Copyright © 2005 Martin Newell Pepys 0.1 Blogware © Steve Dix
There was a Christmas TV ad some years ago, which, for some reason lodged in my mind. In the advert, in a posh country cottage, a highly-polished dining table was being laid and the candles lit. In the background, through the leaded light windows, seen in soft focus, a woman rider returning from her ride was leading her horse up the slope to the house. The camera panned back to the table, and its crystal glasses. As a bottle came into shot, a plummy adenoidal voice intoned: Christmas and there are so many heppy things to do. Time to uncork the Harvey's Bristol Cream...
It caught my warped imagination. Each year, when I step out onto the stage at Colchester Arts Centre's annual Christmas Poetry Bash, I sidle up to the microphone, give it a long pause, leer at the front row and begin, Christmas... There then follows a series of fairly dodgy intimations of how events may progress after the sherry has been drunk: I will telephone first thing and apologise to...the stable-hand in question. I'll spare you the details but it's an ice-breaker. I also dress up: as a top-hatted Dickensian rouι, or as a raddled old glam rocker. Were you a glam rocker, for long? they'll ask. Aye, sir. Man and girl. This year, I went Georgian.
I can't remember exactly which year it was that the Christmas Poetry at Colchester Arts Centre began. John Cooper Clarke and I had been doing some kind of pre Christmas gig together since the mid 1990s. The writer, Ross Sutherland, then a Colchester sixth former joined us as an understudy in 1997. 'Young' Luke Wright came on board shortly after that. The four of us have been doing the event in its present form for at least ten years. It's become a tradition now. It's the hometown gig and usually, the last one before Christmas, when we all finally get home to hang our heads I'm sorry, that last word should have read 'hats'.
The Legendary Georgian Fop, Sir Nartin Mule
I think the most extraordinary thing about it, is that three hundred or so people will come out in late December weather to hear and see poetry being performed. It's not purely poetry, though more a hybrid of poetry and comedy. It is a fact that the English generally prefer their poets dead. The type of poets who can fill a hall are rare. Examples are Roger McGough, John Cooper Clarke, Simon Armitage and best of all, the goddess-like Pam Ayres whom J.C.C and I both thought should have been appointed Poet Laureate two laureateships ago. Never mind, though. She can fill theatres a thing which most of us can't.
Luke Wright and Ross Sutherland, both of them whey-faced Coggeshall teenagers only a decade or so ago are now the Poster Boys of Poetry. All of London and indeed, Edinburgh know their names. Ex-Salfordian, John Cooper Clarke has lived around here for over two decades now. He likes it and Colchester loves him being here. I am also from round here. That's Colchester, in Essex. Burned our own library down, we did. Both the books destroyed. Shame. Only one had been coloured in. Ha ha. And yet, each year, four local poets will pack the former St Mary's Church with people. Cultural wasteland are we? Well, come and have a go if you think you're bard enough.
Four Faces of Poetry
John Cooper Clarke, is about as revered and famous a poet as it's possible to be without actually being dead. In recent years, even the cartoonist Ralph Steadman caricatured him, for heaven' sake. John should be in Coronation Street, really an occasional cameo as Vera Duckworth's long-lost son. He could just appear as himself cheerily telling gags and shuffling round to the betting shop in his carpet slippers. I eat a third of a Mars Bar a day to help me rest. he'll tell you. Asked recently by someone, if he'd come across, '...that alternative Chinese remedy for pain, where they stick needles in you,' John asked, What? Heroin?
Declaiming
In 2008, after I'd been badgering the Arts Centre supremo, Anthony Roberts for two years, about borrowing the pantomime cow from the Mercury Theatre, he returned to me: It's no-go on the cow I'm afraid but they'll lend us their old camel. The upshot of this, that year, was that while Johnny Clarke was on stage doing his stuff I stood in the back office helping a slightly-tipsy Luke and Ross to struggle into this camel costume. We even located the levers inside it which make it roll its eyes or clack its teeth. I led it through the backstage darkness and out onto the stage behind the unsuspecting Bard of Salford, now in full flow. To give John credit, he didn't jump. But I could see that he was taken aback. The camel took an ungainly bow and we exited. The audience loved it.
At the end of John's set, we all went back out again. I got on the piano, John got the microphone and we struck up Santa Claus Is Coming To Town unrehearsed and in the wrong key. Luke and Ross, now over-emboldened with Christmas cheer, tried to make the camel do a dance and went lumbering over sideways into a chaotic heap. Stage and audience were in uproar. That was absolutely brilliant. One of the best gigs ever. I'm still waiting for John to get me back.
Things may come and things may go but the art school dance goes on forever.
Pete Brown
THREE BONZOS AND A PIANO
Age shall not weary them... Last weekend I went to University of Essex Lakeside Theatre to watch three founder members of the Bonzo Dog Band in show called Three Bonzos and A Piano. Percussionist Sam Spoons and the sax players Roger Ruskin Spear and Rodney Slater are now cantering nimbly around in their late sixties. With the help of Dave Glasson, their piano player, and the veteran Liverpool Scene guitarist, Andy Roberts, they perform a two-part, two hour show of musical comedy. You would be better off seeing it yourself, rather than me wasting column inches attempting to describe it. An almost full house many of us of a certain age watched with a mixture of hilarity and disbelief as five fit old geezers scampered their way down a musical by-way pretty much untrodden this past 30 years. If you get a chance to see this show, go and do so because I promise you, there is absolutely nothing else on the circuit like it.
Sam Spoons plays the Dummy whilst seated on Roger Ruskin-Spear.
The stage explosions of yesteryear fell victim to Health & Safety, long ago of course, but there are still Roger Spear's unreliable robots, the gadgets, the gags and best of all, some terrific musicianship on offer. With the Bonzos during their maytime, you were never really sure if they were great musicians deliberately playing sloppily, or inspired improvers punching above their musical weight. Whatever the truth back then, the chaps are certainly at the top of their game now.
Like so many of their 1960s contemporaries Lennon, Clapton and Townshend for instance the members of the Bonzos came into pop music via the London art schools. Interestingly, two of the original band also had Essex roots. The late Vivian Stanshall grew up in Westcliff, while Neil Innes although his family moved away from the county was born in Danbury.
The Bonzos, who honed their talents on the pub and cabaret circuit, came to national notice in the late 1960s, just as pop was beginning to take itself rather too seriously. Somewhere along the way, pop groups stopped writing ingenious songs about meeting girlfriends at rainy bus stops and began instead devising concepts and epics. Suddenly everyone wanted to be Stravinsky. On a 1967 song by Traffic, for example, Hole In My Shoe, a musical interlude occurs and a little girl's voice is heard saying: We climbed on the back of a giant eagle and flew through a crack in the clouds, to a place where happiness reigned all the year round and music played ever so loudly.
L to R : Dave Glasson, Rodney Slater, Roger Spear and Sam Spoons.
The Bonzos reinterpreted this in their own fashion. Over the same piece of music, Bonzos vocalist, Vivian Stanshall intones poshly:In September of 1937, I bought my wife a new electric iron. She's still using it to this very day and it's never needed repair. In the grim and great-coated early days of prog rock, a skeptical few of us found this sort of thing endlessly funny. The Bonzos served as a safety valve in a musical engine rapidly beginning to overheat on its own self-importance.
And yet, nobody liked the band more than the very people whom they were lampooning their fellow musicians. The Beatles and Eric Clapton for instance, loved them. The Bonzos were invited to appear in The Beatles film, Magical Mystery Tour. Clapton's supergroup, Cream, had the Bonzos as special guests at a Saville Theatre showcase. The Who's Keith Moon and Vivian Stanshall became best mates and co-conspirators in a number of infamous pranks one of which involved dressing in Nazi uniforms and attempting to get served in a famous London bierkeller. Bonzos drummer, Legs Larry Smith actually moved in with George Harrison at one point: His concierge... a wry Rodney Slater laughed when I asked him about it.
Soon, the Bonzos were signed to Liberty Records. They also performed each week on a cult TV series called Do Not Adjust Your Set, alongside Pythons-in-waiting: Idle, Palin and Jones as well as a young David Jason. By the end of 1968 they'd scored a top five single, Urban Spaceman, produced by Paul McCartney. Rock's own jester troupe were now famous in their own right. Rodney Slater, assured me that behind the scenes, there'd been a woeful lack of organisation. Was it fun, though? I enquired. The sax-player peered at me over his spectacles:It was like being handed the keys to the wine cellar, a pharmacy and a young women's dormitory all at the same time and that's all I'm saying, okay?
When they went to America in 1968, various hitches caused them to have to hang around for two weeks, until they could get to play. They met Jimi Hendrix in New York. Too stoned to speak. Slater recalls. No surprises there, then. When I asked Mr Slater what the peak of it all was for him, again, he replied, Being able to do more or less what you wanted for eight years, to get handsomely paid for it, to see the world for nothing, and hopefully leave a little bit of light around. A perfect answer, really. The three Bonzos Slater, Spear and Spoons along with their two mates, are now touring sporadically and it seems, mainly for the fun of it. It's enough to keep them musically supple but not so much that it would burn them out. They have a new songs too. One is called Old Geezer Rock. Age shall not weary them, indeed. www.threebonzosandapiano.co.uk
At what point did razor blades become a 'shaving solution'? When did shopping become a 'retail experience'? I'm old enough to remember old fashioned shopping, you see. My gran and grandad used to do it every Saturday morning. They'd take three bags along for their purposes. There was an old leatherette bag with a broken zip. That one was for potatoes and other vegetables which came with the dirt still on them. There was another waterproof bag with two handles. And then, inside that one was a string bag anyone remember them? This was where my grandparents put all items which didn't matter if they got wet, like canned food. I don't remember many plastic bags, because they were expensive and cost thruppence. They'd walk about a mile to the shops, buy some food, visit the indoor market, pay the newspaper bill and then walk a mile back. I suppose the whole procedure took a couple of hours. Daily staples, such as bread tea or 'hlf. lb. lard' as my gran wrote it were obtained from Taylor's, the corner shop down the road..
Boring? Of course it was boring. It wasn't meant to be exciting. But it was simple compared with the perplexing kerfuffle of the modern retail experience Nowadays, we're so obsessed with shopping that the subject makes headlines. Last week, for instance, there were complaints that Colchester has too many charity shops. In other news it was reported that Priti Patel, MP for Witham had been in consultation with Mary 'Queen of Shops' Portas about how to rejuvenate our ailing high streets. Mary Portas, in fact, has been hired by our P.M David Cameron, as a 'retail advisor'. What??
Well never mind her, Ducky. Last Friday, Marty, King of Shops here, had his own retail experience in Colchester. On the way to the High Street from St Botolphs, I counted nine charity shops. I quite like them. A man can acquire high quality not-yet-previously-enjoyed shirts in such places. As a result of this I've got new Moss Bros, Charles Tyrwhitt, and Burberry shirts in my wardrobe. Perhaps shopping in such a way doesn't do much for the economy. But then, the economy doesn't do much for me, lately, does it?
I pressed on to Red Lion Books in the High Street. Here I asked the proprietor, Peter Donaldson, whether or not he thought that there were too many charity shops. Charity shops? He said, genuinely baffled by the question: I don't know about that but there are rather a lot of clothes shops. Now I think of this, he's right, There are an awful lot of clothes shops. Why?
I wandered off to buy razor blades at Superdrug. I've got one of those high-tech, five-bladed turbo-charge gizmos. It hums pleasingly and even flashes up a light when the battery's getting low. It's great but the replacement blades are so expensive that Securicor now has to deliver them. They're so nickable, in fact, that the shops keep them behind the counter. What Marty, King of Retail Experiences discovers in the racks, therefore, are some clear plastic boxes which can only be undone at the cash desk. When I finally found what I believed may have been the correct boxes with blades for my particular model of razor there was no assistant to ask I gazed over towards the tills and observed a long serpent of people all waiting to be 'processed'. And that's when I broke out into a muck sweat, put the box back on the hook and fled out into the street. After some special breathing exercises to calm me down, I walked around to Boots, which seemed quieter, with a faster queue processing system and bought the blades there.
Next, I went to Top Man to buy trousers. Unlike most British men, I like my trousers to fit, so I take my time over them. Most of my fellow countrymen don't have a clue about trousers and regard it almost as suspiciously effeminate to do anything other than to pick the first dull-coloured oversized pair, before flapping manfully out of the shop with them. After half an hour of struggle, I said to the assistant, Yes, these are much too tight, I'll take two pairs please. I thumbed through the shirts. They were boy's shirts rather than men's shirts, really pretty enough but made nasty material. So I returned home after a two hour retail experience with two pairs of trousers, some components for my shaving system and no shirts.
What does Marty, King of Shops think? He thinks that perhaps our rulers should lower the business rates, allow some of the larger-retail spaces out for multiple use, and possibly turn some of the High Street over to residential use, so that it becomes a 'neighbourhood' too. There could be a no-space-left-unoccupied policy. They could encourage small family-run pubs and limit the larger youth drinking venues. Maybe the fast food culture of walking along stuffing your face in between retail experiences might be discouraged too. And they could get rid of all those silly jutting pavements and bollards and allow limited term car parking in the High Street. Marty, King of Shops thinks they should look back at how it used to be in the 1950s maybe, when it all just about worked. But what does Marty, King of Shops know? His trousers are too tight and he just doesn't understand the modern retail experience.