Anyone who's heard the hypnotic circling chords of CS & N's 'Guinnevere' on their eponymous album will know how flexible Arthurian romance can be. There, David Crosby is some West Coast modern day Lancelot caught - amid fraught pentagrams, orange trees, seagulls, gardens with aimlessly wandering peacocks etc - in a fatal spell of attraction for an elusive green eyed, gazing golden haired woman,  longing to be free out on the  sea with her. This is a long way from the Arthur of Dark Age history,  not quite so far  from Celtic mythology and a direct descendant of French romance:  the troubadours of Provence would have recognised this Norman version of The Matter of Breton in it even if the Dark Age warriors riding behind the Romano-Celtic Arth-Ursus into battle against the Saxons might have wondered what their warlord's shadowy wife 'Gwenhwyfar' (white phantom) was doing consorting with a general they hadn't even heard of, unless he was Llugh, the Celtic god of light and harvest, after which Londinos (London) is reputedly named. The point is, 'The Matter of Britain' has lasted because, like Britain itself, it has a magical relationship with time and place. It changes and it stays the same. 

My version of Guinevere below is very much the French romance one, the Matter of Britain as sung in French verse by Provencal troubadours, magical hero-stories exiled to Brittany (Little Britain) with Celtic Britons fleeing through Cornwall as the Saxons conquered the West, given a shining armour polish by the Normans, a brilliant gloss of French romance and courtly love and spreading across the North of Europe (and into Spain).  And that's before we even get to the later Arab enchantments, new learning and flying dragons absorbed as the Christians embarked on the Crusades and those twin propaganda campaigns, the Norman Conquest's identification with the Saxon-subduing Celtic knights of old followed by Henry VIII's repeat of the same, both to legitimise a new Britain using the old Matter.

"Lady Guinevere" was first published in 'Schools Poetry Review' in the late 80s and then in my first volume of poems "Coming Home" in 1991 along with an alternative Welsh-metered Dark Age/ Celtic mythological "Gwenhwyfar" the twinned poems evident love of all things Arthurian earning me an invitation by elegant formal letter to a British order of Arthurians which I was too wary to take up. I subsequently extended the sequence into a book of verse called "The Lost Land" which I learned by heart and performed as a one man show (Arthur; Britain's Making") - using masks and English, Welsh and Scottish flags - at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2011. Not to mention an epic school play "Jennifer's Gwenhwyfar" - epic in every way, cast of 70, 2 hours long, produced by 3 different directors in 3 different local schools, published by a teacher's training college, workshopped in class and with youth theatre groups, still rewriting it for various remakings 30 years later...

The audio link  https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/lady-guinevere is to the version of "Guinevere" which will appear on our Peacock's Tale folk indie duo's forthcoming album of "The Lost Land" and opts for our remit of 'traditional' tale with 'contemporary' beat.

Lady Guinevere

Belle ami, si est de nous, ne vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous.

Let them play at boyish games round
A table. Though walled up, bound,
In an unpublished garden, stone
Tower with window, all alone,
This court still revolves around me.
I twist them all round my pretty
Little finger, a studded ring:
The champion knight, the poor king,
Modred, Gawain, my Lancelot.
It’s the only power I know.

He comes through enchanted forests,
Rough-horses, haunted castles, mists;
From slaying giants, big bad knights:
Barons with feudal appetites;
Impossible quests for Our Lady,
Sowing wild seeds Love meant for me;
Obsessed so with courtly sin and
Confession – Indulgence’s twin;
Greets Artos, old friend – clash of mail 
(So grieved his crown still lacks a graal,
So tedious!) He comes to me  

Who waits… and do not wait to see  
The object of his worship pass,
Wasted, into this looking glass,
Wheat-hair, rose-lips, unsown, should he
Choose to deny himself – and me.

I have a heart, self-determined
Core of I Am, God-underpinned,
Won on the Cross, for me. It can
Choose a beloved, a ‘husband’
The church would make him. But marriage
On earth’s not as it is (a rich
Royal land transaction) as one
With my Lancelot – in heaven.) 

lyrics

Caz Captures The Last Boudicca

Ace photographer and Brighton fashion icon Caz captures Fringe veteran Gaz as he gives his final Boudicca to the cool and kooky of Edinburgh on Friday 26 August.

Receding Fringe?

After twenty nine days at the Edinburgh Fringe, treading cobbles in the rain to granite cellars to watch more shows in one day than I’ve seen in the previous year, while performing two shows of my own, I’m back to gentle Norfolk sunshine.
My chief impression is that ‘Fringe’ no longer describes it. Mainstream stand up by people off the telly, pantomimes, children’s shows, safe reassuring comedy are the shows that bring in the coach-load audiences blocking up the elegant narrow genteel streets. Alternative comedy and challenging theatre is everywhere but most of it attracts the kind of audiences that ensure the Fringe average stabilises at three. The alternative New York underground legend Lach - a countercultural mid evening show and witching hours cellar cabaret – is critically acclaimed as the essence of Fringe but played to more empty seats than walked out of some of the larger commercial promotions. Empty vessels make the most noise? And even then the group of brainless drunks who had their photo taken with Big brother ‘star’ Pete, outside before talking loudly through the first twenty minutes of Lach’s heartwarming and kooky show had to be given the option of pursuing their quest of vacuous celebrity elsewhere by Lach himself. ‘I’ll turn my back and if you’ve attended by mistake you can disappear’ – which they duly did to relieved applause from the rest of the house. ‘They were sucking my energy, man.’ The audience’s too.
I saw a physical theatre production of Steven Berkhoff’s Agamemnon that was so stunningly good I attended it twice. Twice more than the reviewer who arrived late, fell distractingly asleep in front of me, and then left after twenty minutes. The cramped venue ensured that all of the work the performers did at floor level was not seen by anyone further away than the front row – and, if they were that reviewer, not even by them – but everything about this production was fresh, vibrant, starry, young, brilliantly new: the kind of multi arts and innovative experience the Fringe should foster. It was well supported but hardly registered in a city devoted to celebrity reruns – not to mention shambolic imitations - of what audiences already see on TV all the time.
The star system the reviewers use can make or break you at the box office but it lacks any objective criteria – witness shows that get one star in the Scotsman and Three Weeks and four stars from some of the sixth form publications. That wouldn’t happen at A level: or let’s hope not. If the performer is famous, and therefore the house is full, there are already stars in the reviewers’ eyes. More worryingly, ‘weird’ seems to be a reviewer negative – is this the Fringe or Top of the Pops? - and among all the thousands of mega-bankrolled advertising campaigns fronting the big shows and the modest ones fronting the little shows, I read of one obscure one man effort that got hammered as ‘an exercise in self-publicity!’
Henry the Hoover and Friends was genuine kooky comedy and Shakespeare’s Monkeys combined joyously skilful Shakespearean acting with a two woman audience-interactive politically incorrect stand up which debunked everything from celebrity cookery programmes to Dame Judy preciousness (no offence to the real Judy)– the use of spoons instead of daggers for Macbeth a moment of comic heaven – in a way that would have had the Bard himself chortling with joie de vivre. Significantly, both of these were part of the Free Fringe and this may well be the future of the Fringe spirit (though apparently the Scotsman doesn’t review the Free stuff). Money corrupts and it also corporatizes. It’s a bit like punk rock – what started as a shocking deconstruction of culture has become, through audience demand and promoter control, a sentimental replay of reassuring Punk Hits.

My best night at the Fringe

Lach's Antihoot Line-Up for Tonight (Thursday Night): A Fantastic Night of Top Comics and Songwriters!
BULLETIN: TONIGHT: 1/2 Price TKTS (only £6!) plus a full bar!
"Top Five Late Night Shows at Fringe"- The List
"Five Stars!"- The Herald
Thurs.Aug.18- 1) Trevor Browne, 2) Bob Fletcher, 3) Kaley Northcott , 4) James Hazelden, 5) Abie Philbin Bowman, 6)-Alev Lenz, 7) Gareth Calway , 8) The Vans, 9) Nick Sun, 10) Laura Theis, 11)Tom Oakes, 12) Dan Wright
August 18 at 12:26pm


PS In Norfolk, I usually go to bed at 10 pm. Here, I was onstage behind a mic rocking for Boudicca at 2 am, and we were still celebrating at 4 am. I think we even helped some young ladies create an arts installation out of repressive traffic cones until a police car approached. Then we went home like students a third of our age to tea and toast as dawn came up over the Firth of Forth. Magic.

Tales Out Of School- A Retired Teacher Lets It All Out

Below is my publicity shot for the Edinburgh Fringe. It was taken by Si Barber for the TES at Hunstanton Funfair. Note the highbrow fringe. The show is about someone who after twenty seven years of telling teenagers off and giving them work to do that they really don't want to do finally gets the chance to leave school and get a life. I'm doing nine nights in a row instead of my usual dozen first night nerves every one night stand series but hoping it will all be more than a nine day wonder because I'm looking to turn it into a serious tour. The plan is that the Star Club in Hamburg books me for a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, then that a young businessman named Epstein decides that an Edinburgh fringe and a cute suit will widen my appeal. After that, a booking at the Oasis club Manchester, a national tour, Garethmania and the Big Break in America via the Ed Sullivan show etc. One thing I will NOT do is play Sunday Night At The London Palladium by command of Her Majesty or accept an MBE. Oh all right, Ma'am, Brian, if you think it will help book sales...