It is so welcomingly hot
this July morning, sitting outside
beneath the shade of a parasol
with the fanning cool of breeze,
reading these newspapers.

Over the road, doors
are open to New Life Church
who every Sunday worship there,
weekend learners in the
school’s assembly hall,

allowing air in and their
pretty singing out,
hymns which partly sooth the barbs
of my absolute disdain for
this benediction.

They cheer too,
whoops of winning and joy at
a challenge being played, bonding
within the psychology of
such struggle and belief

in their belonging. I thank
the summer’s sun and our brief walk
together before this shared serenade,
the two of us doing our best
with uncertainty.

[Originally posted April 2013]

May You Never Forget

This is undoubtedly John Martyn’s most popular album, following on from Bless the Weather and including the title track which was written for Nick Drake after his sad early death. This song and album once again joins the idiosyncratic bass playing of Danny Thompson with Martyn’s acoustic guitar and equally distinctive vocal, now beginning to develop a slightly lower timbre – a nuance – but not the jazz slur of his next album; however, the sax of Tony Coe and vibes of Tristan Fry hint at the jazzier sounds to come later in John’s career.

Second Over the Hill returns us to the folk song/sound upon which John established his career and which graced so much of Bless the Weather, mandolin, autoharp and violin all played by Richard Thompson on this bright track. Next song Don’t Want to Know and seventh May You Never are two of the most beautiful and well-known songs written by Martyn, the latter probably having the most covers of any one of his works [a problematic homage in that John’s originals are so perfect].

I’d Rather Be the Devil provides another outing for John’s use of echoplex and other effects on his guitar and it is a dynamic piece of bluesrock with the soloing presaging so much of the brilliance we would all enjoy over the years, especially seeing Martyn playing live – listen to the exquisite echoplexed acoustic soundscapes dancing above Danny’s complex bass lines. Dreams By The Sea is another rousing rock track and these two definitely produce more overall variety on this album. The instrumental contribution of Rabbit (John Bundrick) plays a key role in the jazzier range too.  Closer The Easy Blues/Gentle Blues illustrates John’s virtuoso playing of acoustic blues, the speed matched by Danny’s dueling double bass and it is such a delightful tandem romp. Unforgettable brilliance throughout.

We have these
words:

frown
wrinkled
cold
sneer
command

so the plosive ‘c’ sound
is redundant

or superfluous

another meaningful word

as is the plethora
of negative language

[‘superfluous’ that is, being precise]

where ‘many
negative words’ would
really
very
alot
do

a different kind of superfluous language
I would prefer

to that taught by some teachers
who should know

better

the bestest word
for what
they should
know

to make this point.

[Image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand]

She drawls a slow song to the band’s easy
rhythms, a drive-by cruising down the riff’s
long melody. Red beret, Garbo-gloves up to elbows,
she introduces these boys here with a purr and they
play to her coy eulogies as if hopeful lovers.
It is a deliberate seduction, crafted like the patois that
crawls from nicotine air – a cigarillo drawn through
loose yellow-gold strands of hair – with lyrics of
licked lips after a night trip to downtown bars
becoming songs in dark alleys behind juke-box joints.
She sings the finer points of folk taking dreamy
rides through hot city streets in stolen cars,
the routes to where they’re heading mapped out in
Rickie Lee’s neon-flashed urban Americanese.

With some apologies for the title – but not much – I post this poem as it links to my previous, but also to say that it appears in Yesterday’s Music Today, an anthology of poems about music edited by Rupert Loydell and myself and still available at Knives Forks and Spoons Press here.

[Originally posted July 2013]

Rickie’s Wonderful Joint

Hit single Chuck E.’s In Love announced Rickie Lee Jones to the world and me in all its funky sass and beat storytelling, narratives made real by the grammar of the street, And he hang that sign on the door….He learn all of the lines. But the album also announced the folk songstress in the Joni Mitchell lineage, for example the sweet piano ballad On Saturday Afternoons in 1963. These ballads were also stunningly beautiful, Night Train as plaintively aching in this beauty as any we had heard before, the slur and harmonies in the vocals rising and rolling hypnotically, the poetry painting atmospherically,

Here she comes
I’m safe here with you
On the Night Train
Oh mama, mama.
Concrete is wheeling by
Down at the end of a lullaby
On the Night Train

Young Blood provided the strut that balances this perfect album of folk to be-bop, funk to jazz. Easy Money told one of the album’s many beatnik stories with characters living in the grooves. A song I would play again and again was the gorgeous The Last Chance Texaco, poetry and melody made beautifully poignant in the wonderful writing and singing of Rickie Lee,

A long stretch of headlights
Bends into 1-9
Tiptoe into truck stops
And sleepy diesel eyes
Volcanoes rumble in the taxi
And glow in the dark
Camels in the driver’s seat
A slow easy mark

This song has one of the most dramatic denouements, the motoring metaphors peaking in the vocal which harmonises at the end as a car that races by and away.

Side 2 of the vinyl picks up the beat with a clutch of storytellers, beginning here with Danny’s All-Star Joint – more places and people we grew to know so well – and Rickie recites her urban poetry

Your sister’s into mustard
She loves to walk the pup
She likes the pickles and the relish
She never gets enough
A Hershey milkshake
Steamin’ on a stick
For a Carte Blanche sandwich
Oh lettuce get thick…
It’s not because I’m dirty,
It’s not because I’m clean,
It’s not because I kiss the boys behind the magazine
Hey boys? How ‘bout a fight?
Cuz here comes Rickie with the girdle on tight
And if she don’t know your name
She knows what you got
From your matzo balls
To the chicken-in-the-pot
Chicken-in-the-pot
Chicken-in-the-pot

and of course we love it because Rickie is dirty, the sleaze and sass as taut as her girdle.

Then we visit Coolsville to meet Bragger and Junior Lee, just before bopping over to Weasel and the White Boy Cools to hang out with Sal, Angela, Perry and Mario. It is just so……cool.

Penultimate Company is all late night jazz and blues, so sweetly sung – just listen to how Rickie delivers the verse

I’ll see you in another life, baby
I’ll free you in my dreams
But when I reach across the galaxy
I will miss your company

and beyond, the sweeping strings unable to compete with the rising beauty of her vocals.

This brilliant album ends on After Hours [Twelve Bars Past Goodnight] and we are lullabyed to loneliness with Rickie Lee’s Laura Nyroesque lament, saying goodbye to the vivid world we have also inhabited for those two glorious sides,

And all the gang has gone home
And I’m standing on the corner
All alone

the seed
is a weed

flower too
we know

planted
to grow

but also
a sword

for those
who saw

a bloom
pushed

into soil
knowing

or not
as who

knows
and then

they will
fall upon

or should
having

been that
sure of

its slice
this way

or that
now when

their seed
will make

others cut
and bleed

Questions and Observations

At the end of reading an Ian Seed prose poetry piece you will very likely want to ask a question. Very often you will need to ask a question. At other times you are quite simply learning: that you can swat flies dead with a Russian novel, probably Crime and Punishment or Dead Souls – and probably paperbacks if they have been pulled from a rucksack – but you mustn’t use insect spray without first anticipating its trajectory and destination.

Other times at the end of reading an Ian Seed prose poetry piece you can be surprised by the sudden tenderness shown or taken in by a sense of fear that you have been told is ridiculous but gets you scared all the same. It is the crying and what happened at childhood.

The joy of an account like Tunnel.

And who would have thought that being free would cause so much anxiety?

Shining shining a light on melancholy and karma.

One question I have to ask about another train journey is should I feel bad when I smiled at that first joke about dementia – I’m sure it was a joke – especially when later on I was taken to her more painful reality?

I once had a girlfriend called Jane and she walked right past me in Ipswich when she was my girlfriend.

Is poet P. a real person and would I know her/him if they sat next to me having a haircut too this Friday?

Wir haben deinen Ring gefunden.

And how Abuse resonates beyond those borders of real and unreal, imagined and experienced: how storytelling is magical and disturbing in these talented hands.

The first two sentences of Translator is a great joke.

The German football team was dumped out of the World Cup this evening and didn’t show any of the defiance that man at the cinema did in Verboten.

Was it Peggy Mitchell?

Bad Breath is brilliant.

I am assuming the poet P. is not the Scottish poet Alan Jackson who may or may not have had a first collection Underwater Wedding.

And at the end I think distances is a good way of summing up all those uncertainties we as readers might want to reduce to knowns with our questions when we realise that they stretch out into both lament – by our being on the other side of them – but also into Ian Seed’s trademark intrigue – by our being on the other side of them.

I am a big fan and highly recommend you get it here at this excellent press.

these young people
understand the elderly

aware of their defiance
and the fragility of bone

how a skull was
once covered in thicker hair

and how vernacular
could be seen as singsong

or sassy or
the voice of stubbornness

and though they sift
through nouns and verbs and

enjambment
they also empathise

and never mention autumn
or other old allusions