The first was a run of The Rules of the Game , a community theatre piece, by Partisan Productions, about ‘secret’ sectarianism. Ms. McGreevy, who you might remember from my teenage years, and myself were responsible for the music: a sort of Weillesque plod through the scenery. I found myself on accordion, an instrument that I can barely brace across my chest, let alone play, which is, of course, the reason I gave up GCSE Music; that and the momentary misstep that I should probably train to become a doctor.

I was lumbered too with accordion responsibilities in Wireless Mystery Theatre’s successful production of Mercury Theatre’s War of the Worlds . All of which makes me regret buying the thing from that poor, dying woman that sold it me. I don’t see that my £10 would have been much help at all.

The worst and most troubling event of last week, though, was Wireless Mystery Theatre’s other endeavour, which was something of a departure into reputable theatre. The company was invited, nay strongly recommended, to perform Carlo Gebler’s Charles & Mary, in Mr. Torrans’s lovely No Alibis bookstore. The radio play was originally broadcast in January of this year and it was hoped we would recreate it for the launch of Mr. Gebler’s new book. Which we did, down to the tinny, distant quality of listening to the original through a transistor radio.

Now, some will suggest that it is because Ms. Clarke, the producer of WMT, is also my Beloved that I was cast as the male lead, Charles Lamb. This couldn’t be further from the truth; the truth is that, because Ms. Clarke is also my Beloved, I couldn’t get out of playing Charles Lamb, however much I begged, as she already has too much information against me. Thankfully, I never have to act again, unless I fall on hard times.

Mr. Gebler’s play is a marvellous piece of work though. It tells the true tale of Charles and Mary Lamb, the authors of the early-19th Century children’s primer, Tales From Shakespeare . Also, incidentally, he was an alcoholic and she was a paranoid schizophrenic who killed their mother. It is easier, I think, to play people without issues or extenuating circumstances, but there is probably a reason why such ideal characters are seldom written. If the intense Ms. Lamb were only plain, there would be no story, and the excellent Ms. Bronagh McCrudden would not have received such plaudits as “capital,” “excellent,” and “a Tour de France.” The last didn’t seem to make much sense.

What affected both the Lambs is dreadfully complex: they were poor, but educated; their mother was overbearing; Mary, the elder, raised Charles, and their relationship was completely co-dependent as a result. Yet, Mr. Gebler, who gave an engaging mini-lecture at the end, was both warm and humane in discussing them and Ms. Lamb’s one fierce and conclusive act: although people may do terrible things, they are not defined by those terrible things. Or, at least, most are defined by their attempts to atone or overcome. This comes from his many years of working with prisoners in Maghaberry and his views on rehabilitation, recidivism, and mental illness were refreshing.

Of course, the other thing that knocked the Lambs off-kilter was books and surrounded by them in No Alibis, one can understand why. The childhood of the Lambs was spent reading romances and fantasy and the Shakespeare that would make their names and lead to their downfall. They could not translate the ideals of fairytales into real-life behaviour. I spent far too much of the performance eying up the copy of Trois par Georges Perec that I had been reading during sound check, unable to translate its ideal French into real-life English. This is, of course, why I gave up GCSE French.

The Boho Dance, Joni Mitchell.

Joni Mitchell moved to Bel Air, one of the three platinum-gated suburbs of Los Angeles, in 1975. Her previous album^4. had provided her greatest commercial success and generated enough sales to move her out of Bohemian Laurel Canyon. She maintained both houses across town, but lived beside the magistrates and politicians instead of the handcrafters of wooden jewellery. The Bel Air mansion itself was memorialised on the back cover of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, flanked, for some reason, by Burundi natives schlepping a giant snake. The Laurel Canyon house was immortalised in song^5..

In the same year, Tom Wolfe wrote, in The Painted Word, about the Boho Dance^6., a condition with which Ms. Mitchell must have been acquainted. It is, he observed, the series of frantic movements and contorted gestures through which the artist must put themselves to make a living: with one hand, they must flip the Bourgeoisie an offensive, avant-garde gesture, while clasping the middle-class shoulder with the other, lest the Bourgeoisie and their money get away. Who else but the reasonably well-to-do could afford to keep an artist anyway?

Those who impress achieve the act of The Consummation^7., by which they get to move to bigger houses in Bel Air or Manhattan or both. Still, they must try even harder to arrive at the opera in paint-spattered jeans or otherwise show they do not belong with the Bourgeoisie, now that money no longer marks the difference. Even a gruff declaration of genius in an interview may do the job^8..

The musician doesn’t have it so bad as the painter, as they can sell several million copies of a single album. Some even do so. One could hardly do the Boho Dance in 2/4 anyway, but the folkies tried. Ms. Mitchell claimed that she had always been a painter first and foremost^9.; Leonard Cohen was a poet^10.; Phil Ochs was a singing journalist^11.. Each one denying that they were really pop musicians with millions of adoring fans. And, even when those fans wanted Bob Dylan to be the earnest folk artiste, he betrayed them with a Gretsch^12.. He said, with tongue in cheek, that he was “just a Song & Dance man^13..” Fans should listen to you, but never you to them.

People like pop songs only if they sound good, but they like popstars for more complex reasons. Like Mr. Wolfe in the art world, a star is invisible without a theory behind them^14.. There must be some place, some myth, or some imaginary scape where the artist and listener can meet on equal terms. It’s certainly not Ms. Mitchell’s Bel Air palace or her 80 acres in British Columbia. She and her contemporaries, however, are eternally associated with the counter-culture Bohemias of the 60s and 70s.

All the appropriate locales are valourised in song: Greenwich Village^15., Chelsea^16., Laurel Canyon^17., and Haight-Ashbury^18., each with charm or poignancy. Even when Mitchell critiques the Boho Dance from afar, she presents the Greenwich setting as affected but sweet. There are no such paeans to neighbouring^19. Bel Air townhouses or Manhattan penthouses; no one wants to hear about a millionaire’s quality of life. At most, the wealthy suburb is lambasted for being stifling and for the disapproving hiss of summer lawns^20.. No artist ever wants to appear to be on the side of the Bourgeoisie, even if they are the same side of the platinum gate.

Notes
^1. “So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village. a menage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.” Norman Mailer, The White Negro, 1957. This before Ms. Mitchell’s jazz collaborations, most notably with Charlie Mingus in 1979.
^2. Scènes de la vie de bohème, Henry Murger, 1851.
^3. The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac, 1958.
^4. Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell, 1974.
^5. “Our house is a very, very fine house/With two cats in the yard/Life used to be so hard/Now everything is easy/’Cause of you.” Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Our House, 1970; documenting the affair between Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell and the house they shared in Laurel Canyon.
^6. “(1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the cirles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighbourhood, Bohemia itself, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in face, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.” Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975.
^7. “(2) The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artist of Bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards–and shower themwith all the rewards of celebrity.” ibid.
^8. “Well, sometimes you do get arrogant because there’s no one defending you but yourself. I mean, that’s where my arrogance lives in, you know, defending my work.” Joni Mitchell, in interview with Tavis Smiley, 2007.
^9. “I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.” Attributed and quoted on www.jonimitchell.com
^10. ‘The Poet of Rock Music’ – Subtitle on Leonard Cohen tour posters, 1976. Although, everything that Mr. Cohen says must be considered with the bend of his brow. Like Mr. Dylan, there is the possibility that, while one can snub the fans be claiming to be something other than a pop singer, one can also snub their fanaticism by claiming to be only a pop singer. Mr. Cohen began as a published poet before learning to play guitar in the 60s, reading poetry at his shows throughout his career: “a man in elfin boots, long hair and a cloak who stands up in one of those moments of pregnant, reverential silence which punctuate a Cohen performance and shouts out ‘God bless you, Leonard’ to crackle of sympathetic applause from the rest of the audience; an audience which, in short, substantiates the tag ‘The Poet’ more than it does the description ‘Of Rock and Roll…’” Mick Brown, The Return of Leonard Cohen, Sounds magazine, July 1976.
^11. “Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music. There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.” Phil Ochs’ introduction to The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo from Phil Ochs in Concert, 1966.
^12. “Judas,” audience member at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965, when Dylan first played an electrc guitar as part of his live set. It was a Fender Stratocaster, not a Gretsch, but that rhymes even less with the word kiss.
^13. “I’m just a song and dance man.” Bob Dylan, 1965, in repsonse to accusations that he was the ‘voice of a generation.’
^14. “What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of the New York Times saying: In looking at a picture today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial. In short, frankly these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.” Tom Wolfe, ibid.
^15. Bleeker Street – Simon & Garfunkel, Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood, Positively 4th Street – Bob Dylan, Talkin’ New York – Bob Dylan, etc.
^16. Chelsea Hotel #2 – Leonard Cohen, Chelsea Girls (album and song) – Nico, Chelsea Morning – Joni Mitchell, etc.
^17. Laurel Canyon Blvd. – Van Dyke Parks, Laurel Canyon (album and song) – Jackie DeShannon, Ladies of the Canyon (album and song) – Joni Mitchell, etc.
^18. (If You’re Going to) San Fransisco – Scott McKenzie, Haight-Ashbury, the Beautiful– Ashleigh Brilliant, etc.
^19. “For getting away from the Bourgeoisie there’s nothing like packing up your paints and easel and heading for Tahiti, or even Brittany, which was Gauguin’s first stop. But who else even got as far as Brittany? Nobody. The rest got no further than the heights of Montmartre and Montparnasse, which are what?–perhaps two miles from the Champs Elysees. Likewise in the United States: belive me, you can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same…” Tom Wolfe, ibid. The Boho is the inverse of the Hobo; one is free of place, the other dependent on it.
^20. “He gave her his darkness to regret/And good reason to quit him/He gave her a roomful of Chippendale/That nobody sits in/Still she stays with a love of some kind/It’s the lady’s choice/The hissing of summer lawns.” Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975.

Bohemian Like You, Courtney Taylor-Taylor.

With sixty percent being good middle-class boys, The Rolling Stones were Bohemians from the start^1.. They didn’t need rock’n’roll to work for them, like Mr. Presley or The Beatles did. The others could break the rules once they’d become successful, but Mick Jagger was still enrolled at the LSE and could become a banker anytime he chose. He was into R’n’B for purely aesthetic reasons, meaning that, even if his blues were never very sincere (and he never wanted them to be), the band’s imitation of the blues always was^2..

If The Stones and others managed to mobilise millions of students and teenagers in free-love and drug-use, they encouraged even more to sit in their parents’ houses listening to records. The mass-Bohemianism of the late-sixties changed Bohemia from a place that could be pin-pointed on no map to a state-of-being transmitted through record sales^3.. One could consume Bohemia or live it vicariously; working all day and growing your hair long at night^4.. You could even try and live it, if you wanted, with the rock star as the perfect role-model. Youth culture and mass-Bohemianism became the same, just as rock’n’roll was a synonym for freedom^5..

It was no surprise then that The Dandy Warhols cribbed, knowingly, The Stones’ Brown Sugar, when they mined the platinum snub of Bohemian Like You. Not because The Rolling Stones were a joke, but because the image of the Bohemian The Stones had constructed was still the one to aspire to thirty years later. Or, at least, it was the popular image of Bohemianism, because the music was still popular. It was something upon which even parents and progeny could agree.

The litany of clichés sung were snide, but harmless; they must have applied to The Dandy Warhols once and most of their fans still^6.. The joke was that we could all sound like that if we took ourselves too seriously. And, in the video of the single, the words run along the screen, as on a karaoke video, so that you can sound like that if you wish.

Of course, The Dandy Warhols are singing the song for real, on the records^7. and in the ads^8.. They made the money from it too. The rock star’s success makes them acceptable^9.. Without stardom, one can support the rock’n’roll fantasy from a minimum wage (The Slacker) or a trust fund (The Hipster), but, however it is done, it remains only the moving around of the image, rather than Bohemianism itself. To be successful, one must play by the rules or, at least, cheat discretely. And with success come mansions instead of squats and A* grade drugs instead of whatever killed that guy you‘ve never heard of. Rock stars would be decadents, if they could find the time^10..

Rock is the right medium for the Bohemian; it rejects technique, offering a living without demanding discipline. All you need is someone to drive the van. The Rolling Stones have a bus though and so do The Dandy Warhols. Such are the trappings of success and it is the successful ones that people want to be like. Ever-changing non-convention is easily ignored for the time-tested representation, but when the two set against each other, as in the Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown^11. Massacre^12. tour film, DiG!, the difference becomes clear^13.: The Dandys organise their photoshoot in the BJM’s drug-strewn, party-ruined living room. Although, few would have heard of the film, if they hadn’t heard of The Dandy Warhols first.

Notes
^1. “(The Beatles’ success) allowed the Rolling Stones to come along and then be as cool, as obnoxious, as bohemian, as ‘fuck you,’ as in-your-face as they wanted to be. It suddenly turned out that you could act this way and not suddenly burst into flames. You could just get away with it.” Greil Marcus in interview with Jason Gross, June 1997.
^2. “Mick Jagger was never a rocker. He wasn’t a mod, either. He was a bohemian, an antiutopian version of what Americans called a folkie. That is, he was attracted to music of a certain innocence as only a fairly classy–and sophisticated–person can be.” Robert Christgau, The Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1976.
^3. “What was about to happen was an unprecedented contradiction in terms, mass bohemianism, and this is where the idea of “pop” became key. (…) Applied first to low-priced classical concerts and then to Tin Pan Alley product, the word was beginning to achieve more general cultural currency by the mid-Fifties, when London-based visual artists like Eduardo Paolozzi were proposing that a schlock form (e.g., science fiction pulp) might nurture “a higher order of imagination” than a nominally experimental one (e.g., little magazine). Shocking.” Robert Christgau, Ibid.
^4. “There were solid economic reasons for the rise of mass bohemianism. Juxtapose a 20-year rise in real income to the contradiction in which the straight-and-narrow worker/producer is required to turn into a hedonistic consumer off-hours, and perhaps countless kids, rather than assuming their production function on schedule, will choose to “fulfill themselves” outside the job market. (…) for all these kids, popular culture meant rock and roll, the art form created by and for their hedonistic consumption. In turn, rock and roll meant the Rolling Stones.” Robert Christgau, Ibid.
^5. “We don’t care, we want product as cynically as they dish it, too bad. After all, the stones have a lot to stand for. After all, so do we.” Lester Bangs, It’s Only The Rolling Stones, The Village Voice, Oct. 1974.
^6. “The Portland quartet known as the Dandy Warhols were born kicking and screaming in 1993, making music to, ahem, “drink to”, an alternative soundtrack for slackers, stoners, and midnight tokers which celebrated the permanent vacations of the elegantly wasted. Think Keith Richards with New Wave hair.” Matt James, Pop Matter, Aug. 2010.
^7. Bohemian Like You, No. 5 in the UK charts, 2001, taken from the album Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia.
^8. Vodafone, Ford Focus, Ford Mustang, Holden Astra,GM Summerdrive, Citroen C4 Picasso, Next.
^9. “Conservatives can accept some Bohemianism, but only for the few to whom it is appropriate, not for the masses and as Allan Bloom wrote, it must justify itself with intellectual or artistic achievement. Anything else is just mass non-conformism, as self-contradictory as it is self-indulgent.” Robert Locke, Sweet Land of Libertarians: A Conservative Critique of Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About America, Front Page Magazine.
^10. “We’re too busy to be decadent.” Bill Wyman in an unpublished interview with Lester Bangs, cited in Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste.
^11. Brian Jones, of The Rolling Stones, died on July 3rd 1969.
^12. Although presented in the film as an unhinged, self-destructive, ‘free spirit,’ the 60s-based music of Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre is described as: “not an act of invention; it was not based on any pretense of crafting something new; it was a thoroughly post-modern music; it was pastiche of everything.” Carlo McCormick, editor Paper Magazine, DiG!, 2004.
^13. “The Dandy Warhols are the greatest cartoon, that’s what I think it takes to be successful as a pop star. I don’t give a fuck what they do. It’s not for me; he’s not singing songs to me.” Anton Newcombe on The Dandy Warhols, Ibid; “They were absolutely our favourite band. And they were the most interesting, amazing characters, but it’s basically like a pack of fourteen year old boys from abusive, broken homes set loose in the ghetto. Y’know, that’s basically what that felt like. Yeah, let’s go hang out with them, but come on, these kids are all gonna end up in prison.” Courtney Taylor, of The Dandy Warhols, on The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Ibid.

Quite a bit smaller than “The Jazz Corner of the World” that was Birdland was the Café Bohemia, which, according to certain record sleeves, was only “The Jazz Corner of the Village^1..” It was a jazz club only by accident; its owner, hardly interested in the stuff at all, had failed at everything else^2.. One drunkard promised to pay his tab by playing a string of shows there, but, by the night of the first, cirrhosis of the liver, and a few other things, had already killed Charlie Parker – for it was he! The name on the posters, though, had already changed the nature of the place^3..

Oscar Pettiford led the house band for a while and wrote Bohemia After Dark in the venue’s honour. Not in the least romantic, barely even smoky, it is New York hard-bop or, as it said on the door, “progressive jazz only^4..” With no lyric, the piece conveys the atmosphere of the music club through music alone, making it, like all post-swing jazz, nothing more than music for music’s sake: rhythms to which you can nod your head, but never dance^5..

Cannonball Adderley became one of the stars of hard-bop, coming to prominence after sitting in on a session with Pettiford at the Bohemia. He had only just moved to New York from Florida and brought his sax to the club for fear of it being stolen. Within a few weeks, he had already recorded Bohemia After Dark with the Kenny Clarke Sextet. Of course, later reissues would have to put Adderley’s name on the front so that people would buy it, for, by then, he had already played on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and led successful groups of his own.

A number of key live LPs would be recorded at Bohemia in the three years that it opened^6. and Mr. Davis would found his first important quintets there. It couldn’t last though, neither as a pit-stop for touring musicians or young tyros trying to make names for themselves: the young players do make their names and the old names go on touring, sending each off to bigger venues. Even the notion of bop as a hard, intellectual music with no white audience couldn’t last^7.. Black musicians may have stopped being merely the white man’s entertainer, but they couldn’t stop white listeners being entertained.

There was a difference between earlier white Bohemianism and black Bohemianism (or Bohemia after dark, if you’ll forgive me): Bohemianism generally meant giving something up or renouncing one’s privilege and most of those young jazz players had neither. So, where in other fields, the artist may prove the purity of their intention by declining the money, Mr. Davis could scowl, refuse to compromise, and take it anyway, without caring what anybody says^8.. Even Mr. Adderley, who had a conservatory education, would do well without compromising any notions of being an outsider, because jazz came from the outside, so, when it moved to the concert hall and the arts festival, it was only fair to charge people to get in.

Notes
^1. As seen on certain reissues of Bohemia After Dark.
^2. “For six months, I tried to make the place pay, first as a bar and restaurant, then with girl shows, and then with various acts.” Jimmy Garofalo, the owner of Café Bohemia, in an interview with The Village Voice.
^3. “The Bohemia’s audience reminded me of cafes in Europe, where people were serious and intense, and paid attention. They regarded the music as an art form, and even acted a little superior about the fact that they were there and listening to Miles.” George Avakian, quoted in “When Giants Walked the Village,” Downbeat magazine, 2005.
^4. “As long as they could, they would create a chamber music – even a soloist’s music – of protest and rejection, playing for themselves as Outsiders. They would accept the fact that the only vitality they could encompass was the nervous frenzy of a jungle turned to asphalt. Their music was their religion in that they put into it all the skeletonic truth they knew. Having played it, they died of consumption, drinks, drugs, or mental breakdown.” Wilfred Mellers, Music in a New Found Land.
^5. “Swing had always been a staple component of jazz in any category, because jazz began as dance music, and without a detectable beat the dancers would have been stymied. (…) No matter how complex, subtle or allusive it became, jazz had always contained that energizing simplicity. Unfortunately bebop had the technical means to eliminate it.” Clive James, Cultural Amnesia.
^6. Charlie Mingus – Live from Cafe Bohemia; Kenny Dorham – ‘Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia; Art Blakely – At the Cafe Bohemia, Vol. 1, 2, 3…; The Jazz Messengers – At the Cafe Bohemia, Nov. 11-23, 1955; George Wallington – Complete Live at the Cafe Bohemia; Etc.
^7. “A new soapbox for minority groups that have special brands of music to get off their little chests.” The New Yorker magazine, 1955.
^8. “If I don’t like what they write, I get into my Ferrari and I drive away.” Miles Davis, Attributed.

Beautiful woman, New Escapologist

The exciting new issue of New Escapologist has arrived, at last, at my home, where it is now being read by everybody. It is the longest issue yet released, with over one hundred pages, and looks as beautiful as ever. Moreso, even, as the lovely Ms. Samara Lieber has designed a new-look cover.

It deals exclusively with the subject of Bohemianism: a subject distant from my heart. The self-professed Bohemians that I tend to meet are lumbered with privilege and a stubborn, teenaged contrarianism. Thankfully, none of them made it. Instead, Issue Five features articles from the likes of the lovely Mr. Dickon Edwards (on bedsits), the lovely Mr. Neil Scott (on beards), and an interview with the -I’ve never met him, so I can’t say- Mr. Alain de Botton (on record). One of my typically long-winded essays appears, this time on the topic of Mr. Satie, who, himself, was never long-winded.

In glorious revelry over this release, I will include, over the next few days, a few pieces that I wrote that did not make the final publication: some short, fragmentary extrapolations of Bohemia’s appearances in pop lyrics and on rock records. Why, though, you might ask, would I publish here, articles deemed insufficiently good for proper paper release? Well, they have been sitting at the back of a drawer for several months now and the study is really beginning to stink.

Named after keyboardist, Mr. Andrew Chilton’s favourite Cathedral city, Coventry is the fourth in a long line of three Vichy Government records.

With The King of Limbs, the done thing was to live-blog one’s first experience of the record. I was on holiday at the time and hardly in any position to live-anything. Even if it were possible, I would have been immediately too late: it had been live-blogged to death. Luckily, I had Coventry secreted in my luggage when I arrived home; I hadn’t listened to it yet and, well I imagine, neither had anybody else. I live-blogged it instantly, by which I mean I mumbled things to the cat as we wandered through the empty house, listening to the record quite loudly. The cat was kind enough to record everything as soon as she returned.

Turn On, Tune In, Vote Mugabe
“Their cocks are glistening with pre-cum as they line us up against a wall”… “As the youthful idiots go marching through the streets, Lenin looks down from his balcony and nods”… vile homophobic screed directed at The Kremlin gay bar in Belfast, with its fiberglass statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the balcony over the door. Disgraceful propaganda for notorious homophobe Robert Mugabe.

Flytipping
“Flytipping deserves a quiet night.” Like the titular activity, the songwriting here consists of dumping dated odds and sods on an otherwise beautiful setting, that is pop cultural references on what appears to be the backing of Don’t Stop by Fleetwood Mac.

The Nudes of Modigliani
Mr. Manners is at his best when dissecting the ways in which men look at women: The Male Gaze from Whores in Taxis. This is also good.

The Kids in North Korea
Orientalism, based on the premise that the experiences of the children of North Korea will somehow be different to those of us in the West. Lazy exoticism; Edward Said furious! Has music not progressed since Claude Debussy?

Siberia
Using the same conceit as Mr. Momus’ A Lapdog, Mr. Manners uses exile to tundra as a metaphor for absence. “Siberia is wherever your face and voice are not” Your arse?

All the Young Dudes
Having heard this one too many times at a Christmas party, I am now immune to its charms. Now, Arthur, stop that! Stop scratching the settee! Bad cat.

St. Jamie of Islington
Mr. Manner’s teetering conversion to Catholicism has been en point and on the edge for years now. Like many of the finest Catholics, though, it is purely aesthetic.

Oranges are the Only Fruit
An imaginary present in which post-modernism prevails and homogeneity is the only option. The only heterodoxy permissible is in sexuality, which, of course, results in Ms. Winterson being heterosexual herself, which means that she never writes Orange are not the Only Fruit and Mr. Manners is never inspired to write the song.

I’m Jack
Unusually polished production for The Vichy Government. Arthur, stop it. Stop it. Now stop.

The Man Delusion
No! Bad cat. Fine! Get out. Get out. Through the door. Go on. Go on then!

Iberia
Bloody thing. I don’t know why I put up with you, really I don’t. Why, if you were only four feet taller, I’d… Why, I’d… Get out! And don’t come back! O, a clarinet?

We are Now at War with Germany
No record.

Master Flea was, of course, the full-length novel of German Romanticism that my erstwhile collaborator, Mr. Martin White of the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra, had spoken of in great detail through a series of e-mails months before. So great was the detail, in fact, that no clarification was required with the package. He hoped that we might work together on converting the work into a musical. Unfortunately, when the book arrived, I had forgotten all about this. Frankly, I thought I had acquired yet another secret admirer with an inclination to communicate through gruesome fairytales.

Master Flea, our concert musical in one act, was debuted on Monday, February 21st 2011, in the Leicester Square Theatre, which is not a boxing arena in the East Midlands. It starred (and I truly mean starred) Chris Gilvan-Cartwright, as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Colin Hoult as Theodor Hippel, Thom Tuck as Eduard Hitzig, Catharine Rogers as Julia Marc, Martin White as Johannes Kreisler, and Jeremy Limb as Police Chief Kamptz. Music was provided by the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra and Mr. Foz Foster (from favourites of my adolescence, David Devant & his Spirit Wife ). And appreciative noises were mostly provided by the audience, except for the lovely Ms. Aislinn Clarke, who was trying to capture the performance for posterity, and I, who was largely hyperventilating.

Colin Hoult & MFMO – If I Could Step Inside Your Mind

Most of the songs have been in differing states of completion for years. Since the novel arrived, I had been scribbling lyrical ideas under my desk in work or sneaking to the bathroom in order to check the spelling of character names. Writing lyrics as I read the book – actually, an epic, scholarly work of seven incomprehensible adventures – meant that we ended with much more material than anyone would care to hear. It was too much even for the first, two-and-a-half-hour-long draft that we intended to press into the mouth of Cameron Mackintosh. The script that was used, in the end, was written over three afternoons a week or so before the first performance. The cast managed two rehearsals, I believe. It was slightly shorter than two-and-a-half-hours. Cameron MacIntosh didn’t show. And thank goodness for that; it sold out and he would just have proved a fire hazard.

Cat Rogers & MFMO – I Sleep Amongst The Tall, Tall Flowers

The under-rehearsed nature of the performance was perfectly suited to the work. Unable to understand Hoffmann’s tale ourselves, Mr. White and I agreed that it was best to present the story of how the author attempted to salvage his banned and censored novel as a play. However, if anyone can actually explain to us what happens at the end of Master Flea, we would be eternally grateful.

Mr. Hoffmann wrote the book in 1821, the year before he died. It was to be serialised in a newspaper, but, unfortunately, when sending the first part to his publisher, he forgot to keep a copy for himself. When he wrote the second part, he could barely remember the names of the characters and began to get himself a little confused. By the time he submitted the second section, he had already insulted the Chief of Police, his boss, in a vicious satire and was beginning to fall ill. The conclusion, then, was written in a fug of bodily breakdown and mental turmoil, mostly in the hallucinations of fever, I like to think; in all, not the sort of cohesive narrative that allows one to tell a story through music. Of course, I didn’t know the story was quite so perplexing until I’d reached the second chapter, by which point I had already written forty-five sets of lyrics.

Monday, February 21st 2011 was, also, incidentally, closing night. This draft of the script has been sent to our publisher and I am beginning to feel a little ill. I think I remember most of it though and a Belfast production is sure to come together with as little hands-on effort from me as was this wonderful London show.

I extend my thanks to everybody involved. And thank G-d that Mr. White and I didn’t have to play and perform the whole thing by ourselves.

In one afternoon, it was agreed that we would write and record as many one minute films as we could possibly. In the end, though, we wrote and recorded slightly fewer than we could possibly; I attribute this to very interesting radio documentary about the Derry Walls that came on in Mr. Costello’s car.

If I recall correctly, three films were recorded in all. Maybe four even. And, of course, all the busy contributors missed the submission deadline. However, they will all appear, at weekly intervals, on www.talesofthe.com and things started, at the end of January, with A Serious Matter, a piece starring the excellent Mr. Andrew Croskery and my own Mr. Costello. More will follow.

This week, they posted the following: Robbery for a Minute. In it, one can see m’colleague, Mr. Costello, and myself acting roles not dissimilar to our own characters. It is a veritable cinema of verite. This is something Mr. Costello has threatened to do at every rehearsal since we first played music together at the ages of 15.

Thanks must be extended to Mr. Jim McMorro who edited the whole show. I don’t pretend to know what the music is, but it certainly makes the film exciting, if not listenable.