I’ve just been listening to Burnin’ by The Wailers. When I first heard it fifty years ago, I had no idea what a duppy was. It was four years later when I befriended some Jamaicans that I learnt that a duppy is a malevolent spirit. It’s both a singular a plural noun. When Bob declares he’s a fully conqueror, he’s claiming he can overcome all kinds of evil.
I wish I could have persuaded my parents that obsessing over music is educational. Mind you, my kids claim that computer games improve concentration and problem solving. I don’t believe them.
What have you learnt?
17 is half of 37.
That’s the last time I ask Heaven 17 to help with my Maths homework.
Nothing from Nothing leaves Nothing – Billy Preston is more mathematically helpful
I find Kate Bush is excellent with irrational numbers. She’s not so bad at history either.
Enola Gay – I though it was just part of the cycle of songs Joan Of Arc / Maid Of Orleans.
I was wrong – Pop Music teaches History (a lot better than my O Level History Teacher – less droning and essay setting)
That’s all very well but Frankie says sex and horror are the new gods.
Everything I need to know I learned from iron maiden
https://www.southeastofheaven.com/?p=10867
https://ultimateclassicrock.com/iron-maiden-history-lessons/
and the name of a medieval torture device
Many years ago, the large scale Ordnance Survey maps on film we used were stored in several large cabinets, which we called Iron Maidens. They had four, long, curved spikes from which the maps hung. Two were fixed to the back of the ‘Maiden’, and two to the front. The front hinged forward. Select a map from its tabbed hanger, pull the front forward, and take the map off the fixed hangers. Taking care not to fall into the thing off the step (the ‘duckboard’) in front, as someone once did.
There’s a mediaeval German torture thingy (I think called a Richtrad) like a spiked cartwheel which had nothing on those cabinets.
That is beyond brilliant. Thank you @vincent
I’m entirely educated by folk songs and folk singers.
Me too. Ask me anything about The Diggers. In 1649, to St George’s Hill…
Yes. I recently commented that asking ‘Where in the world is Van Diemen’s Land?’ would be a reasonably pitched question at your local pub quiz. Ask the same question of a bunch of folkies and they’d all get it.
I don’t know the folk reference. I’d answer with absolute certainty in the pub quiz thanks to Matthew Kneale”s brilliant novel English Passengers.
Or fans of The U2s might know it from Rattle & Hum.
Or from Bill Douglas’ brilliant film Comrades, which is free to watch on Vimeo. (Unfortunately split up into 12 parts).
It’s my all-time favourite British film, alongside Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives.
It tells the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. But it’s as much a tribute to the early history of cinema as it is to the history of trade unions. It’s an artistic, poetic epic divided into two halves, the first showing the deprivation and poverty of rural workers in 1830’s Tolpuddle, the second under the blazing hot sun of Van Diemen’s Land, where the Martyrs were exiled.
This comment appears to have turned into a film review.
Stars:
Phil Davies
Keith Allen
James Fox
Vanessa Redgrave
Freddie Jones
Imelda Staunton
Barbara Windsor
Michael Horden
Michael Clark (the The Fall/Derek Jarman ballet guy)
Might appeal to anyone who enjoyed:
Terence Davies, Terrence Malick, A Very British Coup, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist
https://vimeo.com/search?q=comrades%20(1986)
Have you actually watched it, Gary?
A few times. I love it. I have it on DVD. Watch it. Treat yourself while you’re still lucid. It’s Barbara Windsor’s best film of her career. Same goes for everyone else who’s in it.
In the song Pocahontas Neil Young wrote
For years I had no idea what kitty corner was, now with the Internet two ticks and it means diagonally opposite. Still not sure what it’s to do with the buffalo though.
I asked Marlon Brando that once, and the look he gave me certainly wasn’t butter.
I do know one and one is two
And if this one could be with you
What a wonderful world this would be.
But Frank Zappa absolutely insisted that one and one was eleven and two and two was twenty two. So confusing.
And Medicine Head calculated it as one and one is one.
It’s a most confusing world
Always ask They Might Be Giants:
I learnt a lot from listening to Momus not least the next bit of the story of Lot from the Old Testament. Shocking stuff that I never heard at mass… and he was supposed to be the good man spared from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah! Parental Advisory if you plan to listen to “the Lesson of Sodom According to Lot.”
Carole King’s Where You Lead is inspired by the Book Of Ruth and teaches us all about the complexities of mother daughter-in-law relationships.
Families, eh? Been a problem since mankind was invented.
Joseph had curtains with nice tie-backs. Always houseproud was Joe.
The thing about Joseph – if he did close his eyes and then drew back the curtain, now could he possibly see for certain?
And don’t get started, elsewhere, to Leon Trotsky. I still envisage him with ears aflame.
I posted this back at the old place: One of my history O Level classmates wrote in a test “Trotsky was killed with a toothpick”. The teacher read it out to everyone.
I guess if you were to kill someone with a toothpick, you’d hammer it into their ear and make their ears burn.
Desperate Dan probably used an ice pick as a toothpick..
The Beatles’ back catalogue is littered with stuff either long forgotten or, especially outside the British Isles, never known in the first place.
Who in America would have linked “the pretty nurse is selling poppies…” with Remembrance Day?
Has anyone ever collected them all together?
“Made the bus in seconds flat.
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke”
From the days when the upper deck on British buses was a thick fog of cigarette smoke as people made their way to work or school in the morning rush.
I learned that smiling faces sometimes pretend to be my friend. I must also beware the handshake that hides the snake!
Space is the place!
I already suspected it was so, actually.
‘Twas kind of Sun Ra to confirm.
When my dad (born in Morocco, worked in London in the 60s and 70s) took us kids for a walk he always hummed a singalong melody which I always thought was an old Arabian or Berber folk song.
A couple of weeks ago I listened to the MOJO covermount CD of Pink Floyd-related stuff, and there it was: »our« walk-in-the-park melody. Turns out it is the theme tune to »Steptoe And Son«!
Never heard it before.
Marvellous.
What’s the Pink Floyd-Steptoe connection (apart from a dodgy cover band name)?
Guitarist and vocalist Syd Barrett followed Jenner’s humming with his guitar and used it as the basis for the principal melody of “Interstellar Overdrive”. Bassist Roger Waters once told Barrett that the song’s riff reminded him of the theme tune from Steptoe and Son (by Ron Grainer).
I like that. Fits in with the comic, pixie wildness of Barrett.
“Does it Rog(2 – I’ll always be the first Rog, and don’t ever forget it, you pale imitation)? Now why would that be?”
I’m thinking up the plotlines for a ‘long lost’ late 60s Steptoe episode where the Floyd turn up at 26a Oil Drum Lane, ostensibly in pursuit of vintage Victorian clobber for their next appearance at the UFO club.
Albert is keen to ingratiate himself with this young, happening, psychedelic group and shows them the clothes rack of ‘gear’ acquired round the back of one of the musical theatres off Shrewsbury Avenue, trying to engage a rather abstracted Syd who appears to be the leader.
Albert just wants to know his much money they can make off these middle class ponces.
Roger picks up on Harold’s pretensions and decides to engage him in conversation, patronisingly assuming he can best him in debate.
With Harold otherwise occupied, Syd starts flirting with Albert, who had spent the previous scene selling dodgy beer to Nick, and challenging him to a drinking competition. Half cut, Albert is easily persuaded by Syd to join him in trying out some costumes from HMS Pinafore.
Meanwhile, Rog and Harold’s conversation has turned to the World Wars and Harold, indignant at Roger scoffing at his medals, delivers him a haymaker, knocking him flat on his back.
All along, Rick, who uncovered an ancient harmonium under a dust sheet, had been experimenting with various forms of amplification rigging up an old pneumatic drill and a diesel generator.
As Steptoe fist connected with Waters jaw, the rising chordal strains of the studious Mason maesto reached peak crescendo and the generator exploded.
“Set the Controls for the Heart of the Slum” was the provisional title for the episode.
Yep I’d watch that.
I feel as though I already have.
Oops! I meant “Harold is keen to ingratiate himself”…
You wait ages for a mashup, then two come along, one behind the other.
Blur vs Steptoe & Son: