly propped up against one of the walls in Benny Andersson’s office is a piece of artwork by Bruce Nauman, an American artist. It’s a simple concept: a rectangle split into halves, one white, the other black. On the white half is the single word ‘AH’, reversed out of the black is the word ‘HA’. Benny appreciates its simplicity, and chuckles at the reminder that he and Björn Ulvaeus, his co-conspirator in ABBA, created – in ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ – one of the most famous ‘ah ha’s in music history.

The office where Benny works, every day when he’s in Stockholm, is in a building owned by Mono Music, his record company, on Skeppsholmen, one of the cluster of islands that make up Stockholm’s city centre, a leafy former naval base which is now home to modern art and architecture museums, and where the annual jazz festival takes place. Mono Music’s long single-storey building, an old nautical stores, looks out across waters criss-crossed by ferries and antiquated steamers. Inside there is little that would tell you that this is ABBA territory, even though Benny and Björn’s long-time manager, Görel Hanser, also has her office at the other end of the building; her chocolate-coloured dog, Bruno, patters and potters across the wood floors. Her logo, Gööööööööööörel, created by Rune Söderqvist – who also designed the ABBA logo – reflects the way Stig Anderson, ABBA’s first manager, would yell to attract her attention back in the days when she was his assistant. ‘I was very good at shouting back,’ she says. There are no ABBA gold discs on the walls, no photos of the group, only traces of Benny and Björn’s music-making after ABBA stopped recording: posters for Chess, the musical they wrote with Tim Rice, and for Kristina Från Duvemåla, their own musical based on one of the most famous works

in Swedish literature. There are photos of other Mono Music acts, and of the Benny Anderssons Orkester, Benny’s gathering of folk-inspired musicians, which is a return to one of his great loves. A double bass sits in one corner of the office. The message is loud and clear. ABBA is in the past.

After working with Genesis on their 2007 autobiography Chapter & Verse, they asked me to supply the liner notes for two box sets: one of filmed concerts, this other of live recordings.

Genesis Live 1973-2007

CD BOX SET, 2009

It’s early May down at the Farm. The last few miles of the drive over have been past village cricket grounds freshly rolled and mown for the imminent season’s opening match, across wooden bridges tucked in the crease of shaded dells and alongside wide, green, sun-dappled fields, escorted by a regular secret’s-worth of magpies.

Outside the studio, carried on the spring breeze, comes the snickering of a horse from a nearby paddock. The setting could not be more pastoral. Or more perfect for the home base, the headquarters, the repository of Genesis music for nigh on thirty years. Calm, collected, peaceful, in the heart of the Surrey countryside, and never more than a dozen or so miles, as the magpie flies, from where members of the group past and present went to school, stepped up onto a stage for the first time, and have spent so much time living, working and making music.

And here in the studio, from which so much of that music has emanated – conceived, honed and perfected within these walls – Nick Davis, production guru since the We Can’t Dance days, is putting some finishing touches to this CD box set with Tony Banks, whose Still solo set was the first within the Genesis family to benefit from Nick’s thoughtful skills. With two weeks or so to go before the extras CD gets locked down, and after three months of solid listening, note-taking, cogitating and mixing, it seems a good time to sit back on the Farm’s comfy sofa and take stock.

One that got away: a proposal and set of samples for a book idea with Endeavour, the book end of Getty Images. It never saw the light of day, but I still like it. Maybe one day.

The Great Gig In The Sky

A TRIBUTE TO ROCK’S LOST TALENT

“HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GET OLD.” THE WHO, ‘MY GENERATION’

The spectre of death has haunted rock’n’roll ever since the plane carrying Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper smashed into an Iowa cornfield in 1959, the moment captured by Don McLean on ‘American Pie’ as ‘the day the music died’. Perhaps James Dean set a precedent.

Before the advent of rock’n’roll Hollywood had provided the stars who caused the same kind of shock value whenever they died unexpectedly: Rudolf Valentino, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard. In September 1955, the same month that Little Richard recorded his classic ‘Tutti Frutti’, the 24-yearold Dean delivered a very rock’n’roll death, at the wheel of his Porsche 550 Spyder. James Dean, as the Eagles later sang, was ‘the low-down rebel if there ever was’. The die was cast.

As rock’n’roll became an important cultural force, its very USP was its anti-establishment, outside-the-norm vibe, represented by young men and women, often made wealthy overnight, living a lifestyle far removed from the manicured lawns and mannered rules of post-war suburbia.

They were travelling on the road in frequently dodgy transport, with alcohol, drugs and casual sex on hand to pass the time or recreate the highs of performance – a recipe ripe for early death.

The roll call lengthened quickly: Eddie Cochran, Otis Redding, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. Each year brought new shocks, new legends, new memorials. The young dead were preserved in amber, a Jurassic Park of lost talent, forever young, forever mourned.

“You only pass through this life once. You don’t come back for an encore.” Elvis Presley

Janis Joplin

Just over a fortnight had passed since the news about Jimi Hendrix had filtered out from London, in a pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook age. And in another hotel room – this time the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood – Janis Joplin was discovered by worried bandmates the day after she collapsed, under the influence of heroin, banged her head on a table and never recovered consciousness.

Jimi and Janis, the original king and queen of rock excess, had much in common. Notoriously both died at 27, the same age as Brian Jones the year before. This was the start of the macabre, mythical Forever 27 Club. They’d both been introverted teenagers, suffered from the ravages of acne, been seen as outsiders. Janis once told the chat show host Dick Cavett that her schoolmates in the blue collar town of Port Arthur, out on the Gulf coast of Texas, had ‘laughed her out of school, out of town and out of the state’. Both had found their own kind of salvation in the power of the electric blues, in celebrity, in flamboyance – and in addiction, to booze (famously in Janis’s case, Southern Comfort), drugs and sex.

On the day she died, Janis had been in to the Sunset Sound studios – where the Beach Boys had recorded Pet Sounds, and the Doors their self-titled first album – to listen to the backing track of ‘Buried Alive In The Blues’. The musicians working with her said she was focused and sober during the sessions, corralling her addiction in the evenings.

The album, released posthumously, was Pearl. Overseen by the Doors’ producer Paul A. Rothchild, it was the most polished showcase for her extraordinary voice, despite being forced to use a demo vocal on ‘Mercedes Benz’, the only take available, its highlight her cover of Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me And Bobby McGee’: ‘I’d trade all of my tomorrows for just one yesterday.’ Janis bequeathed money for a wake thrown at the Lion’s Share club in San Anselmo, north of San Francisco. The invitations read simply, ‘The drinks are on Pearl’.

Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse’s admission to the 27 Club was almost guaranteed. Five years earlier, she appeared, drunk or high or both, on the no-holds-barred BBC TV show Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Host Simon Anstell (a friend of Amy’s) took her to task (“This is not a pop quiz, it’s an intervention”) and asked her, “Do you want us to sit here while you drink yourself to death?” For the next five years that’s exactly what happened. She lived up to the prediction, and the music industry to its shame let her carry on regardless.

Her life had a pattern of self-harm. Her parents, Janis and Mitch, divorced when Amy was nine, and from then on she was cutting herself, shoplifting at ten, smoking at twelve, getting into Janis Joplin’s favourite tipple, Southern Comfort, in her early teens. Her mum called her ‘half angel, half devil’: the devil side balanced by a singer whose husky contralto –one critic called her voice a ‘velvety, soulful foghorn’ – was nurtured in jazz clubs and singing with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra.

She had just turned 20 when her debut album Frank was released. Her second album, Back To Black, and its smash autobiographical hit ‘Rehab’, propelled her to fame. For many of her friends that was the moment she was lost. “I don’t think I’m gonna be at all famous,” she’d said beforehand in her glottal-stopped Mockney. “I don’t think I could handle it. I would probably go mad.”

The image she created was unforgettable: Cleopatra eyes, towering beehive, a tattooed Jewish Jessica Rabbit. She was once asked how she wanted to be remembered: “As genuine Amy Winehouse”. The genuine Amy was rapidly being covered over with scar tissue through a toxic two-year marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil, who introduced her to heroin.

The spiral gathered pace: cautions and a trial (she was found not guilty) for common assault, injunctions against the paparazzi, her dad announcing Amy’s lungs were only working at 70% capacity because of the effects of crack cocaine usage. Clips of stumbling performances included a shambolic show in Belgrade in June 2011. The end was visibly nigh.

Moving to Rochester in 2006 opened up some new possibilties, including Emma Dewhurst’s excellent, much missed, listings magazine WOW Medway .

He is full of praise for Dickens World MD Kevin Christie, who stepped in to offer the Britannia Theatre as a replacement venue. Linking him with the Roffen’s owners, Brian and Sarah Henslow, Roan says, ‘Without these people, music, especially jazz, just can’t happen.’

WOW MEDWAY

Blue Notes, Green Shoots

MARCH 2011

This year jazz in the Medway area is set to flourish, finding fertile ground with new audiences and venues. Many of those good vibes are down to Roan Kearsey-Lawson, who runs the monthly 144Club at Rochester’s Roffen Suite and September’s Maritime Jazz Festival. Good vibes, literally, since as well as being an impeccable drummer, he is a superb jazz vibraphone player – and they are as rare as hen’s teeth.

Roan, Medway born and bred, was inspired by hearing a drum solo by Rochester’s own Ronnie Verrell, a big band stalwart famous for providing the drumming for Animal in The Muppets! After paying his dues around London and the South East, Roan got involved in putting on a Dover-based jazz club. When that closed, he decided to create a similar venue in Medway, launching the 144Club five years ago.

It’s a relaxed, Ronnie Scott’s-style club, the audience at small tables surrounding the stage where top-flight guest artists are backed by Roan’s regular house band.

Last year a significant step forward for the club was inviting Scott Hamilton, the American tenor player, to perform. Roan will be bringing more international stars to the Roffen – in July saxophonist Greg Abate will be over from New York – while still showcasing the best UK musicians, including Chatham-based Tommy Whittle, still playing sax well into his 80s.

If he’s not given himself enough work running the club, teaching and performing, both with his quartet and his New Orleans street-beat outfit Blew Tubes, Roan has taken on the logistical load of the Maritime Jazz Festival, after rescuing the first festival in 2009 when the organisers were about to cancel. He is full of praise for Dickens World MD Kevin Christie, who stepped in to offer the Britannia Theatre as a replacement venue. Linking him with the Roffen’s owners, Brian and Sarah enslow, Roan says, financial pressure elsewhere in the UK.

Dora Loewenstein, daughter of the Rolling Stones manager Prince Rupert Lewenstein, and my co-editor on According To The Rolling Stones, organised an annual concert at the Roundhouse in Camden to raise money for Save The Children, each focused round a particular music genre from funk to soul to disco. I wrote the copy for the programme including these two.

UK. Night Of Blues 2012

The blues is a music for all time , but right now it seems particularly appropriate for the times we find ourselves living in. When the blues evolved in the fertile lands of the Mississippi Delta during the 1890s and the early 1900s, the world was in the grip of a global depression, Ol’ Man River himself had suffered back-to-back years of flooding, and febrile street violence – lynchings rather than looting – was on the rise. Against that background the blues emerged, born out of the tension created by the aftermath of enslavement and emancipation. The field hollers that expressed and masked, in coded messages, feelings of anger, frustration and pain were re-invigorated and liberated by the tantalising vision of freedoms to come.. If no one can carbon date precisely when the blues began, its geographical journey can be charted in a way no other music form can, right down to the very crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49, a location rooted in blues legend – the site of Robert Johnson’s legendary, mythical, pact with the devil, where he traded his soul for the power of the blues. From the Delta, fuelled (and feared) by the tasty musical cauldron of New Orleans – the cradle of jazz which cooked up its own gumbo version of the blues – the blues swam upstream, like a resolute, resilient salmon, along the course of Mississippi, and following the route of the great Highway 61, right up through the central core, the visceral artery of the United States of America. The blues arrived in Memphis, and then when the local authorities tried to stamp it out by shutting down the clubs along Beale Street, the blues simply kept moving north, on to St Louis and finally leaping across to plug into the electric energy of the mighty Chicago.

How come the blues has proved to be such a remarkable survivor? In its apparent simplicity are layers of complexity, and at its heart a universal, emotional truth. As the great Willie Dixon once put it, “the blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling and understanding”.

Night Of Country 2017

Country as a genre is a raw, direct music which wears its heart proudly on its sleeve, a music evolved by newly arrived migrants to the USA, singing about their struggles, their work, their daily lives, ‘the folk music of working-class America’. The ever-flourishing success of country music – it is the most popular music radio format in the US – is at one level down to that authentic connection with real emotions we all experience. Like the blues, a simple music form – songwriter Harlan Howard called country “three chords and the truth” – it has been able to permeate virtually every nook and cranny of the music business, spanning alt.country and bro country, rockabilly and rap. When Dolly Parton played Glastonbury in 2014 it seemed perfect. Younger country artists simply cross-fertilise with panache: Luke Bryan has said, “No one grew up more country than me but we listened to Eazy-E and 2 Live Crew”. In reverse, Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler’s 2016 solo country album went to US Number One and R. Kelly’s The Buffet included a country song called ‘Barely Breathing’.

There is also a distinctive instrumentation: guitars, pedal steel, dobros, fiddle, banjos and mandolins. A tiny factoid: the harmonica, invented in Vienna in the early 19th century, arrived in America just before the Civil War, its portability and distinctive sound perfect for the mood of the times. Behind it all, behind the façade of the Grand Ole Opry, is a self-deprecating, sardonic sense of humour, never taking itself too seriously, which highlights all the tales of heartbreak and hardship (country’s own Blitz spirit) and delivering some of the wittiest song titles ever: ‘I Changed The Oil, She Changed My Life’, ‘You’re The Reason Our Kids Are Ugly’ and the sublime ‘My Wife Ran Off With My Best Friend And I Sure Do Miss Him’...

More liner notes, for a live recording by long-time James Brown sideman Maceo Parker.

Maceo Parker: The Bremen Concert

LINER NOTES, AUGUST 2015

Live recordings are, by definition, a snapshot in time, a backbeat of memory, a droplet of adrenalin forever suspended in amber.

No live show can be the same as any other. Each encapsulates its own mood, energy levels, inspiration (and mistakes, if they haven’t been edited out…). Often, that can prove its primary strength, when a confluence of musicians appear together, for one night only, in a performance that flares with an intense force. Think of Les McCann and Eddie Harris’s Swiss Movement, something of a fluke, a brilliant fluke, recorded at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival. But as part of a tour, the most enduring live recordings deliver an additional, broader context, summoning up the overall spirit, the predominant mood, the zeitgeist, of that group of musicians in the process of evolving a chemistry between themselves, as well as with their audiences.

Live In Bremen does precisely that. It celebrates 25 years since the release of Maceo Parker’s breakthrough album Roots Revisited, which propelled him forwards – from a career as a James Brown and George Clinton sideman to influential leader in his own right – and back towards the music that he listened to growing up. This Bremen show is a definitive distillation of the band Maceo took out on tour after the album’s release, a tour which connected him to a younger audience, encountering for the first time his music, his showmanship and his authenticity.

The taproot of that band was the coming together of two generations of musicians. The elder (though absolutely not elderly, just older) were the three horns who had worked so often together in the James Brown bands – Maceo himself on alto sax, tenor player Pee Wee Ellis, and trombonist Fred Wesley. Their younger rhythm section came out of the New York jazz scene: Larry Goldings on organ, with Rodney Jones on guitar and Bill Stewart on drums. This fusion had been sparked at Augie’s Jazz Bar in New York. Larry Goldings, originally from Boston, a student with Keith Jarrett, had a regular couple of nights there. He remembers “Augie’s was up near Columbia University, a kind of hole-in-the-wall place, no stage. Augie was a jazz fan. He didn’t pay, but it was a place you could play and pass the bucket round. There was no piano there so I played organ.”

One night Maceo Parker turned up to catch a show by Larry’s trio. In fact he was there to check out Bill Stewart, the drummer. David Baker (a much respected, now much missed, jazz engineer) had recommended Bill to Maceo as he started pulling together a band for Roots Revisited. At Augie’s Bill’s drum work easily lived up to expectations, but there was an unanticipated bonus. Maceo was equally impressed by the organist. “It blew me away to see and hear Larry. I almost forgot that I was there to hear the drummer. It had that level of impact.”

What caught Maceo’s ear and eye was Larry’s two-keyboard set-up, which allowed him to play the bass part with his left hand. This was the result of a panic phone call one evening from percussionist Leon Parker, another of Augie’s regulars, who was short of a bass player and knew Larry liked to play walking bass. He gave it a go. It worked, and the two organ set-up became a fixture.

Larry had noticed Maceo in the club, and thought “Who’s that dude, seems like he’s somebody?...’ Introductions were made during the break between sets. That evening opened up some ways forward for Maceo. “As a musician you try to address what is in front of you. There are always possibilities to do this or that. You have to weigh those different possibilities and make a decision.”

As it turned out Bill Stewart got the drum seat for the Roots Revisited album but Larry had to wait his turn (Don Pullen handled keyboards on the album sessions). Shortly afterwards Maceo placed the call to Larry to join him for the tour. “His leap of faith was flattering. The organ was something I was still exploring as part of the group sound. But I guess he liked what he heard.” Maceo also appreciated the sound of guitarist Rodney Jones – who’d worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Lena Horne – to complete the line-up.

This recording, from November 1990, comes from the latter half of that tour, which mixed dates at smaller jazz clubs with a handful of festival appearances. Bremen fell somewhere in between, a larger venue holding around 800.

The audience there was predominantly in their 20s and 30s, not a typical jazz audience, producer Stephan Meyner says. Shortly after the release of Roots Revisited, which had performed as well in Germany as in the States (where it had topped the Billboard jazz charts), they wanted to hear that mix of jazz and RnB, and funk.

Maceo Parker recently heard Larry Goldings working with James Taylor (who had sang background vocals on Maceo’s own ‘My Baby Loves You’). “I loved it, and, just like listening back to this show, I got a warm feeling, the glow you have when you appreciate other musicians. Larry, Rodney, Bill, Fred, Pee Wee. Good Lord. It makes me swell with pride.”

And here’s the liner notes, written for the soundtrack of the second Mamma Mia! movie Here We Go Again, that legitimately allows me to say I was on a Number One album, both in the UK and nine other worldwide territories.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

LINER NOTES, 2018

Well, here we go... Welcome back! It’s been ten years since Mamma Mia! The Movie. Ten years in which original creator and producer Judy Craymer and the creative team had time to ruminate, cogitate, and consider how – or even if – a second film could follow the success of the first.

It was, let’s face it, a very hard act to follow. A movie that was the highest-grossing live-action musical film of all time, with a record-breaking DVD sale. The soundtrack, a Billboard #1, went platinum. And the stage musical has now been seen by over 60 million people.

The upside of those intervening years – including “five years to recover from the first one”, as Judy Craymer drily observes – was the space to let potential storylines gestate, and build on the work of writer Catherine Johnson, director Phyllida Lloyd, choreographer Anthony Van Laast & co. In the end it was courtesy of Richard Curtis and writer/director Ol Parker that a way forward was found to achieve the glittering, shimmering result.

It’s a prequel. And a sequel. (We need a neologism for this: let’s just call it a Greequel...) Ten years further on, we learn the truth about the long hot summer of 1979, when Donna Sheridan romped with three likely lads who became three likely dads... and what happened after Donna and Sam declared ‘I do, I do, I do’ in the chapel on Kalokairi.

One of the questions everyone had asked was whether there’d be ‘enough’ ABBA songs. The answer is a resounding yes. By opening up Donna’s diary and the clues carefully seeded by Catherine Johnson throughout the original script, the creative team could plunge deep into ABBA’s back catalogue.

They surfaced with a treasure trove of jewels, revealing some lesser-known gems, polishing up songs that never made the stage show or the first movie, and re-cutting the classics which just had to be there. All in a way that Benny and Björn,

the musical and lyrical custodians of ABBA’s legacy, not only approved of but deftly adjusted, tweaking a word here, a chord there, refracted through Benny’s orchestrations and Martin Koch’s musical direction. As Benny notes, “This is really joyful work”.

They returned, as in the first movie, to the original sounds of each song. “The songs are in my head,” says Benny. “I have known them for 40 years, every single note.” Once again he brought in the original band (this time sadly minus the late bass player Rutger Gunnarsson) to record the backing tracks at his Stockholm studios. The lesser known songs are a delightful (re)discovery. “Even if you don’t know an ABBA song,” says Judy Craymer, “you are going to warm to it, the theatre, the comedy, the emotion.” Or as Meryl Streep puts it, “ABBA’s songs are in our DNA”. Each contains that inherent dramatic quality that inspired Judy Craymer in the first place; Benny applauds Björn’s skill at creating these “3-minute short stories”. The songs engender and reinforce the rich emotion of the film, the themes of motherhood and family, of loss and of love which resonate universally.

It was crucial for Judy Craymer to reunite all of the original cast – including Meryl Streep. This time their younger selves, led by Lily James as young Donna, underpin their experience and legacy with a fresh shot of youthful energy, reflecting the way Mamma Mia! continues to bring new generations to the sunny optimism of ABBA’s music.

And amongst the voices this time is Donna’s mother, Ruby Sheridan. Cue Cher. As Judy Craymer says, “Cher had seen the stage musical a few times when it first opened, so we knew she loved Mamma Mia! and the music in it. She is not just a great actress, she is also an extraordinary musician.” The feeling is mutual: for Benny “she is such a personality but completely professional, totally devoted to the song as it was”. And that deep, resonant voice is unmistakeable.

This is a sparkling collection. An irresistible mix of irrepressible joy, laughter, tears and ABBA. With the Mamma Mia! family brought back together. We hope you enjoy listening. Again and again and again.

I first stepped foot on foreign soil somewhere south of Cherbourg in July 1970. I know this because my mother Esther, rather brilliantly, kept meticulously detailed journals of our summer holidays – in her spirit I still have all my day-to-day diaries (listing events not emotions) since 1979. Those family holidays also reached Spain, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland, where my mother found the Alps disappointingly small. Once I could afford to travel under my own steam, or aviation fuel, I was up and away, with my first big individual leap to the USA, landing in a pulsating Manhattan in the fall of 1983, followed by other significant continental touchdowns, in Cairo, Kerala, Melbourne and Buenos Aires, all unforgettable.

Wherever I am I always do a lot of research in advance allowing me to go off piste and in depth. Writing the Book Of Cities and then Islands with my wanderlust friend Ben Donald opened up more destinations, and I have, if not a bucket list (too metallic and clunky), then perhaps a trug list of citie and islands, peaks and peninsulas I still plan to visit.

The follow-up to The Book Of Rock was dreamed up with Ben Donald, then a publisher, now a successful independent TV producer ( The Mallorca Files on BBC) over a posttennis pint in Queen’s Park. It was a similar approach to Rock but we allowed a spread for each of the 250 cities included, and rather than alphabetical order – in the German edition Vienna would have to come under W, for example – the book started on the Greenwich meridian and spun westwards by longitude. “A book to fire the imagination of even the most committed armchair traveller”, wrote The Observer

THE

BOOK OF CITIES PAVILION, 2004

Bordeaux

Bordeaux is definitely a place to explore on foot, a flâneur’s delight. The great architectural glories – the showcase Grand Théâtre, the grand Place de la Bourse designed by Petit Trianon architect Jacques Gabriel, and the leafy Esplanade des Quinconces – are impressive, just as the city’s intendants intended them to be, but the real heart of Bordeaux lies elsewhere, in the backstreets of the old town. Behind mundane pedestrian shopping streets there is a network of narrow roads which suddenly opens up into small squares, each, or so it seems, blessed with an antiques store, a quirky bookshop (Bordeaux is big on books) or a relaxed café. And further out, in contrast to the stately neoclassical buildings in the centre, are distinctive stone bungalows, known as échoppes, which at the end of the 19th century sheltered the city’s workers and which now house IT companies.

Ultimately, though, everything in Bordeaux comes back to wine. When the feisty Eleanor of Aquitaine dumped and divorced her husband Louis VII in 1152 to marry Henry Plantagenet (soon to become Henry II of England), laying the foundations for the Hundred Years War, she also instigated centuries of serious trading in fine wines between Bordeaux’s merchants and British oenophiles, who played a major role in boosting claret to its position as the most famous wine in the world.

Bordeaux, not surprisingly, has an abundance of highquality wine shops, but it’s better to head out to the vineyards which start right at the edge of the city. To the east lie Sauternes, St-Emilion and Entre-Deux-Mers, but the holy grail is north-west of Bordeaux, in the Haut Médoc peninsula set between the Garonne and the Atlantic. Puttering through its small towns and past its châteaux, a rich gazetteer of familiar names – Margaux, Lynch-Bages, Lafite-Rothschild –rolls past like a silver-tongued sommelier’s sales pitch.

Dublin

Anyone who’s spent even the briefest time in Dublin knows that the craíc is never more than a few paces away. But the stag and hen parties who fly in for a weekend’ intensive celebrations in the taverns of Temple Bar will doubtless miss out on Dublin’s other attractions, which lie equally close at hand. For Dublin is a tiny city. Not only is everything pretty much within gentle walking distance, but everybody, or so it seems, has known everyone else all their lives, which only reinforces the city’s warm, close-knit, fiercely loyal character.

However far you wander from the River Liffey as it slouches through the middle of this small-town capital, there are reminders for Dubliners of the culture and hardships that forged them. The General Post Office on O’Connell Street was the launch-pad of the doomed martyrdom of the Easter Rising of 1916. The surprisingly elegant, even theatrical Dublin Castle was for seven centuries the symbol of British occupation. The magnificent illuminations of the Book of Kells glow in the calm of Trinity College. And everywhere there are statues: of Yeats and Joyce of course, or that cockle and mussel-vending Molly Malone, or the vast monument to nationalist hero Wolfe Tone in St Stephen’s Green, an edifice known locally as ‘Tonehenge’.

The hangover of British influence can still be found, in the imposing Custom House and the Four Courts, or the Georgian doors of the houses lining St Stephen’s Green. But it’s probably more valuable to celebrate local talent, especially in the written word which has always flourished here, whether the cultured wit of Jonathan Swift, the epigrams of Oscar Wilde or the belligerence of Brendan Behan.

Music also lies deep within the soul of the city, from traditional fiddles and bodhrán drums playing in the corner of a pub to the anthems of U2, whose Clarence Hotel is just along from the Ha’penny bridge. Bono and the boys – along with Riverdance, The Commitments and Mary Robinson – were integral to Dublin’s great resurgence.

Walking along Dublin’s quays and canals, beside water as slowmoving as the black pool, or ‘Dubh Linn’, that gave the city its name, helps clear the mind after a pint or three of Guinness and a shot of Jameson’s. At its very heart, Dublin is still pure, undiluted Irish.

Santa Fe

Santa Fe has survived its most challenging test, when, during the 1980s and 1990s, it became the desirable destination for the upwardly mobile and artistically aspirational of the United States, a “sagebrush Shangri-La”, as People magazine announced. Santa Fe Style – a mixture of pueblo chic and hippy New Mexicana – was made tangible by chains of red chilli ristras, native American rugs and beehive fireplaces. The smell of piñon and cedar and the tinkling of wind chimes drifted in the air. Chef Mark Miller created a distinctive, spicy local haute cuisine at the Coyote Café. There was even a Ralph Lauren Santa Fe paint range.

The city has got through the most pretentious excesses of those times and settled back into a more tranquil life, where the best of its individuality can emerge in a gentle and relaxed way. Up on a high plateau against the backdrop of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and bathed in a sharp desert light, its scenic attractions have been charming a group of artists and writers since the beginning of the last century, amongst them D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams and the patron saint of Santa Fe, Georgia O’Keefe.

Los Alamos, where Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project colleagues devised the atom bomb, squats up in the mountains above the pueblos (managing to be simultaneously banal and sinister), but back down in Santa Fe, the mañana pace and dream-catcher vibe of life eases away such painful and self-destructive memories – such is the soothing and addictive effect of the self-styled ‘City Different’.

Kochi

Way down south from the holiday beaches of Goa, Kochi (formerly known as Cochin) sits on the coast of Kerala, a gateway to a lush interior where canoes and barges glide quietly through the canals and lagoons of the Backwaters. The city itself is a mix of the big and bold and the timelessly old, spilling over a clutter of islands and peninsulas, from where ships are dispatched into Kochi’s excellent and safe harbour, a salt-water lagoon lying just off the Arabian Sea.

Kochi’s spice trade appealed to travellers and raiders from Europe and the Far East. They all left their traces. Early arrivals were the Portuguese, touching down on Christmas Eve 1500. The rajah of the region granted a feitoria to the incomers, a franchise for trading that they were quick to exploit. No less a voyager than Vasco da Gama arrived: he later died in the city and was for a while buried in the tiny church of St Francis, the oldest church in India, which still stands near the water’s edge in Fort Kochi, though Vasco himself is long gone, transported back to his homeland. Not far from the church stands Kochi’s most celebrated sight, another reminder of foreign visitors, this time heading east to west: the Chinese fishing nets, great cantilevered constructions of bamboo and billowing mesh, bow down like a row of wading birds into the harbour water before surging back up to reveal the squirming victims in their maw.

In the straightforwardly, rather than disparagingly, named Jew Town, a luminous synagogue lined with blue and white Chinese tiles – no two alike – recalls the influx of Jewish immigrants in the 16th century. Although the synagogue is lovingly maintained, the ageing Jewish population has dwindled to low double figures; sadly this little gem may shortly become a preserved museum rather than the living place of worship it now is. The Dutch and then the British – of course – also came to Kochi for its spices: the commercial area of Willingdon Island was built in the 1920s from the residue of Lord Bristow’s dredging of the harbour.

But it is not really for the legacy of the incomers that this area is the one most Indians say that they would like to visit. It’s the slow, relaxed Southern Indian quality of Kochi and Kerala that appeals.

Aswan

The terrace where Hercule Poirot strolled is still there. The Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, built by Thomas Cook in 1899, sits on an outcrop above the River Nile, a cocoon of tea and biscuits, gin and tonics at sundown, with a Moorish vaulted dining-room that catered to Winston Churchill, Howard Carter and Tsar Nicholas II. Little, on the surface has changed. Below the hotel, the feluccas, manned by tall, djellaba-clad crewmen, ferry visitors from Aswan’s corniche out to the islands in the river – only now they come with beatboxes which pump funky Nubian music out across the waters.

Aswan has long been the frontier town between Egypt and Nubia to the south, and – as the farthest anyone could navigate up the Nile –once known as the end of the civilised world. Here was the river’s first unnavigable cataract, hence the hotel’s name. For many, this is the Nile at its most stunning. The city, on the East bank, faces golden desert sands that run down (past the mausoleum of the Aga Khan, who loved to winter in Aswan) to the emerald-coloured river where red granite rock is tempered by fringed palm trees.

Upstream, egrets, parakeet and Horus-like falcons swoop. Higher again, the Aswan dams hold back the waters of the Nile. To protect irreplaceable ruins due to be flooded, the temples of Philae and Kalabasha were painstakingly removed and reconstructed, as were the immense statues of Abu Simbel, further south, way into the Nubian Desert. A long drive through the dark of early morning to catch the figures illuminated in the sunrise is more than worth the 3.30am alarm call.

PIC TO SCAN

Venice

It was one of Dorothy Parker’s Algonquin sparring partners, the humorist Robert Benchley, who on arriving in Venice wired back to New York the plaintive message “Streets flooded. Please advise.” Behind his bon mot lies a genuine truism. Because the thing that is most striking on arriving in Venice for the first time – most elegantly done via a sleek motor boat to the Cipriani or Gritti Palace – is that the streets are indeed full of water.

Other cities, like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, have canals, but here they are everywhere, of every shape, size and mood. France’s Venise Verte or London’s Little Venice are tame simulacra. Nothing can compare with the original’s profusion of waterways, the arteries and veins of Venetian existence. Vaporetti, traghetti, gondolas, barges, skiffs and water transport of every description cross-cross the water – carrying not just tourists but piles of coal, food supplies, or patients heading to hospital. This is a living community, not a Disney fantasy, nor a Canaletto canvas.

Venice is a great place to get lost. There is no handy grid system for easy orientation, but a sinuous layout with signs that occasionally and vaguely point towards the Rialto or the Piazza San Marco. So there is nothing easier than fleeing the madding, maddening summer crowds: exploring out of season, the far-flung – and often exquisitely malodorous – fondamente shrouded in the fog of Don’t Look Now, joining the locals (all of whom know each other – the population without tourists is tiny) for a Sunday afternoon in one of the much-coveted Lido beach huts; savouring a plump tramezzino sandwich and a glass of prosecco in a quiet square; or stumbling across a Vivaldi concert in an out of the way church.

After The Book Of Cities , it was not too much of a stretch to suggest The Book Of Islands , which was published by Colin Webb’s new company Palazzo Editions. Katy Guest reviewed it in The Independent: “The celebration of ‘islomania’ behind this book is nothing to do with being a helpful travel guide; nor can its remit be scientifically defined. ‘We went by instinct in the end,’ write its authors, as they struggle to define what gives a place its ‘islandness’. And fine instincts they were, too.

THE BOOK OF ISLANDS

PALAZZO, 2008

Ithaca

Ithaca has long been hailed as the birthplace of Odysseus. His long and difficult journey, his odyssey, no less –trying to return home from Troy to relieve his wife and family, but having to avoid Cyclops, Circe and Calypso along the way – was the inspiration for Homer’s epic. “My home is under the clear skies of Ithaca,” Odysseus says. “It is a rough land, but nurtures fine men.” Now, however, we find that new academic research suggests that Odysseus’s Ithaca might in reality have been Cephalonia, the adjacent island. And for good measure, Homer’s authorship has also come under scrutiny – he may have been a very talented editor who collated an existing oral history. Homer called Ithaca “good for goats”, and although that might seem a little dismissive, it is absolutely accurate. This Ionian island, one of the group along mainland Greece’s western edge, is full of mountain passes and steep hillsides, and there are goats all over the place, nudging their way into deserted monasteries or gently tiptoeing across the coastal roads. A series of switchbacks leads up to the Monastery of the Archangels at Perahori, one of the highest points on Ithaca, from which the island’s shape is revealed. It is long and slender, and virtually bisected by the bay of the largest town Vathi, with its immensely deep natural harbour. Outside Vathi, small red-roofed villages line the steep wooded inlets of the island’s coastline. In Kioni, on the east coast, yachting flotillas stop off for supper (maybe the delicious local onion pie) before continuing their sailing holiday down through the Ionian islands. These villages are the starting point for miniodysseys to the local bays via wooden motorboat, to pebbled beaches beneath terraced olive groves. Nobody else will disturb you – if another motorboat putters into view it will keep going to find its own quiet oasis. Water is the element of Ithaca, once the capital of all the Cephalonian states, and its islanders are known for their navigational expertise and exploring mentality.

Corsica

There is a beautiful Corsican music called paghjella, a polyphonic choral chanting, CDs of which are usually on sale in the souvenir shops alongside the pocket knives, ewe’s cheese and bottles of Cap Corse apéritif. The haunting male-voice choirs relay chants handed down from generations past, and the music’s contrapuntal nature reflects the core of Corsica’s history and character: oral tradition, complexity and togetherness. Polyphony is the epitome of Corsican solidarity.

Balanced on the tip of Sardinia’s nose, Corsica has (apart from a couple of interruptions) been part of France since 1768, when the island was sold by Genoa to Louis XV. It is a tempestuous relationship: Corsica tries to remain ruggedly independent. The Corsican language, with its distinctive “u” endings – like the polyphony transmitted orally and for long periods never notated – is easily visible throughout the island. One of the great local heroes, Pasquale Paoli, tried to set up a Corsican republic in 1755, but was quashed by the French army. The political struggles continue: between summer visits holiday cottages are blown up – sauté – by the separatist movement. Ironic then that one of France’s most celebrated leaders, Napoleon Bonaparte, was born into a noble family in the island’s capital, Ajaccio.

Under threat, Corsicans retreat into the mountains and the forests of cork, oak and pine or the scented thickets of scrub known as the maquis, from the Italian for “mesh”. Napoleon always said he could sense the smell of the maquis from the sea; now the herbs are used to scent honey. These mountains were once inaccessible other than on foot or by mule. The demanding GR20 mountain path recreates that difficulty, although an alternative is to take the quaint single-track railway from Ajaccio or Bastia to meet in Corte, the old capital and soul of the island.

In the hills, the unwritten law of vendetta prevailed among the tightlipped, introspective towns like Sartène in the south, which the shortstory writer Prosper Mérimée called “the most Corsican of Corsican towns”. The great irony of it all was that the men always wanted the land in the hills and the supposedly worthless seafront land was given to the women, who have benefited from selling off their plots for holiday apartments and second homes.

Caption here

Canvey Island

At the entrance to the Thames is an island that lies so low in the water it barely peeps over the surface. This is Canvey Island in Essex: a final, flimsy bastion before the onslaught of the often merciless North Sea. Although Dutch engineers shored up its defences in the 17th century, the ravenous waters often encroached. The most recent disastrous flood occurred in 1953, when the island was entirely swamped apart from one tiny area of raised ground surmounted by the Red Cow pub. With pragmatically sardonic humour, the locals renamed it the King Canute.

There is an older pub on Canvey, the Lobster Smack, which dates back to the early 1500s, a one-time haunt of smugglers, and later of Pip and Magwitch in Dickens’ Great Expectations. When the tavern first opened its doors, the island was primarily populated by sheep – which still feature on its coat of arms – and had a thriving cheese industry. But although the marshlands were not the healthiest places (malaria was always a threat) Canvey enjoyed a remarkable turnaround in the Victorian era. A local businessman, Frederick Hester, took the seemingly reckless decision to turn the island’s creeks and channels into a Venetianstyle estuarine holiday resort. For a while, the beau monde descended on Canvey, until Hester overextended himself and went bust in 1905.

Seventy years, some Second World War pillboxes, and one massive flood later, Canvey had its second great renaissance, courtesy of the legendary Dr Feelgood, whose no-frills, deliberately mono R&B presaged the arrival of punk on Down by the Jetty and the live Number One album Stupidity. Guitarist Wilko Johnson, vocalist Lee Brilleaux and their rhythm section of The Big Figure and John B. Sparks purveyed gritty tales and gruff, tough romances. Their very own delta blues captured life amid the mud, the marshes and the Shell Haven oil refinery: the front cover shot of their debut was taken right by the Lobster Smack.

Aran Islands

The Aran Islands form part of the final frontier of Europe, its very western edge, beyond which lies the immensity of the Atlantic and, beyond that, a New World. They were once described by the poet Seamus Heaney as “three stepping stones out of Europe”. They have also offered a haven in times of turmoil in the rest of Ireland and Europe, and provided a sanctuary for Irish language and learning.

Set in the Bay of Galway, the Arans – not to be confused with the Scottish isle of Arran – are slabs of karst limestone, like the landscape of the Burren on the mainland rather than the granite of Connemara. They are crisscrossed by boreens – tiny lanes – and dry-stone walls enclosing minuscule fields, protecting the exposed soil. The wind and weather here can be savage, and unrelenting westerlies lash the outer edges of the isles. The fishermen in their traditional open canvas-covered curragh boats wisely avoided the west coast and put to sea in the east. However, although the storms are fierce, they are rarely freezing and so ice has not cracked the stones of many monuments and buildings on the islands. Among those that are still found here are round-towered early Christian churches, monasteries and the great prehistoric fortress of Dún Aengus on the largest island, Inishmore, a citadel so ancient that no one can precisely date it, perched above plummeting cliffs that provided a natural defence. Dùn Dùbhchathair, the Black Fort, on the southern coast is even older.

Despite this fortification and an innate insularity, the Arans have had an impact on world culture completely disproportionate to their size and population. There was a period when their intense Irishness was seized on as a pure idyll, and its folk traditions romanticised by artists, writers and playwrights. James Joyce called it “the strangest place in the world”. In the 1900s J. M. Synge was encouraged to visit the islands by W. B. Yeats, and wrote widely and warmly about them, drawing on these experiences for his masterwork, The Playboy of the Western World. More recently, and in a totally different way, the islands were the setting –dubbed Craggy Island – for the irreverent television sitcom Father Ted: the islands of Inishmore and Inisheer, the smallest of the trio, wrangle over which was the ‘real’ Craggy Island and hold an annual football match to settle the dispute.

Martha’s Vineyard

Following his death in the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, John Belushi’s body was brought back from West to East, to the island where he had a holiday home. He was buried beneath a suitably larger-than-life stone slab with the single word BELUSHI chiselled into it, in a cemetery straggling down a gently wooded slope near Chilmark on the southern shore of Martha’s Vineyard.

Belushi was just one of many celebrities to summer there. James Cagney had bought a farm on this triangular island in the 1930s. The Kennedy clan spilt over from their Hyannisport complex on Cape Cod, seven miles to the north; they were followed by James Taylor and Carly Simon, and a bevy of writers, television hosts, filmmakers and politicians, all part of the diaspora from the mainland who boost the island’s wintertime population of fifteen thousand fivefold.

But out of season - once the yachting fraternities have hauled anchor and the beautiful people have taken the ferry back from Vineyard Haven - is the best time to see the island, especially during the fall, when fading reds and browns dapple the gentle hillsides, and there is the strongest sense of time standing still. Here something of 1950s America still persists.

Somehow Martha’s Vineyard has continued making the news – Edgartown is instantly recognisible to anyone who has watched Jaws – though it was not always positive. In 1969 Teddy Kennedy swam back to Edgartown after his accident on neighbouring Chappaquiddick. Thirty years later his nephew John Jr’s plane plunged into the waters off the Aquinnah cliffs, the former Gay Head, home of the descendants of the island’s original inhabitants, the Wampanoag tribe.

Key West

The spiny tail of the Florida Keys pokes out into the Caribbean for 125 miles, its islands like eight hundred mini vertebrae. Key West, the island at their very far end, can consequently claim to be the “southernmost city in the continental United States of America”. This sense of being far-flung, but not too far, has attracted a wide selection of alternative lifestylers (Key West was one of the first US cities to actively foster gay tourism), who like to group themselves beneath the banner of the self-styled “Conch Republic”.

Robert Frost once said of Key West: “What a beautiful island it is. I wish it could be a little more isolated, though.” In fact, the island could only be reached by boat until the 1910s, when the Florida Overseas Railroad constructed by Henry Flagler joined it to the mainland. Perhaps surprisingly, despite its previous isolation Key West had already prospered: by the end of the nineteenth century it was the most populated and the wealthiest city in Florida.

Key West’s grid of laidback streets is an attractive network of cafes, art galleries and shrines to its notable residents. The list of writers who have plied their trade on the island is a lengthy one - ranging from poet Richard Wilbur to Tennessee Williams. And top of the pile is Ernest Hemingway, who combined the two great Key West traditions of game fishing and writing. Hemingway spent ten years on the island, mainly at 907 Whitehead Street. He wrote To Have Or Have Not, and fell for his third wife Martha Gellhorn at Sloppy Joe’s, the bar that is still going strong (though it has since moved premises) Carl Hiaasen, a resident of lslamorada, back along the keys, has a typical darkly comic view: “Key West trades in on the name ‘Hemingway’. You can’t take a leak without seeing Hemingway this and Hemingway that. And the irony is, if Hemingway were alive today he’d take a blowtorch to Duval Street...”

P&O

[In the late 2000s, I wrote for various P&O publications, including their Portunis Club magazine, the brochure for their superliner Ventura, and their 2010 Cruise catalogue – the pieces were all about destinations, including a cluster where the brief was ‘Arriving in...’

Rome

Arriving in Rome is like emerging from the most wonderful time capsule. History is everywhere around in Rome. But it’s not the kind of history preserved in the glass cases of fusty old museums. There is so much history here that it lies piled up almost nonchalantly, layer upon layer – and I savour the thought that I am going to be able to dig down into so much culture.

The very first thing I do in the morning is to go out onto my balcony and keep my eyes closed! Because the sounds of Rome are unlike any other city’s: an exuberant rumble, just the right side of pandemonium, full of life and excitement and voluptousness. Over the rooftops comes the tolling of the city’s church bells. From the surprisingly narrow streets below I hear the insect buzz of the Vespas straight out of that great movie Roman Holiday. There is the chitter-chatter of locals on their phones sending out a river of one of the most sensuous languages in the world. Some visitors believe that if they listen hard they can hear the lions in the Colosseum roaring, and the cry of the wolverine who suckled the twins Romulus and Remus, the city founders.

And to start the day: a pure shot of genuine Italian coffee, an espresso standing at a busy bar where commuters on the way to their office take a quick hit, or a more leisurely cappuccino while just people watching. Just enough to prepare for a walk through time: first back to the Roman empire, and the ghosts of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, Claudius and Messalina.

The Norwegian fjords

Arriving in the Norwegian fjords is like entering the most natural and refreshing well-being makeover. Just the first breath of the air makes me feel purged and energised: I draw and draw in as much pure oxygen as I can, clear, clean and chilled. As the liner turns into Storfjord – the ‘great fjord’ I look forward to stopping off at the town of Ålesund, an extraordinary and unexpected jewel of architecture up here along the Norwegian coast. After a devastating fire in the 1900s Ålesund was rebuilt from scratch as a snapshot of Art Nouveau style and its turrets, towers and diagonal roofs above the houses that seem to float on the waterside are exquisite. We pass further along the Storfjord before cruising into its southerly offshoot, the Geraingerfjord, sixteen kilometres of glorious scenery that has not surprisingly been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I lie back in total peace and watch the steep mountainsides of this much narrower fjord glide silently past. Their peaks push up through fluffy clouds and are reflected in the glacier-cool, greenish blue of the waters. On the shore I admire the delicate flowers of apple blossom in vertiginous fields clinging to the sides of the fjord, and am delighted to see that all of the cascades in the waterfall the locals call The Seven Sisters are on display; sometimes they can be rather reticent depending on the recent rainfall. On the other side of the fjord, a lonely cascade, their suitor, waits in vain. Enjoying the views from the deck of the ship is a magical experience, but I also decide to stop off in Gerainger, the small town which sits at the end of the fjord. From there I head up to Flysdalsjuvet, a rock that soars high up in the air, and allows you to look down like an eagle on the wonderful vista below. To satisfy the appetite I have acquired from reaching such heady heights, I bring myself back to earth with a hearty round of hot chocolate and waffles laden with sour cream and jam: time for a little more purification…

I’ve always been a fan of biography and memoirs – everything from Karen Blixen’s Out Of Africa to the extraordinary Beneath The Underdog by jazz great Charles Mingus. So it has been a pleasure, and a privilege, to work with and write about people who have been incredibly good at what they do or whose lives have had quirk and character. As a ghostwriter (I actually loathe that word: the process is so much more organic), the chance to spend long stretches of time with business gurus, Irish matchmakers or graciously ageing rock stars is a joy. I am there to help them, not a journalist rootling out a story, nor a fan wanting my albums signed. They open up – and it’s often cathartic: at the end of our sessions Mike Rutherford of Genesis usually ended up prone as if on a therapist’s couch. I have not included writing published under those celebrity names, but only where I was credited as co-author, plus other lives I loved exploring, especially for The Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium

The Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium was one of those ideas that arrived intact, lock, stock and barrel, when I was watching University Challenge at home win Queen’s Park, with a threeyear-old Wan Mae. There was a question about the origin of the word ‘guppy’, and alongside us was an aquarium full of tropical fish, including some brightly coloured guppies. Within a couple of days I had created a proposal for a book about people who had had objects named after them –from Joseph P. Frisbie to Mercédès Jellinek, and deals with Random House in the UK and Penguin in the US meant I could travel to the States, Argentina and throughout Europe to discover the backstories for a book published in Autumn 2007.

Adolphe Sax

Sax. What a name. What a perfect name for the instrument Adolphe Sax invented. There is no clear cut reason why certain eponyms should take hold in the language, although some kind of mellifluous easiness on the ear is an obvious advantage. But Sax. I don’t believe you could invent a better name for the instrument even if you sent out a thousand market research teams to focus group the ideas to extinction. That initial S, as curvaceous as the body and bell of a tenor. The A, a single, open, breathily vulnerable vowel. And the whole rounded off with a smacker of a smoochy latenight X, the shimmer of a ride cymbal dissipating the name into the air of a smoky basement club. With apologies to Kim, I can’t help feeling that the Clijstersphone might have been struggling to establish an enduring presence in the pantheon of musical instruments.

Oscar

I do like a good cemetery. As my wife will confirm, I will go a long way for a good grave. On holidays our itinerary often includes a rather large diversion to take in a particular tomb. So over the years I have stood in front of John Belushi’s memorial, a powerful, squat slab of stone on the gently rolling slop of Martha’s Vineyard’s southern shore, a single word chiselled into its face: BELUSHI. I have tranquility at Westwood Cemetery in the heart of Los Angeles, where Marilyn Monroe’s final resting place was marked – on the day I went there – by a single red rose. I have taken the waterbus to Venice’s Isola di San Michele, where the graves of Diaghilev and Stravinsky glitter. I can appreciate the ornateness of their tombs as much as the restrained formality of François Mitterand’s family sepulchre in Jarnac, or the simple headstones of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, side by side in some final piece on the hilltop in Laugherne.

Samuel Maverick

Joe D. Hawes met me in Tivoli, Texas. ‘Turn right at the crossroads with the traffic light. You won’t miss it,’ he told me. ‘There’s only the one light.’ Sure enough, on a foggy morning a single orange light blinked tentatively as I approached, after a 50 mile run from Corpus Christi out along the Gulf coast. If this township was a tribute to the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen it had some way to go in the illumination stakes.

Joe’s pick-up was exactly where he’d said I would find it. A maroon Chevvy Silverado pick-up with an aluminium gun-rack. Joe climbed down from the truck. He was all-Texan. Tall, barrel-chested. Cowboy hat, work shirt, denim jeans and boots. A crinkled, weather-beaten, kind smile. ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘Follow close behind me. We heading out to the boondocks.’

The boondock in question was Joe’s ranch, Rancho Riacho – ‘we called it after a funny little creek’ – where he lived with his wife Marjorie. They married in 1940, when she was seventeen and Joe was twenty, and now in his late eighties Joe was still keeping cattle. And more importantly, he was still running cattle out on the Matagorda Peninsula where, in the 1840s, a sometime rancher called Samuel Maverick had run cattle too, the cattle that carried his name into the English language.

From the turn off to Rancho Riacho we lumbered over a mile or more of rutted tracks, through muddy fords, over a timbered bridge crossing that funny little creek and past squat mesquite tress that looked as if their trunks were buried underground and only their highest branches had made it to the surface. Unfazed cattle watched us nonchalantly. As we drew up to Joe’s house, a posse of wild turkey pottered across the track. In a townie kind of way, I ventured that up until then the only wild turkey I had ever seen was inside a bottle of bourbon. Joe laughed kindly as he leaned up against the gate the the ranch house. On top of the gate discoloured metal letters spelled out J. D. HAWES. ‘All rusted up, just like me,’ said Joe sadly. He was getting ready for a hip replacement operation. ‘Been getting around on one leg for a while now. That’s old age, I guess.; But although his gait was a little stiff, he was still 100 per cent prime rancher and, to my untrained

[My agent Gordon Wise and I tried selling a follow-up to The Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium, based around the stories behind board games – Colonel Mustard’s Compendium. Still open to offers...]

Etienne de Silhouette

August Edouart introduced the word ‘silhouette’ into the English language after travelling across the Channel to England in 1814 – he had previously served in Napoleon’s army – and looking for a way to earn a living and support his wife and five children.

His fist artistic endeavour was creating was portraits, using human hair embedded in the wax for extra authenticity, a technique he also used for favourite pets. However, at dinner one evening, after he had been in England for ten years or so, he was shown a mechanically produced profile by one of this hosts. He rashly declared he could do better. His fellow diners called his bluff and provided him with scissors and card. Cutting freehand, August proceeded to produce a profile that was so accurate that he decided to abandon his line in wax pictures and concentrate on what he now called his ‘silhouettes’.

But how did the name of Étienne de Silhouette, finance minister of France, become associated with shades and profiles? This is the way Edouart tells it: ‘In the reign of Louis XIV, there was a prime minister, whose name was Silhouette: he was a man disposed to economy, even to sordidness; whose conduct was mean, and whose mind was narrow.’

That’s a great final phrase, but I do need to interrupt and point out that Silhouette was actually the chancellor for Louis XV. Carry on, August.

‘He was very much disliked, especially as he was not a promoter of the fine arts, and artists in general had a very great hatred to him on this account. It was at this time that likenesses produced by the shadow were invented. Their cheapness was a great encouragement to many persons to have them in this way: the artists perceiving at length, that it would end in their detriment, for the people taking a fancy to them, styled them, in derision, ‘Portraits à la Silhouette’, signifying that they were paltry, and only suitable to persons like the Minister.’ Even though Edouart’s English goes a little wonky towards the end there, we can get the gist.

[My agent Gordon Wise and I tried selling a follow-up to The Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium, based around the stories behind board games – Colonel Mustard’s Compendium. Still open to offers...]

Murder Most Enjoyable

BOOK PROPOSAL, 2008

‘Cluedo has always had a nostalgic aura, blurrily reminiscent of creepy old houses and buried family secrets.’

Kate Summerscale

Gratifyingly, the search for the truth about Anthony Ernest Pratt, the inventor of Cluedo, required a good deal of sleuthing and some Holmesian deduction, and turned up if not a shoal of red herrings then at least a decent-sized creel’s worth.

On first investigation Anthony Pratt’s life seemed to be as faceless as that of his permanently hapless victim, Dr Black, but I managed to tease out a few slender scraps of clues from archives, cuttings and often wildly inaccurate potted biographies. A discreet obituary notice was tucked away in the pages of a Birmingham evening paper, the married surname of a daughter cropped up in one fading article, and there was a throwaway remark about a former neighbour in an interview – possibly the only one he ever gave – a couple of years before his death in 1994.

From this scanty evidence, it was time to reactivate some long-dormant little grey cells. I made a sideways leap of faith and placed a cold call to a certain Mrs Marcia Davies at the Health and Safety Executive in Birmingham. That her office was close to Chad Valley, home of that great British board game company, I took as a good omen. My hunch was right. She was indeed Anthony Pratt’s only child, and invited me to morning coffee in genteel Bromsgrove on Birmingham’s Worcestershire border. Her father was a bona fide Brummie, born in the now inner-city district of Borsall Heath in August 1903.

The interrogation took place in the lounge, with biscuits, on a somewhat blustery March morning; Marcia later said it had been emotionally draining to relive so many memories. In her mid-fifties, cheerful and reflective, she apologised for only having a couple of photographs of her father – ‘we weren’t a family who took photos’ – one showing Anthony and his wife Elva in the back garden of one of their first houses, taken some time in the early 1940s.

Anthony looked extremely dapper in suit, tie and owlish glasses, like Captain Mainwaring in civvies; he had as it happened served in the Home Guard. In the other photo, from thirty years later, he was still sporting a jacket and tie, with an exquisitely folded pocket handkerchief, the only significant change a swap to Ronnie Barker-style glasses.

This tallied with the impression formed by the reporter from the Birmingham Evening Mail who had interviewed him in 1990 (‘Meet Mr Cluedo. The man who dices with death…’). She remarked on his urbane appearance and the ‘touch of elegance in the glass of Madeira he pours to follow his meals-on-wheels shepherd’s pie’.

In the corner of Marcia’s lounge stood one tangible connection with Anthony Pratt: his fine upright piano, a Broadwood, which had been part of the family furniture for as long as Marcia could remember – she had re-acquired it after his death, and rather than let it languish had recently started learning to play.

‘He was a tremendously talented pianist. The first piece I heard him play when I was a child was from Rossini’s Thieving Magpie; he enjoyed all those operettas.’ Anthony had been good enough to perform professionally on ocean liners during the 1920s and 30s. ‘He had to leave school at fifteen and went into a chemical company, but then the music took over.’

An oft-repeated, cut and pasted line is that Anthony Pratt was a solicitor’s clerk. Marcia pooh-poohed this Pooterish impression: ‘He would never have described himself as that. He did work for a solicitor but only much later on, during the 1960s.’ And as for another claim that he was a parttime clown, she had no idea where that particular piece of disinformation had come from. His time as a professional musician was his only real career, although even that stalled. ‘The stage fright took over, so he gave that up, and then he seems to have drifted. He couldn’t settle.’

The Second World War brought, maybe not stability, but some focus to his life. In his mid-thirties when war was declared, Anthony’s extremely bad eyesight would have precluded him in any case from active service. He did some war work in a local factory (‘which he hated’), joined the local

Birmingham’s southern suburbs.

What got him started on the idea of creating a board game during the summer of 1943 was his friendship with the Pratts’ next-door neighbour in King’s Heath, Geoffrey Bull – who had already persuaded Waddington’s, the most prestigious games company in the Empire, to produce his game Buccaneer. Waddington’s continued selling Buccaneer, with its treasure ships laden down with barrels of rum, gold, diamonds rubies and pearls, well into the 1980s. It was certainly another board game classic, though never quite in the same bestselling league as Cluedo.

Marcia had no doubt that getting to know Geoffrey Bull was the impulse behind the invention of Cluedo (‘that was the trigger’), because although Anthony was a father who liked to come down to a child’s level, and had a wicked sense of humour, ‘especially observing the characteristics of people we met’, board games were not a particular passion of his. It was murder that fascinated him. ‘He had books and books and books on murder, psychology, Freud and Jung, philosophy as well, an enormous collection of books. They all had to go, though.’

Whenever Marcia went anywhere with her father he would always point out the places where infamous murders had taken place. In the 1960s they lived in Bournemouth and he would take her to see the hotel in which Neville Heath killed Doreen Marshall in 1946, or the Villa Madeira where the scandalous Rattenbury murder of 1935 had been committed.

His tastes in crime fiction ran more to Raymond Chandler and Edgar Wallace than Agatha Christie – ‘he never rated her’ – and he was a fan of the ghost stories of M.R. James. The ghoulish was what captured his imagination: strange then that he ended up being remembered for creating a game that was so much more in the vein of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

This was Anthony’s own version of how he came up with the notion for the game. ‘I was leaning on the fence of our King’s Heath house and it dawned on me that this wretched

When Michael Jackson died in July 2009, Endeavour, the book end of Getty Images, asked me to write the text for a not quite instant but very swift book about him: it came out two months after he died.

MICALE J PAGES

Michael Jackson: A Life In The Spotlight

ENDEAVOUR, 2009

And then it was all over . In retrospect the death of Michael Jackson should not have been so very surprising. Health concerns, severe financial worries threatening an entire lifestyle, the demands of preparing for a major series of concerts after a decade in the wings, the sheer weight of expectation building and building. Yet when the news came it was a shock. The first 911 call went out from a rented property in Holmby Hills at 12.21 pm – ‘50 year old male. Not breathing at all’. The ambulance crew found Michael’s personal physician trying to resuscitate him. He was whisked to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center where the fight to save him continued. It was too late. Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at 2.26pm, Pacific coastal time, Thursday 25th June 2009.

Digital technology allowed the news to ripple outwards from Los Angeles more quickly than any previous ‘Where were you when?’ moment. Michael’s death was Twittered and Facebooked across time zones in a matter of moments. In China and Japan it was a dazed awakening in the early hours of the morning. In London, looking forward to the O2 Arena shows due to start in a matter of days, it was the end of a hot summer’s evening. Against the background chatter of news channels dispatching reporters and assembling pundits, and a soundtrack of radio stations lining up back to back hits, Michael’s fans stood in tearful silence, or quietly prepared to light candles of remembrance.

The memorial service for Michael Jackson was held on Tuesday 7th July, at the same Staples Center where on the very eve of his death, he had been rehearsing for the This Is It shows. For someone who had spent the majority of his 50, almost 51, years in the limelight, it seemed oddly fitting that this celebration of his life was also an entertainment special with a global TV and online audience of maybe a billion. Elizabeth Taylor declined to attend (‘I cannot be part of the public hoopla. How I feel is between us.’), as did Michael’s ex-wives. His parents and children, alongside friends and 17,500 fans, waited for the body of their son and father to arrive. A true superstar, he kept everyone waiting 20 minutes,

before his brothers entered carrying the gold-plated, rose-laden casket.

Among the many tributes that day three stood out. Berry Gordy remembered the impact of that moonwalk at Motown’s 25th anniversary in 1983: ‘He went into orbit – and never came back down.’ His 11-yearold daughter Paris expressed her personal loss: ‘I just wanted to say that ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine.’ And civil rights leader Rev Al Sharpton acknowledged Michael’s influence on racial awareness – ‘He brought down the colour curtain’ – before turning to the three children: ‘There was nothing strange about your Daddy. What was strange was what he had to deal with.’

Paris had it right. No one outside his immediate family could begin to imagine the true Michael Jackson. The rest of us only saw, from the outside, the singer, songwriter, dancer, showman. But it is the entertainment he gave us which will be his legacy. The conspiracy theories, the rumours, the speculation about his death can rumble on for years to come. None of that matters. Because although Michael Jackson died on 25th June 2009, his music did not.

‘If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.’

Working with Willie Daly, a third-generation romantic matchmaker based in County Clare, meant a year popping over to the West of Ireland, and enjoying the particular way of life out there. It was a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Willie

Daly: The Last Matchmaker

LITTLE BROWN, 2010

I was born to be a matchmaker. Willie Daly, the son of Henry Daly the matchmaker, and grandson of William Daly the matchmaker before him. It’s in my blood.

Each morning, as I step out from my farmhouse to take in a broad lungful of that clear, cool air we are blessed with in County Clare, I always spare a moment to glance over, across the sally-bushes and the hedgerow of blackthorn, at the small stone cottage that stands next door. For that is the house where I was born six decades and a little more ago, up here in the valley they call Ballingaddy, or Baile an Gadáihe, ‘the home of the thief’, some long-forgotten scoundrel.

The view from my farmhouse is the very one I saw as a child.

Over centuries the folds and fields of this valley have rolled gently down towards the sea, where the swell of the Atlantic batters the famous Cliffs of Moher. Ballingaddy lies out on the west coast of Ireland, nestling beneath the rugged limestone outcrops of the Burren. Five miles away as the scald-crow flies is the village of Doolin, where you’ll hear the finest jig and reel sessions in this corner of Ireland. And from Doolin Pier the ferry boats head out to the Aran Islands, which Seamus Heaney called ‘three stepping stones out of Europe’ – next stop, America.

Even though I have lived nowhere else but here, I have never stopped thinking what a truly gorgeous land this is, a magical mix of the stark landscape of the Burren with the soft emerald of the rolling meadows. There is a great sense of peace, the quiet of the early mornings broken only by the cries of the seagulls or the clip-clopping hooves of horses out on a walk, though if you listen hard you can always catch a hint of the constant raucous roar of those pounding waves. There is definitely something special carried in upon that sea breeze, something in the waters, that helps the smallest seed of love flourish.

I have always maintained that if you’re lucky enough to be born in County Clare, you can’t help but be blessed with a romantic soul, or else you must have been born with a heart carved out of Burren stone.

THE SPIRIT OF ROCHESTER

Our house in Rochester was home in the 1890s and 1900s to the Thorndike family, including Sybil, who became one of Britain’s most august actresses, and her brother Russell, a cheeky chap and very good novelist. In 2017 I organised a festival celebrating the family’s time in Rochester, including a booklet about their life there.

The Spirit Of Rochester: Dame Sybil & The Thorndikes

CITY OF ROCHESTER SOCIETY, 2017

The seven tall, straight-backed Georgian houses of Minor Canon Row guard the southern flank of Rochester Cathedral: watchful sentinels, alert but never aloof.

The red-brick houses, as their name makes abundantly clear, were constructed in the 1720s to provide accommodation for the Cathedral’s minor canons, those cogs who kept its liturgical machinery turning. Other residents of the Row at any given time might include the organist and other clerical worthies. As well as the elegance of their houses, they were all, conveniently, only a matter of yards – a hassock’s throw perhaps – from their place of work.

In May 1884, the most recent arrivals in the Row were the Thorndike family: Arthur Thorndike, his wife Agnes and their eighteenmonth-old daughter Agnes Sybil, always known by her second name. She got off lightly. At one point, her mother had suggested that she and Arthur should have nine children and he had gamely agreed, proposing that five should be boys, called Artemas, Arcturus, Alfred, Arthur and Albert with four girls, called Agnes, Armidallah, Achsah and Aholibamah.

A couple of months earlier Arthur Thorndike had been appointed as a minor canon by the Dean, Robert Scott, the great classicist (coeditor, with H. G. Liddell, of the definitive Greek-English lexicon). This was a significant promotion from his previous post as a curate in Gainsborough, a country parish in Lincolnshire, and marked a step up onto a very secure rung on the ecclesiastical ladder.

Arthur had arrived in Rochester in February. While he settled in to the routine of his new job, he waited for a chance to move into Minor Canon Row. From temporary lodgings at 12 Boley Hill, in one of the houses which then stood in the moat of Rochester Castle, he wrote to his wife for news of the daughter he was missing. Agnes wrote back, ‘She is a darling pet and she can say heaps of words’...

Within a year of moving to Rochester, Sybil had a brother: Russell,

born Arthur Russell in February 1885. In later years he often teased his sister about the fact she was the only one of her siblings not born in the city. It rankled. When Sybil, aged 65, jotted down some notes for a never-published autobiography, she wrote, ‘I was born on October 24th 1882 in the town of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire: always I was annoyed that I had not first seen the light in the cathedral city of Rochester, where my brothers and sister were born. It seemed all wrong somehow when the Cathedral was my whole childhood.’ She naturally remembered little of Gainsborough, apart from the smell of ‘freshly mown hay and a wax doll’.

Sybil and Russell grew up in a garden of delight in the heart of Rochester. The Cathedral and cloisters filled the view from the front windows of 2 Minor Canon Row. The back bedrooms overlooked King’s School, which had already been educating whining schoolboys and supplying shining choirboys to the Cathedral for the best part of 1300 years. Stepping out of their front door they could look left and see Rochester Castle, its Norman keep, turret and towers every schoolchild’s doodle of a castle. Although the houses in the moat of the Castle are long gone, along with other Precinct buildings, nothing much has changed since.

The mood of Minor Canon Row was captured by the writer Amy Cruse in her quaintly titled 1929 book, Boys And Girls Who Became Famous. ‘Now and then you would see dignified clergymen passing sedately to and from the great doors, and perhaps a little boy and girl bowling their hoops along the Row. But for the greater part of the time you would be quite alone, with no one to watch you except perhaps some Minor Canoness and her children looking out from their open, latticed window. At least so you would think, but if you had ever lived in Minor Canon Row you would know that the place is never empty, but is always haunted by certain shadowy figures.’

Gorgeous on a blossom-strewn springtime morning or a long summer evening, the Cathedral and its surrounds could equally be spooky and sinister, wreathed in autumnal mists or submerged in midwinter fog, when its gaslit back alleys, dark corners and leering gargoyles added a distinctively Dickensian twist. Rochester’s industrial

pollution, pumped out from the factories and cement works along the Medway, only added to the sinister smoggy setting.

Charles Dickens had died not much more than a dozen years before the Thorndikes arrived in Rochester, leaving The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, set in ‘Cloisterham’, tantalisingly unfinished.

Dickens’ presence was still tangible, and Sybil and her brother were only a couple of degrees of separation from the great man. There were plenty of Precincts regulars who remembered him well and were more than happy to talk about their memories. The Dickens industry was already well underway. Russell Thorndike remembered, ‘Whenever strangers came to Rochester, they talked of little else’.

Arthur was a keen Dickens enthusiast. He took Sybil and Russell out to Gad’s Hill, the house a few miles outside Rochester where Dickens lived and died. Both parents read the Dickens novels to their children: Sybil recalled that her father, ‘being an amateur actor of the old school who liked exaggerating all the parts, he gave the characters a colourful quality of something larger than life.’

They all relished the Edwin Drood connections. ‘Our house was one of the famous Minor Canon Row, where lived the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle,’ recalled Russell, ‘whom Sybil and I always pictured as our father’ – since both were Minor Canons, strong swimmers and fine singers.

An American visitor to Rochester once asked Sybil and Russell, playing with their hoops outside their house, if this was where ‘old man Crisparkle lived’. They invited him in for an impromptu tour, during which their parents arrived with Dean Hole.

This was Samuel Reynolds Hole, who succeeded Robert Scott in 1887. He was a truly eminent Victorian, a famed horticulturalist (passionate about roses), sportsman and orator. Sybil never forgot his great stature – he was nearly 6 foot 4 tall – and ‘than lion head and voice of magic’. This encounter marked the start of a lasting friendship between the Thorndike family and the Dean, a friend of both Dickens and Thackeray,: the Dean had a wry sense of humour and the ability to make Agnes laugh whenever she was feeling a tad depressed.

The family could have fun guessing the identities of Dickens

Ann Mari Bonsor’s father was an heir to the Swedish Wallenberg family and her mother part of the doughty Scottish MacKays: she had had an extraordinary life up to and during the Second World War, before settling into an existence as a Home Counties mum.

Ann Mari Wallenberg: If The War Comes CLEARVIEW, 2020

This is the story of my life – particularly the first 21 years of it, when I found myself part of three extraordinary families, the Mackays, the Wallenbergs and the Hambros. I was not always at the heart of those families, in fact I was frequently peripheral, which often made me question my true identity, but made me something of an objective observer of the worlds they moved in, worlds that for the most part have evaporated. I was also caught up in the flurry of global events during the Second World War, and looking back I am faintly astonished to find myself still here at 90 and able to reflect on my good fortune at surviving.

One of the characters who makes a cameo appearance in these pages, Sir Victor Mallet, who was the British Ambassador to Sweden when war broke out, wrote an unpublished memoir which is in the vaults of the Churchill Archive in Cambridge. In it he writes, ‘If the word “memoir” is to be taken literally this is a memoir, because I am writing almost entirely from memory.’ Although I have been able to corroborate my story through cross-checking, wherever possible, other sources, much of it went undocumented, or the documents that might have existed have vanished, in fires, blitzes, or in one house move or another. Memory, of course is a fickle beast, with all its idiosyncratic quirks, kinks and confusions. So this is what happened to me - to the very best of my memory.

***

My parents met at sea in November 1922, travelling from Southampton to New York onboard the Cunard Line’s RMS Mauretania, one of the most romantic and glamorous transatlantic liners of the day, holder of the coveted Blue Riband.

How they ever met was extraordinary, a miracle, a fairy tale. F. Scott Fitzgerald would have had a field day with the story.

My mother was just 22, on her way across the Atlantic to visit her father, who was over in the United States on business. My father was only a year older, heading out to New York to spend time working at the First National City Bank.

They found themselves thrown together for the seemingly endless

days of the crossing, and by the time the Mauretania had docked in New York Harbour, they had decided they were going to get engaged – but had as yet not told anyone else.

He was Marcus Wallenberg, a scion of the Wallenberg banking family, one of Sweden’s most powerful business dynasties. Charming – deceptively charming, ominously charming – and dashing, he was a brilliant, if erratic, tennis player who a few months earlier in the summer had made his first appearance at Wimbledon.

Marcus was really rather good-looking (even if I say so myself: the photographs of him from the time capture all of that surface sparkle) and the adored youngest son of six children, doted on by his mother. He was quite a catch, I imagine.

She was Dorothy Mackay, known as Doie, the daughter of Alexander Mackay, an entrepreneurial and rather extraordinary Scottish businessman. An accountant by training, he had become a founding director of Shell Petroleum, and had interests in cattle in Texas and an orange plantation in Florida. So although the family home was Glencruitten, an estate in the hills above Oban, on the west coast of Scotland, all of the Mackay family were used to crossing the Atlantic. If they had had air miles for liner travel, the Mackays would have been multi-platinum card holders.

In fact, at one point, Cunard threw a special party to thank them for all their custom over the years. I can certainly remember as a young girl watching the huge cabin trunks being prepared for the voyage. Some were virtually the size of wardrobes, full of evening gowns, with drawers stuffed with accessories and niceties, others the most petite of vanity cases. They were piled up in the front hall of Glencruitten, a number of them tantalisingly labelled ‘Not Wanted On Voyage’, ready to be loaded up for the trip.

This was definitely first class travel, and their fellow passengers were drawn from the upper echelons of European and American society. When my mother sailed to New York the year before, in October 1921, with her elder brother Ferrier – on board the SS Olympic, a sister ship of the Titanic – they were joined by Claire Dux, an opera singer who had played Mimi opposite Caruso, the Russian violinist Bronislaw

As a life-long aficionado of the tangent, of twists and turns and digressions, I have of course written about many different subjects. This section brings together those disparate groupings. Again, like ‘ghostwriter’ or ‘bucket list’, I am for some reason not particularly fond of the word ‘miscellany’. It sounds altogether too disorganised, an amorphous catch-all, a bit too – and I hesitate to use this word, given its importance in my life – vague... So I prefer the phrase flotsam & jetsam , because there is a sense of deliberate action involved. I did once get an e-mail from some word-nerd in the States, following the publication of The Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium , politely querying my usage of ‘flotsam’ in one chapter. But I feel confident that I am using them in the right sense here, although please do feel free to disagree. What I suppose ties them all together is that at some point in my life I have wielded a pen, tapped a typewriter, laptop or i-Phone and... just got on with writing.

Virtually everything I have ever written has been non-fiction. Anyone who has worked in non-fiction knows that facts are elusive, slippery little things and that there is no real truth, apart from in fiction... In 2011 I took part in a fiction masterclass at Brighton Library with the wonderful Ali Smith. She asked us to write a short piece in advance – based around just a title: ‘After The Theatre’ – for her to critique one-on-one with us during the day. I was thrilled when she found that my piece reminded her of Muriel Spark’s writing.

After The Theatre

ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE/BOOKER MASTERCLASS WITH ALI SMITH, MARCH 2011

Finally, finally, Len had a few moments alone with Josephine. He wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them. The hours overnight at the hospital had been such a swirl of energy, a blur of information, faces and questions, a constant kerfuffle in which he had been swept along, jostled and bruised but strangely exhilarated.

Just when he had thought he could catch his breath, Muriel had made an entrance, marching into the room along with her own particular brand of kerfuffle.

Len was fond of his only daughter, but he often wondered if she was ever stationary. Every time he met up with her she seemed to be in transit, in a hotel lounge, the champagne bar at St Pancras, that salt beef place in Selfridge’s. He wasn’t entirely sure where she actually lived: Acton, Ealing, somewhere west. Wherever it was, she was never there.

This day of all days Muriel was in even more of a rush than usual, something to do with karate lessons for Kaden, or was it Kiran – bloody stupid names he’d always thought. He imagined she’d chosen them for her sons as revenge for being lumbered, her exact word, with Muriel, which had been his mother’s name, but one that according to Muriel was fit only for a superannuated milch-cow.

With a kiss and a clanking of bangles she swanned out of the hospital room, promising gaily to take over his vigil by Josephine’s bedside later that day. ‘Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll be back before you know it.’ Len doubted it.

In the wake of her perfume – was that patchouli? – and the diminuendo of her bangles, a relative silence settled around him. The monitors hummed gently, beeped occasionally. Down the corridor he could catch a fragment of Muriel’s voice, thankfully distant, hectoring one of the nurses.

He was aware of a slight sizzle of tinnitus in his left ear.

Now it was only him and Josephine. He moved over to the bed and sat down next to where she lay. Serene, unmoving. Gone was the incessant motive force that Muriel had inherited. The facial muscles that so clearly expressed emotions to the upper circle were for once stilled.

My God, she’s already laying in state, Len thought. And suddenly he realised that if, as the ridiculously young consultant had told him, there was really little hope she would survive the injury to her head, a whole new onslaught of demands was about to hit him. If Josephine, Dame Josephine, failed to recover, he would be bombarded by journalists looking for a quote, interviewed for the obits, approached to contribute to the inevitably reverential documentaries.

Len slumped back in the chair. Why had he not been at the theatre? He should have been there, should have been sitting in the stalls at an Audience with Dame Josephine Baxter. But he’d been torn. Josephine appeared at one of these puffed-up ego trips every six months or so. He loathed them, hated the whole artificial lovey-ness of it all. This time he hadn’t gone.

The nurse he’d noticed on the way in, the one who reminded him of a young Helen Mirren back in the days when she and Josephine had been wowing the RSC, popped her head round the door. ‘You’re Dame Josephine’s husband aren’t you? Just give me a shout if I can get you anything.’ She ducked out before he could reply, otherwise she might have seen Len’s lips twitch. ‘Dame Josephine’s husband…’ His tag for the last forty years.

So he’d not been at the theatre, hadn’t been there to remind Josephine to use her tripod walker, forget vanity. He’d been heading over to meet her after the theatre when the phone call came to inform him she’d fallen and bashed her head backstage.

Now that proud head was shorn where the doctors had operated, her hair brutally clipped away, revealing those delightful ears of hers, which would probably never hear the news Len had been desperate to tell her, something even Josephine would have found extraordinary. But it was too late. She had comprehensively trumped him. He had been upstaged again

After The Book Of Cities and The Book Of Islands, Ben Donald and proposed one about festivals. The layouts looked great, but the crash of 2008 intervened and those large illustrated book projects crashed and burned too. Another one that will find its time.

The Book Of Festivals

BOOK PROPOSAL

Niigata Cherry Blossom Festival

“First cherry blossoms, a cuckoo, the moon and snow: another year closes”

Haiku by Sanpu (1647-1732)

Like the gentlest and most beguiling of spring tides, the cherry blossom ripples across the islands of Japan. As each year unfolds, the nation carefully tracks the progress of this fragrant wave, in the same way that the frontline of the fall foliage is keenly monitored in New England, a major news item guaranteed front page coverage with nightly forecasts from the weathermen.

The island of Okinawa in Japan’s deep south is the first to welcome the flowers, which can arrive there as early as January. By March and April the blossoms have reached up into the main island of Honshu – home to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, and the port city of Niigata, where every April one of the most renowned of cherry blossom festivals takes place.

In keeping with the calming vision of the cherry blossom, this is a festival where for once a profusion of noisy spectacle is definitely not a prerequisite. Gentle reflection is the predominant mood, as families gather for picnics beneath the blossoms. These gentle viewing parties, or hanami, have been a custom since at least the 8th century, probably earlier, when posses of aristocrats would gather to observe the flowers and write down the haiku poems inspired by them.

These Japanese nobles had in fact taken the idea from their Chinese counterparts, who were similarly entranced by the beauty of apricot and plum blossom. But whereas for the Chinese the cherry signified the idea of femininity and love,

it was a sense of fleeting existence that found resonance with the Japanese psyche, the brief, delicate glory of the cherry blossom a perfect representation of the transience of human life. The sakura cherry tree of Japan has over 400 varieties, but none of them bear fruit, only flowers, and hence its purely ornamental beauty is the most perfectly symbol of ephemeral existence.

The Niigata festival is celebrated in the parklands that surround the remains of the city’s 17th-century Takada castle, its black and white wooden walls covered with softly curved gable ends. The arrival of the blossom in early to mid April is remarkably reliable (only twice in 50 years has it arrived late) and the locals make the most of the fortnight or so when the blossoms will be out, with stiff, if restrained, competition to seek out the most advantageous viewing positions among the groves of cherry trees. There are taiko tea ceremonies to observe, stalls serving glutinous dango rice dumplings or octopus in dough, sake to sip, and age-old songs to enjoy: a great family day out.

But it is once night falls that Niigata’s festival is at its most magical. Paper lanterns have been dangled from each of the park’s near on 4,000 cherry trees and their soft illumination creates one of the most moving and memorable sights of a Japanese spring. And then, as quietly and as swiftly as the cherry blossom arrived, it withers, the subtle colours of its tide move further north to Hokkaido and beyond, and the cycle of life revolves one more time.

[From 2009 I ran a short class in Creative Writing at King’s School, Rochester, where Wan Mae and Mei Mae both were. It was for Year 3, the eight-year-olds, a wonderfully enthusiastic age... One year the school asked me to give the keynote speech for the Pre-Prep speech day.]

King’s Speech

PRE-PREP SCHOOL LEAVERS SERVICE, JULY 2014

What a wonderful event this is, in the beautiful setting of Rochester Cathedral, surrounded by Year 3’s family, friends, school mates and teachers, celebrating their arrival at the end of Pre-Prep, ready to move onto new, and exciting, adventures to come in September.

I’m sure many of your families know this, but for those who don’t, last month I had the pleasure of running a Creative Writing Course with all of Year 3 on a glorious summer’s day. I am an author, a writer – and I’m also very proud to be a King’s parent. It’s a real privilege to be asked to talk this afternoon and to present the gifts, prizes and awards later on.

Year 3. You worked very hard on that hot, sunny Thursday three weeks ago. What impressed me most was the great energy and enthusiasm you all put into your writing and the fantastic and varied ideas you came up with – as well as the thoughtful, sometimes challenging, questions you asked me about writing and being a writer. As you were working so hard on Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Tim Rice kindly gave me some of his personal thoughts about writing lyrics, especially for you, as extra inspiration!

From a blank piece of paper, which is still the writer’s greatest fear, you each created something personal and special, based either on the idea of dreams, rivers or one particular scene from Joseph.

And so many of you had the confidence to read out what you had written in front of everyone else, and some of you, amazingly, even sang it!

So as you look ahead to September remember and retain that sense of creativity and confidence as you go on to learn new things and explore new subjects.

Exactly a year ago I was sitting out here in the cathedral because my younger daughter Mei Mae was taking part in her Leaver’s Service. She’s now in Prep Lower 1, and her elder sister Wan Mae is finishing Year 3 in Prep.

One thing I really miss about being a Pre-Prep parent is that I don’t get the chance to take part in Open Mornings any more, showing round families who are thinking about coming to King’s. I loved doing that because when I was talking to them about King’s it always reminded me just what a fantastic school you are lucky to be part of.

Something I tried to emphasise was that the Pre-Prep is part of the whole school. From Chadlington House you can watch the cricket or rugby teams playing on the Paddock, Senior School pupils come and help out in Pre-Prep, lots of you have brothers and sisters in other parts of the school – and of course many of your mums and dads went to King’s too, which I think is a huge compliment to the school.

So as you get ready to change from Pre-Prep to a new environment, relish that sense of community and continuity as well: you’ll be amongst friends, teachers and places you already know.

Last week I also did some writing sessions, this time in the Prep School as part of their Arts Festival. On Thursday I was working with the year 4s, who are just about to go up to Senior School. They were the very first year group I did a Pre-Prep writing session with, five years ago now. Doesn’t seem that long. It was truly inspiring to see how they had evolved and progressed in Prep School. And I look forward to seeing you flourish over the coming years too.

Recently I asked Mrs Green, Mrs Loft and Mrs Skillern if I could set up a new award. We’ve called it the Dodd Award for Creative Writing and it’s based particularly on the writing we did together in class, recognising the ability to take an idea and

to turn it into some excellent writing under a lot of pressure!

We’ll be announcing that award later on, but I’m delighted that Wan Mae and Mei Mae have been given the afternoon off by Mr Overend and are here to help me present it.

The focus of our writing day was on words in musicals. I wanted to show you how two writers could treat the same idea in very different ways, and was going to talk about the song ‘River’ by Emeli Sandé, and ‘Moon River’ by Johnny Mercer – because I like rivers, especially the Medway that flows through Rochester.

But I wondered if you would even have heard of the song ‘Moon River’. Ten minutes or so before we were going to start our writing session, there I was sitting in Mrs Green’s classroom, looking at my notes, thinking about ‘Moon River’ – and something very odd happened. I heard the music of ‘Moon River’ drifting down the corridor. I thought I must be dreaming, but realised it was actually happening.

I tiptoed out, peered into the assembly hall and saw Mr Overend at the piano playing ‘Moon River’. And then, amazingly, you all started singing it, beautifully – just as you did this afternoon. I couldn’t believe it!

When Mrs Loft and Mrs Green told me it was a song for this afternoon’s service it seemed completely appropriate. It talks about a real river in Georgia in the southern United States and how two friends are going to head off across it and explore the world together.

Because although you are very familiar with King’s, and have met many of the teachers in Prep School already, it is still a significant step. I’ve seen this through watching Mei Mae over the last year. You will become more responsible. More grown up. More in charge of what you are doing. And you will have even more opportunities to do what you enjoy. (And I’ve heard that one of the big highlights is the salad bar at lunchtime…)

So for all of you who will be moving across to Prep School, although it doesn’t seem that far, in fact there is still a big jump to make.

You have been really well prepared to take that leap, and for that I want you to remember all the teachers and staff who have helped you over these last few years. They are very proud of you. And you should be very proud of them.

One reason I wanted to talk about ‘Moon River’ is that I have always loved the words to the song. Listening to it again just now I think a few of the lines are particularly relevant today.

They include ‘I’m crossing you in style’ – so turn up in September with style, panache and all that confidence and creativity I saw the other day. ‘Dream maker’ – King’s School is dedicated to helping you discover what it is you want to do with the rest of your lives.

And finally ‘Two drifters, off to see the world’ and my all-time favourite line: ‘There’s such a lot of world to see…’ As a writer I admire those eight apparently, deceptively simple words so much. ‘There’s such a lot of world to see.’

Take all of the opportunities that lie ahead, go and explore all of the world that is out there. Celebrate it, tell other people about it, whether that’s writing a novel, a film script, a play, a blog or an app, writing a song (or even a musical), or through dancing, sport, whatever it is you enjoy. Just express yourself. Make sure you let everyone else know what you are doing and learning – and please keep asking those questions, especially the difficult ones!

Thank you all for making this such a memorable afternoon.

I have been delighted to be part of it.

Have a wonderful and relaxing summer, and come back refreshed, re-energised and ready to enjoy the next stage of your adventure.

Remember, there’s such a lot of world to see… Thank you.

In later years working with the Year 3s, I would start a short story and ask them to continue the tale, which would influence the decision about which student would win the – doubtless much coveted – Dodd Award. This is one from 2018.

The Shell

Jodie shut the door carefully behind her. The noises downstairs, all the thumping and bumping, were suddenly muffled. She walked across the empty room and looked out of the window. In the distance she could see the river glinting in the sun, a boat leisurely pottering along.

She thought, This is what I’ll see every morning I wake up. It made a change from the flat they’d lived in before – till today, to be precise – which only had a view of Tesco’s car park.

The sound of a raised voice caught her ear. Although she couldn’t hear what was being said, Jodie recognised that tone immediately. Her mum was getting stroppy, telling the removal men, Two Aussies And A Van they were called, that they were doing something completely wrong. Jodie felt quite glad it was the removal men who were getting told off, not her for once.

Soon she had to go down and get her bits and bobs from the packing cases. She’d thrown away, well, been told to throw away, lots of her favourite things, toys that she’d pretended she didn’t care about: her old ballet shoes, a snow globe from Eurodisney, the Curious George tricycle which reminded her of her first trip to London to see the movie.

Getting rid of Blue Ted had been a particular wrench. But mum was in one of her clearing-out moods, so Blue Ted went into the black bin bag that was going to help the poor kids. Jodie wasn’t so sure. She thought she’d seen dad popping it into the boot with all the other stuff he was taking to the dump.

She looked around the room again. A new start. New friends to make at the new school. At least she’d always stay friends with Becca. Becca had sworn she would call her every single day come what may and visit at half term.

Out of the corner of her eye Jodie noticed something in

the corner of the room. The people who’d moved out must have left it behind.

She wandered over and picked it up. It was a shell, some kind of exotic one, like you might bring back from going on holiday. She remembered that if you put a shell to your ear you can hear the sea. She lifted the shell, and listened. Nothing much, a bit of a hum, though nothing you could really call the sound of crashing waves. But something was tickling her ear. She moved the shell away. Poking out from inside was a tiny piece of paper.

She gently pulled it out. The paper had been rolled really tight, so she smoothed it out on the wooden floorboards. There was a single word scrawled on the paper in red ink. Or it might have been blood.

It said, HELP.

In 2019, Philip Hesketh, the Dean of Rochester Cathedral, asked me to write a piece of chamber/choral music for a Festival he was organising to celebrate the life of one of his predecessors, Dean Samuel Reynolds Hole: an eminent Victorian, friend of Dickens and the Thorndikes, famed orator (he was called ‘the Dickens of the pulpit’) and great rose-lover, who founded the National Rose Society and wrote best-selling books about roses... I used three artworks as inspiration for the lyrics – a Botticelli of Mary and the Baby Jesus in a rose garden, a portrait of Dickens’ daughter Kate by her husband (she has a little pink rosebud in her mob cap), and Damien Hirst’s take on the Rose Window at Lincoln Cathedral constructed from butterflies and metallic paint. The words referenced Dean Hole’s own writing, along with a dash of Dickens and Homer.

Arise, A Rose, Arisen

AUGUST 2019

Arise

Rosa mundi, et rosa munda

Felicitas matris profunda

A mother’s love, boundless and deep, Mary adores her babe asleep

And in that secret garden

Wild strawberries are ripening (Pure and noble and true)

Beside the rose among the thorns Sweet violets sway in the breeze

Rosa mundi, et rosa munda

Felicitas matris profunda

The Christ child blooms, as flowers arise

Beneath the gaze (A tender gaze

The modest gaze)

Of Mary’s eyes

A Rose

‘Every life has its roses and thorns’

The writer captures a natural truth

Every day launched by rose-tinted dawns

By evening time may see hard times and brambles and storms

And yet, a rose, a soft pink rose

Shows new love in the band of a dear daughter’s cap

Signals hope through the gloom

Rescues grace from the gales

The bloom-filled branch bends and bends, bends and bends

And sometimes snaps

But love and faith and belief will transcend

The grief and pain

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

Arisen

He who would have

She who would have

Beautiful roses

In his garden

In her garden

Must have beautiful roses

In his, in her, in our hearts

The butterfly

The fragile butterfly

Flutters on the crimson rosa

Papillon, Farfalla, Schmetterling, Mariposa

Levity defying gravity

Denying life’s innate brevity

Renewed, reformed, reborn

Arisen, arisen, arisen

Floreat Regina Florum

Another book proposal yet to see the light of day, this one based around 200 French words that, for me, sum up my personal relationship with France and also that of Brits in general.

Vive La Différence

BOOK PROPOSAL, 2020

Cassoulet

The cassoulet forms one third of the Holy Trinity of tinned foodstuffs essential to purchase, pack and weigh down the car’s rear axle on the long haul north to catch a ferry back to Blighty. Cassoulet, confit de canard and choucroute: a culinary cluster of Cs designed to bring back a glorious, savoursome memory of France on even the most cheerless and windswept of British midwinter days.

Of these the cassoulet has a pretty good claim to be the godhead: Languedoc’s finest creation, that sumptuous, slower than slow-cooked combination of haricot beans, pork, duck, sausage and herbs topped off by a golden crust of breadcrumbs. In fact the only key ingredients are the haricots and the casserole: the earthenware dish to cook it in.

Everything else is ideal but not in fact essential.

There are many local variants of the disk, and cassoulet connoisseurs will argue long and hard about the relative, nuanced, merits of the versions from Carcassonne, Toulouse or Castelnaudary. They are all delicious, but maybe Castelnaudary edges it, since the cassole was originally made in the village of Issel close by, and the town hosts a cassoulet festival every August, complete with a Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet, a guild of manufacturers whose Chevaliers sport brown robes and a fetching cassole-shaped hat.

Elizabeth David, in her classic, chatty 1960s book French Provincial Cooking, credits chef Marcel Boulestin with introducing the food of South-West France to the British after he arrived in London in the 1900s; he was followed much later by Pierre Koffman, and most recently Hélène Darroze. Whether in the UK or Gascony, Elizabeth David

suggests cassoulet should only ever be eaten at lunch: it takes the rest of the day to recover. She relays the story of a local gastronome heading to the shoemaker’s in Castelnaudary one afternoon, only to find the shop completely shuttered and silent. He feared there must have been a death in the family, but then noticed the sign pinned to the door: ‘Fermé à cause de cassoulet’...

My eldest daughter, to her credit, acquired a very early taste for cassoulet (as well as couscous, of which more later). Invited to a fourth birthday party in north London, chock-a-block with yummy mummies, she was asked earnestly but condescendingly by one mother, ‘And what’s your favourite food?’ – expecting the answer ‘Chicken nuggets’, I think. My daughter paused for a second, before turning to her, fixing her with a beaming smile and delivering the perfect riposte: ‘Couscous and cassoulet’. Collapse of yummy mummy.

Putain!

There is no better way of understanding a foreign people than by mastering, or at the very least having some passable knowledge of their curses, imprecations and generally bad language. Putain! is a classic: reportedly the favourite swearword of the French – more so even than the overused merde – though on what scientific or lexicographic grounds is not known. A slightly dated word for a prostitute (think ‘harlot’, maybe), it flags up a significant difference between French and English: we would never use ‘trollop’ as a expletive, and ‘slag’ only as an unpleasant EastEnder-ish insult. Likewise ‘bordel’ – brothel – best used in a phrase like ‘Magne-toi, bordel’, Get a bloody move on. It’s best not to translate these phrases literally, more to get their flavour and force. Putain! is pretty but not unacceptably strong – maybe ‘Holy shit’ is closest – though the prudish prefer to say punaise in the same cloying way we use ‘sugar’. Most importantly it’s all about the timing. My friend Michel, who I’ve known since we were both 13, taught me all my very best bad French. A few years ago, on the phone following a longish break in communication, he asked me how old my daughter (the cassouletloving one) was. When I told him she was now a teenager, there was a momentary pause, then one single, explosive ‘Pu-tain!’ - immaculate.

A few more song lyrics, from the 1990s I think, when I had a flurry of songwriting, inspired by the likes of Jimmy Webb and Aimee Mann.

She Looked Like Jackie Kennedy

She looked like Jackie K

Flying into Love, flying into Love

Pink suit and a red bouquet

And those little white gloves

I said Watch out

You’re gonna get hurt

She didn’t listen to a word

Not I’m sitting here in my own little perch

Saying no no no no no

She looked like Jacqueline

And the smile on her face was so serene

Bright eyes and a healthy glow

And a pain inside no one could know

Brought up so emotions never show

I remember when we were growing up together

Long summer afternoons when we thought Donny was heaven

Making plans, sharing dreams with each other

Now the dreams are tearing her in two

She turned for one more wave

Flying into Love, flying into Love

Limbo Dancing

And when the evening’s almost over And the sun is fading fast

You’ll find the limbo dancers

Praying for your past

And when the dust has nearly settled And the heat of day grows cold

You’ll find the limbo dancers

Dancing for your soul

Limericks have been part of my writing since Class 1 in Rushmere Hall when I wrote my first few for homework. Then in December 1996, when I was leaving Virgin Publishing, the amazing art director and typographer David Costa sent me (by fax) this limerick: ‘So Virgin’s losing its Dodd/What a blow! What a bugger! What a sod!/They’ve searched for replacement/In cellar and basement/But all they’ve come up with is God.’ From then on he and I would swap limericks about the projects we were working on, including The Book Of Rock and Genesis: Chapter And Verse. Then after many years we revived the habit during lockdown.

RUSHMERE HALL PRIMARY SCHOOL, CLASS 1

There was a boy called Dan

Who went to live in Japan

He thought it was nice

To eat lots of rice

And stayed there till he was a man

MARCH 2000, THE BOOK OF ROCK

I’m worried about Mötley Crüe’s Use of umlauts on ‘ö’s and on ‘ü’s

This infatuation

With Hun punctuation

Is giving me Nico-like blües

JANUARY 2007

Hurrah, the limerick’s returned Long years for this have I yearned

A fresh chance to foster

The wit of D. Costa

And to learn about things that get kerned

FOR CURTIS TAPPENDEN’S UCA CREATIVE WRITING GROUP, 2011

A limerick written in haste

By two people is not cut and paste It’s an organic flow That creates, to and fro, Short poems of dubious taste!

LOCKDOWN LIMERICKS SENT TO DAVID COSTA

In times Coronaviral

To halt that downward spiral

Raise your spirits aloft

With some jazz, smooth and soft: Let’s all go Spyro Gyral!

There’s an upside to forced quarantine A benefit never foreseen You can choose to exclude Your inlaws and not be rude Plus it saves splashing out on strychnine

I’ve been trying to find something duller Than arranging my bookshelves (like J.K.) by colour I’ve ordered my tool room by size: it’s now spotless My chillis have been graded by hotness And my gods filed from Zeus through to Allah

This pandemic’s been a chance to explore Words and names we’d not used before Now we bandy about ‘PPE’, ‘R value’ and ‘flout’

And shout hurrah for Captain Tom Moore!

At PDQ, the Philip Dodd Quartet, we have immense fun coming up with themed jazz puns, but also one year we got into jazz haikus.

Just a couple of mine.

Some one-liners I am unduly proud of, plus a Nick Newman cartoon he drew off a throwaway gag of mine in 2024.

An observation at the Dickens Christmas Festival in Rochester, watching husbands being dragged round the Craft Fair, as well as let’s say weight-challenged locals...]

The easing of lockdown just sucks

As once more we must deal with those schmucks: The pub bores and pillocks and pricks

The dullards and dipshits and dicks

Who for weeks were impounded: aw, shucks...

Finally, and thanks to lockdown, I’m

Glad I’ve got my herbs planted – sublime!

The reason it took such an age

To pot up my dill, chives and sage?

Simple – I never did have the thyme...

The etiquette of staying two metres apart On busy pavements is now quite an art

Terpsichorean, like a gavotte, Sarabande, quadrille or foxtrot...

But joggers with earphones are farts!

I’ll go mad if I don’t get my barnet cut soon I’ve gone from beatnik to unkempt baboon

I should have ignored my pudeur de bourgeois

And blithely set up a ménage à trois

With Teasy-Weasy and Vidal Sassoon

As Captain Oates said, I might be a while

This Antarctic look takes hours to compile

My goggles are by Gucci

My snowsuit from Pucci

Hey girlfriend! A boy’s got to go out in style...

That Nordic soundscape

With those deep be-bop chordings

Just means: P D Q

Paul, rhythmic guru

Will and Phil, rubato kids

[And finally, some genuine work in progress – from the lyrics for a new piece for Rochester Cathedral: an oratorio based around the eight statues either side of the entrance to Quire in the nave. The statues are all saints, bishops and luminaries connected with the Cathedral’s history.]

Saints & Sinners, Martyrs & Mortals

WIP, JULY 2024

Our skin reveals a palimpsest Of lives hard lived & lovers lost Of lessons learned & bridges burned That cannot be re-crossed

The wounds may heal The blood congeal Scars all but be concealed

The swifts wheel from the west And swirl and waltz into the sun Their screeching cry in endless flight And the owls who haunt the gloam of night Recall the piercing spear which left its mark Upon our Saviour’s mortal side

In June 2004 I launched a new podcast called We Did It Medway, co-hosted with my very good friend, local lad, heritage consultant and writer Rob Flood, who’s also the chairman of the City of Rochester Society. We call it a bright, quirky and respectfully irreverent podcast, a fresh way to look at, and listen to, the culture, history and character of the Medway towns and their impact. Right off the bat our first episode, ‘Suffragist City’, about Medway women in politics – starring then Rochester & Strood MP Kelly Tolhurst and current MP Lauren Edwards – got a great plug in the Radio Times from Simon O’Hagan who wrote, “Those of us who grew up in the Medway towns feel protective of a conurbation whose proximity to London tends to lead outsiders to overlook its distinctiveness. So good on Rob Flood and Philip Dodd for celebrating the characters and quirks that have always abounded in Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham and more.”

WE DID IT MEDWAY

Downstream, against the tide

The river twists but makes good headway

And we will always say WE DID IT MED-WAY

**

When you come down to Strood

You’ll find a certain attitude

No room for prudes or pseuds...

That’s just the flow you’ll find in Medway

Downstream etc...

**

There’s incredulity

That Rochester is not a city

(But) We’re through with self-pity

That’s just the flow you’ll find in Medway

Downstream etc...

**

At Chatham’s dockyard gates

A salty kind of welcome waits

We like to tell it straight

That’s just the flow you’ll find in Medway Downstream etc...

**

And then we’ve got the Gills

Forget that score of seven-nil

We have our own ball skills

That’s just the flow you’ll find in Medway Downstream etc...

**

Rainham could get depressed

In Beatles terms the town is Pete Best (But) No need to get too stressed

That’s just the flow you’ll find in Medway Downstream etc...

Going through my files for this booklet, I found I had amassed various thoughts from writers on the craft of writing . Some are brilliantly insightful and practical, others oddly banal. I too have given advice to various groups, from arts students to the delightfully enthusiastic Year 3s of King’s Rochester, where we donated a family Creative Writing Award still being presented. Whoever asks my advice, I hope my answers are consistent and authentic: I do try to use my direct experience to inform my suggestions. Here is a Q&A I wrote for my good friends Margot Lester and Steve Peha, when they asked me to contribute to their book for US schoolkids called How To Be A

Writer. It seems to me a reasonable summation of what I’ve tried to do ever since I was that seven-year old in Ipswich creating my tribute to Churchill. Then to follow, just for fun, are some lists of words, music and objects that give a little insight into how my particular brain works, or something like that.

Margot Carmichael Lester is one of a talented posse of University of North Carolina graduates I was introduced to by Greg Dinkins. In 2006 she and Steve Peha produced a book called Be A Writer for 10 to 16-year-olds and asked me to contribute. I was delighted for them when it picked up an Independent Publishers Award Gold Medal in Young Adult Non-fiction.

Be A Better Writer

What kind of writer are you?

I’m a non-fiction book writer , so I’m usually writing about factual subjects after doing a load of research, trying to convey my personal take on what I’ve found out. I also help people write there own autobiographies or personal histories, which involves interviewing them and then turning their spoken words into text, capturing their distinctive voice. I have also worked on copywriting for design groups, supplying the words for packaging, brochures, radio ads – everything from beer companies to lifestyle nutrition. Copywriting is fast and needs to express a lot succinctly. A great way to keep you on your writing toes!

Why do you write?

I’ve always loved words and playing with words. I still do, especially great puns (a recent favourite I came across was the Canadian tennis store called The Merchant of Tennis). I enjoy the challenge of trying to communicate ideas, hoping that readers will come away with fresh insight into whatever I’ve been writing about. These days, I write because publishers commission me, but I never think of writing as a chore. Every day I’m learning new things.

What made you want to be a writer?

There must have been something planted in my brain early on. In my loft, I’ve got a ‘book’ I wrote when I was about seven. Winston Churchill, the great British prime minister during World War II, had just died, and I took it upon myself to write a biography of him, complete with an introduction, chapters, and photos with captions. As a teenager, I created several magazines based on my life (which was a pretty unremarkable one, believe me), and just carried on doing similar things. Now I’m lucky enough to make a living out of writing and editing.

What advice would you give to a fellow writer?

My advice is always ‘structure, structure, structure’. By that, I mean try mapping out whatever it is you’re going to write and plan roughly

how many words you need for each section. When you’ve got all your thoughts and notes together, bash out a first draft, following the plan. If you can’t think of what to write, simply put down the first thing that comes into your head, even if it’s ‘blah, blah, blah’, anything to fill the space. Strangely enough, I sometimes find those are the best bits! The structure stops you worrying about the shape of what you’re going to be doing, gets rids of that ‘blank page’ phobia some writers suffer from, and frees you up to get creative.

Also, read as much as you can, anything you like: obscure novels, great literature, erudite biographies, celebrity magazines, serious newspapers etc. Keep pouring new thoughts, new words, new phrases into the reservoir of your brain to refresh it, and you’ll find you’re always full of fresh ideas and ways of writing what you really want to say.

When you first started writing, what was your biggest challenge (coming up with ideas, spelling, endings, etc.) and how did you overcome it?

The hardest thing when I started writing seriously was letting go of my text. As a teenager I had been able to spew out rafts of song lyrics, poems, articles without ever stopping to worry. But then I became quite perfectionist and felt I had to keep chiselling away in a vain quest for an ideal piece of prose (which generally does not exist). I eventually realised that writing needs to engage with other people: readers, editors, critics. In most instances you’ll in any case be able to change the first draft you share with someone else, and although it’s tough at first not to take critical comments personally, the feedback you get will help you improve your writing. One final twist: those comments and editorial suggestions, however constructive, are never definitive, usually subjective. I have learnt to trust my instincts. I will fight hard for what I know is my good writing but graciously concede where a tweak or two – or better still a simple deletion (that much-repeated phrase of William Faulkner’s ‘Kill your darlings’ is still valid) – will make that text so much better.

I have always kept what I now know to call commonplace books, including lists, phrases, words and quotes I’ve come across. When my mother died I found she had, unknown to me until then, done exactly the same. These are a few lists that I do tweak from time to time, but mostly stay solid, and are accurate as at 66.66...

LISTS

10 favourite words bamboozle dappled dudgeon funky meander myrrh serendipity shimmer smithereens twilight with an very honourable mention for supercalifragilisticexpialidocius, used by the incredible Sherman brothers, Robert and Richard, for the song in Disney’s 1964 Mary Poppins movie. I always thought they had made it up especially, but the Oxford English Dictionary recorded an almost identical word in 1931 in a column called ‘A-muse-ings’ by one Helen Herman in the Syracuse University student newspaper Daily Orange: she wrote that the word ‘implies all that is grand, great, glorious, splendid, superb, wonderful’. The Shermans did say that they had heard it at a summer camp in the 1930s in the Adirondack Mountains, passed down via generations of kids. A factoid: Rodney Pattisson, who won two Olympic sailing golds and one silver for Great Britain in 1968, 1972 and 1976, called his Flying Dutchman yacht after the song. And of course, when Inverness Caledonian Thistle beat Celtic in the 2000 Scottish Cup, the Sun’s headline famously ran ‘Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious’!

Almost impossible even if I’ve given myself a dozen tracks rather than the classic eight. 75% has been fixed for a long time, but the other three ebb and flow a little.

10 favourite French words

alouette

crépuscule

épouvantable

farouche

flâneur

frisson

libellule

nonchalant

nuance

pamplemousse

Desert Island Discs

Francis Poulenc: Sonata For Oboe & Piano

Pink Floyd: The Great Gig In The Sky

Brahms: Variations On A Theme by Haydn

Joni Mitchell: In France They Kiss On Main Street

Archie Shepp: Steam

Kate & Anna McGarrigle: Kiss And Say Goodbye

Keith Jarrett: Country

Jimmy Webb: Sandy Cove

Edvard Grieg: Holberg Suite

George Frideric Handel: L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il

Moderato

Rumer: A House Is Not A Home (Burt Bacharach & Hal

David)

tbc

Cities

Baltimore

Buenos

Aires

Melbourne

Mumbai

Munich

Oxford

Paris

Santa Fe

Stockholm

Venice

Islands

Aran Islands

Capri

Corsica

Hong Kong Island

Ile St-Louis

Key West

Manhattan

Martha’s Vineyard

Sylt

Trinidad

10 Favourite buildings

Centre Pompidou, Paris

Dickens Chalet, Rochester, Kent

Getty Museum, Los Angeles CA

Hemingway House, Key West FL

Jesus College, Oxford

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston MA

Michelin Building, South Kensington, London

Snape Maltings, Snape, Suffolk

Villa Cavrois, Croix, France

Yellow Crane Tower, Wuhan, Hubei, China