The good lady told me she caught Mike d’Abo (the former Manfred Mann frontman, successor to Paul Jones) on TV last week talking about one of the songs he wrote, Handbags And Gladrags. She got the impression it had been written for Rod Stewart but I said I was sure Chris Farlowe had recorded it first.

D’Abo apparently said he had to write a woodwind part for Stewart but since he doesn’t write music he had to have someone transcribe it.

Whatever, the song has since become more widely known as a result of The Stereophonics recording and the version which was used as the theme music for Ricky Gervais’s “The Office” TV series.

I dislike the Stewart and Stereophonics versions both. (I can’t remember “The Office” one clearly. I didn’t watch that show.)

In theirs the relevant lyric is rendered as:-
“the handbags and the gladrags that your grandad had to sweat to buy you,”
which is okay but implies a willing benevolence on the grandad’s part and is rather sweet.

However it means something completely different – and much less damning – compared to the original:-
“the handbags and the gladrags that your grandad had to sweat so you could buy,”
which is more redolent of the wastrel ways of an ungrateful grandchild.

This is Chris Farlowe’s version (from 1968):-

There is, by the way, a connection of sorts between Chris Farlowe and myself. But I don’t want to make too much of it as I have read he has become something of a right winger and BNP adherent. (If this is not the case I apologise to him.)

There are no prizes for getting the connection as it’s pretty obvious.

Orbit, 2009, 485p

The author is another member of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle and as a consequence I have known him for many years. He is also one of nature’s good guys. The usual caveat therefore applies to this review.

The Seeds Of Earth, part one of Humanity’s Fire, is set several centuries after an alien race called the Swarm had attacked the solar system. Three colony starships, Hyperion, Tenebrosa and Forrestal were sent out on random courses to preserve at least some of humanity from imminent destruction. The descendants of the Hyperion emigrés (of Scots, Russian and Scandinavian extraction) live on Darien, a planet which has a lush habitable moon, Nivyesta, to which many of Darien’s natives, the Uvovo, have moved. Darien’s galactic neighbourhood is also inhabited by a congeries of races some of whom have designs on the planet. The novel proper starts when contact from Earth – saved from the Swarm by one of the competing galactic powers – is finally established.

Aside: Would colonists of Scots descent really accept the name Darien for a new world? Given the doleful associations of the real Darien Adventure I would doubt it.

In Cobley’s scenario there is a lot of setting up to do. Back-story and explication are somewhat too in evidence in the early chapters. He uses a multiply stranded structure – each chapter has its own narrator whom we return to by (irregular) turns, with the inevitable corollary that the story is fragmented and, as is usual with this device, the reader develops a preference for some viewpoints over others.

Cobley has a lot of plot to cram in. As a result many of the scenes – especially the action ones – feel a touch rushed but the political machinations of the alien incomers to Darien are believably Machiavellian and redolent of Great Power activities in our own, or any, time.

The story only really gains momentum in Part 2 when we meet Kao Chih – one of the Tenebrosa Émigrés (kept in a kind of indenture on a secluded world far from Darien) – who is sent to Darien as a secret emissary. Much of the latter part of the novel deals with his misadventures en route. His arrival on Darien is, though, crucial to the dénouement.

The book seems to stop rather than finish, leaving rather a lot unresolved. There is a strong unexplored hint that the Forrestal also managed to achieve a successful planetfall, for example. Seeds Of Earth is the first of a trilogy, of course, which may provide an explanation for the loose ends.

An eclectic mixture of Space Opera, quasi-police procedural and thriller, complete with bizarre alien transformations, ancient artefacts and their attendant guardian technology, plus betrayals galore, Seeds Of Earth has perhaps rather too much incident – even if there is a particularly fine edge-of-atmosphere dogfight in the ultimate chapter – but space for character development and exploration is necessarily restricted.

I will, though, be looking out for the second in the Humanity’s Fire sequence, Orphaned Worlds.

Scottish FA Cup 3^rd round replay. The Rock, 5/12/09.

It’s deja vu all over again.

No big, money-spinning game after all, then.

We kept them down to one goal but it’s disappointing that we couldn’t score against them in 270 minutes of football.

Back to the league survival grind on Tuesday night.

No sooner had the tedious process finished than Motty was at it again. England willl win it, he said.

At least Alan Shearer and Mark Lawrenson went for Spain and Brazil – though, historically, Spain have an even poorer World Cup record than England. (Not so in European Championships, of course.)

There was a degree of unseemly euphoria at England’s “good” draw and first place in the group was taken for granted. Already it was so-and-so (possibly Germany, though the likely alternatives, Australia – even Serbia and Ghana – could be tough prospects) in the last sixteen and France in the quarter finals.

Let us be clear about this. The USA are no mugs. They could have won the Confederations Cup last summer. If the USA play to form, England will be stretched to beat them. Algeria beat the African Nations champions, Egypt, to qualify and Slovenia may well spring a surprise.

[By the way, judging by how France struggled to qualify, they will only get to the last sixteen if Uruguay and South Africa are mince. I expect at least one of them to be tougher.]

As for the quarter finals, that will be your lot. Overseas it usually is.

I posted recently about the availability of Fergus Bannon’s novel Judgement.

Thanks to Jim Steel I now know Fergus has a website.

I’ve also put it on my side bar.

The story Fergus had in Interzone those many moons ago whose title I struggled to remember was Burning Brightly. Worth a read.

English SF and fantasy writer Rob Holdstock died on Sunday.

His early work was SF. Eye Among The Blind and Earthwind are on my bookshelves along with the short story collection In The Valley Of The Statues and the anthologies he co-edited, Stars Of Albion, Other Edens, Other Edens II and Other Edens III.

He moved into fantasy and the novel Mythago Wood garnered much acclaim – not to mention the BSFA award for 1984 – but I found it not to my taste. He published other works set in the same location of Ryhope Wood, including Lavondyss which I have had for years and not yet read, as well as other fantasy books.

I’ll need, now, to seek out his other SF novels Necromancer and especially Where Time Winds Blow which Ian Sales praises highly.

Robert Holdstock 2/8/48-29/11/09. So it goes.