The Sombrer Opacities of the Gloom: PJ Harvey & Let England Shake

I 

In  common with Nick Cave, I have little time for popularity contests. That said, the contest for Album of the Year 2011 was effectively over by mid-February with the release of PJ Harvey’s masterpiece, ‘Let England Shake’. Universally acknowledged as an instant classic the album’s almost spectral soundscape serves as perfect backdrop to Harvey’s evocative lyrics; lyrics that deal with the singer’s often tempestuous relationship with her country, especially at times of war.

While much attention was drawn to the aspects of ‘Let England Shake’ that deal with war, less was to be said about its lament to a nation’s decline. Perhaps the reviewers all felt too embarrassed, as the English generally are when it comes to discussing patriotism. Yet while PJ Harvey saves her most graphic images in capturing the consequences of conflict, the one word that reverberates throughout ‘Let England Shake’ sits at the core of its very title. England is the heart and soul here; the bringer of shame (you leave a taste, a bitter one) and yet even in its greyness and its grime it is the daydream of soldiers sat stagnating in battles past and present.

Oh America. Oh England.

'Let England Shake' is not a jingoistic album. A difficult balance is maintained between passionate cry and dispassionate appraisal; between the love of the land, the acceptance of its shortcomings and the disapproval at its darker episodes. England, that name resounds through the three opening tracks. Songs that are sung in eulogy of better days, that conjure Blakean visions of the Thames ‘glistening like gold’ in the memories of battle scarred minds, that chide the US and UK in disappointing tones for the orphans that their wars have left untendered (What is the glorious fruit of our land? Its fruit is deformed children. What is the glorious fruit of our land? Its fruit is orphaned children). 

Personally, I have a troubled relationship with the country of my birth. Technically I am Scottish, my submariner father having been stationed at Faslane when I arrived, mewling, into this world. For years after coming south, I clung to a pseudo-Scots identity, especially after moving to East Lancashire, where anyone born further away than Rishton was treated with idle suspicion (see Modern Epilogue). With my professed Celtic origins and my accent cobbled together from half a dozen places we had lived in over the years, I felt a perverse pleasure at being so alien in a place already so suspicious of outsiders. There I heard casually spoken the kind of racist vitriol that should have filled any rational being with revulsion, aimed against people one barely saw really. That crystallised in me a certain hatred for the English, with their petty mindedness and their hypocrisy and their cries for fair play, unless it involved diddling some third world country out of its natural resources. And I knew that it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be Scottish as that I didn’t want to be English.

If you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.

And here’s the nub of the matter. Generally people aren’t looking for somewhere merely to belong, they’re looking for something to rally against: To be in dynamic opposition against. That’s really why people go to the football or form breakaway religious sects, so they can condemn and abuse those who hold marginally different views to them. I was no different. I had no Scottish friends, I was a member of no societies, I observed no traditions or holidays, yet the fact that I was born in Scotland meant I wasn’t English and I could wind up my English mates every time they got unceremoniously dumped out of the latest footballing tournament. I felt an affinity with the Asians in the town, paying special attention to be polite, courteous and grateful in shops, in a futile attempt to show that not everyone around here was gormless and ignorant. As usual I sided with what I perceived as the underdog, a curiously British, if not English, trait.

I should’ve figured it out much sooner than I did, but eventually I came to a solution. The people that I was angry with weren’t English. They were working class men from a depressed, post-industrial northern town that had had a new ethnic group introduced into its population right as the town’s fortunes took a nose dive. Many mistakenly saw in that cause and effect rather than symptoms of the same malaise. Ironically, it was the increase in living standards that the mills brought to the towns of the north west that ultimately led to mass immigration. Better schools meant better education, which meant better prospects for the general population and the mills were suddenly deprived of the factory fodder on which they had always relied, leading their owners to import cheap labour from the hot house of the sub-continent, already acclimatised for the hot house of the mills. So when I look back on those countless idiots spouting off about the trouble with the Asians, I can take a perverse pleasure in knowing that the Asians probably wouldn’t be there at all if these bozos’ parents hadn’t had the nerve to want their children to be able to read.

The person who did more than anyone to force me to confront and rethink my own prejudices was John. John was born and bred in this part of the world and yet unlike most everyone else I knew he didn’t just look out of his window, identify the first person that looked different to him and heap all of his misfortunes on their shoulders. John wanted to be different. So did I and that made us fast friends. That and a weird sense of humour.

Often we would sit up ‘til the early hours, amusing ourselves writing spoof newspaper articles or offering continuous commentary on the shit on late night TV or just talking into the early hours on matters weighty and irrelevant. Time and again in these debates the same two topics reared their confrontational heads: pride and nation. Their appearance was always guaranteed to raise the stakes. John delighted in challenging my notions of pride, which I saw as an entirely negative emotion. I kidded myself that I preferred to be humble in my achievements, but really it was that I preferred simple understatement for greatest effect.

Discussions of nation were always subdivided into two sub-categories; a) John’s pride in his nation and b) Rob’s sniffy attitude towards John’s pride in his nation:

J: I’m proud to be British.

R: Why?

J: Why? Because of warm beer and red post boxes and cricket on the green, that’s why.

R is confused by this. Post boxes are yellow in France, blue in the United States. So what? And as he was to discover years later, post boxes in Britain were originally painted green, but people kept walking into them.

I argued that if he took pride in anything as random as the colour of a post box, he should also feel shame for slavery and assorted other colonial crimes. John declined this invitation, stating that slavery had nowt to do with him. I countered that the Royal Mail’s colour scheme had little to do with him either, but he still seemed to want partial credit. He’d put up a spirited defence and we’d argue over the main points again, like running a biro over a well-worn shape on a pad.

Still, there was little that was said there that failed to make its mark, no matter how stubbornly it was rejected at the time, and over the years those same arguments sat fermenting at the back of my brain. I expanded my scope beyond mere borders. It was useless to talk of England and Scotland in this context. What were England and Scotland anyway? Northumbria used to be part of Scotland and most of the north west was at one time part of Wales. In order to be scientific, I had to consider a geographical region, not an arbitrary, amorphous tax zone. That could only mean Great Britain at large.

While I could wriggle out of being English, I couldn’t escape being British. It’s amazing how one’s attitude changes when one is forced to integrate with that group (humour). Actually, I have to admit that I am typically British in many ways. There’s the love of the plucky underdog, the obsession with the weather, the twenty a day tea habit. People here are also very tolerant, chiming well with my chosen philosophy, which states that what people do behind closed doors is their own concern (excluding the abuse of others). When comedian Richard Herring grew a toothbrush mustache in order to gauge modern day public reaction to something synonymous with Hitler, he was left pretty much unaccosted throughout the country. During the Second World War that same toleration and love of the underdog led English publicans to refuse US Army requests to segregate their premises. Segregation didn’t square with British notions of fair play.

Which isn’t to say Britain always plays fair. The concentration camp was a British idea; the first ever aerial bombardment of a civilian target was committed when Britain bombed Iraq. And of course Britain was heavily involved in the slave trade: the fortunes of its North American colonies were predicated on slavery, as were those in the Caribbean.

However, it’s all too easy to get caught up in post-colonial guilt and start to believe legends based on half-truth. While it is true that British troops gave small pox blankets to Native American tribes people, this was done as a gesture of good faith rather than genocide. The small pox hospital in question was empty at the time and the British had no need of the blankets. Meanwhile, it turns out a virus like small pox spreads by person to person contact not through soiled linen. The Native Americans got sick because they were exposed to diseases carried by Europeans from the Old World, which is why in the end they tried to keep themselves to themselves (until we went looking for them).

No matter how you divide or sub-divide a community, you will always find good and bad at the margins, with the rest regressing to a societal norm. Those wishing to lionise or demonise that community look only to its margins, and to only one side at that, forming a brand new nation in their minds as they do so (it’s the very confirmation of the theory of confirmation bias). Yet before you can know where you're going, or what you should be doing, you have to know where you are and how you got there. More importantly, you have to accept where you are: be grounded in the reality of where you are. And this brings me back to PJ Harvey.

While the disembodied voices of long dead soldiers echo through its halls, ‘Let England Shake’ is an album for the here and now. Harvey knows where England is and how it has arrived at this point. And she knows its future looks bleak. I fear our blood won’t rise again. Is it her fear or folksy acceptance of the inevitable? It’s a damp, grey place, full of fog and graveyards and dead sea captains and fetid alleys that host acts of drunken violence. And yet this is home.

What's striking about ‘Let England Shake’ is how brutally honest it is in its patriotism. It shows England at its most depressed and holds it up as a thing of beauty. It’s a tough love to be sure, the way only a parent can love a child, but it's the kind of national attitude I can tip my hat to, in my tolerant British way. I don’t have to agree with the sentiment to admire its honesty.

As with Polly Jean, so with John. John doesn’t wear his national pride on his sleeve, he keeps it locked in his chest. You won’t see him hanging a flag of St George on his car or out his window, but he’s still proud of where he comes from. And how far he’s come. And despite my still tricky relationship with pride, I’m proud of him too.

Isn’t it great that we’re all better people?

As for me, I no longer suffer the same violent reactions towards expressions of national pride. I still feel a little uncomfortable when the bunting is hung out for international tournaments, but I’ve long since come to realise that it has nowt to do with patriotism. The individual, that’s who I always most wanted to be, the kid doing his own thing.  Of course large groups of people united through a common focus make me uncomfortable, it goes against everything in which I idiotically believe. Still, it’s a small price to pay, because while it may be a way short of the best, Britain is a better place to live than most. It is still one of the very few places in the world where one can be an individual without harassment from religious or political authority. And in that respect at least, I attribute my British passport to good fortune.

Ultimately it comes down to familiarity. It’s familiar here. It would be the same wherever I was born. Yet before you can know where you are going, you have to know where you are; be grounded in the reality of where you are. Yes, I was born in Britain. I attach no pride or shame to that event. It was a long time ago and I don't really remember that much about it. It's fine. Moving on...

"And if, when all a vigil keep,

The West's; asleep, the West's asleep-
Alas! and well may Erin weep,
That Connaught lies in slumber deep.
But-hark! -some voice like thunder spake:
"The West's awake, the West's awake'-
Sing oh! hurra! let England quake,
We'll watch till death for Erin's sake!"

II

Even seen from the distance of two centuries, Goya series of prints 'The Disasters of War' still have the capacity to shock. They depict the numerous atrocities that both sides committed during Napoleon's invasion of Spain. It's hard to know how much of what Goya drew he actually witnessed, but he reproduces each scene with visceral immediacy. Executed men tied to posts, pathways littered with corpses, body parts hanging from trees; it makes one thankful we live in such a sedate corner of the world these days. 

Europe was entrenched in yet another war at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was a time when politics fired artistic passions. French artist David had helped unleash the guillotine upon the aristocracy during the 'Terror' and now fawned over Napoleon. Beethoven had idolised Napoleon, but turned against him upon hearing he'd declared himself Emperor. Tchaikovsky celebrated the beginning of his downfall with the appropriately triumphant '1812 Overture' and Tolstoy wrote at length about the affair long after it was all over.

Although not displayed until long after Goya's death, 'The Disasters of War' were one of the first attempts at a kind of documentary photography. Long before the invention of the camera, Goya was sketching in sharp focus. There is much of 'The Disasters of War' in the photography of Robert Capa and Don McCullin. The images were also influential in the mind of one  PJ Harvey.

'arms and legs were in the trees'

Goya's greatest composition came out of that same outrage at Napoleon's incursions into his homeland. 'The Third of May, 1808' is perhaps the most powerful comment on war ever committed to canvas. Everything that war is about is encapsulated in that one image. The bloodied pile of corpses, the anonymity of the executioners, the fear in the faces of the onlookers, the sacrificial, Christ-like, pose of the condemned man. It is an image that truly speaks a thousand words.

 

For as long as men have gone to war, they have sought to recreate the experience through a variety of artistic forms. Writing, painting, music, photography and film have all been employed to varying effects to capture something of the sights, sounds and smells, the sensory overload and outright dislocation of battle, rendered knowable for the benefit of those thankful to be spared its horror. The twentieth century saw slaughter conducted on an industrial scale from its beginning to its end. Wilfred Owen equated the men conducting the First World War with Abraham going against God's commandment and slaughtering his son, 'and half the seed of Europe, one by one', in a return to the practice of human sacrifice. He died a week before the Armistice was signed.

What passing-bells for those who die like cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

Poetry was still in vogue back then, as it had been since the rise of Napoleon, and for many in Britain what was happening over the channel was first communicated to them through the poetry of Owen, as well as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Rupert Broke. Today they are as part of the national conscious as Shakespeare or Blake. Poetry's influence would decline over the years as new forms of entertainment were invented, but the war poets impact is so great that they are almost mandatory on any English Literature course in Britain. Tune in to any radio or TV station around 11th November to hear them recited as part of Remembrance Sunday commemorations. Like Homer's Iliad, they capture the boredom and the inertia that sets in between the violence.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

While the English related their experiences through verse, other nations turned to prose. American Ernest Hemingway used his time as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front as the basis for his 1929 novel, 'A Farewell to Arms'. Hemingway was badly injured by a mortar shell and the book focuses on his alter ego, Henry, and his relationship with the nurse who tends him back to health. It's a romantic novel, told in that tough, plain way that Hemingway is famous for, but he doesn't shy away from the grim realities of war.

German, Erich Maria Remarque gives us a perspective from the other side of the trenches. 'All Quiet on the Western Front' humanises the 'enemy', shows him as being subject to same propaganda, witness to the same horrors, paralysed by the same terrors. The Nazis burned it on their pyres of banned books.

For most horrific war novel however there is only one contender and that is the panic inducing, 'Johnny Got His Gun' by Dalton Trumbo. 'Johnny Got His Gun' relays the inner monologue of an injured American G.I. as he slowly comes to realise the full extent of his injuries. Both his arms have been blown off by an explosion, as have his legs, all his senses likewise destroyed, only one small patch of skin on his forehead has any sensation remaining. He is in solitary confinement in his own body. We hear his claustrophobia, his panic, his desperate wish to die. The technique is simple and yet the effect is devastating.

'Johnny Got His Gun' may be the greatest anti-war novel ever written. Indeed it is so powerful that it was banned during World War Two. A film version was made in 1971 and in 1987, fifty years after it was written, heavy metallers Metallica recorded, 'One', based on the novel. But then when it comes to approximating war, there really is only heavy metal can do it justice (see Slayer's 'War Ensemble', habitually used by US troops in pumping themselves up for battle).

With 'Let England Shake' there is no attempt at approximating the feel of war, merely an attempt to present a soundtrack against which to project its voices. PJ Harvey's lyrics call to mind many conflicts, but time and again they return to World War One. She knows the old adage that those who refuse to learn the mistakes of the past are doomed forever to repeat them and deliberately comes back to a conflict that is now a century in the nation's past. History repeats itself. There was death then, there is death now. A hundred years ago young men were massacred by their millions on the fields of Belgium and France. Today those figures are dramatically reduced. Yet whereas the vast majority of war casualties used to be soldiers, today they are mostly civilians. Not that we even call them wars anymore. Wars have battlefields.

Often neglected in history lessons is the Spanish Civil War that broke out in 1936. And yet as in Napoleonic Europe and the trenches of the First World War, it set artistic passions ablaze. It was a place to which to rush and defend from the fascist forces of the Nationalists. George Orwell joined the POUM Militia, a leftist Spanish political party. He wrote 'Homage to Catalonia' about his experiences, including being shot in throat and witnessing the street fighting that broke out in Barcelona and pitted factions in the left against one another.

 

Orwell in Barcelona, 1936, near the back, a clear head taller than anyone else

 

Hemingway made propaganda films for the Republicans and in 1940 published the novel, 'For Whom the Bell Tolls', the tale of an American soldier who joins a group of Spanish guerillas to dynamite a bridge used by Franco's fascists. It's another tough tale from our Ernest and his most accomplished. The English poet Laurie Lee meanwhile had been tramping around the Spanish countryside at the outbreak of war and at the end of 'As I Walked Out One Midsummer's Evening' his hosts are endeavoring to find him passage out of the war zone. In 'A Moment of War', Lee depicts his journey back into Spain to try and join the fight. He is imprisoned as a Nationalist spy, then released to join the International Brigade. After anticipating battle for so long, he finally kills an enemy soldier in a skirmish and decides war is not for him.

The Spanish Civil War is a fascinating moment in history because it was the first concerted effort against the rising menace of fascism upon the continent. Hitler was an opportunist, he gained territory by chancing his arm and getting away with it. The elites of Europe were still trying appease him and hoped he'd go away. Read the literature of the day and it seems it was already to clear to many by 1936 that war between Germany and Great Britain was inevitable. Spain was a first chance to take the fight to the fascists.

The Falling Soldier - Robert Capa

And in the spirit of Goya, the defining image of the Spanish Civil War, one of the defining images of art in the twentieth century, is Picasso's 'Guernica'. Picasso painted 'Guernica' in response to the bombing of the Basque village of the same name by German and Italian planes. You don't really appreciate the impact of' Guernica' until you have seen it up close and personal. The canvas is enormous, the twisted, tortured faces filling the vision. It's no wonder the copy in the UN was covered up when Colin Powell came to plead his case for war with Iraq.

Guernica

Yet the warnings were not heeded and we all know the result. The slaughter of the Second World War was once again on an industrial scale. The consequences and the aftereffects reverberated through the Suez Crisis and Korea, into the Vietnam War. More tons of TNT was dropped upon the counties of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos than were dropped by all sides during World War Two, including both atomic bombs. The century ended as it began, with slaughter, and all that appeared to have changed was that we had outsourced the casualty figures to the 'enemy' of the day.

The twenty first century began with a bang, quite literally, and the shock wave from the attacks on 11th September 2001 have been circling the globe ever since. They should have caused us to pause and take a good long look at ourselves. Instead the same rhetoric was trotted out to push the same imperialistic ambitions that would have existed whether there was Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban or not. The war in Afghanistan has now gone on nearly twice as long as the Second World War, three times as long as the First World War, and few people understand what it's all about. Even if the reasons given for the invasion were accurate, they surely ceased to be relevant long ago.

PJ Harvey asks these questions. Her lyrics serve to show how no one involved in war benefits from its destruction. Family life is decimated, the fertile ground is ripped open, soldiers are haunted by the things they are ordered to do. Harvey uses the past to examine the future and ask why things seem to have changed so little in a hundred years.

Walker's in the wire, limbs point upwards, there are no birds singing 'The White Cliffs of Dover'.

Yet there is a glimmer of hope here. Noam Chomsky reminds us that things do tend to get better, despite concerted efforts to slow the pace of progress by those in power. We can, he notes, talk about differences of opinion within today's equal rights movement, yet try even talking about equal rights a century ago. The concept would have been baffling.  Civilisation slowly evolves.

The two most thoughtfully polemic works written in response to the 9/11 attacks were both written by women: Suheir Hammad's 'First Writing Since' and Ani DiFranco's 'Self Evident'. Both were composed by Americans directing their anger back at their own nation and calling it to account. They actually asked how this could have happened and offered suggestions that didn't resort to simplistic accusations of jealously. They express the anger left by the attacks, but they ask for solutions that don't revolve around the same old cycles of death and retribution.

With PJ Harvey's 'Let England Shake' we have perhaps the most effective and succinct commentary on the wars of recent years. Until even recently women's only role in war was as grieving mothers or victims of invading armies. Finally they have achieved a voice. And there really is no way to say that without sounding patronising, because it should have of course been that way a long time ago. Yet this where we find ourselves.

The global arms industry is worth tens of trillions dollars each year and the international community at best ignore and at worst ferment local conflicts and fuel the trade in weapons (Chomsky and others argue that it was the outbreak of the Second World War that ended the Great Depression in America and the US economy has been reliant on its arms industry ever since). Austerity is everywhere and people still die like cattle and it can seem like we're sliding back to the days of the workhouse and trench warfare. Yet things still improve. Ultimately the will of the majority wins through, even if it does take a century of trying. History does not repeat itself, but moves in waves. It goes up and down, with some repetition, but is always moving forward, playing variations around the melody as it goes. History is the world's longest standing jazz solo.

It's refreshing to see an album written about such a controversial subject was lauded by the press upon release and found instant success. Only the Daily Mail seemed to misunderstand, saying 'Let England Shake' drew no conclusions about the Iraq War. That's the Mail for you. For the rest of us, it's good to be reminded how things still tend towards the better. And at the risk of repeating myself, before you can know where you're going, it's good to remind yourself of where you are. If you believe you're trapped in a vicious cycle, you will repeat the same mistakes forever. To know history is moving forward is begin to put the mistakes of the past behind you.

'Let England Shake' takes its place in the pantheon of crucial commentaries upon war. From Thucydides to Julius Caesar, Delacroix to Dali, The Clash singing of 'Spanish bombs in Andalucía' and Lemmy's uncharacteristically tender vocals on Motorhead's '1916', right up to PJ Harvey, each new addition to the genre freezes war as a moment in time for our appraisal and careful consideration. In these days of virtual online battlefields and drone bombers operated from halfway around the world, the western mind has become almost entirely removed from the consequences of war. Many are still affected by them, soldiers and civilians alike. The conflict in Afghanistan rumbles on into its thirteenth years with no end in sight. It may be the war-without-end predicted by George Orwell in Nineteen-Eighty Four. PJ Harvey is an antidote to the apathy felt towards wars being waged that barely affect European life. She reminds us of why we should feel aggrieved. Perhaps if we paid greater heed to our great war chroniclers, they might instruct us to a clearer path towards peace.

"Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened."

Gassed - John Singer Sareant

III

In common with with Nick Cave, I have little time for popularity contests. That said, it was good to see 'Let England Shake' win the Mercury Music Prize. It was the most predicable, least contested outcome in the brief history of the contest. PJ Harvey became the first artist to win the award for a second time. She got to enjoy this one. 'Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea' was announced winner in somber tone on 11th September 2001. Harvey was in Washington DC on the morning of the attacks. That experience began a decade long quest to understand the consequences of the event and to make a definitive statement about it. That the Mercury result never seemed in doubt is a testament to how well she succeeded in her efforts.

  
I remember seeing PJ Harvey at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall around the time her previous album, 'White Chalk', came out. Standing alone on a stage usually occupied by the Halle Philharmonic Orchestra, she filled the hall with sound with nothing more than electric guitar and vocals. It was a little disconcerting at first to realise she was going to be performing alone, but spellbinding to hear songs like 'Rid of Me' and 'Big Exit' stripped of any backing, making Harvey work all the harder to match their intensity.

She was chatty, nervous, confessing it terrified her playing solo. Switching to piano, she kept time with a metronome, apologising that she was still learning. It only added to the evening's charm. The new album was more melodic, more melancholic than the driving guitar riffs of her previous two offerings. Regret had replaced attitude. It was as she has always done, switching styles, trying something new. Yet the elements that would characterise the sound and the style of 'Let England Shake' were coming together that evening: the prepared piano, the autoharp, the long flowing dress of an Edwardian steam punk. The feather headdress was all she lacked at that point.

The concert ended with a standing ovation and we went away feeling that Polly Jean was well on her way to becoming a national treasure. Her idiosyncrasies developed over the years. Like wearing feather headdresses. Well if you going to be regarded a national treasure here, you have to develop a few eccentricities first. Ordinariness in our cultural icons just won't do. 

Following years of intensive research into the history of British conflict, Harvey emerged in her mercurial new guise as messenger and medium to the ghosts of war. Despite their shifting styles, her previous albums had been strictly personal affairs, raw and introspective. With 'Let England Shake', she almost removes her voice from the action altogether, serving only as a conduit to the lyrics. With that comes a greater aloofness, you can see it in her live performances, standing separate from the band, remote and distant. It's all part of the drama. 'Let England Shake' is as much a piece of theatre as it is a piece of music. All so different from that nervous, carefree night in Manchester not so many years ago.

My favourite fact about PJ Harvey is that she used to send advance copies of her albums to Captain Beefheart. My least favourite fact is that Captain Beefheart didn't like 'Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea'. Which is a pity, 'cause I have a fondness for that one. It reconnected me with PJ Harvey. The album almost entirely passed me by for a couple of years. Indeed, Harvey was owed the award for Least Contested Mercury Music Award having previously received the award for Least Noticed Mercury Music Award. Even Harvey seems to have virtually disowned the album these days. It's easily the most commercial thing she's released, but a solid rock album with some great tunes. And even some of Beefheart's best albums were commercial. Commercial for Beefheart that is (see 'Clear Spot'). I wonder what he would have made of 'Let England Shake'.

The sides of 'Let England Shake' that are shaded by war are perhaps universal to all, but there are other sides that can only really be appreciated when you've lived here awhile. Like reading Orwell's 'The Road to Wigan Pier', it doesn't leave you feeling patriotic or ashamed, just presents you with a picture of Britain that you can recognise and understand.

Like 'Johnny Got His Gun' or 'The Third of May 1808', 'Let England Shake' will remain timeless in its relevance and appeal. It's an album that speaks of the times it was written in, but has a atmosphere that is itself timeless. There isn't another album that sounds anything like it. I can't wait to see what Harvey tries her hand at next. With Beefheart for a mentor, anything is possible. An opera on the life of Emma Goldman perhaps? Whatever it is, I only hope she doesn't need to spend four years researching the next one.

"Ay, already the sombrer opacities of the gloom are sphanished! Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfast-bringer, morroweth whereon every past shall full fost sleep. Amain."

 

Eponymous 6

Eponymism and The Eponymist came about because I used to think that if I ever had a band I’d call them Eponymous. Our first record would of course be self-titled, with subsequent releases called things like ‘Ditto’, ‘See Above’, ‘As Previous’. Silly, pretentious Sixth-Former. And while these days I’m a little more sophisticated, I’m still as pretentious as ever and I retain the name on my blog as a warning to others of the obstacles that might lie ahead.

Anyway, I love a good eponymous album. Artists and record companies choose to release them for a variety of reasons, from the establishing of brand to the desire for a clean state to sheer bloody laziness. So here, for entirely arbitrary reasons, are six eponymous albums that bring me joy.

Rodrigo y Gabriella

I was on the phone one day outside Fopp in Manchester when I heard this kick ass Flamenco version of Metallica’s ‘Orion’. I went back inside, walked up to a member of staff and all but demanded he tell me who was on the stereo. He gave me a look and said, “This is Rodrigo y Gabriella.” as if I was the last person on Earth to have heard.

While the Metallica and Led Zeppelin covers hook you in, these are merely a gateway to the rest of the album. It’s incredible how much of a racket two people can generate using nothing but a couple of Spanish guitars, an energy they more than manage to match live. A vibrant album, rhythmic and pounding, whenever I need a kick start to the day instead of espresso I plug straight into ‘Rodrigo y Gabriella’.

Portishead

Of all the albums to come out of the Bristol scene in the late 90s, Portishead's second album most closely approximates the sound that triphop seemed to be trying to achieve. Darkly it broods, a great haunted house of an album, full of long shadows and creaking floorboards and discord lurking around every corner. Yet like any good ghost story, its effect is spellbinding and finds its perfect complement in Massive Attack's Mezzanine, that other totem of triphop. Largely neglected, like the middle child that it is: for me their best.

Elastica

Unlike triphop, Britpop seemed to pass from fashion to fad in the blink of an eye. While Pulp and Blur kept perhaps their best albums until after the cliché had calcified, Elastica's eponymous debut represented the strongest release that Britpop had to offer. More akin to the spirit of punk, 'Elastica' strains at the edges with tight, two minute tracks, its sixteen songs galloping to a conclusion in a little under forty minutes. And as it careers along, the influence of the Clash, the Slits, even early Chumbawamba (Jimi Hendix and Thin Lizzy) ooze out of every chord. A brilliant beginning, but sadly Britpop's best and brightest burned out far sooner than they ought. Still, it's one classic album more than most bands ever achieve.

Bob Dylan

As an evangelical Bobcat, Dylan's first album is something of a curiosity to me. Recorded in 1961 when he was just 20, 'Bob Dylan is a entirely different beast to its 1963 follow up, 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan'. While the latter showcases Dylan's emerging genius with some of his greatest compositions, his debut is an album consisting largely of folk standards he had rarely played before, the arrangements mainly purloined from other musicians he knew from playing in and around Greenwich Village. Only two of the thirteen tracks are written by Dylan. Talkin' New York is ok, but it is Song to Woody, his eulogy to Woody Guthrie, that is the album's stand out track and a warning of the creative explosion that was about to go off in Bob's head. Dylan immediately rejected the album as mistake, but everyone has to start somewhere. Not his best, but certainly not his worst (see 1979-1988), and I still know every damm word.

Led Zeppelin

In the 1970's the eponymous album was very much in vogue. From that one decade alone I could chose half a dozen albums. Yet my roots are with heavy metal and heavy metal's roots lie with Led Zeppelin's tectonic debut. It's perhaps a little hard to imagine nowadays, when metal has become mainstream and fashionable, what effect 'Led Zeppelin' had when it was first released. 'Good Times, Bad Times', 'Dazed and Confused' and 'Communication Breakdown' must have sounded like communiqué's from another planet, like the premier of Beethoven's 'Eroica' or the opening snare shot of 'Like a Rolling Stone'. Forty years on and it sounds like a blues album when compared with the thousand and one bands that Led Zeppelin spawned, along with Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Yet few of the imitators can even approach 'Led Zeppelin' and it's sequels for sheer unadulterated class.

The Good, The Bad and The Queen

Ok, so  this one is a bit of a cheat, as the band claimed to have no name. Yet iTunes lists the album as The Good, The Bad and The Queen - The Good, The Bad and The Queen, so let's go with it.

The Good, The Bad and The Queen represent that rarest of musical entities, the one album band. Comprised of Damon Albarn, former Clash bassist, Paul Simonon, former Verve guitarist, Simon Tong, and Nigerian drummer, Tony Allen, The Good, The Bad and The Queen's only album was released in 2007. Zeitgeist is a much overused word and yet the album does perfectly capture the mood and atmosphere in Britain at that moment in time. The spectre of Iraq is never far away and the approaching recession hangs like a bank of brooding grey cloud on the horizon. "Friday night in the kingdom of doom", from 'Kingdom of Doom', is such a perfect opening line that I nicked it and used as the opening line to a short story. And while the later Blur albums are brilliant and The Gorillaz ok, for me this is the best thing that Damon Albarn has yet done.

2nd Epistle to the Foxnewsians

Dear Foxnewsians,

It is important to say something positive about the world in which we live so that we become more rounded individuals. To that end, I thought I would write a little this time about what I enjoy about America. I write two semi regular series of articles. The one, ‘And Another Thing...’ is usually me on auto-rant. The other, ‘Best Things Ever’, sees me picking something I have a particular passion for (tea, Shakespeare, ‘In the Loop’), and eulogising it. If my 1st epistle belongs to the former series, think of the 2nd as very much of the later.

Of course, a country is an arbitrary boundary and a nation but a random collection of individuals. I am sure that America is a beautiful land, it looks it, but I confess that I only been once so far and that was to New York, which people tell me isn’t like the rest of America (I’m sure no part of America is). Yet I am and always have been heavily influenced by American culture and it to this that I turn my attention this time.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love the blues, that pure American sound. I love John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters. On first hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (following a recommendation by Van Morrison) I wanted to jump up and down in the street. ‘Down by the Riverside’ blew me away. And then there is Chuck Berry: ‘Too Much Monkey Business’, ‘Never Can Tell’, ‘Nadine’, they’re like totems along the highway of my life. They say if Chuck Berry had been white, he’d have been bigger than Elvis.

I love listening to the Eagles’ song, ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’, at the end of drunken night, because it reminds me of my late father. I love the Raconteurs ‘Carolina Dream’, because it reminds me of an obscure Dylan song on unfashionable album. I love Ani DiFranco when she sings ‘Self-Evident’ and ‘Serpentine’ and Rage Against the Machine when they perform Alan Ginsberg’s ‘Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox’. Their version of Springsteen’s ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ is also shit hot.

Anyone who knows me knows of my obsession with Bill Hicks and Bob Dylan, I quote them more than anyone except possibly Shakespeare, so I will skip over them briefly. The late Bill Hicks was to my mind the greatest comedian ever to walk to earth. Comedy was an art form in his hands, his timing honed to within the millisecond. Dylan is the everyman, through his lyrics he shows you what man is. Not what man should be, what he aspires to be, but what he actually is. A flawed genius to be sure, but what other kind of genius is there?

Of all the sounds in all the universe, it is Nina Simone’s voice that sounds the most exquisite to my ears. When she sings ‘For All We Know’, ‘Mr Bojangles’, ‘Just Like a Woman’, it’s like retuning to the womb. And when she plays those first strains of ‘Good Bait’, the first chords of ‘Mood Indigo’, OMG, a well played piano is the most powerful narcotic you can subject my brain to. Must be why I love Tori Amos (other than her being a redheaded goddess and all). In the right mood, that woman can induce a state of almost transdimesional relaxation, an overwhelming feeling of being at one with the multiverse.

I love Wilson Pickett and Otis Reading and Jackie Wilson singing ‘(You’re Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher’. Statues should be erected to Louis Armstrong, if only for ‘What a Wonderful World’ and ‘We Have All the Time in the World’. I have a predilection for Joe Satriani albums and Alice in Chains got me through some difficult times. I understand from my brother that with their new singer, William DuVall, they are the best band he has ever seen live.

And then there is the music of George Gershwin, which shows multiculturalism at its most creative, throwing up new forms like tectonic plates colliding. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and ‘An American in Paris’ are joyous compositions, as are ‘Summertime’ and ‘I Loves You Porgy’. Again, if you want your heart breaking, listen to Nina’s version of the latter.

I love NASA, despite my socialism and ambivalent feelings on how their budget could be better put to use. Yet astronomy has always fascinated me, I watched the first Space Shuttle missions with wonder as a child and still have the Space Shuttle manual bought to celebrate the maiden launch of Columbia. Edwin Hubble is a hero and the telescope which bears his name is one of the wonders of the engineering world. The first time I saw that image of the pillars of life in the Eagle Nebula, it brought tears to my eyes. I feel sorry for people who deny that the Moon landings took place because faced with a historical event which I can ultimately neither prove nor disprove, I prefer the optimistic course. Neil and Buzz deserve their place in history.

I am a huge Science Fiction fan and in this regard America has obviously had an enormous effect. I was 5 in 1978, the year ‘Star Wars’ came to Britain. I can remember walking home from the cinema, looking up to the sky and thinking, I wonder if there is anyone out there. It’s always seemed a pretty profound thing for a 5 year old to think and was certainly the first step on a journey which led me to become an Astrophysics undergraduate, as did the popular science authors I read. In George Greenstein’s now out of print, ‘Frozen Star’, I learnt about neutron stars and pulsars and black holes and quasars. Michio Kaku opened my eyes to higher dimensional space, as well as to an appreciation of Picasso. And Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan taught me about DNA and natural history in ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’.

Of course, Star Trek had an enormous effect. ‘Deep Space Nine’ is second in my list of best ever TV shows, with Ronald D. Moore’s reimagining of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ not far behind, both shows daring to display the shades of grey which overshadow war. With Battlestar it’s like they took the DS9 episode ‘By the Pale Moonlight’ and built a whole franchise ‘round it.

Philip K Dick is another influence, ‘The Man in the High Castle’ and ‘A Scanner Darkly’ are rightly regarded as classics. While Dick has been the victim of too many dubious film adaptations, I regard ‘Blade Runner’, loosely based on ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, as my favourite film, combining as it does the three classic ingredients, sci-fi, hard-boiled detective drama and film noir.

On the absurdist side of sci-fi there is Kurt Vonnegut. To describe him as the American Douglas Adams is the finest tribute I can pay the man. ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ is a revelation and remains one of the few contemporary accounts of the horror of Dresden, where the allies firebombed a German city of little, if any, military significance for three days during World War II, killing an estimated 25,000 civilians. Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in the city at the time. Talking of war, the absurdity and horror thereof, check out Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch 22’ and Dalton Trombo’s ‘Johnny Got His Gun’ as the finest examples of each subgenre.

Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Maltese Falcon’ is second only to the monolithic ‘Ulysses’ in terms of my favourite novel. The Bogart adaptation is third after ‘Blade Runner’ and the Godfather trilogy as my favourite film: All are emblematic tales in the emerging American mythology. Philip Marlowe is a greater detective even than Holmes and Chandler the only author who can match Joseph Heller for wordplay. Marlowe’s prose rolls off the page like a wave, like honey drizzling from a spoon. I love to while away an afternoon in the company of Marlowe.

In terms of classic authors, I am a great fan of Mark Twain, holding similar views on golf, and I unconditionally love everything of his I have read so far. Thanks go to the American historian Howard Zinn for introducing me to Jack London’s seminal work, ‘The Iron Heel’, a futuristic retelling of how fascism came to conquer the Earth. ‘The People of the Abyss’, London’s frank description of the condition of the working poor in the city which bears his name, inspired George Orwell to write ‘Down and Out in Paris and London' and ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, classic texts of the British left. Yet American literature for me is defined by the early 20th century. F. Scot Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Arthur Miller, these are the voices which spoke to me when I was first venturing into reading more challenging fiction. ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, ‘Death of a Salesman’, these are the foundations on which American literature is built. I have recently come to realise that ‘Moby Dick’ is a masterpiece and special dispensation should be given to Tom Paine and ‘Common Sense’, for though he was born in Norfolk, he perhaps more than any other author shaped the independence movement in the colonial United States.

Yet of all American authors, it is John Steinbeck that I admire most of all. Before even the mighty Russians (Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsym), Steinbeck is the high priest of narrative storytelling. ‘In Dubious Battle’ is so good I sat up from 10.30 to 5am finishing it. He does this every time, draws me in, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, ‘East of Eden’, ‘The Winter of Our Discontent’, even ‘Once There Was a War’, with Steinbeck’s prose I find myself compelled to keep reading, I want to know how it ends, because I know it’s going to be dynamite. John Steinbeck should be compulsory reading in American schools, for he offers some much needed perspective on the realities of the American Dream. Steinbeck should have his own national holiday.

The latest addition to this American Classic Collection is ‘The Wire’, a TV series which could hardly be more Russian if it were set in St Petersburg rather than West Baltimore. The British intelligentsia worship ‘The Wire’ as the greatest TV show ever made, but it is hard not to eulogise it, it is simply is that good, a show that starts small, grows, evolves, shows the drugs war from both sides, the police and the dealers, taking in increasingly large sweeps of the city, before, finally, embracing all. I know many people that have watched it, but few that have a bad word to say about it.

What else do I love about American culture? I love Heather Graham and Julianne Moore and Henry Miller and Alice Walker and Maya Anjou and Walt Whitman and Noam Chomsky and Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley and Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson and Scott Joplin and The Blues Brothers and Jaws and Indiana Jones and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dr Strangelove and Family Guy and Scrubs and The Big Lebowski and My Name is Earl and Batman and Talking Heads and The Onion and James Joyce Quarterly and Fight Club and Pulp Fiction and The Sopranos and the Galileo probe and Dilbert and Dita Von Tesse and Looking for Richard and Robot Chicken and Ren and Stimpy and Jimi Hendrix and Serena Williams and Gillian Anderson and Angelina and, grudgingly, Brangelina and The Black Crowes and Chinatown and A Confederacy of Dunces.

I love America for its delusional self image, because it’s optimistic attitude looks to be the biggest, the best, the boldest. The problem is that in order to achieve those lofty goals one needs more than to merely brag about your greatness. It takes determination, hard work and unity to truly be the best, yet you are one of the most disunited countries on the face of the planet. American culture is rich enough to guide the way. I have not even begun to exhaust my list of cultural icons, but I think you will agree, oh Foxnewsians, that the previous couple of thousand words are a testament to the extent that your country folk have inspired me. And don’t go saying, look viewers, he’s admits it, America is greatest country on Earth. How’s that work? How do the 280 million best people in the world in a population of 6 billion ordinary people, how do they all come to conglomerate, randomly, within the same arbitrary boundary? Now don’t go making me write a ten part mini-series on everything great that isn’t American, ‘cause you know I’ll do it!

You shall here from me anon.

Amused, Manchester.

PS: How did you get on with the homework from last time? The answer was: Fascism. On a dichotomous, two dimensional political scale, the opposite of socialism is fascism. Half a point if you said Dick Cheney.

The Pillars of Life