I Am Not Worthy (6): Glenn Fabry

With storms and floods and the grey land running in dark shadowed patches under an angry sky it’s all gone a bit Glenn Fabry. Here in the bitter north the light makes longhouses of barns and the river coils pale and sullen down the valley. Crows were blown by my window yesterday evening, fighting the elements but come morning feasted on the dead and the would—be. It’s a Beowulf landscape, and not oddly animated but primal and sharply defined and therefore as I say, it’s all gone a bit Glenn Fabry.

You’ll perhaps know the work best from comic covers, and most probably Preacher, or Hellblazer. But for me it’s an older time when as a youth scribbling in pencil and picking out in ink in a world where colour was all, and I for that was impaired, Glenn Fabry was there and making Slaine in 2000AD something a lot more than it was before or after. It was fantastical and horrific, it had enough of the real to catch you and plenty of the other world to make you stay. Here was a man than knew his ink, and here was a man then that told me through his pictures that pen and ink is fine, better than fine – light and dark, intricacy and space. This is why I work in pen and ink. Not because I copied but because there it was, just what I saw, and how to show how others might see it too. Worlds that like all the best fantasy are horror.

You don’t need the words. Pieces that are a story all of their own.

And it’s dark, and the wind runs ragged over the mountains of Tolly Maw.

And it’s all gone a bit Glenn Fabry.

And I am not worthy.   

Chumbawamba End It

Thirty years and something like seventeen albums down Chumbawamba are winding it up. You can read their history all over the place - but this is my blog so it's them, and I, and what they mean to me.

So no more then soon to be, and it hurts a little. Agit-pop of the highest order one of the certainties of life was that there were the Chumbas, and it feels like I’ve heard a good friend who quietly having cancer is only now telling me there’re but a few months left to live. And so few bloody friends have been up here to visit that those who did I feel the more so when they no longer do. Because Chumbas did; they played the Kirkgate twice and at the last my eldest (as a wee sprout) bopped along on my lap, and that was where and when the live album of the time was recorded. A month or two later at Solfest I thanked Boff, and shook him by the hand, little knowing that it might be the last time.

I’ve seen Chumbas any number of times. Years back in Brixton when (unless the memory plays false) they were part of the line up at the Academy – one of those where you’d have Hawkwind, and Sensor, and Back To The Planet and indeed everyone you could want to be there for a day or two solid. I got there late but in time for Chumbas and whilst the bouncers kept everyone from the stage I and my mate Helle ran, jumped and kicked off the barrier to land square and proud amongst them right into the middle of Sometimes Plunder. Come the singalong lines asking the driver regarding a wee-wee – that was us, into the mic and then a clap on the shoulder before we were tossed back into the crowd. Another gig and at the Fridge my girlfriend-then came up behind me for two songs and nuzzled away – only it wasn’t my girlfriend, but a cute blonde punky girl (my girlfriend waving politely when I turned about). I was young you see and when I was young they were the soundtrack. More so even than Poppies, or Carter, even The Levellers and RDF. For me.

Later and the band dropped the electrics and the nun costumes, and were ready to ease me into middle age with acoustic and old English rebel songs. ‘It’s okay,’ they said, ‘You had a cracking time when young, you still can now you’re not; it’s okay to have dignity. It’s okay to still care. It mattered. It still does.’

They meant what they said. They had principles and they were our principles, and it was right to think, to reason. Even the hilarity of Tubthumping (the one song you’ll know) with rugby teams chanting the chorus for years afterwards – meant they did better pop than pop bands. And hey, it raised a lot of money for causes most rugby players would abhor.

They never sold out. They never somehow betrayed us. They never became a tribute band of themselves.  Most importantly of all, they were a cracking band and produced cracking albums.

As I say they were the soundtrack of my life, young and middle aged. Even when faced with lies, and nonsense, and petty minds they’ve given me the broad shoulders to laugh it all off. There are more important things. And it’s right for me to be honourable, to hold to my principles, to keep to my art, to care about what matters and don’t let what is not mire me down.

I’ve never posted links before. How can I not now, at least this once?

But who the fuck will help me now when I’m old?

And cheers, and thank you, all of you.

Now how do I soap a stamp for a letter that has no envelope?

So many questions. I’m going to hunt up Sssh and put it on for the answers. Or to remember that answers don’t matter - so much as making sure you ask the questions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpT5M3qVpMs 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxfc7vvlQp0

Britain Needs More Boffins

I read regular calls for schools to direct kids more towards the sciences, for useful professions and contributions to society but without much said about how that might be made more fun. After all there’s only so far sniffing about it and muttering absolute received-truths will get you, when if kids aren’t interested – then they aren’t interested. And like anything (and especially at a given age) if it’s dull, then they’ll snooze through it all. I’m not saying every science class has to resemble the Christmas Lectures (but it’d help) but perhaps what we need is a little less alphabet maths and a little more of the boffin? Frankly I should have dozed through physics at school but I was blessed with a series of excellent teachers who were more about the practical than the theoretical, and if they’d worn more tweed and smoked more pipes then they would have been boffins; chaps that made discoveries in sheds. And let us not forget that most of Bletchley was just that, their sheds hastily fabricated affairs as the word spread out. Because of which work in so many ways here you are reading this.

But that’s all dire, important and earnest stuff. I like the madness. The strange ideas. I like Project Habakkuk for example. Whereby in the war (and needing larger aircraft carriers and with a shortage of steel) plans were proposed and tested to build the bloody things out of ice. Or rather pykrete, which is a woven combination of ice of wood pulp that could be machined like wood and cast like metal. Truly huge artificial icebergs with flat tops and hollowed out for engines and the inevitable cooling plants. Also and surprisingly bullet proof – as Mountbatten proved by shooting at an experimental prototype (probably whilst not with his wife indulging in numerous affairs with both sexes, you’ve just got to love the decadence of the upper classes in the 30s and 40s). So enormous, and we’re talking biggest ship ever, carriers made of water and mdf. Not only bullet but torpedo and 1000lb bomb proof, albeit pottering about at a stately six knots.

It never happened, though a lot of work was done on it and a smaller prototype took three years to melt to obsolesce. But it was mad, and it was brilliant, and I’d have been a lot more into the sciences at school had we been engaged in making soggy-raffia gunboats with the tensile strength of Guernsey.

Though even at Yateley Comprehensive they would probably have frowned upon the pipe.

Ten Minutes With Mrs Peel

For once a fine day and therefore...  mowing. With the better half at work, and with the sprouts under my care then nonetheless in between daily rain showers it was cutting of grass, and preparing sports days shirts, not to mention a good run up at the tax forms, and yet all done and before Q was home. Astonished I turned to a commission piece of art I’ve been playing with for ages but which, so tight is the brief, I’m simply not getting right to my satisfaction. So before the sun dips and a challenge, to break the intensity, a different sketch entirely and one I timed myself at. Ten minutes from pencil touching paper and no more. So ten minutes later and a very quick Emma Peel style 60s super-spy (for another project entirely).

But to be fair, what day isn’t a little less frustrating for an Emma Peel style 60s super-spy?

The ten minute challenge – give it a go.

Eric Sykes

“For me, there is a daffodil in every dustbin.”

              I’d gone out to the bridge yesterday in the hope of catching Eric as he went by. It happens quite a lot in Tolly Maw and those few moments of a last cheese sandwich with someone can be precious. But he didn’t go by, and it started to rain, so I ate the sandwich. A wet sandwich is enough of a symbol for me. I was delighted then to find this morning that rather than wandering off Eric Sykes was moving in. I didn’t ask about the whole being dead thing. It’s usually taken in the wrong way. He’s taken a house down on Sebastapol Terrace. I’m helping him move his baggage. There’s quite a lot.

              Eric Sykes was one of the mysterious figures for me. I used to read radio scripts as a boy. It was after Hancock and The Goons but I knew so many of them despite not hearing a one. And Eric Sykes was strongly involved in both. Many things indeed. In the 1950s he shared an office with Milligan, Galton and Simpson. It’s hard to imagine what that must have been like as a heart for British comedy then and since. Later and my parents liked Terry & June – I liked Sykes. Would I like it now? Does it matter either way?

              He was part of that Saturday afternoon delight, when there would be Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines on. That’s still true to a greater degree. One of those films you make damn sure you never own so that when it comes up on tele it’s still a nice little event. Eric Sykes also played Charlie Griffin  (the undertaker-hit man from John Gardner’s Boysie Oakes series) in the film adaptation of The Liquidator. I don’t recall a lot about the film, but it’s telling that though I’d read most of the novels before seeing the film, Eric Sykes was ever Charlie Griffin on reading them later.

              Eric Sykes was one of that stable of writers and performers that served as very young men in the war, and came out the other side dedicated to laughing at life (and perhaps because of it). I remember by great-uncle Charles was like that. As Lt. Back uncle Charles was captured and spent years in a Japanese POW camp and by the time I knew him he was this jolly, laughing, chap. Not because of his never spoken-of experiences, but perhaps despite them?

            Eric’s efforts, his achievements, everything he was involved in is a very long list indeed. A worthy list, a list to be rightly proud of. We stop to have a cup of tea and he lights up a cigar.  He looks out the window. “There’s a price to pay everything,” he says. “But I find that price is very, very reasonable.”

            Thank you Eric.        

Superman, Power Girl, and Sue Lawley

Look Betty, communists. Winged communists

The Justice League of America is to be outlawed we hear in the wake of everyone else but Superman being made superfluous due to Superman. Recently forced into the public eye through a documentary film almost certainly of the same name* (I’ve not seen it due to it not being all about cartoon animals that sometimes sing), the Justice League other than Superman has refused to save the world three times since Friday. No one noticed, because Superman did it. Offered the chance to be villains instead their refusal has met with an emergency session of the American Super Senate chaired by Superman that has voted unanimously by Superman to make it illegal to be a superhero unless Superman. When asked for comment Batman thought it was high time he was outlawed properly, and couldn’t be sure whether he was or not at any given time anyway.

“We were never needed really,” said Barry Allen, latterly The Flash. “We used to get the message that somebody in a mask was holding up a hospital and Superman would be there and back before I’d even reached the door. And it pissed me off, because reaching the door first is just about all I did anyway.”

Superman able to do anything everyone else could (apart from fire a bow, probably) better, faster and more invulnerably was unavailable for comment - though sources indicate he is engaged in important business saving the world with his new Superbow.

Being outlawed will pose a serious problem for the more earnest of former superheroes, JLA or not. Comic Con has already registered a protest over the new laws, citing the worrying lack of young women likely to be dressed as Power Girl in San Diego next month. “Without all the chicks dressed as Power Girl,” a spokesman said today. “We might have to move the whole event to the Corn Exchange, Guildford England. Apparently there are no such problems there, where we are assured many women will be cosplaying as ‘Sue Lawley’.”

Batman was seen rushing to punch the spokesman in the face, though Superman is reported as having already done it.  

*It might be The Avengers. I don’t know, I haven’t seen it. I hope they made a better fist of it than Steed’s last outing.

Celebrity Lizard Hell Tanner Divorce

It’s terribly sad when celebrity marriages break up isn’t it?

Not strictly speaking married myself, I’ve never been as committed to a relationship as people whose lives make my own better for their having very nice teeth. I mean to say, two kids and fifteen years later and it’s not really a proper togetherness is it? So I have to find hope in the lives of better people. More successful people, people who admittedly don’t mind standing around an awful lot on a film set. My better half doesn’t share in this. Not now that Johnny Depp had split up with long time girlfriend Tintin - because he’s all sort of probably available after all and when a girl was a goth as a teenager (and let’s be fair here, if anyone is allowed to be a goth it’s teenage girls) then Depp is, if not a god, then at least a bishop. Or a high priest. The sort of high priest that can turn into a snake whilst passively watching gently swaying dancing-girl acolytes. Dancing girl acolytes with crimped purple hair and heavy black eyeliner.

            But Thulsa Depp wasn’t married either, so he doesn’t count. And just to make a convenient link then really I’m much more upset with the announcement that very-tall actress Katie Did is seeking sole custody of her daughter Pepsi from lizard-king Tim Smiles. Already the media is salivating over the details of their five year marriage, rubbing their own scaly hands together at the revelations that will come out. Because of course Tim Smiles is notoriously the leading-light in the Church of Hell. Oh, it’s easy to point out the obvious flaw in the name, but the Church does not use the word from the somewhat-somewhere place of flame and Family Fortune but rather because the Church (as you must know) derives from the works of R. J. Zelazny. In his work Damnation Alley the grisly prophet Hell Tanner (a lizard) drove across a stormy America to deliver vaccine from California to other, more wise-cracking lizards. Offered a full pardon the novel is not to be confused with either Escape From New York or Judge Dredd’s first long running story, The Cursed Earth. The Church of Hell forsees a time when the chosen ones will be pretty much the classic anti-hero in a post-apocalyptic wilderness, in a remarkably tight 150 odd pages of giant gilla-lizards and making it with blousy biker girls. Who are also lizards. Of course for that to happen there has to be an apocalypse. And therein lies the bored porn that allows conspiracy theorists to reach for the Windolene ever near to the monitor.

            So those of us who worship celebrities that worship Hell Tanner are very sad right now.

            And we’re going to blame you, persistently and annoyingly wherever you show yourselves on the internet; because that’s what it’s for. That and sneaky shots of Katie Did getting out of a taxi and flashing her knickers to a prone paparazzi looking up from a drain.