One More Time

Cricket legend and symbol of struggle against sports apartheid D'Oliveira dies

2011-11-19T11:51:00.002Z

Basil D’Oliveira, the England cricket great and worldwide symbol of the fight against sporting apartheid, has died at the age of 80.
D'Oliveira's selection for England in 1968 led to South Africa’s sporting isolation after the racist regime refused to accept his presence in the squad due to tour the country that year.

D’Oliveira, known affectionately as Dolly, had been chosen to play for England after leaving his native South Africa in 1960. But South African Prime Minister BJ Voster told the English cricket authorities he would not be allowed to play.

The subsequent cancellation of the tour was a watershed in the sporting boycott of South Africa and led to an intensification of the campaign to isolate the apartheid regime. No official team from any country subsequently toured South Africa until apartheid was abolished, following Nelson Mandela's release from prison in 1990.

Tributes to D’Oliveira began pouring in on news of his death.
Cricket South Africa chief executive Gerald Majola said: “He was a man of true dignity and a wonderful role model as somebody who overcame the most extreme prejudices and circumstances to take his rightful place on the world stage.
"The circumstances surrounding his being prevented from touring the country of his birth with England in 1968 led directly to the intensification of opposition to apartheid around the world and contributed materially to the sports boycott that turned out to be an Achilles’ heel of the apartheid government.
“Throughout this shameful period in South Africa’s sporting history, Basil displayed a human dignity that earned him worldwide respect and admiration."
In fact, the D’Oliveira affair was not as clear cut as subsequent history as made it appear.
The MCC initially buckled under pressure from South African cricket officials and decided not to pick D’Oliveira for inclusion in the 1968 tour. The pretext used was that his style of bowling would not be suited to his native country.
However, the public outcry over the decision not to include him in the squad led to the MCC relenting and calling him up to replace Warwickshire’s Tom Cartwright when he was ruled out due to injury.
D’Oliveira (pictured above) was born in Cape Town in 1931 and as a child quickly began to display a phenomenal talent for cricket. However, under South Africa’s apartheid laws he was classed as "coloured" and barred from playing first class cricket.
He went on to captain South Africa’s national non-white cricket team and played football for the non-white national side, but with the help of the commentator John Arlott and the journalist John Kay Dolly emigrated to England where he joined the Central Lancashire League team of Middleton.
The move proved an eye opener for D’Oliveira, who was surprised to see white people doing menial, labouring work and waiting on him in restaurants.
He joined Worcestershire in 1964 and became a British citizen. Two years later he was selected for England as an all-rounder, and in 1967 was one of Wisden’s cricketers of the year.
Mr Majola said: “The fact that he could have a Test career batting average of 40 in 44 Tests and an economy rate of less than two with the ball on his way to 47 wickets was remarkable considering he was past his prime when he made his debut for England in his mid-30s.
“One can only imagine what he might have achieved had he made his debut as he should have done at the age of 20 on South Africa’s tour of England in 1951.
“I would like to pay tribute also to all those people in England, notably John Arlott, one of the greatest cricket radio commentators of all time, for the roles they played in making it possible for Basil to achieve his dream of playing international cricket for his adopted country."
D’Oliveira played in 44 test matches, scoring 2,484 runs, with five Test centuries and a batting average of 40.06. He took 47 Test wickets.
As well as being an ambassador for a sport free of discrimination he was also a tough competitor.
The night following England’s 2-0 series win over Australia in 1970-71 he took to jabbing his forefinger of every Australian he met, saying: “We stuffed you.”
D’Oliveira was suffering from Parkinson's disease.

Retromania: Can pop survive its obsession with the past?

2011-06-10T15:01:00.001+01:00

Ever since Elvis Presley picked up his guitar in 1954 to holler That's All Right, Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup's rhythm and blues hit from 1946, rock and roll has looked backwards to go forwards.
The Hamburg-era Beatles belted out standards such as Roll Over Beethoven and Dizzy, Miss Lizzy. The young Rolling Stones looked to the Delta bluesmen of the 40s and 50s. Musicians have always mined the past for inspiration.
But what happens when the seam is worked out? When every style and genre has been revisited, reworked and mashed-up? When every trend and teen tribe has been repackaged?
In his book Retromania, Simon Reynolds, one of our most thoughtful music writers, poses a stark question for anyone who cares about the future of pop: Has it become so obsessed with its own past that originality and invention are now beyond its reach?

The Beatels, by Linda McCartney

The paradox of the current mania for borrowing, sampling and recreating rock's rich tapestry, is that the principle of 'be here now' – the essence of pop – has become 'be here then'.
And if that's the case, if today's thrill-seeking teenagers are too busy looking back to music's glory days – whether it's the sixties, seventies or eighties – to create something original, what will they have to be nostalgic about tomorrow?
Reynolds makes the observation that the enduring appeal of the sixties is that it was a period without any wholesale revival of musical styles from previous eras.
The sixties retains a freshness for subsequent generations precisely because its beat boom, soul, psychedelia, funk and early reggae burst onto the scene as dizzyingly new, not rehashed and rediscovered.
Worse still, Reynolds points out, each generation since the one which witnessed the explosion of punk between 1975 and 1978 has laboured under the nagging feeling they missed the last decade that really mattered.
Today's plundering of history goes beyond mere nostalgia. We have artists such as Van Morrison, Belle & Sebastian and, this year, stadium rockers Rush, staging concerts to perform one of their classic albums in its entirety. It is rare to attend a festival without finding a legendary act headlining the bill. And only last month (May 16) Kate Bush released Director's Cut, an album in which she reworks some of her own songs from 20 years ago.
We are witnessing what Reynolds and others have called the 'museum-ification' of rock.
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, is more than just an exploration of the way rock's past has become an obsession.
It is also a devastating critique of the way music is now consumed and how the digital technology by which it is delivered mitigates against anything but the most superficial appreciation.
When the choice is seemingly endless, when a mere flick of an MP3 player can skip over 'dull' tracks – and even the 'boring' bits within tracks – who now truly immerses themselves in an album. How can one be lost in music when faced with the nagging thought that there's always something else to listen to?
Boundless choice also threatens to stifle the creative act itself.
Songwriters were frequently motivated by the obsessive desire to create the music they wanted to hear. Scarcity was the mother of invention. But why go to that effort when the exact sound you want is already on iTunes, Spotify or YouTube, waiting to be sampled?

It takes a brave writer to say there's nothing new under the sun. Who knows what is even now bubbling under the surface, while ageing hippies and balding punks, like myself, moan at the lack of originality?
Thankfully Reynolds hints at two possible ways out of the self-referential maze of retromania.
Punk, he points out, only became a truly revolutionary movement – and watch BBC's current reruns of pre-punk Top of the Pops from 1976 if you doubt its impact – when, in its passage to the UK from the US, "non-musical catalysts from the world of politics, art theory and avant-garde fashion entered the picture". Before arriving in London and Manchester it had simply harked back to the sound of early sixties garage bands.
The politics of 1970s racism, squatting, industrial turbulence and cultural boredom – married to the Situationist ideas of the Sex Pistols' and Clash's Svengalis Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, and the visual creativity of fashion designer Vivenne Westwood and graphic artist Jamie Reed – were midwives to the moment.
Today's troubled times may yet provide the spark to light a new type of pop.
There is also the prospect that pop's renewal will come from outside the West – "from regions of the globe where culture is less exhausted in both the 'used up' and 'tired' senses."
Joe Strummer, who helped blaze punk's trail, but also revered rock and roll history, maintained that the future is unwritten. Reynolds ends his book with the invocation: "I still believe the future is out there".
It's for tomorrow's crop of musicians and songwriters to repay their faith.
* Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, by Simon Reynolds, published by Faber and Faber, priced £17.99.
(This review first appeared in The Sunday Telegraph's Seven magazine)

Goodbye Poly Styrene

2011-04-27T14:01:00.003+01:00

Why do I feel so bereft at the death of Poly Styrene - who was, until this week's obituaries, one of punk's great unsung heroes?
Was it because, as a mixed race, intelligent and bolshie young woman she embodied some of the movement's best features?

Funny, sassy and gutsy: Poly Styrene

Was it because songs like Identity, Germ Free Adolescents and Oh Bondage, Up Yours! were a sensitive and perceptive critique of consumerism in the plastic age, providing the perfect accompaniment to the righteous, fulminating anger of The Clash and the Pistols?
Or was it because she looked like the kind of girls I was at school with? Funny, sassy, gutsy.
All that, of course - and more.
Because she follows Joe Strummer, Johnny Ramone, Ari Up and Malcolm McLaren to the grave.
Because those who carried the energy, hope and anger of my teenager years are dying early, while around us the ambassadors of cultural mediocrity continue to prosper.
Because too many members of a generation are dying early. A generation who, between 1975 and 1979, reinvented not only music, but fashion, design and the art of agitprop and, in so doing, changed the attitude of thousands to society, racism and the politics of personal responsibility.

X-Ray Spex at the Victoria Park carnival (Andy Wilson)

In April 1978, when me and 80,000 other people marched into Victoria Park in East London for the Rock Against carnival to reject the National Front and create multiculturalism on the ground, Poly was there with her band X-Ray Spex, along with The Clash, the Tom Robinson Band and Steel Pulse.
She was there for the carnival's 30th anniversary celebrations in 2008.
That said it all.
Some time before her death Poly said: "Punk attitude lives on because of the spirit of fearlessnes to try and change things for the better."
So long Poly. And thanks.

X-Ray Spex: The debut album

Bad vibrations for iconic Ulster record shop

2011-04-19T12:04:00.001+01:00

Bitter irony that on Britain's Record Store Day came the news that one legendary outlet may not go the distance.
Good Vibrations record shop in Belfast was an oasis of Catholic and Protestant unity during the worst years of the Troubles, when Ulster's punks came together across the religious divide to share its owner Terri Hooley's love of exciting new sounds.

Terri Hooley (Belfast Telegraph)

It was Hooley who introduced the late BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel to a thrilling new single by a little known local band - Teenage Kicks, by the Undertones.
Peel declared the record his all-time favourite and a line from the song is engraved on his tombstone.
But Hooley doubts whether he'll be able to keep the shop open much longer in the face of cheap dowloads and the recession.
"Business is so bad," he told The Independent last Saturday.
Hooley was a legend during his own opening times. He smoked with Bob Marley, punched John Lennon at a party for his pro-IRA comments and criticised Bob Dylan to his face for not campaigning against the Vietnam War, provoking the response: "Why don't you just eff off."

The Undertones

The Independent's veteran Ireland Correspondent, David McKittrick quotes Hooley's reflections on the vital role his shop played during the late 70s and early 80s, when, amongst other things, he was threatened by Loyalist paramilitaries for protection money.
"If anywhere in the world needed punk, it was Belfast - punk in Belfast was a uniting force," said Hooley. "It was the first time since the Troubles began that Protestant and Catholic kids could come together in the city centre and mix.
"And it didn't matter if your hair was pink or orange or green - as long as you were a punk, it was a unifying force."

London '77: Motor City boy meets the Last Gang

2011-04-14T15:30:00.001+01:00

I recently stumbled across this picture from the archives, a grainy black and white shot of The Clash posing alongside Rob Tyner of MC5 during the singer's visit to London in 1977.

Kicking out the jams in 1977

As an image of the baton being handed from one generation to the next it's a bit like finding a photograph of an ageing Karl Marx in a London coffee house with a young Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, or Elvis Presley sharing a beer with John Lennon in a pub on the Liverpool dockside - except this historic meeting actually happened.
Where MC5 channelled the politics of the US counterculture, the anti-Vietnam war generation and the black power movement into a blast of sonic rage, The Clash turned their anger at the racism, petty repression and creative ennui of Britain during the mid-seventies into an aural assault.
During his visit, when he also met a couple of the Sex Pistols, Tyner astutely told the NME: "We went through our heavy political period in the late 60s and 70s. Britain is on a serious No Future trajectory, and on that level, Rotten is dead on....The music of groups like the Pistols and the Clash draw an energetic electricity from the political environment."

Motorcity is burning

Both bands had their svengali-like mentor - White Panther Party founder John Sinclair for MC5, Bernie Rhodes, veteran of the events of '68, for The Clash - to provide ideological grounding and political inspiration.
But their respective front-men were no blank sheets either.
Tyner, who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1991, was plugged into Detroit's hipster and left-wing scene, while Joe Strummer was a veteran of the west London squatting movement and had even had a brief spell selling the Morning Star, the Communist Party daily paper, outside South Wales pitheads.
Inspiring then to see the two bands briefly come together during the eye of the UK's punk storm.

Marxist NUS leadership candidate Mark Bergfeld making waves ahead of election

2011-04-11T18:13:00.002+01:00

Britain's five million students will have a new leader this week, when delegates pick a replacement for the outgoing president Aaron Porter at the NUS's annual conference in Gateshead.

Mark Bergfeld: The next NUS president?

Porter quit unexpectedly earleir this year, unable to cope with the mass movement unleashed by the Government's imposition of a huge hike in tuition fees and the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance.
Among the candidates standing for the post is Mark Bergfeld, an activist who hopes to capitalise on the anger and militancy of the thousands of students who have taken part in occupations, street demonstrations and sit-ins over the past six months.
Their action, beginning with the seige of Millbank tower last November, kick-started the mass opposition to the coalition's austerity measures and he may be the beneficiary of the new mood.
My profile of Bergfeld, published on http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ has prompted much discussion on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, and not all of it as one might imagine. While some leftists have sneered at the piece others have welcomed the publicity, albeit from an unexpected source. Read the original here.

'You can't have a revolution without songs'

2011-03-31T21:22:00.002+01:00

A review of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, by Dorian Lynskey

If this majestic new history achieves one thing it will be to nail the myth that protest songs not only began, but ended with We Shall Overcome - that timeworn sing-a-long beloved of sixties marches and sit-ins.
So panoramic is the sweep of Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, that it opens with Strange Fruit, Billy Holiday’s haunting cry of despair and revulsion at the southern lynchings of the 1930s, and closes with American Idiot, Green Day’s satire on George W Bush’s USA.

Lady sings the blues

In the opening pages Lynskey neatly explains why Holiday’s showstopper – audiences were left stunned, speechless and sometimes moved to violent reaction by its performance – heralded a new type of protest song.
Before Strange Fruit, written by a Jewish American communist and introduced to Holiday by a nightclub impresario, protest songs were musically rudimentary and served principally as a rallying call for a particular struggle, often industrial. With Strange Fruit ‘pop’ embraced politics and from then on a song’s artistry served to reinforce its message.
The book’s 33 chapters – 33 being the number of turns or ‘revolutions’ per minute of a long playing vinyl record – are packed with anecdote and detail, vividly capturing the era in which the songs were written and performed.
Thus Lynskey’s account of what led Pete Seeger to rework the slave spiritual We Shall Overcome and Nina Simone to pour her anger at the bombing and murder of four little girls at a black church in Alabama into the searing Mississippi Goddam', leads to an examination of the tensions, ideals and confrontations of the civil rights movement.
The book is profoundly moving in its evocation of the sheer importance of singing to the morale of the young black and white activists who faced down police batons, dogs and the Ku Klux Klan in the struggle for civil rights. “The freedom songs are the soul of the movement,” wrote Dr Martin Luther King.

Nina Simone: 'Goddam'

Similarly the journey from Country Joe McDonald’s I-Feel-Like-I’m-fixing-To-Die-Rag to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Ohio, reflects the evolution of the Counterculture and anti-Vietnam War generation from impassioned and darkly humorous protest to visceral rage.
Lest anyone should think protest songs died out when the last US GI left Saigon, Lynskey hails The Clash - and other punk bands whose anger railed at the complacency and prejudice of 70s Britain in particular - as being in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in their righteous examination of an unjust society.
The Clash’s singer Joe Strummer had earlier in his career adopted the stage name Woody in homage to the radical American troubadour and his own lyrics read like newspaper dispatches from the front line of a fractured society.
Strummer’s acknowledgement - cited by Lynskey - that he lacked solutions to the world’s problems, coupled with his insistence The Clash continually question what songs should mean and what the band should stand for, encapsulates both the burden of the protest singer and his historic mission.
For those who bemoan the death of commitment and Sartrean engagement by musicians in the world around them, 33 Revolution’s later chapters emphasise the contribution of reggae, rap and grunge to the playlist of riot and revolt.
In the late Nineties, Rage Against The Machine provided a soundtrack for the anti-capitalism protests, while the work of M.I.A - the Anglo-Sri Lankan rapper Maya Arulpragasam - points to a hybrid of musical and political cultures that will surely mirror the global melting pot of the 21st century.

MIA: The future of protest song?

Just as the devil has the best tunes, it appears that those who rail at authority, rather than those who defend it, still tend to make a better pop record.
But Lynskey does not shy away from addressing the barbs usually aimed at protest songs: that not only do they preach to the converted, but they are a futile gesture in the face of overwhelming forces.
“To create a successful protest song in the twenty-first century is a daunting challenge,” he writes. “But the alternative, for any musician with strong political convictions, is paralysis and gloom.”
Whether the protest song has reached its run out groove is for each new generation to decide. In our new age of austerity, protest and rebellion that seems unlikely.
After all, they also sang in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
* 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, by Dorian Lynskey, is published by Faber and Faber. (This review first appeared in The Sunday Telegraph's Seven magazine.)

Camden gallery sheds new light on Bob Marley and the golden age of reggae

2011-03-19T13:34:00.002Z

During 1975 and 1976 photo-journalist Kim Gottlieb-Walker and her husband Jeff Walker, the head of publicity at Island Records, enjoyed unique access to Bob Marley and other reggae greats.
The result was an unparallelled collection of photographs soon to be displayed at the Proud Gallery, in Camden, North London.
During several trips to Jamaica and a series of meetings in Los Angeles, Gottlieb-Walker shot many of the artists whose sounds defined what came to be known as the 'golden age' of roots reggae.

Gottlieb-Walker's Marley

As well as Marley himself, her subjects included Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, Toots Hibbert, Burning Spear and Lee “Scratch” Perry.
Incidentally, the Proud Gallery is housed in Camden Market, close to the building where The Clash - great reggae fans themselves - had their first rehearsal studios, affectionately named by their guitarist Mick Jones as 'Rehearsals Rehearsals'.
The exhibition Bob Marley and The Golden Age of Reggae, which accompanies a book of the same name, is at Proud Camden, from April 7 to May 15. For further details see here.

Still angry after all these years: The Clash's call to arms 34-years-on

2011-03-18T09:13:00.002Z

Caught up with his band mate Paul Simenon in the fury of the Notting Hill Riots of '76 , and failing miserably to set a car alight, Joe Strummer did the one thing he could do - and do well.
He wrote a song about it.
The result was The Clash's debut single, White Riot, released on March 18, 1977, seven months after that Bank Holiday uprising and 34-years-ago today.

Notting Hill '76: In the shadow of the Westway

The song was an excoriating, 100mph call to arms for the nascent punk movement. But over the years it has suffered from wilful misinterpretation.

A small number in the band's audience took the song to be an incitement to race hate, but The Clash's public commitment to anti-racism and their love and support of black music prevented that reading gaining wider currency.
Indeed Strummer's intention was clear enough to anyone who cared to open their eyes and look around them.
Black kids, for years on the receiving end of harassment from the police and the courts, had shown
on that hot August day in west London that they had had enough.

Confrontation: Notting Hill '76

Strummer's suggestion was that disaffected working class white kids should - and would - follow their example.
With its police siren opening and slogan heavy lyrics ("Black man gotta lotta problems/But they don't mind throwing a brick/White people go to school/Where they teach you to be thick", "All the power's in the hands/Of the people rich enough to buy it/While we walk the streets/Too chicken to even try it") White Riot was crude, angry and direct.
But like a banner on a march or a placard at a sit-in, the slogans were written to grab the listener by the scruff of the neck and force them to engage deeper in the movement's aims and ideals.
1789 had "Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite". 1917 has "All Power to the Soviets" and "Peace, Bread and Land".
Well, 1977's cris de coeur - which gave the constructive wing of punk its compass and loadstone for the days ahead - was White Riot's barked questioning: "Are you going backwards or are you going forwards?/Are you taking orders or are you taking over?"

White Riot: The single cover sleeve

Today, the legacy of 'Do It Yourself ' embodied by Strummer and punk continues to bear fruit. Strummerville, a London-based charity set up in his name, works to provide help and encouragement to young bands with something to say, but lacking the means to do it.

Coke cuts links with father of Martine murder suspect after boycott

2011-03-16T16:29:00.000Z

Coca-Cola has severed its ties with the father of the man wanted for the murder of Norwegian student Martine Magnussen.
The announcement follows a boycott of Coca-Cola's products by friends and supporters of Miss Magnussen's family, which attracted the backing of more than 53,000 people on Facebook.

Murdered: Martine Magnussen

Coca-Cola's UK spokeswoman told me: "We had discussions with the Boards of our bottling partners and Shaher Abdulhak agreed to divest his interests in our bottling operations in Egypt and Libya, and relinquish his Board seat on our Egypt bottler. He is in the process of divesting his financial interests in our Yemen bottler.
"Those discussions with the Boards of our bottling partners were taking place well before the boycott."
She added: "We have complete sympathy for the Vik Magnussen family and hope the investigating authorities can solve the crime as quickly as possible."
Coca-Cola are playing down any link between the boycott and the pressure they exerted on Mr Abdulhak Snr to cut his links with the firm.
It seems clear, however, that the US multi-national was embarassed by his continuing involvement in their Yemeni, Egyptian and Lybian operations.
Coca-Cola said: "Our discussions with the campaign group helped bring new urgency to the process."
One of the boycott's organisers, Sturla Ellingvåg, of the Justice for Martine Foundation, welcomed the move, saying: “We are naturally very happy that Coca Cola has addressed this issue at the very top of their international organisation, and reached such a just conclusion. We are full of praise for the way they have acted.”

Wanted: Farouk Abdulhak

Mr Abdulhak insists he has done all he can to persuade his son Farouk to hand himself over to the British authorities to face trial for Miss Magnussen's murder. But he denies sheltering his son at the family home in the Yemeni capital Sana'a.
I have written extensively on the quest for justice by Miss Magnussen's family's, both on this blog and for The Sunday Telegraph.

Martine Coke boycott: The real thing?

2011-03-07T14:20:00.000Z

The boycott of Coca-Cola by supporters of murdered Norwegian student Martine Magnussen, which I mentioned in one of my recent blogs, has attracted tens of thousands of supporters.
Launched for a two week period from March 1, through Facebook, it has so far won the backing of more than 50,000 people and the numbers are growing all the time.

Murdered: Martine Magnussen

The Justice for Martine foundation called the boycott in protest at the US multinational's refusal to cut its ties with a businessman accused of sheltering Miss Magnussen's killer.
Miss Magnussen's family and friends claim that Yemeni tycoon Shaher Abdulhak has been sheltering his son Farouk, who fled Britain shortly after her rape and murder in London, in March 2008, and is now wanted by Scotland Yard in connection with the killing.
Mr Abdulhak Snr firmly denies the claims and says he has been trying to persuade his son to return to Britain to face trial.

Wanted: Farouk Abdulhak

The US multinational's position is that, essentially, the case has nothing to do with them.
A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola said: "Our sympathies are with the young woman's family and friends. This is a matter for international and local police authorities to prioritize, investigate and resolve."
Naturally a few thousand people refusing to buy its products is not going to cause much pain to Coca-Cola's deep pockets, but the boycott is an intriguing example of consumer protest around a specific cause.
If nothing else is will have brought Miss Magnussen's case, and the controversy surrounding it, to the attention of a good number of previously ignorant Coke drinkers.

It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe

2011-03-04T17:58:00.000Z

So farewell Suze Rotolo. The girl photographed cuddling up to Bob Dylan as they walked through a snowy Greenwich Village has died of lung cancer aged 67.
To many fans she was just the singer's girlfriend, pictured in 1963 on the cover of his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.
But of course Rotolo had a life of her own. And what a life it was.

Rotolo, on that album cover . . .

The daughter of working class Italo-American communists, who herself became active in New York's radical scene from an early age, Rotolo can be credited with opening Dylan's eyes to the civil rights movement and tuning him to the growing progressive mood of the era.
Her mother, Mary, was an editor and columnist for the American edition of L'Unita, the communist daily founded by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Her father, Gioachino 'Pete' Rotolo, was an illustrator, printer and union organiser.
Pete died of a heart attack in 1958, leaving Mary to bring up Susan (she later shortened it to Suze) and her older sister Carla. Folk music was the ever-present soundtrack of their home in Jackson Heights, Queens, and Suze later wrote they were "raised on Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Pete Seeger".
As a teenager Rotolo immersed herself in the counter-cultural life of Washington Square Park and, the year her father died, joined 100,000 other students marching against segregation in a protest led by the singer Harry Belafonte.
After graduating from high school she found work at the New York office of the Congress for Racial Equality, dropping in and out of experimental theatres and folk clubs in the evenings. It was at Gerde's Folk City, in the summer of 1961, that she first saw Dylan and, after meeting him a few weeks later, the pair became an item.
He was clearly smitten. "Right from the start I couldn't take my eyes of her," he wrote of their first meeting. "She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden-haired, full-blood Italian."

Suze and Bob: "I couldn't take my eyes off her . . . "

Rotolo became his muse, inspiring early songs such as One Too Many Mornings, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right and Boots of Spanish Leather.
For her part she introduced him to the work of Cezanne, Kandinsky and Picasso, along with the writings of Bertold Brecht and Arthur Rimbaud.
She also told him the story of a 14-year-old African-American boy murdered after simply appearing to flirt with a white woman in Mississippi, in 1955. The story inspired The Ballad of Emmett Till, one of Dylan's most gut-wrenching cries against injustice and racist prejudice.

Down in Mississippi no so long ago: Emmett Till

Dylan told his biographer Robert Sheldon: "She'll tell you how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her: 'Is this right?' Because her father and mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was."

Their relationship began to break down after three years and in fact by the time Don Hunstein took the Freewheelin' photograph, he was already becoming involved with Joan Baez, his fellow singer from the folk scene.
Rotolo maintained her progressive faith over the years. She defied the US government's ban on travelling to Cuba when she and a group of students met Che Guevara in 1964. She became a film maker with the United Nations and in 2004 joined Billionaires for Bush, a satirical street-theatre group.
Speaking of those early songs of Dylan's, which would have turned out very differently without her, she said: "From the perspective of an older person looking back, you enjoy them, but also think of them as the pain of youth, the loneliness and struggle that youth is, or can be."

Call for boycott of Coke over Martine case

2011-02-24T13:17:00.000Z

Campaigners are calling for a boycott of Coca-Cola in protest at the US multinational's refusal to cut its ties with a businessman accused of sheltering the killer of Norwegian student Martine Magnussen.
Miss Magnussen's family and friends accuse Yemeni tycoon Shaher Abdulhak of sheltering his son Farouk, who fled Britain shortly after her rape and murder in March 2008 and is now wanted by Scotland Yard in connection with the killing.

Martine Magnussen

The boycott, which has already attracted nearly 28,000 pledges of support on a Facebook group, comes despite repeated denials by Mr Abdulhak Snr that he either helped his son flee Britain or that he is hiding him at the family home in Sana'a, the Yemeni capital.
Campaigners for the Norwegian-based Justice For Martine Foundation asked Coca-Cola to cut its ties with Mr Abdulhak, who has a licence to manufacture and distribute the company's products in Yemen, Libya and Egypt. Their call was backed by a number of Norwegian MPs.
However, Coca-Cola refused to revoke Mr Abdulhak's licence - prompting the launch of the two-week boycott from March 1.
A spokesman for Justice for Martine said: "The foundation hopes that both individuals, corporations and public agencies will support the case and avoid buying Coca-Cola products during this period."
The US firm's stance is in contrast to steps taken by the German auto giant Daimler, who recently announced it was distancing itself from Mr Abdulhak, one of the wealthiest men in Yemen.
In a letter to the foundation it revealed it had "terminated the distributions rights" for one of Mr Abdulhak's firms, United Engineering & Automobile Co.

Farouk Abdulhak's father Shaher

Daimler also promised to further investigate claims about Mr Abdulhak's role.
Mr Abdulhak denies he has in any way helped his son to escape justice, adding: "I've made it very clear to my son that he should assist the authorities in any way he possibly can, if indeed he can."
A spokesman for Mr Abdulhak added that since 2008 he has publicly supported the Metropolitan Police's investigation into Miss Magnussen's murder and has also been active in using "both diplomatic and legal channels to resolve the matter in a way that ensures justice for all sides".
A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola said: "Our sympathies are with the young woman's family and friends. This is a matter for international and local police authorities to prioritize, investigate and resolve."
The row follows the publication of a book on the murder of Miss Magnussen by Norwegian journalist Marianne Vikas (see my previous post).
Among the claims in the book, Martine: The Hunt for Justice, is that after her body was discovered half-buried in rubble in the basement of Farouk Abdulhak's flat in central London, police searching his apartment found a top belonging to 23-year-old Miss Magnussen.

Martine murder suspect's cryptic admission

2011-02-19T12:43:00.000Z

A new book about the unsolved rape and murder of Martine Magnussen in London in 2008, claims that the man wanted for the killing admitted to a friend that he was involved in her death.
According to the book's author, Norwegian journalist Marianne Vikas, shortly after Miss Magnussen's death Farouk Abdulhak told the friend that a woman had died at his central London flat.

Martine Vik Magnussen

According to Vikas, Abdulhak told the friend in a telephone call made shortly before he fled Britain: "I have got into a terrible situation. A woman has died at my flat."
He then added cryptically: "You know what they say in films? Dead bodies are heavy."
On hearing a few days later that Miss Magnussen's body had been found half-buried under rubble in the basement of Abdulhak's flat in Great Portland Street, the friend is understood to have taken his words to be a clear reference to her death.
The startling claim is the first reported admission by Abdulhak that he had some involvement in Miss Magnussen's fate.
The friend, who is understood to have been a classmate of both Martine and Abdulhak at Regent's Park College, where the pair studied, reported the conversation to Scotland Yard detectives investigating her murder.

Farouk Abdulhak

Miss Magnussen, 23, had been raped and strangled after going home with Abdulhak following a night out in Mayfair with friends.
Within hours of her death on 14 March 2008 he had fled Britain, flying first to Cairo and on to his native Yemen.
Abdulhak's father, Shaher, is one of the richest men in the country, running a string of businesses and enjoying close links with the ruling elite.
He was initially suspected of sheltering his son behind the high walls of the family home in the capital, San'a, but has consistently denied this.
Scotland Yard issued an international wanted notice for Abdulhak when discussions between Britain and Yemen to extradite him stalled. There is no extradition agreement between the two countries and so far Abdulhack has refused to return to Britain voluntarily.
It is hoped Mr Abdulhak Snr, whose business interests include oil, tourism, property and the licence to produce Pepsi in Yemen, will pressure his son to return to face trial in London .

Martine, by Marianne Vikas

Vikas's book, Martine - Jakten Pa Rettferdighet, was published by Gyldendal in Norway earlier this month and is not yet available in the UK.
Anyone interested in the attempt by Miss Magnussen's family and friends to have her killer brought to justice should go to the Justice For Martine website.

Ring, ring, it's 7am

2010-09-07T09:21:00.000+01:00

Can there be a more serendipitously poetic iPod shuffle moment than this?

As the 8.16 from Clapham Junction pulls into Victoria Station and discorges its tide of sullen commuters Joe Strummer's radio link to Bob Dylan's Corrine, Corrina segues seamlessly into the Clash's Magnificent Seven, his evocation of alienation under capitalism delivered as thumping 1980 rap:

Ring ring, it's 7am
Move yourself to go again
Cold water in the face
Brings you back to this awful place.

(The Magnificent Seven, from Sandinista! The Clash)

So I join Strummer's the tide of knuckle merchants and bankers too, heading for the barriers, churning out that boogaloo, but this time with a smile on my face.

Strummer's "Dig in, dig in" DJ link on my iPod is to Dylan's version of the 1928 country blues standard and comes from his BBC World Service show, London Calling. This was used in turn by Julien Temple for the soundtrack of his bio-pic of the punk legend, The Future is Unwritten.

Thanks for the start-of-the-week pep talk Joe. Dig in, dig in.

Sweet Marxist Theory

2010-08-07T15:15:00.000+01:00

Today I stumbled across what, many years ago, was one of my favourite songs; Sweetest Girl by Scritti Politti. That led me to refresh my memory about the band's genesis and subsequent history.

A look at Scritti's Wikipedia entry unearthed the following gem:

The name Scritti Politti was chosen as a homage to the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci: The name is generally understood to refer to Gramsci's political writings (although the correct spelling in Italian would have produced "Scritti Politici"). Gartside changed it to 'Scritti Politti' as he thought it sounded more rock and roll, like "Tutti Frutti".

Oh, happy days when such a rationale for a band's name would be greeted with thoughful nodding rather than loud guffaws.

Eighties hit 'Sweet Child O'Mine' hailed greatest guitar riff

2010-02-06T18:01:00.000Z

Music fans have voted Sweet Child O’ Mine, by 1980s rockers Guns ‘N Roses, the song with the greatest guitar riff of all time.

The 1988 hit received 33 per cent of a public vote, with people commenting that the riff was so instantly recognisable you could tell the song ‘from the first three notes’.

Led Zeppelin's rock anthem, Whole Lotta Love, came a close second.

The seventies hit, known to generations of Britons as the theme tune to Top of the Pops, received 28 per cent of the vote, with one respondent describing it as "epitomising what guitar riffs are all about".

Voodoo Chile by Jimmi Hendrix came third in the survey with 24 per cent of the vote. The song was recorded in 1968 and the 15 minute track was Hendrix’s longest ever studio recording.

The survey, commissioned by the DVD label, Indi Vision UK, was carried out to celebrate the release of the documentary, It Might Get Loud, on DVD and Blu-ray.

Directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), the film is a celebration of the electric guitar, bringing together three generations of rock royalty – Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, The Edge of U2 and Jack White, of the White Stripes – to discuss their musical journeys and their life-long love affair with the instrument.

The White Stripe’s Seven Nation Army was fourth in the poll, with 13 per cent of those questioned judging it to contain the best guitar riff ever.

Fans were also asked which decade produced the best music. Leading the pack was the 70s, with 36 per cent of the vote, followed by the 60s and 80s. Limping along in final place were the noughties, which barely 10 per cent of those questioned thought had produced the best music.

Rasta Doc

2009-12-02T09:10:00.000Z

In my last post I mentioned the People's Festival, held annually in Wilmington, Delaware, to celebrate Bob Marley's connection with the town.

One of the acts on the bill last June, was Johnny T, known as Rasta Doc and described on the festival's website as "a talented orthopedic surgeon turned Bob Marley tribute performer".

Johnny T

I've not seen or heard Johnny perform, but somehow I can't help thinking that the world needs his skill as an orthopedic surgeon more than it needs his talent as a tribute act.

Perhaps he successfully combines the two.

Bob Marley: By The Sweat Of His Brow

2009-12-01T15:38:00.000Z

Perhaps only the most devoted reggae aficionado will know this, but in 1966 Bob Marley dropped out of the Jamaican music scene for a year and - despite already having a number one hit under his belt with Simmer Down - went to work at the Chrysler car plant in Wilmington, Delaware.

In an intriguing documentary on BBC Radio 4, on Saturday, December 5, Jonathan Charles tells the story of Marley's Chrysler Year, during which he took a job driving a forklift truck on the night shift.

The experience fed his already highly developed empathy for the wretched and downtrodden of the earth, as well as inspiring his 1976 song Night Shift:

"The sun shall not smite I by day/Nor the moon by night, no . . . Working on a forklift/In the night shift/Working on a night shift/With a forklift"

In a seperate piece for the Delaware News Journal Robin Brown traced the story of Marley's association with the city of Wilmington, where each year they stage a festival celebrating the great visionary's music.

I Fought The Law . . with six strings and a plectrum

2009-11-18T11:19:00.000Z

Prisoner rehabilitation is not the most fashionable of causes for pop stars to espouse. Which is why you have to admire singer Billy Bragg's efforts to recruit his colleagues onto a project offering hope to those locked up inside Britain's jails.

Bragg has persuaded the likes of Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett, The Clash's co-founder Mick Jones and Dirty Pretty Things, to stage a number of low-key concerts for inmates, a world away from the backslapping of most charity events. These have now been captured in Breaking Rocks, a new documentary about the charity Jail Guitar Doors, set up by Bragg to supply prisoners with guitars and the skills to use them, in order to help them on the outside.

In the film Jones and Bragg perform a version of The Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" and Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" at Brixton and Wormwood Scrubs prisons in London. After one visit (pictured below) Jones says: "The guys were telling us how much this scheme had helped them move on from their previous lives before prison. It was really touching to think we've helped, even if it's in a small way."

The initiative is attracting a growing number of performers. Shiflett has led a guitar class at Brixton, while indie band Hard-Fi hope to perform inside Feltham Young Offenders Institution in west London, the setting of "Feltham Is Singing Out", their song about the suicide of a petty thief on remand. Dirty Pretty Things held a workshop inside Brixton, and Lincoln band Eastroad played at HMP Stoken, in Rutland.

But the principle aim of Bragg's charity is not to stage star-studded concerts, but raise money for instruments. Guitars have already been donated to HMP Styal - Britain's largest women's prison - as well as Guys Marsh in Dorset, Pentonville, Wandsworth, The Verne on the Isle of Portland, Wormwood Scrubs and Reading Young Offenders Institute.

Bragg believes that mastering a guitar can offer a way out of the re-offending cycle many prisoners fall into. "I support punishment," he says, "but I also believe in rehabilitation. Prison has to be about much more than just locking people up. We want people to move on from their situation and reconnect with the outside world. Learning to play and write gives them self confidence, which is very important in cutting re-offending. We're preparing them to deal with what life throws at them in a non-confrontational way."

Bragg and the film's director, Alan Miles, plan to screen the documentary - whose title is taken from the opening words of the Bobby Fuller Four's classic "outlaw" song "I Fought The Law" - at a number of jails next year. In one of the film's most moving scenes Bragg introduces a former prisoner on to the stage at the Glastonbury festival. The man, recently paroled from nearby HMP Shepton Mallet, soon has the crowd cheering as he performs a song he composed behind bars.

"The lifers at Shepton Mallet prison over the hill hear the festival at night," Bragg tells them. "There are guys there who play guitar and as musicians they know, as I know, that a guitar will help you transcend your surroundings and find a release."

* Breaking Rocks is being screened at The Shortwave Cinema, in Bermondsey, south London, on Sunday 22 November, then at venues nationwide in February.

(This piece was first published in the New Statesman)