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Wow, you mean I’ve turned somebody on to Pete Atkin? Result!
Yes, he is good live, preferably in an intimate setting. There are actually three gigs in very unusually quick succession lined up for next month – in the King’s Road, Ambleside and Middlesborough – plus one in October in Whitby. One 200 miles from me (and I’m reluctant to go back to London unless I really have to: Rebecca’s attitude to the place in that story was written from the heart), the others more like 300.
I see you’ve been having a good listen, Ath…
Interestingly (or not) Messrs Atkin and James have each blamed themselves and excused the other for the lack of sales. After Clive James wrote in the fourth volume of his memoirs that the problem was that his lyrics were too cerebral, Pete Atkin wrote a long and thoughtful refutation (it’s here on the website if you’re interested) which boiled down to his belief that his tunes weren’t simple and catchy enough. ‘The egg is on my face.’
I’d like to see him one more time before one or other of us pops his clogs, but since I took myself off to the wilds of Wales he hasn’t done a gig anywhere within convenient reach. About the nearest was a recent appearance at Ledbury (Herefordshire), but that was a workshop-type thing at a poetry festival, rather than a ‘proper’ gig.
Ah, Ath, your wife is French, n’est-ce-pas?
I don’t find it particularly surprising that a folk music lover should like Pete Atkin. Folk audiences, right from the start of the revival sixty and more years ago, have always been receptive to more serious subject matter in what used to be called ‘contemporary folk’ – though it’s often been with a left-wing political / social commentary slant, and such stuff is almost entirely absent from the Atkin/James songbook. I nearly left out the ‘almost’ until I remembered one song about the Kent State shootings (‘There isn’t much a target needs to know’), and another about the My Lai massacre (‘Just lying there were ladies so old they hardly bled / Thin kids who never needed a red hole in the head.’).
Tracking down the music, at least on-line, is dead easy. If you go to the discography section of Smash Flops you’ll find a play button beside just about every track Atkin has ever recorded. Hard copies are another matter. The reissues of the seventies albums I mentioned in the blog vanished when the record company went bust. They were reissued again, re-mastered even, about ten years later, only for the company’s whole stock to be destroyed in a warehouse fire during the 2011 Tottenham riots. I once suggested on the forum that there must be a curse on them. Pity, because the second time around I had my moment (a very brief moment, as it turned out) of fame when Pete Atkin mentioned me in the sleeve notes to one of the albums.
Yeah, the appearance of the website has hardly changed at all over the years, though the content has grown quite a lot.
Glad I brought back some meories for you, John.
Since writing this blog I have put my money where my mouth is and become a paid-up RNLI supporter, paying a direct debit every month. One of the consequences of this is that I receive a quarterly magazine. In the latest edition, which came a few days ago, I read that the old Penlee lifeboat station has now been granted Grade II listed building status.
Thanks for that interesting link, Libby. One thing it doesn’t mention about Hawthorn is how fond he was of his beer – yes, despite the kidney problems – and of horseplay under its influence. I suspect the fate of the autograph hunter was his idea of a joke rather than any act of aggression. Hawthorn’s sense of humour was not subtle. Once Stirling Moss was standing under a tree in the courtyard of the hotel where the drivers were staying for the French Grand Prix, when he felt what he thought was rain. Looking up, he saw Hawthorn perched up in the tree, calling down, ‘I’ve always wanted to piss on you from a great height.’ Hmm…
Even so, I don’t think he was quite as nasty as some like to make out. I would suggest that his apparent callousness and subsequent denial were his way of shutting away the guilt he couldn’t face. Having overshot his pit, he had to go round again and so had a whole lap to realise the full horror. When he got out of the car tears were running down his face, which somewhat gives the lie to the assertion that he didn’t care about the people who died.
And though his cutting up (I think we may call it that) of Macklin was ill-judged and regrettable, it pales in comparison to the tactics of blatant intimidation and deliberate accident-causing introduced into Formula 1 many years later by those lauded multiple champions Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher. Had it not been for the catastrophic consequences it would been a minor incident and soon forgotten.
***
No, I missed that, Libby. That would be the call that was suddenly cut off? Yes, very emotive, even though that wasn’t actually the end of the lifeboat.
Ah, I see Edmund Clydesdale’s at it again. I’ll have to catch up with him. And there’s plenty of scope for drama in those Arctic convoys. One sale made.
That straight road through the village is called Roman Road. It’s part of the old Roman road from Neath to Brecon.
I do actually have an idea of what Banwen used to look like when the mine was open, because in the corridor in the Dove Workshop (an adult education and community centre, just visible in the opening shot among the trees, top left) there is an aerial photo of it. It looks more like a war zone than anything else, with spoil everywhere and hardly any greenery in sight.
(The Dove Workshop was founded by a group of miners’ wives during The Strike. The building used to be the mine office.)
I’m told the commonest surname round here is Evans. It was, of course, Uncle George’s name. And the family that used to own the mines hereabouts pre-nationalisation was called Bevan-Evans. They also owned the local brewery. A couple of miles down the valley at Seven Sisters they used to own a pub across the road from the mine, so the miners would be giving their wages back to Mr Bevan-Evans every time they went in there for a beer.
Yes, and not least among its attractions is that those houses in the terraces can still be had for less than £100,000.
The Valleys have always been famous for community spirit, though anyone who was alive when the mines were open will tell you that it’s not what it was. The mine at Banwen closed as long ago as 1964 (that pretty pond was once an open-cast coal digging), but yes again, there is still quite a strong sense of community in the village. I can’t say we’re really in the thick of it, but that’s more because we’re both rather shy and retiring people. We’ve never been made to feel less than welcome. This is the sort of place where people you don’t even know will smile and say hello (actually, round here it’s more likely to be ‘Hiya’) when you pass in the street.
A few years ago MrsB had an accident on her bike right outside the rugby club and was taken to hospital in Cardiff in the air ambulance. When I and my son finally got back from Cardiff in the evening, pretty shattered both mentally and physically, I phoned for a takeaway and, having a few minutes to spare and feeling in fairly dire need of a drink, I called in at the rugby club bar (yes, the bar in the film) on the way to collect it. Within five minutes at least half-a-dozen people, some of whom I’d never spoken to before, had asked me how she was.
Thank you, Ath. Your assessment of my efforts in very pleasing. I did worry that it might be too long, but there are so many interesting facets to the subject, and I didn’t want to leave any of them out. Also, I didn’t know that there was anyone in my potential readership who actually knew and liked Johnson’s music.
I came to the blues by a very similar route, in my case via the Stones, John Mayall, Eric Clapton and Peter Green, and it took me a while to get acclimatised to the undiluted real thing. Those who accuse such people of ‘raping’ the blues overlook that it is principally because of these rapists (especially the Stones) that there is a National Museum of the Blues in St Louis, that a president of the USA hosted a celebration of the blues in the White House, and that many an ageing blues musician got a nice financial cushion for his old age. White Americans were almost wholly ignorant of the blues, and by the late sixties most black people regarded it as old-fashioned and a bit Uncle Tom. Sonny Boy Williamson may have been dismissive back in the sixties (‘These white kids want to play the blues so bad. And they do.’), but those who were still around to benefit (he wasn’t) were grateful enough.
Hmm, yes, Eric Clapton. You wrote a blog about this nice art / nasty person dilemma, did you not? For me, EC come across as quite modest and thoughtful when he’s talking about himself or music, but on just about any other subject, oh dear… But I can’t get away from the fact that his playing on that 1966 John Mayall album, as I’ve said before, still sends shivers up my spine. Sad that he hit his peak at the age of twenty-one. For me, anyway.
(Just looked him up, and discovered that, apart from his work on drug dependency, he supports Amnesty International and the Prince’s Trust. Real people can be quite complicated.)
Much of the stuff in this blog came from two books, both of which I heartily recommend to anyone who’s interested in Robert Johnson. Up Jumped the Devil, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, is the fruit of half a century of research by both authors and is as close to a definitive biography as we’re likely to get, while Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues takes a wider perspective and is quite fascinating on the history of the blues and the gulf between the perceptions of it by white fans and by its original perpetrators and audience.
It did, but not by very much. I went looking for info on this, and found three post-nationalisation disasters with forty or more killed. Not quite slaughter on nineteenth century levels, but you have to take into account that the industry was being steadily run down.
Though I’m old enough (I was born in 1950) I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing when I heard of the assassination of JFK, but I do remember quite clearly hearing about Aberfan – I was listening to pirate Radio London in the dining room at home.
And it was a truly sorry business in every way. The NCB claimed that they didn’t know the tip was sitting on top of a spring, though it was common knowledge among local people. The council repeatedly expressed worries about the danger, but nothing was done. The enquiry revealed an appalling list of failures and incompetence, but no one was ever prosecuted or sacked. And to add insult to injury, the NCB appropriated £150,000 from the disaster fund to help pay for the removal of the tips.
And thank you too, Seagreen.
For those of you who are interested enough to look up that song lyric, I should explain the significance of that line ‘Down there in the dark they are lying.’ On the grounds that conditions were too dangerous for any further rescue work, the controversial decision was taken to permanently seal the affected part of the mine, so most of the bodies were never recovered.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
Thank you, Ath, for your kind words, which at least slightly warmed the cockles of my ageing heart in these grim times.
As far as I know there was never a mining disaster in which the owners and/or management were culpable (most of them) where they were held properly to account. The Gresford disaster of 1934 was a particularly controversial case, perhaps because times had begun to change by then. A (justifiably) bitter song, which was written anonymously and sold on a broadside to raise money for the bereaved, is still in circulation – info and lyrics here.
I did try to post the ‘little mother’ photo on the blog, but I couldn’t get it to work. The picture can be seen here.
Kate’s answer is a good one, but if you want a more in-depth one there’s a place I can’t recommend highly enough where you can read clear, detailed, intelligent (and often quite witty) advice on every aspect of writing. Old hands here, especially those who know me, will be able to see this coming. It is Emma Darwin’s blog, This Itch of Writing.
https://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/resources.html
The blog has been going for years and is pretty huge, but that link should take you to the real nitty-gritty of it, what she calls The Tool Box.
I think maybe you are over-thinking this a bit. You may not even need to write a letter as such.
You could try here, for a start. Jericho Writers, which is what the old Writers’ Workshop, sponsors of the Word Cloud, morphed into a few years back.
https://jerichowriters.com/our-services/jericho-editors-room/
Thank you one and all. I’ve had a good feeling about this story ever since I knocked out the original version for last winter’s challenge in three days flat, but never in my wildest dreams did I envision it would do this well. Well, in my wildest dreams maybe, but not anywhere else.
The result has bolstered my faith in my writing ability, though not in my chances of being published. As most (all?) of us know by now, the quality of your writing is far from being the only factor in that. Do we think it will sell in the current market? Does this author make good copy we can promote? Et cetera. This competition was judged blind, so my writing was able to speak for itself without all that other stuff interfering. That’s actually a rather good feeling.
Thank you, Kate. Yes, it is. Once again I seem to have missed the boat to be the first to announce it, but hey, who cares? After writing and submitting two novels and getting 60% form rejections and 40% no reply at all, it does feel rather good to have got some validation at last.
Bitter, moi? Not just at the moment.
For a start, you could try Jericho Writers, which is what the Writers’ Workshop, sponsors of the old Word Cloud, morphed into a few years back.
Sorry, I can’t make the kink go live without the entire post vanishing. You’ll have to copy and paste.
Ah. Forgot to check for new posts (not often necessary here, sad to say), hence the duplication with Ath’s post.
That’s four Denizens now on the longlist, a 20% hit rate. Impressive. Or is anyone else going to come out of the woodwork?
Wot I said to Ath, Daeds: making the longlist is an achievement, so congrats on that.
Congratulations to you too, Kate. We may be a small group of people here on the Den, but we’re talented…
Thank you, Ath. I’ve only just this minute found out myself, and I’m still taking it in. Oh, and thanks too for your challenge, without which it would never have been written.
And congratulations to you too, Ath. Which story is yours? It did strike me that at least one of the titles had your ring to it, but I might have been completely off-beam so I ain’t sayin’.
I too fail to understand what ‘static’ is supposed to mean in this context, or why it should apply to present tense. I have no problem whatever with reading present tense stories: sometimes I think I even prefer them. With past tense you’re always at one remove, as if listening to someone tell a story. Present tense is immersive, immediate. After all, as Ath says we live our real lives in present tense.
For my own writing, present tense – and first person – are my default settings, what come to me most naturally. I like the way you can incorporate your protagonist’s thoughts and reactions seamlessly into the narrative. It’s like the difference between direct speech and reported speech: free indirect style becomes free direct style, as it were. Like this:
I take a couple of steps towards her, and she shrinks away, her eyes wide. What’s up with her? It’s not exactly as if I’m an intimidating sight. A woman, on her own, and not a very big one at that.
Maybe I find the technique so congenial because I’m an introvert, and so when I’m writing I tend to closely inhabit my protagonist’s head, filtering everything that happens through that one POV.
Emma Darwin says that present tense can be restrictive, but I guess that depends on how you want to tell your story. Bearing in mind that she is a historical novelist, I imagine that she wants the ability to stand back and take a broader perspective than present tense can afford. On the other hand, when I took my second novel to York I told her I’d deliberately chosen first person present tense because I wanted restrictions: my story depended for its effect on the reader knowing no more than the protagonist knew.
I discussed that last point with the person who recommended the series to me, and we agreed that that’s actually one of its strengths. In real-life situations of war, revolution, unrest etc good people are just as likely, or even more likely, to get killed as bad people. The atrocities that occur at regular intervals are paralleled in real life too, though Martin does tend to rub your nose in it a bit. That was another thing that put me off. I don’t want my fiction to be insipid sweetness and light, but so much (almost) unrelieved nastiness was getting a bit depressing.
I’m not sure that I’d call The Ten Thousand Doors urban fantasy, exactly, as I understand it (yes, I did go and look it up). it has some of the tropes, like fantastical elements intruding into our world, but the setting is neither urban nor contemporary.
I take your point about some modern fantasy being more original (I’ve sampled George R R Martin, but eventually got lost in the diffuse meanderings of the plotting), and I’ve no doubt missed out on some good stuff, but hey, life’s too short.
It only occurred to me after posting to do a bit of investigating, and it turns out this must have been a female golden-ringed dragonfly, which is the longest British dragonfly and is often found quite some way from water.
‘…Every book back I read seemed to involve a magic sword or a ring and sorting the good from the bad became impossible…’ Yes, Kate, that was exactly my experience.
By contrast, to take a selection of the Ballantine books I read in my youth, The Well at the World’s End (William Morris), The Worm Ouroboros (E R Edison), The Night Land (William Hope Hodgson) and The King of Elfland’s Daughter (Lord Dunsanay) are all about as different from each other as could be imagined.
I can assure you that there are no swords or rings at all, let alone magic ones, in The Ten Thousand Doors of January.
I’m in the same position as I was in last year: the Den is normally the only place I interact with anybody on-line, so I would be very sad to see it go. I’m a bit more up-beat about it, though, because since the ‘members’ side-bar on the home page has been changed from ‘most recent’ to ‘most active’ (good idea) it shows that quite a few people do drop in regularly even if they don’t contribute much, or at all. You can, after all, enjoy and value a forum as a lurker.
Those two SE groups are a compelling reason for keeping the place going. I’m not a member of either, but I remember how much I used to enjoy interacting with the other two long-term survivors of my own group before they eventually drifted away. It would be sad to deprive the members of those groups of that pleasure.
Like Libby, I’m still working on one of my annual challenge stories (from the most recent one in my case), so yes, there’s certainly value in that.
All the work you put in, Ath, to revamp the Den is much appreciated, certainly by me. It’s much more user-friendly now.
And your kind comment about my blogs has put a little more heart into me. Perhaps I’ll even write another one soon.
