Hawkmoon The Musical

The Lyceum looks set to open next Saturday with the Lloyd Webber latest – The Beastly Lords of Granbretan. A musical adaptation of Mike Moorcock’s Hawkmoon series previews suggest that whilst the source material and even story seems to have been adhered to (albeit and understandably compressed) how well that adapts is music is less certain. There are pieces from rehearsals to be found on the net and I’m not sure how I feel about such lines as ‘My German love’s flame lances to my heart’ and ‘Oh Baron Meliadus such a naughty wolf, take me, make me Eva to your Adolf’ (sic). Actually I’m not at all unsure how I feel about such lines. I know exactly how I feel.

It’s nothing like Hawkwind. The Chronicles of the Black Sword was the first proper, big venue big gig I went to. I’d seen all manner of weird blues, skiffle and banjo bands in the likes of the old Bacchus bar in Bournemouth (qv) but being whilst a teen thin, long-haired and hungry then of course Hawkwind were very important. Led Zeppelin important. Illicit pint important. Panting, urgent fumbling important. Important enough certainly that my first big gig being Hawkwind and Elric was breath-losingly, shakingly-excited, arrive four hours early in bloody Guildford exciting. And it was great, it was brilliant, it was in a way as with many things too, a little life changing.

I hope the same is true of The Beastly Lords of Granbretan, but I doubt it will. But I won’t know because I won’t be going. So I won’t see Michael Ball as Baron Meliadus or Jedward as Dorian Hawkmoon. I can’t even remember the name of the winner of last year’s Quest For Yisselda on ITV, but she’ll be in it you would have thought. They’ve got Rickie Gervais as Huillam D’Averc, and Ron out of Harry Potter as Oladahn.

Update!

Joe Pasquale is playing Count Brass. I’ve changed my mind, this I have to see. Joe Pasquale evil-goblin-voiced winner of I’m A Celebrity is taking a break from The Price Is Right to squeak out such immortal lines as ‘We ride, we ride on Granbretan! With my big pointy sword and brassy tan’, and ‘I am neutral, I am brutal and my two brass balls are fruitful’.

And aren’t all our two brass balls at that?   

Space 1999 Troofers

Astronauts. Apparently.



Conspiracy loonies have been given a colourfully wrapped package today with the Government’s announcement in answer to accusations that the moon did not get blasted out of orbit back in 1999. For twelve years now a lobby growing throughout the internet has sought to demand answers regarding the disaster when Moonbase Alpha after nuclear waste stored there apparently exploded on September 13^th of that year blew it out of orbit. Despite the advanced Eagle shuttles, knuckle-duster lasers and a foxy shape-shifting Catherine Schell not even retro flared trousers and a lot of plastic could seemingly prevent the catastrophe. Blasted into a universe almost entirely composed of absolutely nothing the astronauts and scientists of Moonbase Alpha enjoyed more weekly adventure than a rich man with a chocolate cock until after two seasons they passed beyond reception range. Or something.

Long have Moonbase troofers scoffed at the events as portrayed, pointing for instance at the moon, in the sky, each night and denying common knowledge of its being either a weather balloon or marsh gas, much to the agreement of men that need to shave their backs and women with brooms throughout the west country.

Today though and under mounting pressure the Government has announced that they ‘never said any such thing, at all,' on the subject and that 'the moon is up there, in the sky, look’. Conspiracy site Utterarsewater has since in the face of Government admittance that the moon is still where it always was has demanded an explanation into where the moon has gone, whilst providing four pieces of evidence to suggest that Space 1999 was faked.

Government Minister Tim Eggme had since declined to comment further. 

Modesty Blaise

The Tilda Cuckoos

I can’t help it, I worry.

That’s pretty much what I do now, worry, and now the school’s have turned our all the more so. For I worry about my sprouts as I hear them play because I know that the sound is that of starlings mobbing a cat.

Seven years ago and Tolly Maw (I discover from Michael the post master) saw every woman and a shop window mannequin fall pregnant. Born in the usual fashion and much to everyone’s delight the children were healthy, quiet and apart from the sound of the BBC radiophonic workshop using a theremin* whenever they caught one another’s eyes, all then was well. I did wonder on taking my sprouts to their new school at the universal stark white hair and burning eyes of the year between them, but you don’t like to ask do you?

I worry now because it’s our first summer here and the sprouts out and playing, are playing with these children. Children whose growing similarity to the crowds of sticky Tilda Swintons weighing down the telephone wires is hard to ignore. As the children play the Tildas most uncharacteristically bellow. Like fat mothers stuffing burgers through the fences of a school within a mile of Jamie Oliver they bark, they call, their bones rattling and their eyes setting small fires amongst the bus tickets and ration coupons that still blow about the high street. I see now why the Tildas gathered a month or three ago, these virulent cuckoos with claws of Prada chitin and sharp teeth of new urinal porcelain, still wrapped.

With such do my sprouts play. 

But it’s not my daughters screams I can hear. It’s their laughter.

*Look it up.  

Run Fat Boy, Run!

I went for a run the other day, two runs indeed and it’s been quite some time since I’ve done that. This time last year I couldn’t walk (or sleep, or do much but complain about the gout and painfully whisk at the flies with a zebra-tail duster whilst I shouted at the houseboy for fresh daiquiri). Then I was on a stick and of late I’ve been walking again. The other morning then and early enough to greet bakers getting up and murderers going to bed when walking I started to run. I used to run in school, but in school then there were blackboards and a teacher that drank gin in a teacup, so it’s been a while. That morning it was brief run but I went later to the nearest town, always half-flooded Stilbourne and there sought out a running shoe, even two.

Well I’m not sure if the fashion is very early or we’re just very late but the last time I’d seen a shoe like it the thing had been upon a Spice Girl. Silver with yellow decoration I was forced to ask ‘Is there perhaps something a little more masculine?’

There was it seemed, not.

I still ran home, only three miles with a half mile warm down and I felt great although I felt great in plimsolls. They’re not called plimsolls but they’re what I wear in the sun and let me tell you, they might have been cutting edge in 1920 but so were cinder tracks (and smoking cured bullet wounds). I will look again, another time, but soon I hope because with such shoes I fear that forgetting my shorts I shall be forced to go for a run in my pants.

I thought also to run in company and there is a starters club. I see them sometimes. The slimmest of them looks to be Baron Harkonnen, and he can cheat, what all that flying about on his suspensors. But who knows and soon the fells of Tolly Maw may shake to the flap of our plimsolls. The Baron Harkonnen, Friar Tuck, Mr, Pickwick – and I.    

Summer, Larks, and Smelly Girls

It’s the first day of the school summer holidays here in Tolly Maw, the Monday – not the Friday before which was just a Friday. I woke earlier than everyone perhaps more excited than the sprouts who mostly enjoy school anyway. But I as I sat with my tea and a list of things to-do for work I was excited for them.

I used to spend the whole year just waiting for this Monday. Because school was just rubbish frankly, annoying and in hindsight those five years of physics, geography and maths could have been better spent on languages, and car maintenance, or bunking off a lot more. Even taking aside that I was already hitching all over the country and hanging with people comparative to then a lot older than I, even when younger I sort of knew school was just... rubbish. I went to a modern junior school they’re already knocking down and a modern comprehensive school that was rotting even then.

I did okay, sort of just in the top sets because like a class system – oh, actually, aha – I just sort of was. I had better things to do, better places to be, better books to read and better things to write, and draw. Hell, school managed to make Lord of the Flies and Great Expectations bloody awful, and they’re both cracking stories (I later discovered). But when young and today, yes it was hot, it was summer, and there were six weeks without homework I didn’t have to pretend somehow to have done.

But here in Tolly Maw the school is old, it smells of chalk and floor polish that no one makes any more and they would still cane the children had not my own Catnip and Bosswell led a series of hilarious rebellions using flour and lacrosse sticks. There are only two teachers for everyone from four to eleven, one year only has two pupils. The first teacher smokes woodbines, and the second is Lionel Jeffries. The only reason there’s a new surface on the playground is to hide the last Ofsted inspection though I’m pleased to see that with punch cards they are teaching my girls the rudiments of computer science.

So with thoughts of soap box carts and apple scrumping I never myself did I finished work only to see that my girls were not skinning their knees so much as playing with their dollies in the garden. If I built a club house they wouldn't be able to come in. Bosswell at least is showing promise with a catty but Catnip the little love is girlier than a pink unicorn with a candyfloss perm. I love her dearly but I still pushed her into a muddy puddle.

Because I’m a ghost-pirate-highwayman. And girls smell.   

The Amy Winehouse Experience

It’s sad and I never knew her of course, but I’ll raise a glass to Amy Winehouse. I can’t imagine there’re many people out there that disliked her work. You don’t have to be a basement-cold fan of jazz or blues to appreciate that like so much found in those genres then like it or not, you have to admit there’s real talent, real skill there. So cheers Amy, you were brilliant and now you’re immortal, you will no longer age, because if we did not actually know you then you and your music are no different to us today than they were a week ago.

Everyone is here for but a brief flare of the match, your own burned brighter than most.

You were great.

‘You think so?’

I do. She was a blues singer not Binky from pop act Popz! She was not a role-model, she had no one to let down, and she let no one down and it’s awful that I’ve already read now that she deserved it, or people have no sympathy because it was... blah, blah, blah. She was young, she was successful quickly and in these times of Celebrity, again, a real talent. Amy Winehouse does not deserve our pity, especially self-satisfied pity that if only she had gone to work in a bank...

‘Ah,’ Mme Roux is not convinced. I can understand that. But she knows me very well, better than myself sometimes. Roux is her married name (though she has no husband). She says, ‘and what then will this experience teach you?’

‘That life is fleeting, not for wasting. Not for squandering, and not when it comes to one's self – for compromising.’

She fetches from a choir master's satchel a white skullcap. Fitting it she raises a boy-scout salute, and very Polish says, ‘Here endeth the lesson.’

Cheers girl.