Copyright © 2005 Martin Newell Pepys 0.1 Blogware © Steve Dix
I found a couple of old photos the other day. I took them with my old Kodak Instamatic at a summer fete on Harpenden Common in 1966. They're snapshots of the late Steptoe & Son star, Harry H. Corbett. For me, at the age of 13, newly returned to England after two years in Singapore, he was the most famous person I'd seen in real life, close-up.
I write this because lately, I've become interested in the changing nature of fame and its evil-twin, celebrity. Fame, which of recent years has become another currency, like money and time, isn't quite the same thing as celebrity. Fame is the public's recognition of an individual or group of people who've becoming successful at a particular activity. As likely to come to a sportsman or scientist as to a politician or artiste, fame can at times be useful for promoting existing products and helping the creator obtain work.
Celebrity, which is fame with its flies undone and a drink in each hand, seems fairly useless. Since cancelling my TV licence two years ago, I hardly have a clue who the current celebrities are. In a supermarket, I now gaze baffled at the magazine racks, at least half of which are filled with celebrity magazines. It's confusing, because the cover pictures often depict stressed-looking people, usually women, who are mostly pop stars, models or TV soap actors. Trying to guess whether a front-page headline such as “Should she go back to him?” refers to a fictional story-line or a real situation becomes increasingly difficult as these lines blur. Then there's the question of why the faces on the magazines covers are famous in the first place. Is that pouting, pan-sticked beauty a bona fide talent, or simply someone famous for being famous?
The stories in such mags, often concern themselves with people, real or fictional, who are undergoing a crisis of some kind. The moral of the story, if one exists, is that attaining celebrity status won't necessarily bring you happiness.
The language of celebrity constantly struggles under the weight of its own leaden superlatives. All female singers are now Divas. Anyone who's lasted longer than two years is an Icon. People no longer have a story, but a Journey. You only need score one goal or chalk up a minor chart hit in order to be Living the Dream. The celebrities in upmarket soaps such as Downton Abbey – an Upstairs Downstairs for people with short attention spans – probably manage to separate their on-screen and off-screen personas more successfully than say, the stars of Geordie Shore.
Geordie Shore, which I caught a soul-corroding ten minutes of recently, was shocking. Not because of the cast's earthy language, or their strange aspirations but because the descendants of a breed of once-proud northerners, will now accept a reptilian TV company's scabrous shilling just to prove to the world that they can rival their U.S. or Essex counterparts for sheer gonzoid stupidity.
In the past I have been around fame quite a bit and to a lesser extent, celebrity.
Fame, should you happen to work in arts or popular entertainment, can be quite beneficial in small doses. Taken occasionally, it helps immunise you, against the larger more toxic dollops of it. Celebrity, on the other hand, which is what happens when fame overflows, is a mask; a big grinning, winking mask with a flashing bow tie underneath it. It'll serve you well at a party or a promotional launch. But when a loved one dies, your marriage unravels or your child becomes seriously ill, that's when you'll find that the mask won't come off, no matter how hard you tug at it.
Then, as you lie on your hotel bed in some foreign city, unable to sleep at 4 a.m. knowing that someone will wake you in three hours for a press-call, fame may not feel quite as zippy. When you finally give up trying to sleep, you'll switch the TV on and stagger to the bathroom. Here you may catch yourself unclothed by that weirdly unflattering light above the shaving mirror. Then you'll hope that those little electric pains which you've been feeling in your chest are nothing more exotic than a bit of tour-anxiety. Soon you'll brace up, pack your bag, adjust the mask and take the lift downstairs in time for the pick-up. Days later, you'll arrive home tetchy, just in time to meet the journo and snapper who are doing a three-pager on your perfect home for Wotcha! magazine.
Now, back to Harry H Corbett, cherished actor, former marine, and all round good bloke. One of my teenage snapshots shows him smiling as he signs autographs. The other is darker, more defensive, a thing which probably bypassed your 13 year-old cub reporter at that time.
Corbett, who died of a heart attack at 57, already shows signs of suffering the dull ache of celebrity. At the peak of his fame, on a golden Saturday in 1966, he's working: opening the summer fete on Harpenden Common and signing autographs. Later he'll fire the starter pistol for the Donkey Derby.
Fame isn't everyone's flute of Tattinger. But there others, it's said, who'll attend the opening of a tin of tuna. They never tell you this when you go into showbiz but it's not actually compulsory to attend the parties or meet the piranhas.
I never do. But then I'm not very famous. Mwah!
I returned to my spiritual home recently, a proper recording studio. It has a full-size mixing desk, FX racks and an engineer to sort out the sound for me, so that I can get on with being a pretentious tart. There's an engraving by Hogarth, dated 1741. It's called The Enraged Musician. Here, a violinist attempting to rehearse is disturbed by a cacophony in the street below. All manner of street traders shout out their wares. While they do so, a man sounds his horn, a busker plays a hautboy and a child thrashes a drum. It's a picture which I very much relate to.
Most of the time when I'm not writing, I'm either recording or composing music. The archway above which I work stands on a busyish sidestreet. The cars and supermarket delivery vans go back and forth. The two cheery young families living either side of me come and go downstairs. When school ends, the young mums and their children, often halt at a point just across the road from me, for a pavement chat Passing boys bounce their footballs loudly on the road outside my window or rumble past on skateboards. Lastly, commuters returning from London, trundle wearily by dragging their wheelie-bags. How are they to know that I'm at work on something so brilliant, that one day it might eclipse Penny Lane? I mustn't complain. They're only civilians. They too have lives. The working world cannot attend my fragile genius. It's my cross, and I'll bear it, okay?
Besides, I've found ways around some of the noise problems. At the busiest times of day, I'll work in headphones, recording electric guitars and basses directly into the desk. I mainly leave the vocals for early afternoon, which is a quieter time. Provided that nobody's sanding a floor, hammering, or road-drilling, which they often do, a bit of extraneous noise can be passed off as ambience.
Home-recording technology is marvellous these days. Long gone are the times of sound-proofing half a garage with eggboxes, building a chipboard drum booth and promising your mum or the neighbours that you'd be done by 6.00 pm.
Recording my upright piano however, has been a constant problem. In addition to the 'natural street ambience' my floorboards creak. Every chair in the house creaks, the piano keys themselves click and squeak -- often in untraceable places. Oh and certain bass chords sometimes set up a sympathetic rattle in other instruments. It drives me nuts. Then I solved the problem when I discovered a large professional recording studio only a few miles away from my home. It has a good grand piano. I have to hire it of course, but it's well worth it. In two or three hours, I can now record my piano parts cleanly, put them onto a memory stick and add them to the master recording at home.
In earlier times I'd spent months of my life in studios. How I loved it, locked away from the world, not even knowing what time of day it was. All of this in the company of sterling fellows just like me:selfish, obsessed studio rats, only interested in getting the song right.
During the 1990s, as home-recording technology improved and became cheaper, the golden age of the studio rat waned. Access to digital technology, for many hard-up musicians, was a godsend, enabling them to have multi-tracking facilities in their own homes.
But the technology soon superseded the artform. This made many songwriters lazy. Creativity itself gradually began to boil down to how many presets you had on your new electronic toys. Since the digital cut'n'paste revolution has happened, few stars of the Auto-tune age now walk into a studio with a batch of fully-formed songs. They tend instead to get a few half-mast ideas, then expect the producer and the studio to weld it all up into something vaguely chartworthy. Songwriting, as it once was, as Rodgers & Hart, Lennon/McCartney, Carole King and the Gershwins knew it, has largely degenerated into a Preset Pie, topped with cliche and nursery rhyme. The megastar singer Adele may be an exception. Okay, she's not Amy Winehouse, but she can write a song. The song, A Million Years, from her current smash album is a case in point. However, I do mischievously urge you all to also listen to a 1966 Charles Aznavour song called, Yesterday When I Was Young. Please don't write in.
Instead, let's move on to how it all worked, yesterday when I, your correspondent, was young. The tunesmith and wordsmith wrote the song. The agent took the song to a publisher. The publisher ran it round the record company. The A&R man matched the song to an artiste. An arranger sorted out the backing, while a producer told the musicians and singer how to perform it. The recording engineer got it down on tape, the record company mastered, pressed and promoted it and finally, in a best-case scenario, the public bought it. Sometimes, almost as an afterthought, the songwriters were paid. The difference nowadays? The Internet has eaten everything. Most of the jobs I've mentioned no longer exist, while songwriting has become a curious old pastime, like sedan-chair upholstery or gibbet-building. Popular songs are probably the worst-crafted and least memorable they'e been in sixty years. Never have so many listened to so much, so cheaply and got so little back. If you don't want to know the score, don't pay anyone to write it.
The day they took possession of it, priest and worshippers had gathered on the small green in nearby St Helens Lane. It was the first religious service that the building had witnessed in 461 years. During this time, among many other things, St Helen's Chapel had been a private house, a shop and a workshop. When the small congregation entered and began to sing, “It sounded as if the walls themselves were singing back at us, asking us: 'Where have you been all this time?'”
It is very hard – even for a benighted heathen like myself – not to be moved by Father Alexander Haig's account of how in the year 2000, the Orthodox Church came back to the chapel in Maidenburgh Street, Colchester. The emotion is in his voice and in his eyes while he tells this story.
St Helen, or St Helena as many call her, was mother of Constantine the Great and of course, Patron Saint of Colchester. Depending upon which sources you believe, she was born nearby in Colchester Castle – then her father King Coel's castle. She is said to have built the chapel for her own worship. According to history though, she was actually born in Asia Minor – modern-day Turkey. Here, religious doctrine, local legend and and blurred historical account all conspire together to make what Hollywood film-makers would call 'a reality soup'.
One thing is for certain though. St Helen's Chapel is very, very old. Nobody knows exactly how old but it was here before the Normans arrived
(autumn of 1066 onwards )and even then its restoration was on their To Do list. Appearances can be deceptive. The chapel's walls, three of which are on the foundations of the ancient Roman Theatre, have seen much rebuilding over the centuries. The exterior, in a town rich in other historical treasures, is a rather unspectacular Victorian one. It is the interior which is so interesting. The luminous red-golds of the saintly icons which line the chapel's walls– along with the candles which quietly hiss and sputter during my visit, combine to make the little church far more atmospheric than many much-grander places of worship.
Father Haig, does his erudite best to crash-course me through the basic history of Orthodox Christianity, which is fascinating. Eastern Orthodoxy was the earliest form of Christianity. Catholicism is a stripling by comparison. A schism then occurred between Eastern Christianity (Greek) and its rival Roman Catholicism (Latin) in the 11th century. The emergent Catholic Church in turn experienced its own dissenters a few centuries later and so Protestantism was born. Father Haig himself was an Anglican priest for three decades, but converted to Orthodox in the mid-Nineties. The matter of women vicars, he says, was one issue which prompted his decision. Looking around St Helen's now and absorbing something of its overwhelming mystique I can partly sympathise with this. If you'd been brought up with a theological package – one rich in ritual and reverence– and then woken one day to find that your place of worship was now full of people playing drum-kits, blasting saxophones and guitars and happily clapping along, all conducted by someone a bit like Dawn French in her Vicar of Dibley role, might you not yearn for a return to an older weightier wholemeal faith – one with no additives and nowt-taken-out so to speak? The matter is obviously more complex than this but it is the simplest explanation that a theological chowderhead such as I can muster.
Father Haig's flock comprises Greeks, Greek-Cypriots, Bulgarians, Serbs, Arab-Christians and others. There may be between thirty and fifty worshippers attending any one service One feature of an Orthodox service is that all music is chanted or sung. The Orthodox faith believes that the voice comes from the soul, whereas musical instruments are of the earth. Similarly, the Sanctuary of the church, which represents heaven, is curtained off from the Nave, the area where the congregation pray. The Sanctuary may be observed when the curtains are opened but only the priest has access to this area. “It is” adds Father Hague, using an Olympian analogy, “As if life were a race – and this were the stadium.” Here he points at the many icons of the saints. “And these, are our spectators who cheer us on, should we tire or falter.”
Perhaps it is the sheer antiquity of St Helen's Chapel, or maybe it's something to do with the candles, the icons and the quiet measured tone of the priest's voice. But time seems to dissolve while I listen to him and I suddenly find that an hour has slipped by in what seems like five minutes. As I walk out dazed into the cold drizzle of Maidenburgh Street, I pause to look back down the hill and north to the distant fields on the outkirts of town. Well over a thousand years ago – when the Riverside Estate to the east – was still marsh and water meadows, a St Helen's Chapel, in some form or other, existed here. At the top of Maidenburgh Street, the High Street bustles moodily about its midweek business. Two minutes walk away, nestling in quiet sidestreets, is this ancient, holy building that has somehow fallen back into the hands of the very faith that created it. St Helen's Chapel is Number 2 on Colchester's Heritage Trail. It's also on a rather older, more venerable trail – one which leads all the way back to Antioch.