Current affairs

POWER CHORDS: an intro.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Read the covers? You want more blurb? It’s here…

This is arguably the third part – so three books – in Rick Walton’s #lolsobiography concerning life, sport, music. But ‘Power Chords’ will, can and does stand independent of ‘The Dots Will Not Be Joined’ and ‘Beautiful Games’.

The author has always wanted his work to be explainer-lite, but concedes that you newbies may need to know stuff. He is a writer and sports coach. He has over 600 blogs up on’t internet, via bowlingatvincent.com (on absolutely everything) and sportslaureate.co.uk, which covers mainly cricket, football and coaching. He has ECB Accreditation for attending cricket, as a ‘freelance bloggist’. There are awards on the shelf for contributions to sport. There is a genuinely unique voice in action – ‘authentic, wise and beautiful’.

                                                             *

Themes include the power of ideas and music; particularly when they pour in to teenage life. Identifying with or finding people that speak for you. But early life, too: so of course family and experiences at school, quality of adventure and support, quality of love and environment, mates and comrades. The growth, perhaps, of like-mindedness and the concomitant recognition of things to oppose.

                                                              *

If this sounds bit joyless then na. On the contrary. Your writer’s life is full of tremendous, uplifting, wonderful experience – of poetry. And gob-smacking people. It’s just that anger is an energy for him. The Enquiry in here is not so much to forensically reveal the source of some emotive and/or existential rage – this may after all be a profoundly unscientific business – as to dig out some old vinyl and enjoy. And maybe hope that today dynamic, engaged rock ‘n roll can do its thing all over again.

                                                             *

PROLOGUE.

Where to start, in terms of family life and culture? Or maybe specifically music? And how to know when awarenesses became so developed, or grief, shock or hormones took over so completely that the whole of my life became about defiance. Because I think maybe it did. And this feeds in to everything.

But maybe before the ideas-fest and the tribal allegiances kick-in we need to go eyeball to eyeball. And do that thing where we try to accommodate. I have strong opinions on some things which may have arisen from my love of music. (This book is about that process – or speculations about how mere choons can shape or contribute to a life). It feels extraordinary and kinda thrilling to me that anything so flimsy and unbodied could be so fabulous and enormous. I’m really hoping you have some personal sense or experience of that.

                                                               *

We live, it strikes me, in an extraordinary and dangerous moment. The West is arguably madder than it’s ever been, with the Trump/Musk coalition-thing a catastrophic threat to the intelligence, knowledge and goodness that underpins society itself. (It’s November 2024 as I write: we await the second Trump term but Brother Elon has sculpted the matrix into an angry monster). The truth has suffered an especially foul Special Op’[1] – Bannon’s infamous shitstorm. Those previously relatively harmless Influencers (think makeovers, think pranksters, posers and dancers) have morphed into combat-ready sub-nazis.

This is a challenge. It can drag us down and have us raging at (and waaay beyond) the deliberately-reduced politics we now suffer in the West.

                                                              *                                    

But hang on. In the face of Trumpism and Reform, alt-rightism and this galaxy of loss, what’s our civil/intellectual/physical/cultural reaction? Depends who we are. Are we leaders or passengers or artists or victims? Who do we look to, where do we go? Weirdly, it seems a scientific certainty that there will be a response, even in this turbulent evil. (Is that not how the universe works?) The response may even be a thing of glory and inspiration.

Wonderfully, we make our statements in a myriad of ways. As the mighty Slits did, we can ‘create’; kick up a fuss; make something challenging and radical and beautiful. We may need to do more, but this is part of the change – or at least one irrepressibly human, principal means to strike back. Let’s create. Let’s be anti-badness; anti-racist; anti- any declining status quo. Our pens are ‘snug as a gun’.[2] Our fingers are on the fretboard. This is part of life’s purpose.

                                                                *

I was recently given a class pic from Healing County Primary School which tugged heavily and made me realise how BIG those times and connections were. In my case they really were largely idyllic. Coz Stevie Blendell, Wayne Okopskyj, Mark Moss, Linda Dye and Helen Sitch and the rest were bloody wonderful. I could feel and smell and hear them, in that picture. Made me remember football and school sports on the playing-field; skating or ‘sliding’ on the playground in proper snow and ice; getting 8 out of 5 for something I wrote (about Guy Fawkes, I think). And even the dinners, which I loved. Stodgy, honest food that I’ve not entirely left behind. Maybe the meat was thin and the mash lukewarm after that queueing… but Eve’s pudding and custard! Or some kind of jam sponge! Bloo-dee Nora.

                                                                *

The barbershop contest was not at all what they’d expected. They love their singing but were inevitably “only there for the craic”, having no real idea they were to be joined by worryingly disciplined crews from the States and all over Europe. It was a disaster of sorts: the travel, to and from County Cork; the mismatch singing-wise; their mad, unserious approach. But now they’d landed at the Dru… and they really got it.

After brief deposition of bus detritus into their rooms, and maybe one or two relieving showers, the lads started to drift down to the bar. (This remains a fabulously evocative and restful kindofa place – or will be again, when the current re-furb takes it back to where it was for many years). They took a further inhalation of the bay and trundled back in to where yours truly was stationed, at the bar-front. The news that we had both Guinness and Murphy’s on tap was received quietly but warmly, as was the sight of more than one species of Blackbush and Jameson’s up amongst the spirits. It began.

                                                                 *

I worked part-time for John for more than two years. Doing everything that needed doing. Freeing him up to take those brilliant pictures. Very often I would go with him to the Royal Court, Hampstead Theatre or to the National to change films and generally assist. He would always shoot live rehearsals, usually the last one before opening, using two cameras. There wouldn’t be much kit – a monopod, sometimes, and a bag with cameras, lenses and films – so we travelled light, but I could make myself useful. Sometimes I would take back-up pictures.

                                                                  *

SIX – ROCK STARDOM-AVOID. (1).

We’ve all got reasons why we didn’t become a rock star – haven’t we? (Or Jesus is that just me?) Come on: the Things That Got in the Road. Lack of Ways In or Mates Wiv Contacts or that whole Distance From London malarkey. All the conspiratorial cobblers that stops a raging talent like yooo/like me, from raging publicly.

Sometimes this is fair enough: we’re actually crap. ‘Have rhythm’ but mediocre on the guitar. (There really are zillions of shit-hot guitar-players out there). Have words but maaybee they’re just not as good as you think they are? Have too much FIRE, quite possibly, which is theoretically ace in the wonder-years of the late seventies but even then narrowed your options down to the independent labels, bless ‘em. (Now, by the way, where is that fire? Idols, maybe, but where else?)

                                                                *

I saw The Fall in what was then a crappy hall in Duncombe Street Grimsby, when I was about eighteen. I knew the music, loved it. They made that beery, spidery, edgy, shambolic noise that was our poetry and the flag for our spunky republic.

Mark E Smith was a Northern Myth and a Northern Monster. And like us he was drunk. We loved him because his ramblings coursed with our spite. He seemed to be leading his own mad nation towards something.                   

                                                                *

Surely it’s true that for most of us the music we drape ourselves in is key to what we are and become? We come to reflect each other. I looked like a member of Joy Division or Bunnymen or Gang of Four – heavy coats, dark baggy clobber – because I felt like I was in those bands. It’s become a cliché but they did speak for me. Only Gang of Four from amongst those three had any obvious political stance: the other two just chimed with authentic, contemporary soul. They were more or less deep and dealt in something thrilling and real. We were kinda proud to wear their badges – literally and in terms of style.

                                                                  *

Punks identified anyone who sounded like The Bizz, or was complicit in its pitches as the enemy. This was of course almost everybody. If you swam complacently along with the major record labels, the machinery of production and the Gods of Commerce then you were traitorous filth: all of you. If you deliberately made your musical sound easy to access, you were shameless, vacuous scumbags. Plus energy. If your energy was that traditional thing aspiring to loveliness and sweet diversion then you were, despite your smashtastic success, a joke.

                                                                   *

The three chords and less than three minutes thing that punk was predicated upon is very pop. It’s also obviously anti-indulgence… and therefore may be supportive of smart choices. Knowing is everything: this includes knowing there is nothing wrong with ‘music to wash up to’. The two poles of what we might call engaged or protest songs and ephemera can absolutely subsist – and did. 1979 may have been the peak of the history of popular music – albums and singles – because of the energy and drive of punk and the sparkling wit of energized pop.

You may have noticed we’ve barely nodded as we flew past the idea of entertainment. This is because punk was obviously right to demand more. Tell us something about (y)our lives. Prove to us that you really care. Pass the integrity tests; show us you’re a good deserving human trying to do good. Do that thing through the new wave of music; either by thrashing out your protest or via sharp, knowing but unpretentious pop. *Add value* to our entertainment.

                                                                  *

Lydon was and is somewhere between the various caricatures of force of nature, clown and cultural icon. He was and is punk, for better and worse. For all his loudmouthery and those moments where we Guardian-reading liberals had wished he would ‘just stop!’ Lydon has produced material of staggering ambition and import. (So I for one largely forgive him). The Pistols singles are almost as sensational now as they were then. ‘Public Image’ the single is an extraordinary and well-executed re-birth. ‘Poptones’, ‘Careering’, ‘Flowers of Romance’, ‘Keep Banging the Door’ and ‘Rise’ are all giants.

When ‘Anarchy’ arrived, it’s not hyperbolic to describe it as the ringing of some division bell. It was a statement of defiance and newness. It was a challenge that battered into living-rooms and subverted lives. That song, that moment, despite the undeniable whiff of punk fashionista around it, was MASSIVE. It remains one of the Great Noises.

                                                               *

It was Strummer I loved. Sure he fell right into the imagery but his vocals launched so heartily at us and mostly his Good Man-in-the-Street politics rang true. His vocals on the 101-ers’ ‘Keys To Your Heart’ are a high point in pre-punk action. I believed in Joseph’s voice and his scattergun anti-capitalism. ‘Career Opportunities’ and ‘Working for the Clampdown’ are tremendous, compelling noises: more overtly political than Rotten, or somehow more specifically targeted than Lydon’s material ever appeared.

                                                               *

MARK E SMITH AND THE FALL.

Mark E Smith was scathing about everything so he might baulk (from beyond) at being offered this honour. Tough. He earned it, for being a one-off and for being edgier than a very edgy thing. He’d hate to be suffocated in cliché as some ‘punk-poet’… but of course that’s what he was. Dark. Driven. Chronically alcoholic and downright fascistic in his role as frontman. But unquestionably a kind of genius.

Because the music was so angular and so much the deliberate anti-dote to blandness and comfort, he was punk. Because he wrote about daft, working-class things, he was punk. The sound was a kind of colourful chaos – often more colourful and mutable than our conception for punk – but the anarchistic intent locked it into the vibe in a way that extended and re-powered the movement. Plus the fella looked like a punk – maybe, admittedly in the American, ‘hopeless layabout’ sense of the word.

                                                                 *

Foolish to remotely compare how things felt from Year A to F, but the parallels around race and wealth, between Thatcherite Ingerland and Trumpian North America are striking. Thatcher (for us) was an obvious bigot and likely white supremacist: see also Trump and Musk. In both eras there is an extraordinary sense of the rich getting richer – by design. That shamelessness, now so epitomized by Trump’s cohort of oligarchs and technocrats is both the exercise of increasingly authoritarian power and triumphalist cruelty. Meaning a particular kind of wickedness.

                                                                 *

Simone also covered the Billie Holliday classic ‘Strange Fruit’ and in ‘Backlash Blues’ and ‘I Wish I Knew What It Was To Be Free’ she railed brilliantly and with passion against the patent, rancid injustice of the time.

Can’t wait any longer. Who, in the time of Musk and Trump, will carry that torch? This feels like a moment not just for Angels of Protest but for massive, concerted resistance – yes, perhaps led by artists and musicians.

Plus some Desert Island Discs and a free, absurdist playlet.

All in ‘Power Chords’.

[1] Deliberate perversion of things we thought were fixed and factual. Facilitated by socials/moguls/what we might call the Extremist Establishment.

[2] Slits: ‘Typical Girls’, from ‘Cut’. Seamus Heaney: ‘Digging’.

Prologues.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

(Because this is me, there is another prologue before this section).

Where to start, in terms of family life and culture? Or maybe specifically music? And how to know when awarenesses became so developed, or grief, shock or hormones took over so completely that the whole of my life became about defiance. Because I think maybe it did. And this feeds in to everything.

Defy the shock of people dying. Then before you know it defy the evil that was Thatcher. Wade in there. Defy the bigotry and prejudice criminally at large and *in some way* oppose the privilege. All this in a teen rage. Then live up to those who came before, whilst knowing they were different – maybe simpler, better – and that things don’t or can’t work like that. But let them still be your gods.

Don’t fer Christ’s sake out yourself as such – faaar too pretentious, far too self-righteous! – but absolutely be a protest singer. Be the inevitable mad mixture that you feel; of hard, deep thinker and honest force. Be immune to judgements from outside; be fearless and pour the good energy in. Time will or may come when you can be more accepting. For now, trust and work and be conscious. These things have value.

                                                                     *

The moment is everything: accident-of-birth catapulting me simultaneously into a hormone-fest and Anarchy in the UK meant this particular youth was inevitably a Child of That Time. Driven or pumped. Scarred, maybe. Furious, definitely; judgmental definitely. Carrying a load, probably.[1] Deeply lost but as deeply certain as most teens – yes? – that he would do things in enflamed opposition to the pitiful acquiescence that was Normal Life. So yeh, off-the-scale indulgent in some respects but also having a kind of rebellious integrity.

People died on us and I‘m not going to tell their stories here. There’s enough of that in the previous books. You just need to register the possibility that maybe everything Yours F Truly does is a kind of amorphous, inadequate, politicised homage to three great ‘ordinary’ blokes. This is not to say that I am a hugely party-political animal, or that I under-appreciate the Walton Women: but it rightly implies that I’m on a permanent slow-burn around how the world just ain’t good enough, in a way that those better men simply weren’t.

There’s generational stuff in play here, because a) life was simpler and b) in some senses it was less aware. Folks just didn’t know or couldn’t know the world, its peoples and its foibles in the way we can now. (Not that this makes us any more educated). Plus sentiment. I may gush, or goddammit not be able to see[2], or drown us in the kind of emotive slippage we’re all prone to. This is what love does: this is what age does.

I may never know if these old guys were just wiser, apparently swerving the day-to-day cataclysms that eat away at me/you/us, but however dubiously old-school it may sound, here’s my daft Braveheart moment: *raises fist*.

I am proud to be of them. Always, I will love, revere and follow them, or try to, for their invincible (yes) and endless (yes it was!) honesty and humility. They are recalled in the hope that we can all, in the modern idiom, stand on their elephantine shoulders.

                                                                     *

I guess the thing that stirs me the most is the urgent need to change the universe. And that really may be a direct result of punk and Margaret Thatcher.

Bit loathe to put dates into this baby but it may be inescapable. Absolutely not telling you freeloaders my birth date – not until we’re mates and you’ve proved you’re worth it – but suppose I can offer the rough figuration that I was a furious and pyrotechnically hormonal late-teen when the over-combed one began to preen through and over our lives. She, and Rotten’s voice, and Strummer’s heart, and Costello’s lyrics and my father’s death were the things that made me. They were contingent and co-forming energies that powered and power me towards trying, at the very least, to live a life that opposes.

This book, the third part (so far) in my #lolsobiography, is inevitably about that. But it’s also about sport, about influence, about how wonderful things are, even when darkness and dumbness and the twisted evils of money and privilege continue to pin us to the deck. My faith in art and music and sport never dims. My faith in the Three Great Mates we all have and need and my two sensational kids carries me through. 

                                                                       *

Life seems to have conspired towards poles of opinion, not just on social media but that might be the most obvious example. Too many of us make judgements that are ill thought-out or unforgiving. We’re bawling our truths at each other. We exercise (or exorcise?) a kind of manic certainty that draws us into conflict rather than conversation. Everything from the Twitters[3] to PMQs contributes to this.

Let me put on record my own weakness in this regard: I get angry and I judge. But in my heart I know that tolerance – and knowing that you may be wrong – are essential human virtues. We do have to judge; we do have to decide; we do need to get better but we also need to be civil. That’s not a recipe for capitulation.

*Takes further deep breath*. Look I’m as ready as the next bloke to launch into Grandstanding Mode. The Times and the Socials and everything about now make GM the engaged individual’s ‘natural’ response, do they not? Us punters are being teased towards some angry vortex all the time. Ah: cue some polar expeditionism.

We live, it strikes me, in an extraordinary and dangerous moment. The West is arguably madder than it’s ever been, with the Trump/Musk coalition-thing a catastrophic threat to the intelligence, knowledge and goodness that underpins society itself. (It’s November 2024 as I write: we await the second Trump term but Brother Elon has sculpted the matrix into an angry monster). The truth has suffered an especially foul Special Op’[4] – Bannon’s infamous shitstorm. Those previously relatively harmless Influencers (think makeovers, think pranksters, posers and dancers) have morphed into combat-ready sub-nazis.

This is a challenge. It can drag us down and have us raging at (and waaay beyond) the deliberately-reduced politics we now suffer in the West.

So don’t expect me to qualify everything – I may fall short! I know we’re well-advised to avoid cheap blame-games but I’m still gonna launch, here and there. Of course under-privileged and under-educated people have always been likely to ‘strike out’. Of course this general discontent has always been weaponized by people with hands on the levers. But there are lines we just don’t cross; there are things which are just plain wrong.

The Great Families and the oligarchs; the MAGA cult and the ‘gammon’; the liars and the cheats and the racists are bad folks.[5] Some more, some less. We who feel this may be entitled to tell them that, although this is likely to be inflammatory. ‘We see you’. But we also have to deal with them – by that, I mean debate, include, educate – however difficult or unlikely that may seem. And, perhaps before we inter-react, or rise to condemn, or commit the sin of prejudice ourselves, we have to go big and go public on the idea that they, these people, are as valuable as we are. They have our right to argue.

It may not get much tougher than to accept that the ‘racist morons’ or ‘easily-led’ on our streets or in our timelines are people we have to appreciate but… we do. Whilst opposing them.

Where lies progress in all this? On a political level I suppose we need to elect governments that will be a) strong enough morally to oppose prejudice and b) smart enough economically to improve the lot of the disaffected. Clearly, sadly, the momentum appears to be going the other way in certain key democracies.

This brings us back into the circle of action, or exasperation. There is a kind of backstop, a point of no further retreat for many of us. Prejudice and privilege are wrong. Whether entitled or powerless, ignorant or driven, player or played, they are wrong. We can and should choose to do better around those things – we surely have to? This implies all kinds of stuff but let’s just call it goodness. Most of us recognize it, even if we choose not to ‘walk in its path’. There are a million distractions, some gorgeous, some filthy. We need to be decent and fair and friendly; to find the invincibly moral core. That can be common; can define us.

But hang on. In the face of Trumpism and Reform, alt-rightism and this galaxy of loss, what’s our civil/intellectual/physical/cultural reaction? Depends who we are. Are we leaders or passengers or artists or victims? Who do we look to, where do we go? Weirdly, it seems a scientific certainty that there will be a response, even in this turbulent evil. (Is that not how the universe works?) The response may even be a thing of glory and inspiration.

Wonderfully, we make our statements in a myriad of ways. As the mighty Slits did, we can ‘create’; kick up a fuss; make something challenging and radical and beautiful. We may need to do more, but this is part of the change – or at least one irrepressibly human, principal means to strike back. Let’s create. Let’s be anti-badness; anti-racist; anti- any declining status quo. Our pens are ‘snug as a gun’.[6] Our fingers are on the fretboard. This is part of life’s purpose.

[1] Went to see some weirdo, many years later, after a heart episode. He looked at me and immediately asked why I was carrying the world’s troubles. ‘I’m seeing a yolk across your shoulders’.

[2] Yup. Definitely prone to welling-up.

[3] Yeh I know, now X. Pipe down!!

[4] Deliberate perversion of things we thought were fixed and factual. Facilitated by socials/moguls/what we might call the Extremist Establishment.

[5] Read on before you judge…

[6] Slits: ‘Typical Girls’, from ‘Cut’. Seamus Heaney: ‘Digging’.

If Not Now Then When?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

The more I’ve thought about the particularly rich and what we might now call developmental periods of my life the more obvious it’s become that anger and conscience sparked via music have come to guide or define who I am.

Music can describe, reflect, light up or emphatically nobble us. (Confession: I’m crocked). Very often it does capture the times themselves – the times in which we grew. Of course relating said theory to punk or new wave may seem thin to those who weren’t there or those who just don’t get shifted by choons in the way some of us have been. But surely you get this? Surely you have your own tonal moments, or words etched over your heart? Songs that just carry you, whatever the era?

Welcome to the club. Whilst I will maintain that ’76-82 was massive, not just for my gang of mates but in terms of influencing zillions of lives, I am clear your own vibe is just as valid. Tell me all about it: maybe later?

We’re bound to hype-up the things around us when our hormones are hyper-active. Things are or were more highly-coloured when we’re young. That perspective is always gonna out-biff real perspective and I’m fine with that. ‘Our music’, the stuff we got off on or got furious to in our teens and early twenties, is always gonna be the best. For me this was punk and post-punk. Yes I can take a philosophic in-breath before conceding that it’s not the Only Time. But it felt that way. Maybe until now.

Clearly and for obvious reasons, everybody holds tight to the music of their teens. I get that. It’s just natural. It’s gonna feel special. But try to get a fix on 1976/7/8/9. It feels like the streets are on fire and sometimes they are. There are Thatcherian (was that ever even a word?) or what we might nowadays term Trumpian levels of divisiveness and even hatred in the political ether. There’s Jonny Rotten and Joe Strummer and Paul Weller… and that sound.

(In my humble view) the late Seventies is the greatest time in the history of popular music. For the energy and the intent, however flawed, or obscured by inadequate explication, however feebly understood by the pogoing masses. Something was really happening. Throw in being a tumultuously hormonal young fella with a powerful sense that things aren’t right or fair, plus shock and existential confusion over a family tragedy or two. Why wouldn’t you attach, pretty directly and permanently, to the soundtrack of these life-changing moments?    

But why was it so brilliant? I’m thinking because here in Blighty it kinda had to be.

The Punk Experience was all about immediacy, urgency, spittle; about kinds of revolution in the now, because of the now. In our case that meant Thatcher, injustice and anger. The North-South divide. Racism. Homophobia – later enshrined in the law in the infamous Section 28 – but a part of the Thatcherite vocab well before HIV struck in 1981. Shameless boom for some, bust for many. We can be entirely specific that Thatcherism was a signal factor in the emergence of a furious counter-culture. Trump and Musk are surely worse by every metric?

What does this mean, if anything? A) I find it fabulous, rich territory, this whole idea that powerful responses to circumstance, through art – i.e. music – can be such huge, formative participants in our lives. B) That implies (or makes un-deniable) the notion that both individuals and cultures – political, structural – can be changed by noises, by ideas. Throw in the demystification and opening-up that was essential to punk and we may have grounds for optimism that a Second Coming (for widespread, meaningful dynamic protest music) really may be a natural outcome, *here and now*.  

                                                               *                         

Chewing this over with a mate and he offers the thought that maybe Mozart was punk: he certainly set out to provoke The Toffs. My understanding is that the great man had a love-hate relationship with his audience and that the work, beautiful and godlike though it might be, was on occasion(s) specifically driven by conscience and by anger. He was also something of a rebel entrepreneur, hosting his own gigs to make those socio-political statements. (Malcolm McLaren, eat shit!) Point taken.

Spinning forwards, it seems obvious that popular music was intrinsic to the cause and the life of the Civil Rights campaigns of the US. (I recently watched some extraordinary footage of Nina Simone at her fierce, magnificent best. It was a revelation. More on this momentarily). Blues itself may be a resistance movement that dwarfs punk in scale and richness. Some would argue that the folk scene of the Sixties was as hearty and conscious as any period.

Zooming out geographically, of course there are spectacular and seminal indigenous protest songs from the Arab Spring and from Latin-American bands raging about murder, corruption or drugs, or the stuff that felt relevant and possibly *most obscene* to them. Go find them.

Anger is an energy. I found the ‘Rolling Stone 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time’, late-on in the writing of my next book. Found it interesting… and a challenge. Not that I’m entirely shifting from my advocacy for punk – no, sir. But a(n admittedly imperfect) ‘world perspective’, over a century of angry music? Well why wouldn’t that be a challenge?

Nina Simone’s ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ is in there at number 7. (But hang on. I bet you wanna know who tops it? Sam Cooke; ‘A Change Is Gonna Come, from ’64). Back to Nina.

She pronounced herself ‘skeptical’ of protest music out of concern that it can over-simplify and therefore reduce moments of reckoning and complexity. This was before the murder of four black children in the infamous Alabama church bombing and the assassination of activist Medgar Evers, both in 1963. I imagine she just got so mad she flew into the writing of one of the most poignant and potent songs of any time. ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ first appeared on a live album and guess what? It was banned for a time, in some southern states.

Simone also covered the Billie Holliday classic ‘Strange Fruit’ and in ‘Backlash Blues’ and ‘I Wish I Knew What It Was To Be Free’ she railed brilliantly and with passion against the patent, rancid injustice of the time.

Can’t wait any longer. Who now, in the time of Musk and Trump, will carry that torch? This feels like a moment not just for Angels of Protest but for massive, concerted resistance – yes, perhaps led by artists and musicians. The wildness and vileness of the whole MAGA Project makes the bigotry and divisiveness of Thatcherism feel almost petty. I don’t normally do perspective but despite piling up a lifetime of anger and revulsion around that woman and despite being a giant pond’s distance away the pall over America feels scarily more foul than late Seventies UK.

My book is about my life and the impact upon it of contemporary rackets. I depart to major on Nina Simone for several reasons. She was radical – she told Martin Luther-King she could not be non-violent. She had a real, sensational power and talked of having no choice but to respond to the evil of the time. Simone’s voice and piano are rare, rare things. And she has produced some of the greatest music that’s ever graced this planet.

                                                                *

In that ‘100 Best’ we find Woody Guthrie – more than once, from memory – but at no. 11 with ‘This Land Is Your Land’. We find a reminder that Tracy Chapman’s smooth-but-eloquent ‘Fast Cars’ is deliciously spiky. We remember (maybe with mixed feelings?) one of the superstar protests, in ‘Sun City, by Artists Against Apartheid. We get a nudge towards checking out Beyoncé at the Superbowl – 2016, she’s done more than one! – with her black sisters wearing deliberately provocative Black Power military-chic, performing ‘Freedom’ and thereby making a HUGE POLITICAL STATEMENT IN FRONT OF HALF THE WORLD.

Closer to (my) home there is one of the most upful protest songs ever committed to vinyl – Specials AKA ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ from 1984. I played it to a theatre group in the hotel bar I was running in West Wales. Resident and rehearsing at our place, they insisted on hearing it at the end of every working day, to fire them up whilst bashing out their own inspiring art.

Number 2 on that Rolling Stone chart is ‘Fight The Power’ from Public Enemy, a raw and in-your-face revisitation to the Isley Brothers’ record of 1975. Recorded for Spike Lee’s movie ‘Do The Right Thing’, it may owe its high position in that chart to the exposure around that, as well as its punk-rap brazenness and defiance. It’s noteworthy (and I take no issue with this *whatsoever*) that all five of the chart-toppers are by people of colour protesting injustice. Suggesting again how vital a force music can be in offering an outlet, a voice that can really register.

Bob Dylan was at no. 6 with ‘Masters of War’. Interestingly – or not – the descriptive blurb alongside makes a link between folk and punk; a reminder of that profound tradition for conscious stories which is so characteristic of folk music… and, yaknow, folk like us.

Remember Helen Reddy? Me too, just about. She may be offended by the label ‘Australian soft-rocker’ but consoled by the knowledge that her ‘I am Woman’ of 1971 became a feminist icon that bounced down the years. (It’s at 73 in the chart). It kinda bounced into my lap because – I’m pret-ty certain I have this right – the England and Wales Cricket Board used the 2013 Katy Perry song ‘Roar’, which uses Reddy’s refrain, to back some All Stars promo stuff I played in schools. (I was, some of you will know, a Community Cricket Coach for many years. Am now just a Pathway Cricket Coach). In this way, Reddy’s rally may still be roaring.

The Top 100 of anything is usually reductive garbage; we know this. I take significant umbrage with the fact that ‘Guns of Brixton’ – one of The Clash’s worst songs – is in the Rolling Stone collection, at no. 56. Cobblers. Especially when I’m seeing nothing of Elvis Costello! Not going to go scouring the whole thing again but not seeing ‘Ghost Town’ (but X-ray Spex are in there) and no ‘Eton Rifles’ but ‘Fascist Groove Thang’ gets the nod. Ah well; subjectivity, eh?

                                                               *

Punk-influenced music was and is massive in the lives of many of us. It was populist, in theory and in practice, in a good way. Perhaps most satisfyingly, the advent of Independent Record Labels, or more exactly their proliferation, based and inspired around new wave music, was central to making the movement – and that whole ethos around DIY – work.

Real People could make records. To some extent the capitalist universe was successfully bypassed. Yes the treadmill was still grinding and bands were still (diabolically in my view) talking about ‘cracking America’, but the Problem of Scale – i.e. specifically aiming to make records that would be played across American radio – was suddenly drenched in righteous spittle. Tiddly, ‘cottage-industry’ Independent Labels were pumping out real and relevant music, close to home. That was important. No: it was fucking maaarvellous.

Or’nary Herberts could get up and do stuff. Me; you; Fergal Sharkey; Mark E Smith. They could record it, too, and access to new technologies would only increase, thereby (theoretically at least) multiplying the opportunities. New and often more personal or political messages could be sent out from voices previously unheard. This was the Great Demystification. The offering. You no longer had to be ‘musical’, or ambitious, or on a contract with a major. You could go from your bedroom, thrashing three angry chords, to a local boozer or small independent venue. Fair enough, this must have led to some bad art. But it gave us the 101ers and The Jam.

Values were re-set; the power of honest, simple art was re-stated; truth stood in the doorway; everybody was welcomed in.                                                    

There were a million fakers, from Billy Idol to New Romantics down the line but something did change. The mighty and sensational music produced late seventies/early eighties – Joy Division/Echo and the Bunnymen/Talking Heads and the soon come Two Tone era -could not have happened without the spark, the release, the (yes!) moral judgment and the idealism of punk. To be credible, you had to write about something. Cut the frills and the solos. Tell us what fires you up… or at least stop seeking adoration. Tell us a meaningful story. Tell us something that matters. Maybe get angry with the government.

Karl Ove and me.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

The boy Knaussgaard definitely dun gud.

Have battered my way through the first two volumes of ‘My Struggle’, where he shreds and re-builds most concepts of art, truth, the human condition and that which is sayable. The word ‘compelling’ appears on both sleeves: it’s a word that might sound bland. Not here. I read these bad boys in a couple of days flat; almost impossible not to.

‘A Death in the Family’ and ‘A Man in Love’ are MASSIVE LITERATURE in the (classic?) sense of having tremendous envisioning scope, and also in terms of being unequivocally serious art. The clues are in the names – most obviously in ‘My Struggle’, which is of course a deliberately epic-sounding moniker designed to bounce through the generations. This is art with ambition (as well as scary North European normalcy), aimed at the peak, at the heart, at the authentically high and thoughtful but delivered via the contemporary and the everyday. As I say, I’ve devoured both tomes.

Now like every other schmuck doodler, and despite just diving in and never over-thinking, I’ve latched onto coupla things. Notably the fearlessness and the voice.

Knaussgaard is relentless and ruthless around honesty. This is his voice and we are compelled to believe it, for the execution, for sure – for its brilliance – but also the amorphous power, the urgency across the text. Something in the vividness and energy of the storytelling (is that what it is?) completely captures us.

His often challenging but crystalline worldview(s) will out, if you will, because he commits utterly and directly: meaning the kind of autobiography that smacks you in the face because of its combination of insight and what we might call observational truth. The fella is, as Geir remarks, an ascetic. He makes a brutally real record of things but also, critically reveals the soul – in the landscape, of the people. This is some achievement.

I have read nothing about Knaussgaard, deliberately, so far. I imagine his saying of the unsayable, for example, around caesarian births and the general liberalisation/’feminisation’ of cultures and the contempt in which he holds the Swedish worthie-intelligentsia fashionista-crew draws a heavy dollop of flak.

Maybe it’s too blokey – reactionary, even? I’m watching this… but currently in the These Are Important Issues We Must Be Able to Talk About camp. Plus he is of course right about the smugness of some of us liberals. And Knaussgaard is *at least* as excoriatingly critical of himself as of anybody else. The books are alive with opinion but too wise, I think, to document arrogance or certainty. He is observing meticulously and with vigour so as to find truth: at whatever cost.

On pages 496/7 of ‘A Man in Love’ the (ahem) *wild, hard-drinking Norwegian* writes about writing itself.

(*Absolutely in as a wind-up!* Wonder if the magazine interviews he so detests have ever described him that way?!? Anyway, onwards)…

I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up.

… the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words it was the same.

Knaussgaard goes on to say that he hated this sameness with ‘every fibre of his being’, because it had ‘no value’. I take this to mean that he felt it an inadequacy, a distraction, a betrayal, because art should or can offer more than this. (And Knaussgaard is unmistakably a serious artist).

I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work… Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value.

Value lies in ‘diaries and essays… (which) just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a gaze you could meet’.

He is talking about the direct way into truth that autobiography can proffer.

Now I am not a great writer – unlike my Norwegian brother, here. And I really don’t overthink these things: I just do. However forgive me if I did feel just a teeny bit vindicated by this argument for honesty-through-voice.

By accident this is how I’ve practised my own prattling for aeons. For always. Falling back on personal experience – the things I know and care about – because that way I might find some truth. Because I would know it was honest.

That’s as close as I get or as deep as I get into thinking about what I can or should write. Bottom line, do I know it? Can I be true? If so, all else is superfluous. Number of readers, quality of reaction, fear of judgement, all an irrelevance. I can absolutely park that suspicion that I may be a nobody and a laughing-stock as long as the voice in there feels authentically like mine. I can have some hope that things on the page, feeling genuine, can resonate, can have value.

Might sound ridiculous. To hear me paralleling-along with a properly magnificent tome (or six). But I have no delusions of grandeur, here. Neither does Karl Ove, although he plainly does have Literary Ambition. It’s just gratifying (is that too much?) to find that we share the wee recognition that maybe there IS something good about writing what you really know… in your own voice.

Postscript: in a not unrelated burst of wild confidence, Yours F Truly has landed on the notion that my vicarious upgrade via the Knaussgaard voice-authentification-assessment means I am well within my rights to claim that the Dots Will Not Be Joined/Beautiful Games constitutes a new art form, which I am happy to christen lolsobiography. I trust no explanation is necessary? The third volume in the series (of however many) is underway.

You have been warned.

Beyond the budget.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

(A prologue – not by way of apology but certainly to note the significant and progressive nature of the Reeves budget. Adults are in the room: some congratulations may be in order. However, I stand by what follows)…

Many of us fail to (ahem) network or even accept capitalism(?)/business/the ‘run-of-the-mill’* as a way or The Way because we don’t accept its values. It’s crap; it’s low; it’s a signal underachievement given how brilliant and generous and intelligent people can be.

*(Great phrase, by the way!)

Why would we pretend that systems designed to keep certain wealthy people wealthy and beyond accountability are satisfactory? Why would we accept them? We’re better than that.

Why are there billionaires (and why are most of them vile humans?) when most people have little or nothing by comparison? It’s not right. Why is so little of what we might call politics about redressing these obscene imbalances? (We know why: because most politicians lack the courage or decency or heart to make change and the media universe is nobbled – crippled with corruption and dictatorial myopia – by those billionaires and/or ‘media barons’ effectively corralling or twisting our views towards their own).

This may all boil down to privilege and the protection of privilege. And that may be why I have an issue with private schooling – the Industry of Privilege.

Sure there are wunnerful people – kids/families/teachers – at private schools (I know there are, I’ve met plenty of them) but they all need to be big enough to accept that they are buying or serving privilege. There can be no meaningful change – no ‘re-distribution’, no ‘levelling’ – without this first building block being hauled out, or at least called out. That is, discussed as a real thing.

The assumptions of entitlement – in the ether, in fact – start and are cultivated here. They finish, maybe, they reach their catastrophic low-point with Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his ilk. How can this world (our world, Blighty) have come to be designed so that a human so grotesque and unworthy in every respect could make good on his wild, childhood intention of being Universe-King (or whatever the feck it was?) Johnson was and is a kind of icon to our system failure. It’s utterly obscene that an arse of his scale could believe and then absolutely find that everything and everybody really would fall in behind his boorish megalomania. Because of family and money and Eton and yup, everything.

In this landscape a budget from a centre-right Labour regime which has eminently capable but some might argue pitifully conciliatory people at the helm is likely to be an irrelevance: relatively. There may be encouraging splashing of the pool but there is already too much invested in  the appeasement of the World Order – from issues of class to the markets, to the media, to Israel, to That Which Is Thinkable – that we know Starmer and Reeve ain’t gonna stir things too much. The leadership is largely of this place; or content with it. There is no anger and no compelling sense of mission – though they talk of little else.

The party has already fallen into the trap of silencing dissenters. However much talk we hear about ‘changes of direction’, The Radical is very much out.

Sadly both this fact and the (less heinous than the Tories but still hugely galling) evidence of ‘successful’ gifting and lobbying feeds into the painful narrative that ‘them fookin’ politicians are all the same’. Plainly they’re not, but who can blame Dave from Wythenshawe for equating hugely trumpeted Labour indiscretions with heavily obscured Tory filth? With media and social media often acting deliberately against truth, how are we to engage intelligently with anything?

I won’t watch the budget coverage because it bores me and I don’t expect it to offer much of a lift. Plus the coverage will be depressingly dim. I do hope they prove me wrong and that there are some brilliant ideas – the Labour hierarchy, unlike the previous clowns, is quite possibly capable of that. Mainly though, it will tinker when we need to rip it up..

The personal and the possible.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

The personal stuff. A Tory-free Wales. Pembrokeshire red. (Grimsby red, too!) Feels almost great.

Deeply pleased that not just my own former MP – Crabb, Pembs – but every Conservative clown or thug or xenophobe has been cleared-out, from Haverfordwest to Harlech. This is a triumph, of sorts.

Watched Neil Kinnock on the tellybox, last night. Really interesting. For one thing he was beautifully and next-level articulate: he was also bold and honest enough to target the appalling behaviours he views as being central to the debacle. Nellie bach nailed the badness of the central characters, without needing to name Johnson and Braverman and Truss. We all know what kind of people they are. Kinnock described the ‘revulsion’ we feel for their entitlement, their mendacity, their cheap and shameless waving of that race-card as a symbol of electable(?) single-policy hatred. Good, finally, to hear a prominent Labour figure express the obvious: that policies matter but so does decency – so do morals. We can be better than that.

Strangely now, (or maybe not?), I’ve heard Conservatives finally and belatedly call this out, too. George Osborne had moments of clarity and decency, during last night’s coverage. As did Buckland, this morning. They both directly addressed the sleazy-shiftiness, the shittiness, the behaviours that characterised Johnson-ism and its corrupted hinterland. So if we get into reasons for the Tory wipeout, for the scuppering of twelve Conservative Ministers, for the quiet, seamless ushering-in of the Low-thrumming Starmer Machine, we maybe can or should park political ideologies… and look at urges and feelings.

Cannot stand Farge and deeply resent the platform offered to him. Would go so far as to say that I hold the BBC partly responsible for Brexit, on account of the ridicu-level of airtime the boorish dunderhead received – chiefly, of course, on Newsnight. That airtime felt suspicious to the point of being corrupt. (Oof. That word again). The media generally have been heavily guilty of making Farage the story and thereby changing the story. Extraordinarily, editors have baulked at challenging the wrongness and badness at the heart of his ‘schtick’: instead they have courted and thereby encouraged racism in the ether. This has been a signature disgrace.

Wales has a concerning number of crass right-wing citizens – hang on, let’s call them what they are; racists – so following the vote-counts the story here has already been twisted towards ‘Reform Success’. That’s the headline: not the fact that there will be no Reform MP’s within Wales. Similarly, there is and will be a disproportionate dollop of coverage across the nations. It will be noted that folks have voted ‘in protest’ at the government’s manifest failures. They’ve ‘struck out in anger’, (bless ’em).

The fact (and it is surely a fact?) that the overwhelming number of Reform ‘supporters’ are dumb, effectively apolitical xenophobes-plus will continue to stew but remain unsayable. This is problematic territory: people have the right to protest but racism (and the advancement of what we euphemistically label ‘populist policies’) is and are stupid and wrongheaded. In fact they are just plain wrong. Wilful, negligent, cowardly or overt support or appeasement of Farage has put us here – in a place where danger lurks. The media have served us badly, again.

But hey. Reform are not the story: the Tory Wipeout is. There are no Conservative MPs in Wales. They have been decimated everywhere else. This is a profound change for the better. Starmer has steered Labour with caution but some skill. I nearly couldn’t vote for him – but did. His blandness and that whole deliberate strategic policy-vacuum-thing did my head in but worked. Retreats on green-ness and social policy are concerning; his invisibility then appeasement on Gaza was appalling. His complicity in the wretched and everlasting demonisation of Corbyn* is an embarrassment and insult to the collective intelligence. But he’s used these things (godammit) to win big.

*Where is the Corbyn victory story, in the media, by the way? Mysteriously lost)*.

There is almost no chance that even with a super-majority, Starmer will shift towards the transformational change previously aspired-to. This is another, ‘realist’-centrist new Labour. Despite using the word relentlessly, the new Prime Minister knows he can’t afford to change much – even if he had the appetite. No dosh for Big Projects; not really. But the fella is cute enough to know that decent, steady politics will douse most of the fires. There will always be racists and dumbos: we must all hope their urges can be appeased or defused by good governance and improving circumstances. Not easy; not swiftly achieved; but possible. I wish Starmer and Labour well.

pic from BBC.

Notes on Nationalism… and porkies.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

In the new age of Tory über-twattery it was a tad deflating to note, as I innocently flipped open ‘Decline of the English Murder’ that Eric Arthur Blair himself was educated at Eton. Jesus. Had forgotten that. But the more I dug in to that collection of disparate essays the more I liked, or re-liked the man.

It’s opinionated; it’s judgemental; it’s prone to the occasional hideous lapse – n-words, daft generalisations – but also chockful of brilliant, even timeless observations about life, politics, philosophy. It’s bolshy in an entertaining way about trends of thought and cultural icons. Almost certainly, it’s prescient regarding the filth that is fake news and that particularly modern (but plainly not) phenomenon of swamping the universe with porkies of a particularly poisonously-charged variety. This in the knowledge that most of the media will give it a platform unchallenged and enough of the people will be titillated by its raw bigotry.

(From Notes on Nationalism, 1945);

‘The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied’.

This of course is absolutely the essence of the Bannon and Trump playbook… but also surely redolent of the Cummings Project in the UK, and more recently Braverman’s ‘appeal’ to Confused and Angry, of Grimsby. Yes, Orwell’s essay is specific to nationalism but plainly – and sadly – its reach is into and across the racist spectrum.

I am much taken with the idea that although

‘nationalistic loves and hatreds… are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not’,

we must and can

‘struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort’.

For me this is a truth and something of an inspiration: that we must recognize some degree of ‘inevitable bias’ and then act intelligently. We can therefore prevent both concession to evil and, through opposition that is self-aware, steer clear of ineffectual, ultimately inactive rage.

‘The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality’.

Orwell is making the case for a generous kind of engagement here, something which decimates the (il)legitimacy and rank ugliness of Braverman’s contemporary posturing. The absence, within the current political discourse, of Orwell’s connection to commonly understood decencies has been profound. And deliberate, surely? We may fascinate over the degree of consciousness exorcised around the fug that is our philosophical vacuum, but not, I think over its prevalence.

If only the likes of Kuenssberg and Peston had the wit, nerve or grounding to challenge the likes of Johnson, Patel and Braverman for their obvious, perennial spite – their badness. The UK might be in a very different place had the direct and essential questions not been confined to honourable margins such as Byline Times, or the Twitter feeds of outraged individuals.

Major journo’s have gone missing. They apparently remain undisturbed by the grotesque distortions around Small Boats. They failed to stir at the whole Rwanda invention, despite it being a manifestly provocative kite-flying operation, designed to delight the most perverse and cerebrally-deficient amongst our rightist brethren. They saw and heard nothing during Partygate.

Presumably it’s just too difficult these days to find balance around moral questions? These people, even those with no ties to ‘journalistic principles’ or obvious stake in the grift of the press barons, utterly facilitatedthe fall into mindlessness. They were lazy, they were cowed. Orwell calls them out, from 80 years back:

‘this, I repeat, needs a moral effort’.

It Goes On…

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

It goes on. Painfully; extraordinarily, the crassness of it all being weirdly relentless – almost as though These People are intent on wearing us down.

Building regulations ‘opened up’… in clear, bullish, provocative contradiction to the water crisis. Deals cut for the Barclays; reams of contracts reeking of the same, foul whiff, succeeding the awesomely flagrant track-and-trace and the (useless) protective equipment deals. Remember those? Remember the bee-line to donors and pals? Remember your cash being systematically pilfered? It goes on.

Johnson’s lazy, assumptive greed may have been at the epi-centre of this historic low: but his Cult of Endowment has spread. The modern Tory seems to generally believe that the rules don’t apply to them. They are without conscience and they recognise no authority but their own ability to push things through.

We can’t let their dumb selfishness, their raw, idle corruption and their hatred of others drag us into the kind of desensitized fog that suits their purposes. We really are (and really have to be) better than that.

Zoom in. Our rivers – the arteries of our landscape – are choked with shit. It’s a perfect symbol for the era of Johnson and Gove, Truss and Patel, Mone and Sunak, Braverman and Zahawi and Rees-Mogg: the time when shamelessness, greed and the worst, most indulgent kind of uncaring trumped the authentic work of government.

Add to that list the names of Shapps, Jenrick and Coffey and we have a pret-ty clear picture of the Deeply Crap People who have constituted the party-in-power for more than a decade.

They were murderously incompetent through the pandemic. They were more obviously corrupt around the sickening Covid Fast Lane (for sidekicks and schoolmates) than any government of our lifetimes. Only #theveryworstofus could turn international but also deeply personal family tragedy into a business opportunity for the clan. Only that Johnson tribe (and its flunkies in the media) could squeeze filthy lucre out of that moment.

But it goes on. Via inevitable subterfuge – the disappearing stories, featuring Mone, Harding(!), All That Covid Money – or through the whole, wretched, perennial Tory donors thing. Environmental standards sliding yet again (despite the outrage around our rivers!) because the Tories need to payback the developers. Sunak the smiling void implicated in a zillion convenient outcomes for his family, for the people he needs. Crass, mindless gifting of advantage to industries or individuals that back the Conservatives – even these Conservatives. Just how stupid do these clowns think we are?

It’s possible that the wearing-down of our intelligence (and therefore our resistance) is strategic. The Soul-Dead Robots advising the Tories *really might be* sensing, in their foul, ‘pulse-gathering’ systems, that pressing the Small Boats button or the ‘look, Wokes!’ button hard or often enough might see these charlatans through.

We have to be better than that. I think we are. We have to gather ourselves; protest; use the law – even when the process feels tilted against us. Not only must these Tories go… but they must be held to account.

Pic from Reuters.

The Boy Linaker dun gud.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

It’s brought out the Wise People and the utter morons. It’s mind-crushingly obvious and kinda MASSIVE with subtle richnesses. As I write, it’s a massacre, with both the BBC and this, the filthiest and lowest government of my lifetime, fabulously skewered by everyone from Lineker and Wright to the external articulate voices of the centre and the left.

For the plainly compromised Beeb, with its laughably compromised Chairman and Tory-littered hierarchy, this is A Moment. For some years, many of us have been simply unable to trust in (or even watch) the headline news and current affairs output because of the embarrassing luxury of pro-right-wing talking heads or ‘storylines’. One example – and surely history will judge it this way? – has been the responsibility of BBC (amongst many others, of course) for facilitating Brexit and the similarly race/xenophobia-based projects of recent years, by hosting Farage and equivalents disproportionately often. It simply cannot be that he appeared appallingly endlessly by anything other than deep-lying design.

News output remains complicit now, by falling in behind the repugnant #smallboats soundbite. Hosting the ‘illegal’ (but not!) migration of desperate, endangered people as though it was ‘an invasion’ is a travesty of the facts as well as suspiciously helpful to the Tories. (The BBC are using that phrase – that phrase! – routinely, as though there’s no other way to describe it. Almost as though Sunak’s PR team are feeding it in there).

Let’s be clear; this gang of heartless, shameless bastards pushing the immigration agenda are doing it a) because they are evil and b) because they know that in terms of electability, hatred is all they’ve got. For the key public broadcasters to fall in so pathetically behind a patently racist campaign is extraordinary and abominable, making this something of a historic low-point, both in terms of amoral politics and journalistic integrity. Shame on all those involved.

We need to make it explicit that naturally there are people of integrity at the BBC: there will probably be more lefties than fascistic goons, simply because most beings with any level of intelligence must gravitate towards what we might clumsily call liberal ideas. But I’m not going to list yet again the chief influencers at editorial or full-on management level who have either funded the Tories or worked in the cesspit that is the right-wing media. It’s just fact that too many Beeb Bigwigs are not independent or neutral: (this needs sorting). It’s just obvious that the gaffer needs to go, for being in and/or lining Johnson’s pockets. It’s just obvious that because the game is up for the Conservatives, the leadership is going the nasty, red-meaty route.

Gary Lineker is brightish, goodish man. (The Mail, Sun and Express will shortly being trying to contradict that notion by digging out filth upon the fella but that notwithstanding, he has form for being a tolerant, generous human). If you can be bothered to look at *what he actually said* in the tweet that started this furore, you will see that he rather carefully constructed his observation: it’s neither crude nor especially inflammatory. Lineker uses the words ‘not dissimilar’ as opposed to saying that the language of the Tories was actually taken from the Nazi playbook. For me this suggests a degree of thought and care markedly absent from many of the responses. But that’s semantics: let’s get back to the facts.

It’s a fact that this government is deliberately raising cheap, visceral fears and enmities in order to distract from other failings and to focus the public/political agenda on stuff that might be a winner for them. No matter how low, or twisted, or immoral, or untrue. No matter that the ‘crisis’ itself is largely invented. Or that we take massively less refugees than other, comparable European nations. No matter that it’s wrong and inhuman to portray scared, vulnerable people in inflatables or small craft as nailed-on criminals and cruel burdens on the state – as scroungers, or worse.

This is what Lineker is drawing attention to and forgive the repetition but again I’m going to say it’s obvious. It’s undeniable. It’s true. He is saying that our government’s response to these events (or relative non-events?) speak of prejudice and intolerance in a way that makes us think, inevitably, of 1930s fascism. For this is the demonisation of innocents.

It may be dangerous or inappropriate in any context to talk of ‘decent people’, in 2023, but surely all decent people – even Tories – know that the small boats travesty stinks. We must be better than that? As I write, more and more of Lineker’s colleagues are backing his stand. So there is hope, friends.

The bowlingatvincent.com Multinational Corporation Review of the Year – 2022.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

bowlingatvincent.com – literary wing of the Protest Channel that is @bowlingatvinny – had a strongish year. (I know ‘cos I just looked back). Except that it accidentally traduced the original purpose of the whole damn enterprise, which was to roar about sport and art pretty much alternately. I may reflect on this.

Of the fourteen blogs during 2022, five were about football. I rather unpicked Wales’s World Cup Adventure, got into United and Ten Hag (v West Ham), covered England’s Lionesses v USA and through their Euros win and watched my home town Town at the Play-off Final. Astonishingly, of the eight zillion opinions and tactical judgements I expressed through nerve-janglingly live coverage of all these occasions, I can – even in the allegedly sobering light of day – find none that were wrong.

  • Contest. And then maybe not? I was dead right that Wales needed to play better and that Bale should retire from (certainly) international football and probably club action, too. Now.
  • ‘Where are Wales? What level they at? Are they heroic over-achievers, in a cruel, more heavily-endowed-with-everything kindofa world? Or what? Where’s the Wales Place, in footballing terms – and maybe the other stuff? Football-wise, are they brave and bold, or are they ungenerous and perverse? Are the ‘limitations’ enabling or stultifying? Where do, or should Wales pitch themselves?’
  • I was right to note with some embarrassment that the USA – not Argenbloodyteena – ‘slaughtered’ Wales in the first 45 minutes of their campaign and that for all the justifiable gas about a rare and wonderful World Cup appearance, Page’s ‘pragmatic’ conservatism disappointed. Sure, Wales have few great talents (so responsible caution blahdiblah) but the endless holding patterns only seemed to undermine both individual performance – no surges; no racing adrenaline for player nor support! – and the essential hwyl that has carried Wales for aeons. It was all a bit lame.
  • I nailed the Rashford Thing and the signs of re-growth, under Ten Hag, in Holding Players. Elanga was similarly *seen* and Fernandes un-picked, en route.
  • …’quality-wise, there was little difference. In the first ten both Casemiro and Eriksen showed glimpses of their rarified best, either threading or spraying fabulous passes into feet, offering real hope that the mythical(?) corner into Team Flow and Sumptuous United-ness might yet be turned. But no’. 
  • In Things Have Changed I trumpeted the stunning transformation in women’s football, in England, and by implication, beyond. Ingerland ‘bossing the yanks’ said it all, after a decade or more where North American soccer all-too-serenely ruled over us amateurish Brits. I noted the ‘supreme equanimity and humour (as well as tactical intelligence)’ of the new gaffer – Wiegmann.
  • More controversially, perhaps, I mischiefed-up the Euros Final, fearlessly calling out relative under-achievement, performance-wise – even in victory – on the day. (Come ON. Don’t you get bored of the faux euphoria that massively over-inflates the *actual performance(s)?* It’s perfectly possible and generally the case that trophies are won in ordinary games by ordinary performances. This in no way deflates the fabulous significance of the achievement).
  • So, in Clickbait? You betcha! I do argue that recent SPOTY winner Beth Mead was one of several who were mixed, rather than brilliant, in an absolutely brilliant tournament win. I correctly identified that presser invasion as ‘the best moment in the history of sport’ and named Millie Bright Player of the Tournament… because she was.
  • Finally – well, previously – I *actually went* to the home of West Ham United FC, to cover the Mighty Mariners. Great day/crap game.
  • ‘It’s absurd in 2022 to use phrases like ‘attractive football’; worse still to associate that with abstracted, rose-tinted community goodness but as I look around the acres of ‘park’ now home to the Happy Hammers, the clash of values, vistas and jazzed-up-verbals is somewhat mind-blowing’. 

The Other Channel, now sportslaureate.co.uk , carried more football but bowlingatvincent.com was always the home for rugby. Life and *things* – like cricket, mainly – have regrettably drawn me away from funny-shaped balls but I managed to post homages to the egg on three occasions.

Despite being a Likely Phoney – male, middle-aged, possibly voyeuristic; at best a flawed dilettante – I watched a good deal of the Women’s Rugby World Cup. It was sensational. England may not have produced to their absolute peak but they have been utterly magnificent – frighteningly, powerfully so – for two years. France are not far behind. And then there were the homefolks.

  • The final, between England and the Black Ferns, had to somehow bear comparison with the semi, between New Zealand and France, which may have been the best rugby match of all time. I wrote rather wryly about the Black Fern’s ultimate, inevitable win; again creating mischief, again misunderstood. England had a player sent off – rightly, under the rules of the modern era. It (the offence) wasn’t malicious and it happened so early that the contest was effectively re-drawn as a training-ground routine. England held-out wonderfully gamely but were done, from the moment of the card.
  • ‘The second half may have been as colossal as the first. It was an exhausting watch, with the defiant visitors floating through chunks of time, before selflessly, heroically heaving against the inevitable. Both sides naturally made changes and inroads. Both scored. But the universe had been shifted. The crowd knew it. England were overhauled, before striking back. Then overhauled. With three points in it, the battered visitors kicked for the corner rather than look for the three points that would bring extra-time’.

I wrote two posts on (men’s) Six Nations stuff, back in February. They stand up, too. One of them channelled both The Mekons and Dylan Thomas: it also morphed into part-coverage of Eng women v Aus, at The Cricket, with ‘Rafters clanging. Sea rumbling’. It’s likely that I was in a caravan, in one of those storms, at the time, so it wasn’t Heather Knight who was fearing airborne adventure. Oh: I may or may not have been drinking.

There were but two artsy posts. One on Freddie Flintoff’s TV caper and the other around the Sensationalists/YBO’s art and lifestylery. I am critical of both… but right… as you will see… if you go back through. I’m really not sure what caused the apparent shift away from The Arts: they remain at the core of my life and my learning. I still believe I have some contribution to make, to reviewing and/or ‘criticism’.

From Sensationalists: people who might convince us: ‘Morons at the Mail, poor or tokenistic arts education and profound levels of ignorance have engineered a situation where we are a) visually illiterate b) suspicious and small-minded and c) too bloody lazy to stand in front of an artwork and let it do its job – beguile us, transport us, challenge us. This, for what it’s worth, is my context; the belief that art matters and that artists carry that privilege of being our conscience with courage and often a deep, deep, incorruptible honesty’.

From The Sublime to…

The unfortunate truth is I felt compelled to write upon multiple occasions – well, four – about the Tories, or Our Government. These are angry pieces.

In more than one of these blogs I savage Johnson and regret not a word of it. Plainly he is the worst Prime Minister of my medium-considerable lifetime. In A Christmas Puppy? I almost dare to bid an un-fond adieu.

‘So could the Age of Embarrassment finally be over? Might the Bumbling Buffoon, the Etonian Mess really be done?

It’s possible. In a characteristic veil of porkies and shameless, conscience-less swerves between the reported fact, his Urgent Gatherings and the forbidding fridges of a life lived in cosseted anarchy, Johnson really may have spent himself. It’s possible. The lies and the deceit and the vile uncaring will of course go on, endlessly, but it may be that his time in the Real Spotlight is over’.

I am content, foolishly, perhaps, to judge him morally as well as describe his practise, which has brought chaos, death and shame to an increasingly grubby kingdom. There is surely a kind of Shakespearian wickedness, an epic foulness around his skiving off from the first five COBRA meetings, in a world emergency, in order to a) sort his ’women problems’ and b) finish writing his effing book. This is un-caring – not needing to care – on a truly appalling level. It’s absolutely him.

So I’m fuelled with hatred and contempt, for Johnson and his thin acolytes. There are dishonourable mentions for the whole filthy clan: Mogg; Truss; Kwarteng; Hancock; Cummings – and by implication for the quietly grotesque hinterland, into which the likes of Dido and Mone hope to disappear. They appall and offend me, as does the xenophobic Brexit catastrophe and the ongoing, raw corruption across those VIP Lanes, corporate favours – particularly the gaze-averting re our scandalous water industry – and the whole, humiliating House of Lords gravy-train.

My dismembering of the Tories is less forgiving, less funny than (say) Marina Hyde’s – deliberately so. I fully accept that driven, polemical writing of this sort may contribute little to the task of ‘turning things around’: but forgive me if I simply bear honest, angry witness. Despite the fact that nobody’s paying me to do this, it does feel like ‘my job’. (Plus lacerating hostility may not necessarily devalue the writing).

The year, then. Set in a matrix of an Ingerland that feels like it’s unravelling further – or at least the brink seems closer.

Thankyou to all who do read. Regulars, who may have a sense of how ‘niche’ I remain, will understand that there are times when I am tempted to either give this malarkey up, entirely, or to further streamline, by gathering all the writing and twittering into one place. This may yet happen, but might curtail my ability to speak the truths I want to speak. We’ll see.

Anyhow. Please do continue to visit the two websites and, if you would, RT on the Twitters – that’s oxygen, for us bloggists. In case you’re wondering, if energy permits, I hope to produce a sportslaureate.co.uk Review of the Year, too.

Love and heartfelt thanks to all: have a wunnerful New Year.

              Rick.