Stille Nacht (Silent Night) by Pee Wee Ellis.

Neil Young - Harvest Time (Official Film Clip)

R.I.P Christine McVie. I'd Rather Go Blind (1969)

I Did It Otway.

The night after I got home from London, I had a call from a neighbour Phil. “John Otway is playing in Trowbridge tomorrow night if you fancy going”. “Ok, that sounds like fun, I’ll see you in the pub at 6.30”. The next evening, we caught a taxi from The Crown to the railway station and hopped on the train for the short journey to Trowbridge. The Village Pump is a little folk club in the yard of The Lamb pub which has somehow managed to survive for about fifty years and has hosted some great musicians during that time. This isn’t the first time I have seen Otway perform. I think apart from Van Morrison I have seen him more times than any other act, often by chance, such as tonight. When we arrived, the pub was absolutely packed, not with Otway fans, but with football fans because tonight England were playing USA in the World Cup, and everyone wanted to watch it on the big screen. We managed to get a drink and went outside into the fresh air of the yard. After a few minutes who should also emerge from the pub but John Otway himself. 

We had a little chat and Otway kindly signed a ticket which I had brought along. It was from his 50^th birthday party concert at the London Palladium which me and Kim went to in 2002. We talked about that great concert which Otway remembered vividly. Dr Feelgood were also on the bill that night, and sadly their great guitar player Wilko Johnson died this week. He was great friends with Otway who paid a little tribute to Wilko during his show this evening. Then it was time to take our seats. We found a table at the back, but this club is so tiny everyone gets a great view.

I didn’t write down the set-list, but Otway played two sets of about 45 minutes each with an interval in the middle. As well as the songs, there is also lots of crazy hilarious banter where Otway tells stories about his long career. He began with the first of his two hit singles which was Really Free, and anyone who watched The Old Grey Whistle Test on the BBC in the 1970s will never forget his performance of this song, and Cheryl’s Going Home which he also performed in Trowbridge. He also sang his other hit Bunsen Burner which took me right back to that magical night at the Palladium when he sang it for the fans in the pub across the road. Another great song was Beware Of The Flowers which was the flipside of Really Free and I think should have been a huge hit in its own right. Louisa on a horse from his first album with Wild Willy Barrett was another highlight in Trowbridge, as was Josephine, and I Can’t Complain from the equally great Deep and Meaningless album. 

I also enjoyed The Middle of Winter. A personal favourite of mine is the poignant Poetry & Jazz which shows what a great lyric writer Otway can be. Of the more humorous songs, there were I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor sung in the style of Bob Dylan, Crazy Horses by The Osmonds which featured a manic solo on the theremin, Blockbuster by The Sweet, House of the Rising Sun which involved a lot of audience participation. Body Talk where he had microphones all over himself. He finished with the Wild Willy Barrett song Head Butts in which he repeatedly head butted the microphone, which must have hurt. During the interval I bought some Otway Christmas cards at the merchandise stall which were 5 for £2.00 and Otway’s biography called I Did It Otway, Regrets, I’ve Had a Few!. Otway signed it for me. I didn’t realise that the price for the book had been reduced, so when I got my change I said, “I wasn’t expecting that much change”. “You haven’t read the book yet”, Otway replied, which I thought was funny. I got Phil to take a picture of me and Otway. So, thanks to Phil for getting me a ticket, and thanks to the one and only John Otway for a great night in Trowbridge.

Me & Otway.

A Visit To London.

It was pouring with rain on Monday morning as I headed for the railway station to catch the 10.37 train to London. Little did I realise what lay ahead. All went well until the train stopped at Basingstoke. We waited and waited, and the train didn’t move. After about half an hour the conductor made an announcement. “We apologise for the delay which is due to a signal fault”. I had arranged to meet my friends Jacky & Bill at Waterloo Station at 12.44, so I phoned them and said we had a delay.

 Another half an hour went by, and we were still in flaming Basingstoke. Luckily for me I was reading a book about Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hahn which stopped me from getting angry and losing my cool. Finally, they asked us to get off the train and make our way to platform 4 where another train would take us to Waterloo. We eventually arrived at Waterloo two hours late. It was great to see my friends who had waited patiently for me. Then we caught a bus to Dulwich where I was grateful to have two pints of cider and relax. I had enough of travelling for one day, so we just stayed locally that evening and went for a meal in a place called The Great Exhibition which is named after the Great Exhibition which was held in 1851 at the nearby Crystal Palace.

On Tuesday the weather had improved. It was a very pleasant sunny day, so after watching a World Cup game we went for a walk around Dulwich Park. London has some wonderful parks, and the trees look magnificent at this time of year. It was near here in Peckham Rye that William Blake claimed to have seen the Prophet Ezekiel under a bush, and he was probably ten years old when he had a vision of angels in a tree. His biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, told the story: 'sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every branch. Returned home he related the incident, and only through his mother's intercession escaped a thrashing from his honest father, for telling a lie.' A month later, he had another vision of angels walking towards him through the rye.

Sadly, I didn’t see any angels, but I took quite a few photos of the trees. I got Jacky to take my photo under an oak tree that is classed as one of the ‘Great trees of London’. After that we had a look at Dulwich Picture Gallery which was opened to the public in 1817 and houses one of the country's finest collections of Old Masters, especially rich in French, Italian, and Spanish Baroque paintings, and in British portraits from Tudor times to the 19th century. I found some of the sculptures in the grounds quite fascinating as well. On the way back home, we passed an old burial ground where the village stocks stood in the middle ages. That evening we went to the local pub and then went home to watch another World Cup game.

On Wednesday morning I said cheerio to Jacky and Bill after my too short visit and caught the 175 bus back to Waterloo. I had plenty of time before my train, so had a look at the National Windrush Monument, which was unveiled in June 2022 by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge. The monument memorialises the British West Indian immigrants who came to the United Kingdom on board HMT Empire Windrush in 1948, who subsequently became known as the Windrush generation. The inscription accompanying the monument includes a poem "You Called..and we came" written by Professor Laura Serrant OBE. I must say that it is a wonderful and moving tribute to the people who came to this country after the war to help rebuild Britain. It just seems a shame that it took so long for them to be recognised. Then I caught the 12.20 train home, and was grateful that this return journey was relatively uneventful.

The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan.

I finished reading the new book by Bob Dylan last night. It is called The Philosophy of Modern Song and is Bob’s first book since the autobiographical Chronicles in 2004. I learned a lot from Chronicles, and this new book has been even more educational for me. A beautiful book of 340 pages containing 66 essays by Bob about songs that mean something to him. It is a collection of pieces Bob wrote over a ten-year period. The book is dedicated to Doc Pomus who along with his song writing partner Mort Shuman wrote dozens of hit songs, many of which are covered in this book. As well as the great writing, the book is lavishly illustrated with some stunning pictures and photographs. The front cover is a good example. I recognised Little Richard and Eddie Cochran, but who was the mystery woman with them? It turns out that her name is Alis Lesley. I looked her up on Wikipedia and YouTube. (See video below) Apparently, she was briefly famous in 1957 when she was styled as ‘The female Elvis Presley’. Her real name was Alice, but she changed it to Alis to sound more like Elvis. So, even before I opened the book, I had learned something.

That is typical of the whole book. As well as writing about many singers and songs I was very familiar with, Bob has introduced me to musicians and songs that I didn’t know existed. Songs like Take Me From This Garden of Evil by Jimmy Wages. He was a rockabilly singer who went to school in Tupelo, Mississippi with Elvis Presley. He recorded a number of songs for Sam Phillips at Sun records, but none of them were released at the time. Every song mentioned in this book that I hadn’t previously heard I looked for on youtube and listened to, which added to the pleasure of reading the book. Detroit City is a song I remember by Tom Jones in the 1960s, but now, thanks to Bob I much prefer the original by Bobby Bare. Other singers and songs I have discovered from this book include Johnnie & Jack who sang Poison Love, Old Violin by Johnny Paycheck, A Certain Girl by Ernie K-Doe, Feel So Good by Sonny Burgess and many, many, more.

As well as talking about the history of the songs, Bob uses them as a starting point for setting off on long stream of consciousness type explorations of all manner of subjects, often in quite nightmarish detail. For instance, he imagines the song There Stands The Glass as being the story of a war veteran who has committed atrocities, described in harrowing detail. We know Bob has a very vivid imagination from songs such as Desolation Row, but some passages in this book go even further. It is no wonder Bob once said, ‘If my thought-dreams could be seen, They’d probably put my head in a guillotine’. He uses the Pete Seeger song Waist Deep In The Big Muddy to comment on how people get led into all sorts of messy situations by inept leaders. Bob doesn’t take sides though, he just observes, and doesn’t offer solutions. In the same essay he mentions ‘whining leftys’ and ‘badgering right-wingers’. He does show a lot of sympathy for the native American people though as shown in another song I hadn’t heard before Doesn’t Hurt Anymore by John Trudell. 

When looking at the song War by Edwin Starr he says that the people who vote the masters of war into power are just as guilty as the perpetrators. Bob says that if you want to see a war criminal, then just look in the mirror. He looks at relationships with the same world-weary eye. When discussing Cheaper To Keep Her by Johnnie Taylor he casts an eye at the multi-billion-dollar divorce industry racket, and it sounds like he is speaking from bitter personal experience. He also reflects ruefully on old age and a youth driven world in Old and In The Way by Charlie Poole. I was quite impressed by Bob’s knowledge of British history, When talking about Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood he mentioned the case of Derek Bentley whose words ‘Let him have it Chris’ were misunderstood by his accomplice and led to him being hanged for the shooting of a London policeman in 1953. I didn’t think Americans would have much interest in British criminal history.

When you look at the songs covered here, you get the feeling that Bob likes early rock & roll and soul records. Also, the great American songbook with songs by the likes of Perry Como and Bing Crosby being studied. Bob seems quite sympathetic to Colonel Tom Parker as well, who a lot of people blame for Elvis’s demise. Although there are essays about the likes of Cher, Nina Simone, Judy Garland, and Rosemary Clooney I couldn’t help but notice that the overwhelming majority of songs were by male artists. Also, as you know I’m a big Van Morrison fan, so I was hoping that Bob might talk about some Van songs. Sadly, Van only gets one tiny mention when Bob is talking about Willie Nelson. Bob is obviously a huge Willie Nelson fan, and he puts him on a par with Hank Williams. 

One thing is certain, which is that Bob and Van were both influenced by the same people. There are pieces about Little Walter, Mose Allison, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, and many other artists who we know Van admired. There are also songs such as All In The Game, There Stands The Glass, and Your Cheatin' Heart which Van has covered. I have really enjoyed reading this book and listening to the songs for the last few days. Bob Dylan fans will love it, but so will anyone with an interest in the history of popular music. Highly recommended.

ALIS LESLEY - So Afraid (1957) Unissued Recording