“Love Can Build A Bridge” has one of the best line-ups of any charity single – three women who have each made, on their day, magnificent pop records. What’s more, Cher and Hynde and Cherry aren’t off-form, phoning it in or smoothing themselves down – their voices blend and contrast in exactly the intriguing ways you might have expected.

And yet this is a tiresome record. It’s a simpering bore, a dose of pop castor oil, a lacklustre plod whose only appeal is the background sense you’re doing some good. What went wrong?

Maybe it’s just a mismatch of singers and material. What makes each of these three singers special on their best work is their different flair for drama – the way they use the grain of their individual voice (raucous or smoky or squeaky) to bring characters and situations alive – whether the characters are them or not. “Love Can Build A Bridge” doesn’t use that side of their talent – it’s a solemn song about togetherness in adversity, and what it requires from its singers is oaken solidarity, not individual spark. Hynde has a useful roughness as the song opens, but Cher is too much in blunderbuss mode and Cherry is underused. And then they all have to get out the way for Eric Clapton, anyhow, whose uninspired solo fits the trudge of the arrangement in general. It helped people, I guess, though you wouldn’t know it to listen.

I should say from the outset, I’m unreasonably fond of this record. “Unreasonably” not because it’s a bad song or ‘guilty pleasure’, but because it’s not a record I want to reason with. I like it as a trip into full-bore, bodice-tearing ballad melodrama, and it does this job rather well, probably better for being a movie soundtrack without a movie. I want to hear it every few months, I hear it, I’m done – like the thunderstorms of “Think Twice” are dissipating some sort of emotional ozone buildup.

So it’s not something I’ve ever played repeatedly or carefully considered until now. And the more I do consider it the more awkward a thing it is, a strange hybrid of at least three quite different takes on making a big ballad. You have the “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” angle – Celine building it up to knock it down, chunks of drums and power chords falling around her. I’m always fond of that. You have the more up-to-date approach – the ballad as skeleton for a vocal routine, which of course Dion has the technical chops to carry.

But before both of these you have a third ballad-form – one summoned up by “Think Twice”‘s brooding opening, a drift of soft-synth bewilderment cut through by a lonesome guitar lick, a warning of tears and lamentation to come. This is, frankly, Phil Collins territory – songs whose landscapes crackle with sullen potential before erupting into an almighty sulk. “Think Twice” promises something similar – a more wounded, less resentful “In The Air Tonight”.

Now, “In The Air Tonight” is a good song, and strange itself – a marriage of saloon bar bloke rocking and clipped post-punk aesthetics which sounds like not much else. But it’s a song that rests on a particular instant – its gorilla moment, the savage beating Collins gives his drums as his dam of resentment bursts. Does Celine have anything to match that? She’s a singer, of couse, not a drummer, but she’s trying to give us something which rivals that moment for soft-rock force – her gutbusting “NO NO NO NO” which stops the song dead before it bounces back swinging into its final chorus.

A couple of things stop it quite working, for me. First of all this being a megaballad they’ve thrown a stormfront of drums in too, and the two climaxes push each other out of the way a little. Also, Dion switches to a kind of ersatz soul register for her tub-thumping breakdown, reaching for a pseudo-Aretha moment after a song which has gone in quite different directions. Oh, and the lyrics fall down, too – suddenly she’s all about sacrificing everything for her man when before she’s been telling him to grow up and face what’s been happening.

But most of “Think Twice” is a job well done – Dion with a sharp, keening edge to her voice, picking her words with care as she treads delicately through the song. The arms-swaying chorus isn’t the record’s real draw – it’s the “this is getting seee-reeee-us” hook which gets into the brain first, and “are you thinking of you or us?” is a question that cuts to the emotional chase of the track. There’s no-one else for Celine to outwit or outsing, no other woman, just a lover who doesn’t want to be there. It’s a sorrowful, grown-up kind of a a subject, and for a couple of minutes the record is lonely and restrained enough to match it. A shame it partly fluffs its ending.

I guess there was probably a lot of hand-wringing about his butt. But I probably glazed over during anything that followed the phrase ‘Noh-Varr’s butt.’ Just to get this out of the way: Jamie McKelvie is doing an extremely fine job of supplying some slightly-older-than-young-and-thus-ok-for-your-correspondent-to-goggle-at totty, here. Who knew the whole part-cockroach thing was attractive?

The question that appears to be being raised by the young people is: is Young Avengers cool enough? And indeed, if it is cool enough, is it also geeky enough? Are Billy and Teddy’s hairstyles preventing them being colossal dorks?

I don’t even want to get into the last question of that (although no, no of course they are not; they’re just vaguely dealing with being super greasy teenage boys for goodness’ sakes) but whether Young Avengers is too cool is a good question.

Y’see, Noh-Varr looks pretty cool. He’s a silver-haired alien boy for ladies in their twenties to mentally high-five Kate Bishop over. He’s got a spaceship and nega-bands and he’s been in the grown up Avengers and he’s totally done it, probably several times.

This sort of thing was not a feature of the previous Young Avengers series. They were 14/15/16 and at best confusedly enthusiastic and pubescently angry about things; even Hawkeye’s extreme levels of competence and Young Vision/Jonas’ 30th Century brain couldn’t always get them out of scrapes and they were never that far away from a fatherly intervention from Captain America.

But a lot of stuff has happened since then. And they’re older and not necessarily wiser but definitely warier. Less willing to contact a grown up, more feeling they themselves are the grown ups and having seen the extreme fallibility of people they thought of as heroes, understanding that they can’t rely on anything else.

Not that they haven’t tried- the very start of the Mother arc saw Billy and Teddy trying to -I’m sorry, I’ve just realised their names are Bill and Ted, good grief- trying to contact the Uncanny Avengers and realising that the parasite had infected everyone who could help, forcing them to stand on their own and make whatever good or bad calls they were going to- something that, when it comes to Billy’s powers, scares both of them.

Back to Noh-Varr. Ha, back. He has -oh, nevermind. Noh-Varr isn’t going to phone his mum. In fact, as it transpires in this issue, he can’t phone his mum anymore than America or Kate could. But he wouldn’t anyway- it would be enormously embarassing, for a Kree warrior and besides, he’s out past his bedtime, in an area of the galaxy he’s been specifically told to stop horsing around and shagging earth girls in.*

But is Noh-Varr actually cool, just because he’s breaking his curfew? Or is he, well, totally chancing it? He seems more grown up, because he’s got his own space ship but he’s a Kree warrior for goodness’ sake, that’s like having a bicycle and even Billy’s got one of them. And more damningly than that, he’s wildly out of his depth- he doesn’t know who Skrillex is, he wouldn’t be able to order a Subway without getting confused, he wouldn’t see the purpose of skinny jeans. (‘These clothes are skintight and yet they restrict movement, are they for recuperative purposes? I have no injuries.’)

This is all well and good if you’re Hawkeye, whose affection for anything that isn’t etiquette is well documented and who could hardly have resisted someone with no concept of it but if you’re a silver-haired alien boy trying to make his way on Earth, these things could all be problems. But Noh-Varr? Is, as Tom said in his piece on issue #1, a real true Earth fanboy. He doesn’t care about the relative actual coolness of something as per the Earth’s culture currency, he cares about whether it is aesthetically intoxicating to him.

So Noh-Varr looks cool. Sure. But look at this massive dork! He’s got no idea what’s going on, he literally said “Come with me if you want to be awesome” because he is such a loser with regards to how to talk Earth. He just did an amazing sequence of backflip-DJ-hopping and he’s utterly ruined it with this dorky-ass line, saved solely by his dorky ass.

And in the previous issue, we have Loki. Loki, who is a grillion-year-old, interdimensional menace. Loki makes deals with the devil and wins. Loki sets fire to Asgard and gets away with it. Loki doesn’t have a bedtime. But look at this idiot! He’s suddenly surrounded by cool, sexy young people and he’s desperately trying to stop them punching his face in or totally ignoring him. These are people he’s actually finding it (not that hard but) a little bit difficult to manipulate, en masse. Individually, he can mess around with their emotions but when he’s trying to convince them he’s on their side, he’s not very good at it. And this is a guy who, while wearing Sif’s body, convinced the entire of Asgard to shack up with Dr Doom. No, he has to resort to admitting he watches Game of Thrones for the tits- the sort of thing the assassinated Kid Loki would have been much more competent at- and he’s a powerless geek getting bullied by his dad, in comparison.

To conclude; Noh-Varr and Loki are both aliens- come to that, Teddy is an alien but he took longer to realise this- and that seems pretty cool when you give them the ‘intergalactic, time travelling ensign’ and ‘god of mischief, terror of the nine realms’ titles. But this is high school, my friends; maybe even college and you aren’t an invader or a deity here, you’re a dude who dances to old records and some stunted kid who’s gone up a few classes.

Young Avengers is a comic about outsiders and against the immense, dorkish idiocy of this pair of green-and-black-and-gold sartorial enthusiasts, Kate and Billy and Teddy are suddenly looking a lot like the popular clique. Does this make them cool? Well, sort of, they are superheroes but would that mean they don’t get shit said about them behind the lockers? Absolutely not. They’re outsiders who’ve found little places and friendships and relationships that feel a little more inside, who’ve learnt to work within their own perameters of coolness but who are ultimately external to their demographic peers.

And that’s what growing up is about. It’s what surviving that disturbing lurch between 14 and 18 is about. It’s what growing into the beginnings of the person you’re going to be is about. Which is a theme it would be extremely hard to argue with for a comic about teenage superheroes.

NB: there has never been any question about whether Ms America is cool. Please stop hitting me, help.

Of course from my eight-years-on-from-all-this-eighteen-year-old-business perspective, this is continuing as an enormously cool series and one that consistently wrongfoots me. I’ve been around this hurr fiction block enough times that, usually, I can see where things are going- this drives my other half bananas when we’re watching something with a suspense-riddled plot and I cheerily announce whodunnit- but I literally cannot guess the twists at all here.

I’m fairly confident that they’re not all going to end up dead because if so, there are some very convincingly mocked-up solicitations for the rest of the series but beyond that I genuinely have no idea what is going to happen next and am only just about restraining myself from every spoiler-y preview whenever my dashboard goes into screaming-and-crying meltdown.

*Interesting/not interesting parallel; in the first issue, Noh-Varr tells Kate he’s been told not to hang around Earth anymore for everyone’s good around the same time Billy is freaking out at Teddy for hanging around superheroing for roughly the same reasons. Billy’s controlling Mother parasite does seem to, with its faux-concern, be a twisted and destructive parallel to the worries about these Young People out there Doing Things.

Still lets look at these five new flavours:

Ok, so some of these have been around before, just branded differently. Th old Curried Beans had raisins in it, I’m guessing this is no longer the case. Barbecue beans and even probably even beans with fiery chilli have been around before (though probably will not come close to a liberal hand with the Tabasco). No the two interesting ones are the “Garlic & Herb” variant and the “Cheddar Cheese” one. I have no problem intellectually with the Garlic & Herb idea, it just seems to run a little counter to the concept of Baked Beans. Garlickier beans could be nice, just never a concept that I had ever thought of. On the other hand Beans & Cheese, that’s been around at least on top of jacket potatoes, for donkey’s years. But just leaving grated cheddar cheese in the tin? That seems a little wrong. OK, it seems downright disgusting.

Still none of this will harm the brand, which makes you wonder why they are not more adventurous. Yes Cheddar, but how about Brie? We are used to cocktail sausages, how about mussels? And the biggest mystery is the missing flavour. Heinz now own HP Sauce, so where is the Beans With A Hint Of HP, which is how at least 40% of British people already eat them?

*Hello New Coke.

**If you throw beans against a wall, a few will stick. And then get dried on, and be bloody hard to get off – and make up the substain part of the claim against your deposit.

Glad I did, of course. I’ve not yet got to the parts where Mignola hands over the illustrative jobs, so the stories I’ve been reading are purely him, and while I knew he was a marvellous artist I didn’t appreciate the ways in which he’s marvellous. Among them this: he gives good Cthulhu.

Good Cthulhoid work has always been rare – Lovecraft’s own tone is a tightrope between the pedestrian or silly on one hand and the merely mystical on the other: most of his followers fall straight off. And the ever-increasing presence of Cthulhu and pals in geek culture hasn’t helped. Lovecraft was once a cult act, relatively speaking – like a lot of 80s boys I only knew him via Chaosium’s Call Of Cthulhu RPG – but in the last decade or two his tentacular profile has oddly changed. Without ever having any real moments of pop culture epiphany – no blockbusters, no videogame renaissance – the Lovecraftian cosmic bestiary has crept up the monstrous league table. It’s no challenge to zombies or vampires but I’d say Cthulhu is at least nipping at the mummy’s heels – and even if his dread name isn’t quite mainstream, the basic idea – nameless terrors lurking outside the walls of reality – has never been more easily grasped. Perhaps Hellboy can take partial credit.

Recognising Lovecraft is one thing – integrating him is another matter. Products of the pulp imagination have often had a shabby time of it the further from their roots they go. In one way Lovecraft has done well – his work has more vigour and popularity than most of his contemporaries, with none of the faint sense of duty that accompanies an attempt to do right by Doc Savage or Barsoom. But still Cthulhu doesn’t play well with others. For a start the fear that animates street-level Cthulhoid horror – fatal encounters in strange ports; sunken families in forgotten towns – is not a respectable one: miscegenation was Lovecraft’s animating, ugly terror. Strip that out and you’re left with the cosmic horror – plenty to play with there, for sure; who doesn’t now feel toyed with by monstrous and invisible forces? – but some of its connective tissue is missing. A way must be made of making it less remote.

Generally this has been through forced crossover – straightening the strange angles of the Cthulhu Mythos and making its creatures bedfellows with vampires, monsters, even superheroes. Doctor Strange tackled a Great Old One or three in all but name. Doctor Who swung a screwdriver in their direction. In Grant Morrison’s Zenith, these bestial forces from before the dawn of the superhero age were poured into three-dimensional super-vessels, the unknown source of their abilities. None of it quite fitted – the clear-lined, rugged world of post-war entertainment was too well-lit for the sickly dreams of R’lyeh. A tentacle was just a tentacle.

But Hellboy is different, thanks to Mignola, even though it’s also the same. It too integrates a Cthulhoid vibe and Cthulhoid creatures with folklore, cinema and penny dreadful monstrosities, and it too has a hero who’ll take a good swing at any of it. But the illustration sells it – huge blocks of shadow, heavy lines and sharp tilts, textures of stone and old metal. The sheer pressure of Mignola’s style acts as a kind of unified field of horror, a gravity of the monstrous under which all threats are part of a greater uncanny same: witchery and cosmic obscenity, the taciturn Balkan peasant and the flapping Innsmouth native. And because of that Hellboy wears its Lovecraftian clothes – when it chooses to don them – better than several decades of work before it.

All that said, the first two hours were a shambles, here’s why:

Opening 45 mins late led to an unmanageable queue and had knock on effects all afternoon. If they’d opened on time, even with just the cask bar, the hardcore would have had a beer in their hand by quarter past. It wouldn’t have stopped a massive queue later, but would have taken the edge off.

Staff were baffled by the needlessly complicated till. I’d have gone tokens all round, rather than a mix of tokens and cash. Staff also hadn’t been briefed on what beer was what and only having the names on the barrels and taps meant the punters couldn’t help out/help themselves without referring back to the programme. It would also have helped if it had been pointed out to the staff that our commemorative glasses were two-thirds of a pint and thus when we asked for “two-thirds” we meant “fill it to the top”. I had to explain this more than once…

The event was oversold in two ways. Obviously there were too many people there, particular for the first session when there are bound to be both problems and a rabid bunch of tickers banging at the door (I include myself in this group!), I can only assume they sold to the fire limit which is always a risk. Secondly the marketing oversold the event. Being unaware of the space before I got there I was expecting a set-up like the previous LBA event at vinopolis, with each brewer being given a table to sell their beer, allowing you to chat with the brewery staff and see very easily what is available. It was somewhat underwhelming to walk in and see a standard stillage not much bigger than a decent pub beer festival.

Now, this might be a bit controversial, but the punters didn’t help themselves either. I’ve never been to a beer festival where every beer in the brochure has been on, so to repeatedly see people peering at the list and then asking for something clearly not written on any of the barrels in front of them was exasperating (I’ll let people off in the keg room where both space and light was at a premium). Also blithely queuing for ten/fifteen minutes and then saying “um, which one is a pale ale?” is not helping anyone is it?

The final nail in the coffin for a decent number of punters was the hail storm about half one which just added insult to injury. Not that LBA can be held responsible for the weather obv!

I’m sort of referring to LBA on purpose here because their name was above the door as it were, even if the event was at London Fields Brewery. I heard tell over the weekend that London Fields (or at least the people London Fields were working with to run the event) had been turning down offers of help from other brewers, but, regardless, as an organisation (however loosely defined) this reflects badly on them. I also understand there was to be a debrief the Tuesday afterwards at their regular meeting, wouldn’t have minded being a fly on the wall there…

I’d be somewhat trepidacious about going to another one of their events, and certainly wouldn’t go to the opening session, but it’s a shame when London is finally becoming (returning to being?) a great brewing city. Let’s be clear, most of the beers i had were cracking, the Pressure Drop Builders and the Weird Beard 5 O’clock Shadow being the two stand outs. I also had some lovely conversations with friends and strangers about beer, which is my favourite thing to do. Oh and as it was the only picture I actually took, I should mention that I also had my first Stout Float (london fields black frost with salted caramel ice cream), which was incredibly yum.

Other people had both better and worse times than me:

Natedawg wasn’t happy and neither was David on CAMRGB, but Matt had a lovely time at the evening sesh…

With apologies to the medium of graphic narrative, Eurovision, ticky boxes and all my now-former friends.

*Research back into their archive tells me this: the site began in 2010, mostly to post asian-flavour porn. After a couple of months, it shut down for more than a year. About a year ago, it restarted — still with a smattering of softcore at first, but this interspersed more and more with what’s now its primary diet, as described above. I genuninely can’t do justice to some of the things he/she/it is finding. I love it.

Ladybird source: greatinspire.com
Manowar source: mymodernmet.com
Otterdragon source: visualnews.com

All via taktophoto.tumblr.com

Actually we almost totally avoid talking about creative epiphanies, to instead discuss lost comic panels, skinny men getting stuck in holes, posh breast cancer ribbons, A BOOK THAT SHOULD NOT BE OPENED (we open it) and pop music which for the first time on Lost Property Office we recognised from the opening notes. And for pretty much all of the running time Al forgot (until pushed) to pimp his new novel The Fictional Man, which is a pulp rollercoaster ride through a metafictional universe eerily similar to ours (which at least as many Sherlock Holmes’s). I’ve read it, its great! At least as good as he is on this show.

So here’s an annotations post, which in the way of annotations posts will be updated with new information as you uncover it in the comments boxes. (And will also be updated with links and images!)

Contains, obviously, HEAVY SPOILERS for Avengers Assemble #15AU

SOLICITATION (available here):

The whole solicitation – “Ultron rules OK!”, “Aggro!” et al – is referring to this old issue of Action!, the notorious weekly 1970s comic which was the subject of questions in Parliament for its exceptionally brutal and anti-authority content. “Kids Rule OK” – the story of a world overturned by catastrophe in which kids ran gleefully wild – was a particular flashpoint for the trouble around Action! and the “AGGRO IS A WAY OF LIFE” cover would raise eyebrows even today. The Action! ban is in some ways the UK’s version of the Frederic Wertham incident – after a month off the shelves, Action! was toned down considerably, and the need to channel its violent impulses into something more palatable to the authorities – and the printers – led to the launch of 2000AD, though even 2000AD would contain considerably redder meat than most Comics Code endorsed US comics.

At no point does anyone inside the comic mention the exact words “Avengers UK”.

Why is it “#15AU” and not “#15″? Because it’s part of this spring’s big Marvel crossover event, Age Of Ultron, about long-standing Oedipal robo-menace Ultron finally taking over the world.

COVER:

Captains Marvel and Britain punching out some Ultrons. Look – Big Ben! Getting destroyed! So we know this is a disaster story set in the UK. The rest of the comic may have one or two pointers to this too (though at no point does the fight happen near Big Ben).

P2:

Synopsis and premise. By a scheduling quirk, this issue comes out after the “Age Of Ultron” reality described here has been reset, so the information given here isn’t really accurate. (As of writing, Ultron has not simply managed to kill his father, but has got his father killed before he was born – not even Oedipus managed that.) So while what’s about to happen is not exactly an imaginary story, it’s not really a week-by-week crossover either. Age of Ultron isn’t the kind of event to need plot-exposition crossovers, so best to just enjoy this episode as a stand-alone.

P3:

Panel 1: Tottenham Court Road is home to a huge concentration of electrical goods shops, and here it is being attacked by robots (irony!). The eponymous tube station has historically been the place you’d go first as a wide-eyed comics shopper arriving in London – it’s near Forbidden Planet old and new, near Orbital Comics, nearish to the new Gosh! and very close to the old one, and so on.

Panel 3: There’s this British TV programme, with these robot-like creatures called the Dal – oh OK, you know that one. This sequence isn’t just a cute reference, though, it’s a cute reference which establishes there’s something a bit weird about this besuited survivor.

P4 (double page spread)

Panel 1: The character intro/outro captions – “Carol Danvers IS Captain Marvel” – are obviously doing standard character intro work, but may also be a reference to the typical “You Have Been Watching…” titles on a UK Sitcom. Well, that’s what they reminded me of.

Anyway, Carol Danvers is Captain Marvel. She used to be Ms Marvel, and Binary, and possibly other things – she’s been around since 1968 but only took this title last year with the start of her current series. She is an Air Force Colonel, so outranks her own codename.

Carol wants to eat British chocolate. Some American visitors – her clearly included – believe it to be nicer than the US brands (they are broadly right).

Panel 2: As established in Age Of Ultron, Ultron’s attack overwhelmed human and superhero resistance extremely quickly. The “can’t fly” condition is a subplot in Carol’s own title, Captain Marvel.

Panel 4: Some British people say “sorry” a lot. Stereotypical but true.

P5

Panel 3: New Oxford Street and Great Russell Street are parallel to one another, so this isn’t the complete route. But I wouldn’t be great with London directions when under Ultron attack either. By the standards of Marvel Comics set in Britain, this is phenomenally detailed. Fans of Walt Simonson’s awesome Thor run will remember with some delight his conception of where anything in England actually was.

Panel 5: A vodka and coke is writer Al Ewing’s preferred tipple – met with bafflement when he asks for it in the US, apparently.

Panel 7: The sword and amulet reference is to Captain Britain’s origin, from Marvel UK’s Captain Britain #1, by British-born Chris Claremont. This – the first appearance of Captain Britain – came out in mid-October 1976, in the fortnight between the Sex Pistols signing to EMI and Action! being withdrawn from sale. So it doesn’t fit the traditional cultural narrative of the time, but its mystical approach to British superheroes has set the tone for a lot of later depictions of England in US comics. British-made super-characters tend to be a little different, as we’ll see.

P6

Panel 1: King Arthur’s sword Excalibur, which has a fair bit of Marvel Universe history behind it but has for the last few years been in the hands of…

Panel 2: Faiza Hussain, also codenamed Excalibur, a British Muslim doctor from Essex who has powers as described here – entirely defensive, according to her creator Paul Cornell, who used her all through his much-missed 2008-9 Captain Britain And MI-13 series. She (and the sword) most recently showed up in X-Men spin-off Gambit at the end of last year, apparently.

Faiza is treating a survivor of the Ultron attack, a Government minister who is exaggerating the extent of his injury. Which Government minister? It could be quite a few (and doesn’t really matter) – most of the current UK Government, and indeed most of every UK Government, are white men, and that’s all the information we have.

Panel 5: BIT OF POLITICS HERE. The NHS (National Health Service) is free at the point of service but the current Government (of which this guy is a part) is opening large sections of it up to private competition, widely seen as a first step to ending free healthcare. The Minister, by implication, already uses private healthcare, hence Faiza’s “now”.

P7

Panel 2: Faiza is established as a UK superhero nerd, so recognises Graham at once.

Panel 3: “I Love The [Insert Decade]” was a nostalgic UK clipshow which ran in the 1990s and is repeated occasionally – talking heads comment on 80s stuff they were into or involved with.

Panel 4: Computer Graham! There are two things to know about Computer Graham. One is the “bedroom coders” stuff he tells us in the issue, which is a two-panel summary of an important British pop-cultural moment, the early videogames boom. This happened everywhere in the West, of course, but it happened differently in Britain because the bulk of our videogame market wasn’t console-based, it was based around small, programmable home computers. So instead of our touchstones being large US and Japanese corporations, they were tiny software houses and teenage one-man bands rising to pop-culture success on games coded in, yes, teenage bedrooms. There’s a fine book detailing this history, and also at least one song about it. There was a very strong patriotic streak to the UK computer revolution – British gamers building a homebrew market in the face of flashy, but essentially crap, American imports. So no wonder Computer Graham’s come out of hiding now.

The other thing to know about Computer Graham is that he’s a re-spray of a real old UK comics character, Computer Warrior, who starred in Eagle for 9 years, battling enemies inside mostly real games. I only read a couple of Computer Warrior strips, but I am fairly sure his treatment here does them justice. In the original strips he’s only a player, not a coder, though.

Panel 5: Doomdarke is – minus the ‘e’ – the villain from Mike Singleton’s Lords Of Midnight, one of the great cult UK games and an astonishing display of what is possible with 48k RAM. Singleton died recently, so this is a nice tribute. Macaroni Ted is from Jet Set Willy. probably the most anticipated UK bedroom-coder game of the whole era. The Chief Examiner has Marvel pedigree – he appeared in the Scott Adams range of Questprobe text adventure games, notorious for their unfairness.

In fact, all three games referenced are very hard – JSW famously uncompletable due to a bug (which the makers claimed hastily was a feature). So Computer Graham is kind of a badass.

P8

Panel 1: Captain Britain, AKA Brian Braddock, has as mentioned been kicking around the Marvel Universe since 1976, and has as much pedigree in stories about its mystical and alternate-reality elements as he does in UK-set yarns. In fact he’s the Guardian of the Multiverse, quite a wide-ranging gig, and it’s as that he’s been used recently in titles like Journey Into Mystery and Secret Avengers. Brian’s powers fluctuate with his self-confidence – a relatively recent kink to his power set established in Paul Cornell’s run when he returned from the dead powered by the ‘hopes and dreams of Britain’ (thanks Hazel).

Panel 2: The boarding school Brian’s been teaching at may be the Braddock Academy, introduced – I think – in teen superhero Battle Royale knock-off Avengers Arena, but I haven’t been reading that. If it is, presumably Ultron may not be responsible for the dreadful fates of *all* the missing kids – some are battling Arcade and each other on a death island (though I guess said death island has been Ultronned too).

Panel 3: Dane Whitman, the Black Knight. Black Knight used to be a mainstay of the Avengers books – he debuted in the 60s, and featured heavily in the 80s – he was on the team in what’s probably the first Avengers comic Al Ewing read (mind you, so was Starfox). For a long stretch in the early 90s Dane was basically their male lead, with the 90s mullet to prove it. But he was one of a few formerly prominent characters almost completely ignored during Brian Michael Bendis’ long run in charge of the franchise. He was a lead character in Paul Cornell’s Captain Britain and MI-13 series, though, which presumably set up his current status quo – back wielding the Ebony Blade, his mystical sword which, Elric-style, is very bad for him. His tussles with Ultron take place off panel.

Panel 4: Magic Boots Mel is new to this story, and like Computer Graham she’s an updating of a British comics – well, archetype, almost, the kid who is magically awesome at sports thanks to enchanted kit. Billy’s Boots would be the most famous example, where a schoolboy gets a dead star’s football boots and finds himself playing like a man possessed.

Mel is more typical of native British adventure heroes than even Computer Graham. British heroes are basically gimmick characters, because of the circumstances in which British comics were made – weekly anthology titles, needing filling each week with a rotation of strips. It meant there was a continual need for new heroes, so any given craze or leisure pursuit would be turned into a strip. Football, the national pastime, got entire comics devoted to it.

As Pete points out, Mel is also reminiscent of Jess Bhamra, the heroine of 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham.

And a great suggestion from Daibhid C in the comments – Mel may be a reference to Melchester, the fictional home of Roy of The Rovers, Britain’s longest running football comic hero.

Panel 6: Mel’s outfit – black top, skull and crossbones motif, blue shorts – is a riff on the one worn by Danny, leader of the Bash Street Kids, a UK kids’ comic strip originally created by the great Leo Baxendale which has run for decades.

Panel 7: Gimmick heroes weren’t particularly robust or deep – they just had to be likeable, so that’s what the enjoyably gung-ho Mel Kapoor is.

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Panel 3: Can’t believe I missed this one:

This panel – as MJ Hibbett (who wrote the computer song upthread!) and Seb Patrick pointed out – is a homage to this famous scene from The Invasion, a 1968 Doctor Who story in which Cybermen invade Britain. They do rather less well than Ultron has. One reason I should have picked up on this is that I got Al Ewing a DVD of this story for Christmas last year. Oof!

Panel 4: As close as we get to an “Avengers UK” moment!

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Panel 3: A useful closing-off of a potential plot hole – what about them Multiverse powers?

Panel 4: There’s a lot in this panel. As far as I can tell, this explanation for the Ebony Blade is entirely new, and I think rather good – it ties it explicitly to Excalibur, which creates storytelling neatness (a magical evil blade forged at the same time as the magical good one should probably have something to do with it) and also positions it as Excalibur’s functional opposite. Excalibur unites, the Ebony Blade divides. Excalibur’s use is largely defensive and symbolic – it protects and maintains the symbolic order of the unified Kingdom. The Ebony Blade is more gruesomely practical – it is a weapon, and essentially destructive.

What Ewing is doing here is tying this concept to an explicitly political reading. Unification in the modern UK means multiculturalism, means bringing everyone under the protection of Excalibur without erasing their difference (so Captain Britain gets to be a British Muslim woman). The Ebony Blade, however, is the impulse of “Little England”, to divide – to set resident against migrant, middle-class against poor. Which is – BIT OF POLITICS II! – precisely what the current UK Government is doing. The other England is always below the surface, and sometimes not even below.

Brian’s specific references are to “scroungers” – right-wing shorthand for fraudulent (or sometimes genuine) state benefit claimands – and “chavs”, an ugly catch-all word for the mostly white, mostly urban poor and young.

Panel 7: Mel at this point is sounding authentically like a UK teenage adventure comics character, which is to say not especially like a UK teenager. (Fans of Dr Who will know it as “Ace Syndrome”, and the resemblance may not be accidental) (As several people mentioned, the Doctor also had a companion called Mel, AND in the novels one with the surname Kapoor for that matter).

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Panel 5: Faiza gets a promotion. Merlin, Roma and Otherworld are all elements in the original Captain Britain origin. (Merlin is the Arthurian Wizard, Roma is his daughter (a Claremont invention), Otherworld is the magical kingdom that’s the source of most British heroes’ magical powers, one way or another. Oberon (King of the Fairies) is a more recent addition, I think from Paul Cornell’s Wisdom miniseries.

Panel 6: Brian calls upon British culture as well as established Marvel UK divinities – though as of Kieron Gillen’s Journey Into Mystery run, pop impresario Tony Wilson counts as both – he is a steampunk “Manchester God” who now rules (or jointly rules) Otherworld. Perhaps in an unseen tale Captain Britain also teamed up with kids’ TV character Bagpuss? I’m fairly certain this is the only Marvel Comics mention for the “saggy old cloth cat” but I wonder if the Ashes have been menthioned before? (Update: They have! Faiza is an established cricket fan.)

If Captain Britain is now powered by the hopes and dreams of Britain, then the somnolent pink giant Bagpuss represents the latter and the Ashes the former.

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Panel 6: Brian explains the loophole in his powers, a consequence of having about 20 origins I’d guess.

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Panel 2: Good zing from Captain Marvel.

Dribbling is – for non-football/soccer players – the art of keeping the ball under control while moving with it. It is not generally an art British players are much enamoured of, and indeed Mel does not take this advice, preferring in the end a more ‘Route 1′ approach to superheroics by hoofing things at robots.

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Panel 1: Carol, despite her earlier ceding of command to Brian, naturally takes it back as soon as an actual combat situation develops. I don’t think they’ve worked together much, so “Steve Rogers” (Captain America) is an improvised manoeuvre she can be sure Brian will get.

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Panel 3: If Mel didn’t remind me of Ace before, she would with “Maneouvre N-9″, a reference I suspect to Nitro-9, Ace’s homebrew explosive of choice.

Panels 4-7: A collection of footballing slang, UK comics style.

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Panel 6: On computers with tape-loaded games – which was basically all of them, during the UK home computer boom (and Graham’s heyday) – phrases like “Data? Rewind Tape. Error.” would be the computer’s signal that it couldn’t read data off the tape. Since a lot of commercial software cassettes were copied on dirt-cheap, bottom-end industrial copiers (the good ones being used by the music biz), an awful lot of time would be spent reading this message, obeying its dread command, and waiting in false hope only to get it again. And again. So there’s a definite joy in seeing gleaming tech bastard Ultron taken down this way.

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Panel 1: Being from the 80s, Computer Graham thinks of code in BASIC. In general line 10 of this important program would read “PRINT “TOM IS SKILLFUL”" or something similar, not Ultron’s more drastic variant.

Panel 4: In the UK educational system, A-Levels are the second tier of exams, taken at 18 after GCSEs at 16. Mel hasn’t taken her Fighting A-Levels yet.

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Panel 3: As happy an ending as the (already doomed) Age of Ultron timeline gets.

As a kid I only read British comics (Beano, Dandy, Topper, Beezer, Sparky et al), and never graduated to — or really understood — Marvel or DC. They were too vast in conception to catch up with, I felt: too big a universe, filled with too much backstory. As a consequence I only recall two ministories, a Spiderman vs Doctor Octopus which ended on a cliffhanger as the latter hefted one of those water-coolers that sit on top of New York buildings at the former OH NOES, and a Silver Surfer spread where this gentleman floated unconscious in space while a squamous and bubbling mucous-beast crawled though a mirror from an eldritch dimension into an empty (excuse alliteration) marbled mansion OOOOH NOOOOOES. So anyway, I didn’t get much of a bead on what Superheroes were like as people. Lately I have embarked on a study of same — for other purposes eventually to be revealed (possibly) — and have drawn up a table, based on Iron Man1&3, The Hulk (second half only), Capt America, Thor, and Avengers Assemble.

At-a-glance guide to male Marvel character qualities:

Arnim Zola: . . . . . . . . a d!ck
Captain America: . . . a d!ck
Emil Blonsky: .. . . . . . a d!ck
Hawkeye: . . . . . . . . . . a d!ck
Iron Man: . . . . . . . . . . a d!ck
James Rhodes: . . . . . . a d!ck
Loki: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a d!ck
Mandarin: .. . . . . . . . . a d!ck
Nick Fury: . . . . . . . . . . a d!ck
Odin: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the alld!ck
Phil Coulson: .. . . . . . . a d!ck
Red Skull: . . . . . . . . . . a d!ck
The Hulk: . . . . . . . . . . tries not to be a d!ck, fails
Thor Odinsson: . . . . . not a d!ck

Notes:

1: various male characters of lesser screen time (or non-humanoid structure) not included; plz quiz Hazel on same (she says: all d!cks except Volstagg and Hulkling who isn’t in the films anyway).
2: No one included from the Fantastic Four or X-Men or Spiderman movie franchises, since there it’s hard to separate bad writing from being a d!ck (they are all d!cks, but the evidence merely on-screen and in-script is blurred and boring)(I am not going to read the comics obviously.)
3: Hence, as Tom pointed out when I first debuted the table yesterday, “this fine collection… will never get to interact with the godfather of Marvel Universe d!ckery, Reed Richards” (Hazel: RR is “the ILX of superheroes, the Pitchfork hip hop review of science”)
4: Hulk summary slightly adjusted after accurate protest from Kat.
5: All this also sorta ties in with an essay I made notes for, years ago, about Joss Whedon’s Firefly. Which in boiled-down form (hurrah!) was that where Buffy was a study of various types of strong women, Firefly broke no new ground here, and was really (as per its roots in the classic Western) about modes of masculinity. And that Whedon’s basic thesis is: men, gotta love em, but they’re all d!cks.
6: (I do love the men in Firefly, the worse the better — Jayne! — but even Wash and Book are in fact d!cks).
7: WHERE DO YOU STAND?

A few years ago I returned from a trip to Spain with a somewhat disreputable CD – Rice And Curry, by Dr Bombay, AKA Swedish Eurodance chameleon Jonny Jakobsen. Browned-up for this project, and singing songs like “SOS (The Tiger Took My Family)”, Dr Bombay is the most eyebrow-raising example of how older traditions of ethnic and cultural comedy took root in Eurodance – Jakobsen has gone on to perform as Scottish stereotype Dr.Macdoo (LP title: Under The Kilt) and ‘comedy’ Mexican Carlito. And Rednex are in very much the same game.

It’s a feature of eurodance that comes out of European disco – just as anything could be discofied, from film themes to classical music to rock, so anything is fair game for novelty Eurodance treatment, and if it made people laugh too, so much the better. The genre existed in the same amoral, self-serving zone stand-up comedy sometimes claims for itself: the effect on the audience (partying, laughter) is all that matters, and anything goes to get there.

I’m not saying this because I’m personally offended by Rednex’ appropriation of hillbilly culture, it’s just a fascinating and overlooked part of Eurodance aesthetics. I doubt any rock band in 1995 could have got away with the rat-eating, drooling hick-play of the “Cotton Eye Joe” video, but if nobody’s taking the music seriously anyhow, it’s never going to get that level of scrutiny. Or to put it less kindly, there were plenty of other reasons to hate Rednex in 1995.

But does “Cotton Eye Joe” work on that basic, energetic, ass-moving level? Yeah, pretty much. It’s repetitive, but it’s based on something very repetitive – the traditional “Cotton Eyed Joe” line dance, itself rooted in old ballads. (The male vocals on Rednex sound like they might simply be sampled from an older record, in fact.) The hollering diva interludes actually change things up a little, though that decades-old hook is solid enough to stand on its own. Like most European novelties across any age of pop, you can easily imagine why it got so big. And like many, a little of it goes a very long way.

(You might reasonably ask why I like Doop and get annoyed by Rednex? Any answer would be post-rationalisation, but I think it’s the vocals – dumb instrumental hooks seem happy to work on me while they’re playing and not swirl unbidden round my head. And Rednex’ vocals are particularly shrill and penetrating – the folksy charm of the twangy country voice is quite lost when looped and backed by pounding Eurobosh beats.)

The only problem is, you can’t vote Eurovision style, so instead, just vote for your favourite intro, and we’ll see whether a strong intro leads to a strong win in the real thing. And hey, no politics…

Club Action returns THIS SATURDAY!

Join DJ Chlorine & The Barnet Ape for a celebration of the best of German technobosh, Italo-disco, Russian girlpop, Swiss post-punk, Irish jigs, Serbian turbo-folk, Spanish holiday hits, Scandinavian hair metal, French house and of course UK Garage (and everything else that could possibly score douze points).

Special guest DJ duties fall to DJ MAXIMATOR who owns at least 7 different versions of Ça Plane Pour Moi and may well play them all at once.

WHEN: This Saturday! 4th May 2013, 8pm-1am

WHERE: New venue! Downstairs at The Hideaway Bar, 114 Junction Road, Archway (nearest tubes Archway/Tufnell Park, 390 & 134 buses both run all night)

WHO: 2 Unlimited, ABBA, Ace of Base, A-Ha, Alcazar, Alizée, Annie, Boney M, Björk, Black Box, Bucks Fizz, Cascada, Daft Punk, Europe, Falco, Giorgio Moroder, Girls Aloud, Infernal, Justice, Kraftwerk, Katy B, Lindstrøm, Lordi, Lulu, Margaret Berger, O-Zone, Plastic Bertrand, Praga Khan, Propaganda, Roxette, Röyksopp, Ruslana, Scooter, So Solid Crew, Stardust, tAtU, Teddybears STHLM, Todd Terje, Tomcraft and of course Yello.

PLUS: Early arrivals can expect a small amount of ORGAFUN (er, mp3s permitting…)

My bottom scorers this year were a brace of 2s for Man U and Wet Wet Wet, and my top scorer was Baby D, which got an 8. This is now the 4th year in a row where I’ve not given a 9 or 10. (Every year from 1971 to 1990 had at least one 9+.)

Does every Beatles need a Stones? East 17′s manager Tom Watkins may have come to think so. His group poked their noses into the charts before Take That, but found themselves defined against Gary and the boys, and showed every sign of revelling in it. Take That looked back to disco; East 17 knew their way around a rave. Take That were a five-pack of flavours; East 17 moved as a crew. Take That flexed for your gaze but stayed at arms length; Tony Mortimer wrote songs about eating you out. North v south, cheeky v lairy, smooth v rough – playbook stuff, just the way the pop press like it. One effect of the division is that Take That moved onto ballad territory long before their rivals – East 17 always had a place for mid-paced bump’n'grind, but avoided the real weepies.

Until now. This is East 17 doing a slowie, and really going for it, piling on the trimmings of balladry until the song creaks. To this day it shows up on Christmas compilation albums because it’s got Christmas bells on – the clanging chimes of emotional doom. But it’s got everything else on too (except drums). Something about its shameless blowout ambition suits the season, though: all the overdriven heartbreak of a Christmas Day soap packed into five wailing minutes. By its final choruses “Stay Another Day” is piling the bells and strings and multitracked pleading chorales on like marzipan and icing, finding a space partway between Cliff Richard and Jim Steinman.

Linking it all together is Brian Harvey’s sometimes clumsy vocal. Given an Important Song to sing, he picks his way through the tune like he’s too big for it, a laddish King Kong doing his best not to hurt something frail and precious. The effect turns out to be perfect for the record – Harvey’s sad, sing-song, man-child vocals are wounded and baffled exactly when they need to be, when his character’s understanding of the situation breaks down: “Don’t understand what’s goin’ on… All that I do seems to be wrong.” It’s the same bewildered impotence Joy Division tapped in “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.

So for all its ungainliness, “Stay Another Day” has soul, of a sort. Sincerity, at least. I don’t think sincerity is an automatic pass in pop music – pop for me is about making shapes other people can fit themselves into, and honest self-expression is one route to that but not the only one. But sincerity can ambush me nonetheless. At the time “Stay Another Day” came out the relationship I was in seemed to have ended – I didn’t turn to this song, but I could feel the need in it, and give it a nod of recognition. It’s messy, it’s ridiculous, and it knocked every Take That single to that point into Brian Harvey’s backwards white cap.

Just a quick urgent note to say that Freaky Trigger’s esteemed CHEESE CORRESPONDENT Marna made this^^^ — and that the closing date for pledge contributions to fund a printed edition is Friday pub-time.

(For details run film, and then go here).

After a run of mostly charmless number ones, it’s easy to rate this record: its vigour; its momentum; its status as a memento of good times people were having not as a marker in an album sales plan; its simple reminder that away from the charts the story of rave was still playing joyfully out. “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” was two years old – something people were sniffy about at the time – but history has a habit of squeezing such gaps. It now seems to have the stuff of life about it in a way little else in the 1994 list does.

Baby D were one of several groups on hardcore label Production House, which like many labels conjured new acts as whim and contingency required: its in-house producers would branch off, team up, hook up with vocalists, and lo, a band was born. Floyd Dyce – great name! – the writer and producer for Baby D, has a tremendous resume, with writing credits on close to a hundred tracks, including early-90s wonders like Acen’s “Trip II The Moon” and the House Crew’s “Euphoria (Nino’s Dream)”, songs that bumped around at the lower end of the charts selling a ton in all the wrong shops.

If you know those tracks, you’ll know the broad Production House outlook – uplifting, always ready to drop in a big hook, keeping the rushy spirit of UK house alive. “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” is in the same tradition, but more carefully streamlined and chart-ready. Old it may have been, but it’s also a fantastic bridge between the breakbeat-driven rave hits of 1992 and the hands-in-air, heart-on-sleeve pop house of mid-decade. Its breakbeat undercarriage gives “Let Me Be” a rough, robust chunkiness which plays well off Baby D’s powerful vocals. What she’s singing is the usual mash of ravey trigger phrases – feel the energy, I’ll take you up, fly away – sewn together with enough conviction that it feels like a song not a collage.

Like a lot of dance producers, Dyce seems a restless, tinkering sort, and he’s re-released this track repeatedly since 1994 – when it was already a hydra of versions and mixes. But then he had a strong core to build around. I wish there had been more hardcore and rave songs at number one, but if this record has to stand in for most of its genre it can do the job with pride.

New series! Recently I have been suffering from insomnia, and to give a sense of routine to my bedtime (which should help) I’m trying to read a short amount before I go to bed every night. To get me into the swing of things I’m reading one Canto per night of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, in the Oxford World’s Classics Edition translated by CH Sisson.

Because I am a pie-eyed narcissist incapable of having an experience without wanting to blog about it, I’m going to write about this. The only rule is that I have to wait until the next day to do so, and I’m not allowed to check the book. So only the memorable impressions will get through. You can follow the individual posts on Tumblr but I’ll post “digest” versions here too – with comments! I already know I’ve got some completely wrong impressions about Dante and Beatrice (for instance) though I’ll get a chance to correct those.

And that ends the introduction.

Inferno I: There’s A She-Wolf In The Closet

Even if you’ve not read the Divine Comedy you probably know the basic structure, or at least the fact that Dante wrote a book called Inferno and it was about going to HELL. And maybe you know the opening too, which is very matter of fact – “Halfway through the course of my life I found myself in a dark wood” – or something like that, depending on the translation.

This opening stuck with me from an earlier attempt to read the book, when little else did. It’s a very matter-of-fact description of, essentially, a mid-life crisis, and it’s no surprise I’ve picked this book off the self shortly after my own 40th birthday and during a period of directionlessness and self-doubt. I don’t intend to dwell too much on that stuff and I don’t want to turn Dante’s knotty and very personal epic into any kind of self-help book. But it resonates nonetheless.

So he’s in the wood. It’s not a real wood. Except it is also a real wood – the settings have that mythic character of being real and not real at the same time, something the best fairy tales and fantasy fiction have part inherited from the Divine Comedy (or from a more intuitive pre-Enlightenment understanding of allegory, I dunno). The wood is a physical place, the entrance to hell is a physical place, it’s only the means of transport to these places that are obscured by fog. Dante can’t remember exactly how he got there, and he also can’t get out – again, a diagnosis of a dysfunctional mind and spirit as well as a physical set-up.

From “An Inferno Paper Doll Set”

He tries to get out, and this is what the Canto is about – he attempts to take the easy road up the hill of salvation, and gets blocked by a succession of beasts: leopard, lion and a perpetually hungry she-wolf. These are allegorical, not sure of what – there’s a whole Roman thing going on in this book so maybe the She-Wolf is pride or Earthly Power or something – but they work just as well as magical way-guardians in a story, since everything here is its real thing and also its magical self. The poet Virgil turns up – a ghost – and offers Dante an out: take the long way round (THROUGH HELL) and get to Paradise that way. From a storytelling perspective, it’s an admirably rapid set-up.

Inferno II: No Bechdel Test In Paradise

A flashback in this Canto – Dante asks (reasonably enough) why me and why you, and Virgil tells him: the poet in on commission from Dante’s dead ex, who was in Heaven talking with her girlfriends about Dante and noticed he was in trouble in the dark wood.

(I don’t think this really answers the “why Virgil” question, but perhaps I misunderstood it. The “why me” part lets Dante seem humble – important as this is a book of discovery, I guess – and is a clever feint away from the fact that the casting of Virgil, Italy’s original epic poet, is surely a MASSIVE bit of self-promotion on Dante’s part. Which his later reputation justifies – you win this one Dante!)

Dante decides he’s up for the challenge, and through the door to hell they go. That’s about what I can remember from this chapter, so a quick note on the translation.

This translation, for World Classics, is by CH Sisson. He writes a long intro about how he never wanted to translate Dante and would be an idiot to do so but then decided for fun to tackle Canto I and immediately realised he would be amazing at it. The rest of the intro is about how bad most of the other translations have been, so our translator comes across as something of a cock. (But then Dante wasn’t exactly modest, so all’s well.) Anyway, this Wonder Translator’s style is quite dry, very blank verse – I’m usually hard pressed to find any metre – but has the great advantage of really rattling along even when not an awful lot is happening.

Inferno III: Don’t Shilly-Shally

This Canto is AMAZING, and Metal, and AMAZINGLY METAL – it’s our first proper glimpse of Hell (well, just the lobby of Hell really), and it starts with the 9-line inscription on the gates of Hell, which is generally remembered these days only by its final payoff – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” (Wonder Translator puts it differently because that’s just how badass a translator he is, but it’s the line). The first three lines of the gate inscription are great too – something like “Welcome to the CITY OF PAIN”.

It’s such an effective scene-setting intro and for me really good evidence that this stuff was intended to be read episodically, maybe read aloud episodically. I have forgotten anything I did learn about the way Dante was spread’n’read in his day. You’re surely meant to be thinking, right where were we, Dante and Virgil are going into hell, then WHAM all this “BEYOND ME IS DEATH” stuff comes out of nowhere, And this Canto ends on a cliffhanger for goodness’ sakes – a great hell-wind sweeps up and casts Dante into unconsciousness. (It’s not a GOOD cliffhanger – “And then I knew no more” rarely is – but it is one.)

Between that we get Dante’s horrifying first encounter with the inhabitants of the underworld, except these are the PUSILLANIMOUS, the people who won’t take a side in the struggle between good and evil, and so get it worse than anyone. Or at least that’s what they think now. They’ve ended up as disembodied howlers following a banner endlessly in circles through the lobby of Hell.

This section has the “Who would have thought death had undone so many?” line I remember from The Waste Land, which T S Eliot is using to suggest that the masses of the 20th century are like these feeble Dantean souls, and very high-handed he is about it. Dante would probably have sympathised – the pusillanimous obviously disgust him.

People talk about The Canon and its influence on Western Thought and it’s usually either in an abstracted sense or in this Rock Family Trees diagrammatic “influence” way. But this Canto really gave me the sense of how Dante bleeds into vernacular Western thought – not just in every “Welcome To Hell” scene-setter (it’s on the away player’s entry of Fenerbahce football stadium!) but in the way the religious element to Dante’s viewpoint here (God has no time for fence-sitters!) has leeched out into secular thinking with actual post-death judgement by a Divinity being replaced by a kind of vague “posterity” – the “test of time”. Nobody will remember you unless you STAND OUT (but of course death has undone far more than you can possibly imagine, and few will remember you anyway) Dante’s treatment of the pusillanimous is the underlying revulsion behind every call to GET SHIT DONE. It’s the deaths head behind every motivational quote, and I work in marketing so I’ve seen a few.

Then there’s an encounter with Charon – retconned into a demon – and a nice bit of business where Virgil has to explain to Dante that, duh, Charon not wanting to let you into Hell means you’re not as damned as you think you are. And then hell-wind, unconscious, boom, see you next time

Inferno IV: Hell’s Velvet Rope

My first encounter with the Divine Comedy was at school – we read some of Inferno, and this very first Circle Of Hell was the part which stuck with me. I was an atheist then, and I’m an atheist now, but at 18 I was like most clever atheist boys, i.e. pretty insufferable (Obviously I may still be this). Of all the religious injustices for me to get worked up about, the distribution of souls in an afterlife I didn’t believe in anyway should have been fairly low, but I guess this Canto really rankled with me because I remember it very well.

It’s the circle of the Virtuous Pagans – including everyone who lived and died before Christ, without doing anything particularly terrible, but obviously not being redeemed by him, so they don’t get passage into the higher sections of the Christian afterlife. It also includes virtuous people of other faiths, as we’ll see.

This is also Virgil’s home circle in the afterlife, and he’s understatedly upset about it, pointedly making sure Dante knows about the composition of this circle (whose sufferers aren’t really being actively punished, just enduring eternity without hope of salvation). Dante, on the other hand, as a good 14th century Christian, is basically fine with the arrangement and wants to get through the lower levels as soon as possible. Virgil then leads him to his actual home – a kind of luxury part of the circle where the souls of the REALLY virtuous pagans (great poets, scholars, philosophers and so on) get preferential treatment – cool water, warm grass to sit on – and hang out together in an eternal sausage party. Dante gets to mingle with Homer, Ovid and the other greatest poets of history (who accept him as their equal, according to Dante – no false modesty here!) though leaves the exact details of their conversation to other fanfic writers.

The problem of the Virtuous Pagans must have been a keen one to a man of Dante’s sensibilities and I guess only got keener as the Renaissance got underway. From a Renaissance perspective in particular it’s a thorny injustice: here are people who our declined Earthly civilisation needs to rediscover and draw example from, but from a theological perspective there’s no hope for them. Was the theology ever changed, I wonder? Dante asks whether anyone ever gets out, and Virgil’s reply is the answer to the second part of the VPs problem: what about Abraham, David et al? They get special dispensation, is the answer – Virgil reports that a bit after he ended up in hell, Christ came through and rescued his ancestors, the Old Testament patriarchs, etc – the story of the “Harrowing Of Hell” which was so popular in Medieval Christianity. But before that (and implicitly since) nobody was saved.

I wonder if the VP’s VIP area is a Dantean compromise – he knows his doctrine, and there’s no salvation for Virgil or the other poets and philosophers, but he’s enough of a proto Renaissance man to want to make their stay in Hell as comfy as possible.

For me the most interesting inhabitant of this area is Saladin, the 12th Century Muslim ruler and military commander – shown as a solitary figure standing “off on his own” among the Greeks and Romans. It reflects Medieval fascination with the man – a great enemy of Crusader Europe, but later seen by Europeans as more chivalrous and honourable than most of the Crusaders who fought him (which, given the thuggishness of Medieval Europe and the origins of Crusading as a means to control endemic violence by armoured bandits, wouldn’t have been hard).

You’d think the man who reconquered Palestine for Islam might have been placed lower down by Dante, rather than in First (Circle) Class, but as well as an urge to stress the might of a successful foe, there might have been a dim, highly-filtered awareness of how relatively advanced Arab civilisation was compared to 13th Century Europe (though none of its poets, arithmeticians, etc show up here). And anyway, by 1300 the concept of Crusading was a discredited embarrassment, so poor Saladin gets to enjoy an eternity of being a token Muslim among the Virtuous Pagans, given the side-eye by the Roman and Greek greats.

Inferno V: Cleopatra Comin’ Atcha

We’re now past the people who Dante basically doesn’t want to be punished, and the ones (i.e. the pusillanimous) who he does but has no doctrinal justification for it. So from now on it’s literally torment all the way down, and here to kick it off is MINOS, judge of the damned. Minos’ excellent gimmick is that he has a horrible tail which he lashes round each sinner, and the number of times it twines round you is the circle of Hell you end up in. He gives Dante a warning about how dangerous the journey is, but divine authorisation means he has to let the travellers through.

We’re into the second circle, which is full of wantons and love rats. Faithless and doomed lovers throughout history now swirl around in an implacable tempest (probably representing their inability to control their passions) and we see a few of them. Most of them are women, who – surprise! – seem to get the blame for extramarital badness from Dante more than the men. Cleopatra shows up here, for instance. And Aeneas gets a slot in the Virtuous Pagan Lounge, but Dido (who loved him then killed herself) is dumped in the second circle. (Continuity buffs might have expected Aeneid author Virgil to have something to say about this, but he’s quiet for most of the Canto rather than involve himself in metafictional blame games).

One man I can remember seeing in the initial parade of dead lovers is Tristran (of “Und Isolde” fame), whose adulterous story was a medieval sensation and – OK I checked Wiki for this – particularly popular in Italy. The reason Tristan’s story was such a winner seems to be its invocation of courtly love – a kind of fashionable and glamorised adultery (if memory serves MEANT to be unconsummated, hmmm) whose DIRE CONSEQUENCES are shown in this Canto’s featured interview, with Francesca and Paolo, a pair of Italian lovers and murdered contemporaties of Dante.

Obviously a feature of the Divine Comedy is Dante’s mix of classical allusion and hot Florentine gossip, the latter of which has often faded a bit with age. But Francesca’s testimony is – Minos’ awesome tail aside – the most captivating bit of this Canto,. Francesca’s fatal encounter is spurred by sitting together reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Alas the lovers are heedless of the likely conseqence of reading this intoxicating story, and Francesca’s account is a stylised description of the moment courtly love turns into unfortunately consequential lust. (“We read no more that day”)

It’s corny but sweet, but that – according to the chapter notes, so this may be CH Sisson projecting – is how Dante wants you to react so you see the TERRIBLE TRAP of courtly love: the way you end up led astray by romantic stories and fail to take responsibility (Though at least Francesca stands up for herself – Paolo just floats around blubbing). The real sin in the second circle is the Sin Of Corniness.

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community, and crossposted at FT.

In which 5IVE and disgruntled chums help a revenant but unrepentent DAVROS to infect his multitudinous metal brood with MORGELLONS the MORVELLAN DISCO VIRUS, as a reward for getting him out of jail. Or something.

A notoriously very-hard-to-follow DO-YOU-SEE allegory for the utter lack of honour among the galactically villainous. Doesn’t help that from the off it’s a switchback of mistaken identity via doubles: meaning that coppers and soldiers and even daleks are not who you immediately think they are. Doesn’t help that I watched it more than a year ago, before various distractions intervened and derailed me, and haven’t revisited (bcz my “method” does not allow me to). So instead of discussing the plot I’m going to bore on abt the Daleks, turning the tables you might say hohoho *sigh*

The setting: two places and two time (Butler’s Wharf and a prison ship in space; 1984 and THE UNSPECIFIED FUTURE ) have been superglued together by a time-corridor. The prison ship is under attack by a space cruiser.

The upshot: a four-or-more sided battle where everyone can seemingly suborn everyone else, no one knows whose masterplan is what, or why anyone is doing anything.

The cast: it is STIFF with cameos from the famous of face — at least one (Leslie Grantham) misleadingly, since Den was not yet Dirty. Plus an ex-Likely Lad battling wildly against typecasting (and losing). And RULA LENSKA.

The story: experts informed me this story was literally incomprehensible. It is certainly very easy to get muddled (in fact some of the characters do). Actually the real problem is an interestingly grown-up one, not that common in pulp SF. Plenty of SF — and plenty of Who — takes the bodysnatcher form: in a threatening us vs them situation, are you still US or are you now THEM? But this is a four-way war: as well as the Doctor, there are two kinds of dalek, and FOUR kinds of human = defenders, attackers, Tegan and Turlough. You absolutely can’t recognise someone’s allegience from their face or uniform (or pimply metal carapace). It’s a fog of doubles: the daleks are busy making zombie-replicas of humans for their purposes; Davros has a kind of USB bodkin clip that converts you (human or dalek) into his bellowing slave. Defender humans disguise themselves as attacker humans to sneak through the lines. And — this became canon but was I think in this ep still something of an emergent surprise? — the Daleks and Davros are really not NOT ON THE SAME SIDE . Anyway, several minor reveals depend on characters not knowing which side someone (human or dalek) is on; problem being, we the viewer often don’t either (I think there are always visual or contextual clues but they are VERY EASY TO MISS).

(Turlough: what can you say about Turlough? He mooches around in a sinister gingerly way, to no apparent purpose. Hurrah!)

The Daleks: unlike many reading, I am actually older than the doctor, and so for a while lived in a world in which Daleks were unknown. I cannot of course recall this world: I was 3 when they first went on telly, and their cultural omnipresence and readability was instant (cf the “De Gaullek”, from the Daily Mail, Dec 1964). Always when I visited little friends or relatives as a tiny, they would have some little plastic or clockwork dalek that I coveted: my cousins had a magnificently elaborate bath sponge in yellow and blue layered sponge, real Claes Oldenberg stuff. So what so what you ask? This: I love them like anyone my age — in the sense that they are utterly indelibly there in my affective system — but I AM SO OVER THEM AS PRIMARY STORY FUEL. What made them so tremendous so quickly actually cements in tremendous limitations and inflexibility, tactical and strategic, logistical and logical.

The consequence of this is a shifting effect. Because they cannot get more insanely unbendingly genocidal, the only way to make them more “interesting” is to “humanise” them. So you vary the stories by giving them allies, and viewer-interest switches to where the uncertainly — meaning the thrilling peril — lies: the non-Dalek baddies. There’ve been attempts to in-build complexity: Genesis was fascinating anyway, as a “Childhood of the…” type story, but it also brought in two new modes of less-Daleky Dalekdom. Davros was an insane human (ok ok Kaled) who built them as he himself desires to be: a becoming-Dalek, if you like. And (as part of the same plot) we got in under the metal shells to view the organic mutant-Kaled Dalek-baby residue that drives them, all squiggly and yucky and spiteful, but not terribly threatening. Which was a twinned reveal, exciting and intriguing as a variant — and (if anything) even MORE of a tiresome, terrible burden for unboring plot-devisement since. (So much of it DNA-related as well: as in “let me just alter your DNA by standing near you…”)

By Destiny = second series-appearance of Davros, the shine was off the new trick. If you wanted intriguing nuance, deft cunning or conflict-of-passions complexity in or near Dalekdom, or the allure of a character changing his or her mind (except as a transparent ruse), you were certainly looking past him. If anything, his triple-trump trick — UTTER EVIL, UTTER SELFISHNESS, UTTER SCIENTIFIC GENIUS — actually works to make the Daleks en masse slightly more interesting (potentially). They know they have to approach DaddyDavros at tongs-and-plunger length, to use him best — they always seem smarter than him, which suggests they’ve evolved a faint sense of irony. (Dalek-irony: “Davros is an malicious untrustworthy anti-Dalek idiot because he’s EXACTLY LIKE US EXCEPT MORE SO. SELF-EXTERMINATE?”)

Written out, this actually suggests ways the Daleks needn’t be such a colossal bore: if they were treated more as a feature of the landscape than a primary (evil) character. (The way THEY treat Davros!) Our attention anyway wanders towards those non-Daleks palling up to them by choice — such as Commander Lytton here. Assuming he’s not himself a programmed zombie, he must be a mercenary or other villain of independently cynical motive, and MOAR PLZ, such people are watchable and fascinating. (We don’t get much more: he appears in one later story, battling the Cybermen, and dies — bravely enough for the Doctor in question to admit he wasn’t a mere one-note baddie.)

(Actually real name Gustave Lytton, so the internet tells me).

At the heart of all this is the balance of RELIABLE DARK THRILL-POWER (eg cliffhanger reveal of Dalek entering room bellowing exterminate) vs SUSTAINABLE WATCHABILITY. Daleks can’t be allowed to plot-explosition at one another: never exciting (Daleks shout quite slowly). And Dalek-Irony, surely far more scarily fruitful a tool of future mass-death than legless spongy naked unshelled squiggliness, is just way outside canon. Actually — The Master aside — very few Who-villains have any kind of a sense of humour. It’s one way (possibly the main way) that we know it’s OK to watch all these on-screen kids-tv DEATHS: most of them happen to people (or creatures) who are resolutely, programmedly charmless. With — of course — the occasional stark and shocking exception, a companion-death, or a recently encountered and likeable “our side” character. If not Dirty Den, then Rodney Bewes (whose comedy was less in the script than his in resume).

Jokiness — in various modes — has gradually become the default in-TARDIS sensibility. It’s a way of coping (it’s also a wise-ass trope that’s gradually — since Bond in the 60s — eaten into any genre which also features guns and explosions and serial plight). It’s a way — as I’ve just argued — of codedly pre-sorting the deserving-of-death rom the rest…

And it isn’t always enough. Probably the thing this show is best remembered for is the leaving of Tegan, exhausted, fed up of endless violence, and no longer able by camaraderie and banter to hide from her feelings the snuffing out of so many, so many, so many

As you can see the secret of cutting the cost of gig tickets is to go to gigs that took place nineteen years ago. If you fancy seeing the Manic’s in Hull in 1994, or Mansun at the Kilburn National, well – you’ll be quids in. I am sure this is excellent advice, otherwise why would you advertise the piece which such out of date tickets. Of course back then I too had my own methods of getting into gigs for free, which I can shamefully reveal now…

I had the good fortune to win a ticket to a Kingmaker gig on Mark Goodier’s Evening Session in the summer of 1993. I say good fortune, it felt like it at the time, but Kingmaker bashing notwithstanding, I dutifully waited on the line for the ticket details. Of course there were no physical tickets, I was added to the guest list and told to present myself as such.

Next day I got to the newly minted Forum*, where I gave my name and was let in without anyone even looking up. “Ho”, I thought, “that doesn’t seem at all that secure.” And it wasn’t. Many people think that the secret of the guest list is that they don’t think you can read upside down. But you don’t need to be able to read upside down. When Mark Goodier, with all appropriate DJ sincerity said “The lucky winner of the Kingmaker tickets is Pete Baran of Borehamwood”, he told the world, or at least two of the world (it was a plus one), how to get into the gig. And so subsequently to a sold out Suede gig I went two weeks later as Nigel Smith of Ruislip.

Sorry Nigel, if you are reading this. I really wanted to go to the gig. But I reckon you got in too, because I think that the following conversation would have happened:
“Hi I’m Nigel Smith, Radio One competition winner”
“You’re already in.”
“But I’m not, I’m here. Look its me, I have ID.” (Fishes out a shonky Brunel University NUS Card).
“Well it says you came in. You’re name has been crossed out.”
Nigel looks like he is about to cry. His girlfriend looks like she is about to dump him.
“Oh, go in, someone must have tried it on.”
And in he got. To possibly shimmy to Metal Mickey next to me unknowingly.

Rule one of pretending to be a competition winner, get there early. Beyond that it was plain sailing, though I did occasionally wonder if the Nigel conversation was really happening or if I was just assuaging my guilt. So I turned my attention to upside-down guest-listing (actually a lot harder than it looks), or “UK Managering”. UK Managering was my favourite, as no-one would ever get hurt. In the early nineties, all US bands thanked their UK Tour Manager on their record sleeves and rightly so as being big in the UK was the way to break the world. There is no way their UK Manager would not be on the guest list at a gig in London, so away you go. And this worked well for Dinosaur Jr, The Breeders and then I stopped doing it. Cos it was wrong, cos it was stealing from the bands, cos I got caught.

I should have known better than to pretend to be Elliott Smith’s UK Manager.

*Sad to say my only real piece of student activism that I instigated at University was to try to stop Kentish Town’s Town & Country Club being sold off to Vince Power. Ah the futility of teenaged rebellion.

Also, as it turns out, there wasn’t much of it to play. By the end of our holiday they were on Chapter 14 of Skylanders Giants, at “25% complete”. Naively I imagined there might be 50 or so chapters. Not so! This is a platform game, and “complete” means that you’ve collected and unlocked every last gewgaw, not that you’ve got through the story. In fact there are 16 chapters and that’s your lot. A dozen hours gameplay, I’d guess, and that’s with a 6 year old at the helm.

Well, you’d say, so what? There are plenty of games where story mode is hardly the main attraction. How many of the hours I’ve logged on Pokemon were strictly in aid of beating the Champion and winning the game? Not many.

The weird thing about Skylanders, though, isn’t just that it’s short but that it’s so fussy and busy with it. The core gameplay – put Skylander down, he appears on screen, you run about with him, hit things, get XP, swap him with another one – is the same throughout, but at the same time they barely give you any chance to grow better it. You’re constantly being hassled into a giant mecha battle, or flying an autogyro, or playing pattern-matching minigame “Sky Stones”. It’s an odd experience: Skylanders’ figure-switching mechanism isn’t just a cash cow, it’s a good way of appeasing short attention spans – but then Skylanders seems fearful of those attention spans anyhow, so shuffles you continually into doing other stuff. It’s a game that seems to have very little confidence in its own core mechanic. Maybe rightly – it doesn’t do a lot with it. There’s no sense that your Skylanders are any kind of team, and the only time you get much use from the switching mechanic is for unlocking small sub-areas with particular figure types.

Will things improve? The next iteration – Swap Force – promises a new twist on the collectables front (heads are detatchable and moveable, greatly boosting the character roster). But on the gameplay side the only iteration is that now your Skylander will be able to jump – the first time this has been a boast on a platformer since about 1981, I’d guess. Will future games be longer or better in other ways? There’s not a lot of incentive: as my kids would attest, playing a dude whose head is a giant eye he throws at enemies is a pretty quibble-proof feature.

(This review was originally written as “UB40 ft PATO BANTON” not “PATO BANTON” which actually makes a material difference to my commentary – see “EDIT” section below)

So, the Friday before last was the day that Popular died. Not in terms of its updates – feeble though they’ve been again – but it saw the end of the backbone of Popular, an ancient and unbacked-up hard drive which housed the corpus of MP3s I’ve been writing about, downloaded in a great gobble ten years ago and rarely updated, save when wrong. When I bagged and tagged this horde I had barely heard of torrents or streams – so their loss (and the vanishing of all my other music) is an irritation, and a liberating one at that, more than a tragedy.

But apt, I guess, that this should happen as it’s time to write up a song about materialism. Not in its original, Equals form, but Pato Banton’s scene-saving guest spot here puts a wicked spin on the song’s one-track narrator. “Come back! Yes with mi colour TV and mi CD collection of Bob Marley”. It’s a fine approach to the becoming-obligatory guest verse – an undermining counterpoint to Ali Campbell, taking the song’s Point-of-View on a heel turn. OK, as unreliable pop narrators go it’s hardly subtle, but Banton’s funny, unflashy presence makes “Baby Come Back” easily the most tolerable UB40 Number One.

(Also – is this the most explicit drugs reference so far to go unbanned? “Bag of sensi” is one of the items Pato’s lover has made off with and I can never remember hearing a radio edit.)

Banton takes on his duties with relish, and just as well: the rest of the record is a rather sorry effort. It’s brisk enough – it stomps rather than grooves, and busybodies you onto the dancefloor, but the Equals version did something similar. Ali Campbell’s delivery is more painful than ever, though: a strained bellow with a terrible fear of consonants. If ever there was a man who needed to be sidelined from his own song, it’s Campbell, and we can be thankful Pato Banton was on hand to do the unpleasant job.

(EDIT: As pointed out in the comments thread, this is NOT a UB40 song, except inasmuch as it has Ali Campbell and UB40 on it – it was supposedly just credited to Pato Banton and I was sure enough in my memory that I didn’t check Wikipedia, or anywhere else. Mea culpa! But that makes this a very strange single – is there any other non-remixed number one where the credited artist is on it so little? It’s a fair reflection of the division of quality on the record, however.)

Follow the Footsteps (1953)
(cover image: William Stobbs)

“It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong,” said Caroline. “If we ask Daddy something he always tells us the long way round, which isn’t interesting at all. But he does try.”
“I can’t understand him sometimes, even,” said Andrew,
“That’s something” said Mr Feaste. “Intention better than fulfilment–net result fulfilment. Strange, what?”

As of the early 50s, the genre — established by E. Nesbit, developed by Arthur Ransome, routinised by Enid Blyton, Malcolm Saville and literally dozens of others — was quite tired and predictable: the middleclass children of a family, a dated shade of perkily bland, and often curiously under-examined, all RP and private schooling, arrive in a rural or otherwise characterful locale, and find a treasure, foil a crime or solve a puzzle. Mayne’s first published book for kids doesn’t much break with the pattern (certainly less than you’d expect if you know his later work), but the beginnings of the break are visible. The locale seems to be invented — I think it’s a made-up island just off the Northumbrian coast, not unlike the Farnes, but only a bridge-crossing away from the mainland. It’s an island with a history — ancient and recent. The recent is that the nephew of the local landowner is missing from school — the ancient is a curious tale about a saint who lived in the now-ruined abbey centuries ago, whose footprints were said to be visible on the ground in cold weather, and who hid a treasure somewhere on the island (presumably from Henrician iconoclasts, sicked on the monasteries the first of the Cromwells). Naturally, the children of the family — a sister and little brother — encounter and befriend the missing nephew, and help him solve the riddle and find the treasure. The place is reasonably carefully sketched (meaning imagined), though it feels more like an outsider’s idea for setting a slightly contrived puzzle, than a real place with real people in it. It’s too obviously a labyrinth begging to be entered, so it makes little sense that no one before the children has ever thought to (or got anywhere). Actually there is a local, one Squenn, who has been thinking along the right lines, but he’s a (deeply unMaynish) villain, with a silly name and an equally foolish comeuppance wobbling up the pike… The uncle is Maynish, though: an adult who doesn’t really understand children, who is both intelligent and (in his way) kind, and who behaves and talks in a slightly distanced, distracted way, the latter more to himself than anyone present. Plus: rivers and bridges, expeditions underground, an uneasy, semi-uncanny shift in (or under) the terrain of the setting, the gradual revealing of the mythified figures of the past as practical, human-scale characters, and their legends as decodable and detailed non-magical stories.

___________

There’s a storyline we’ve all seen in many movies, old and new: you fall in love with that special someone but are firmly rebuffed; despite repeated very firm evidence that the feelings are not reciprocated (and never will be), you nevertheless press your claim against the odds, in all manner of relentlessly quirky or plain melodramatically ludicrous and extreme ways… and lo! your love object suddenly (and often at the darkest moment) realises that yes! you are the one! And yet, as we hope we most of us usually recognise, to “be passionately romantic” as per movie or novel in this way, is to be behaving the way stalkers do in the non-movie world. So that a long-standing trope in romantic fiction, familiar to the point of being invisible, is presumably at least now and then acting as deep spur within the inner lives of some, shaping their portrait of their own courage and persistence and deserts. Spur, that is, to abusive acts that will get them locked up (and quite rightly so).

A fair amount of classic kidlit fiction — and by no means just in its avant-garde or edgy reaches — features a trope that’s potentially just as irresponsible. In which more-or-less autonomous children — by dint of unsupervised time-freedom and natural curiosity — encounter on their own time a puzzle that the adults round them have left unsolved, and proceed to solve it. Their choices shape the story they’re in; their acts and decisions and investigations reshape the world the adults to hand — at varying distances — threw them into; the world, that is, that the asdults are also in. As above: Nesbit-Ransom-Blyton, via Narnia, Paul Berna, Philip Pullman and more. Sometimes the children skirt catastrophe; generally they save the day. The underlying implication — very agreeable of course to many child-readers — is that children are in various ways rather more capable than adults, and perhaps even (in a sense) a better kind of adult. Certainly various coded-disagreeable adult types are bested in many such tales, and the suggestion is everywhere that the nice grown-ups are too set in their ways (as well as busy) to have been able to achieve what the kids did, on their own (and often against advice or instruction).

___________

No More School (1965)
(image: Peter Warner)

Mrs Oldroyd always went to the piano now, and played a hymn. Ruth went to the piano and looked at it. She had hoped that she would suddenly know how to play a hymn, because so far she had been as good as Mrs Oldroyd at her job. But the oiano just looked at her with its black and white teeth, without any helpful expression on its face at all.

This is a beautifully realised idea, aimed at somewhat younger readers, and encouraging them to ask themselves how they might cope if they suddenly had to run their own lives without adult help. It’s about a small village school — 14 pupils in all, and one teacher — which has temporarily to be closed when the teacher becomes ill. Rather than walk over the hill to the school in the next village, as the authorities require, the children decide to carry on where they are, and “teach” themselves. The main teaching duties are shared out between Ruth and Shirley, both 9, though a couple of the older boys help with cooking. The problems faced include discipline and authority — how to get older boys you know all to well in one role to behave non-disruptively, when they’re torn between being off in the field for harvest, as their dads want, and, well, skipping harvest AND proper school, if they agree to play along. But also there’s of course the fact that up to certain age, pupils are very rarely very clear about where particular lessons are taking them: they may know what they’re meant to do, as regards reading or sums, but not why, less still what the larger purpose is of any given strand of education. (And nor of course do all teachers!)

A source of the idea may have been Julian Gloag’s Our Mother’s House — a grim 1963 novel, much discussed at the time, in which the seven children of a single mother letting no one know when she dies, in the hope that the family won’t be broken up and sent into care (Ian McEwen’s The Cement Garden later trod similar ground). No More School is good on the anxieties and frustrations of the two little would-be schoolmistresses, but the overall tone is light and funny, gently absurdist, the situation doesn’t even last two weeks (and of course everyone is going home before teatime, even if they’re keeping matters to themselves). Even so, it raises (in its low-key and undemonstrative way) questions beginning to be asked really quite demonstratively at Berkeley and the Sorbonne by radical and militant students. And some of them it also answers, realistically and affectionately: this isn’t a manifesto, it’s a gently imaginative counterfactual snapshot; but kindly as it is, it’s more than just whimsy.

My mother loved Mayne’s writing at this point — she was something of a self-taught expert in children’s literature — and this was her favourite, to the degree that she often quoted it (“Draw and explain a hen”). It’s one of mine, also — though I was quite a lot older than its target readership when I first read it, I think. Which perhaps gets us to the question who his readers actually are/were. Adults admired his writing enormously — approving of his books for slightly unchildly reasons, probably — but he was never hugely popular with most children. Except those rare, readerly children who were perhaps more at ease with narratives that explored ambiguity and uncertainty, that turned away from quest-success and status-reversal and similar big-gesture eucatastrophic closures, and quietly nibbled away at the tropes that render so much children’s fiction so pleasurably fantastic (even when they’re absolutely not fantasies).

Earthfasts (1966)
(Cover: David Knight)

“How long have you been out?” said Keith’s mother, in a tone that meant she would stand no nonsense, no matter how official the police visit was. It meant, too that she was old enough to be the policeman’s mother, if she wanted to be; and since she hadn’t actually been his mother at the moment he was born, she was going to be it now.

The word “Earthfasts” is non-standard, at least in the sense that it’s not in most dictionaries, though its meaning isn’t hard to guess at (and it appears in the book in a context that allows this). In Old English an “earthfast” was something fixed in the ground (example: a half-buried rock in a field); in the tale we’re reading, things we believe are fixed and rooted we find suddenly on the move, uncannily active, mysteriously and unbiddably agenda’d; nature off the leash, in ways playful or terrifying, and sometimes both. Up to the mid-60s, Mayne’s shtick can be described as a non-angry young man’s kitchen-sink realism, all subtly odd angles and surprising specifics, bound together with his extraordinary (and inventive) ear for the witty poetry of ordinary family language, its semi-private jokes and codes and silences. Now it shifted a little, backwards and forwards, to begin to explore older and more fantastic modes of story. Earthfasts in particular is a story about time-travel, so that local folklore intersects with the everyday — which merely amplifies his hold on, interest in and insight into the everyday is. An 18th-century drummerboy, Nellie Jack John, emerges from under a hillside into the present (there’s some ambiguity what the present actually is, as I noted some while ago, here), and his unintended arrival in our time is the occasion for the wider unsettlement. Farm pigs vanish, and return as dangerous wild boars. Standing stones vanish; distant giants walk the hillsides; invisible entities — from a mischievous but unsinister boggart returning to bother and entertain a local farm, to indescribable unseen objects or forces unleashed through the village. Mysterious armies seem to be massing, at one dimension’s remove — NJJ was planning to lead his soldier-boy pals to King Arthur’s treasure, rumoured to be stashed under the hill — and yet all of this, potent as it is (and bewildering), is really just the context and background to the friendship between the two boys observing and cataloguing it all, and trying to understand it: Keith and David.

This is a close friendship — neither has siblings — but not one of equals: “You’re clever but not intelligent, I’m intelligent but not clever” as David puts it, typically acutely, typically insensitively. Keith looks up to David, admires him and is somewhat intimidated by his intellect — but also feels that he often protects David from himself, from his inwardness, his abruptness, his occasional intellectual disconnection. The emergence of the newcomer — oldcomer, perhaps — heightens the need for both kinds of intelligence (they want to help the drummerboy, to return to his own time if possible but survive in the present if not, as well as explain his arrival), but as they’re negotiating the changed relationship, disaster strikes — unusually and unmediatedly shockingly for a children’s book. Now we’re watching people coping in an aftermath, events traumatic and dreary by turns: until the story folds back through the terrible knot of itself and things return to something more like normal. (Though not everything.)

I was a very episodic reader as a child, often rewarding myself for a few closely followed pages with a few skipped ones, so I very much didn’t get all the implications as a child-reader. It’s a pretty tough read, in fact, sometimes deliberately elliptical, and certainly uninterested (at this stage) in the deeper reasons behind the events. My original childhood Puffin books copy went walkabout years ago [hence random name on the scanned cover above left!], and I only belatedly quite realised Mayne subseqently expanded the tale into a trilogy, purchasing all three books in one edition. At which point WM may have re-written/retconned some of Earthfasts to fit with Cradlefasts and Candlefasts (I’m genuinely uncertain about this, and would like to know: it seems more difficult and darker than I recall, but as I say, I could be a bit of a skippy reader back then).

(Probably at some point I’ll track down a second-hand Puffin copy and check for myself.)

__________________________________________________

Wondering as I wrote up my notes on No More School about links Mayne might be making with the 60s student revolts in France, I spotted Dom Fox was tweeting notes about David Graeber and Occupy, anarchism and the unstable contours of the politics of authority. Beginning with the example of parents and children, he (like Mayne) was exploring the problems and puzzles of abolition, his focus overlapping with mine (or so I felt).

Anyway, here’s some of what he wrote, jigsawed together from twitter fragments (some skipped, some re-ordered it to be clearer for my purposes) (and I’ve alerted Dom, so he can pop by and correct how I’ve stated it if need be): “… a child can only to a limited degree evaluate the decisions of an adult parent; the parent’s authority is a mechanism which saves time (the time it would take for the child to achieve a mature outlook) at the cost of closing down, temporarily, certain lines of enquiry or debate. The child is not absolutely incompetent, and the adult is not absolutely competent, but for some purposes a form of tutelage is desirable. Authoritarian parents assume it is desirable for its own sake, a matter of relative status, of “honour”.

I don’t see authority as a “necessary evil”, or even as evil at all, but as a mechanism which trades present executive urgency off against a wider (and prior) commitment to rational debate. It’s about scheduling, timely conflict resolution, distribution of labour. There can be such a thing as legitimate authority, and the question of its legitimation (within an egalitarian context) is a hard problem that is not resolved by calling the whole notion of authority “kyriarchal” and demanding its abolition.”

The 60s ruptures — Strasbourg is usually considered the first of the soixant-huitard uprisings, in 1966 — postdate No More School, and it’s probably a reach to claim that the ideals and utopias that flavoured them were somehow in Mayne’s mind in 1965 or earlier (even if his second novel, recently tracked down but so far unread by me, is called The World Upside Down). Dom Fox’s fragmentary discussion continues, suggesting that the “decline of authority” that the 60s seemed to see and to celebrate is better described as a “modulation, from an overt, questionable and legitimisable form to a covert form, which can never be legitimate because its legitimacy is never in question. Replacement of epistemic authority based on displayed competence and credentials with ‘soft power’ of appeals to sentiment, shameless button-pushing. Meta-discourse rationalizing this as fairer and more agreeable, less hierarchical and elitist, than someone who knows something you don’t sharing it with you.”

I think Dom’s distinction (into “hard” and “soft”) is basically correct, and not just because it mirrors Mayne’s landscapes, his buried and fissured rock structures, his strange reaches of subterranean water. I like the pragmatic intricacy of Dom’s way of thinking about authority, as something at once unavoidable and in need of challenge — but I honestly don’t know how helpful it is to try and think about generalised aggregate trends from one to the other (what he later refers to as the “wild success of soft authority”). First, different layers and blocs of society, not to mention different generations, were pulling in different directions, relate to different structures of different authority in different ways (and the patterning of these ways will change over time, for generations obviously, but for layers and blocs also). Second, we are all of us at any given time within the ambit of rival structures of authority, soft and hard, which pull at us in different directions — and the way we’re pulled will change over time, sometimes quite sharply. Perhaps we can cluster the patterns somewhat, depending on likeness of class or or age, or similarity of context — but I think theoretical generalisations can quite easily mask the empirical particularity they’re meant to be explaining. (Not least because a theory usually comes with its own regimes of unspoken soft-power loyalty — as in, I’m citing [insert favourite comedy-punchbag intellectual A here] bcz he/she’s a power in the land round where I want to stake my claim, and behaving as if there ought be doubt about this will do me no favours ect ect]…)

The Battlefield (1967)
(image: Mary Russon)

They tiptoed on to the road, and along it. Then Leslie put her heels down and walked normally. “They won’t hear now,’ she said. We’re out of earsight.”
“It’s got darker,” said Debby. “Or is it the lantern. They work best in the dark.”
“I think the sky is blacker,” said Lesley. “I wish it would have a moon, or something. But I’m not frightened of this dark at all.”
“I don’t like evening dark,” said Debby. ‘But this is different. I think they change it at midnight, and this lot hasn’t got inhabited yet. But don’t put the lantern out.”

A constant theme in Mayne: children bothered — though that’s too strong a word, really — by the gap between their imaginations and intelligence on one hand, and their knowledge and experience on the other, surrounded by friendly adults who can’t (or won’t) supply the information they need to know, and don’t quite have the sensibility or means (or just the time) to close the gap. A very 60s stance: that the “childish” perspective — unstructured by adult knowledge, adult focus, adult demands, adult compromise, adult jadedness, adult resignation — has an undistracted under-informed unwised-up tenacity that causes logjams to shift; that a little knowledge, sometimes self-taught, often inexpertly applied, can move things around in unexpected ways.

I’ve seen The Battlefield described as “fantastical” — though nothing that happens in it is remotely impossible by the ordinary laws of physics, meteorology and meteorology. It’s the story of two sisters, who live over the pub their parents run, who begin properly to explore the battlefield itself for the first time: it lies close by, between village below, and pub above, a kind of quaking bog full of rough scrub and rocks fallen from the cliffs above. The girls are much the age of the two girls in No More School, nine or perhaps even less — Debby, the younger of the two, makes a joke about not knowing her seven times table, which is a tell, I suppose, but extremely hard to parse absolutely (as jokes always are). Perhaps we should treat the booktitle less as a naming — a an actual space of land outside a village, a historical event in confused tale in village memory — than as a metaphor of course — but what for?

At one level for the relationship between the sisters — not that they ever even argue or worse than play-tussle, and a lot of their play is trying out the ways language works and doesn’t, to describe the world, or just to disport itself in its local or ancient oddity — but they are quite different in temperament, a difference that provides much of the readable pleasure of the book. And at another level, it’s an allegory of the gap discussed above, the buried conflict between adult perspective (closed down, lacking space or time for curiosity or undistracted and immediate response to the world at hand) and childs’ eye view (which of course lacks experience, risk assessment, basic relevant knowledge). If it’s allegory — and we should note that the battle itself is a mystery, located in various pub discussions in Roman times, or the Civil War, or even the Crimean — it’s therefore a hint that this conflict can end very badly. The only adult present who seems to know what’s going on is a taciturn shepherd who rarely speaks, and no one much ever speaks to, even in the pub — but his explanations (which are roughly correct) come out as Biblical warnings that no one really takes any notice of. Though events don’t end badly this time — without giving too much away, the climax of the book, a strange swift fever-dream of a sequence of events, is pretty much the Aberfan disaster transmuted into one of Tolkien’s happy-ending eucatastrophes. The sisters find no bodies when they’re poking about in the unsettled boggy terrain the battlefield has become, a recalcitrant and uncontrolled landscape in flux, in ways the reader will find more frightening than they seem to; though they do find an old cannon. And something gets displaced: everything changes, including the shape of the world all round, very startlingly, but OK, nobody actually died today (or was even much hurt or frightened). The climax is told from the girls’ uncomprehending and at-the-time obscured viewpoint and is worth being slightly ambushed by, unspoilered, I think, so I won’t say more. Except to say that, as a carefully nice ending, it has a very strange undercurrent.

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In 1979, when Lyotard sketched our present-day existential character — a consequence as he understood it of a mushrooming of new modes of media and technology —he summarised it descriptively (and notoriously) as an “incredulity towards metanarratives”, and named it the “postmodern condition”. Without wanting to refight the postmodern wars — you know, really ANY of them — I want to argue that there’s actually nothing new about the fact of our feeling conflicted, torn between rival structures of authority, loyalty, affective ease (and the stories and “metanarratives” that function as metalepses for these structures, this sense of ease). Maybe modernity helps tag the likely kinds of rival structure involved from, I don’t know, 1905-1968, and post-modernity for the patterns of conflicting structure that emerged after this. But acknowledging this is really just a way of demonstrating that it’s not a terribly helpful lens, more confusing than not until observed specifics are introduced to illustrate or challenge it, ideally from a variety of conflicting angles

As a writer evolving in time — though who isn’t? — Mayne wrote stories that centre round children discovering elements of an adult world round them, in its ancient and its present-day forms. Learning his trade in the 30s and 40s (as a reader), and starting out in the 50s as a published author, he was first working across a period in which elements of the pre-modern and the modern were at constant odds, and (from the mid-60s) in a period the forces and and trends genuinely (but confusedly) addressed by the notion of “postmodernity” were also arriving. If his central focus is the uneasy, fracturing interraction between deep past and everyday present, pop groups and modern media (meaning radio and television) often also play a part, now and then, arriving into his isolated valley villages and bleak north-eastern coastal towns to add to the complications. Outside these backwaters, the counterculture, that childrens’ crusade against war and racism, that naive refusal of life even slightly constrained or administered administered or denatured by technology, by bureaucracy, by compromise. The intricately heated blurring of the lines between classroom discussion and hallway knowledge, in and out of schools, which my friend Frank Kogan has explored in detail in the context of rock writing. Confronted with and affected by the new medias, this nested, tangled ratking cluster of rivals systems of authority, and the emergent literacies of same, students and professors wrangled on campus with the changing politics of learning and teaching, the young adapting far faster than their elders to these new tools, for good or evil. Fast-shifting changes in sexual mores; convulsions in settled assumption about the normalities of desire.

In all this, at whatever apparent parochial distance, Mayne’s project was the imagining, as an adult with the full literary reach that implied, of the world of the child (aged five or nine or 12 or whatever): confronting with puzzled fascination and boldly playful, stubborn curiosity the nature of the plasticity of ordinary language, the sheer shifting weirdness of words, at once so rigid with rules and usage, and so open and flexible. Authority — meaning the good kind of authority — and of course its abuse (very much the bad abuse) are also part of Mayne’s real-life story (with ugly impact, assuming the 2004 court case was decided correctly, on the lives of some of his readers). I agree with Dom, that the fact of authority, hard (or actually soft) is not just something that can ever just be wished away: or at least, that this is merely an innocently adolescent species of wish. But with every authority, there’s always the danger of abuse. As its own kind of authority, imagination is similarly inescapable, but it’s also always perilous: you can get lost in it, beguiled by its power and potential — and others can get lost with you, and hurt, your gift their calamity. Fracture is embedded in these landscape, hidden — as the fossil of ancient crime or calamity, though often just some curious earlier occurrence — to arrive, out of time and disorientating, sometimes radically, more often simply amusingly, readably (and educationally, if you choose to interpret “education” in a comfortably broad sense). The value of Mayne’s books remains the subtle, quizzical, precision with which he explores the (similarly?) embedded knowledge — who can command it, who can decode it, who can use it against itself, what unexpected turn these protocols upside down — within seemingly very ordinary and relatively unfraught situations. Though it’s not clear to me how much Mayne believes in ordinary or in unfraught. There are two parts to come, in this rereading, of the Earthfasts trilogy — and parts two and three were written in the 1990s, so I’ll wait till we get to them before I read these ideas back into Earthfasts in detail; The Battlefield — imperfectly formed and slight as it seems — begins to make a better sense, at least to me, studied in this context. For the moment, though, all his books operate more as uneasy, intuitive, unconsciously prophetic whispers of solid ground turned treacherous and strange, of landscapes as suddenly tricky to navigate for the old and the wise and the knowledgable, as the young and the adaptable.