walk on the wild side full band version

The original film https://youtu.be/g_Fp0EceMpA was just the two live takes - guitar and vocal and the bass track - filmed consecutively and then spliced together. Those two live takes remain the basis of this performance but the full band, including Maz on the vocal chorus, is now overdubbed onto the sound of the original film. So you get the satisfaction of the immediacy plus the extra textures of the various overdubs. This whole thing wasn't planned- we heard an interview with Herbie Flowers who created the unique bass part on the original Transformer track (and also played tuba elsewhere on that beautifully soft touch album) and just wanted to see how he did it and how much of it we could pull off in our own way. It happened quite quickly at first but then a little slower as we kept hearing more stuff on the Lou Reed track that we wanted to recreate as a Peacock Tale.

The Worm That Didn't Count (for National Poetry Day)

Our contribution to National Poetry Day on the theme of 'counting'. A digital download of the studio audio will go live on Bandcamp on the day itself (Thursday Oct 3) and a link to that will also appear here.

The Worm That Didn't Count

i'm a creep,

a real crawler,

no backbone

at all, a

low humble

grinder, base

mouth full

of soil, a

wet, writhing

hyper-

sensed slave

to all, a

chill, faceless

horror, tightlipped,

toothless

scrawl, a

dim, brainless

shrinker from

harm, a cringing

coil, but a-

live!

and i can turn

To a snake in the grass, or in your bosom,

(Or under a garland of bright apple blossom)

Moving you deep in your bowels:

Subtly developed, sophisticated,

Staring through hooded lidless eyes

At a dense underworld, dimmed, deaf as Dis,

Feeling my sniff-flicking way with my tongue,

With a wriggle of ribs, swift-scaling the dust,

Dumb, unless rattled, when, breath caught, I hiss.

I'm

Puffed up with sluggish irritation,

Stitched in a dead skin, a splintered vision,

Excreted through rocks like fear, or birth,

Charmed by your writing arms, scared of sticks,

The dinosaur undead, too potent to handle,

Daemonic, divine, river written in the stars,

Smooth poison keeping Creation sweet,

The dragon. Get off my back or I'll strike you.

You've wanted me always, under your heel.

© Gareth Calway 1991

Metal

Peacock's Tale Musical Storytelling ( @PeacocksTaleFolkIndieDuo ) is the final iteration of an artistic (and teaching) career spent trying to make art as part of a combined arts collective. I was never quite able to square the circle of (a) the thrill of artists from different disciplines working together with (b) their temperamental predisposition against team work. I suspect you don't have to be married for 40 years first but it helps. Anyway, while as PTMS we focus our combined arts mainly on musical storytelling, a part of me still wants to go out as a full blown multi-arts collective called Wasted On You Lot. If we did, Metal, filmed at UEA near the Sainsbury Centre, would be our first performing installation. Find the text of the poem, an alternative film and a digital download of the audio here - https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/tr...

Walk on the Wild Side

Holly came from Miami, FLA
Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows along the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she

They said, "Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side"
Alright

Candy came from out on the Island
In the back room she was everybody's darling
But she never once lost her head
Even when she was giving head

She said, "Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey, Candy
Take a walk on the wild side"
And the colored girls go

"Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo

Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo"

Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
New York City's the place

Where you said, "Hey, Joe
Take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey, baby
Take a walk on the wild side"

Sugar Plum Fairy came down and hit the streets
Looking for soul food and for a place to eat
Went to the Apollo
You should've seen them go, go, go

They said, "Hey, sugar
Take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side"
Alright
Huh

Jackie, she is just speeding away
She thought she was James Dean for a day
But then you know that she had to crash
Valium would have helped that bash

She said, "Hey, Jackie
Take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side"
And the colored girls go

"Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo

Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo

Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo
Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo"

The Song of the Wedding Rings

The idea here was to write about marriage in terms of the actual punishing metallurgical processes by which gold wedding rings are made, from the formation of the minerals in which it is found to the finished pieces of separated jewellery with which the marriage begins. It became quite an effective allegory for the resistance and conflicts invited when two souls embark on the perilous adventure of wedding into one and was a deliberate challenge to the convention that the wedding is the 'happy ending' of something as in romance novels, as any 'married' person knows it's just the start and you aren't really 'married' in that sense for a long long time, if ever. The ego resists it as fiercely as the love invites it. Thus the choice of poetic form, terza rima, is  that chosen by Dante for Paradiso but also for Inferno and Purgatorio. This 'wedding' of the he and she  is hell and purgatory with a vision of heaven. I read it at our best man's wedding as part of the service though for obvious reasons in that context I emphasised the heavenly vision just before the end.

He. 

It's very dark in here. I'm paralysed,

Dorman and dreamless. Feel poles

Of heat and cold unchanged. And neutralise

Them. Don't know what to do with myself, doled

With endless wastes of time to kill. Waiting

For someone to turn me up, an end to hold

Onto. Feel a distant purity but ring

False, hopelessly flawed and dull, when struck. Dumb.

This happen to me. Especially nothing.

I sent a short time somewhere crowded, numb.

About eight million years. There was lots

Of immigrant stuff I'd vaguely become

A art of. It was probably chaos.

I just lay back, let it all not happen.

Then there was a change. The night was a-buzz,

Vibrating. And I - it was quite sudden

I suppose - was in two places at once.

It got - warmer. My molecules loosened,

Got a little excited.... Ages thence,

It registered that the immigrant stuff,

With impossible speed, had vanished, whence

I was more my own thing. Though a good half

(In two different places) was missing,

Cut. But that's neither here nor there. I have

No lost identity. I feel nothing.

She.

Can't move. Can't. Move. Can only steal my grain

Against him, against more change. Petrified.

And what should I? Nothing ever mends. I'm 

Stuck with myself, though God alone knows why.

I never asked to be here.Molten Light's

Delirium conceived me just to lie

Beneath the piled millenniums of Night

In everlasting restlessness. I'd been

Going nowhere. Slowly. Coldly. My bright

Beginning finished soon as it began.

Now I'm in my own way. Too dense to shift

From it. In a life without end... I'm dammed.

The only chance I've got - of real Life -

Is being overcome by Force. Another's.

But afterwards I'd only lie there. Stiff,

As if unmoved. Regardless.Why bother?

He

I want her but won't give a mile, an inch.

She's only a bit of stuff. But, oh, she's

Heaven. If only she'd yield, I'd be so rich!

She

I've done with cast-offs, drossy heels and quartz.

I was bathed in cyanide to free me,

Though a false gleam conceals it, of course.

I hate and despise like poison sweet

These clods, detest their coarsened common feel.

I'm REFINED, (if you even know what it means).

No. Not just 'polished' my so-called 'dear'.  REAL.

He

You needed nerves of steel just to survive

Where I cane from. You were given a scrape

nd crushed from the start. Bent/ All you insides

Exposed. Filed. Drilled into shape.

You needed a tempered will like iron,

Smoothness and flash a hammer couldn't break.

The fault's my background. Not whom it picked on.

She

You want me? Why? Does a certain stable

Fluency attract you to me, blending

My lightness and grace? I'm pliable

If you really try. But I risk nothing,

It's just how I am, it doesn't move me.

To you it;s magnetic. All this straining

To reach me's YOUR problem. YOUR star. Icy.

He

I feel half dead. My other half's somewhere

Else. One day I'll be got back in once piece,

Perhaps. Meanwhile, I've been jolted half-aware

In opposite directions. Once...Or twice...

She

Or not... No amount of chemistry,

No amount of earth, no amount of time

Can touch me. Put your life's current through me

I'll stay switched off. Like lead, for all my shine.

He

I can't wake up. Such fatigue. It's so hard

To push through this irresistible dark, Fate's

Immoveable object - myself.... I'm shattered.

Ony once, I was dreaming of a shape

Brilliantly mettled, Primely Moving. It all

Came together, in every place...

She

Oh yes, I've dreamt of a true Golden Age

Where I, the immutable Iron Maid,

Break out at last of that golden cage,

Dim memory melting riveted gaze,

Endure, am accepted in, a world I embrace.

Touch. Know - another being. Feel...

Escape...

                    But - No. Im too rusted in place

In my restlessness. I will play it straight.

Keep a grip. Lie low. Remain poker-faced.

Preserve my goodness, value, glow. And wait.

Sonata in G "Love and Death"

In the classic days of the single this would be the experimental/'progressive' B side of "Bring Me To Fring All Saints." The track explores what, if anything, remains when the body dies? The answer is beyond reason and even the strongest faith can only guess. The only certainty our little duo has on this question is that if the little self we fearfully cling to in the face of death is all we have, then we're not really living anyway. That little self palpably dies whenever we let it go and embrace a larger existence, as for example when we love. 

The lyric is a Petrarchan sonnet repeated with variations. In sonata terms the first theme ( in the tonic key) is "In fear of death and out of love with God" which changes key into "In love with death and fear of God and doubt" and back again, a pattern repeated with word modulations on the same theme as the octave of the sonnet works out (ABBBAABBA.) The second theme (in the dominant key) is "In doughty love with love and life and out" which changes key into "Of fear with death, I hear your heart-strung tune" and back again, this second pattern also repeated with word modulations on the same theme as the sestet of the sonnet works out - (CDEEDC. ) The sonnet is repeated with subtle variations and then the two themes, both verbal and musical, are developed before the recapitulation (beginning "In fear of death and out of love with God/ In love with death and fear of God and doubt") resolves with a repeat of the original dominant sestet in the tonic key.

Thus, the themes of love and death are expositioned, developed and resolved as both sonata and sonnet.

All the vocal and instrumental lines ( bass, harmonium, acoustic guitar, tom, snare) are simple but the overall sonata construction is more complex than anything I've ever tried before so I didn't want to waste the considerable cognitive effort required on a trivial subject. Love and death are certainly not trivial themes. As regards the lyric, the phrases had to be as musical as they are semantic and in constructing a sonnet for this musical programme two things happened. 1. I wrote in a less linear, more cyclical, way than usual and being so preoccupied with the form (and the minting of phrases that resounded and that could be developed in the repetitions and varied as tunes are in a sonata) my mind was so preoccupied it let my deepest feelings about these themes through undistracted and unfiltered.

The sonnet as a poetical form repeats metrical and musical ideas anyway (the form, meter and rhyme in an octave and sestet which pivot around a 'turn' at the end of the eight line ) and the 'thought' of a sonnet goes one way (thesis) and then the other (antithesis) towards its synthesis at the end. In this one, those repetitions, pivots and resolutions are extended through subtle variations of the same sonnet (rather than say a sonnet sequence based on verbal thoughts only) within an overall musical sonata.

music as an actual formal musical sonata with sonnet lyrics. 


peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/sonata-in-g-love-and-death for full notes.  

lyrics

In fear of death and out of love with God,
In love with death and fear of God and doubt
Of love and life and All and driven out
Of every In and home and church, a rod 
For my own back, and with my own nails shod,
In fear of life and death of love I shout
My doubtful notes, my beaten heart as stout 
As death, and out of fear I pray to God.

In doughty love with love and life and out
Of fear with death, I hear your heart-strung tune
And let my not-self go, and all in love
All lost like little self in All above,
Self’s little death, my darkness all consumed,
Unshrouding June from ‘I’-cy clouds of doubt.

And half in love with death and fear of God
In fear of All - and all in love with death,
As out of love with life as dying breath
Repeating prayers of lightning to a rod
That doesn’t give a damn, an outed odd
In death with love who never dared to guess
Death’s loving door, a grave, would answer ‘Yes...
And half in love with death and fear of God
In fear of All - and all in love with death,
As out of love with life as dying breath
Repeating prayers for lightning to a rod
That doesn’t give a damn, an outed odd
In death with love who never dared to guess
Death’s loving door, a grave, would answer ‘Yes
Fear’s death will come and fall in love with God.’


In doughty love with love and life and out
Of fear with death, I hear your heart-strung tune
And let my not-self go, and all in love
All lost like little self in All above,
Self’s little death, my darkness all consumed,
Unshrouding June from ‘I’-cy clouds of doubt.

And half in death and for the love of God
The death of God all in love with death,
As out of love with life as dying breath
Repeating prayers for lightning to a rod
That doesn’t give a damn, an outed odd
In death with love who never dared to guess
Death’s loving door, a grave, would answer Yes
Fear’s death will come and fall in love with God.

In fear of death and out of love with God,
In love with death and fear of God and doubt
Of love and life and All and driven out
Of every In and home and church, a rod 
For my own back, and with my own nails shod,
In fear of life and death of love I shout
My doubtful notes, my beaten heart as stout 
As death, and out of fear I pray to God.

In doughty love with love and life and out
Of fear with death, I hear your heart-strung tune
And let my not-self go, and all in love
All lost like little self in All above,
Self’s little death, my darkness all consumed
Unshrouding June from ‘I’-cy clouds of doubt.

credits

released July 1, 2024
In the film, I'm doing my first play through which remains as the basic bass guitar and vocal track on which everything else was later added (including Maz's guitar).

license

Solidified Might

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss

And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.

I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,

I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this

More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,

Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

It would be cool to say I grew up on a back porch listening to Elmore James and Big Bill Broonzy (as name-checked by George Harrison on late Beatles and later solo albums) but my first childhood blues experience was Tommy Steele on a dansette record player channelling Elvis (who himself channelled  the Black blues musicians of the South) and his "Singin' The Blues" is still my default. It always come into my head in these moments. Soon after, I was fascinated by Frank Sinatra's haunting track  "Birth of the Blues" with its mysterious tale of "some people long ago" working out on the fields (ie on slave plantations) who "nursed it, rehearsed it, put it through a horn till it was worn into a blue note...". I then progressed to a "Top 6" cover band's version of the Stones "Little Red Rooster" themselves covering (superbly it has to be said) the original Black artists. Later of course there was Jim Hendrix who actually was Black and sang some authentic root blues like "Hey Joe" amid the psychedelic developments though his record company left his terrific blues standard "Redhouse" off his first album because it was "too Black'! I was actually more interested in the various fusions and developments and I still am. Ditto Dylan. Ditto the Beatles venture - after years rooted in and  brilliantly fusing it with European traditions - the Black music they loved on 'Yer Blues" on the White album. Ditto Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. (The debate by then was is it ethical for white men to sing the blues at all, an early version of our cultural appropriation debate. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's contribution was "Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?") Ditto the brilliant Side 4 of the American-heavy CBS sampler "Fill Your Head With Rock" - starting with Janis Joplin and even including one Black artist Taj Mahal. The Blue Horizon sampler "How Blue Can We Get?" offering one White album and one Black album (including Elmore James), was much rootsier. I realised its importance as the starting point of our music but , as with Led Zeppelin, it was the fusions and developments into 'rock' and prog and psychedelia etc that really excited me.   

In much later life, having a bash at playing and singing it myself, I realise that its great gift is its accessibility. There are blues virtuosos and geniuses of course - most of the above named, in the case of the visionary Hendrix perhaps the greatest blues-rooted performer and composer of all time  - but like skiffle and punk it's also not too hard to do it at a simple level. And that simple urgent formula and the way it lets your heart sing out with longing or sorrow is a Godsend. It began and flourished out of great suffering but it endures as a vehicle for joyous creativity, lover's complaint and a consolation for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 

Speaking of developments and fusions, the lyric is a villanelle, a 14C  dance form adopted and developed (from its folk origins)  by the French renaissance court. I'm not sure if anyone has ever sung a formal villanelle as a blues before. The villanelle form is dance-like, recurring and repetitive and based on only two rhymes and pivoting around two refrains. This suited it for my subject, a stony consciousness longing to escape from its deadening self-confinement. This is a metaphor we use in expressions like 'stony stare' and 'heart of stone' but I'm also exploring the idea from "God Speaks" by Meher Baba of what (infinitesimal) consciousness an actual stone might have. For more see,  - https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/villanelle-in-e-stone-blues

Back Porch Blues

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.
Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss
And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is. 

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.
I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,
I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this
More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,
Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

credits

A villanelle poem I published in 1991 sung on our back porch as a blues in E.

Villanelle in E (Stone Blues)

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss

And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is. 

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.

I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,

I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this

More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,

Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

 @PeacocksTaleFolkIndieDuo  for all our videos. The lyric is a personal best, perhaps a lifetime best, and comes from a sequence ("Evolution') admired by poetical luminaries like Ted Hughes and the editor of "Encounter" magazine, who published two poems from it in the 1980s commenting that in this one I "was brilliant at entering others' souls, even rock it seems." So while not necessarily any more profound than your average blues lyric (the human longing and suffering expressed in the folk poetry of the blues can reach an eloquence as high as any) this is in a higher literary register than "Well I woke up this morning" etc). For a start, it's a villanelle, a 14C Renaissance dance form adapted from folk tradition by a very sophisticated French court and given a new lease of metaphysical life in the 20C by 'difficult' modernists like Dylan Thomas and William Empson. To succeed, the poet has to manage two refrains introduced in the first triplet and repeated alternately as the closing each of the succeeding three line verses, before reappearing as the final two lines of the final quatrain, the whole in a regular line and meter. And to do it all using only two rhymes.) Like the sonnet and ghazal, it's a form the poet has to master before he or she can say anything meaningful through it but its recurring and repetitive (though graceful and dance-like) nature makes it unfit (claustrophobic and static) for many purposes. For "Stone' though (and for another I wrote called "On Being Locked Inside A Shrinking Room By an Inept Caretaker") it was perfect. The philosophical basis of my "Evolution" sequence is based on the "Evolution" strand of "God Speaks" ( Dodd, Mead, 1973) by the Indian spiritual Master Meher Baba - the most brilliant book I have ever read. In it Baba (amid much else) resolves completely the conflict between Science and Religion by explaining how the soul pursues consciousness through seven inadequate forms - (with Gas as a sort of precursor) Stone, Metal, Vegetation,Worm, Fish, Bird and Animal before reaching its optimum in the human form. Much remains to be done, millions of human reincarnations as every class/race/gender of human being and then a process of Involution by which the soul gradually withdraws itself from its own ego-consciousness and self-interest through ever-increasing love towards identifying its true self as God. Before the human form such conscious divine identification is impossible, hence its value as the perfect form. Stone is the least conscious form, being hardly aware of itself at all and lacking all the self-preserving instincts, mutual attraction and caring (as for the little ones) of the higher pre-human forms. But the soul identifying with it will eventually one day progress to a relatively more 'sensitive' responsive and aware form, metal, then eventually vegetation (with its first stirring of sexuality) and so on. So trying to tell its story is in many ways the basis of the whole of this sequence. Especially when it becomes evident that as consciousness ascends through higher forms, it becomes clear that we don't get rid of all the 'impressions' gathered on the way. Not only is the human body made up of a lot of 'stone' (our big heads for a start) but the potentially universe-embracing, passionately feeling, loving and compassionate divine humanity we have (humanity worthy of the name) is also still capable of 'stony' insensitivity to others and ourselves, so that the metaphors 'stone-hearted' 'stony stare' 'stony silence' may actually be actual as well as figurative. This is the metaphysical idea explored here in this adoption of a stone as a poetic persona. Finally, stone is petrified energy, was once overwhelmingly active and explosive as lava, or once living bones, or metamorphosed by heat or weight etc etc. And this principle - the verb into noun, the process into stasis - is also at work throughout Creation and in consciousness. (Baba called this impressing of consciousness 'sanskaras' or impressions, the formation of habits of thinking, feeling and action). Emotionally we re all "made of dead reactions", the experiences we have had and the impressions we receive, the habits of a lifetime (and millions of lifetimes?) become the 'solidified might' of our personalities. What can shift this stone-like petrification, reinforced by fear, hate, greed, doubt, lust, mistrust, despair, negativity? What can get our lives flowing in tune with the rest of existence? Only Love. More of that at a later stage of this sequence, (and especially in the second sequence 'Involution". ) Now though, I'll just sing the blues. digital download on Bandcamp, https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/villanelle-in-e-stone-blues )

Twenty Years (The Civil Wars)

There's a note underneath your front door
That I wrote twenty years ago
Yellow paper and a faded picture
And a secret, in an envelope

There's no reasons
No excuses
There's no secondhand alibis
Just some black ink, on some blue lines
And a shadow, you won't recognize

And if it means I'll be waiting twenty years
And twenty more
I'll be praying for redemption
And your note, underneath my door
And your note underneath my door

Our cover of a sad love story written by the south/north Civil Wars duo whose combination of many of the binaries that make up the USA generated much creative tension and some wonderful songs before they broke up. Maz's vocal strikes just the right note of lost innocence.

Halley's Comet

Part 2 in our ongoing sequence "6 Degrees of Separation; 7 Degrees of Love" (preceded by "A Love That Involves Evolution")

The Swimming Song The US election take

The Swimming Song

This summer I went swimming 
This summer I might have drowned 
But I held my breath and I kicked my feet 
And I moved my arms around
I moved my arms around

This summer I swam in the ocean
And I swam in a swimming pool
Salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes
I'm a self-destructive fool
I'm a self-destructive fool

This summer I did the backstroke 
And you know that that's not all 
I did the breast stroke and the butterfly 
And the old Australian crawl
The old Australian crawl

This summer I swam in a public place 
And a reservoir, to boot
At the latter I was informal
At the former I wore my suit
I wore my swimming suit, yeah

This summer I did swan dives 
And jackknifes for you all 
And once when you weren't looking 
I did a cannonball
I did a cannonball

This summer I went swimming 
This summer I might have drowned 
But I held my breath and I kicked my feet 
And I moved my arms around
I moved my arms around

Fight fight fight (response to an article in the Guardian)

The ‘uncanny image’ (Johnathan Jones, G2, Arts) of Donald Trump as some sort of risen Christ/anti-Democrat Iwo Jima /right wing “No Parasan’ will of course be received by all too large a section of the Religious Right as testament that their angel has been spared by God to ‘fight fight fight.’ Spared from an assassination attempt by a confused 20 year old conservative registered Republican; fight not just the ‘witch hunt’ against Trump’s denial of a democratic change of power in 2020 and the attempted quasi putsch of January 6 but now it seems ‘fight’ “to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together;”  however little of the whole country and whole world’s diversity is ‘visible on the Republicans’ twin white male Trump/Vance ticket. But whatever terms you use, God (Providence? Fate? Accident? History?) has indeed spared Trump as ‘He’ didn’t spare Jo Cox, JFK, Martin Luther King and others whose message seem a lot closer to the “love thy neighbour as thyself” of the actual  – God-unspared - Messiah than Trump’s fake news ‘Risen Christ.’ ‘God’ also spared Hitler (and all his subsequent evil) twice, the first when an English soldier in the First World had him in his sights, the second in 1944 by Germans tired of his relentless fight to ‘bring the whole world together’ under a jackboot.  Farage, the mock-heroic British Trump with his milk shake stigmata, will doubtless drool over his death-defying hero’s brilliant manipulation of media and want to bring it home to the UK, but whatever apocalyptic destiny there may be for an America where a ‘Biblical’ King appoints the Judges who then exonerate him from all charges, it doesn’t make that mean-spirited abusive bully a risen Christ. 

Euros2024: The House Where I Saw England Win The World Cup On TV

I return to the Rodden Estate in my home town of Frome in July 2024 to secure a victory for England against Spain in the European Nations Final. Until Wednesday's semi final (10 July) I hadn't watched England play on TV in Frome since July 1966 (in the days when everyone played in black and white) and this was clearly the missing final link in lifting the 58 years of hurt from off the Three Lions' collective back. But just to make sure, I popped back next day (or was the day after?) to the old house and the green green grass of home (that's my box bedroom window at the end of house shot and the living room below where we watched the game. I put a 'Swinging London' Union Jack up outside at the end of the game. It will be a Three Lions bag or two from Frome Marks and Spencers if we do it today.) Then I popped up to Badger's Hill where I used to get my leather ball dubbined and watch Tony and Kim Book (the former later a top flight winner with Manchester City, the latter later a goalkeeper for Bournemouth) contest the old Western league while listening to the Light programme's commentary of a First Division second half game. Ah, 1966 and all that - under a recently elected Labour Government. Why has it all taken so long to come again? And in one way a little further. A first final on foreign soil... But it is here. If we've won and you're in the mood for happy endings after a lot of unhappy false beginnings, you can read all the 58 years of context here in a small collection of sonnets here https://calwaygareth.blogspot.com/p/the-beautiful-game.html but these will read a lot better of there's a victory sonnet at the start. If we lose, you can just stare at the wall and wonder how long you've got left for the next chance like me. With the glorious exceptions of the women's team two years ago, the England Rugby team in 2003 and the cricket triumphs, I hope you don't have to wait as long as I have. Fingers, legs and stars crossed.

Bring Me To Fring All Saints - the remake

A new recording and a new film for the anniversary of its subject, Flight Sergeant Pilot Lancelot Percival Williamson, 1920-1945, late of this parish who died on July 13 1945 after five years service in the RAF on two major fronts of the Second World War, aged 25. He joined the RAF in 1939, aged 19. He was agonisingly close to surviving the entire war when, by a cruel irony, he died in a plane crash on a solo training flight in Derbyshire just after his last home leave in Norfolk. 'Percy' hailed from Eaton Farm Sedgeford, went to school in Fring, sang in Heacham church choir and (a week before his death) played cricket for Sedgeford and is buried next to his older brother at Fring All Saints, North West Norfolk.. We performed this homage as part of the Remembrance service at Fring All Saints in November 2023 since when the gravestone has happily been cleaned and made much more legible, hence the new film. Our thanks to the person who carried that out as well as to Tim Snelling Sedgeford village historian whose excellent research gave us many of the images and press cuttings you see here and in the new abridged companion spoken word version (link to follow) The tune is a traditional folk song about a good young man cut down in his prime. The aircraft you hear at the end of this film was flying over as we finished recording so we left the mikes open. (A similar happy accident occurs in the new spoken word version). I landed a crocked plane, when still just a fitter, 5 years derring-done, never shot down in flames, In a cloud of unknowing, I flew for the sunrise And came down to Earth but lived up to my names. Six knights of Logres to carry my coffin, Six Logres ladies to walk by my side, Through hellfire and slaughter to a wheatfield of poppies And a home hedge on Friday the 13th of July.

Beat the drum slowly and play the pipes only, Play up the dead march as we go along And bring me to Fring All Saints and lay me down easy, I lived in the free air that breathes through this song. Instrumental break Repeat first verse.

Summer Wine

Strawberries, cherries and an angel's kiss in spring My summer wine is really made from all these things Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time And I will give to you summer wine Oh, oh summer wine I walked in town on silver spurs that jingled to A song that I had only sang to just a few She saw my silver spurs and said let's pass some time And I will give to you summer wine Oh, oh summer wine Strawberries, cherries and an angel's kiss in spring My summer wine is really made from all these things Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time And I will give to you summer wine Oh, oh summer wine My eyes grew heavy and my lips they could not speak I tried to get up but I couldn't find my feet She reassured me with an unfamiliar line And then she gave to me more summer wine Oh, oh summer wine Strawberries cherries and an angel's kiss in spring My summer wine is really made from all these things Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time And I will give to you summer wine Mmm-mm summer wine When I woke up the sun was shining in my eyes My silver spurs were gone, my head felt twice its size She took my silver spurs, a dollar and a dime And left me cravin' for more summer wine Oh, oh summer wine Strawberries, cherries and an angel's kiss in spring My summer wine is really made from all these things Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time And I will give to you my summer wine Originally the B side to Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood's single "Sugar Town" in 1967 its lyric in the old tradition inhabited by Keats La Belle Damme Sans Merci and Coleridge's Christabel. Our filmed recording of our version coincided with the brief heatwave of June 2024 which might turn out to be the summer. Get it while it's hot!

Tyger Tyger!

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Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat. What dread hand? & what dread feet? Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp. Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? The self-styled "Author and Printer" William Blake (1757-1827) earned his living as an Engraver and Illustrator, working for (among others) Mary Wollstonecraft and the famous (and Laureate-refusing) 18C poet Thomas Gray. He engages profoundly with the 18C and the Enlightenment, largely refuting its reasoned, deist, classical, Locke-Newton Universe with its measured symmetry and clockwork precisions in favour of an emotive Romantic Bible-based Christian mysticism (and against the Augustan preference for formal control, wit and Graeco-Roman reason) but also very much a part of the Radical 18C London which embraced Wilkes and Liberty and the American and French Revolutions. Of all the Romantic poets (with the possible exception of Burns working the plough on his own farm) he was the only who had a trade, who worked with his hands, as an artisan involved in cottage industry. His writing - notably the long Biblical prophetic Books - is full of the imagery of hammering and smelting. He used "a method of printing which combines the Painter and the Poet" "a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered". It involved a concern with having beautiful wove paper and ink, translucent and opaque water colours, manipulating the copper surfaces of his plates, varnish and corrosive fires (aqua fortis) which etched valleys around the exposed cliffs. The symmetry in "The Tyger" is much wilder and weirder than that of Newton's measured and (to Blake) circumscribed Universe. Blake portrayed this Universe in a painting called "The Ancient of Days" which critiques the God represented in the new 18C Cowper-Wesley "Olney Hymns" as a character called Urizen ("Your reason not mine) bent blindly over a brilliant coloured Universe which he is measuring (and containing) with a pair of 17/18C compasses. The compasses are definitely off and hurled burning into the distant deeps and skies of Creation here. There is a spoken word version of this though with musical accompaniment. on https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/tyger-1 Blake's visionary genius extended to two usually separate art forms and though the words can stand alone and the art resonates on its own as well, the complete experience is to see his visions/ poems in full colour. Our combined arts tribute is to present the spoken words in this musical wash in which everything - included the spoken poem - is keyed into the harmonium drone. This is the sung version. Blake also sang and there is a lot of musical reference in his writing. The Songs of Innocence and Experience from which "The Tyger" is taken have Introductions featuring a cheerful Piper "piping songs of pleasant glee"(Innocence) and the sadder voice of a Bard "calling the lapsed Soul" (Experience). "The Lamb" with its "tender voice" appears in 'the "Songs of Innocence', the "Tyger" in the "Songs of Experience." This track develops the tune of the refrain in Tyger 1 into a full verse and chorus song again all keyed into the C drone of the harmonium.