Number 4: Bruce Cockburn - Closer To The Light

Bruce Cockburn has long been an artist I feel that I should like more than I actually do. He ticks all the boxes: sort of folk rock style singer-songwriter who writes intelligent and thoughtful lyrics. Yet I have never quite taken him to my heart. I listen to an album, think it's pretty good but then don't go back to it. Part of the problem is that I found some of his political songwriting in the 1980s overly didactic and dogmatic. (Don't get me wrong, as a fan of Bob Dylan and Neil Young I hardly object to political songwriting but I want to be moved rather than hectored.)

This year, though, I decided to give him another whirl, in particular his mid-1990s albums Dart To The Heart and The Charity Of Night. Both have a political as well as a personal dimension, but are less direct and in your face than his previous work, and the more rewarding for that. I've only just realised that both these albums were produced by T-Bone Burnett, which probably helps explain why I like them so much. Closer To The Light is an elegy to Cockburn's friend the songwriter Mark Heard who died tragically young at the age of 40 in 1992. I hope to write more about Heard another time, but this is a quietly powerful song that I ended up playing over and over.

Number 5: John Hiatt - Through Your Hands

John Hiatt is hard to categorise as an artist. He seemed to come out of the New Wave movement and could have been seen as an American Elvis Costello. But then he also seemed to be part of the Americana, new country thing and a bit like a rockier version of Steve Earle.

I suppose, though genres shouldn't matter. His best and most successful albums Bring the Family and Slow Turning were hardly off my turntable (or actually tapedeck) in the late 1980s. But then the quality of his albums dropped abruptly it seemed and I allowed myself to be influenced by poor reviews into not buying.

Because I did listen to him so much back then his work had laid fallow in my music app, but this year I have had a revival of interest leading me to listen to things I missed before. I don't know if this quite counts as a duet as the vocal contributions are unequal, but the lines sung by the Innocence Mission's Karen Peris really make the song.

While others in my list this year have been more nostalgic, this is looking positively to the future - a kind of pep talk from the angels.

Number 6: Pernice Brothers (featuring Neko Case) - I Don't Need That Anymore

Now I'm back on the more familiar ground of indie, Dylan-influenced music that I think of as the sort of thing I listen to.

Despite the moniker, the Pernice Brothers are really a vehicle for Joe Pernice, a songwriter who has previously recorded as a solo artist and as the Scud Mountain Boys and Chappaquick Skyline (an album under the latter name being described by one critic as 'terminally-depressed orchestral pop musings', which sums it up quite nicely).

The fact that he wrote a song about BS Johnson made me take to Pernice immediately, whatever he happened to be calling himself at any given time and he can be depended on for thoughtful, intelligent lyrics even if all a little downbeat. I see the line-up has at some point included James Walbourne, who is the current lead guitarist of The Pretenders as well as Richard and Linda Thompson's son-in-law. This only increases my positive feelings towards the band.

This year's album Who will you believe maintains the consistently high standards of his output, with this song, featuring the excellent Neko Case, being its outstanding track. I can only find an audio track but this is one worth savouring without the intrusion of video.

Number 7: Sailor - The Old Nickelodeon Sound

Writing up this list is bringing home to me quite how untypical many of the songs I've listened to the most this year are of my usual preferences. Perhaps the realisation that I am not far off 60 years old has made me feel wistful and nostalgic and led me to play tracks that nurse that sentiment.

At the start of this year, I would have been shocked to think I had listened to anything by Sailor, let alone that one of their songs might be among my top listening material this year. I was vaguely aware of their 1976 hit Girls Girls Girls, which seemed insufferably naff not to mention off-puttingly sexist even by the standards of the time it was recorded. I assumed that they were one of these artificial, put-together groups such as were formed to enter the Eurovision Song Contest.

So I am not sure why I even clicked when the Youtube algorithm suggested one of their songs to me - perhaps it was incredulity. But having done so I discovered they have a more interesting history and quirky output than I had imagined.

I'm not sure quite how much of this online biography is true, but evidently they have some kind of curious back story. At least they clearly were a proper group and while Girls Girls Girls remains a troubling listen, in the context of their wider output it seems more a reinterpretation of music hall style than boorish sexism. 

Their trademark was an instrument they called the Nickelodeon, a two-person keyboard, described as comprising 'a custom-designed all-purpose machine, the constituents of which were two upright pianos, two synthesizers, mini organs and glockenspiels all mechanically linked and contained within a wooden frame'. I have a weakness for such quirkiness so having clicked I was converted.

At least two of their members went on to interesting post-Sailor careers, the lead singer and chief songwriter Georg Kajanus, who himself seems to have an exotic background, went on to produce classically tinged electronic music with a band called Data, while one of the nickelodeon players, Phil Pickett, later played keyboards for Culture Club and co-wrote Karma Chameleon. (I've triangulated the latter point enough to think it is true not a Wikipedia editing prank.)

Anyway this song has chimed with my mood this year and climbed my personal chart. More typical examples of my musical taste will start again tomorrow.

The video is not of the best quality but I think conveys the spirit of the song and the band better than linking to an audio track.

Number 8: Justin Hayward - Forever Autumn

My theme of nostalgic and retrospective listening in 2024 continues.

I never really got into the Moody Blues, nor indeed musical versions of pioneering science fiction novels, but remember this coming out when I was starting to take an interest in the charts as a 12-year-old in 1978. This was before I realised that my peer group would disapprove of my liking such stuff and that I should keep quiet about it.

Anyway as the leaves began to fall this year I compiled a playlist of autumn-related songs, including this one that I ended up playing over and over as if to atone for years of denial. The video is not of the original but a live version recorded last year with Justin Hayward's current band. It includes an introduction in which he relates the story of how he came to record the song.

Number 9: Susan Fassbender & Kay Russell - Twilight Café

This is one that an algorithm suggested, possibly influenced by my recent listening choices of obscure 1970s and 80s artists.

I was surprised I had never heard of this, because back in 1981 when it reached Number 21, I did follow the charts and watch Top of the Pops etc. Not having heard the song before nor even heard of the artists I looked them up to read the sad story that Fassbender committed suicide in 1991. 

It seems that although this song made the charts and led to television appearances, the next two singles failed to repeat this success, the record company decided not to go ahead with an album and Fassbender and Russell left the music industry and started families.

That seems to have been the way it was back then. Nowadays, when recorded music makes so little money, musicians earn their living by performing live and finding other income streams. Back then live performance was done first to obtain a recording contract and afterwards to promote records. Touring was a loss-making activity. So presumably after this brief brush with fame, there was no choice but to head back into normal life.

It seems that many years later the act's surviving member, Kay Russell, collected demos and arranged for them to be released. I would highly recommend it, but I wonder if their music didn't belong to any obvious style or genre and their songwriting output was quite varied contributed to their not achieving sustained commercial success.

Whichever way, there does seem to be some online recognition of their output, including a Facebook Fan Page, which appears to be run with involvement of Fassbender's family. Sadly, Kay Russell died earlier this year and I can't help but wonder whether that unhappy news might have been what pushed this track up the algorithm and on to my screen.

Anyway I have enjoyed discovering and listening to the song, yet in view of what was to come the second verse feels all too poignant:

The music grabs me, spins me round and around
My spirit soars, no longer smashed to the ground
The cares and worries of a busy day
Just slide across me as I start to play

Number 10: Matt Bianco - Whose Side Are You On

Somehow I feel the need to explain myself with this one...

Way back when I was in my teens, liking certain sorts of music entailed not liking others - at least if you wanted to avoid having your friends mock your record collection and stop being your friends. So it was not OK to like The Clash and Yes, or indeed REM and Matt Bianco.

Both at the time and subsequently, the latter were often cited as the epitome of 80s Uncool. I remember reading an article by Paul Morley where he expressed this view as a fixed truth, requiring no further explanation. Which is a bit rich given that when he was in Art of Noise he tried to recruit Thereza Bazar from Dollar as lead singer. 

For myself, not being a musician or even knowing about music per se, I like songs, pretty much regardless of style and never had a problem liking prog and punk or alternative rock and lounge music, provided the tune was memorable, the words at least interesting and the arrangement pleasing to the ear. But I was conformist enough to hide my copy of the Matt Bianco single
Get Out of Your Lazy Bed at the back of my record collection along with my Jethro Tull and Al Stewart records just in case anyone spotted them and mocked.

Now, though, I am 58 and don't have to account to my peers for my musical tastes. Since back in 1984 as a poor student, I hadn't the budget actually to buy Matt Bianco's debut album and sensed anyway that this was a step too far into loss of such street cred as I might have had. 

Anyway, this year I have downloaded and listened to it and the whole thing is rather fun, admittedly more in the mode of background music than something to concentrate on. In the process I puzzled over why Matt Bianco were so despised and decided to look this up on the internet. One, essentially positive, blog post described it thusly 'It’s not overtly offensive, it’s not thrilling, it’s…nice. Whether that’s what Robert Johnson flogged his soul for is a moot point.'

The thing is, though, not all music has to shake the establishment or protest against authority. Matt Bianco's music can be enjoyable even if Get Out of Your Lazy Bed isn't a satire of ruthless capitalism or More Than I Can Bear a call to revolutionary consciousness. It could also be argued that just a few years after punk, using musical styles dating from the pre rock and roll era was at least a little daring. And worth remembering that even REM and the whole Paisley Underground had a jingle-jangle element that drew on the 1960s. I'll even push it so far as to say that Whose Side Are You On, as a wry comment on the murky and mercenary world of espionage, was quite topical for 1984 and also that it is now uncontroversial for artists to follow a range of influences including Latin and lounge music. Perhaps Matt Bianco were pioneers

Whichever way, it's enjoyable song and the video, which I never saw at the time, is rather fun too. I feel no shame in liking it.

Number 11: Buffalo Tom - Autumn Letter

Apparently taking their name from the first half of Buffalo Springfield and the drummer's first name, Buffalo Tom seemed to be regarded in their early years as a sort of discount shop Dinosaur Jr, whose leader, J. Mascis, produced their first album. But I preferred the influencees to the influencer and have nearly all their work in one format or another.

The release of a new album Jump Rope at the end of May this year passed me by until a few months later, by which time I had also missed seeing them on tour - they remain high on my list of bands I like to see live but haven't. Otherwise this one would be higher in the charts.

There hasn't been much in the way of stylistic evolution by Buffalo Tom, over the decades. Their new album sounds remarkably like their first one, released in 1988. But they can always be depended on to deliver grungy but melodic songs combined with literate, well constructed, if often opaque lyrics written by their lead singer and guitarist Bill Janovitz. I read somewhere that he has a master's degree in English literature so perhaps that explains it.

I only started listening to this one in mid-October so perhaps Autumn Letter was destined to be my favourite song on the album. The words conjure up an autumnal feeling and indeed seasons seem to be a sub-theme of this album with the next but one track Come Closer starting with the words 'Bleak, midwinter sun'.

Autumn has always been my favourite season and the closing lines

    Panic shouts out (panic shouts out)
    Pity drowns out (pity drowns out)
    But mercy wins out in the end

seem to offer a note of hope rather than fear or regret.

Number 12: The Innocence Mission - Black Sheep Wall

Led by wife and husband team Karen and Don Peris, The Innocence Mission could be compared to 10,000 Maniacs, having some kind of alternative folk style. Only they weren't as well known and had only one sort of hit, Bright as Yellow. With the exception of a couple of songs, I never liked 10,000 Maniacs as much as I expected, finding the lyrics a overly worthy and earnest and the tunes not particularly memorable.

The Innocence Mission, whose work I somehow stumbled upon a few years ago, seemed at once more musically creative and lyrically enigmatic. It's also typical of me when finding two bands with similar styles to prefer the one that's less popular.

Anyway, they had drifted from my consciousness until hearing Karen Peris singing a duet with John Hiatt, while revisiting the latter's oeuvre (of which more later in this series I hope), leading me to seek out another album, their 1989 self-titled debut.

For me, the most listenable track was Black Sheep Wall, which I assumed from casual listening was about a reprobate lover, but now I look at the lyrics it seems to be a reflection on parenthood and protective feelings towards a child. Moving and haunting.

My top 12 tracks from 2024

I have long given up any pretence of keeping up with which music artists are popular, in the charts (if that's still a thing) or even appearing on Jools Holland. For a time after I had passed the age for following these things I still subconsciously the information by hearing what my stepchildren were listening to and even trading recommendations with them. Even after they left home I still read the music press, for example the late lamented Word magazine, which catered for older people who took popular music seriously. But I haven't found a good substitute for that publication.

Yet I've never grown out of obsessiveness about music. It's just that now, as I have hinted at in other posts about books, I'm catching up with things I've missed over the years rather than identifying new artists to follow. This year I have even overlooked new releases by artists I do like, and am now belatedly catching up on latest offerings from the Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney, Cassandra Jenkins and Nick Cave. I also tend to listen to music more when working at my computer - not like the old days when one bought vinyl or a CD, took it home and pored over the lyric sheet and other credits. So I don't pay as close attention to songs as I once did.

At the same time my nerdiness seems to have increased, as I have started using the LastFM website, with its Scrobbler function, which keeps a record of which songs you have listened to, and unlike Apple Music, lets this be applied to specific time periods. This has become my new toy, enabling me to compile my personal listening chart for 2024.

To confirm my above observations, pretty much none of the tracks that I've played the most this year have been released in the last 12 months, but with the help of Youtube suggestions and the like I have still found what for me have been new discoveries, as well as rediscovering other things. In the remaining 12 days before Christmas, I will roll out my top 12. 

For reasons set out above this is without any detailed lyrical exegesis or commentary on the musical arrangement, but at least sets me a challenge of keeping up the blogposts for a time.

Could the wilderness years be over for Coventry Rugby?

I am delighted to see that Coventry Rugby Club have applied to be approved as eligible for promotion to the English Premiership under the rules about stadium capacity. As they sit at the top of the second tier, for now things are looking up although there is a lot of the season still to go.

I have written here before about the travails of being a Coventry rugby supporter. I am always tempted to blame myself. Fifty years ago when I really became aware of their existence as my maternal grandfather was a supporter they were one of the great names of English rugby and winners of the then Rugby Football Union Cup for two seasons in succession. After I started supporting them it seemed to be all downhill.

When the league structures came into place in the late 1980s they lasted one season in the top tier before being relegated. While the club had clearly lost its way, there was every reason to hope that before too many years passed they might climb back up again, but it was not to be.

In part this was due to Cov's further off-field problems, including nearly going out of business twice. But the real issue was that a few years after the game went professional, the route back to the top tier was blocked by the restrictive practices of premiership clubs (£), whose owners believed that as they had invested in the game at a crucial time, their clubs should be protected from the jeopardy of relegation for all time.

They did this through a system that provided much lower funding for promoted teams and rules governing stadium standards and capacity, requiring clubs seeking to join the premiership to have a ground capacity of more than 10,000. Given planning and land ownership constraints this is all but impossible for many clubs and unfeasibly expensive for everyone. It has had the effect of fossilising the top tier of the game. 

It is also a nonsense, because premiership teams compete in European competitions against clubs with stadiums that would not reach premiership standards - and apparently without adverse consequences. For example, as I can testify from recent experience, Benetton's 5,000 capacity Stadio Monigo in Treviso (above) has an amazing atmosphere when full and looks pretty good on television too.

Earlier this year there seemed to be a relaxation of the premiership's protectionist rules, with acceptance that a promoted team could have four years to increase capacity from 5,000 to 10,001. But then the RFU stuck in a clause saying planning permission had to be secured before promotion for the new criteria to be met. This again puts prohibitive costs of obtaining planning permission in the way would-be promotion candidates, particularly as the whole thing may prove unnecessary if they don't go up or do but go straight back down again. 

Cov's latest application comes with a clear suggestion that legal action may be necessary to get the RFU to back down and an expression of confidence that this will be successful. I note that at least one legal commentator has suggested that the minimum capacity rule

is likely to breach competition law, as the restriction of competition and/or abuse of dominant position it entails cannot be justified by reference to a legitimate objective

Perhaps the RFU will see sense in time to avoid a costly legal battle, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

Gearing up for the Ivy Compton-Burnett experience: 'PG Wodehouse rewritten by Patricia Highsmith'

I have mentioned before my epiphany, about 40 years ago, that reading novels for pleasure might be a good thing - both intellectually improving and enjoyable. At the time I cast around for guidance on what I should read, with the aim of becoming WELL READ.

Among my discoveries was a short volume by Anthony Burgess, 99 novels: the best in English since 1939, a personal choice. Given that Burgess was a famous novelist and respected critic, I figured he should know what he was talking about and resolved to work my way through his list. I learned later that it had been produced in a fit of pique after none of his works made it onto a list published by the Book Marketing Council of the 12 'best novels of our time' (in English). Burgess described that list as 'execrable' and his decision to choose 99 novels came with the suggestion that the reader could decide on the hundredth and might choose one of his own novels.

In 1984 I might have hoped that 40 years later I might have read at least a majority of the recommendations, possibly nearly all of them. I was probably never much up for Finnegans wake and never much liked the sound of the 15-volume A chronicle of ancient sunlight by Henry Williamson, the dreadful fascist who is most famous for Tarka the Otter. 

Much of the list was predictable, the familiar roster of Waugh, Greene, Spark, Murdoch, Amis etc. that I would probably have added to my list anyway. But it introduced me to many authors and books I hadn't heard of, whether John Kennedy Toole's marvellous picaresque A confederacy of dunces, Richard Hughes' The fox in the attic, which is not as well-known as it should be, and Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan.

For a while I seemed to be working through the list, but then somehow became parted from the book and ceased to use it as a guide. Also I began to read more history and less fiction and hopes of achieving well-read status diminished. But recently I was given a new second-hand copy and looked with curiosity to see how I was doing. Not good – 28 out of 99, which means I've been going at a rate of not much more than one every two years. I could make myself feel better by noting that my list disproportionately included the multi-volume novels like A dance to the music of time, The sword of honour and the Balkan trilogy.

It's true that I have read other good or great books from the same period that aren't on the list. Among them are, Elizabeth Bowen's The death of the heart and Brian Moore's Cold heaven, both of which I could have sworn Burgess included but are clearly not there. I can see a few more that I really don't want to read. Maybe one should have a go at Norman Mailer's The naked and the dead, but Ancient evenings – I don't think so. And having listened to a radio adaptation of CP Snow's Strangers and brothers, I think I can spare myself its 10 volumes - even if part of me feels I should read a classic novel sequence by a  a fellow University of Leicester alumnus. By all accounts it is a stodgy old read.

Others I thought it best not to bother with because I had not heard of the author let alone the book, but on closer inspection Pavane by Keith Roberts and The disenchanted by Budd Schulberg look quite interesting. I might give them to go.

The ambition remains to get to 50, and to make progress I should target shorter ones that I actually want to read. To that end I have lighted on one of Burgess's recommendations that I haven't read and which isn't that long, Ivy Compton Burnett's The mighty and their fall. Compton-Burnett has long been in the same category for me as BS Johnson, about whom I wrote last year - intriguing enough to want to read, but with a sense that it's a bit daunting so not quite what I want to pick up just now.

There are a few reasons for this, starting with the author's rather scary appearance. Next, the forbidding appearance of hardback versions of her books lined up in public libraries when I was younger, with the yellow Gollancz covers offering no pictorial enticement. In paperback they appeared in the somewhat austere Penguin Classics range with their white and orange spines, implying seriousness rather than fun.

Then there were the titles with their consistent 'and' format starting with Pastors and Masters (1925) through to The Last and the First (posthumous (1971). And then there are the distinctive features that the books are all written almost entirely in dialogue and all set in Edwardian country houses even through to those written in the 1960s. Their themes of claustrophobic family (occasionally institutional, such as a school) life seemed rather daunting too. It all sounds like a kind of Kafkaesque ghost story.

Yet there have always been reasons not to be put off. I remember seeing an edition of the South Bank Show in 1984 on the centenary of Compton-Burnett's birth presented by Melvyn Bragg and featuring a dramatisation of scenes from Elders and betters, which if I remember rightly is about an elderly relative using her debilitating illness and the prospect of inheritance to manipulate her family. I seem to remember it concluding with a haunting scene showing leaves being blown about in the wind. That was what first intrigued me about her work.

In addition, the books are supposed to be funny, which is always an attraction to me. So is the unconventional format and style (see BS Johnson again). They were read and popular in their time and Compton-Burnett was well-known enough to have a damehood conferred on her. They can't be that difficult.

So my Dame Ivy moment has almost arrived. I've done a bit of preparation, listening to an edition of the Unburied Books podcast, focsuing on Dame Ivy's A house and its head, featuring John Darnielle, the lead singer out of the wonderful Mountain Goats, who I'm somehow not surprised to find is a Compton-Burnett fan. I've listened to a dramatisation of another novel, A family and a fortune and read this article by Stuart Jeffries on the Royal Literature Fund website, arguing that on the 140th anniversary of her birth Compton-Burnett's novels are ripe for rediscovery, although it's debatable whether his description of her novels as 'PG Wodehouse rewritten by Patricia Highsmith' will encourage this or not.

While I continue to prefer hard-copies to e-books, it has been hard to find The mighty and their fall in decent condition so Kindle it is then. I hope to report back here on what I find.

Leicester revisited and rediscovered

Somewhere I have made it to recently is Leicester, a city where I studied as an undergraduate and became a political activist, and which thus had a defining influence on my life.

My appetite for election campaigning was much influenced by Chris Rennard, who at that time was East Midlands Area Agent and a rising star of the then Liberal party, and my political thinking by the late Professor Robert Pritchard, a polymath who led the Genetics Department that developed DNA fingerprinting and who then became leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicester City and then Leicestershire County Council.

While I can’t claim to have been that assiduous in my studies, I got my act together to earn a decent enough degree thanks in great part to the wise guidance of Dr (now Professor) Stuart Ball, the distinguished historian of the Conservative party. That encouraged me to engage in postgraduate study in later life.

For a few years after I returned to live in Watford, I continued to visit Leicester, still having Lib Dem friends there. But over the years I lost touch with people and didn’t go back for over two decades apart from a brief and sad visit in 2015 for Bob Pritchard’s funeral.

This year, though, has taken me back twice, once for sightseeing as we were staying nearby and most recently to watch rugby, of which more later. While I hope I wasn’t a total philistine when I was a student and do remember going to the Newarke Houses and New Walk Museums, somehow I never made it to the cathedral, nor to the greater architectural gem of St Mary de Castro parish church. I’m sure I intended to visit but never quite got round to it before leaving.

This year I was able to put that right and indeed that whole part Leicester was quite a revelation and I wish I had discovered it when I lived in the city, including the medieval Guildhall. The cathedral itself while II* listed, would be quite low down the English rankings, although it has received a boost in from the reburial there of Richard III, something they certainly make the most of. At St Mary de Castro, however, the volunteer on duty is keen to assert that it is in a completely different league from the cathedral. Boasting elements of all eras of English architecture, from Norman to Gothic Revival, its highlight is the triple-arched Norman sedilia. It is really two churches in one, a collegiate and a parish church and thus has two naves. It is evidently very high church, being full of icons and making more of its Marian affiliation than one expects in an Anglican church.

The more recent visit took in rather less distinguished elements of Leicester’s architecture and skyline. With an hour or two to spare before heading to watch rugby at Welford Road (sorry, Mattioli Woods Welford Road Stadium), we dropped in at the University of Leicester campus. There were various reasons why I chose Leicester back then, but aesthetic considerations were not really among them, although there have been significant changes and new building since I was there, and these are mostly positive additions.

I knew that the famous paternoster in the otherwise undistinguished Attenborough tower, where we humanities students were based,  had been taken out of action in 2017, as it became increasingly difficult to get parts to repair it, but I had a vision of it still being in place, perhaps with the platforms permanently suspended between floors. Alas, it has been replaced by an ordinary lift.

The more famous tower on the campus is the Engineering Building, indeed this is the feature that people most often mention if I tell them I went to Leicester University. Designed by the famous modernist architect James Stirling and his colleague James Gowan, it was a notoriously terrible environment to study in, notorious for leaking water and unpopular with students and staff alike. It was one of Stirling’s Red Trilogy, another one of which, the History Faculty Building at Cambridge University, was reputedly the subject of the following parody by Tom Sharpe in his novel Ancestral vices:

“… thanks to the architect’s obsession with the idea of advanced technology and his consummate ignorance of its practical application, a slight spell of bright weather followed by a small cloud could threaten students who had been sunbathing one moment with frostbite the next.”

The Students Union building had had a serious makeover since I was there, but it was nice to see my friend Neil Fawcett’s name on the honours board of past office holders from when the Lib Dems seized power for a few years there in the early 1990s.

Then it was on to Welford Road to watch Leicester versus Coventry, the club representing the city of my birth and which I have supported since childhood. This was once one of the great rugby rivalries, but in the 1980s Leicester secured their place among the elite clubs while Cov slid into the doldrums. It was painful to be a Coventry supporter living in Leicester at the time, and seeing players who actually came from Coventry and its environs, such as Neil Back and Darren Garforth, lining up for the Tigers.

So for the last 35 years the two clubs have been in different leagues and games between them few. But the need for some kind of cup competition during the international break had led the Premiership clubs to condescend to play teams from the league below and thus Cov had a rare competitive away fixture at Welford Road. And they won, 33–19,  cheered on by a large and vocal contingent of away support. Admittedly the Leicester team was largely composed of academy players, while Cov had a full-strength team out, but I suspect the Tigers would still be better paid than their second tier counterparts. So it was a happy outcome to the day and a visit that brought back mostly fond memories.

If the silly rules that still make it almost impossible for tier 2 teams to get promoted are ever changed, perhaps I will yet get to see a Leicester v Cov league match, and indeed visit Leicester more often.

On not seeing Bob Dylan play at the Albert Hall this week

By the time this post goes up, Bob Dylan will have played his the last of his tour dates at the Royal Albert Hall. As he is 83 years old this could yet be his last live appearance in Britain. I am a little disappointed and wistful not to have there, given that I am a fan of more than 40 years and virtually a Dylan completist in terms of recorded music.

In truth, though, only a little disappointed. I didn’t try that hard to get tickets. Although I had recently sort of made my mind up to go and see Dylan again if he toured Britain, I took no steps to find out when shows would be announced or tickets go on sale and it was all sold out by the time I cottoned on. In truth, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to go. As his Bobness has a reputation as at best an inconsistent live performer, and as on the two occasions I did see him, in 1981 and 1989, he was excellent, I almost subconsciously decided back then to quit while I was ahead.

Also as the years have gone on he seemed less and less likely to play songs from the era I like best, namely those from about 1978 (Street-Legal) to 1990 (Under the Red Sky). This is not quite so eccentric a view as it might once have been considered. There was a conventional wisdom that Dylan’s great period was the 1960s and this just about continued up to Blood on the Tracks and Desire before a serious loss of form that continued until 1997’s Time Out Of Mind which was seen as a return to greatness and his subsequent work has been met with a succession of five-star reviews.

I started listening to Dylan, though, in the late 1970s after my Dad borrowed Street-Legal off a colleague at work who was a real obsessive. This was the time of the 1978 tour, Dylan’s first visit to Britain for several years. So his stock seemed quite high, but it then took a nosedive after his conversion to Christianity, leading to the ‘Jesus Trilogy’ of Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love over the subsequent three years.

While I had managed to hear the sixties classics and become a Dylan fan, it was a bit awkward when these new albums came out with their decidedly uncool and untrendy Christian message. I still bought them (or received them as presents) but it didn’t do to be too enthusiastic. Even Dylan enthusiasts didn’t like the new stuff and longed for a return to secular material. If you wanted raspy-voiced harmonica-playing American singer-songwriters you listened to Bruce Springsteen and bought The River not Saved.

So I went along with this, all the while thinking that the Christian albums actually sounded rather good. After all Mark Knopfler, who it was OK to like, played some mean guitar on Slow Train Coming, the tunes were memorable, Dylan’s singing and backing group were as good as they every had been and the words were at least interesting. Maybe there was a bit too much Jesus, even for someone with my mild Christian sympathies. But you didn’t have to agree with it to like it. For me, 1981’s Shot of Love album was a happy compromise, one or two overtly religious songs, some with Christian themes but less overt proselytising and some straightforwardly secular material.

At this point I had my first experience of seeing Dylan live, at Earls Court in 1981. The good news was that unlike in his North American concerts of a year previously he was now playing some of the old stuff, not just Christian material. But tickets didn’t sell all that well and I can remember hearing an impromptu interview with Dylan on Capital Radio after he rang the station, presumably to drum up sales. In the end it was a great night, with a slug of some of the better recent material and a good smattering of his 1960s classics, which took up more than half the setlist. It was only slightly marred by missing my train home and getting in big trouble (it was my 15th birthday and one of the first times I was allowed out into London for the evening without adult supervision). Anyone who wants confirmation of how good he sounded during this tour should listen to the live tracks from the previous and following evening on the Trouble No More official bootleg album. Great voice, great band, great choice of songs!

At this stage I expected Dylan to continue the move towards more secular themes tinged with Christian sensibilities. In fact his career took another strange twist. There were stories that he had abandoned his Christian faith and returned to Judaism. With the moralising certainty of a teenager (‘I was so much older then’) I felt a sense of betrayal, not because I shared his version of Christian faith (which I didn’t) but because I had persevered with him through these difficult years and this new departure made his Christianity seem insincere and superficial – like a career move gone wrong.

Anyway, when the first ‘post-Christian’ album Infidels came out in 1983, it was touted as a return to secular Dylan and those who refused to listen to the Jesus trilogy seemed to love it. This seemed odd to me since, as the title suggests, it was if anything more preachy than Shot of Love and more like the fire and brimstone of Slow Train Coming, even if the biblical references were now to the Old Testament not the New, it seemed to include warnings about false prophets, and odd negative references to moon travel. If the outtakes Death is not The End, Lord Protect My Child and Foot of Pride had been included it could have passed for being the fourth instalment of Dylan’s God Quartet rather than a step away from religious material. I was interested to hear an edition of the Jokermen podcast that referred to Dylan having a long Christian period lasting from Street-Legal to Infidels, which has some validity especially given the former’s references to Lucifer, Armageddon and St John.

In the intervening decades Dylan’s Jesus years have had enjoyed some sort of rehabilitation, perhaps aided by their being long in the past, a relatively short episode in a long career and capable of being regarded as Dylan’s take on gospel the way Nashville Skyline is his take on country. This was helped by the Trouble No More box set that came out in 2017, featuring outtakes and live performances from the 1979–81 years. To the uninitiated or the gospel refuseniks it gave a new sense of the power and excitement of his performances in these years. Whichever way, even though none of the albums of the time quite warrant the title masterpiece, partly due to Dylan making poor choices of which tracks to include and to omit, this remains my favourite period of his music.

So in thinking about whether to see him live this year I was initially encouraged by seeing that Dylan is regularly concluding his set with my favourite of his songs, Every grain of sand, which is surely the greatest one from the Christian years. Even then I had mixed feelings. He has developed this way of growling out songs as if reciting a shopping list. With its profound lyrics that dwell on on faith and doubt, life and mortality, Every grain of sand is a song for the ages. I feared he would ruin it, and indeed I found at least one version on Youtube where that was the case. Yet I also found this version (linked to in the picture above) which is powerful, haunting and profound. Maybe the possibility of hearing such a performance should have made me make more of an effort to go this time. I can but hope that he will come round again, he will keep the song in his set, that I can get a ticket and that he will deliver a good rendition.

On the 20th anniversary of the Orange Book

The Liberal Democrats’ conference in Brighton is an opportunity to celebrate the party’s best result in terms of MPs elected for more than 100 years. Understandably, few enough of those gathering here are reflecting on this also being the anniversary of the publication of the Orange Book.* Why revisit painful memories?

Being the curmudgeon that I am, though, I have found myself reflecting on this mostly forgotten anniversary. In an ideal world I might have spent time preparing a carefully researched paper on the impact of the Orange Book on Liberal Democrat politics, but procrastination and other commitments got in the way. So what follows is more a personal reflection with an element of justification for why I am somewhat immune from the euphoria about the Lib Dem revival of 2024.

For those not familiar with the intricacies of Lib Dem internal politics, the publication 20 years ago of the Orange Book, a collection of essays by prominent Liberal Democrats, triggered the nearest the party has come in recent decades to outright factionalism - between ‘economic liberals’ or Orange Bookers and ‘social liberals’, especially during the years leading up to the formation of the coalition government in 2010.

There are many reasons why Lib Dems might prefer it not to be mentioned. Those who wrote chapters or at some level welcomed its renewed call for economic liberalism, and who remain active in the party, may feel embarrassed about any association with its the subsequent trajectory of its co-editor and driving force, Sir Paul Marshall, who went on to become a Brexiteer, Tory donor, GB News investor and now as new owner of the Spectator.

This seems to vindicate those who saw it as a kind of neo-Thatcherite Trojan horse within the party. The left of the party will probably not wish to waste time trampling on its grave and as we all unite in celebrating revival and success why would anyone want to revive memories of past factionalising?

Its original launch before the 2004 conference was cancelled, primarily it seemed because David Laws, then a high profile front bench MP, had written a chapter advocating public health insurance, which was directly at odds with party policy. This might have been less of a problem at the start of a new parliament when the party might reasonably have been openly debating its future, but was ill-advised in the last autumn conference before a likely general election. It also appeared that other contributors hadn’t seen the chapter and didn’t agree with it.

The irony was, given the way the title was adopted as shorthand for a revisionist, free-market versiono of Liberalism, that much of the book was quite mainstream. David Laws’ introduction, which made a case for personal and economic, alongside political and social, liberalism, was controversial, as was Vince Cable’s chapter on liberal economics, ironically given his later status as the left-wing conscience of the coalition. Mark Oaten, also a bête noir of the party’s radical/activist/left wing, wrote a fairly anodyne chapter on crime albeit with the provocative title ‘Tough Liberalism’, but the other contributors, Susan Kramer, Chris Huhne, Ed Davey were hardly apostles of iconoclastic revisionism. And Steve Webb’s chapter on family policy appeared positively Fabian.

>While I remember its publication as provoking a fiercely hostile reaction from much of the party, I was surprised to download the relevant edition of Liberator magazine (No. 298) to find a range of reactions and comments, including an article by David Laws himself. Even that scourge of ‘the right’, the late Simon Titley, was quite measured in his criticism, commenting that it ‘may spark a serious debate’ even if he then concluded the the book was part of an internal Lib Dem putsch and ‘more of a lemon’ than an orange.

It did, though, spark debate. There were two sort-of ripostes in the form of Liberator’s collection of essays Liberalism: something to shout about and Reinventing the State edited by Duncan Brack, Richard S Grayson and David Howarth. (Grayson was to join the Labour party during the coalition years). Two of the latter’s contributors had also written chapters in the Orange Book. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published Beyond liberty: is the future of liberalism progressive?, with contributions by journalists, academics and leading Lib Dems, including some who had contributed to other volumes. Unsurprisingly given the IPPR’s historic closeness to the Labour party it appeared to be if anything pushing the Lib Dems in a Blairite direction. There was also the rather pedestrian Britain after Blair from the Orange Book stable.

Yet the arrival of the coalition made it all irrelevant. While the decision to go into government with the Conservatives may be seen as the culmination of an Orange Book project, there were plenty of people from the left of the party who were willing to participate in and support the coalition, relatively few high-profile defections and none among MPs. Despite unhappiness about austerity and individual measures of the coalition, few seemed to argue that we shouldn’t have entered into it.

The years after the 2015 debacle were a fight for survival with debates about political philosophy more or less irrelevant. While the Brexit referendum vote was catastrophic of itself, it did seem to give the Liberal Democrats a new sense of purpose as the one consistently pro-European party. And while the 2019 campaign ended in disaster, it did at least tee up some promising second places, which created a platform for the success of 2024.

Yet if this year’s general election saw an electoral revival for the Liberal Democrats, it hardly marked any kind of Liberal intellectual renaissance. There has been no recent wave of publications by leading party figures setting out their worldview. We still have the Social Liberal Forum and Liberal Reform as ginger groups in the party representing rival views on the merits of economic liberalism, but one could hardly describe the party as a ferment of ideas just now.

Instead the Liberal Democrats have ended as a party not much different from Labour in outlook, but which for reasons of history, demography and current local strength holds the ‘main alternative to the Tories’ franchise in certain constituencies, enabling it to win seats when the Tories are at a low ebb.

All of which, to get back to the Orange Book, suggests to me that ideological and intellectual disputations count for very little in determining the party’s electoral fortunes. We struggle to obtain much media coverage anyway or to get any detailed understanding of our policies. So it seems to be enough for the Liberal Democrats to appear a bit like Labour but a little less tribal or political to that we appear a safe alternative to vote for and can boost our parliamentary representation in a bad Tory year. Which is fine but as a political raison d’être hardly inspiring. 

While there are a few different reasons I give for joining the then Liberal party back in 1985, one is being inspired by a Jo Grimond article in which he argued that while the free market was more successful than socialism at delivering economic growth, it produced unequal outcomes and the challenge for Liberalism was to find ways of redressing that balance. Which sounded like something I could sign up to and so I joined the Liberals hoping to find a lively intellectual debate going on about this.

In fact by that stage Grimond was regarded by Liberals as having gone a bit eccentric and right-wing in his old age and that conversation was not happening. Yet debate about how the Liberal Democrats can offer something distinctive has occasionally threatened to break out and the publication of the Orange Book was one of those occasions. It seemed positive that books were being published, ideas debated. But sadly not now and the Liberal Democrats appear to have reverted to being (to borrow a phrase I vaguely remember hearing Nick Clegg use once upon a time) a collection of left-of-centre people who for one reason or another don’t like the Labour party.

So while it’s great that the Liberal Democrats have their highest number of MPs in over a century and thereby helped to deliver a richly deserved drubbing to a destructive Conservative government, I can’t help wishing that the party had something more distinctive to offer than simply being a vehicle for beating the Tories in areas Labour don’t seem able to reach.

*Although David Laws did wryly mention it at the Liberal Democrat History Group fringe meeting today.

 

Hoodwinked by experts? My belated twopenceworth on the Post Office scandal

WHEN you write an obscure blog as an occasional self-indulgent hobby, the world is not waiting for your take on the big issues. That much I have learned. So in reactivating this site I resolved to remember that and stick to rambling on about my own inconsequential nonsense.

So on the Post Office miscarriages of justice scandal, I was simply going to nod along with Jonathan Calder's judgement that 'Ed Davey should go easy on calling for people to resign' and ponder quietly why it is that after reading intermittently about this case over several years, muttering that it did seem like a miscarriage of justice, being pleased to learn of the TV series and watching it in a single evening, I felt uncomfortable about its aftermath.

A degree of enlightenment comes from reading David Aaronovitch's Substack post The fatal flaw in Mr Bates vs The Post Office', which has flown into my inbox as I am a non-paying subscriber to his newsletter. I haven't always been an Aaronovitch fan, and still often disagree with him, but I came to a grudging admiration through reading his (sadly now discontinued) Times column, in particular because he is willing to make difficult arguments rather than simply write to please his readers. This is a case in point.

The fatal flaw he identifies with Mr Bates vs The Post Office is not simply that it is full of familiar good-guy underdog and heartless-bureaucrat-villain tropes, but that while it is clear why the former do what they do it displays no interest in and doesn't attempt to understand the latter: the Post Office CEO Paula Vennells or her sidekick or their Fujitsu contractors. 'But what about the baddies?' he asks, arguing that their motivation is what we really need to know.

Weirdly I could have a stab at that one, paradoxically because my experience of holding public office, even if only at the lowly level of district councillor, gave me enough understanding of the perils and pitfalls of power that I resolved not to attempt to climb any higher up the ladder. Even dealing with such matters as controversial planning applications, rows about allotments, taxi regulation, market relocations and hospital redevelopments was daunting enough to make me think this may have parallels on a grander stage. At the very least when I read or watch abuse-of-power stories, I pause and wonder whether I would have done any better before getting on my high horse. So, based on my maybe slightly relevant experience, here are my best guesses as to how they may have gone wrong without having malign motives. 

When I was a relatively new councillor a more experienced opponent advised me: 'The secret in this game is knowing when you're being bullshitted by so-called experts'. But that's not as easy as it sounds. Experts can be quite good at bullshitting. At the very least they have more specialist knowledge than we generalists/lay people/elected representatives do. You end up having to take some things on trust, unless you happen to have knowledge that contradicts what you are being told or have access to other experts with other opinions. 

There can be moments when it feels you have troubles and stresses enough and privately hope to be reassured not burdened with yet another woe. And then there's the risk of appearing too stupid to understand. On the latter point, I'm sure that among the reasons for my dear wife's longevity as Elected Mayor of Watford was a willingness to keep asking questions until she got an answer she understood and a sixth sense for when someone's story wasn't stacking up, the latter skill perhaps deriving from her previous career as a schoolteacher.

Another, perhaps opposite, challenge was that over my 30 years in the foothills of public office, a regular flow of strange stories came to my ears, of varying levels of plausibility. Some of them I knew to be untrue because they were about me (land I supposedly owned, but in fact didn't, where planning permission had just been granted.) Indeed to read comments on newspaper websites one might imagine that every controversial planning application was only granted permission due to 'brown envelopes'. We could have paralysed the entire council if we had investigated every such spurious allegation or rumour.

Sometimes serious, specific and public accusations were made that went beyond hearsay yet fell apart almost as soon as an investigation got underway. Yet just occasionally an issue was raised that initially sounded improbable, but on closer inspection proved absolutely accurate – there was something wrong that needed putting right. Knowing which was which was never straightforward - more art than science. And while one may be aware of cases that proved either spurious or true, one never knows if there were other things one should have followed up but didn't because they seemed too implausible.

All of which is to say I can at least imagine how the Post Office ended up in denial and why ministers believed their assurances. I can even read Mr Bates and the Post Office against the grain to see why they might have done so. Before the emergence of a whistleblower what specific evidence did they have to show Fujitsu could change individual postmasters' records? Even if they knew it was possible why would they think Fujitsu staff were deliberately falsifying records to postmasters' detriment? There seemed no evidence of any gain to the company or of fraud by individual employees. While the line that no one else was having problems was clearly false, might fraud by postmasters not have appeared at first sight the most plausible explanation - fraud does happen? If Horizon had gone haywire why was it still only a small proportion that was affected (at least that was my impression from the series) and why was what was being thrown up was all in one direction - unexplained losses not unexplained surpluses? Maybe these points have been answered, but such initial reactions might not have been unreasonable.

None of which is to let Paula Vennells, other Post Office officials or government ministers, even Lib Dem ones, off the hook. The job of public officials to judge when we are being hoodwinked or bullshitted by experts and which of the many unlikely stories one may hear has the ring of truth and needs further investigation. Praise is due to those who have exposed miscarriages of justice, whether James Arbuthnott, or back in the day Chris Mullin, and serially Private Eye. Likewise, brickbats, and even withdrawn honours, are the price of misjudgement. But amid the justified condemnation perhaps there is room for a little understanding of why those with responsibility can get such things badly wrong.

Two Bentleys

Strongly partisan though I am for Watford, and keen to proclaim the town's merits, I can't really argue it is full of architectural gems. Indeed on that point it is probably most famous for a building it lost, James Wyatt's Cassiobury House, described by Pevsner as 'one of [Hertfordshire's] major architectural losses of the C20'. Its famous staircase, which is often attributed to Grinling Gibbons, but which I've just read isn't, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where, unlike last time I looked this up, it does at least appear to be on display.

So it is always a pleasure to visit one of the town's undoubted architectural masterpieces, Holy Rood Roman Catholic Church, although my attendances at Mass are rare these days and even the current Pope would probably regard my religious views as more heretical than merely heterodox.

Holy Rood, Watford

Holy Rood was part of the great programme of Catholic church building in England during the nineteenth century as anti-Catholic laws were repealed and worship no longer needed to be quite so furtive. It was designed by John Francis Bentley, regarded as one of the great architects of the gothic revival and this is his only complete church. Hence it is sometimes referred to as 'Bentley's Gem'.

With its wide nave, crossing and series of side chapels, and highly decorated chancel, it feels like a kind of mini-cathedral rather than a mere parish church. Its Rood loft, unusually without a screen below, is a highly distinctive feature. One can feel the sense of exuberance at the Catholic Church putting itself back on the map, both literally and metaphorically.

Westminster Cathedral

Bentley's most famous work, by contrast, is anything but complete. Distinctive outside for its striking red brick and Portland stone stripes, inside Westminster Cathedral is a riot of colour and decoration in its bottom third, but above that it's all bare brickwork turned black from candle smoke. It creates a rather eerie sensation, one commentator likening the upper parts of the cathedral to railway tunnels. I had always assumed that at some point the money had run out and plans to decorate the rest of the building had been abandoned. But the late Gavin Stamp in a 2016 article refers to it always having been known that it would take a century to complete the interior. It even seems that plans to complete the work remain in progress.

Unusually, I had occasion just before Christmas to attend services in both Holy Rood and Westminster Cathedral giving me a chance to compare and contrast. As well as their relative levels of completrness, the striking difference between the two is their contrasting styles, the one Gothic Revival the other Byzantine. The one thing that does unite them visually is that each has a dramatic Rood cross dominating the nave.

I am curious as to whether that is a common theme in Bentley's churches. And I wonder too why Bentley, who seems to be considered an important gothic revival architect designed so few complete churches, and why his most famous one is in a completely different style.

Answers to such questions can be hard to find, but I see that since I last pondered them at all, Historic England and Liverpool University Press have published a biography of Bentley by Peter Howell, which might enlighten me. Yet it's just after Christmas, when more books that remain unread came into my possession. And its price of over £30 is that little bit more than I like to pay for a book I don't actually need. So it will have to wait while I monitor its price on various websites and hope I can swoop in for a bargain. In the meantime I will have to remain curious and wait for my answers.