LISTENING TO - Massive Champion by Getdown Services

Getdown Services presence in our music universe, appears to have a stronger public profile with every year. Their debut album Crisps, was a portfolio of whiplash wit and droll eccentric observations about the male way of being men in 2023. Featuring a wild mix of styles from dance to indie, drawing on 80'sand 90's tropes, and giving them a distinct twist that was all their own. Since then Joshua Law and Ben Sadler have been literally working their arses off performing in small local venues across the country, to some acclaim. They are, according to reviews, a two man communication of wonder and enthusiasm, and something to be sought out as an experience. Between Crisps and their second album Massive Champion, their have been an albums worth of tracks that didn't make the debut album and EP's galore. This output I'd say was of mixed value, some real gems, others variations on familiar Getdown Services themes. More does not necessarily mean better. I began to think they were putting out far too much.  One might be forgiven for thinking they released anything that moved, with little vetting for quality. So, Massive Champion arrives presenting challenges as most second albums do.

I Can't Die Like That - Getdown Services

It opens with a bit of an oddity. Poor Bannister, is a folk tinged song about watching an old woman asleep on a bus, while some random drunk guy pukes up on his trousers, but tries to pretend nothing is wrong. This is certainly an novel way to open an album. With the next song we are returned to rather more standard GS territory I Can't Die Like That, where they wonder about "Maybe my neck wont snap, if I fill it with snacks'  should he ' Kiss the floor like the Pope' and ' I wonder if I'll ever stop thinking about killing Baby Oleg, I hope not'. But like many tracks on Massive Champion, I Can't Die like That, has a more reflective and sombre feeling to it, about mortality and purpose. The whole album is flecked with regret. About childhood experiences, growing up, and why he is choosing to live his life in this way. Joshua Law, as the primary songwriter, has developed a vein of sadness and poignancy in his songwriting, alongside the strongly scabrous swearing, and sarky humour. Probiotic begins with a dialogue where he is asked why he won't eat probiotic food. The answer - 'because it's got bits in it'.

Cha Cha Slide - Getdown Services

Social anxiety appeared in their first album on the track 'I wish it didn't bother me', here it's 'Cha Cha Slide ' as a six year old Josh goes to his first party and feels a bit out of it and clueless, he wants to be like his friend Dennis, but finds I hard. This is a gently touching song, that channels the embarrassment and self consciousness of a young child's experience. Then we hit two really quintessential songs, which are the summation of what Getdown Services currently are. Radiator, probably needs no introduction. It paints a picture of two guys living in a room they can't turn the heating down in. The sweaty semi-squalor of a bachelor existence is painted so well. 

The Definitive Map

The Definitive Map that follows appears to be channelling mid 80's The Fall, in the way they collectively chant 'Trespass', it is by far the best of their rock numbers on the album. After this peak the album did feel to me to become more a meandering through moods, with its brief monologues and love songs. So far Getdown Services USP has been them being two unpretentious blokes who are best mates having a bit of a laugh together on stage. This album appears to be reaching for a bit more than that, but has not yet found a way of confidently standing in that world yet.

If you could sum up Massive Champion I'd say it is certainly more reflective than it's predecessor, the highpoints are when they are on their most well trodden ground. This album has been out for a while now, and though I've listened too it through quite a few times, it doesn't feel a must have purchased. Whilst it has definitely got highlights that show off their brilliance, their is something about it that feels under developed as the next stage in their career. It's not quite resolved enough, to know what they were aiming for here. Maybe the next album will nail this to the mast more securely. 

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

READING ALOUD - Wendell Berry - A Poem On Hope

A Poem On Hope by Wendell Berry

Subtitled Embracing Place and Possibility, this poem charts it's course through some very familiar themes in Wendell Berry's writing more generally. That hope is not something you can abstractly acquire. Hope arises from having had a strong sense of the place from which you have sprung, and it's future that you care for. It's a landscape that has to a large extent made you who you are. Without this we find ourselves adrift, anchorless, most likely these days alienated and imaginatively ungrounded. Where everything we might express about hope is an idea remote from lived experience. Wendell Berry's tone when he is reciting this, is even, breaking the lines of this poem where it will bring it greater import. Shifting the focus from person to place, meaning to emptiness, hope to despair, that cycle around to come back at you from a different angle. There is both clarity and mystery being woven here. Like his writing his reading aloud is strong on precision with an understated feeling tone.

A LEGIT OBIT - Wendell Berry (1934 - 2026 )

Wendell Berry when you saw him being interviewed had such a quiet unassuming manner, if you weren't paying that much attention to what he was actually saying. Because the ideas he talked about in his lectures, books and poetry were far from unassuming. They were trenchant and important reflections on the nature and consequences of modern industrialised agriculture. How our relationship with the land and cultivation, through becoming entangled with the agro chemical industry, had lost its sensitivity to the quality of soil, food and health. And what the consequences actually were upon us of how something is grown, upon the health benefits of what we eat and drink. Through the unbridled pursuit of increasing yields and profits, the balance and harmony of man's needs with natures fertility has got seriously out of wack. 

Wendell Berry, wasn't some folksy countryman, with a misty eyed nostalgia for the olden days, he was frequently hard hitting, a thoughtful man who examined motivations, saw their outcomes, and in detail would show you what result was meted out upon the health of the soil, the health of animals, the health of rural communities, of humanity and the planet we inhabit. And that breadth of perspective was what made him extraordinarily influential upon the wider organic food movement, ecological campaigners and agrarian movements.

He was certainly not a household name. I'd say most people who saw his death being announced would not have had a clue who he was. The written word was his choice of weapon, the range and style of things that he wrote about was impressive. Yes, he wrote about environmentalism and rural communities, but also novels, longer form non fiction, essays and evocative yet direct poetry. He has had as great, if not more influence as a poet than he has had as an environmental campaigner. As able in the delineation of the state of our inner world as he was in his statements about the outer. Wendell Berry was that very rare individual, who could expertly identify and go straight to the root of the problem, and write about this with such unshowy eloquence, yet heartfelt precision. 

For example. There is a video on You Tube where Wendell Berry gives a short lecture on the subject of the politics of gay marriage. His response was to say that what anyone chooses to do with their private life, how they wish to relate to each other as consenting adults, is entirely theirs to decide, and no one else's business. That this should not require sanction or seek approval from anyone, political or otherwise, outside of it. The problem, as he saw it, with treating private things such as marriage as public rights, is that this requires public political interventions into what is essentially a private decision between two people. That any right to marry that is dependent upon political approval, can just as easily be removed by political disapproval. The fundamental thing to defend is your liberty, your freedom to choose whatever you wish for you and your chosen partner, to be able to live your life together however you want, free from outside pressure, need to conform, or any requirement for external approval.

If you want to know a good place to start with his writing then there is an excellent compilation called The World- Ending Fire.

A LEGIT OBIT - Dolly Parton (1946 -2026)

Dolly Parton, became a torch bearer for everything that was positive, appreciative and playfully fun in the American way of life. Coming as she did from a poor Appalachian family, she appears to have never lost the common touch that could easily reach over boundaries of class, race or gender. Her superlative songwriting ability saw her accumulate many musical accolades. And with the wealth and the fame, she consistently found new ways of putting them to beneficial use. Whether that was distribution of free books or funding the development of life saving vaccines. She demonstrated how to put your good fortune to the benefit of the disadvantaged. Founding numerous trusts to support philanthropic causes that will continue helping beyond her own death. The honest good heartedness of this woman was truly exemplary.

Dolly's image, the way she chose to dress, became over the decades a deliberately self constructed parody. In this she exemplified the Quentin Crisp maxim that you should  do deliberately what you previously did by nature or accident, in order to get the joke onto your own terms. She saw Dolly Parton as this persona she adopted, that she could quite easily have become a drag queen. And she was more than willing to publicly send herself up, which was simultaneously endearing and disarming. Because no one could accuse Dolly of being performative, ingratiating or disingenuous, because she never hid who she was, the boobs, the plastic surgery, the ridiculousness of showbusiness fame. She made it all seem so natural and unaffectedly true to her life. She was one very impressive human, that everyone will mourn the loss of.

A LEGIT OBIT - Tim Curry (1946 -2026)

Anyone of my age, may well remember the first time they went to see the film  The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I was in Hull on my Foundation Course, and we had an Arts Humanities teacher who dragged us all to see it at the nearby ABC Cinema. This landed as such a revelation to me I went to see it repeatedly more than a dozen times in as many days. I'd lived a sheltered life until that point, and had not really encountered high camp before. I instantly fell in love with it. Central to this infatuation wasTim Curry's performance. When Hubby and I rewatched the film recently to mark Curry's recent passing, I was once again struck by how full on his performance is. As the film was shot so cheaply and rapidly Curry's Frank n Furter comes pretty much straight from being honed to perfection over months in front of a theatre audience. So all the vocal inflections, pointed phrasings, mangling of vowel sounds and breaking of the fourth wall are timed to the minutest second to generate laughs. It is his show, and he is clearly very aware of the viewer out there, sat in a theatre, a cinema or in front of a TV screen. He makes the most of every single scene, and he is pretty much in all of them. One can only imagine how intimidating this must be over fifty years later for a new actor to take on this role. You look at Curry so on fire and try your hardest not to want to just copy everything he does. How would anyone make this role their own, and not end up disappointing?  Though there is no shortage of actors willing to give it a try.

And that ability to make a truly memorable performance that dominates the screen or stage was an ability he used, whatever the part he was playing. He could easily steal the show if he so wished. Using his vocal facilities to the hilt, that strong forceful singing voice, the larger than life stage presence, the expressive face, well this could be hard to contain. Any subsequent filmmaker would never choose him for a small subtle intimate ensemble piece. Curry at his absolute best was not subtle, but neither was he hammy. For when he was allowed to let rip he would produce, out of nowhere, a truly memorable bit of expertly finessed character acting. So there was his pirate turn on the Treasure Island Muppet Movie, playing a demon in the film Legend, and his very creepy version of Pennywise in the adaption of Stephen King's - It. He invariably ended up playing the baddy in films, because this was much more fun. As he did in Clue, and in a truly 'so awful it's good' film Congo. Nothing ever reached quite the cinematic must see pizzazz of Rocky Horror, though he always gave it a try. But then how do you follow Frank n Furter?  Not very easily is the answer. And most of the cast could never quite shake off being known for Rocky Horror, and in some cases, only that film. It defined their entire subsequent career. Curry was not alone in that. But he did have a go. Even after the physically debilitating heart attack, he continued to do a large range of voice overs. Because even unseen, he could still do larger than life, better than anyone. 

LIFE AS PILGRIMAGE - 2 - The Performance & Dressing Up For God

Down hill from the family home in Dyson Road, a mere ten minute walk away, was St Augustine's Church of England Primary School. There I was presented with a daily assembly of hymns, prayers and readings. I don't remember this being particularly churchy or solemn, though perhaps a child never sees these things with such a jaundiced eye. St Augustine's had a monolithic Victorian stone built church, looming massively right next to it. In amongst the surviving momentos of my early education is a small exercise book. It has Scripture written in pencil on the front, in my infant handwriting. At some point in my early childhood, I wrote and illustrated this. And it contains  Christian religious instruction, a standard part of a C of E Primary School's curriculum, And this booklet definitely tilted more towards the Anglican, than the Non Conformist approach. Complex ideas of sin, original and actual, written out on a blackboard for me to copy in my rudimentary understanding of English spelling.  I learnt I was primarily a Child of God, though it's never explained what surrogate role my parents played in this.

I believe, because I was brought up Methodist, with chapels and services so plain and scarcely adorned, I had an appreciative response to Anglican, even Anglo Catholic, churches, rituals and ostentation, that was an eye opener to wonder and awe. After an upbringing starved with restrained aesthetic stimulation, you just blubber your face in the luxurious bubble bath of it's sensory stimulation. By comparison this felt life enhancing, conjuring up a response of being giddily thrilled. 

Whilst at Primary School, around the time I was eight, it was discovered that I had a passably good boy soprano voice. And the music teacher, Miss Gilliat, told my parents she thought I was good enough to be a chorister in Halifax Parish Church. Being good at singing, is something of a wasted talent in a Methodist Chapel. There was nothing more to offer a boy soprano than sitting up in the gallery singing along with the buxom ladies in the ad-hoc, who ever turns up sings, choir. Anyway, after a thorough audition by the Parish Church choirmaster, I was in. 

Being in a leading part of Church of England services, with it's candles and incense, felt rather exotic. It also gave me permission to dress up in a burgundy cassock, white ruff and surplus. There was an heightened sense of beauty, elevated through singing anthems, hymns, Festivals of nine lessons and carols, and on one occasion Bach's St Matthews Passion. All this was utterly exhilarating to a pre-pubescent choir boy, from a non-conformist background. From these experiences was born enduring lifelong loves - for church music and architecture, to name but two. The power of the human voice in song, to connect you, lays out a more transcendent relationship with divinity, however briefly experienced in the full flow of a performance.  Singing was the first thing I'd discovered that I was confident in knowing I was actually rather good at, 

And this flipping between austere almost minimalist aesthetic and the effusively baroque over the top coloured maximalism, remains a dynamic pull within me still. My Methodist upbringing, plus my art and design training, pull me towards the former, whilst my instinct, and the thing I adore most is the latter. Over the years, in my own artwork, I've learned to intuitively place more trust in the maximalist in me, and ignore any inculcated tendency to temper my expressiveness back to a more restrained, less emotionally indulgent form. You are taught at art school, that this is what serious artists do. The pursuit of beauty was an inherently distrusted motive, it was manipulative, even untruthful. And a similar dichotomy existed at times within my relationship with Buddhist practice. Either refined to the essentials, like a Zen monk, or the rich exuberance of Indian or Tibetan rituals. Restrain your engagement with emotionality, avoid cultivating intoxication or excessive indulgence. There was my habitual English upbringing in the Protestant moderation in all things, which became further reinforced by meeting a familiar friend in Buddhist restraint.

As a child, I had a passionate and exuberant side to my character, that I tended to suppress because I felt that it was unacceptable. But in my choices of music, my love of art, for performing, for OTT camp, and having made in later life friends from Latin American and Indian cultures, I discovered a way of being human, a joyful light hearted exuberance to be enjoyed in an uncomplicated way. I think if I'd been more self confident earlier in my life, this outgoing side of me might have found space in which to fully manifest. Instead I retreated into myself, and concealed this side. There has been times when I instinctually felt I had betrayed my personality. For within every closeted introvert, is an misdirected extrovert trying to find their way out of the cupboard.

PROTEST & PROGRESS - Peaceably if we May, Forcibly if we Must

From the perspective  of the 21st century, we have little remaining sense for just how ground breaking the upheaval of the British Industrial Revolution was. As the first Western country to become fully industrialised, people from other countries were flocking to visit Great Britain to observe for themselves, to learn of the latest innovations, see what was actually going on in its streets and market places.

Whenever you are the first to do anything, you are the one who makes the mistakes that others learn from. The ones you have to go back on later to correct. Things happen that you do not anticipate. It's you who encounters unexpected economic consequences. How do you respond to increased social tensions? What happens when your drive to modernise the economy, ignores the welfare of its own working class citizens? When riots or disease break out in the insanitary conditions of cheap urban slum housing? Britain was the first country that had to find answers to these questions. Essentially, how do you maintain social order in a rapidly developing technologically led economic boom? And the rule of the British Parliament at this time was definitely not fit for that purpose. It was basically a closed shop of privileged, extremely well off individuals, looking after their financial investments and property portfolios. Their responsibilities towards the social fabric and collective cohesion came very low down the list of its priorities.

Marx and Engels

Frederick Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842, sent by his family to work in the family mill there. This move had been designed to extract him from the political radicalism he'd become actively involved in back in Germany. Though Engels spent his days dutifully working in the family firm, in the evening, with the help of Mary Burns who knew the city well, he ventured out to investigate for himself how working class factory workers lived and survived in these newly urbanised conditions. What eventually resulted from these nocturnal adventures was a highly influential pamphlet - The Conditions of the Working Class in England. One of Engels newer politically radical friends, Karl Marx, inspired by this document, came to stay with him. And together they began formulating a more radical socialist alternative to the rampant capitalism they saw ruining and debasing working people's lives in Manchester. This project eventually produced the Communist manifesto.

The Luddite Riots in the early years of the nineteenth century, were notable because they were the first real sign of the working class protesting their dissatisfaction with the conditions of their new urban life. The industrialised northern towns were becoming the magnet for a wide range of radical political, economic and social theories. Ordinary working people were politicised on the streets by reading pamphlets and broadsheets, and hearing public talks, about these ideas. They were increasingly more prone to noisily demanding better work conditions, pay, and the right to vote. Manchester, became a particularly intense hot bed for a broad range of these radical campaigning groups, and politically out of the box thinking. The sort of ideas being proposed by Engels and Marx, would eagerly feed into this.  A new economic reality demanded a new politics, and a truly representative people's democracy lay at the centre of that.

In the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of 1818, voting and electoral reform continued being campaigned for. They initially held out a hope for the Reform Act of 1832, but this failed to extend voting rights. It was also followed by The Poor Law of 1834 which robbed the poor of the most basic access to financial support, and made the workhouse their only option if they fell on hard times. So in 1838 a new and more politically astute voting reform group was formed, The Chartist Movement. This very quickly became a huge nationwide campaigning organisation. Initially focusing on staging large and impressive mass protests in Salford, Birmingham, Glasgow and London.  

Chartist meeting Kennington Common 1848

They presented a petition to Parliament asking for universal (male) sufferage, the abolition of the property qualification for candidates, regularised elections every four years, equal sized constituencies, yearly Parliaments, MP's to be paid a statutory salary. These may sound perfectly reasonable to us today. But from 1838 to 1848 the Chartists presented three such petitions to Parliament to no discernable response from government. The Houses of Parliament in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth, was stuffed to the gills with nobility, landowners and businessmen. It was inherently corrupt and self serving. Getting this legislative assembly think in a visionary and democratic manner about its own electoral reform, was always going to be a tall order. 

Chartism's peaceful protest marches began to regularly get more out of hand. Frustrated fringe groups within it began to advocate taking more violent action. This appeared to play into the governments agenda to discredit Chartism and to ignore the eminently reasonable requests of its aims. After the 1848 petition failed to be adopted by Parliament for the third time, the whole Chartist Movement seemed to lose heart and slowly faded out of existence.

Manchester had always been the powerhouse stronghold of Chartism. Chartists there had successfully blocked some of the actions of the cities Tory dominated civic administration. Seen in retrospect, Chartism was in many ways the political precursor of the Labour Party. Many former Chartists did later become active socialists. Another legacy of Chartism was that it introduced and trained many ordinary working class people in how to be politically active and to campaign effectively for change. 

Though it did not appear to achieve it's stated aims within the ten or so years of its existence, all but one of its original proposals did eventually become law, the last being achieved in 1911. Parliament then and now, likes to think of itself as being the primary instigator of legislation, and does not wish to be seen being pushed or coerced into action by external protests or pressure from its own citizens. So once the Chartist Movement had dissolved, piecemeal legislation did begin to slowly appear, that were almost word for word what Chartism had demanded. Chartism's mass protests and strategy did succeed in changing the legislative mood within Parliament, leaving an abiding influence upon the future direction of electoral reform. It was the first modern movement to pioneer mass nationwide protests as a way to keep applying political pressure, for demanding social or political change, and this became the blueprint strategy for subsequent protest groups.

Next Episode - Fetter Not A Brother's Limbs

PLAYLIST 2026 - No 20 - Edge of Saturday Night by The Blessed Madonna & Kyle Minogue

Edge of Saturday Night by The Blessed Madonna & Kylie Minogue

Well, it seems The Blessed Madonna can call upon some pretty big names to bring their talents to the service of her dancefloor. Here it's Kylie,who is no stranger to this sort of electro woofer busting disco banger. Here she is slumming it with this very noticeably mock sleazy looking gay crowd, whilst Kylie is trying to look a bit more bedraggled, wrecked and edgy than is usual in her own videos. 

Goodness knows what this song is about, making everyday a Saturday and getting plastered perhaps.  I mean this woman is 58 and can't possibly do late night clubbing anymore, she needs her beauty sleep. Otherwise liposuction and the porcelain doll like tragedy of Madonna's pension years beckons. This has some very uplifting beats, providing a more than pleasing way to spend three minutes and thirty one seconds with this enduring legend.

FINISHED READING - John of John by Douglas Stuart

It is probably a universal experience of anyone who has gone away to college, that when they return to their parental home, they come back a subtly changed person. Everyone may treat you as though you are exactly the same person who left. Families feel like they know the truth of you, and are often reluctant to update their perceptions. The experience of leaving, and learning who you are whilst you were away from home, from parental supervision, and the framing context of your upbringing, adjust you and your outlook on your life, both past and present. The dynamics of relationships at home, may feel familiar, but not necessarily comforting. It can feel like you are returning to a way of being you no longer wish to inhabit. This disjuncture can be hard to live with. And the story, as told here by Douglas Stuart in John of John, captures that state of returning to a situation where you feel instantly trapped. Finding yourself rebelling in major or petty ways, against the reasserting of old constraints. Here, the desire to leave almost overwhelms it's central character Cal from the very moment they arrive back on the island of Harris.

For Cal, has been away to Art College to study fashion. He's attained his degree, but not his fully adult independence. He's been sofa hopping and living off the kindness of friends for months. His future career has yet to take off.  A lack of perceived inaction or ambition, hence makes Cal reluctant yet, to return to the island of Harris and to Falabay. He phones home every week to speak to his Father. They talk little about what he is actually doing. It's more like a Bible class, a religious instruction, in order that Cal does not stray from the straight and narrow of his Father John's faith. 

Cal is gay, but cannot even contemplate telling his father, because the consequences, well, they don't bear thinking of. For John, has a deep well of frustration and anger within him, which is horrible for everyone when it erupts. It's origins Cal frequently misdiagnoses. He has never understood why, when Cal was only ten, John seperated from Grace, Cal's Mother. Something went wrong in their relationship. Cal's Mother largely takes the blame, just because it was her that left. Though this is clearly not the whole story. There is hidden knowledge here, and it is not getting any better for being kept so secret. John indicates in one phone call to Cal, that his Grandmother Ella does not appear well to him, and this convinces Cal this is the time when he should return to the island and people of his birthplace.

Stuart describes island life, in evocative small details, the colours and sensory qualities of the landscape, the air, the sea, it's deceptive but cruel beauty. There are sensitively aesthetic descriptions of the process of choosing the mix of colours when weaving tweed cloth. Falabay appears to uphold ancient traditions and conventions, if judged by the externals alone. Though in a small intimate population where everyone knows everyone else's busines, keeping secrets you don't want other folk to know, means maintaining a stern stoney unknowable exterior. Island inhabitants always have something tucked away, they've never told anyone. The island economy runs on sheep farming, the weaving of tweed cloth and increasingly tourism. The latter is gradually changing the island and it's people, from a community into a commodity. The old traditions and beliefs of the islanders, though they are desperately clung onto, are teetering on the edge of becoming uneconomic to maintain. 

In the dwindling faithful of a church congregation, there is a clear demarcation between those who have taken Christ into their life, and those who have not.  Everyone knows which side of that line they are currently standing on. The Minister's gentle soft voice might seem benevolent in its intent, but his level of control over his congregation is coercive and invades the privacy of islanders inner lives. And beneath their subservience to the word of God, many of the island men inhabit conflicted and unfulfilled existences of disquieting loneliness. Some of them may indeed be gay, but no-one takes the risk of stepping outside the perceived shadow of shame and exile.

The feeling woven through this novel, is of an over hanging weight of despair and sadness. Of people struggling with unfulfilled lives, self betrayal and guilt. Of men trying, but often failing, to enforce a firm level of control over their inner lives, desires and impulses. And the sense is that so easily, and quite soon, the lid could blow off all these scrupulously maintained stand offs between what men say and don't say, what they feel they are, and what they actually publicly do. All of it buried under unchallenged moral expectations of them. 

The feeling that something personally tragic is being revealed to you here, makes this novel often a heartbreaking story to read. I found I had to space out my reading as I got nearer the end, just in case I couldn't bare where the story was heading. It is that good. Stuart slowly and almost imperceptibly feeds you snippets of information that lead or mislead you into thinking you know where the characters may be headed, and then it doesn't go there, but to somewhere else close by. Will exposing the truth, clear the air, or resolve anything here? Or is there bound to be a dark peaty clod of brutal tragedy discovered in some ditch or on the harbour foreshore, somewhere on this island? 

The Booker Prize winner, Shuggie Bain was like watching a slow motion car crash happen. His second novel, Young Mungo', felt a bit heavy handed and overly contrived in its evocation of grooming and abuse. John of John, takes you far away from Stuart's lived experience of working class life in Glasgow, to a much older geographically isolated rural culture on the Scottish islands. Its written with descriptive and emotional fluency, peppered with flashes of quite subtle perceptive brilliance. However reprehensibly some of these people may behave at times, you still appreciate, love and have some feeling of care for these people. So much is so gently inferred here, of truths understated, briefly mentioned casually in passing, rather than double underlined. It is a superb evocation of the nature of a people, landscape and the predicaments of an island existence. 

I was left hugely moved and often impressed with the depths this novel was prepared to go to. John of John, is Douglas Stuart's best novel yet. It haunted me, and held me in a state of tension, even whilst I was reading it, and lives on vividly in my mind still. It will be hard to find another novel published this year, to beat this one.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

FINISHED READING - Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

"What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience."*

Neil Postman, once a Professor of Communication Arts & Science at New York University, published this book Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 ** It has the subtitle Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  It's a detailed, thoroughly engaging examination of how technologies, and specifically television, have altered the nature of our communication and culture. Turning it from one based on printed communication and the authoritative written word, to one, which through the medium of television, sacrificed intellectual depth to immediacy, with little need for context or comprehension, why this is being communicated, or what this might mean in terms of how we respond. What we must do as a consequence, is a question rarely posed. 

Postman's book paraphrases Marshall McLuhan's maxim, that ' the medium is the message', and turns it into ' the medium is the metaphor'. The prevailing metaphor of elevision programming is entertaining, and is primarily focused on retaining your attention through constant visual stimulation. Anything educational or informative that it says it's imparting is entirely coincidental, irrelevant as a justification for its existence. Television isn't about encouraging thinking at all, but emoting, and the necessity for everything you watch to be enjoyable.

"And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference."*

Imagery, how things look dominate our daily perceptions and political discourses. Television has made the conveying of information a subservient quality, it has turned us into passive receivers of insufficient information, that we can do little or nothing about. It has made us feel impotent. The expression of opinions has changed from a rational carefully worded statement into an irrational emotive sensationalism. That Postman's book is still in publication forty years later, demonstrates how his analysis has found a continuing relevance in describing the causes and effects of our internet social media age, which was presaged by television.

" If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided their performance consistently generates a sense of verisimilitude......For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying."*

It is to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, that Neil Postman looked to speak of the zeitgeist of our time, and the perils our civilisation is currently facing. In Huxley's imagined future people become addicted to technologies, that subtly and quietly take away their capacity to think, their ability to form a critique or retain any sense of history, and the perspective that can bring to the present. Now, doesn't all that sound rather discomfortingly familiar?

"Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art, and so what the ABC network gave us was a picture of men of sophisticated verbal skills and political understanding being brought to heal by a medium that requires them to fashion performances rather than ideas."*

Postman uses famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A Douglas as an example for what has changed. In 1858 they engaged in a series of public debates.  At there height Lincoln would talk for three to four hours on a topic, Douglas would talk for a further three to four hours, to be followed by a concluding response of indeterminate length. And these talks were extraordinarily popular events, that were well attended. Thousands of people would stay engaged and listen intently. You could spend an entire day at these debates. There were breaks for meals where folk went home to eat, and then came back for the next bit of the debate.

American literacy and access to written information at that time was probably the highest it's ever been, The broad general population was well informed, and more than capable of following such long complex debates. Wind forward to modern televised political debates, where speakers get five minutes tops to state their case. This demonstrates how immediacy and the need to keep things moving lest the TV audience get bored, has changed our relationship with how much information we are presented with, or can take in. Add to this that every ten to fifteen minutes their will be the incongruous interruption of an advertising break and you have no clearer example of how television as a medium has messed with, and infantilises, our attention spans.

"And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?"*

Neil Postman undoubtedly was a very skilled and succinct communicator. ( He died in 2003)  Abjuring complex jargon, silly acronyms, specialist academic terms. He uses language and imagery deftly to aid comprehensibility and deeper understanding. And he was able to do all that without you ever getting a sense of being talked down to, or the subject matter being over simplified or dumbed down. This was a simulating book of ideas and perceptions, that took you on a journey into the inner workings of our modern communication media. He repeats several times that he is not implying what is happening is the result of a conspiracy or deliberate malign intent, what is happening to Western culture is a consequence of the essential nature of television itself, as a technological medium.

" Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.....To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a programme for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make assumptions that technology is always a friend to culture, is at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. "*

I found reading this book both compelling and curiously reassuring, simply because it nails quite precisely how we have arrived where we are today. When Presidents of the world's largest democracy are drawn from the world of entertainment, from film or TV reality programmes. Where a lack of seriousness, of being clearly ill informed, of blatantly lying, have become acceptable as just part of the political landscape. Because so long as you keep the attention span moving on, by bombarding the viewer with the next outrageous statement or provocation, people become increasingly numbed to the outrage. Advancing quickly on to the next sensationalised event that's just been generated. This would be a person that clearly understands the nature of modern tele- visual media, and how to exploit it. Enabling them to get away with dismantling democracy, create the foundations for a totalitarian state, and ignore climate catastrophe, whilst amusing the rest of us until we are all dead.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

* All quotations taken from Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, Published by Methuen, 1987. 

** With gratitude to Jared Henderson and his You Tube channel, for first making me aware of this book.

PLAYLIST 2026 - No 19 - Mercy by The Blessed Madonna Ft Jacob Lusk

Mercy - The Blessed Madonna Ft Jaccob Lusk

In the seemingly long hiatus between the Gabriel's first album and its follow up, Jacob Lusk has been appearing to find time to do quite a bit of feature vocalist spots, mainly with Moby, but also here with the DJ The Blessed Madonna. This is a disco music at its most classic, and Lusk's voice gives it all the diva gloss you could hope for. I mean, if you had the opportunity to have that voice 'do your little ole song' you'd grab it with both hands wouldn't you. And The Blessed Madonna does not fail to fully embellish it with glitter..

LIFE AS PILGRIMAGE - 1 -The Creeds and Catechisms of the Infant

There are no pictures of me being baptised, but I do have one of me dressed in something approaching baptismal clothes. The ceremony would have been at West End Methodist Church, in Halifax. Like most Methodist Chapels, this was an unremarkable building from the outside. I have few recollections of its interior, other than it was dark. But if it went true to form, the interior would be plain, probably painted bench pews, an elevated organ and pulpit, with a small gallery. Nothing showy or smacking of ostentation or papacy. You were here to praise the divinity, not man. Turn up for God, be presentable, wear your best clothes. But it was undoubtedly here that I first heard the bible being read and commented upon. At some point in a Sunday service, the children would leave to attend Sunday School, whilst the adults received communion or a sermon was preached.

The God of my infancy seemed to me, to be a given. It came pre-packaged with my parents, and they presented it to me. And that God appeared to be an extension of them. God's relationship with me, felt very parental. God got exasperated with me, told me off, punished me for my behaviour, was pleased with me when I was good. I dutifully sang songs in praise of God, drew pictures of God, of the Infant Jesus, and generally absorbed the Christian teachings in their rudimentary child friendly versions. Encouraging me to behave better, and admonishing me when I was not. I learnt through this what you needed to be, to be considered good. The wrath of God was to be feared. The God of my infancy was definitely male gendered. And older boys and men I knew could be unpredictable and angry too.  I knew of no other way of perceiving God at the time. A child tends to absorb like blotting paper, who God is, how God is, what God does. They are passive receptors of teachings, imbibing unquestioningly whatever is fed to them. God seemed to me then to be similar to mother nature itself. God was just how it was.

Methodists are not particularly dour in their non conformism. At least, not the branch my family attended. My parents were quietly small c conservative, with distinct liberal permissive leanings. Tolerance and patience with others, were considered virtues. They were rarely strict disciplinarians about anything. Both were brought up within Methodism, and had imbibed it's prohibitions on drink and gambling, practicing moderation in all things. Very self disciplined about being respectable, and being seen to be by others. It was clear that my Mother was far too concerned, to the point of social anxiety, about what other people thought of her or her family. She felt the shame deeply, if her children misbehaved in public. When I came out to my parents, though actually quite understanding, my Mother became mortified by the thought of other people's judgements of me and of her, should they find out. 

Showing off, or being proud of something you'd done, were considered as you getting above yourself, and discouraged. Both my parents, though kind and loving, were pretty hopeless at openly praising or encouraging you in your abilities or talents. Talents ran the danger of making you bigheaded or worse than that vain or conceited about your self importance. There was a tendency in my family to ridicule or pull you down a peg or two, if ever you were to be proud, positive, enthusiastic or confidently enjoying something you were doing in your life. These are all things I have had to patiently learn to be for myself, and to be actively open to accepting praise and admiration from others when it is given. Though I can still feel myself inwardly cringe first, before I graciously and happily acknowledge it positively with a thank you. This remains a place of practice.

ART 'N' AB ART - Birkin Hayward & Ben Johnson - Salthouse Exhibition

Two artist's both from architectural backgrounds, have develop two very highly polished, but individually different manners of presenting structure and colour. 

Birkin Hayward paints confidently in slabs of gestural paint, that convey mass and stability, or the play if light in a particular location. Some of these are recognisibly North Norfolk, others are further afield in England or in and around the Mediterranean. Many if these paintings are so astounding from their s8mplicity of execution, but they convey so much about the place. Sometimes the scale is large and has immense heft and weight to the use of a paired back monochrome. Then. It may be as small as A4 and the smallest turn of the brush stroke the white spaces between colours suggestive of the light quality on that particular day. This is an artist who has acquired the skill to make such confident mark making. It is very impressive.

Ben Johnson's artwork is complimentary to Birkin Hayward despite his use of hyper realism. The gallery attendant has to make a point of telling you these photographs are taken of paintings Johnson has previously executed. This is phenomenally detailed and skilled work. Some works are like screen prints and are exercises in how slabs of tone can convey architectural mass and structure. There are also photographs of large wall paintings he executed in Hong Kong of the harbour. The precision in his original drawing is impressive, there is one drawing inside a cathedral which is particularly striking.  Other work has been done using computer aided design, and reaches a level of intricate detail only achievable through that means. 

I didn't look know what to expect when I read the Salthouse programme. So this gallery show was a particularly wonderful surprise, ideally suited to the light and architectural echoes of this church space. This exhibition runs until the 6th of September 2026, a must see it if your here on holiday or local.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

PROTEST & PROGRESS - Unsettling Revolutions

The Stuart dynasty ran out of legitimate Protestant monarchs, with the death of Queen Anne. Parliament pro-actively searched across Europe for likely candidates, settling on George the Elector of Hanover, whose mother Sophie was James 1st's granddaughter. The Act of Union in 1707 had inveigled Scotland of its sovereignty. So George 1st's controversial accession in 1714 provoked a series of Catholic Stuarts from 1715 to 1746 to return to claim the throne. Whipping up rebellion in Scotland against becoming the obedient lapdog of England. All these Jacobite rebellions ultimately failed. With the death, in 1788, of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart dynasty finally came to an end. The era of the newly concocted entity 'Great Britain' began.

Succession became the least of the Hanover dynasties challenges as the 18th century progressed. The imposition of a Stamp Tax upon tea imported by the British East India Company, proved a huge misjudgement. American colonists, fearing that Britain was about to unleash the depredations of the East India Company upon them. A company with a reputation for unprincipled and corrupt trading practices. Proud in their independent non-conformist origin, Americans were not going to accept being preyed upon or penalised in this way. A delivery of the equivalent today of a million pounds worth of Indian tea was thrown into Boston Harbour. In short order, such righteous indignation quickly accelerated into an all out revolutionary war. America declared its independence in 1776, and the ensuing seven years of war ended in an ignominious British defeat. By 1783, America was a nation permanently separated from the auspices of British control.

Six years later, revolution came closer to home, across the English Channel in France. Where economic and political crisis was tearing that country apart. As ever, it was the imposition of taxes upon its citizens by a high handed insensitive monarchy, that triggered the initial revolt, stirring demands for representative people's democracy. That this ended in the monarchy being sent to the guillotine, spread alarm across all the other monarchies of Europe. As France descended into anarchy, the government of privileged landowners and nobility that ran the recently launched capitalist economy of Great Britain, feared a copy cat revolution erupting here.

Back in the leafy green rural countryside of England, there were simmering resentments, but mostly of a different origin. A revolution was brewing, but a technological one. For many centuries England had a vibrant trading economy within Europe, mostly through the superiority of its wool and weaving industries. The working backbone of this industry depended upon a vast army of compliant peasant spinners and weavers working in there own small holdings, or doing piecework for local farmers. This was labour intensive, poorly paid, but nevertheless integral to the functioning of a local, and distinctly rural based economy.

In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, a machine that could spin multiple threads of yarn simultaneously. Vastly increasing production and reducing costs, this one single technological innovation had dramatic consequences. A huge increase in the production of spun yarn, led to increasing demand for any remaining 'common land' to be enclosed.  Enclosure of common land, as we have documented in earlier episodes in this series, had been a long running sore of discontent amongst rural peasantry. This process had, until now, been executed in an illegal ad-hoc way for centuries, as common land was stolen by powerful influential landowners simply performing a land grab. The difference in the eighteenth century, was that you could legally apply to Parliament to enclose the land. And, as Parliament was literally stuffed to the gills with self serving landowners, thousands of such appeals were easily granted over the 18th and 19th centuries. All in order to meet the burgeoning demand for more profitable grazing and arable land.

Besides technological there were procedural innovations like crop rotation systems. Further enabling enclosure, these processes revolutionised the efficiency of the wider arable agriculture economy. Putting additional economic pressures on rural peasant workers as they fought to keep their poorly paid jobs, in the face of a rapidly declining need for them as a workforce. What started as the 18th century Agricultural Revolution evolved into the 19th century Industrial Revolution. It then became easier to relocate the entire spinning and weaving industries into the innovative large manufacturing factories, based near or in towns. Where access to energy and transport was easier to obtain. And the poorly paid cheap labour would simply have to follow.

All of these 'revolutions' in agriculture and production led to the collapse of the rural economy in the late 18th century. Poor people gave up the fight over enclosures and left the countryside in huge numbers for the towns, simply in order to survive. In the early decades of the 19th century, these former rural farm workers were further disaffected by the conditions they found they were expected to work in, in these new factories. They formed themselves into gangs that went around destroying the spinning and weaving factories that had sprung up. The new machinery being literally smashed to bits or incinerated. Was this the begining of a similar revolution kicking off in England, to those in France?

These weaving machine wreckers were referred to as 'Luddites'. Used at the time and ever since as a pejorative term, for someone mindlessly destroying the machines of human progress. But that was far from the whole truth of the matter. A large section of society, the newly urbanised working class, were being routinely mistreated. Their former rural lives had already been ruined, their lifestyle destroyed by the juggernaut of technological progress rolling over them. The Luddite revolts were driven by a demand for their contemporary plight to be taken notice of. Truly atrocious working and living conditions, low poverty wages and the erosion of any skilled workmanship, was rife. Rather than being anti progress, they were anti the wilful degradation of their humanity in the pursuit of this progress. But the greedy desire for increased profit and efficiency in this newly industrialised capitalist economy, was not going to be so easily derailed.

It simply exacerbated centuries old inequalities, long held resentments over how ordinary working class people had no real say in what happened to them. Not allowed to vote, they found they had little option but to take to the streets in protest and these could easily tip over into violent affray. In the aftermath of the Luddite rebellions, a campaign for democratic representation did step up. An economic slump after the end of the Napoleonic war, the failure of the harvest in 1815, made worse by the Corn Laws artificially keeping the price of bread high, and anger over less than 2% of the population having the right to vote, lay festering at its core. A large rally was organised, attended by 60,000 people in Manchester, on St Peter's Field. Local authorities, nervous at such an unusually large number of protesters, sent in the military to break up what had actually been a largely peaceful gathering. In the ensuing panic, as soldiers charged through the crowd on horseback, their swords in their hands, eighteen people were killed and up to seven hundred injured. This was the infamous Peterloo Massacre.

This level of fatalities and the disproportionate nature of the response, caused a public outcry. Fearful of giving further credence, and hence purpose, to such large protests and rallies, the Tory government simply cracked down harder. Banning all unauthorised gatherings, plus manufacturing an alleged insurrection, in order to justify this suppression. Stoked up fears of revolution being on the edge of breaking out. The Peterloo Massacre was to become a truly potent symbol for the injustice and plight of ordinary peoples lives. It clearly highlighted what was truly rotten and morally indefensible in how the governing elites ran Great Britain. Voting reform slowly developed an inevitable momentum, that had its totemic beginnings in what happened in St Peter's Field, Manchester on the 16th August 1819.

The Next Episode - Peaceably if we May, Forcibly if we Must.