Stephanie's Pillowbook

I wrote a post once on the subject ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ It forced me to realise that I am in the absurd position of having reached middle age without knowing the answer to that question. I have drifted through life, pottering about, casually picking up this thing or that, with no direction or drive whatsoever. A useless butterfly. It is true, I have made myself something of a cultured person – at least by contemporary standards: I daresay I would barely pass muster in more exacting times. Still, I do have always in my mind the idea that a life not devoted to science or music or being a mother is a life wasted. So I have become a fussy, bossy, eccentric, crotchety, touchy, vain, pessimistic, naive, inept, insecure, lazy, suspicious, fearful, procrastinating old nag.

Often, I have felt myself de trop, as if I don’t really belong anywhere. When I was an infant I caught bronchial pneumonia and was in a coma for three days. Had I lived in some other period or place I would not have recovered. Perhaps I shouldn’t have recovered? But as I did I do think a little rejoicing and thankfulness on my part now and again would not go amiss! Instead, I feel like a ghost, merely haunting the world. I suspect I will just go on in the same old way. But I can’t help thinking of that little boy pointing at the cumbersome figure of G. K. Chesterton and asking: “What is that man for?” And I often wonder myself just what is the point of me. I have not made this world a happier or richer place. I have not loved enough.

First posted in September 2007

“Phosphenes are defined as luminous endogenous patterns experienced with the eyes closed. They are, among other things, what we see when we ’see stars’ on emerging from darkness into light, or vice versa… The reader may begin by experimenting with his own (harmless) production of phosphenes by the simple method of placing the fingers on closed eyelids and exerting differing degrees of pressure. Weak pressure produces phosphenes of curvilinear form, discs, concentric circles or arcs. These tend to appear at the side of the visual field opposite the point at which the pressure is applied; strong pressure exerted in the same way produces a ‘checkerboard’ effect…
“Outside the laboratory there are numerous situations in which phosphenes occur spontaneously. We may pay little attention to them in many circumstances, for they are often fleeting. They are provoked by a state of fatigue and drowsiness; as a result of psychological or mechanical shock; during fasting and meditation; or chemical intoxication. They further manifest themselves as vehicles of illumination in mystical traditions, and in the phenomenon known as the ‘prisoner’s cinema’, experienced by people incarcerated in dark dungeons; they might perhaps be related to phantoms and ghosts; they are the hazard recognized by the long-distance lorry-driver peering for hours into a snowstorm, and by pilots flying alone at high altitudes in empty, hence visually clueless, skies. Toxins such as those associated with scarlet fever produce phosphenes as do hallucinogenic drugs (that is those which have by definition a selective affinity for the visual system)…
“Phosphenes can be shown to differ according to the method of stimulation, electrical or chemical. Electrically induced phosphenes are of abstract or ornamental type patterns with only vibrational or repeating movements, whilst chemically-induced phenomena also include landscapes and living or man-made objects, such as flowers, animals, machines, and fast-moving, firework-type patterns.” [?]

I suffer from migraines. I started getting them when I was a teenager but they were rare occurrences – perhaps one or two a year – until I passed thirty. Since then I’ve been getting a migraine about once every two or three weeks on average. As well as the frequency the nature of my migraine has changed over the years. At one time I used to get a short, barely noticeable aura followed by an extremely painful headache on the left side of my head. It would hurt so much that once I was on my bed I was quite unable to move. After four to six hours the pain would subside. The next day I often felt rather exhilarated – as though all my worries and cares had dissipated. Nowadays, though, the migraine progresses like this: I notice a little crick in my vision like a blind spot. After ten minutes or so that develops into a full-blown aura: a scintillating zig-zag of fluorescent colour which gradually grows into a psychedelic light-show of flashing and vibrating lights lasting half an hour or so. The aura is usually accompanied by a somewhat metallic taste in my mouth and a sense of foreboding. Once the aura disappears there is a minute or two of calm and then the headache starts. To be honest it is nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Partly because I have found the right drugs to counter-act the pain (two pink Migraleve and 400mg Ibuprofen) – but even so the headache feels different to what it was: more like my head is held in a vice but not gripped too tightly than the sharp, localised, stabbing pain I once felt. I still feel the need to lie down in a dark room, though. I shiver feverishly, my stomach rumbles uncontrollably, I feel more or less nauseated and sometimes have a strong need to urinate. Sometimes I am sleepy, sometimes I am plagued with obsessive thoughts. After a couple of hours I am well enough to get up but for the next twelve to twenty-four hours my head is still fuzzy, and I feel completely shattered and rather fragile. My face is pale and drawn and my eyes are very sensitive to light (it sometimes appears, too, as though I cannot keep my eyes still). What causes it? I still haven’t identified a physical trigger. My GP was obsessed with locating a problem in my diet but I kept a year-long food diary from which nothing could be established. I simply can’t see any correlation between what I eat and getting a migraine. I suspect it has more to do with stress. Migraines rarely arrive out of the blue. They are almost always preceded by a certain restless mood the day before. I cannot settle on anything: I want to read but nothing looks interesting; I want to listen to some music but I cannot choose anything; I don’t know what to eat; I don’t know what to do. I waste the day in fretfulness. All good signs that a migraine is due. I’ve given up going to the doctor about it. The headaches do seem to be managed. He has tried out some preventative medicines but none of them were successful at all. Worse, they all had the side effect of increasing my appetite which meant me putting on weight. The only thing that did work was a course of anti-depressants – I went six months without a migraine after that. It’s not really a satisfactory long-term solution, though, is it? He said the next step in treatment were beta-blockers and he was reluctant to put me on them. So I guess I’ll have to go on living with them (although they seem to have lessened in frequency since I transitioned)

“He was thinking, incidentally, that there was a moment or two in his epileptic condition almost before the fit itself (if it occurred in waking hours) when suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments… His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of understanding… but these moments, these glimmerings were still but a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) with which the seizure itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable.” [Dostoyevsky on Prince Myshkin in The Idiot]

I once had a mystical experience although at the time I didn’t know that was what it was. It happened midway during the first term of my second year at the University of Kent. My grant cheque (remember them?) was late. I had been very careful with money until it eventually arrived, but now I went on a little spending spree. That evening I treated a couple of friends to a meal. We went on to Keynes bar to continue drinking and then to a student disco. I ended up in a friend’s room where we smoked a few spliffs. I had a room in Blean but I didn’t fancy the walk out there so I settled down into a sleeping bag on the floor. The light was turned out and the conversation died down. Then it happened. A great feeling of euphoria welled up within me. I suddenly felt like I had been turned into pure energy. Wave after wave of this delightful energy swept up and down my body. I imagined that I looked like someone in the Star Trek teleporter – in fact I could look down and see myself dissolved into a pulsing mass of electrical energy. I felt orgasmic – or like every cell was rushing. I felt connected to the whole world. And I was overwhelmed with a feeling of love for everything and everyone. Slowly the intensity reduced and eventually I fell into peaceful sleep. The next day I didn’t mention anything to my friends – I believe I was almost embarrassed. I did feel peculiarly content, though, for a few days.

Then sometime in the early 90s I read a couple of books about mysticism. Reading the various accounts by monks and mystics of their transcendental religious experiences I realised that I had undergone something very similar. I recognised the feelings: the profound pleasure, the strange disembodiment, the sense of unity, the expression of compassion for all that exists. Some descriptions were almost identical to mine. Yet I hadn’t interpreted my experience in a religious sense at all. I wasn’t touched by God, I didn’t feel the presence of Jesus, I hadn’t become one with Brahman or whatever. Previous belief obviously determines the content of such experiences. Indeed, being a thoroughgoing materialist I had simply assumed I had reached some sweet spot of physical, sensual repletion. No doubt that is too crude an explanation. Still, I don’t see any need to argue that it is anything other than some curious but natural phenomenon of the brain. One interesting aspect, however, is that while some people, including myself, return to their normal existence once the experience is over – although they never forget what happened – others are able to use it to transform their lives – they can feed off the experience after it dies away. I am a little envious of that.

“And the other extreme concerns that of the rhythms of the universe. Some of our musicians, especially the most intellectual, Kontarsky, for example, said, ‘I can’t do anything with that instruction. What shall I do with it, the rhythm of the universe?’ I said, ‘Have you never never had any dream experience of the rhythm of the universe, have you never been flying in between stars, have you never had a direct experience of the rotation of the planets, let’s say of our own planet, or of the other planets of our solar system? Must these rhythms necessarily be slow?’ All these questions came up in discussion. And he said, ‘No, no, no, I have no experience, I’m sorry.’ And then I said, ‘Well, at least you have one possibility, because you’re a very visual person, you read a lot, your education is visual, and your thinking is visual. What about the constellations of the stars?’ He said, ‘Oh, wonderful!’ I said, ‘Well, just one more suggestion. Think of the interval constellations of Webern’s music. And then combine them with the constellations of the stars. Let’s say you think of Cassiopeia or the Big Dipper.’ And from that moment on that player became the most precise member of our group for performances of such intuitive music. Kontarsky really played the bones – transforming the visual proportions into rhythmic and pitch proportions. And then, as these were very precise geometrical figures in our performance, the others were playing the smallest vibrations that they could produce with their fingers on the chords. I said, ‘Go to the heartbeat, go to the pulse, try to dive.’ And I showed them one thing: when you close your eyes, yes, let’s do that, and no figures, just the dark. I don’t have the dark at this moment, I have spots of gold within the dark. I see spots. And now there is, you see…”
“I see the tip of a candle.”
“Get rid of the candle. Nothing, just nothing. And there, I see millions of small spots of dust, moving. Like clouds. Goldish dust.”
“There are convex rainbow shapes, very thin, and energy centres of orange going woosh…”
“Breathing? Moving? Right. I have the same. Now if I were playing an instrument, these little particles immediately suggest a pattern within the sound that I am producing [makes noise reproducing the pattern]. And I’ve discovered that when there are very good moments when we are performing or when I’m listening to other music, then it becomes just red-violet, no shape, it’s all just like a curtain. And when this starts breathing, very slowly – it’s between the heartbeat and breathing beat – it starts breathing like that and then I’m absolutely sure that it’s good. In a pitch black room, too, the violet always comes. Only after a while do you get to the next step after violet, a goldish colour, and then you may be sure that the cosmic juice is flowing into you. The new musician must very consciously do all these exercises and play in these different states of spirit.” [Karlheinz Stockhausen in conversation with Jonathan Cott]

First posted in February & December 2006

1) It was to be a couple of years before I touched a keyboard again after leaving school. I took the piano up once more after my sojourn in Sweden in 1981. At that time I had a tendency to do things to excess – so while I didn’t practice every day when I did play it would be for 4, 5, 6 hours at a time. Not really advisable, of course, as with all learning little and often is the key. Still, I did recover my technique – such as it was – and improve it a bit. Whereas at school I had concentrated on the Romantic and early modern era I now played lots of baroque and classical pieces. So I worked my way through a mountain of Haydn and Mozart, in particular.

One of my favourite Haydn Sonatas was the one in C, Hob. XVI:48. Here’s the first movement, Andante con expressione, played by András Schiff.

2) I had played a little Bach for Miss Krees – I can remember doing the Allemande from the first Partita with her, for instance. Now I explored somewhat more thoroughly what has been called the Old Testament of piano music, the the 48 Preludes and Fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier (the New Testament being, of course, the 32 Beethoven Piano Sonatas). My performances were completely inadequate, naturally. I had never got into the proper mode of working at the keyboard. People practice in different ways but one can generalise: they read through the music first, then they play each hand separately, they play difficult passages slowly, they repeat awkward parts over and over until they get it right. Finally, they put it all together again and work on an overall interpretation. I, on the other hand, opened the score, played through the piece as best I could and then turned over the page and started on the next one. With predictable results. Well, one of the Bach pieces I enjoyed murdering in this way was the final piece from Book 1. Ah, but this is a work of such sublimity and profundity that something shines through even in the worst performance.

Here is the Prelude and Fugue in b minor played by Jeno Jandó.

3) I also added at this time to my repertoire some of the Sonatas of Schubert as well as the Moments Musicals and the Impromptus D899. The third of those Impromptus is the one piece of music that my father says always reminds him of me. He likes to recall me playing it at home.

This is the version of the Impromptu in G flat recorded by Maria Joao Pires.

4) I returned to University in 1983 and for the next four or five years while I lived in Canterbury I had access to a couple of decent pianos. In my first year I took little advantage but I played more and more often after that. In my final year I began to play to other people. They didn’t have to be strapped down or persuaded not to leave… My playing had undoubtedly improved. Or at least changed. As I said before as a teenager my teacher despaired of inspiring me to play with any feeling. I just didn’t know how to. In my twenties, well, I suppose I had by then loved and lost. Perhaps that emotional maturity or at least experience enabled me to express something in my music-making? For sure my technique must have become rather more certain. While it is no guarantee it is certainly a prerequisite of successful interpretation and expression. If you can play the notes with confidence and ease then you can choose how to bend them to your will. This applies generally, of course: if you haven’t mastered the tools of expression you can’t express anything.

Anyway, during these years I returned to the romantics and early moderns. Chopin was hereafter the core of my repertoire. To the Waltzes and Preludes I learned at school I added many of the Mazurkas, Polonaises and all of the Nocturnes.

From the latter I had particular success playing the one in E flat Op.9 No.2 to other people (played here by Artur Rubinstein).

5) Liszt was always one of my favourite composers. I made several valiant but ultimately unsuccessful efforts at the b minor Sonata but it was, apart from the Consolations, mostly the late music I played, the third Années de Pélerinage, the two versions of La Lugubre Gondola, Schlaflos! and so on.

Here is one of those pieces, the strange, impressionistic Nuages Gris played by Arnaldo Cohen.

6) I’ve always had a fondness, too, for early modern music – so I played Ravel’s Sonatine and Pavane, Debussy’s two Arabesques, the Suite Bergamasque and many of the first book of Preludes. Scriabin was my favourite composer of the period, however, and still is one of my favourite composers.

Another of my party-pieces was the Etude in c sharp minor Op.2 No.1 – here played incomparably by Horowitz.

7) It was around this time that I began to really explore the byways of the piano literature. From the music shop in Canterbury I picked up a couple of volumes of nineteenth-century music containing works by Niels Gade, Stephen Heller, Moritz Moszkowski, Anton Rubinstein and the like.

This is one of the pieces I used to enjoy playing, Rubinstein’s Romance Op.44 No.1 in an old recording by Ignaz Friedman.

8) There were certain composers whose music I played little of. Rachmaninov for one – my hands are just too small. Some people have a strange misconception: because my hands are quite small and delicate I’ve often heard the remark, “oh, you have pianists’ hands.” Not at all. On the whole pianists’ hands vary as much as any other random group. But it is true, though, that many of the greatest performers have had enormous hands – like boxers with great sausage fingers. I can only stretch to a ninth with my left hand (an octave in my right) and even then I can’t take all chords within that space. To play a lot of Rachmaninov you really need to be able to comfortably reach a tenth (Rachmaninov himself could stretch to a thirteenth!).

Anyway, I never played much Brahms either – except for the Rhapsody in g minor Op.79 No.2. Here it is played by Stephen Kovacevich.

9) I did play quite a lot of Schumann, though – Kinderszenen, Waldszenen, Papillons, the Arabeske, Carnaval (well, most of it, anyway) and Faschingsschwank aus Wien. From the latter here is the fourth movement, the deliciously passionate Intermezzo, played by Jorg Demus.

10) We are now reaching the limits of my technique. I did attempt the Chopin Etudes, of course, but the only ones I could manage properly were those, in the main, in which the difficulty lay in the left hand (since my left hand was more flexible than the right), ie Op.10 nos 3, 6, 9, and 12 and Op.25 no.1 and 7.

This is the Etude Op.25 no.7 played by Maurizio Pollini.

11) When I returned home at the end of the 1980s I had less opportunity to play the piano. I always used to go to my parents for Sunday dinner and so I usually managed an hour or two of practice then on my old Broadwood. And once a week, until the mid-1990s, I would try to go round in the afternoon while my parents were at work and have a longer session. However, when I started on my PhD I decided I couldn’t really spare the time any more and gave up playing. When I moved back into my parents’ house and my studies were over I went to the piano one idle afternoon not a few years ago and… horror! I could not play! There had been gaps before and I had felt somewhat rusty going back to the keyboard – but a few Hanon exercises and a couple of the easier Haydn Sonatas were all it needed to recover my fingers. This time, however, that was not enough. I couldn’t play any of the exercises. My fingers had turned to jelly. There was worse to come. I had lost my way around. I had no idea of the geography of the keyboard. Normally I could strike any note without looking. Now I invariably got it wrong. My pieces have gone, too – even when I had retrained my fingers to obey me a little better I found I had forgotten so much. It looked like I was going to have to start all over again. Unfortunately, my piano is in a terrible state of repair. It needed work twenty years ago. More recently it has had small children banging away on it. The whole action has gone. A dozen notes are stuck. It would have cost thousands to put right. In the meantime it was pretty much unplayable. And now my parents have moved it has gone. So these days I just have a MIDI keyboard – but it has such a limited range. I’m far from recovering my technique or my repertoire. I dream that one day I will have a new piano and perhaps start lessons over again. Perhaps in a couple of years time…

Still, there was a time when I could play works such as Beethoven’s Sonata Op.110. That was my greatest achievement at the piano, I believe. I am uncomfortable about assigning spiritual values to art – yet that appears to be the only language available to speak about a work of such depth. It is one thing to listen to music like this – to feel it in your fingers, to make it come alive is quite another. Does it sound silly if I say I used to get up from the piano after striking the last chord of this Sonata feeling, well… privileged? The final movement begins with a passage of recitative which leads to a mournful arioso and that in turn leads to a three-part fugue. After reaching a climax the fugue collapses into a return of the lachrymose arioso full of appoggiaturas. That is followed by an incredible, almost avant-garde, passage in which a G major chord is banged out increasingly loudly – are we meant to imagine the deaf Beethoven here desperately trying to hear his music or to feel the vibrations at least? The fugue begins again but this time with the subject in inversion (ie played upside down) – entries are soon overlapped in stretti. The subject is played in augmentation (stretched two notes to a bar) against a diminished version of itself. Finally the fugue’s subject is transformed into a glorious chorale resounding over a torrent of semiquavers – and there is no better feeling in the world than to have that under your fingertips.

Here is that last movement of the Sonata Op.110 played with rugged intelligence by Annie Fischer.

First posted in June 2007

Some time ago I was tagged by Marion - to come up with “eight random facts/habits about” myself. I decided to list eight of my favourite television programmes.

1) I don’t really share the rosy-tinged nostalgia for ’70s sitcoms common among my generation. There were a few good ones, though – Dad’s Army, for instance, was always a favourite in our house and Fawlty Towers, of course, was a classic. But the best, so far as I am concerned, was Rising Damp. It starred Leonard Rossiter as the sleazy landlord of some squalid bedsits. His character, Rigsby, was obnoxious, a boor, a scruff, a miser, and a bigot, forever interfering in his tenants’ lives. His performances were pure genius. Just to recall the sneeringly camp way he pronounced the name of Miss Joan’s fiancé, Desmond, has me in stitches. The sets were wonderful, too, dreary, faded, rundown, dull and dusty – a reminder of how much wartime austerity still lingered on in 1970s England.

2) I didn’t watch much television in the early ’80s – I was more interested in going out – but I never missed Brideshead Revisited. A strange taste, perhaps, for one who had been a punk not long before and still considered herself an anarchist? Well, I thought the accusations of snobbery hurled at the work irrelevant, really. The slightly decadent, luxuriantly aesthetic, elegiac mood of Brideshead Revisited certainly touched something in me. I read all Waugh’s novels around this time and revelled in them. While I’ve read the book half a dozen times over the years it is the filmed version of Brideshead which has nourished several of my fantasies. The second episode takes place in Venice, for instance. It has never looked more dreamy. If I ever get married it is where I want to go for my honeymoon. Not a very likely occurrence, I know. The same episode stars Stéphane Audran as Cara – shall I confess that it is her portrayal which has always been my model of “how to be a lady”?

3) It was when I was at Kent University that Dynasty became my favourite television programme, indeed the only programme I watched regularly. For me it is still the supreme soap opera – highly camp, gloriously absurd, terribly over-acted. I watched other soaps over the years, Dallas and all the rest, but what could compete with the home-knitted sweaters the gay characters were forced to wear, Joan Collins’ bitchiness and shoulder-pads, the catfights, the hysterical melodrama, the startling physical resemblance between Blake Carrington and Jacques Derrida, the distressing frequency of amnesia, the way they all kept the fire in their living-rooms lit even at the height of summer, the constant illustration of the dictum that money does not buy good taste, the Moldavian Massacre. It was all… delicious.

4) And that leads me to the other essential programme of the 80s which was Soap. No one talks about Soap these days but I thought it was hilarious. There were other American comedies I enjoyed later on: Taxi, Cheers, Friends, Frasier, The Simpsons. The last two in particular were so intelligent and funny. Soap I liked because it was wonderfully over-the-top. It was a sit-com which satirised soap operas. All the clichés were there – murders, affairs, suicide attempts, disappearances, madness, amnesia, kidnapping, the Mafia and the Moonies and South American revolutionaries, possession by evil spirits and alien abduction. My favourite character was the teenager Chuck who used his ventriloquist dummy to say spitefully cruel but amusing things about everybody else.

5) I have no hesitation in proclaiming Twin Peaks the best television programme ever! I really was obsessed with that series. Perhaps I’ll do a longer post about it one day. For now just a few things. It disappointed me that so many people missed the whole point – and finding out who killed Laura Palmer was not the point. At the time I read only one article by someone who seemed to get it. They suggested that Twin Peaks resembled an ancient Roman novel in mixing any number of heterogeneous genres. It was no coincidence, I’m sure, that the series was made at the height of interest in Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque – which relies on that very collision of modes and genres. It was thus precisely that which most claimed to be the programme’s great weakness which was in fact its great strength and fascination. Anyway, while I identified myself with Norma Jennings, I liked the FBI characters best. The deaf boss shouting about secrecy, the fantastically sarcastic and misanthropic Albert, David Duchovny’s cross-dressing agent – I would suggest the most (the only?) convincing portrayal on film of a transvestite. And the wonderful Agent Cooper. Just listening to his voice makes me feel as giggly and flirty as Audrey Horne.

6) One of my old teachers liked to say that if you wanted to acquire a perfect grasp of English grammar you should study the works of P. G. Wodehouse. He was absolutely correct. In addition Wodehouse’s writing also illustrates the transformative quality of art in the way it elevates the utterly trivial into the realm of beauty. What unites, of course, the perfect use of grammar and this artistic alchemy is a sense of style. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the television version of some of Wodehouse’s stories, Jeeves and Wooster. I recall at the time there was some quibbling about the casting but I think it was ideal. Hugh Laurie plays Bertie Wooster not simply as an upper-class twit but as a bumbling idiot with oodles of charm. Stephen Fry, meanwhile, as Jeeves, is exceedingly competent and smart, effortlessly more aristocratic in manner than any of the ‘gentlemen’, and just so slightly sinister. The ridiculous story-lines are wonderfully plotted, every scene however farcical is played straight, and every caricature has the ring of truth. On top of all that I just adore the clothes and the furnishings. The art deco sets are a joy to the eye (and the major attraction of the similarly produced Poirot, too).

7) I am a big fan of American cop shows, NYPD Blue and Law and Order in particular, but Homicide: Life on the Streets was surely the greatest. It was bleak and beautifully filmed. Some episodes were so intense they were almost too much to watch. It had wonderful characters – the cynical Munch, the sensitive pretty-boy Bayliss, and best of all the existentially-troubled Catholic Pembleton, a highly intelligent and ethical man who, while being a brilliant detective, seemed to be floundering in the cess-pit of criminality surrounding him.

8) My current favourite television programme is, without a doubt, Desperate Housewives. Actually, when it was first aired I suspected it would be to my taste but something or other, I can’t remember what now, prevented me from seeing the first few episodes. A recent conversation, though, with a woman who told me I would love it prompted me to catch up on all the old episodes. And I do love it! It is so well written and observed I could hug myself with glee. Bree is my favourite character. I know she is a terribly uptight control freak with serious issues but be honest, isn’t there a tiny part of you which is secretly envious of her whole perfect Stepford Wife act? Or is that just me?

First posted in December 2007

I showed no signs of musical talent when I was a child – I’m not sure it would have been encouraged if I had. Nevertheless, when I started secondary school I decided I wanted to learn how to play the piano. I had heard Grieg’s Piano Concerto and become fascinated by the sound of the instrument. It’s impossible for me to say exactly what it was that I liked about it. There are other instruments I like the sound of – the marimba, for instance, and the cello – but I’ve never had any great desire to play them. The piano was different – I had to learn. Fortunately I went to school in the 1970s when free instrumental tuition was commonplace. I daresay that is now a thing of the past. It is incomprehensible to me: encouraging children to study classical music in comprehensive schools was felt to be elitist – yet current policies effectively confine that music to the well-off and well-informed and actively prevents access for the majority. Well, as I say, I was lucky.

My teacher was called Miss Krees. I thought her rather posh in appearance and manner: she carried herself in a very ladylike manner. When I was in the third year she appeared on the television programme Magpie playing her clavichord which she used to carry around in the back of her Mini. She made an LP, too. It is, I suppose, a thankless task being a music teacher in most cases. Once in a while a talented pupil turns up – but for the most part you have to put up with a succession of reluctant mediocrities murdering the art you love most. Yet you never know what seeds you sow. I was not reluctant but I was certainly a mediocrity. Playing the piano and listening to piano music, however, has enriched my life immeasurably – I would be bereft without one or the other.

My progress was very slow at first because we did not have a piano at home and so I had to practice after school just once or twice a week. Then, when I was twelve or thirteen a workmate of my father’s – the same one who gave me that box of 78s which introduced me to the golden-age of pianism that I’ve mentioned before – gave me a piano. It was a Victorian Broadwood with an iron frame and a mellow tone. I always had trouble with the school instruments: they were modern and Japanese and seemed to have large, angled keys that took a fair bit of pressure to depress. I much preferred my good old Broadwood – the keys were flat and low-lying so it was much easier to just caress them. Even back then, though, it needed work – the felts needed replacing and so on – and it has had such a battering since.

Well, once I had mastered the initial finger exercises and could play two notes at the same time with both hands I began work on my first book: Diller & Quailes’ Second Solo Book. That contained the kind of music everyone starts off with – there’s always a Russian Folk-tune, a Flemish Melody, a Swabian Dance. These were followed by simple minuets by Bach and Mozart, and at the end, Beethoven’s Sonatina in G. Here is one of the pieces I learned: a little minuet by Mozart – played not by me, you’ll be relieved to hear, but by Daniel Barenboim. It’s chastening to think that this was composed by a six-year-old (albeit with the help of his father) and there I was at 12 struggling just to play the thing.

Mozart Minuet in F K2.

Then we went on to the Children’s Pieces of Kabalevsky Op. 27 and 39. I rather think I appreciate these more now than I did then – colourful, vivid, varied works full of piquant dissonances.

Here’s Dance Op.27 No.27 – pianist unknown.

Midway through the Kabalevsky I started on Burgmüller’s 25 Easy & Progressive Studies Op.100. These were more to my taste. Perhaps because they were romantic. Perhaps because they sound rather more impressive than they really are. To a large extent, though, it was the book itself. It was old – the pages were browning. The original owner had written completion dates at the top of the pages – 1911, 1912. I felt that I was breathing in the past when I opened the book. I loved the extravagant arabesques that decorated the cover – and the advertisement on the back promising the delights of all manner of impromptus and preludes and fantasias.

Anyway, here is the third of the studies, Pastorale - again pianist unknown.

I distinctly remember playing this particular study in my lessons. Miss Krees was at her wits’ end to try and inspire me to inject a little feeling into my playing. I’m afraid I never did. While sitting at the keyboard I often noticed, out of the corner of my eye, my teacher glancing at the newspaper on the desk or filing her nails. I don’t blame her, I must have bored her terribly. Why, I don’t know, but at school my playing was characterless – I could not put any passion into my music until I was an adult. Perhaps I needed to live a little first? Perhaps I needed a more secure technique? Whatever the reason, the lifelessness of my playing was the despair of Miss Krees.

Next we worked our way through Schumann’s Album for the Young. I played an awful lot of these pieces and the whole of Kinderszenen a few years later.

One of my favourites was one of the last – Winterzeit II – here played by Jorg Demus.

The main reason for spending so much time on the Schumann was that Miss Krees gave me a choice: work for exams or build up repertoire. I suspect now that she had had one too many complaints from parents about their precious darlings being put under too much pressure to take exams. Well, the choice suited me just fine – I went for repertoire. Not that I was scared of taking exams but I knew myself well enough. Exploring repertoire played both to my strengths and my weaknesses. It was about this time that I began to borrow scores from the library. I would sit at the piano with a fat volume of Beethoven or Chopin and just play through the lot. On the plus side I became familiar with a great deal of music and I developed excellent sight-reading skills. On the negative side I never learned to play anything properly. I simply stopped practising. Everything – including what I played in my lessons – became a run-through. I’d muddle through to the end and start straight away on the next piece. And I never changed that habit, unfortunately.

I did sometimes work, though, on pieces that were on the exam lists. One such was the Scherzo from Clara Schumann’s Sonata in g minor here played by Yoshiko Iwai.

After lots of Schumann we moved to Mendelssohn and the Songs Without Words. Again I played many of them. As a set the last is my favourite but I always enjoyed the very first piece, Op.19 No.1, here played by Daniel Barenboim.

At the same time I worked through the Chopin Waltzes. The one in A flat Op.69 No.1 (performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy) I can remember playing in lessons. It’s also one of the few pieces I could ever play from memory.

By now I was 16 and it was decided I should after all take an exam. So I was entered for Grade VII and spent most of my time on the set works. One of them was the slow movement from Mozart’s Sonata in a minor K310. After a few lessons I more or less managed all the ornaments and other awkwardnesses – but my playing never improved. When the exam came I failed by a single point. Miss Krees was annoyed by that. The report was sarcastic. The examiner could not understand how my sight-reading could be so superior to my playing of the set pieces. It was always that way. I remember just before I left school I arrived at a lesson very early so I went into the room next door, picked up a volume of Schubert and played through – at sight – the first movement of the Sonata in B flat D960 (by no means an easy work). When the time came for my lesson, Miss Krees was astonished: “Was that you next door?” And then I played my pieces for the lesson in the same dull and approximate way I always did.

Well, here’s that Andante cantabile from the Mozart Sonata played by Andras Schiff.

Also from the Grade VII exam was the second Mazurka from Borodin’s Petite Suite, here played by the great Sofronitsky. How leaden-footed my own playing of it was! Anyway, I started preparing for the Grade VIII but illness prevented me taking it before I left school.

Aside from the exam pieces I also played a fair number of Chopin Preludes in my lessons. No.15 of the set was always my party-piece, the piece I’m mostly likely to play for anyone unfortunate enough to catch me in the same room as a piano.

This is Maurizio Pollini’s recording of the so-called Raindrop Prelude Op.28 No.15.

The last piece I did with Miss Krees was by Debussy, sometimes called Tarentelle styrienne and sometimes just Danse. Here it is played by Gordon Fergus-Thompson.

First posted in June 2007

It sometimes seems odd to me that I never really became a geek – the raw material was surely there. Picture me in 1976: I have long, lank hair, I am extremely skinny, I am asthmatic, I am not athletic (games was the only lesson I used to skip), I take piano lessons, I read a lot, it has been decided that I am going to university to study physics, I own a telescope and a scientific calculator and I dearly want a Moog synthesizer. I was surely a nerd, there’s no question about it. However, I remained stubbornly uninterested in computers. Nowadays, when I read accounts of the early days of the PC and so on I wonder that I never cottoned on to what was happening. I read a great deal of science fiction, and magazines like Scientific American and Omni with their breathless articles about the brave new world that computing was ushering in, and I saw the adverts for the early Apples and kit computers, and I shrugged my shoulders at it all.

Well, my first encounter with a computer was not propitious. Sometime in the sixth form my school got a dummy terminal connected by modem to a mini-computer miles away in some other town. It was the darling toy of one of the maths teachers – it was kept locked up and you were not allowed to touch it without him standing over you nervously waiting to pounce in case you did something unauthorized. We used to troop in one by one into the tiny little room where the terminal was housed and enter our simple programmes – usually some trivial maths problem that could have been worked out on paper in half-a-minute – and then receive a print-out a week later. Not much like hacking at MIT was it?

Of course once I got to university I had computer classes every week – writing programmes in BASIC to solve differential equations and the like. However, we did all play a game: the classic Star Trek. There is a good article by Maury Markowitz about the game and its history. Of course it should be remembered that in the 1970s only students in subjects like physics had access to this sort of fun. Otherwise – well, take a look at the game-room here. I wasted many hours in rooms just like that. So many hours that I had to leave the university altogether…

In the 1980s the PC revolution passed me by completely. I simply associated computers with number-crunching and office work. It was not until the end of the decade and the beginning of the 1990s that I started hearing of things which made me curious: fractals, artificial life, the first Sim City, and so on. Everybody at this time had began talking about how word processing was changing the way they wrote and how marvellous it was. And it was word-processing which first got me hooked. If I could vote for the greatest innovation in computing I think it would be cast for cut-and-paste. I was in the midst of my PhD by now and I had reached that stage where I had amassed a huge amount of material and was beginning to panic because I hadn’t any idea what to do with it all. I had for several years been writing down plans, notes, ideas, quotations, paraphrases and so on, which I had cut up, marked with an increasingly arcane cataloguing system, and then collected into piles and strewn over most of the floor of my flat. It was hopeless. Without a computer would I ever have written a thesis? Thanks to Lotus Wordpro and the wonders of cut-and-paste I managed it. At least I discovered that writing a substantial text is mostly a matter of revision and re-organisation.

After I graduated and realised that the groves of academe were not poised to enfold me in their embrace I took a computer course at a place called Taitec. The course was called iNet+ and, naturally, the CompTia certificate I gained was completely useless. I remember going into Taitec one morning and installing NT4 and IIS and configuring a web-server and an e-mail server and the “trainer” telling me I could put that accomplishment on my CV. It was hard to contain my laughter. All I had done was follow a checklist – click this, click that, enter so-and-so – a trained monkey could have done it. Needless to say I have not approached IT firms brandishing my brilliant certification.

Still, I was glad for one thing: the course-book was so poor that I was forced to seek out other reading-matter and found I rather enjoyed learning about computers. I remember when I was a physics student it was considered quite a challenge to crash the computer. By the time I had a computer of my own I was using Windows 95 and crashes were a daily phenomenon. As a novice PC user the most valuable lesson I had learnt when faced with endless BSODs and refusals to boot and so on was how easy it is to re-install an operating system. It should be compulsory. Just as irritating as the sight of people afraid to touch a computer for fear it will explode are those dire warnings everywhere about the dangers of altering Registry settings and the like. That’s exactly what you should be doing. Without fiddling and messing around you’ll never find out how anything works.

Anyway, around 1993, 94 there had also been a lot of hype about the internet in the older media – I particularly remember extravagantly optimistic articles in i-D. And then, a little later, people at university started raving about email and Amazon. I first went online around 1998 or thereabouts when I was working in the Computer Operations room at Dixons Warehouse (I wasn’t a computer operator, though, I just looked after the printers and the stuff that was printed). I think that early experience shaped my understanding of the internet for a long time – because at first all I did was search lists of academic articles. So, I’ve never really gone beyond the idea of the web as a library. I’ve treated it as a vast repository of various kinds of text, pictures, art, music, video, games and software which I have sought out and greedily hoovered up over the years. The web as a medium of communication barely figured in my use of the internet. Of course I had been aware of Usenet and BBS for some time back into the 1980s and my interest had been piqued but once I logged on at long last and started looking at newsgroups and mailing lists I was appalled. Was the internet populated solely by illiterate teenagers, mad flamers, trolls, wannabe hackers and the mentally deranged? I had no time for all that. I lurked elsewhere and downloaded masses of material. If anything changed my perception it was thinking about putting together my own website – which I started pondering as soon as I had learnt HTML on my course. And it was discovering the online transgendered world which got me actually communicating with people.

First posted in January 2006

1) One balmy summer evening in 1987 I was in the kitchen in my flat on Northgate in Canterbury cooking dinner. I switched on the radio. And I was immediately mesmerised. I had never heard music like this before. It was beautiful and strange, soulful and hypnotising. I soon discovered that it was Sidiki Diabate and his group playing ancient praise songs from Mali as part of a fascinating series of concerts in London that year under the banner Music From the Royal Courts. It was an unforgettable evening. Some time after a record was released containing some of the music from that concert. From it here is Ba Tagoma.

2) I became familiar with Mozart’s operas in the ’80s, particularly Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutti and The Marriage of Figaro (I never loved The Magic Flute as much). Here is the terzetto, Susanna or via sortite , which begins the finale of Act II of Figaro from the classic recording conducted by Gui in 1955 with Graziella Sciutti, Sena Jurinac and Franco Calabrese. I chose this particular item, rather than one of the wonderful arias, because I think the thing I most admire about Mozart’s operas is the psychological counterpoint. Other composers have been more skilled at purely musical counterpoint but none have matched Mozart for skill in dramatically expressing different points of view and emotion, not just sequentially, but at the same time. Anyway, the finales of the three great operas are surely among the most fantastic creations in all art. I never fail to be moved by the end of The Marriage of Figaro. One by one the various characters beg the Count’s pardon – which he refuses with all the masculine and aristocratic disdain he can muster; until the Countess appears and he realises that he has been at fault all along. He falls to his knees and begs her forgiveness – which she graciously confers. The opera ends with joy and happiness all round. I do not believe in an afterlife but if there were a heaven I am sure it is a world like this: an endless performance of The Marriage of Figaro – with me singing the role of Susanna, of course!

3) A pianist I admired much at the time was the sensitive and intelligent Murray Perahia. His Mendelssohn album from 1985, for example, was played with such glorious joie de vivre – it was irresistible. From it here is the final movement, Molto allegro e vivace. of the Piano Sonata Op.6.

4) Of course the somewhat mad Scriabin was always more to my taste than the very sensible Mendelssohn. I had both the Scriabin albums of Horowitz and Gavrilov to enjoy in those days (or rather nights). If I had to choose just one piece then it would have to be the Fourth Sonata. Unfortunately I don’t have the Gavrilov recording now but I do have the brilliant Sofronitsky. Here is the second and final movement of that Sonata, Prestissimo volando – exciting, fervid, sensual, ecstatic.

5) I don’t recall now how I discovered Godowsky’s fabulously enjoyable reworkings of Chopin – perhaps it was pure chance? – but I did acquire Jorge Bolet’s selection of etudes and waltzes and Ian Hobson’s larger collection. Purists may sniff and mutter but I don’t think they have a leg to stand on, aesthetically speaking or historically. Transcriptions, arrangements, paraphrases, variations and so on were always part of the musician’s work. Anyway, I love these Godowskian revisions – they are so perfectly pianistic and colourful, witty and virtuosic, fascinating and delectable. The remarkable thing about them is that whatever is done to the original works – whether they are arranged for a single hand, or the hands reversed, or the music is turned upside down, or one piece played against another, or whatever inner melodies, counterpoints, decorations or modulations are added – Chopin’s piece remains. It survives any distortion and is instantly recognisable. No doubt this points to the primary significance of form over any other property. Here is the Waltz in d flat Op.64 No.1, the famous Minute Waltz, exquisitely elaborated by Godowsky (and played by Bolet).

6) Vladimir Horowitz experienced something of an Indian Summer in the mid-80s. There were several documentaries and a number of albums for DG. I lapped them all up. One of the albums and videos was devoted to his moving return to Russia in 1986. The first piece Horowitz performed in his recital in Moscow was the Sonata in E K380 by Scarlatti. It’s a simple piece but it is played with infinite subtlety of touch and expression. Absolutely beautiful. There is nothing more to be said than that.

7) Sometime around 1986/7 Canterbury got a proper nightclub beside the railway station. It wasn’t very good but now and then a couple of blokes I vaguely knew were allowed an hour or so to play the new Chicago House and Detroit Techno. It used to clear the dancefloor! Amusing when you think how house music has conquered all since then. I liked it, anyway, the spartan yet warm electronic sounds, the vague sense of bleak futurism mixed with raw funk. The records of Derrick May possessed a particular beauty. I could not go to my desert island without the relentlessly joyful Strings of Life.

8) The late ’80s and early ’90s were a particularly gloomy period for me. I returned to my home town from Canterbury and pretty much cut myself off from everything and everyone. Well, I won’t dwell on that. Anyway, I used to sit in on Saturday nights, drinking wine in my bedsit, watching television with the sound turned off, half-marinading in self-pity, half losing myself in extravagant fantasy, all to the soundtrack of electronic music. It’s strange, but now, years later, listening to these tracks I almost feel nostalgic. A great favourite was the Substance collection of singles and remixes of New Order, especially the more electro ones by John Robie and Arthur Baker. Here, from cassette (it wasn’t included on the CD), is Bizarre Dub Triangle. It reminds me of drunkenly staring at the endless blue sky on lonely summer evenings.

9) In the mid 90s I had a great enthusiasm for jungle and drum’n'bass. The deep bass, the complex drum rhythms, and sweet string sounds – what’s not to like? I especially enjoyed the various projects of the members of 4 Hero – like their remix of Nuyorican Soul’s remake of Rotary Connection’s I am the Black Gold of the Sun. Gorgeous.

10) I was aware that house music derived from disco and sampled it a great deal. The inevitable revelation came with Dr Love and My Love is Free on a Judge Jules mix-tape. I was smitten. That must have been around 1993. I bought the Mastercuts Salsoul compilations… and I have been a disco queen ever since. So, Double Exposure and My Love is Free and just under ten minutes of the greatest, sexiest music ever made, music that can make me scream with pleasure. The sheer sensuality of the sound is like being wrapped in silks. And just listen to the mix, the way the whole thing is constructed from one short phrase repeated over and over, differently orchestrated with each repetition, and the way tension is built up and then released and then built up again, it’s like being made love to by an expert.

11) I wrote my doctoral thesis on Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner and consequently I listened to the operas over and over during the last half of the 90s. I had been familiar, however, with Siegfried since teenage years. I loved to lose myself in its dramatic music and the way it moved from darkness to light. Perhaps you know that the phrase, it’s not over until the fat lady sings, refers to this opera? Until Siegfried wakes Brunnhilde in the final scene (a good three hours or so after the start) there are no female voices (aside from a Woodbird’s short interjections). Well, here is the last few stirring, ecstatic minutes of Siegfried – sung by Florence Easton and Lauritz Melchior at Covent Garden (in 1932, I believe) as they declare their undying love.

12) As the final item in these Desert Island Discs of music which reminds me of my self and my past I must include something by the fabulous Busch Quartet. They were among the last and most splendid representatives of that Middle-European high bourgeois culture was which was almost totally destroyed by the Nazis and the Second World War. For all the evil we human beings have created it is sometimes worth remembering that a few, at least, were able to make things like this: Beethoven’s heartbreaking Cavatina from the String Quartet in B flat Op.130 played by the Busch Quartet. There is a story that the leader of the quartet who gave the first performance of this work paid a visit to Beethoven early one evening and found the composer sitting in the twilight reading the score of this Cavatina with tears streaming down his face. This movement is, someone once wrote, the very depiction of a soul.

First posted in July & August 2007

1) At the beginning of 1981 I went to Stockholm and I ended up spending a lot of time in a certain flat in Karlaplan. A little group of us used to gather there every evening. We used to listen so often to the New Order single, Ceremony, which had just come out. As soon as I hear the first notes I am transported to that bare black-walled flat with the low table in the middle of the room and the babble of voices speaking English, Swedish, Finnish and the snow gently falling outside.

2) In the summer of that year I travelled around Finland. I got to see Pelle Miljoona Oy in a circus tent outside Iisalmi and Ratsia in a hall in the woods outside Suonenjoki. I love their song Eilisen jälkeen (After yesterday).

3) Sometimes personal associations can lead you to enjoy music that if you had encountered it in any other circumstances you would have disliked it intensely. Well, that’s my excuse for owning the first Hanoi Rocks album. Still, for all its absurdities it does have a kind of naive and upbeat charm. My Finnish girl friends all knew the boys in the group very well so it was not surprising that their music was a constant that year of 1981. It reminds me of so much. To recall just one memory – walking over a bridge with Vilma one afternoon talking about the vintage dresses we had seen in a shop window in Gamla Stan. Oddly, the record summons up the taste of food, too! Of the GB Sandwich – vanilla ice-cream between two layers of soft, chewy chocolate biscuit – and of limpa, a sweet, light-brown doughy bread flavoured with molasses, in particular. From that album – Village Girl.

4) In 1983 I began studying at the University of Kent. I had a friend in my first year called Judy, a very smart and sexy girl who was studying French. Judy loved the sun and smoking spliff and dancing. I didn’t have a record deck or a cassette-player that year and so I was reliant on her for my music. She used to play soul, disco, electro, soca, reggae all day long – and I learned to love it. And the song I loved most was Never Give You Up by Sharon Redd. How that reminds me of my first year at Kent…

5) I don’t recall now what it was that caused me to buy my first Julie London record, Julie Is Her Name. She has been my comfort ever since. Now I have about 16 or 17 of her albums. I love her voice, I love the post-war jet-setter vibe, I love the melancholy mood and nostalgia expressed by so many of the songs, I love the way it is drenched in femininity. At University I played her music most often in the early hours of morning – I can still see myself sitting in my armchair, after everyone had gone, in a little black dress and long spiky blonde hair nervously tapping my heels on the floor and waiting for sunrise and the chance, perhaps, to sleep. The album I liked best, then and now, was Sophisticated Lady. From it this is When the World Was Young.

6) When people came to my room in college as they often did after the bars shut then I would get out my Billie Holiday tapes. Certain songs of hers always remind me of some of my friends and the endless conversations we used to have. That’s what I remember most about student life – the constant talking. What on earth did we find to say? Still, I miss it now. My favourite Billie Holiday song is the desperately sad Don’t Explain.

7) I listened to a lot of classical music at University with a girlfriend Tracy. One of our favourites was the Cesar Franck Violin Sonata played by Heifetz and Rubinstein. Very romantic and yearning, sensuous and perfumed. So, the last movement, Allegretto poco mosso.

8) For my 25th birthday Tracy gave me a boxset of Callas recordings. Here is one of the tracks – A tal colpo… Morro, ma prima in grazie from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. Callas has always been one of my favourite singers. Others may have made more beautiful sounds but she was without doubt the greatest actress of the last century (if one accepts that she acted as much with her voice as with her body). But strangely, her very power is what seems to repel as many as it attracts. Anyway, her character in this extract has been sentenced to death for something she did not do – she begs to see her son one last time. It’s almost too heartbreaking to listen to. Oh, I have shed a flood of tears to Callas…

9) One afternoon in the mid-80s I taped an interesting programme on Radio 3 – a reconstruction of a concert given in London two hundred years previously devoted to the music of J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel. Listening to the tape now reminds me very vividly of lying on my bed in Keynes College and reading the SHAFT newsletter and all the confused feelings and thoughts that that aroused. Well, here is a beautiful and rather melancholy aria from that concert, by Abel, I believe, with viol da gamba obbligato.

10) I was dismissive of Madonna at first as pop music for little girls but I soon became a big fan and her early singles were my usual getting-ready-to-go-out soundtrack. When I lived in Northgate we had a video of her concert from the 1985 Virgin Tour in Detroit. My friend Jo and I used to copy all the dance moves. What fun we had! Anyway, here is Holiday from that concert. (By the way, don’t be misled by the long outbreak of applause after about 3 minutes – there is still half the song left to go).

11) Sometime in 1984 or thereabouts one of my friends gave me a copy of the NME cassette All Africa Radio. It contained tracks by Youssou N’Dour, Toure Kunda, The Rail Band, Fela Kuti and so on and was my introduction to African music which was to become something of a passion in the last half of the 80s. One of the groups featured on All Africa Radio was Somo Somo, a London-based group led by Mose Fan Fan. Later on I bought a couple of their records. From one of them this is Mele. I love the full-bodied sound and the relentless rhythm – I could dance to it all night.

First posted in July 2007

Some time ago I was chatting to a friend who had recently been awarded his doctorate and we remarked how neither of us, looking back over the years, could have imagined ending up with such a degree. I don’t think anybody says, when they are young, “when I grow up I want to be a philosopher“, do they? We also found it interesting how it was that we became fascinated by certain problems within philosophy.

Well, I had my first philosophical thought at the age of six or seven. I remember it quite clearly. A group of us were standing in the school playground talking about what presents we hoped to get for Christmas. I felt suddenly very aware of the fact that other people had different desires to mine. For some time I had noticed that there was a voice in my head which was me and yet, somehow, not-me. I wondered whether everyone else had this voice in their head, too. It didn’t seem obvious to me that they did. In fact, I suspected they didn’t – I suspected that my voice in the head was an anomaly. And for some reason I thought that if my school-friends did have this voice speaking in their heads it should say they same things as mine. Clearly, I was being exercised by the so-called Problem of Other Minds and unfortunately, as I was more likely to read the Moomins than Wittgenstein at that time, I was unable to solve the problem…

Well, while I became reconciled, as I grew older, to the idea that other people were not automatons (!), my own feelings of oddness and difference became more acute. No doubt much of that is attributable to my transsexuality. That certainly left me with the suspicion that things were not necessarily as they appeared. In any case, it has always seemed to me a sign of lack of intelligence to consider conditions as they exist now to be natural and obvious and “the way things have always been”. The more I learned the more I understood that things have been different and can be different. Nothing, it seemed to me, was necessarily normal. Indeed, the very fact that the world existed and that I was living in it at that very moment struck me as strange. I can recall walking to school and laughing to myself that I was on this huge rock hurtling through space. Yet all around me were people scurrying about like ants convinced that their business was of the utmost importance and wholly unaware of the sheer oddity of existence.

So, by the time I was 16 it appears I had definite metaphysical urges. Those urges were fed by a number of books I read during the sixth form: Jack Kerouac – especially Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels – which led me to the poetry of Gary Snyder; John Cage’s Silence and the Cage compilation by Kostelanetz – which led me to Daisetz Suzuki and Alan Watts; Jonathon Cott’s Conversations With Stockhausen, and Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. It’s difficult to explain, especially after thirty years, what I found so captivating about this impressionistic melange of science, art and Zen Buddhism. So I will just quote from the Preface to the Capra book which had such a profound effect on me in that summer of 1976 (although these days I find its analogies strained and unconvincing):

Five years ago, I had a beautiful experience which set me on a road that has led to the writing of this book. I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when I suddenly became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance. Being a physicist, I knew that the sand, rocks, water and air around me were made of vibrating molecules and atoms, and that these consisted of particles which interacted with one another by creating and destroying other particles. I knew also that the Earth’s atmosphere was continually bombarded by showers of ‘cosmic rays’, particles of high energy undergoing multiple collisions as they penetrated the air. All this was familiar to me from my research in high-energy physics, but until that moment I had only experienced it through graphs, diagrams and mathematical theories. As I sat on the beach my former experiences came to life; I ’saw’ cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I ’saw’ the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I ‘heard’ its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus.

It was around this time that I was first introduced to philosophy as such. Mrs Poole, in General Studies one sunny afternoon, told us about Socrates and the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic. Briefly, we were asked to imagine prisoners in a cave watching a shadow play of images on the wall and believing that is reality. The philosopher is said to be like one who has escaped his imprisonment and sees things clearly, as they really are, by the light of the sun. The imagery is related to other scenes in Plato: the end of the Symposium, for instance, when Socrates, having drunk his companions under the table, rises to greet the sun and meet the new day; and the manner of Socrates’ death when he drinks the hemlock and faces death without fear. At 17 this just struck me emotionally – I was moved but without really understanding.

So, I had no idea then of studying philosophy. Although it seemed to be a settled thing since I was 11 that I would be going to university what subject I would take was a problem. I have written about my school education already so I won’t repeat all I said there. Except to say that I wasn’t obviously brilliant at any particular subject but I was pretty good at all of them. Up until about 14 history was probably my favourite subject. But then music took over. However, when I suggested studying music at university everyone was aghast. How was I going to make a living from that? My father had this mad scheme where I would study engineering or something before becoming an officer in the army. Well, that wasn’t going to happen! So a compromise was reached where I would study Physics with Music as a minor. In the end, though, I ended up somehow at Surrey University to take straight Physics.

I was not uninterested in the subject – although optics bored me and I could never make head nor tail of electricity atomic physics was fascinating indeed. I just preferred the more spectacular stuff, I suppose. I was a poor student, though, and once you’ve lost your way in physics it’s very hard to catch up. And then I was making up for lost time – away from home at last I went a little wild. It was no surprise to anyone that I failed my end-of-year exams so abysmally. What shocked me, though, was after acting like I didn’t care I got a stern talking to from my friend Karen. She berated me for wasting such an opportunity. I still feel the shame she instilled in me that morning. It’s not just a sense of failure that I find hard to live down but even more the realisation that the past thirty years or so have been the most exciting ever in mathematics, science and technology – and I missed it. I could have played some very small part in that and I didn’t and now it is too late.

Well, in May 1981, when I should have been doing my finals at Surrey if I hadn’t been kicked out, I was lying on some rocks underneath a birch tree on an island in Stockholm mulling over my life. I decided I would go back to university. For the next eighteen months I read madly in English literature. I read everything. So, English Literature was to be my subject. I did a couple more ‘A’ Levels at the local Further Education College in my early twenties and passed English with an A after just six months. Getting that grade in such a short time and memories of Brideshead Revisited in my mind (the television series had just been shown) I decided to apply to Oxford. This must have been the autumn of 1982. The last person from my FE college to have applied to Oxford was five years before and nobody could recall the process. Anyway, I had to take an entrance exam. I loved that. It was an excellent examination, I thought, and very testing. The questions were mostly general – I can still remember a few: “How do you explain the rise of Christianity?” “Is political assassination ever justified?” At a good public school you get a term of coaching; I had a few lunchtime meetings with one of my teachers. They were probably the most intense and enjoyable sessions in my whole education. Then I discovered that you had to apply not to the University itself but to a separate college. This was the kind of thing, I think, which kept so many in the past from applying. I’m sure I was not the only one to have had no advice and there was little information available. In the end I chose to apply to Merton – I’m not sure why. It was only much later I discovered that was probably, for various reasons, the worst choice I could have made. Well, I did enough in the exam to be called for interview. We had to stay in the college for two nights. I can safely say they were the coldest and most uncomfortable nights I have ever spent! The buildings may look romantic from the outside but inside those bare stone walls it was freezing. I did feel out of place. One mealtime I was spoken to by a very fey couple of students – spitting images of Charles and Sebastian. They plainly regarded me as some kind of fascinating alien. I visited the college bar on the second evening and chatted to a fellow candidate, a Wykehamist. He was very pleasant but I sensed the gulf between us – especially when he revealed that he was being interviewed by a family friend. I was not interviewed by a don but by the Professor of Poetry. That is an elected post – held in the recent past by Auden, Heaney, Fuller and at this time by one Jones. I realised I was doomed to be rejected when he started the interview by saying that as I was a couple of years older than the average he expected me to demonstrate that I was a couple of years further educated. I resisted the urge to ask that I be put forward straightaway for the DPhil in that case… He swanned about the panelled room in a purple smoking-jacket sipping sherry (he did not offer me a glass). It is ungracious of me I know but I could not contain a smirk when I read, at the end of his term, that he was widely considered the worst Professor of Poetry in living memory.

I also took Sociology A Level at the FE college. My tutor had written in one of my reports: “Stephanie is an extremely intelligent student, but she seems always to allow herself to be sidetracked into the interesting philosophical byways of the subject. She has shown far less enthusiasm for the more routine material“. Quite. So far as English was concerned I had looked at the classic works of criticism – William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and I. A. Richard’s Practical Criticism (which I’ve just discovered you can download from the Internet Archive) for instance – which had given me the taste for such theory. Then, reading Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group led me to G. E. Moore and his Principia Ethica which I managed to find in our town library. This was the first work of philosophy I had ever read and it proved something of a revelation. It was not so much the subject matter – a critique of ethical naturalism – that astonished and attracted me as the style. It was logical and lucid. It forced me to read slowly. I had to take as much care in following the argument as Moore had evidently taken in formulating it. And I enjoyed doing that immensely.

I arrived at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1983. First years in Humanities were encouraged to take multi-disciplinary courses so I chose 20th Century Poetry, Literature and Science and Knowledge and the Humanities. The latter was taught by the Philosophy department and the first part of the course was concerned with the traditional arguments for and against the existence of God. I wrote my very first essay on the Ontological Argument. Handing back the essay my tutor said I should switch to Philosophy because I evidently had a talent for it and should be able to get a First in the subject if I wanted. I did nothing at the time but the compliment stayed in my mind – naturally! Then in the summer holidays I read Jonathon Culler’s On Deconstruction. The book itself I found interesting but what really stimulated me was the preface in which Culler introduced a notion quite new to me:

… a domain as yet unnamed but often called “theory” for short. This domain is not “literary theory”, since many of its most interesting works do not explicitly address literature. It is not “philosophy” in the current sense of the term. since it includes Saussure, Marx, Freud, Erving Goffman, and Jacques Lacan, as well as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. It might be called “textual theory,” if text is understood as “whatever is articulated by language,” but the most convenient designation is simply the nickname “theory.” The writings to which this term alludes do not find their justification in the improvement of interpretations, and they are a puzzling mixture. “Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle and Emerson,” writes Richard Rorty, “a kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor epistemology, nor social prophecy, but all of those mingled together in a new genre.”

Culler gave some recent examples of this new-fangled theory: Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory, Douglas Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and Dean MacCannell’s The Tourist. I read all three that summer. I wanted to do theory! The mixture of subjects appealed, the whole approach seemed innovative; this was surely where the intellectual excitement was in the humanities. Nowadays there are courses aplenty on this kind of thing but there weren’t in 1984. It seemed to me, though, that Philosophy was closer to it than English, and surely less conservative, I supposed. So I switched departments at the beginning of my second year. Still, having begun with best of intentions my interests at university had soon turned in other directions – to drinking, politics, late nights, smoking spliff and sex. But I did read during the holidays and in term-time I browsed the journals – especially Diacritics with its rather heady brew of post-structuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, literary theory and philosophy.

Unfortunately, this played into my great fault when it comes to formal education: following my own interests at the expense of the curriculum. I had been the same at school. I was a stranger to seminars and I only wrote essays when forced to by the Senior Tutor. Then, in my third year I suffered with depression, alcohol abuse, self-harm. Because of that I had to intermit for most of a year. Anyway, in the end I only scraped through my finals. Well, the external examiner might have been willing to give me a first but the department apparently said they couldn’t give one to such a lazy sod as I’d been. So they gave me a very high 2.1 instead. However, they did allow me to register the following October for an MA by Research and Thesis. So I spent another year at the university reading Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida without really knowing what it was I was actually researching.

I returned home towards the end of the ’80s. I postponed completing my MA and began a series of tiresome temporary jobs. The final one was at Dixon’s Warehouse. Twelve hours a night I unloaded televisions from lorries. It was backbreaking. If you got a 19” Sony portable that Christmas I hate you! Well, I ended that year with a bad case of bronchitis, I was unemployed again and determined never to work like that any more. So what should I do? Most of my friends from university were at this time embarking on careers. I wasn’t interested in a career. What did I want to do with my life? I asked myself seriously the question “what makes me happy?” Some answers I rejected because they relied on the presence and actions of other people. I realised there was one thing, though, I could rely on myself and that was reading and studying. That was the thing that never failed to please and interest me. So, notwithstanding my unimpressive past as a student, I decided I was going to read and study and to hell with anything else.

By now I had become obsessed by Nietzsche. I had, of course, read him quite a few years before, but now I was interested more and more in the interpretation of his philosophy. Around 1990 it had become commonplace to view Nietzsche’s philosophy as fundamentally aesthetic. Many readings based on Heidegger’s first volume of Nietzsche lectures were appearing and Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature was acclaimed everywhere. Nietzsche was hailed – and sometimes criticised – as the godfather of postmodernism. It was a superficially attractive point of view. And yet I saw a problem. If Nietzsche viewed the world as a work of art, if Nietzsche believed all was perspective, then why did he make such a big thing about Wagner? What justified his intemperate criticisms? At the time, following the usual post-structuralist way I considered it simply as a contradiction within Nietzsche’s thought. With that idea I quickly wrote an MA thesis – some guff about art and chaos in Nietzsche’s philosophy best forgotten.

The day after I sent off the thesis I began to read a book which really marked the beginning of my research, although it had nothing to do with Nietzsche directly. The book was Music and Trance by Gilbert Rouget. It is a gloriously rich and fascinating work. The gist of its argument was that music does not induce trance as is usually thought. Music’s role is rather to accompany and control the trance. Rouget does make certain analogies between trance ceremonies and operatic performance – analogies justified by Renaissance theorising regarding ancient Greek tragedy and opera as its modern counterpart. I realised that Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner insofar as it rested on the deleterious effects his music was credited with having on its listeners was possibly not justified and in fact might rest on some rather old and unexamined ideas. And I soon discovered there was a long history behind the idea of the “effects of music” and I started to read whatever I could find on the subject.

About a year after that I came across another book that influenced the direction of my research – Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics edited by Large & Weber. From the essays contained within I learned that Wagner’s importance in the nineteenth century rested not only on his status as a composer but as the head of a movement – Wagnerism – that took a variety of forms in different countries. Wagner’s writings preached cultural renewal, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, Schopenhauerian pity mixed with Christianity and Buddhism, vegetarianism and so on. It had a stirring effect on many and arguably can be regarded as one of the intellectual ancestors of National Socialism. I realised that Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner was spot on as regards its social, political and ethical aspects. So I started to learn more about Wagnerism.

The more I read about Nietzsche, Wagner, and Schopenhauer, the more I read about history and nineteenth-century culture, the more I became convinced that most interpretations of Nietzsche were fundamentally flawed. That is because most interpretations of Nietzsche are ahistorical. He is read as though he were a contemporary primarily interested in contemporary issues in academic philosophy. That is all very well but it leads many to consider Nietzsche’s writings then as literary, unsystematic, fragmentary, contradictory. It appeared to me that many problems in interpretation could be resolved by reading Nietzsche in historical terms. So, I wrote my PhD thesis to argue that Nietzsche’s philosophy is best understood as a response to Wagnerism. To take one example – why does Nietzsche expend so much effort on the concept of pity? That is a question inadequately answered by most discussions of Nietzsche’s ethics. In the main that is because they see pity in terms of Christianity. Pity, however, was a pressing problem for Nietzsche. It was the fundamental concept in Schopenhauer’s ethics and was taken up in those terms by Wagner. And even where Nietzsche does link pity with Christianity it is a Christianity seen through Schopenhauerian lenses. Nietzsche’s ethical ideas are largely determined by such focus on particular concepts as these.

Anyway, studying for a PhD is quite wonderful – at least in England, and doing a subject in the Humanities – because you are simply encouraged to haunt libraries and read whatever you like for a few years. All that is expected of you is that you keep in touch – so I used to meet my supervisor for a pleasant chat over lunch once a month. Of course, at the end of it you have to produce a thesis. I had my moment of panic about a month before it was due to be handed in. I was, naturally, advised simply to write up something – if I had anything else worthwhile it could wait. A lot of people flatter themselves that because they get accepted onto a PhD programme, and because they manage to do some research, then it doesn’t really matter whether they complete. Except – it is the ability to complete a cogent and concise piece of work that is really being tested. I just about finished on time: I wrote the introduction on the Monday; the whole of Tuesday was spent printing out several copies; and they were bound and posted on the Wednesday with a day to spare. Friday I was off on holiday with my younger sister and her children full of the most splendid feeling of freedom.

My viva was about five or six months later a few days before Christmas. The viva is a relic of medieval times when a doctoral candidate was expected to defend his thesis in public. Fortunately nowadays you only have to stand up against a couple of examiners – and if your supervisor likes you the ones chosen will be broadly sympathetic. Even so it can be quite gruelling. On the other hand you have spent years studying your subject and it has all come down to this one interview. You feel like an athlete who has trained their whole life for one race in the Olympics. I confess I was on top form that day. It was exhilarating. The conversation begins quite generally: why did you think such and such subject worth researching? And it becomes more and more specific: on page 70 you assert so-and-so but surely Professor X has shown that blah blah blah. After an hour and half you are asked to step outside. Twenty minutes, half an hour later you are called back in – handshakes, you’ve passed. It’s curious, though. It’s not like you’ve passed an exam. Rather it’s like they are saying, welcome to the club, now you’re one of us. That evening I was as happy as I’ve ever been.

I was stroppy the day of my first graduation. It didn’t help that most of my friends had graduated the year before. So far as I was concerned it was all a load of flummery and I went through the whole thing exhibiting a permanent sneer. My parents came down, of course, and both my sisters, and they were all far more excited than I was. The trouble is, I couldn’t escape the suspicion that I didn’t really deserve to get a degree – I had put in so little work. I didn’t bother going to receive my MA – I got my certificate in the post. I had no intention of going to my PhD ceremony, either. However, one day my parents said they didn’t expect me ever to pay them back for their financial assistance but… they wanted to see me get my degree. It would have been churlish – and ungrateful – to refuse. So, on a hot July day I sat glumly in the car on my way to Canterbury. Against all expectations it turned out to be a lovely day. When we arrived it was already afternoon and we went for a late lunch. The food and wine made me feel more relaxed. In the early evening we made our way to the King’s School in the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral. Going into the hall I realised things would be different this time. The undergraduates were handed plastic packs containing their gowns. Doctors were taken aside and helped to dress. That’s more like it! The gown, I noted, was heavier than before and much more pleated and lined with velvet. The hat was like a squashed top hat with a broad hard brim and two purple tassels – the sort of thing you see Thomas More or Erasmus wear in paintings. I stepped out of the hall to rejoin my parents. As we strolled in the grounds a woman and her daughter came towards us. The woman gave me a funny look and said loudly to her daughter, “Why is that person’s gown more colourful than yours?” “Oh, she’s a doctor”, she replied. I happened to glance at my mother at that moment and she just beamed. I thought, well, that has made up for a lot. From then on I enjoyed myself.

So what now for my education? It was asked of me in my viva whether I was doing philosophy in my thesis or history of ideas. I said philosophy, of course. But the truth is, I think, that I am more interested in the history of ideas. I never wrote a revised version of my thesis for publication. I’ve just never been able to rouse myself. I just lack the necessary ambition and drive, I suppose. I did apply to do post-doctoral research on the theme of the effects of music but I never got the grant (well, they are extremely hard to get). If I had a year’s income and access to a university library then who knows? At the moment my interests are varied and my reading desultory. Actually, what I’d really like to do is another degree… in mathematics. It would be fun, I think. Every so often I take a look at the Open University syllabus…

First posted in November 2007

1) If you had asked me when I was 15 or 16 who my favourite group was I would have answered: The Mothers of Invention. It was Frank Zappa’s solo album, Hot Rats, that I heard first, however. That was thanks to my art teacher at school, Mr Lawton, of the brown smocks and the hexagonal purple-tinted glasses, who played rock records throughout his lessons and claimed to be able to play the sitar. I learned nothing whatsoever about art from Mr Lawton but I discovered a whole lot about rock music… It was the cover of Hot Rats that attracted me first, it was freaky – it just shouted “cool” and “this is underground“. As for the music, it was melodious jazz-rock with a certain ungainly and sleazy edge. For a couple of years I was hooked – and then the doubts began. What doubts? Well, nobody has put it better than Ian Penman in one of the most splendidly vituperative reviews ever written. Absolutely devastating and unanswerable in my opinion. (You can read it on The Wire’s website). I still have a soft spot, though, for the Mothers of Invention stuff from 1968-69, the era of Uncle Meat and Hot Rats.

So, from the latter here is Peaches en Regalia

2) The Grateful Dead I owe to Mr Lawton, too. He played the live albums often in class. I went through a stage when I was 16 of reading beatnik and hippy literature like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Doors of Perception and lots of Kerouac and Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and Alan Watts as well as reminiscences of Haight-Ashbury and Yippie manifestoes; listening to Grateful Dead records was part of all that. Fortunately, the phase didn’t last very long. Anyway, 1976 was the year of my O-Levels and the album Blues For Allah in particular was the soundtrack to those exams and the hot summer after. My favourite song, though, has always been The Eleven. The Grateful Dead were notorious for meandering rather aimlessly for forty minutes and then suddenly everything would come together and they would fly – as they did often on The Eleven. Listening to this glorious track again I am transported, I’m a tripped-out, long-haired, groovy hippie chick, eyes shut, beads swinging as I sway to those soaring guitars. Positively Dionysian!

From Live/Dead, The Eleven

3) Another song that reminds me so much of the summer of 1976 is Midnight At The Oasis by Maria Muldaur. Exactly the kind of soft, laidback, adult-oriented rock that punk wanted to blow away forever! Yet I adore her voice and this song is so lovely, it’s sexy and feminine and just made for summer nights and long dresses and glasses of Chardonnay in sweet-smelling gardens.

Here is Midnight at the Oasis.

4) The class I enjoyed most at school – or perhaps I should rephrase that: the only class I enjoyed at school (by the time I got to my mid-teens anyway), was music. Four periods in a row! Wonderful. One day, the teacher invited Mr Kenny (who usually taught English) to come in and tell us about jazz. He had a fantastic record collection and used it to take us through the whole history from Jelly Roll Morton’s piano rolls to Miles Davis and the electrified Bitches Brew. Somewhere in the middle of the lesson Mr Kenny played a Charlie Parker record. He prefaced it by saying that Parker was perhaps the greatest genius jazz had produced but that his music was an acquired taste. I wonder what he meant? Because out of all the records he played this was the one that spoke most directly to me: raw emotion clothed in a form as strict as a sonnet. I can still easily imagine myself back in the music-room on that May day staring out of the window when I heard these astonishing and beautiful sounds for the first time.

This was the record – Parker’s Mood

5) I relied a great deal on certain programmes on Radio 3 for my education. There was a particulat one which was a constant stimulation in the mid 1970s and that was The Pied Piper. This was a short programme aimed at children that went out on weekdays and was presented by the most infectiously enthusiastic person I’ve ever come across, David Munrow. He was a fantastic educator who could make any subject fascinating. His speciality was early music and he was very keen to promote the virtues of the sackbut and the crumhorn and that kind of thing. The Pied Piper, though, covered an extremely wide range of music from all eras and parts of the world. It was impossible not to be caught up in Munrow’s genuine enjoyment. I would listen enthralled. Sadly, he committed suicide in 1976…

From the album, Two Renaissance Dance Bands, here is Susato’s Pavane Mille Regretz performed by the Early Music Consort of London conducted by David Munrow.

6) It is hard to believe but the Velvet Underground in the mid-70s did not have the reputation or the cachet they have now. True, the cognoscenti appreciated their originality, but in the great scheme of things rock they occupied a marginal place. In fact, you could usually pick up their records in bargain bins. My favourite song has always been Venus in Furs but the album I played most at the time was Live at Max’s Kansas City. It especially reminds me of skipping Games (and I never did Games or PE after I was 14) and lounging around someone’s house listening to music instead and posing as a disillusioned decadent. Nico, of course, sang on the first Velvet Underground album. Not many people like her singing but I do. And even those who do like Nico don’t seem to think much of Chelsea Girl. I don’t know why. I love it. In any case, it was destined to become my favourite “coming down” record by the end of the 1970s…

Well, here’s Fairest of the Seasons – I think it’s rather charming and cool and beautiful.

7) My favourite punk record came out at the end of 1976 – the Buzzcocks‘ Spiral Scratch EP. This, for me, was exactly what punk was supposed to sound like – speedy, nervous, scratchy, sharp, energetic.

Here’s Boredom.

8) I was rather nervous when I arrived at Surrey University in the autumn of 1978 and kept very much to myself the first few days. Then I took a break from all the “welcome” lectures and introductions of freshers’ week to explore the record shop in Guildford and came home with various singles including the latest by Penetration. As I played it loudly the first time in my study-bedroom on campus there was a furious knocking at the door – “What is this? It’s brilliant!” And that’s how I made my first friends at college.

So, Life’s a Gamble

9) I’ve seen Derek Jarman’s Jubilee several times now. The first was not long after it came out and I hated it then because for some reason I was expecting it to be a realistic documentary. I was much more impressed the second and third time. Jubilee does express a certain truth about the atmosphere and ethos in which punk flourished. Looking back at old photographs and films it becomes obvious how close the 1970s were to the war. Indeed, the war was still a large part of many adults’ conversation. Anyone of my generation will recall their parents going on about rationing. It was more than that, though, it was rather an air of austerity which attached itself to everything. I remember thinking that all around me was grey and grimy, crumbling and decayed. Everything new on the other hand seemed to be made of plastic. The revolution of the 60s had ended in compromise. Phoniness, deceit, fakery and hypocrisy were everywhere. When the Sex Pistols sang “No Future” I really believed it. I thought our society was on the edge of collapse. I know I wasn’t the only one to feel that these were apocalyptic times, that chaos was just around the corner.

The Scream by Siouxsie and the Banshees is probably my favourite rock album. I’ve never tired of it. It’s so evocative of my moods and feelings at this time. I wish I could explain it but I can’t. Can I get away with just saying that it is the sound of my teenage angst? It’s connected as well, though, with some short stories by Robert Silverberg (in the collections Unfamiliar Territory and Capricorn Games), especially the title story of the latter about a girl whose birthday it is in the last year of the 20th century. One of the guests at her party is a man who has lived for a thousand years… I am at a loss to understand quite why this story resonates so much with me. Something to do with time and desire and knowledge…? Anyway, The Scream is the perfect soundtrack to it.

Here is Nicotine Stain from side 2.

10) Crisis came from the Guildford area and then relocated to Brixton. They were the favourite group of every punk in between. In Guildford they were nearly always the support group at any vaguely new wave gig – even though on most occasions they hadn’t even been booked. There were many memorable occasions such as their very last gig at Surrey University where they blew away Magazine and Bauhaus and I missed the train home and watched the sun rise as I sat under Guildford Cathedral. Crisis mutated into Death of June but I never really listened to them. It did surprise me that there were accusations of right-wing affiliations made about Death In June for some of the members of Crisis had been in the the Socialist Worker’s Party. They played often at Rock Against Racism and Anti-Nazi League benefits. They sang lyrics like “Urban terrorism is no substitute for the building up of a revolutionary working class party“. At that Peckham gig I mentioned I recall a speech from the stage urging everyone to help smash up some British Movement march the next day. Yet even then I sometimes wondered whether it was all a matter of chance for a lot of people which side they were on. Just as circumstances of birth determined whether they supported Chelsea or West Ham so with politics.

Perhaps their most popular song, taken from their one and only Peel Session for the second single, UK 79

11) Culture’s Two Sevens Clash is one of the great summer anthems. It sends me straight back to London in the late 70s. Walking down Portobello late on a warm Saturday afternoon: the aroma of Afro-Caribbean cookery, the sounds of reggae from some window above, the air dusty, and the atmosphere thick with anticipation of the night’s pleasures.

Two Sevens Clash

First posted in April 2007