An English Journey Waylaid
Mar. 17th, 2010 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomust"English Journey Revisited was born from the opportunity to hi-jack Alan Moore's rock-school hopes for a 'psychogeographer's all-stars tour'. A glance around my own living room revealed to me a fabulous set of possibilities to actually bring together some [of] my favourite artists and people. So, English Journey Revisited is a waking dream, a vicious street mugging of the basic themes of Priestley's book." (Paul Smith, programme notes).
The warning signs are clear enough: this is about us having fun and we think we'd better claim respectable antecedents, but we wouldn't want you thinking that we're respectable. Artists having fun can have wonderful results, but it can also be very tedious for the audience. No matter: I was up for it as soon as you said "Alan Moore".
The tour has so far played two venues: the Guardian has an interesting video, in which participants, primarily Iain Sinclair and Shirley Collins, talk about the Aldeburgh performance; the New Statesman was there, and seems to have enjoyed it.
Naturally, since this is "an ongoing experiment and an attempt to divine a Sense of Place", last Sunday's event at the Sage was entirely different. Different place, different films, different local input, different responses from the visiting artists. Instead of Shirley Collins we had Tom Pickard; instead of the folk tradition we had poetry: specifically, the heritage of poetry handed from Basil Bunting to Tom Pickard and Barry MacSweeney.
A number of elements of this did not work for me, but it's only fair to make clear that one of these was self-inflicted: we were sitting in the second row, very near the stage. The music of F.M. Einheait (which consists in obtaining percussive effects by, for example, hurling gravel onto an amplified metal sheet, or breaking up breeze blocks) would have been uncomfortably loud wherever we sat, but further back we would at least have been spared the dust. When video was playing, the screen was so close and so high that we had to crane up uncomfortably; the Graham Dolphin video which opened both halves of the show could not overcome this handicap ("It'd make a good screensaver," said![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samarcand).
Iain Sinclair was interesting in a conversational way about what J.B. Priestley had had to say about Newcastle (he hadn't liked it, apparently, but he wasn't well at the time, and anyway it was raining) and about his own earlier visits. A film - blotchy monochrome waves overlaid on pages from the Lindisfarne gospels gaving way to Basil Bunting walking on the sands - might have been extracted from an old television arts programme, and F.M. Einheit and Susan Stenger did their best to drown out his voice (each time we had music and film together, I wondered if the musicians had video monitors - they couldn't have been able to see the screen). Next came Tom Chivers, introduced by Iain Sinclair as the next in that lineage of poets, a huge fan of Barry MacSweeney. He read his poem This is Yogic; we applauded politely; "That one sometimes gets a laugh," he said; we laughed politely (to be fair to him, it worked much better if you assumed it was meant to be funny; to be fair to us, we didn't know anything about his work, and it might have been a good idea to establish first that this wasn't how he sounded when he wanted to be taken seriously). He followed this with a couple of poems about the Peak District (including On Kinder Scout which he wrote for Barry McSweeney). I'm pretty sure that he read them because he'd written them and why not (my tastes in poetry are arbitrary and bizarre, but I thought they were perfectly good poems, for what it's worth), not because one northern location is much the same as another - though I was a little cranky about all the visuals from Northumberland... Then more video, followed by Tom Pickard, reading from his unpublished memoirs about a conversation wih Basil Bunting, and then from his poetry, broad, funny accessible. "Playing to the gallery" said a friend I talked to duting the intermission. Yes, but the gallery were grateful for it: he was no more than entertaining, but we were relieved to be entertained.
Overall, although parts of this section of the programme were interesting, I felt that we were being told things we already knew: this was not a visitor's reaction to the region which was new because it was fresh, unprejudiced, the visitors were telling us things they already felt or knew about the region, and about its past. If the outstanding feature of the North-East is its poets, there should be more voices than this single strand. The images of Northumberland made me think of Katrina Porteous, the references to Barry MacSweeney made me think of Jackie Litherland's poem for him, The Quartz in Your Valley. Come to think of it, the evening struck an authentically North-Eastern note in being predominantly male (I'm probably underestimating the contributio of Susan Stenger; I could see she was doing something throughout the sound performances, but I couldn't disentangle what it was).
Part one was an ensemble piece: all the performers except Alan Moore were on stage throughout. Part two was Mr Moore's solo; the other speakers had vanished, and we saw only Alan Moore and musicians F.M. Einheit, Susan Stenger and Stephen O' Malley. As the screensaver video wound down, Alan Moore stepped up to the microphone, in a glittering coat of sky blue - or was it tongues of purple flame? The coat alone deserved our applause, he told us, and it did, and we applauded. Next he gave us the traditional rockstar line: It's good to be back on Tyneside... - last time he'd been here, he said, he'd performed in the old court in the Westgate Road, where he had got to sit in the judge's chair and pass judgement on humanity (this had been The Birth Caul, and some of us had been there); he expected to have just as much fun tonight...
Throughout his performance, the screen showed two paintings side by side: J.M.W. Turner's Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps and local boy John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorroah. The two are currently on show at the Laing Art Gallery for the Great British Art Debate, art as competitive sport or popularity poll. Alan Moore's piece was a reprise (and extension) of something he and guitarist Stephen O'Malley had performed the previous day in front of the paintings themselves, entitled Conjugation of Four Spirits in a Room. This was at once absolutely specific - a reaction to these two paintings, created by these men, these places, this time - and wide-ranging, connecting the industrial revolution, the Roman wall, the story of Frankenstein, the apocalypse - and a punchline which it seems a pity to give away (since the text of this evening's performance - and the Aldeburgh companion piece - will presumably become available, one way or another; and I for one can hardly wait). It worked at all levels: you could be swept away by the sheer power of the words, or satisfied to the depths of your pedantic soul that here was someone who had read the brief for the night's opeartion, done his homework and delivared the goods. "I hadn't realised," saiddurham_rambler afterwards, "that he could be so funny." (You hadn't? Remind me to find you The Bojeffries Saga). It was the best thing of Moore's that I've seen in quite a while, and a reminder that at his best there's no-one quite like him.
As a PS: I wondered whether the effectiveness of lining the two paintings up like two vast cavernous sockets was in any way contrived - were they really so similarly constructed, or had the scale, for example, been adjusted to improve the effect? We visited the Laing today, to see the originals hanging in a small gallery, no other paintings, just these two on adjacent walls, as perfectly matched as they had been on the video screen, though a lot easier to see in detail.
The warning signs are clear enough: this is about us having fun and we think we'd better claim respectable antecedents, but we wouldn't want you thinking that we're respectable. Artists having fun can have wonderful results, but it can also be very tedious for the audience. No matter: I was up for it as soon as you said "Alan Moore".
The tour has so far played two venues: the Guardian has an interesting video, in which participants, primarily Iain Sinclair and Shirley Collins, talk about the Aldeburgh performance; the New Statesman was there, and seems to have enjoyed it.
Naturally, since this is "an ongoing experiment and an attempt to divine a Sense of Place", last Sunday's event at the Sage was entirely different. Different place, different films, different local input, different responses from the visiting artists. Instead of Shirley Collins we had Tom Pickard; instead of the folk tradition we had poetry: specifically, the heritage of poetry handed from Basil Bunting to Tom Pickard and Barry MacSweeney.
A number of elements of this did not work for me, but it's only fair to make clear that one of these was self-inflicted: we were sitting in the second row, very near the stage. The music of F.M. Einheait (which consists in obtaining percussive effects by, for example, hurling gravel onto an amplified metal sheet, or breaking up breeze blocks) would have been uncomfortably loud wherever we sat, but further back we would at least have been spared the dust. When video was playing, the screen was so close and so high that we had to crane up uncomfortably; the Graham Dolphin video which opened both halves of the show could not overcome this handicap ("It'd make a good screensaver," said
samarcand).Iain Sinclair was interesting in a conversational way about what J.B. Priestley had had to say about Newcastle (he hadn't liked it, apparently, but he wasn't well at the time, and anyway it was raining) and about his own earlier visits. A film - blotchy monochrome waves overlaid on pages from the Lindisfarne gospels gaving way to Basil Bunting walking on the sands - might have been extracted from an old television arts programme, and F.M. Einheit and Susan Stenger did their best to drown out his voice (each time we had music and film together, I wondered if the musicians had video monitors - they couldn't have been able to see the screen). Next came Tom Chivers, introduced by Iain Sinclair as the next in that lineage of poets, a huge fan of Barry MacSweeney. He read his poem This is Yogic; we applauded politely; "That one sometimes gets a laugh," he said; we laughed politely (to be fair to him, it worked much better if you assumed it was meant to be funny; to be fair to us, we didn't know anything about his work, and it might have been a good idea to establish first that this wasn't how he sounded when he wanted to be taken seriously). He followed this with a couple of poems about the Peak District (including On Kinder Scout which he wrote for Barry McSweeney). I'm pretty sure that he read them because he'd written them and why not (my tastes in poetry are arbitrary and bizarre, but I thought they were perfectly good poems, for what it's worth), not because one northern location is much the same as another - though I was a little cranky about all the visuals from Northumberland... Then more video, followed by Tom Pickard, reading from his unpublished memoirs about a conversation wih Basil Bunting, and then from his poetry, broad, funny accessible. "Playing to the gallery" said a friend I talked to duting the intermission. Yes, but the gallery were grateful for it: he was no more than entertaining, but we were relieved to be entertained.
Overall, although parts of this section of the programme were interesting, I felt that we were being told things we already knew: this was not a visitor's reaction to the region which was new because it was fresh, unprejudiced, the visitors were telling us things they already felt or knew about the region, and about its past. If the outstanding feature of the North-East is its poets, there should be more voices than this single strand. The images of Northumberland made me think of Katrina Porteous, the references to Barry MacSweeney made me think of Jackie Litherland's poem for him, The Quartz in Your Valley. Come to think of it, the evening struck an authentically North-Eastern note in being predominantly male (I'm probably underestimating the contributio of Susan Stenger; I could see she was doing something throughout the sound performances, but I couldn't disentangle what it was).
Part one was an ensemble piece: all the performers except Alan Moore were on stage throughout. Part two was Mr Moore's solo; the other speakers had vanished, and we saw only Alan Moore and musicians F.M. Einheit, Susan Stenger and Stephen O' Malley. As the screensaver video wound down, Alan Moore stepped up to the microphone, in a glittering coat of sky blue - or was it tongues of purple flame? The coat alone deserved our applause, he told us, and it did, and we applauded. Next he gave us the traditional rockstar line: It's good to be back on Tyneside... - last time he'd been here, he said, he'd performed in the old court in the Westgate Road, where he had got to sit in the judge's chair and pass judgement on humanity (this had been The Birth Caul, and some of us had been there); he expected to have just as much fun tonight...
Throughout his performance, the screen showed two paintings side by side: J.M.W. Turner's Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps and local boy John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorroah. The two are currently on show at the Laing Art Gallery for the Great British Art Debate, art as competitive sport or popularity poll. Alan Moore's piece was a reprise (and extension) of something he and guitarist Stephen O'Malley had performed the previous day in front of the paintings themselves, entitled Conjugation of Four Spirits in a Room. This was at once absolutely specific - a reaction to these two paintings, created by these men, these places, this time - and wide-ranging, connecting the industrial revolution, the Roman wall, the story of Frankenstein, the apocalypse - and a punchline which it seems a pity to give away (since the text of this evening's performance - and the Aldeburgh companion piece - will presumably become available, one way or another; and I for one can hardly wait). It worked at all levels: you could be swept away by the sheer power of the words, or satisfied to the depths of your pedantic soul that here was someone who had read the brief for the night's opeartion, done his homework and delivared the goods. "I hadn't realised," said
durham_rambler afterwards, "that he could be so funny." (You hadn't? Remind me to find you The Bojeffries Saga). It was the best thing of Moore's that I've seen in quite a while, and a reminder that at his best there's no-one quite like him.As a PS: I wondered whether the effectiveness of lining the two paintings up like two vast cavernous sockets was in any way contrived - were they really so similarly constructed, or had the scale, for example, been adjusted to improve the effect? We visited the Laing today, to see the originals hanging in a small gallery, no other paintings, just these two on adjacent walls, as perfectly matched as they had been on the video screen, though a lot easier to see in detail.
