Star Teacher

Look at the sky, child.

That's Sirius (the Dog),

Orion (the Hunter),

There's the Plough.

That's how, according to our lights,

We know.

Now reach.

Isabelle Madeline Izod's father (pictured above, the one in the suit) gave an ego-less reading of this poem at his daughter's Christening last Saturday. It blew 'me' away also, as I watched from pew 2 on the right. I've never liked the traditional Anglican service about casting the Devil out of the (surely innocent) child - and if not then, when? This service was rewritten in the original spirit of 'suffer the children to come unto me' and said thanks for all things bright and beautiful and Isabelle in particular. Every birth is a miracle: this one especially so, and late in the day for the old man. All of this and much more came through the reading. And Helen - the Mum in the middle - really is as lovely as she looks. That baby's a lucky girl. But she deserves it.

Oh Death where is thy sting-a-ling!

Fairport In A Storm

Fairport on ice: 45th Anniversary tour date Cromer Pavilion Theatre, Sunday March 4

Fairport Convention played in an arctic blizzard at the end of Cromer Pier last night. The journey there and back was terrifying, the breakers hitting the beaches were like a set from The Cruel Sea and inside the pier was like an interior from Titanic ! However, if we were going to go down, we would go down singing. Fairport roadies apparently couldn't even drive the gear to the bottom of the hill and had to skate it in by hand along the boards of the pier. But 45 years on from the summer of love this is a band for all seasons and their fans are too Blitz-spirit-British to let it stop them clapping their gloved hands for long. When they did those old elemental ballads about arctic seas, believe me, we were there with them!

The general tone of the show – let’s take the multi-skilled musicmanship and inspired ensemble playing as read, as they do - is light, the wearing lightly of immense skill. It is a warm fusion of folk, rock and fun warming the cockles of the one’s heart – even the ones under that pier’s glacier bridgehead that night. But there are also moments where the elemental roots of the music lift the audience into an epiphany, awesome in the old sense of that word. This is folk Britannia in all its stoical storm-tossed glory, our ‘long island story’ re-rooted by seasoned minstrels turned on by the hippy experience 45 years ago and still making it new. If I missed anything here in this show, it was the darker elements woven in by Richard Thompson and the ghost of Sandy Denny - of course, who wouldn’t miss those – but Fairport have preserved these in another way– and not on ice, despite the temperature inside the theatre. They know they are part of something bigger and include songs these Fairport legends made great during the 45 years. Nicol doesn’t sing like Sandy – Leslie in one harmony vocal actually does – but he pays the Sandy songs due honour and no-one – no-one - sings group vocals better (and more like a concert of strings) than these guys.

Can't wait for Cropredy.

Writing For The New Humanity

for the indignatos (especially Emma)

If, instead of cowing and naying a sheepish congregation,
You beef so divinely it makes them feel human;

If you can tongue and bell with golden flesh a word
That tolls heaven back to earth, like the Eden in every bird;

If you can string the bow of learning to the arrow of intuition
And keep a faith that’s unafraid of critical reason

And score your heart in blood and swear it aloud
To a backwards-saddled, blinkered, farting holy-cattle crowd;

If you can shake the hand of the Am-Dram-thank-you-ham
Who lifts your tragic laurels with his prat Fall of Man;

If you’re wise to the one-book-brain of Simple Simon
Yet lost in the heart of a rose, not the tongue of a shaman;

If you can whittle your stake to an instrument that plays
A song beyond itself, not a reed that measures praise;

And forget yourself, and the long quest to get it,
In one divine delicious self-annihilating lyric;

If you can follow Hafiz, not twisting as others have
The mouth of God to a trap of lies, yet be roasted as if you had;

The hart of love will lead you tripping lamb-like to the Psalter
And, what is more, you’ll be a writer, my daughter.

Another side of my character

Here is a link to trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C3vTA9UOSo&context=C3ed9d3bADOEgsToPDskLv5IjCzEVdPeII0xfida1g

Knocking on hell's door

A still from Katie Smith's film The One They Seek

The One They Seek

I travel with haste. I remain a shadow to everyone in my footsteps.


Yes it was as glamorous as it looks. And 7 hours in that snow was well worth all the attention.

Cold Moon

Coldest night of the year? And naturally shooting on location tomorrow. Wot, no caravan? Pass me the thermos, Stan.

This image taken on a temperamental Sony Mavica MC CD500. It still uses discs and because this was taken on a night setting, it took about an hour to get off the camera and onto the PC. I'm the other side of the camera tomorrow being a baddie so none of this sort of thing will bother me. All I've got to do is act hard.

Grandfather Christmas

Horse-sensible and risk-foolish,
A gold-domed Grandfather Christmas
Stocking my boyhood with footballs
While fagging yourself to untipped death,
You forged your family chain of shops
Like a rosary of straightness and self-belief
Against the odds, as true to your Book
As your working day was long.


Note: There comes a point in your life when you start to look like your grandfather. Or even your father's grandfather. I remember all these domed patriarchal heads in a permanent blue smoke of family gatherings, sounding off at the world in West country or Welsh accents, Judges and Kings. They grow more like me every day. The caption describes Wellyn, my Welsh grandfather,who was a bookmaker, in this extract from a poem called 'Llewellyn the Great'.

The painting, by Howard Hugh Scott Thomas, notices the bald dome looking out from behind a curtain too, though in a very different context. Howard did my lights up in Edinburgh last summer and watched me sweat blood onstage. He photographed me doing it and he filmed me doing it and finally he painted me doing it. That's him at my shoulder, anxiously overseeing the bard's artistic progress and/or crucifixion. Get those feet dancing, Granddad.

Seemab is God

Either peel off the layers of wounds of the heart and throw them out of sight
Or accept the wounds (of separation from the Beloved) as positive indications of love.

from a ghazal by Seemab.


I love these Urdu lyrics that are both gnostically profound and as catchy as an early Seventies chart-stormer. But then, as Keats mused once with a wild surmise, the truth - if it's really true - will be beautiful and the beautiful true. As light as it's heavy. When I was a kid I used to hear this kind of hymn-like truth in every rock song and poem, even some that were actually about Jagger's stash or Paul McCartney's dog or Clapton being God, but I was still right. And yet the above is the real McCartney, the real Keats. St John of the Cross without the two hundred pages of exegesis, with a singing Harrison guitar. All the hurt that's ever been done to you - forget it, don't dwell in the past - or see it as an honest mistake by someone who tried to love you by their own lights but got it wrong. As we all do. If I ever write two lines that beautiful and true, it will all have been worth while. Meanwhile, I might see if I can carve that transliteration into a proper modern English couplet and then spray paint it over every city hall, church, mosque, synagogue, temple and message forum in the country.

Return to Cardiff

Photos taken by Donna Calway aged five of Frome. No, hang on, that was a hundred years ago. We're both in our fifties now. The painting is in City Hall, Cardiff, the most magnificent building in Wales and quite possibly Europe or the Universe. Built when Wales was coal-rich and Victorian mighty in a style that sort of combined the French of our diminished Enlightenment rivals with the opulent glory of our Indian Jewel in the Crown. Plus a bit of Gothic in there too just to remind the Germans who was boss. And lots of white and ivory. And washed by a century of soft, refreshing Welsh rain. And inside, free to anyone who wants to pop in, a set of Welsh national treasures including a series of white marble statues of Welsh greats - notably a glorious white marble BUDDUG queen of the Iceni which is Norfolk (!) - no statue there though - and this painting of a reprobate's return which the little sister has expertly framed me into.

Moving into Movies

Time to put the new into new year. I am now a screen actor. I have accepted the male lead (a baddie) in a short student-made film set in mediaveal times to be shot in Norwich over the next few weeks. At one's age, one likes to have young people about one!

Success will not change me. I will remain insufferably arrogant, opinionated and vain. You wouldn't want me any other way. If I can make such qualities of use to my fellow artists, makers and - by extension - humanity, then how Canne I say Non? In the film I am pursued across a archetypal East Anglian winter landscape by a woman. She is more nemesis than fury, but all the more a nemesis for that. I can't wait.

The photo shows my massive-award winning young cousin Robb Leech (director of My Brother the Islamist) in Edinburgh with me last summer. He'd just got the award. I'd just finished a punishing Fringe run. The mise en scene (oh we get all the in-terms here) is Igg's Spanish bar on Jeffrey St. I am not at all jealous of my six year old upstart relative, as you can see.

Lucy in the sky and John

I've been watching the fairy bulbs grow into the gloom
Of this Cotswold Christmas city street middle afternoon
And it made me think of you.

Poets are finding it hard to get a place, still
(I'm chiding late schoolboys)
And still see beauty's face a dark looking glass through.

It's been a long time since 1631,
Since metaphysics met a physics you never knew,
But what you didn't do remains undonne.

Gloucester 1981

Ha ha, that had you. Not St John Lennon or LSD or even Lucille Ball but John Donne's timeleless winter solstice poem Nocturnal on St Lucie's Day (the shortest day, today) or rather my own take on it 350 years later. Anniversarie For John Donne on St Lucy's Day. I wrote this poem thirty winter solstices ago today. We are all becoming history. We are all slipping into the dark...

Photo note: Not Cotswolds in the 80s but Norfolk now, it that's not an oxymoron in a place that often feels timeless. This is the twin of the summer solstice photo I took in a slightly warmer dusk six months ago (see blog June 21.) A lot of wassail under the bridge since then. More solstice-celebration in Poem of the Month for December in the main site.

from Sergeant Spectre's Lonely Hearts Club Bang

Christmas morning 1963. The Spectre children have hardly slept. After hours tossing and turning, pretending they are waiting to catch Dad as Santa but really just aching for it to be Christmas morning, they peer around the door of the small living room, its neatly wallpapered surfaces and soberly plastered ceiling a magical garden of decorations. There is the scent of earth and pine. The presents are piled up under the tree like fairytale treasure. The lights on the tree radiate happiness so intense it hurts.

Note and quiz question: this is from a just-about ready new novel about the Sixties where Christmases during the decade get revisited. The Fab Force was mainly at Christmas No. 1 in the album charts 1963-1969. But their signature album Sergeant Pepper was actually replaced at the top by an LP that competed for the top spot with every Beatle album from Beatles For Sale (which came out in 1964) to The Beatles (White album, which came out in 1968) and which is therefore arguably a rival as period soundtrack. What was it? Let me know via the comment box. I think you'll be surprised. Clue High on the hill...?

Under Weigh

Under weigh - when a ship has drawn its anchors from their moorings, and started on its voyage. (Brewer). I just tweeted this. It's a full moon and a triple eclipse so it seemed like a good idea. I was worried it might be a bit trivial. As everyone is getting their knickers in a twist about X Factor on there (and that's just the men) I think was worrying unnecessarily.

An Appointment With Mr Dylan

Rubber Soul type photo taken before and at the recent Hammersmith Apollo Dylan concert by ace photographer Howard Thomas (pictured, bald, no specs ) Dani Thomas, Melanie Calway and the bard on the wire (bald, specs.) Debbie and Thomas Leech joined the photograph later (see next post).

Homage to Adomah

adomah mid flow
a wind in the scarlet leaves
that stirs a whole crowd

Wot no picture?. The haiku IS the picture.

32nd Anniversary

Real Wife

'So you, you say you wanna be married...' (Hendrix)


We're not the teen-dream lovers of the songs
And films n’ soaps n’ mills n' boons n’ ads,
The 'hunters' living with their mums and dads,
The twenty-something dramas, dinging-dongs,
The sizzling catalogues of straps and thongs,
The Darcys, Juliets and golden lads
In modern strip from tales in which the cads
Are fifty-odd like us and cause all wrongs.

Our story didn't end like these above
In frozen celebrations, wedding-deaths;
We've raised a daughter into Now and Next,
We're grownups grown together, more or less,
Our romance is a realistic text:
A dangerous, married, grail-quest of true love.



Notes: If I hadn't been so happily married, I would probably have written much better poems about it. It's a bit like being the 'official' poet of something. You write worthily and triumphantly but not with the aching heart that Yeats tells us creates a changeless work of art. It's a bothersome thought that most of the masterpieces come out of suffering the pangs of love rather than enjoying a 32nd anniversary dinner: the Taj Mahal, almost every pop song worthy of the name (Hendrix's 50th Anniversary, all of Elvis Costello, Sinatra's torch songs for Ava Gardner, Lennon's 'Girl' rather than his mature - and soppy - 'Woman' etc), Romeo and Juliet, Leila and Majnu, Lancelot and Guinevere, Paradise Lost Books 1 and 2, Inferno (which for all its doom beats Paradiso as a work of art every time). Our culture is much better at visions of hell and purgatory than heaven. That's what's wrong with it. Luckily as far as my own creative work is concerned I have the twenty three years before marrying Melanie and most of what happened at work after doing so to provide the spur to the Pegasus flank and fly. All that said, this effort, my favourite from an annual anniversary sequence abandoned at 50, conveys something of the ongoing spur of marriage. After all, as a Sikh once told me on a train to Mumbai, marriage is not the wedding or the honeymoon or even the next 32 years: it's the work of a lifetime.

A Home Win

What does a home win smell like?

It smells like cider.
It smells like the Nova before the tobacco ban.
It smells like November in August, sweet as the blackberries that came and went untasted, coming back on the rain.
It smells like the river under Clifton's suspension bridge of disbelief, at the turn of the tide, flooding out towards the sea.
It smells like the turf of Ashton Park.
It smells like home

Earthquakes In London review

http://glitterazi-culturevulture.tumblr.com/

Earthquakes in London. We saw this exhilarating Brecht-tinged Dionysia in Cambridge Arts Theatre last week and the review (link above: you will probably need to copy and paste it) by Culture Vulture on the Glitterazi website, says it all for me. All I'm adding here is my photo of Trafalgar Square's lion with the improvement made by last spring's indignatos

An Appointment With Mr Yeats

It's a sad fact that collaborations can divide rather than multiply and there was every chance that this unlikely merger of the wonderful Waterboys and the incomparable Yeats would come up with neither and less. But it's a triumph. Every time Kate Kim sings the word 'Politics' every ounce of what Yeats meant by 'Oh that I were young again and held her in my arms' hits the spot. And Innisfree as a blues? Genius. And the rhythms of Come away , come away at the top of the album make you want to believe in all that Celtic twilight whimsy Yeats brought to its apotheosis before moving on to become the greatest Romantic of the Twentieth century, and a Modernist the equal of Eliot. Before the World Was Made sung once by Mike Scott and then Katie Kins and then together kind of makes Yeats' point. And the playing's vintage Waterboys. It's the Waterboys AND Yeats and AND something more than the sum of these parts. I haven't stopped playing it for two weeks and unless my wife threatens to leave me on that account I can't see that changing any time soon. A supreme vindication of cheek and of not letting anyone's reputation stop you from trying to approach what they did in the cheeky way they did in the first place. Romantic Ireland's not dead and gone or with the Yeats Heritage industry: it's here smelling of Yeatsian Roses.

Sedgeford October



somewhere mellow between

the end of the overblown blackberries

and

the start of the harvested leaves

fused flies

on clinical sills

hint at bleached sun

and

in the hedges

thistle winds to come


to eyes trained on histrionic heights

of Welsh adolescence,

this stubborn serenity,

these mediaeval colours

are

endlessly reassuring:

a great grey blanket billowing unbroken from the North Pole

wild chords of geese in its folds;

the flinty, dependable noun

behind mists of adjectives


Just noticed that I missed out October in my Poem of the Month this year. So I'll sneak it in here and hope I get away with it. It's very much an end of October poem anyway, especially this year when it's been like the Costa del Sol half the time. This poem hung in our local Sedgeford pub for years and got read in another local pub (Ringstead's Gin Trap) this year. I'm putting together a calendar of Norfolk poems: this one will be very hard to shift off the October page.

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.

Reviews from my second Edinburgh run

ThreeWeeks - the Edinburgh Fringe review magazine - have published their review of Boudicca; Britain's Dreaming, which they saw on Wednesday 24 August. It's three weeks after the run ended so its not going to boost my audiences now but those who saw it may be interested, particularly the great crowd I had in that night. Best front row ever - dudes you know who you are. I also publish here the Scotsman's August 24 review of the brother show Arthur, seen August 16. This proper big newspaper review feels like a pat on the head from a grown up, even though the reviewer was probably half my age.


ONE MAN AND HIS MASKS; BOUDICCA; BRITAIN'S DREAMING ***

Boudicca’s story is reinvented as a punk fable in this history lesson/political speculation. When Calway speaks about Boudicca’s tale itself, he’s impassioned, ruthless and funny, close to a poetic ‘Horrible History’ book. The direction is energetic – particularly the clownish interactions with the ‘Masks’. ThreeWeeks Sunday 11 September 2011

ONE MAN AND HIS MASKS; ARTHUR BRITAIN’S MAKING ***
Delving into British history, this is slam poetry with a patriotic twist. Attempting to tell what is essentially the story of Britain from the time of Arthur to the present, this madcap production combines tales of the ancient world with football chants and sports commentary.
... What is clearly a long-held passion for the glittering career of a great king is told in an arresting way... (Calway) races from the heat of battle to a cricket match; from the valleys of Wales to John O'Groats, and on to Land's End.
Despite the confusion, this interpretation is full of boyhood glee. It is a yarn well spun, with a few stiches dropped, but vibrant and poetic enough to be a commendable effort.
Catriona MacLeod
The Scotsman Weds 24 Aug 2011

POSTSCRIPT A slightly longer of Catriona MacLeod's original print review has finally turned up on online on the following website
http://thepineapplewashot.tumblr.com/post/11065598132/theatre-one-man-and-his-masks-arthur-britains
Her other reviews are well worth reading too.

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.