We should remember here the plaintive and ironic comment by Who guitarist Pete Townshend, from 2006, talking about his own hearing impairment: ‘I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf’. The Who were once (in 1976) named ‘The Loudest Band In the World’, of course.

Extreme volume is part of the rock aesthetic. From a quick scan among my old albums and singles, I was reminded that the back cover of David Bowie’s 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars contains the instruction TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME, for example. The contemporary English experimental rock band My Bloody Valentine were notorious for employing loud volumes in live performances; their reunion concerts in 2008 and 2009 were noteworthy for the controversy around the extreme loudness, with earplugs on offer at the doors and some audience members leaving because they felt ‘physically distressed’ by the noise. Bandleader Kevin Shields (who himself has tinnitus) has defended the band’s sonic aesthetic—which include trying to induce a state of physical unbalance or disorientation via the volume and frequency of the sounds produced—but also acknowledged the difficulty.

We play with low frequencies that are nothing like anyone has ever heard before—it’s a chaos that sets off a kind of inbuilt alarm system…. We’d like to say that it is cool to wear earplugs; it’s not cool to get your hearing damaged. And anyway, feeling the music is a great experience.

Over the past few years there has been a slew of journalistic and academic articles about, as one put it, ‘music making fans deaf’, and musicians. These writings have been prompted by the hearing loss experiences of the ageing rock generation combined with new concerns about young people’s encounters with loudness via personal stereos. Writing in Rolling Stone in 2005, Jonathan Ringen mapped out the affected male generation: ‘[i]n 1989, Pete Townshend admitted that he had sustained “very severe hearing damage”. Since then, Neil Young, Beatles producer George Martin, Sting, Ted Nugent, [Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood] and Jeff Beck have all discussed their hearing problems’. An advice booklet produced by a campaign group called Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers (yes, that’s HEAR) quotes the following statistic: ‘60% of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are hearing impaired’.

In rock, then, loudness is part of the package: this is seen clearly in album titles like Nazareth’s Loud ‘N’ Proud (2010) and Ozzy Osbourne’s Live & Loud (1993), or song titles such as Kiss’s ‘I love it loud’ and ‘Shout it out loud’ (available on the album Sonic Boom). The career of British glam rocker chart-toppers Slade exemplifies the aesthetic: their 1970 album, their first with the name Slade, is called Play It Loud, their final album in 1987 You Boyz Make Big Noize. The first of their three singles to enter the British charts at no. 1 was ‘Cum on feel the noize’ (1973), later covered by Quiet Riot and by Oasis; intriguingly the effect of the group’s characteristic mis-spelling of song titles works only in, in Lennard J. Davis’s term, deafened mode. But it is Slade’s 1981 album Till Deaf Do Us Part, their most heavy rock- rather than pop-oriented record, which is particularly notable. Guitarist Dave Hill claimed responsibility for the album title, explaining the perverse thought behind the ‘twist on words’: ‘What would separate you from your fans, what would it be if they went deaf?’ Hmm…

____________________________________

Mellipsis. The first one is from over 20 years ago, from when I lived and played in Glasgow with several bands, for one of which I wrote all the music. When I joined Swerve I dug out the archive of old pieces, to see if they were any good, and which if any might be suitable for this line-up. As soon as we first played this one even roughly through we thought it would work. It’s a sort of minor jazz waltz, with a fairly standard structure of A-A-B-A, almost 32 bars (actually 33—there’s an extra bar at the end of the B section throughout), solos over head chords. It was originally called ‘Mmm…’, which looked good on paper but was terrible to say live at gigs, so I’ve nuanced the title. Now it’s called ‘Mellipsis’. It had its first public outing in 20 years last month when we opened the Morecambe Jazz club.

____________________________________________________________________________

Alleycat boys. The second composition is a new piece from this year, called ‘Alleycat boys’. This one in fact is 32-bar, A-A-B-A, very standard. First came the A section bass line, just wanting to have a little bit of an African jazz feel, picking up probably some of that Blue Notes/ Chris McGregor/Brotherhood of Breath/Dedication Orchestra rhythm from listening to those musics for years. G maj-D maj-C maj, but with the drive of the bass line. I added a B section where it goes to E min and A min. I used to try and write more clever music (which I was honestly not very good at), now I’m more comfortable aiming for a straightforward and, well, in an ideal world, memorable melody. The drums here really propel it forward. It’s great to be writing again—even at my rudimentary level, that of the autodidact musician—, especially with a trio like Swerve who will find what works quickly and enhance the very bare bones of chords and melody I produce into something altogether more interesting.

Thanks to all who made it to the event on Wednesday night. A packed house, good discussion, books sold out, lots of interesting people there doing great things with private, public, squatted gardens. Now, as someone suggested, when and where are we planting Kropotkin’s Garden?…

___________________________________________________________________________

I am delighted to be doing a talk about the book at perhaps the best-known radical bookshop in London, Housman’s. (More soberingly, Housman’s describes itself as ‘one of Britain’s last radical bookshops’.) This is in a series of weekly talks about politics, culture, contemporary society organised by STIR magazine (alliterative strapline: ‘ANGER. ANALYSIS. ACTION’).

Housman’s has a hugely interesting history, related to and a pivotal part of the peace movement since the 1930s:

Housmans Bookshop originally opened on 26 October 1945. Its roots, however, go back to the great upsurge of the British pacifist movement in the 1930s, marked particularly by the founding of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) by Dick Sheppard in 1934….

In 1958, thanks to the enthusiasm and generosity of Tom Willis and other Peace News supporters, it became possible to acquire a freehold building at 5 Caledonian Road, Kings Cross. After renovation of the then almost 100-year-old premises, Peace News moved into the upper floors during the summer of 1959, and Housmans resumed as a fully fledged bookshop. Dora Dawtry publicly declared the shop open, in the presence of Vera Brittain, at a ceremony on 20 November, to coincide with the Peace News Christmas Bazaar held nearby.

A definite fillip to the Housmans business was the emergence of the vibrant nuclear disarmament movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, with CND and Committee of 100 material, and a proliferation of other pamphlets and literature, in stock. The shop also served the local community as a general bookshop, greeting cards stockist and stationery retailer. Endsleigh Cards (named after the street in which the PPU offices stood), another trading brand of Peace News, were regularly stocked, especially useful for sending to imprisoned COs all over the world on Prisoners for Peace Day, 1 December each year.

Do come to the talk! And ask a question or make a comment. 7 pm, Wednesday 18 April, Housman’s Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX (just round the corner from the British Library).

At a Rhythm Changes project meeting at Lancaster University on Friday March 15 2012. Usually project meetings are taken up with administration and bureaucracy but we determined to make some time for the discursive and interrogative during these three days. Here we are discussing the transnational and national in relation to European jazz, and I sketch the arguments I made in Circular Breathing (2005) about these questions. They revolve around three main sets of ‘outernational’ (Paul Gilroy) interactions: transatlantic exchange, British imperial / Commonwealth networks, and European gazes.

The Rhythm Changes website explains:

In the interests of sparking conversation and spreading ideas more widely, we thought it would be good to capture a flavour of some of the discussions we’ve been having at our research meeting these past few days, and make them available for you to watch, overhear and respond to.

Think of this series of short videos as conversation starters, an invitation to engage and discuss ideas, as well as just an insight into some of the debates we’ve been having ourselves around these topics.

But why no ‘Hey hey take me away’? Maybe because it is Dury’s most harrowing and direct song about disability, and the abusive treatment of (and by) youngsters in residential special schools? I suppose such a song doesn’t really fit the feelgood if righteous atmosphere of the play. And for a play full of audience participation—more a rock gig that a play in fact—with a dozen and more characters and musicians on stage sharing banter, and twiglets, with the public, not doing the call-and-response style ‘I’m Spasticus!’ at the end of what was actually a fiercely, fiercely powerful version of that still brilliant song felt a misjudged missed opportunity. By the way, giving that song to the outstanding female lead, physically disabled punkette Nadine, who sings it after she’s overheard herself described as a ‘sympathy shag’ by her boyfriend, makes it convincingly angry and angrier. Hello to you out there in Normal Land.

The revelation was a fabulously sexy staging of ‘Wake up and make love with me’, where the centre stage was empty but for a lowlit spot circle with BSL signer and dancer Debbie er signing the song and its acts with hands, body, eyes, and singer John Kelly, a central still presence. It’s easy to overdo Dury, and lose the subtleness his voice and face could have in all the Oi! Oi! cockney stuff (see Andy Sirkis’s occasional lapse into gurn in the recent biopic), but that’s exactly what Kelly doesn’t do. Instead there is a careful kind of underperformance from him, in which his voice does almost all the work. This is a guy in a motorised wheelchair who is not, as they say, severely able-bodied, and most of whose choreography consists of little moves of the wheelchair, circles on the stage, or an occasional rhythmic shift of the head and neck on ‘Sex & drugs & rock & roll’ (just like Dury used to do). A black-gloved hand on a wasted arm holding a mic stand ‘like it’s a surgical appliance’ (as a review once described Dury) elegantly makes the link of a disabled pop performance tradition: Gene Vincent-Dury-Graeae. The erotic charge of Debbie and Kelly’s performance on ‘Wake up’ sets up the terrifically mundane post-coital last verse wonderfully: ‘I’ll go and get the post/And make some tea and toast/You have another sleep love/It’s me that needs it most’. In this song and in the accusation and reclamation of ‘Spasticus’ the play moves most confidently away from any easy punk nostalgia.

What a show! 13 people on stage throughout—actors, musicians, signers, facilitators—and a big busy set that’s a cross between a rock gig stage and an Essex pub, with a drum kit centre-rear and a pool table at the side, with a slide show overhead showing all the lyrics, captioned dialogue, and some fun animations. Oh and bunting and strings of lightbulbs round stage and stalls to give a salty flavour. (Dury contracted his polio in the seaside town of Southend.) A great cast in ensemble, and some terrific musicians too. In authentic punk style, the show’s joins and edges—its rips and torns—as well as the raw and obvious emotions of youthful anger and desire are all on display. Most of the singing responsibilities are taken by the two men in wheelchairs. OK the script and plot could have done with a bit more work, but the power of the show, that has the audience clapping every number and whooping and screaming for more at the end, lies in its capturing the performance of the music. More: it reminds us of how a popular music artiste had important things to say about being disabled, and that those things and that culture still matter.

And there are some great gags too. The lead punk Vinnie breaks the frame to tell us that that singer John Kelly actually wrote as a youngster to the BBC in 1981 when he heard that ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ had been banned. ‘What did you say in your letter, John?’ asks Vinnie. ‘Dear Director-General of the BBC, You’re a cunt,’ replies John to raucous laughter, adding with feigned disbelief, ‘And I never even got a reply.’ Vinnie’s dad, a working-class socialist activist, does a swearing rant against the Tories (this is 1979 remember), finishing with The Tories are … the Tories are… He’s tired himself out—he’s dying you see—and then he remembers the Dury introduction to ‘Plaistow Patricia’: The Tories are [smiles to audience] … ‘arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks!’ And away goes the band, nearly as good as the Blockheads, which is a BIG compliment.

Graeae’s Reasons to be Cheerful is touring England and Scotland until April 2012. See it or be unhappy. At the end you will demand encores plural, loudly.

Radical Gardening

___________________________________________________________

First in the form of book extracts of the exhibition’s rather impressive website. That is, my book is included, in the language of the exhibition, as a contribution to the ‘online venue’s … resonance [of the] zones of intensity’…. From the letter of invitation:

A few photos from the first gig of 2012 by the band, taken by Emma McKay. Live at the Stonewell, Lancaster, on January 19th. Thanks to Dave Wright. We are back there in May, and have a number of other gigs through the spring. Hope you can make one. The gig list of dates and venues is here.

This project builds on four current Connected Communities Programme (CCP) projects. It seeks to demonstrate the potential, challenges and capacity of innovative shared creative activities for developing community connections and identities through transformative experiences. It does so in the context of the everyday cultural practice of community farming and gardening. The four current CCP projects were represented at the 2011 CCP Summit, at which three of the applicants were also present…. These projects have already created new knowledge on how communal acts of creativity can contribute significantly to transformative experiences for communities and individuals and portray the personal and communal significance of involvement in food growing, community farming and gardening. They have involved three communities in the production of social media, community film-making, exhibitions at a community farm and a community centre, and the creation of an innovative ‘talking’ quilt stitched by community members that contains interactive audio elements of personal narratives about food. The new project will continue the work with these three communities that are involved in communal food growing in Sussex, Manchester, and inner London. The community collaborators themselves also wish to continue and deepen the engagement with each other, the academic collaborators and other shared interest communities….

The proposed project will … also demonstrate the role of arts-based creative activity for connecting communities, researchers and other stakeholders. In order to ensure the proposed project develops a broad view of community creativity and how communities relate to university researchers it will also draw on two other current CCP projects that have been reviewing related areas of research: one on the spaces and processes of community cultures (PI: McKay) and the other on how university research contributes to the emergence of community cohesion and resilience (PI: Hart). McKay’s expertise is doubly relevant: as well as the current CCP work on community music, his latest book, Radical Gardening (2011), explores the history, cultural and political significance of the garden.

There are a number of theoretical and empirical reasons for continuing the focus on communities involved in communal food growing and the community farm and garden movement. Food growing both communally and individually is a rapidly increasing socio-cultural phenomenon where new capacities, identities, connectivities and politics are emerging and whose empirical and theoretical significance is not yet fully understood. The number of community gardens in England in 2010 was four times greater than in 2005 (Milbourne 2011) and a number of public bodies have funded new communal gardens. The allotment movement more widely thrives in Britain today (McKay 2011). The CCP project on health and community gardening (PI: Church) has used longitudinal data to show that food growing has become increasingly popular in western Europe in the last decade with the fastest national rates of growth found in the UK, where the proportion of the population involved has risen from 4% to 14% in the short period between 2003 and 2007. Gardening and food preparation are everyday cultural practices which can also involve highly creative activities that are fundamental to self, identity and personal well-being (Cooper 2006). Individuals can experience such creativity as meaningful even if they feel their financial resources, skills and knowledge constrain their practices (Bhatti and Church 2001). Also, as one of the Co-Is has shown, communal gardening spaces can enable transformative and radical activities that question the structures of contemporary society and human-nature relations (McKay 2011).

Independent On Sunday, Books of the Year: ‘A fascinating and erudite history’

The Guardian, Gardening Books of the Year:  ’hugely thought-provoking’

Daily Telegraph: ‘this book is compelling … a highly original history’

Times Higher Education: ‘a bravura account … a truly important book’

The Scotsman: ‘if you’ve been labouring under the delusion that gardening is a staid suburban pastime, this is the book that will change your mind’

The Nowtopian: ‘fantastic, in-depth … a gorgeous, highly readable, and very provocative contribution’

Publishers’ Weekly: ‘a richly-detailed guide’

Library Journal: ‘an eye-opening alternative study … highly recommended’

RIBA Journal: ’inspiring cultural gallop through an alternative history of green in the city’

He was a stupendously enthusiastic scholar of popular music, and had an intimidating encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. Not just that: he knew at least half of the people he talked about. I remember once saying I’m working on polio and pop, and looking a little at Doc Pomus. Dave’s reply started with ‘Yeah I met him at a party once’. To me, these were distant figures; to Dave they were just people in the scene in the city, he’d met or knew. He came to the UK and made it, and Salford, a more interesting place to be. What generosity of spirit, what curiosity and love of music and culture.

Dave came to academia relatively late, and I’ve always thought was tremendously brave in his move as a single man in his 50s aross the Atlantic–from NYC to Manchester! from the industry and archives to the academic life. It was my job once to try to ‘manage’ him… disastrous! How are your bidding targets going, and is the website updated? ‘Yeah, right, George, I’m straight onto it.’ He put his energies into organising events: ‘there’s an exhibition in town on FAC and the Hacienda, ok, let’s have a symposium here to tie in with it’. A conference on film and soundtracks—bringing his love of music and screen together (I look forward to the book of that one). And bringing the IASPM 2012 conference to Salford. Seminars with great speakers—and him usually the best of all at that.

Too soon, far too soon. There were more books in him! RIP, Prof.

________________________________________________

There is a very moving tribute page, Remembering David Sanjek, on the IASPM-US website.

There is a Facebook page, Dave Sanjek Memorial Page.

There is a School of Media, Music & Performance, University of Salford memorial site, In Memory of Professor David Sanjek.

Please do have a look, write or ‘like’, upload a foto or a memory.