Island Records - Portrait of an Iconic Label

Artists such as U2, Roxy Music, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Bob Marley and - initially and exceptionally: Millie Small - all have one major, creative platform in common - a unique record label founded in 1959. This record label, in spite of being swallowed up 20 years ago by Polydor and subsequently enveloped into the Universal brand, remains a byword for independent creativity. This was Island Records, founded in Kingston, Jamaica by Chris Blackwell and despite a modest beginning pressing discs on borrowed equipment at a nearby radio station and scratching together some office space on a tiny budget, the business grew following a move to London in 1962, bringing with it a consolidation of the new wave of ska and American R&B which lit a fuse in drab late-fifties / early 60's Britain.

Historians will say of course, that it was with the Beatles and the Mersey Sound, that popular music suddenly woke up to itself after the initial flush of Mid-50's Rock & Roll had long since waned into a balladeering wasteland and a renewed mish-mash of tame hybrid styles geared to "family entertainment" - and of course there is no doubt that that the early Mersey sound crashed through all this big-time. But this was also a period of a massive cross-fertilisation of styles, and for Island Records, the first big event was to achieve a crossover for ska music into the mainstream via a crackling, populist yet unquestionably "different" sound - Millie Small's "My Boy Lollipop" - a smash hit in 1964 and a harbinger of things to come in terms of breaking new acts with styles which were uniquely ahead of the curve of what was acceptably mainstream.

Thus 3 years after this, Island was focussing on Blues-based rock music / psychedelic folk crossovers from a crop of white musicians including the extraordinary John Martyn as well as Free (a major act of the festival circuit), Spooky Tooth and Stevie Winwood's Traffic. Later came progressive bands such as King Crimson and Jethro Tull featuring a demonic Ian Anderson fronting up with that archetypal rock music instrument - the flute!

By the late 60's the label was signing a wave of eclectic folk acts including Dr Strangely Strange, Nick Drake and Fairport Convention - each hugely individual and influential - and shortly afterwards adding a strand of art-pop to the mix, via Bryan Ferry's Roxy Music.

But of course, it does not stop there. Moving back to its Jamaican roots, the label signed a band locally feted in hometown Jamaica called Bob Marley and the Wailers. Convinced that they had found a "black rock star as big as Hendrix", according to Chris Blackwell, Island Records invested heavily on his instincts and produced Marley's first album "Catch a Fire". History was made. Soon, Bob Marley was to become Island Records' biggest selling act.

Following this reassertion of reggae as a musical force, many reggae acts followed, including Burning Spear, Toots and the Maytals and Steel Pulse. But alongside these were also Robert Palmer, Grace Jones and Tom Waits - and more tellingly, from the Dublin connections which started with Dr Strangely Strange and which influenced the development of acts such as Thin Lizzy, Island signed a new and raw act called U2 , who were, of course, to become the stellar rock act of the 1980's and some would say beyond.

The influence of Island Records is thus there for all to see. When looking at the major waves of creative forces against the explosive backdrop of changing popular music tastes in the decades after the 1960's, attention is grabbed by labels such as Island Records. Such labels took the commercial chances which ensured a raft of creative flowerings, and regular, risk-embracing forays into uncharted waters of creativity.

See iconic Rock Music Photography, including several Island Records acts at Rockarchive.com

Postcard to Ethel Emily

1919 Postcard

This postcard was found in a lever arch file which also contained copies of legal papers in a wardrobe in my mother’s  spare room at Pulling Close, Faringdon in 2010. The papers all related to disposal of assets from the estate of her mother, Ethel Emily Smith. The card was sent to my grandmother (aged 17 in 1919) from her sister Elizabeth.

Such material in my mother’s archive is rare. Her photo albums are a jumble, with little clue as to dates and places. This card is a reminder of a life of expectations which seem remote from the austere family life in Marcham or Stanford-in-the-Vale in the 1930's and 1940's, to which my mother often referred.

Nice to see Elizabeth had 10 shillings for her birthday. Looking at  Measuring Worth

this was worth £20.50 based on historic RPI. Relative to the earnings of an average worker of the time, it was worth just over £76. As Elizabeth says ....  "Not so bad"...  

The gift was from "Mrs" - referring without doubt to the lady of the household where Elizabeth was in service at the age of 23.

1919 Postcard Message

Ethel Emily with Children, Berkshire 1930's

Images from a Shed

Here are a few pictures/sketches which emerged from my shed at Benjamins Cottage in Kelling in 2013. I confess to a certain nostalgia for the shed, the location, the quietude.

The song is “Shady Lane” by Snowgoose. I found it on the July 2012 “Now Hear This” compilation of new releases which came with the now sadly defunct “Word” music magazine. This was a fine publication: music old and new, with in-depth interviews and  deep knowledge delivered with panache.

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

“I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things steadying the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on the sea shore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles, before finally coming up against these trees and their two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming accross those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all.. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyesand imagined that this was the spot where everything I’d lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it..”

These are the words of Kathy H., the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. She reflects on her solitude after the demise of her lover Tommy, and her progression towards the gruesome destiny defined by society for her and her closest friends. When I lived on that same Norfolk coast, at the time believing that this place indeed was where I also had washed up,  I knew they had to belong, at least geographically, to this Miscellany.

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

This novel by Kazuo Ishiguro has details of boarding-school existence which captures some truths for those who have gone through the experience. The formation of cliques, the petty rivalries, the attachment to benevolent teachers, the management of feelings in a parent-free environment are all in the mix, and it is this mix that key individuals discover and explore their core humanity, in spite of the controlling regimentation of daily life. But the novel is not, of course, only or even at all about boarding school existence.

Kathy is a thirty-one year old carer. Those for whom she cares, as we soon discover, are a special set of people, of whom she is one. She is good at her job – she has been doing it for eleven years. But now she is about to give it up for what is, it turns out, to be the beginning of the last phase of her life.  We find her now, reflecting back over that life, and its unique experiences. She calls to mind her days at Hailsham, the idyllic boarding school she went to and which had a major influence on her later years.

But we soon find out, through arcane references and the odd vocabulary that peppers Kathy’s narrative, that Hailsham was no ordinary school, in fact not quite a school at all. It is recogniseable as a boarding school, but differs from the norm in fundamental ways.  A key difference, we soon learn, is that the children here have no parents to go home to, and so that important rhythm of mixing different worlds, is lost to them.

Some of the teachers are distant, uncomfortable with the children. The unspoken secret between controllers and controlled weighs heavy. The punishment for Miss Lucy, who one day reveals all to the class, is immediate dismissal. The class, however, is strangely muted at the revelation. It is a secret which remains unwelcome and quiety shelved as life, of a kind, continues.

But in this mix, Kathy’s friends Tommy and Ruth want to discover more about their destiny. As they grow older, they find themselves working through their emotional bonds which grow from the seeds planted in their time at Hailsham, and it is this love story of possessiveness and then self-sacrifice that provides the background to our exploration of the parallel political, social and emotional world of the novel.

Paths from a White Horse

As an introduction to an author of whom I had been hitherto ignorant, this one was a gentle and pleasant surprise. In April 2012 I was in the Salvation Army shop in Histon, near Cambridge. I believe us males, when pushed by wives or by circumstance into such stores, are known always to make a bee-line for the CD racks or the bookshelves. This wintery February day was no exception for me as I made for the far end of the warm mustiness within. My eyes scanned the row of books before me,. I checked out the covers on the few volumes which had been chosen for special display. As I did so, a rather fine-looking tome caught my gaze – a hardback with a deep green cover with the unmistakable image of the Uffington White Horse emblazoned upon it. I was looking at the cover of Peter Vansittart’s “Paths From a White Horse”, his memoirs.

I paid my 50p and felt enriched. All things associated with this iconic figure deliver to me warm feelings of connection.  Never mind that I had no idea who this man was, shame on me ( * … but see below). But the opening paragraph of the memoirs made sure I knew I was in good company. Here was a man who knows was it is like to have this creature embedded in his consciousness.

“1923: I was three. A White Horse lay bare and solitary, cut into a hillside. It changes whenever I return to it, like a book, painting, friend, but remains fixed in my imagination, a reminder of the multiple transformations that enthuse life. All is provisional. Memory contracts and enlarges as if in a dream that does not cease in the morning”.

Vansittart’s words resonate. Being North Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) bred, and with various members of my extended family living in villages in the Vale of the White Horse, how could they not? The image of this unique creature was and is everywhere: on milk bottles, vans, church magazines, dry cleaners’ shop fronts, cafes. Living away from the downland on which the hill is dominant, my early experience was always of the printed image, which beguiled me.

 It was to be many years before I could stand on the hill itself, for reasons which I still hardly understand. But travelling on the A420 from the age of six, in the truck  laden with pigs and driven by my father to the slaughterhouse at  Stratton-St-Margaret, I had glimpses on the unmistakable contours of the hill. On good days, I could make sense of the fleeting outline of the beast itself, always incomplete, always demanding a closer look. My father is not here to tell me why he never took time to take me to get that closer look. I had to wait for boarding-school days. But I have a lesson from Vansittart when I read this:

“Adults seemed strangely unaware of the White Horse, or reluctant to mention it. Here, already, was the first of the countless secrets that helped to awaken me. The Horse, existing without breathing or eating, though, in days of shadow and sun, it sometimes appeared to move, seemed mysteriously more real than an actual white horse assiduously cropping the pastures.”

In those few words, I am given permission to believe absolutely in the value of symbols.

White Horse Hill, Uffington June 2010

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* .. or perhaps not. This is the intro to the obituary by the Daily Telegraph

Peter Vansittart, who has died aged 88, was among the most prolific writers of historical fiction, with 15 such novels to his credit; but while he attracted much critical acclaim his books achieved only modest commercial success, none selling more than 3,000 copies.

“My novels have been appreciated, if not always enjoyed, more by critics than the reading public, which shows no sign of enjoying them at all,” he ruefully observed. “This must be partly due to my obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others.” >>> more

Read more in; Peter Vansittart Biography – Peter Vansittart comments: – London, Owen, York, and Historical – JRank Articles

Sanctus from the Missa Luba

 It is possible that you have to be of a certain age to know about this music, or at least, to know how people became aware of it in the late 1960s. It is a haunting and other-wordly sound; a Latin Mass based on traditional Congolese songs. It came into popular mainstream through the 1968 Lindsay Anderson movie “If…”, with Malcolm McDowell’s character Mick Travis playing it over and over , his personal soundtrack to an ethereal, adolescent cool in the buttoned-up world of the traditional public school. 

I remember finding a copy on a 45rpm single in the HMV record shop in London’s Oxford Street. I was 6 years out of boarding school, but had seen this movie whilst still ensconced in that peculiar world. I had to buy that disc, just for the memory, and I have it still.

About “If.. – the Movie

Thoughts After Thoreau

First written May 10th 2012 in Kelling, Norfolk

On recommendation from an old friend, I have taken to listening to Radio Four’s “Something Understood“. This week’s programme was dedicated to the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.   ( Link to synopsis here )

In listening, I enjoyed hearing that Thoreau achieved a balance, a middle ground, in the cabin he built near Walden Pond Massachusetts, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. The austerity evolving from ideas of transcendentalism always risks a disappearance into an abyss of anarchy otherwise. Yes it is true that too much attachment to civilisation and its “progress” eats away at the soul, but it is very necessary to be intelligent about how this is all managed in the time-bound state.

I was taken by the extract from the essay “Life Without Principle” which mentioned the “panting of the steam train” which interrupted his sleep and was a reminder of the push of progress and “business”.

That was then. Now, as I stand in my garden and rake the ground to prepare for the runner-bean sticks, I hear in the distance that self-same “panting”, by now a friendly “chuff-chuff” and short tooting whistle as the North Norfolk  Poppy Line steam train takes holidaymakers on their short journey to the beach and pubs of Sheringham.

This is the ”glory”  which Thoreau sought:  to see “mankind at leisure for once”.  The circle comes around, the hard prices have been paid, and the essence of human endeavour seems not so aggressively unhappy: it becomes a matter of attachment to the right bits, if one is to survive realistically and not as some kind of mad Eremite.

I reflect also in the same essay, on his discussion of the man walking in the woods being perceived either as a “loafer”  or as “industrious” . Will he enjoy the  beauty of the woods, or will he despoil them in the name of “business”? Making the earth “bald before its time” of course brings about this inevitable result  caused by too much industrious and enterprising endeavour.

This reminded me of Hopkins’ poem below      ( and yes, Hopkins is found among  myriad others, who were attuned to the essence of what was coming, as the industrial age developed apace,  and saw  its insidiousness weaving into the old rhythms of existence).

Binsey Poplars, felled 1879
Gerard Manley Hopkins

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

But actually, Hopkins was more of a Romantic than an Environmentalist. Poplars last only about 60 – 100 years or just a little more depending on type, and the ones at Binsey were replanted immediately. They  have similarly since been cropped and managed, as is required for trees which are prone to canker and other pests. I also read somewhere, that the wood from the Poplars in Hopkins’ day was taken and used for brake shoes on locomotives on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. So I guess this would have further dismayed the Romantic.

But I am sure Hopkins would have enjoyed the sound of similar steam trains wafting across the fields from Weybourne yesterday afternoon.