A Son of the Rock

The song was of course written by Cat Stevens who transmogrified from a writer/performer of pop in the 60s to an acoustic singer-songwriter when they were in vogue in the 70s, then gave up music for religion (Islam) before returning in the noughties as Yusuf Islam – and now just Yusuf.

I bought his albums Tea For The Tillerman and Teaser And The Firecat at the time.

Ever since his criticism of Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, where he appeared to endorse the fatwa, I’ve never been able to listen to them. I couldn’t bear to.

In 1998 it was great to hear P P Arnold’s voice again as she provided the second vocal in this duet with Ocean Coloured Scene.

Ocean Colour Scene & P P Arnold: It’s a Beautiful Thing

Keith Emerson who died earlier this week was one of the arch proponents of Prog Rock. I’ve already featured several of his recordings with that most unlikely of progenitors of the form, P P Arnold’s backing band The Nice. America, where his reworkings of classical pieces in a rock style perhaps began and which has a good claim, in its extravagance, to be the first truly prog track, its B-side, The Diamond Hard Blue Apples Of The Moon and their first single The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack.

It was, though, Emerson’s work with Greg Lake and Carl Palmer as Emerson Lake and Palmer (aka ELP) that solidified his reputation as one of the “rock dinosaurs” that punk rock sought to consign to oblivion.

Here’s a live performance of part of ELP’s take on Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Promenade and the Gnome

Keith Noel Emerson: 2/11/1944 – 10/3/2016. So it goes.

Coincidences and confluences. P P Arnold, who was the backing singer on The Small Faces’ Tin Soldier which I featured recently, also had a great influence on The Nice whom I mentioned several months ago now. They were formed to be her backing band. However they quickly broke off to do their own thing.

Angel Of The Morning is the object of the most spectacular mishearing of a lyric I have ever encountered. Someone I was acquainted with once asked the good lady and myself why the singer (Angel has been covered by just about everybody – I think it was the Merrilee Rush version) was asking her lover to, “just brush my teeth before you leave me.”

It is of course, “just touch my cheek.”

And yes, Jim, I did split an infinitive up there.

P P Arnold: Angel of the Morning

Just brush my teeth before you leave me….

Almax* recently featured this song on his blog – which for legal reasons (he’s a lawyer) is sadly restricted to only a few readers.

I was moved to comment that Tin Soldier surely has the single best musical intro to a pop song ever.

It deserves wider hearing. This version has the added benefit of P P Arnold on backing vocals, as did the recording.

As a result of his posting another of Alastair’s readers recommended this, Song Of A Baker, for which embedding is disabled. But you can follow the link.

*Almax’s The Defibrillator blog – on my sidebar – is open to all but he tends not to post new stuff there.

I had a strange dream on Friday night/Saturday morning, during which I was crossing a road in Dunfermline and was honked at by a utility vehicle, a fire engine or some such. The weird bit about this was its horn sounded the musical phrase:- Daaah, da-da-da! dah, da-da-da! da-da, dah.

In my dream I recognised it was from a song and so while the dream was still running I kept on humming the tune until I got to the last line of the verse – when I knew what it was. And I felt great just to have worked it out. (Bear in mind I was still asleep.)

The song is The Diamond Hard Blue Apples Of The Moon, written and performed by The Nice, formed as P P Arnold’s backing group but now better known as the first rise to prominence of Keith Emerson of ELP notoriety fame. It was the B-side of America, their first (only?) hit.

It’s a fine piece of psychedelia with TARDIS-like sound effects and some great bits of mellotron work but features almost impenetrable lyrics which a quick search on the internet can not shed light on.

The nearest I can get for the first verse is:-

The ??? stroked circles from the heads of all the heroes
And confusions caused by echoes
That’s not ???? for us to see
The sound of magic carpets (cobblers?)
Suddenly be seeking for the

Here it is on You Tube.

Can anyone decipher them? The lyrics, that is.

Edit (24/4/10): I see the original clip has been taken down.

Here is a new link.

The Nice: Diamond Hard Blue Apples of the Moon

Edit (20/7/17): I found the new link also inoperable so replaced it with the one above.

Wordsworth Classics. (In The Years & Between the Acts.) 2012, 256 p, including x p Notes and a xix p Introduction to both books by Linden Peach. Between the Acts was first published in 1941.

This was Woolf’s last novel, published posthumously. A prefatory note by her husband said it was completed but not corrected nor revised, though he believes she would not have made any large alterations. I beg to differ.

Like The Years (with which it is combined in this edition) this is more straightforward than Woolf’s earlier novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. That doesn’t do much to recommend it though as what we are given here is a portrait of tiresome upper-middle class people doing and saying upper-middle class things but that could perhaps be borne were it not for the fact that the main part of the book is a struggle to get through as it contains a blow-by-blow account of a local pageant in all its lengthy tediousness.

In Linden Peach’s Introduction to Between the Acts he asserts that the novel is interrogating Englishness. If it does, it is only Englishness of a very narrow sort.

The text mentions an incidental character by describing him as “a Jew”, as if that said all there was to say about him.

Sensitivity note: as well as the gratuitous remark about “a Jew” we also encounter the phrases “worked like a nigger” and “white man’s burden.”

Pedant’s corner:- again the Notes explain references of which a British reader would be aware; Somerset House etc. Otherwise; “said Mrs Manresa ogling Candlish, as if he were a real man” (would be better punctuated as ‘said Mrs Manresa, ogling Candlish as if he were a ….’,) “it was a mellay” (usually spelled melé or mêlé,) “Mrs Rogers’ chin” (Mrs Rogers’s.) In the Notes: Sohrab and Rustum is said to be by Matthew Arnold. While he did write such a poem (and Woolf’s characters would undoubtedly have been familiar with it) the original story was in fact from Shanameh, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh) an epic poem by the Persian  Ferdowsi (Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi,) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdowsi) Daladier is said to have been Prime Minister of France from 1838-1840 (it was 1938-40.) “Il Rissorgimento” (Risorgimento.)

And on Wednesday it was the turn of Jeff Beck to leave us too early. He was one of that group of English exponents of the electric guitar which sprang up in the early to mid-sixties. But Beck was the electric guitarist’s electric guitarist.

Sadly he never gained the commercial success on his own account to match his status with his peers. He really only had the one hit and that track, Hi-Ho Silver Lining, wasn’t representative of Beck’s musical tastes.

I featured that hit here and his single Tallyman here. As the Jeff Beck Group he also had a hit with Donovan and the song Goo Goo Barabajagal (Love is Hot.)

His earliest brush with fame came with The Yardbirds. His guitar was a major part of their psychedelic sound.

This clip of the group performing Over, Under, Sideways, Down has a remastered stereo edit laid over the footage.

The Yardbirds: Over Under Sideways Down

Geoffrey Arnold (Jeff) Beck: 24/6/1944 – 10/1/2023. So it goes.

This is Nina Allan’s response to the BBC’s list of 100 Books that shaped our world.

As usual the ones in bold I have read. (18. 19 if John Banville’s Shroud and Eclipse count as two.) Some others are on my tbr pile.

Borka: the Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers by John Burningham

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Stig of the Dump by Clive King

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

Thursday’s Child by Noel Streatfield

‘Adventure’ series by Willard Price

The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones

Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

‘UNEXA’ series by Hugh Walters

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

‘Changes’ trilogy by Peter Dickinson

‘Tripods’ trilogy by John Christopher

The Dolls’ House by Rumer Godden

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

Watership Down by Richard Adams

The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Pavane by Keith Roberts

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

The Drought by J. G. Ballard

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Search for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Ada by Vladimir Nabokov

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

The Affirmation by Christopher Priest

Midnight Sun by Ramsey Campbell

Ghost Story by Peter Straub

The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Personality by Andrew O’Hagan

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

The Gunslinger by Stephen King

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

Shroud/Eclipse by John Banville

My Tango with Barbara Strozzi by Russell Hoban

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

Shriek: an afterword by Jeff VanderMeer

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Glister by John Burnside

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

The Kills by Richard House

A Russian Novel by Emmanuel Carrère

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano

The Dry Salvages by Caitlin R. Kiernan

In the Shape of a Boar by Lawrence Norfolk

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

The Accidental by Ali Smith

Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn

F by Daniel Kehlmann

Straggletaggle by J. M. McDermott

The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

What is Not Yours is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble

All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park

Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson

The Infatuations by Javier Marias

Outline by Rachel Cusk

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates

This is Memorial Device by David Keenan

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

Lanark by Alasdair Gray

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

Attrib. by Eley Williams

Berg by Ann Quin

When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

Munich Airport by Greg Baxter

Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn

Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz

The Sing of the Shore by Lucy Wood

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Dedalus, 2014, 153 p. Translated from the Italian Il Cane di Deo by Judith Landry

Well. This is an odd concoction. Perhaps as far removed from Marani’s New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs as it is possible to get.

The dog of the title is Domingo Salazar, an orphan of the 2010 Haiti earthquake brought to Italy by the fathers of the Holy Cross, a graduate of the Papal Police Academy whose duties are to see to it that the laws of Holy Mother Church are respected and to work for the Church’s worldwide spread. The world he works in is not our own. It is an altered history. Perhaps that should read as an altered future. In it the papacy of Joseph Ratzinger promulgated a new Catholic Catechism and Italy has become a theocracy. (The book was written before, in our world, Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, resigned as Pope. Here he obviously didn’t do so and was not succeeded by Francis.)

As might be expected this Church takes a hard line. “The chief sins against chastity are adultery, masturbation, fornication, pornography, rape and homosexual acts.” The most unsavoury part of this new dispensation however is that the dying are given only so much palliative care in hospital before it is withdrawn; so that they may experience some of Christ’s suffering.

Salazar has been working to sabotage the secular state, spread distrust in science, and intercept the anti-papist refugees from Italy, but he has been recalled to Rome to track down an abortionist doctor named Ivan Zago and uncover euthanasiasts who would deny the dying their pain. The events of the story occur in the lead-up to the ceremony of canonisation of Benedict XVI in which the final scene is set.

Some of the necessary information dumping is provided by extracts from Salazar’s diary (not quite a clunky decision by Marani as the diary is read partway through the book by Salazar’s vicar.) He has such thoughts as, ‘No religion is better than Islam at cloaking faith in reason. Muslims use reason to reveal the intelligent order which pervades creation, and that is the way to disarm science,’ and, ‘The world lived in peace until it rediscovered Greek thought and, with it, the mania for experiment. To experiment means ceasing to put one’s trust in the created world, but wanting to take it apart. …… Now our task must be to bury knowledge. To forget it … to lead people down the wrong track.’ He writes, ‘Our fight, therefore, must be to demolish science. In Africa, we intercept anti-AIDS vaccines and replace them with ampoules containing water. The illness is spreading, and man is losing his faith in science.’ The attitude of Arnold of Citeaux pervades the theology. (This is perhaps not a novel that could have been written by someone not from a nominally Catholic country.)

Salazar’s bizarre longing for a merger of the three faiths of Christianity, Islam and Judaism leads to him being accused of the sins of polytheism and idolatry. He tells his inquisitor that as he was endeavouring to convert unbelievers the word, rather, is proselytism. An odd flavour of the 1930s somehow pervades the sections set in the convent hospital of San Filippo Neri. There is also a minor strand about the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ which prove men and animals have much in common in terms of feelings and a chimpanzee which has been shown capable of speech – in Swahili as it happens.

It’s certainly all interesting but marred rather by a multiplicity of viewpoint characters and a tendency for each new section to begin with the reader not knowing who that character is.

Once again Judith Landry’s translation is excellent even if in the “thriller” moments it tends to cliché (‘hot pursuit,’ ‘right on his heels’) but it must be difficult to render such passages in a more inventive manner. Whether or not euthanasiast is a direct reflection of Marani’s Italian I don’t know but it is certainly a better term than the more straightforward euthanist would be since it carries the overtone of enthusiasm.

Pedant’s corner:- a cleaning women (woman,) Hippocrates’ (Hippocrates’s,) “he sat down as the table” (at the table,) “‘he can hardly breath’” (breathe,) Mercedes’ (Mercedes’s,) “the group had been virtually decimated” (the sense is not “reduced by a tenth”,) “which from which it was separated” (from which it was separated,) Kibale (on first two mentions: it’s afterwards spelled Kibele,) a missing full stop, “The crowd were holding their breath” (was holding its breath.)
In the “Praise for Diego Marani” section at the end:- ignornace ( ignorance,) plus three [or arguably four] in one quote – it’s (its,) ones (one’s,) “the means by which an individual identifies themselves and how they identify with others” (an individual: so him -or her- self; plus, how he or she identifies with others.)