Wolf Folk Club, Sandringham Woods, Norfolk, bite sized previews of the film of the film of the anthem

If you go down to the woods.

Ginsberg, Howl your heart out! The Silver Fox leads the Pack...

  

Never mind Frozen. Never mind Jaws. Here's three John MacLennan hand-cam previews of a film of Howl (a poem what I wrote) - as lupine ear-marked by pack-leader Roger as a Wolf Folk Club anthem - performed live by the Pack. (And we do have a big good time down in those big bad woods.)

 

here

here

and here

Note also the film of the film of the film being made by musician-visitors from the Deep American South. The man making notes is my therapist.

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Lovehearts and red wine

Lovehearts and red wine: maiden recording session -

Hear the Christmas single here

A Sedgeford Christmas Card

The elements of Christmas -

Fire and ice -

In this tempered Arctic sun

That burns in the trees.

In these pools like skating rinks

Deep and dark and even.

Ice

In the flinty ground

And the bitter Easterly.

Fire

In the solstice sunset

Bleeding the black woods

And its ice-pink afterglow

And its fire-blue areola.

Ice

In the barn-wide rising moon.

Ice

In my soul as I'm turned

To the unlit wings

That cradle and grave

The sunset's light show.

Fire

In my soul

At a rising star

Burning like ice

In the polar blue.Fire

In my hearth at home

(Crackling through logs),

In the farmer's field

(Roaring through twigs),

Red-raw and orange

Tongues of life-lust:

The vital, stripped down

Simplicities of winter.

Sedgeford druids Vanessa Wood-Davies and Goliath Dylan-Calway performed http://garethcalway.blogspot.co.uk/p/poem-of-month.html (November 2014) together at the Wolf Folk Club on 30 Oct and (with amplification and as part of Bob Bones' undercover Beautiful Days event at which Julie Bones and her band of bears and cardinals divinely regaled) at the Lynn Arms, Syderstone on Halloween itself.

Bats and spiders, witches and ghouls, Werewolf ale and some rather persistent  cobwebs prevailed. That pub is going places and it was a privilege to broomstick-ride with them for the evening.  Pictures and further details of the general event in companion blog post here

Lovehearts and Red Wine step out

 Nuclear fusion

A duet has been born, premiered and named at the Wolf Folk Club on Oct 30 (someone mentioned Dylan - not sure if it's Thomas or Bob) and love-labouring into the world like a bat out of heaven on Hammereen. We shall return and see if the accident can be conjured again.

Vanessa provided the devilish fiddle interruptions on 'Fiddler's Hill 'and a heavenly tune ('Snow') and performance on harp behind the words on 'Susan Nobes'. Helped by three bottles of red wine I Hamm(er-House of Horror)ed up the spooky verbals . It's not easy to hold the attention of a pub audience, especially one drinking shots, but we did it. 'Fiddler's Hill' recounts a famous Norfolk legend- read about the legend here; Susan Nobes is a true Sedgeford tragedy I unearthed in the British Library by mistake while failing to trace the history of our own cottage. It deserves to be better known. Read Lynn News item about it here.

In Memoriam

In Memoriam.

This is from 'I Got On At Hallelujah Lamppost' written in the early '80s and published in Anglo Welsh Review in 1985 (my first professional publication.) Lately I've been performing it in the very different but always deeply appreciative settings of Norfolk folk: The Wolf - the Wolferton Folk Club, Norfolk - Tuesday 18 April and Folkspot Internet Radio the following Sunday. It's the sort of thing our daughter studied at University for her Thatcher's Britain course. Hang on, that wasn't history, that was our life! I did undercover work as a bus conductor (the Muse knew that - I thought I was paying the rent) to research this sequence of vignettes of the Eastern valley of Gwent: a kind of compressed verse novel encapsulating a modern industrial world. Until they got rid of the bus conductors... and then the steelworkers...and then the miners: they haven't got rid of poets - yet - so here it is. It's became much more prophetic in time with the old elegaic heavy metal community replaced by the cash-jingling 'MORE of lots of MORE to lose, mortuary bound' shiny new culture, as long as you had a job to pay for it. Wherever you stand in that debate - and families have been riven anew about it on Facebook all week - this is what happened in 'Thatcher's Britain' and this is what died to create it.

3. Fire & Brimstone

This valley had iron
In its guts,
Steeled itself to change
Moving with the trains,
Dug into its coal
For a port for the ores of Spain.

It had shod the Great Bear
Of the Steppes with skates
Made In Blaenafon
Had united the States
Across the wild west
With Monmouthshire iron.

And when King Coal called
For a Copper Grail
For his stainless steel Table,
Tongues of fire could purge
The iron in the soul
At Pontypool inferno.

4.
Conductor

The conductor stubs out
Nostalgia and fag
For the rush down valley,
While through his worn bag
Go all the colours of the river,
The green and the silver and the discoloured copper,
Changing
Forever.

5.
Afon Garde

Afon raging with the rain.
The cut steelworks sinks in the sodden clay.
Steel-faced pickets slam a portcullis
And draw up the bridge of their riverbank scrapyard:

The workers
United
Will never be defeated.

Red-soiled, livid, steaming, green,
Fed with liquid fire and gases,
Afon, desperate, blindly burrows
Like a dragon for the sea.

And all the Sunday School kids
Are Monday-morning singing....
The Word
Is on the dole
He'd rather give us the past tense of coalfield.
Emmanuel
Is on the dole
He's gone down the drain with all the rotten leaves.

Panteg steelworks at twelve o'clock,
Busmen chasing overtime, pickets - jobs,
Eyes calm as anthracite,
Clouds lined with lead

The workers
United
Will never be defeated.

6.
New Towns For Old

In Tal-y-waun
The girls are like leather, the beauty ingrained,
In 15, at 50, it remains, on the wane
Like the ghost of Coal always in the unworked vein
And what is already has, and what has will again
In Tal-y-waun.

In the the New Town
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
The old canal is polished up, the gardens laid down,
And pushchair trolley women bus aroundaroundaround
And brakes and valves and services - autopias - abound.
Parked in his mother's arms high above the ground,
The brand new Son of Cymru gives a multistorey frown ,
MORE of lots of MORE to lose, mortuary-bound,
And after six, just trodden chips-
Not a soul to be found.