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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’.

I have a memory which is tough to shake. It’s an earlyish one, probably from my late teens – a time when I was developing the political-philosophical anger that still rages. I was also in many senses finding a voice.

Simply cannot remember where or why or how I finished up listening to Dylan Thomas reading some of his poems… but I did. This was waaay pre-internet so could it have been radio? Who knows. I had found the man’s work prior to this event (and loved it) but never heard him read or speak. I was – and I know these two words don’t fit together – I was relatively shocked.

To a spiky youff from Grimsby he sounded like a posh English public schoolboy. Inflated. Pompous. Weird. But not Welsh. So un-believable.

A similar thing happened the first time I heard Kyffin Williams speak – only more so. Another toff, another fake Welshman; another medium-shocking disappointment.

Of course this is prejudicial nonsense… but it is also true. To this English-born now long, long-term resident of Wales, conscious of his own fraudulence, it hurt a little that class, that privilege had intruded so jarringly into *even this* – the sacred world of art and of the heart.

And yet Thomas (in particular) and Williams remain profound icons: in the writer’s case partly because he plainly was in some senses a big-hearted radical – at least in terms of style – and, frankly, his background wasn’t that posh. He just performed like that; believing, I imagine, that the booming suited the pomp and circumstance and mischief around the great themes of his work. But it was weird, hearing him, back then. It was a blow to my punky idealism and to the notion that hopefully, despite Thatcher *and everything* the Home Counties/Great Families domination of the universe might be vulnerable to our Northern, fraternal surge.

I still hope that what we might call The Creative Spirit can come from anywhere and be recognised: that Ordinary Folk, as well as those with time and privilege, can turn out art that is visible and moves and reflects us. However, the times again may be conspiring against this.

The author David N Thomas will probably never read this: if he does, I hope he takes the trouble to get beyond the title and the sense (that may rise in him) of liberties being taken at his expense. They are not. His book Fatal Neglect, which cuts away the sleazy distractions and outright porkies around Dylan Thomas’s death, is gripping, bold and mildly revelatory. I am bastardising his title to hint a little at the unsavoury richness he uncovers.

I say mildly revelatory because, let’s face it, many of us knew that the ultimately frail but often monstrous, boozed-up genius who gifted us Under Milk Wood had been ill-served by his inadequate compadres and the criminally arrogant doctor who oversaw his death in New York. We just didn’t have the evidence. David N proves we were denied it.

Dylan remains the co-author of his own rather grisly end – naturally – having been a drinker and a slob who mixed with or was surrounded by drinkers, drug-takers, neurotics, hypochondriacs, the privileged and the indulgent. He was in bad shape before the bronchopneumonia (obvious but undiagnosed by Feltenstein, the doctor who took charge) tipped him towards coma and death. There were *factors* – used erroneously as fact by that same doctor – which seemed to suit the romantic view of a soul destined to self-destruct: chiefly alcohol and that lack of restraint and self-care. Feltenstein was myopic enough and cheap enough to build his flimsy diagnosis and his fatally shabby treatment entirely around this most readily-available construct; something that went on to symbolise and/or haunt the extinguished poet for fifty years and more. Dylan Thomas became the extravagant drunk who killed himself with booze.

The book unravels that convenience and in doing so exposes the various inadequacies of Brinnin – the agent – and Reitell – the lover, nurse and editor. The wider group that I may with ironic klaxons a-hooting choose to call American Friends are also skilfully, damningly implicated. Fatal Neglect is about shallowness, selfishness and self-interest as much as it is a comprehensive gathering and disassembling of medical fact and half-truth.

These shitty people get skewered, for their ‘lack of anchorage’ and whilst contriving their cover-up.

Brinnin, the agent, arguably more than anyone. He failed utterly on his duty of care towards a plainly unhealthy man. He worked him, even when Thomas was visibly ill or barely able to speak, to fund his own, appallingly glitzy lifestyle. (To be fair, the Welshman had a penchant for robbing or de-frauding the chancers, suckers and sponsors around him but his Canadian-born American agent was different level). Annual European tours, first class travel, cruises: all on other people’s money. He proved to be similarly profligate in respect of his responsibilities towards scheduling: D N Thomas reveals the extent to which Brinnin needed Dylan to graft and set him to it.

Liz Reitell shares some of the same disconnect from common decencies. She thinks she is Everything, as though Caitlin doesn’t exist or have rights and she, too, drives the dangerously exhausted writer on, carelessly or callously. She shares a good deal of responsibility for the years of edited truth, too; notably overseeing the travesty that was Brinnin’s book about those last days. Reitell is a talent, a shrew, a liar… but going through this, who isn’t?

I like that a sharp wee tome about medical minutiae becomes a scrupulously fair but fierce judgement upon people who barely need to care. Because they have stuff covered. Life, money, travel, expectation. Even the honourable medical men who were horrified at what Feltenstein did closed ranks to protect the hospital and staff who capitulated to the invading, overpowering Doc.

Everything is both material and context. For me Fatal Neglect has travelled well, crossing almost seventy years of myth and mischief around the relatively public demise of one of the great figures of modern literature. (If I have sounded belligerent towards Dylan Thomas that too, has been a fraction of the whole. The opening to Under Milk Wood still strikes me as one of the great, sustained moments in musical prose. The man was flawed, oh yes but by god he was something special).

Which is way it feels satisfying, feels right, that we now know he did not simply drink himself to death. Indeed he should not and would not have died, back in ’53, had he received prompt and professional medical attention. He had pneumonia before he was admitted to hospital. He was given shots of the wrong stuff. Nobody dare tell the fella Feltenstein – who had no authority – that this wasn’t just about the hooch. ‘Friends’ mostly failed him, too – as did those who came to tell the story. Some were duped, some criminally covered-up. Class, money, appearances, disappearances. Editing. Protection.

Fatal Neglect made me feel angry, in a good way. It shines a light into both the petty, alcohol-fuelled drama-queendom of Dylan and Caitlin and the uglier, truly privileged ease of some of the Thomas Groupies. In doing this, it may have found another moment; when more chancers, toffs and tossers – Johnsons and Goves and Hancocks? – are serving up incompetence and worse, safe in the knowledge that they can wallow. Because some folks still don’t really need to care.

bowlingatvincent

I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit

POWER CHORDS: an intro.

Fertile Neglect.