Ring Out The Old, Ring In The New

Birth of a Human Being

My snow soul is slowly taking shape,

Falling from heaven to inherit the earth

And the family features of God and ape,

Angel out of my element from birth…

And this is me, this helpless drop of Man,

This perfect mould of bud and mineral,

Crawling, flight, and every earthly thing.

All of it – nothing.

                                          Yet I’ll assert I AM

In time by striving upright endlessly;

Inherit here a kiss, to milk, like grist,

The love that made me, and by which I’m born;

The word that speaks its perfect mind, the fist

That grasps its imaged God; the whole torn

And bleeding womb of human history.

Note: 35 years ago today, in the Queen Elizabeth hospital King's Lynn, I witnessed my wife giving birth to our firstborn, still favourite (and only) child, Emma. Things started mid afternoon at a quiet and in my case traditionally bilious long school term post-Christmas get together with the neighbours at about 3 pm the day before and went on all night and all morning and just into the following afternoon. (I remember noticing that Norwich City won 2-1, wondering how such a remote event could register.) It was horrendous enough witnessing the birth. I am glad I never had to achieve the feat myself. But it was of course the ultimate labour of love and today, incredibly, our daughter is 35 years old. She has since extended the line by marrying our favourite son in law and giving birth at the same hospital (really nice Maternity unit btw) to two children herself, a daughter who will be four in February and a son who will be two in October.

35 years ago about now, I came home, wrung out by the experience, pranged the car reversing into the drive into a discarded dining room table I forgot we'd left there, and - exhausted, relieved, delirious - wrote , no, not this sonnet but a precursor of it called 'Animal'. A few days later, I picked my family up from QE and we started the greatest adventure, most important human activity and worst paid career of child rearing. Providentially it snowed almost as soon as I'd got them home and we were cocooned for a week, a much needed accidental paternity leave in the age before they gave you any. During that week in lieu, I wrote this sonnet.

Happy birthday Emma! XX

Being Santa

 

As I waited for our grandchildren to arrive and witness my premiere of this most iconic of roles, I shivered slightly. Not just with the damp December cold but with the responsibility. Here was Isla's encounter with the magical childhood Santa we all treasure in our memories. (Theo at a year old so as was unlikely to be find it any less strange and wonderful than his normal encounters with his grandsire)  I felt the weight of generations and centuries on my shoulders. Was my cod Nordic yodel and white beard sufficient disguise to sustain the magic of otherness in the familiar garden den Isla had helped me prepare? Would I fluff my vaguely Scandinavian up and down lines ("Ho ho ho! Have you been a good girl for your mummy and daddy?") overwhelmed by the epiphany of heaven's generosity and earth's humanity I was suddenly embodying, sotto voce, centre-stage and spot-lit in the radiance of a childhood delight? No Method actor (three months living with reindeeer in Lapland on mince pies in a thin red suit communicating only in High Elvish; then matching every word uttered to a motivation and a movement of the stuck on eyebrow so that I really 'felt' it,  - whether the audience did or not) could have felt any less charged and apprehensive. I recalled terrified moments behind the curtain at my Edinburgh fringe shows listening to the audient come in.

In the event, I needn't have worried.  "Grandpa! she shouted through the gap in the trees (top left) from the road below. The stocking hanging off the bough and the red and white through the depleted winter hedge succeeded in bringing delight but not it seems even a willing suspension of disbelief. And then it unravelled even more spectacularly and unexpectedly when she arrived at the grotto entrance and shared that sudden childhood terror of seeing a white bearded loon in the gloom.

"But don't you want your present?"

"No! it's too scary."

Ah well, maybe next year. (Theo will be two so you never know.) Fortunately our daughter, their mother, was old enough to deputise and console.

Christmas

Solstice, Saints and Sinners by Peacock's Tale folk indie duo

JOURNEY OF THE MAGUS by Peacock's Tale folk indie duo

The Only Gift (A Lynn Carol) by Peacock's Tale

Postmodern Post-man Pat's Theatrical Trailer for 'Covid's Metamorphoses'...

A tale for today... and tomorrow and tomorrow. We'd call it a panto. But we're living the panto...

Check the album out here... https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/covids-metamorphoses-the-prologue

and here...https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/covids-metamorphoses-the-tale

Saints and Sinners Christmas EP by Peacock's Tale Audio

 

	1.	Fring Church Bells 01:52
	2.	Saints and Sinners (with bells on) 04:23
	3.	Journey of the Magus 01:43
	4.	You Gotta Move 02:00
	5.	The Parting Glass 02:06
	6.	Down To The River To Pray 02:53
	7.	Saints and Sinners live (amps off) 04:23

about

Press Release 

‘Saints and Sinners' is a cover of a folk song by Scots-Canadian David Francey performed live to camera on YouTube from our cottage in Sedgeford. 

“We set up the studio so that everything – voices, harmonies, guitars, percussion – rings out like a bell. In case the audience is in any doubt, we’ve blended some Fring Church bells (as rung on a Sunday morning by our local vicar) into the live mix.” 

The song’s composer won a John Lennon award for songwriting in 2010. The down to earth message of the lyric is that “it’s a long way from heaven to Bethlehem”but with a deep sympathy for “the joy and the sorrow of my fellow man.” Fellow survivors of the early 70s will recognise the nod to Lennonism in the jingly jangly hippy 60s mix. 

The EP covers the 'Christ' and the "Mess' of Christmas with a sonnet set to a drum and bass soundtrack narrating the 'Journey of the Magus' and an a capello cover of the Scots folk song 'The Parting Glass.' This Saints and Sinners motif is further pursued with two gospel covers 'You Gotta Move' and 'Down to the River To Pray'. 

The whole package may be streamed or downloaded from Bandcamp (search for ‘Peacock’s Tale folk indie duo’) and the ‘A’ side viewed on YouTube from December 6.

credits

released December 6, 2021

See also - https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/the-peacocks-talk-turkey-the-meanings-of-christmas

license

all rights reserved

tags

indie alternative americana folk gothic rap Sedgeford

about

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Peacock's Tale Folk/Indie DuoSedgeford, UK

It's all right, folks, we're married. A marriage of melody and rhythm. Indie folk, Norfolk noir, historical ballads, musical ... more

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discography

Weirdsworth's Lucy by Peacock's Tale Music video

Mary Mary Quite Contrary (How Does Your Garden Grow?)

The Backwoods Cavalier by the Peacock's Tale folk/storytelling duo

The English Civil Wars and Other Nursery Crimes coming this Sunday!!

The video premieres Sunday August 22, 11 am. (date the Civil War started in 1642)

https://youtu.be/rKDIJGQYUAY

A musical film of the Phezant Tail’s new album “The English Civil Wars and Other Nursery Crimes” which premieres on August 22, the date the English Civil War began in 1642. Both album and film tell the story of an England at war with itself in the Roundhead v Cavalier conflict of 1642-1651 (and the origins of that conflict in the English Reformation of a century before) revealing the hidden meanings of familiar nursery rhymes associated with those conflicts. This soundtrack is linked here to still images of the folk and storytelling duo in Royalist and Puritan costume against the historical interior (stained glass, plain glass, wall paintings, whitewashed wall paintings, altar rails etc) and exterior of a small local parish church in Norfolk, which preserve the story of those conflicts. It also features two colour plates central to the story of that Radical 17C attempt to build a visionary new England by the artist William Blake from his mixed media works ‘Milton’ and ‘Jerusalem.’ Photography by Bhas Allan. (Additional photography by the Phezant's Tail) The costumes are Cromwell's Preachy/New Jerusalem (Maz) and Whore of Babylon/Old Gloriana (Gaz) depending on your point of view! Digital download of album with full notes, lyrics and credits https://phezants-tail.bandcamp.com/al... (this link also goes live on Aug 22)

Let us expiate

 

1970   (England 2 Germany W. 3)

"At 2-0 up, my England never lose!"

Swore Dad, and twenty minutes later I

Had lost my father too, wondering why

He'd cheated me like foreign teams, or news

Of English captains nicked, or fools who'd choose

To take wor Bobby off: the Sixties died

In Pontypool exile then, in Groveside

Villas with its Nineteenth Century views.

Pan's People changed to Legs, the Oh No band

Yoked John, Starrs fell, Paul's flare stopped making sense,

'uddersfield 'arold became "Hampstead" Heath;

Brazil were back and in the sun they'd tanned

Our English hide, so '66 had meant

Nothing, meant all things pass - except defeats.

(Pic- performing this piece at the Granary Theatre, Wells, 2000.)

Last of the Iceni live at the Fringe by the Phezant's Tail

 

Bringing in the May by the Phezant's Tail

 

https://phezants-tail.bandcamp.com  for the album

https://youtu.be/u6cM3DIvkCI   for the music video

Annunciazione

 

January 30, Humpty Dumpty and The Siege of Lynn

The nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" is said to be a concise folk account of the English Civil War. In some interpretations Humpty Dumpty is that fallen would-be Absolute Monarch (Charles I) himself, whom all his cavalry and men couldn't restore. In others it is a piece of fallen royalist artillery on the walls of Colchester during the siege of 1648. We wonder if the rhyme immortalised the moment when the Humpy Dumpty of Absolute Monarchy was forever broken in these islands as not even the Restoration of 1660 could put Humpty together again or prevent him developing back into the Parliamentary model.

January 30 1649 was the day Englishmen took the rather un-English step of chopping off a Head of State ("Chop off his head with the crown upon it," as Cromwell put it) and January 30 1661 was the day the only English republic was symbolically beheaded in the posthumous exhumation and beheading of Cromwell's corpse, until then honourably buried in Henry VII's tomb.  (Cromwell's head now resides secretly in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, the college he himself attended but had to leave on his father's death.) So it seems a fitting day to release our gothic musical comedy about a decisive early action in the Civil War, the Siege of Lynn of 1643.

It makes a nice tourist-story to suggest Lynn was a valiant Royalist town holding back the tide but in fact the backwoods Cavaliers who stormed and held it for a month had as much legitimacy as the thugs who stormed the Capitol in the last days of Trump. The royalist coup, against the two legitimately elected Parliamentarian MPs and a Parliamentary mayor, was led by a Sir Hamon Le Strange of Hunstanton Hall (a large painting of him still has pride of place in the elegant Town Hall) anxious for his large but precarious personal fortune if the Parliamentarians won the war and started to address corruption. He was right to be anxious. His, and his son Roger's, passionate Royalism was indistinguishable from their financial self-interest and the deaths, destruction and terror their month-long coup brought down upon the strategically vital port were ultimately in that very cavalier and not very noble cause.

It's also important to remember that the King was not the constitutional monarchy of today, which most of the Parliamentarians would have fought for themselves, but a deluded tyrant. It would be a much better heritage story to explain that in 1643 a key victory for the future progression of Britain was fought and won across the great Ouse between West Lynn and Lynn. Parliament would never have won the War without its naval supremacy and the port of Lynn, along with its supply route into London and ten counties, was essential to retaining this at the start. Once Lynn was re-secured, the War could be fought on other frontiers. But if Lynn had remained in the hands of unelected cavaliers long enough for the royalist Duke of Newcastle to relieve the town, the whole course of the war might have been different.

Credits:

A Phezant's Tail-John Charlton composition.

(Words and bridge: The Phezant's Tail

Melody on the verses and chorus: John Charlton)

Produced by The Phezant's Tail

We are indebted to John Charlton for his work on this track, the first in a two way collaboration between us. His melody helped us marry those mutual exclusives: poetry sung and poetry acted (a long ambition of ours). He also sang with us and played acoustic and bass on the chorus and verse. And a very good time was had by all.

Pic of Lynn from West Lynn by Bhas Allan, taken in January 2019.  Cromwell's Parliamentary artillery bombarded Lynn from this side while its navy blockaded from the Wash. The stained glass (west) window 'shot all to hell' was in the double towered church pictured (St Margaret's, Lynn Minster) and happened on September 3, a spookily recurring date in Cromwell's career. (The date of his three decisive victories in Ireland, Scotland and England 1649-1651 and the day he died in 1658.)

DI Ken Hill Goes Wild

audio performance