Layer 384 . . . Finding A Voice, Teaching Writing, Education, Traditions, Enlightenment, Zen Socialism, Ed Miliband and the Labour Party

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Personal Voice

So why are some of us keen to write, whilst others run a mile from the idea? The esteem we have for 'proper' writers is both a magnet and a deterrent. We grow up thinking and believing that novelists, playwrights, biographers, journalists, columnists and writers of learned tomes are all special people. Some people have large enough egos to see themselves  as potential and future members of the writers club. Others just think they have no voice worth listening to.

Teachers and educators like Harold Rosen pioneered the idea that every single one of us has stories to tell, thoughts worth sharing and a voice worth listening to. What's more, children should discover their personal voice as soon as they are able to talk, and write.

Such radical ideas were starting to gain some traction in schools in England in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s, and then along came the New Labour national literacy strategy with its glib prescriptions, and which, in its stupidity, turned the clock back decades - thereby pretty much eliminating all ideas about young people finding a personal voice, writing for their own purposes, writing for audiences and writing for 'publication' - and enjoying writing as a thing that had personal meaning and utility.

We now have a generation of young people who have rarely completed an entire piece of writing which they chose to write as an expression of their own thoughts, memories, feelings and ideas. Or indeed any piece of writing. We have thousands of young people who know how to construct long sentences full of 'connectives', adverbial phrases and "wow words", but they can't actually write well, and on the whole they choose not to. Lacking motivation to write, they don't do it unless they have to.

Wow words? Don't even ask.

I probably feel more angry about the way the  teaching of writing has been perverted by the NLS (New Labour Shitheads) than about anything else in the crazy world of schools and education. The harm that's been caused is immeasurable.

And why did this happen? Because schools were pressurised into doing it - in order to improve test scores and achieve government targets. Because school managers were desperate to improve test results - tests that awarded marks to pupils  for . . . guess what? Scatterings of connectives. Fistfuls of adjectival and adverbial phrases. Shitloads of wow words.

Oops - non-standard English. Short sentences. Must try harder.

After all, this is what proper writers do - innit? Write in long sentences, fill them with subordinate clauses, and use lots of flowery language. Brilliant.

What a stupid culture. What a mean, ridiculous, hopeless society. What a pathetic, ignorant, uncaring system.

Pity the poor kids who now have to unlearn all that bullshit about what good writing consists of. Poor bloody kids who've been bored to tears by meaningless coaching for pointless tests. Poor kids who've never enjoyed writing a single word in their entire lives, let alone enjoyed sharing their thoughts, their ideas and their imagination, in written form.

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How do we expect kids to articulate their thoughts competently when they rarely, if ever, have either opportunity or encouragement to do so? Let alone individual coaching and mentoring in how to express themselves in their personal voice.  All of which takes time, and empathy, with proper attention being paid to what the child is trying to say - not 'all eyes on the teacher and on the whiteboard' methodology, and exhortations to write in longer sentences and use more flowery language. Because that's what adults do, n'est-ce pas?

In order to say something, there ought to be something worth saying. Most of the writing assignments handed out in schools have no meaning whatsoever for the kids who are forced to carry them out. And the pupils aren't fools either - they know that the writing tasks are not genuine or useful, except in terms of preparation for tests. They're well aware they're just pawns in adults' political and professional games. And they're right to feel bloody resentful about that, even as they beaver away at their exercises and worksheets.

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Keeping Up Traditions

"You need to conserve your traditions in this country", said David Ginola, a decent and thoughtful man, and a sometimes brilliant former footballer, speaking on TV this week.

Is that really so? I can think of quite a few traditions we could happily lose. Too many to mention, really.

But what David was talking about was 'foreign' ownership of football clubs, and 'foreign' managers.

Since football's now just a business, and a branch of the entertainment industry, I guess we could say the same about any other business. Maybe we should be hankering after the distinctively British type of management that brought our major industries to their knees, and for that matter collapsed the banking and finance system. What a triumph for Anglo-Saxon ownership, leadership and management that turned out to be.

If you're a European by birth, is someone from another part of Europe a 'foreigner'? When will people learn that it's not the nationality of people and businesses that matter - it's the degree of enlightenment, creativity and imagination that's important. Worldwide we can all learn from one another in order to make a better planet.

The amusing thing at the end of the Ginola discussion was seeing the people who were taking part in it realise that Ginola is, well, foreign. And the gimp who presents the programme is Irish.

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Right now, the Labour party needs Ed Miliband's Zen socialism

Labour's leader should not listen to the goading of the coalition and media. He needs thinking time to plan the fightback

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/22/labour-ed-miliband-zen-socialism

by Jackie Ashley

What is the Labour party for?

That's the question being flung at Ed Miliband by almost every newspaper and by many of his own MPs.

Look around at the political reporting of Labour just now. It's as if a spew of lava has buried the landscape – a molten river of anger, burning lakes of score-settling and an ash-cloud of bitterness under which everything else has vanished.

Miliband's first job is to make sure that the angry, self-destructive mood of the moment does not wreck his leadership too. He attempted to put a line under the past, to give New Labour a decent burial and proclaim a new generation.

Miliband, I can report, is almost surreally relaxed, displaying the sang-froid that has so struck people in the Commons. He simply won't engage. He won't take sides, align himself with old quarrels or even listen to passionate explanations of what when wrong before.

They need to return to the party in the country, and the many who deserted Labour – and really listen to them.

They need to get inside the banking system and try to understand it from within.

They need to discover how to get more good people into local government, and how to strike a better balance between targets and bureaucracy.

They need to go back, rather humbly, to Labour councillors and party workers who felt snubbed and ignored during the years of New Labour, and discover how hard it became to mobilise and enthuse people. And then they need to rebuild policies from the bottom up, not simply watch what the coalition does, and say the opposite.

I hope Miliband holds his nerve. I suspect he will – some kind of Zen socialism we haven't come across before.

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Ed Miliband sets out 'profound' changes to Labour party

Exclusive: Labour leader reveals plans to review organisation and policies in first full interview since winning leadership contest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/21/ed-miliband-profound-changes-labour

Ed Miliband today launches his party on "the hard road back to power", saying it has to move beyond New Labour and commit to changes in policy and organisation as profound as those introduced by Tony Blair in 1994.

He also appears to clash with the shadow chancellor, Alan Johnson, by saying a 50p tax rate for those earning more than £150,000 should be permanent, as a way of creating greater equality in Britain. Making the country more equal, he says, is one of the issues that gets him out of bed in the morning.

He warns his party not to expect a quiet life, saying: "I am talking about change as profound as the change New Labour brought because the world itself has changed massively, and we did not really change fundamentally as a party, or come to terms with the changes, and have not done so since 1994."

Miliband dismisses suggestions he has been too low-profile since becoming party leader, saying: "It's about digging in, and it's not about short-term fixes, nor shortcuts to success. There is a long, hard road for us to travel." He does not accept that the deficit is the product of over-spending by Labour, but says British politics has not come to terms with the 2008 banking crisis and the economy's over- exposure to financial services.

He appears to disagree with Johnson, who has described the 50p top rate as only "right for now". Asked if the 50p rate was simply necessary to cut the deficit, Miliband says: "No, it's about statement about values and fairness and about the kind of society you believe in and it's important to me."

He sticks with Labour's plan to halve, as oppose to eradicate, the deficit by the end of the parliament, insisting he will not concede that the Labour government overspent before the 2010 election.

"I don't agree with what the Tories say about us overspending. They are on a mission and we know what their mission is and we have got to take them on. Their mission is to say 'This deficit is not the result of an international banking crisis, it is the result of a crisis in government'."

He also rejects suggestions he has been shifting to the centre since becoming leader in September, arguing: "I said during the election I was the person who would take us beyond New Labour. That's the way I ran as a candidate and that is the way I am going to run the party. We've got to recognise that in terms of who we stand up for – we as New Labour lost touch of people's hopes and aspirations."

The overarching task, he says, is to examine "how you can create greater social justice in the economy without having to rely only on redistribution and the welfare state.

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The Labour party can count itself itself extremely fortunate to have elected a leader who has some of his father's socialism in his soul, and is prepared to speak out for the founding principles of the Labour party. This is in contrast to brother David who sold his soul to New Labour and its scheming, triangulating, mealy-mouthed creatures of the night, most of whom were 'intensely relaxed' about the filthy rich getting even richer. Talking of which, there's a documentary on Mandelson being screened on TV this week - The Real PM. I do hope it focuses on his desire to become as filthy rich as his already filthy rich friends.

All power to Brother Ed, therefore, and his principled efforts to create a credible progressive party whose main aim is to transform society into a proper social democracy - a party that cares about social justice and creating greater equality, and isn't merely hungry for power for power's sake. For Britain to become more like Denmark, for example, would be extremely beneficial.

I'm beginning to think that Ed decided to try for the leadership of the party when he realised that it would otherwise fall into the hands of his NuLab brother, and hated to think what keeping on the New Labour path would do to Britain and to British politics.

He can take a lot of comfort from the fact that under his leadership Labour is already ahead in the polls . . . and things can only get better.
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Layer 260 . . . Finding Our Voices

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As I was saying in the last blog, I don't want my children, or other people's children, to sound like automatons, androids, cyborgs, or brainwashed products of a quasi-military production system. I want them to develop their own individual voices which they use to articulate their own individual thoughts and feelings; and I want them to feel like individuals with minds, souls and spirits which they themselves understand and feel comfortable with.

I've recently returned to a book written by Lucy McCormick Calkins called "Lessons From A Child". The subtitle is "On the Teaching and Learning of Writing".

In her introduction she says,

Thankfully my first teaching experiences were in an urban high school where attendance averaged 60% and students weren't afraid to ask hard questions. "Why am I supposed to learn about Egypt?" they'd ask. "This is crazy stuff. Why are we doing this? So what?" When my year was over, I asked myself the same questions. "Why am I doing this? So what?"

In search of a vision, I began teaching first in Oxfordshire, England, and then in an alternative public school in Middlefield, Connecticut. Those readers who visited the British Primary Schools at their best will recognise ways in which their emphasis on collaborative learning, student initiative and craftsmanship have been re-discovered and extended within the context of the writing workshop. I agree with the great British educator, Charity James, who urges us to remember the roots of our innovations:

We are apt to think of our innovations as a new growth of the human spirit, which indeed they are, but this aspect in isolation can make the whole work seem too exciting, too perishable, for its own good. We must see ourselves also in this period as holding the line, as helping to maintain, through our new relationships with students and our new hopes for their learning, an older humanism which the march of matter, the parade of power, would otherwise destroy.

It was Donald Graves who showed me that beneath every research project there are human beings with stories to tell. "Every child has a story to tell," he often said, quoting Harold Rosen. "The question is, will they tell it to us?"

The answer was yes. Children, teachers, principals told us their stories because Graves showed us how to listen, how to see the significance in what others might think was ordinary.

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So it's voices; it's speaking, and it's listening. Do we grade our students on the power, the clarity, and the expressiveness of their individual voices? Of course not. Thankfully not.

[We care only about the length of their sentences, the number of 'connectives' they use, and whether they deliberately use plenty of 'wow words' - designed to demonstrate a working knowledge of multi-syllabic 'colourful' and 'sophisticated' English adjectives and adverbs.]

Do we grade them on their ability to listen to one another, and their ability to respond and to feed back, and to engage in open and genuine dialogue? Of course not.

We don't value these things - and is it any wonder therefore that we're so useless at them? And the pity is that no-one even cares, or even thinks it matters.

We value what we can measure, and we measure the things that don't even matter. Not any more. That's if they ever did.

Write an account of life in ancient Egypt. Say why their religious and political systems were important.

Fuck off.

Write an account of this week's soccer international between England and Egypt.

Ah yes. Now you're starting to interest me.

Say why John Terry was booed, why he's been deprived of the captaincy, and what this says about our current value systems and so-called morals.

Mmmmmm. Quite interesting.

Write an account of life in a contemporary British city. Describe the variety of lifestyles, the points of difference, and why they exist.

Describe why you're pissed off with the pressure of constantly being tested and graded and told that you're not 'on track' to reach the 'expected grades' in tests and exams. Say why you're so fucking bored and angry with this waste of your life, and why you hate school and our exam system so much. Say whether you're writing as a member of an 'advanced' set or 'stream', or from the point of view of someone who failed to become a 'high achiever'.

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Layer 185 Voices and Silence

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I seem to have come across quite a lot of things in the press recently about the concept of individual ‘voice’, which interests me greatly. Finally, nearly 30 years on from when I first started thinking about individual 'voice' (in connection with developing children as writers - having read things by Donald Graves, Lucy Calkins, the Rosens, and the CLPE project group) - there seems to be some sort of general awakening happening.

It’s interesting, and shocking, that so many adults never find their own ‘voice’. How many of us never discover the personal voice within us that’s uniquely ourselves, and become aware of what it has to say, and what it thinks and feels - what it cares about, what makes it feel angry, what makes it laugh, what makes it sad?

It’s the opposite of the bloke in the bar in The Fast Show, who parrots what he hears from his mates, what he reads in the newspaper, what he sees and hears on the TV and radio - the guy who has no considered opinions of his own - who just says things because he wants to be one of the crowd or the gang, and could never stand up for or defend a particular viewpoint, because he has no beliefs or convictions of his own.

To have a personal voice and to stand alone as an individual are obviously fraught and potentially risky things to have and to do. In any case - how do we ever really know what we ourselves really feel about things, as opposed to what we think we think, and feel, as a result of reading, seeing and hearing others give voice to their thoughts and feelings?

Conditioning and brainwashing go on from the time we’re born. We ingest the prevailing culture and its norms and beliefs without even knowing we’re doing it. In our teen age we may experience a reaction and a rebellion, as part of our wanting to become an individual in our own right, as part of the breaking with our parents’ and with society’s rules and dictats - but it’s an immature and ill-considered rejection, on the whole. More often than not, societal and parental values aren’t really replaced with anything more valid.

It’s often hard to challenge cultural and societal, as well as religious, orthodoxies, especially if we haven’t gone deeply into alternatives. Sometimes we pick up alternatives second-hand, as it were, and grab those views, and wear those clothes, because we think they suit us better, without ever having discovered why WE ourselves are rejecting cultural norms, without having discovered what WE think is ‘the truth’ from within. In such ways people become cult members, for example, or switch wildly between extreme political standpoints. “It seemed to make sense at the time”, is often our explanation or defence.

In matters of metaphysics and spiritual belief this becomes even more important. Things we can’t explain by logic or concrete testing and observation can ONLY be intuited. When we think about things like God and the spirit and ultimate reality we can only arrive at our own standpoints through personal reflection and meditation, through examining our innermost thoughts with utmost concentration, and by letting those thoughts rise to the conscious surface after gestating in our subconscious.

In order for that to happen we need lengthy periods of familiarising ourselves with our inner realms, and in order to do that we not only have to avoid outer distractions - we have to clear our minds and our spirits of inner clutter and ‘noise’. This takes time, and opportunity, which many of us feel we don’t have. What we may also lack is inclination. Why bother? What’s the point? Is it worth it anyway?

Well, you’ll never know unless you try - unless you take on personal responsibility for going down that road towards enlightenment, just as the Buddha did all those hundreds and thousands of years ago. After which he didn’t say, ‘Think what I think. Believe what I believe. Do what I say. Worship me and my divinity.’

He said only, “These are my truths. These are my beliefs. This is my enlightenment. Now set out on your own journey and seek your own.”

How many of us consciously do this, or even consider the need to do so?

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All of this, of course, has huge implications for schools, and for parents. I’m writing this now because I have time, and opportunity, and motivation. I know what I know and what I think because I’ve become practiced in doing so. Children don’t, on the whole, develop that practice unless they receive encouragement, and have time and opportunity.

Ask any child to write down their thoughts and feelings and they may baulk at it, and fail, because they may not have the language, the thinking skills, the habit of reflection, and the ability as a writer. Additionally they may not know what they know and feel because they’ve not been given enough time to stop, to sit, and to reflect. Writing anything meaningful to order is nigh on impossible for most of us, and certainly for most children.

Maybe this is why most teachers don’t do it. They don’t see the need, and it’s not in the National Curriculum. Nowhere does it say that children need to find their own voices, as speakers and writers. Yes - they sometimes are asked to ‘discuss’ things, but mainly these things are external to them, and of a purely factual or a purely imaginative nature. “Why did William decide to invade England?” “How would you have felt as a member of William’s army?”

It’s never, or rarely, about things that really matter to the students, things that are affecting them from day to day, things that really bring them sadness, or joy, or fear, or elation. Expressing inner ‘truths’ may be too painful, as well as too difficult. For all of us.

And yet, having transcended life’s day to day frustrations, and challenges, and difficulties, we usually find that life is indeed full of awe and wonder, full of mystery and love and sometimes indescribable pleasure. Though it may sometimes take years before we come round to seeing the glass as half full, instead of half empty.

And as I reminded my dear old mum yesterday, life’s not so bad, when you consider the alternatives. Thankfully, she agreed with me. Just about.

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Zazen IS meditation. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, as the Taoists also say. Gathering our thoughts, becoming aware of them. Examining them, and then letting them free again, to go their own way. Dark thoughts, when brought into the light, usually disappear.

Children have lots of dark thoughts and imaginings. When brought to the surface, or when allowed to come into the daylight, they also disappear. Left to fester within the prison of the individual unenlightened mind or spirit they often take on a life of their own.

Just as good and positive thoughts and feelings, left un-noted and unrecorded, tend to disappear and leave us empty. We need to hold on to them by sharing them with ourselves and others. We need to practice this virtue, and make it a habit. I guess this is what Quakers do in their meetings. It’s also why alcoholics need to stand up and be counted, and admit certain things to themselves, and others.

The most important sharing, however, is with oneself. Of course we can go to meetings and force ourselves, through doing so, to share. But the most fundamental sharing is when we meet with our true selves, naked, all alone with our unadorned thoughts and feelings.

We need to listen to our innermost voices and recognise what our souls and our spirits wish to communicate. And beyond that, we need to find a place of pure silence, and pure grace, where words alone are inadequate, and impoverished, and unnecessary.

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I had this from a friend today, which I'm going to use without permission:

"In the Guardian's Comment Is Free today, in the thread asking for topic suggestions, someone is asking for more contributions from working class people. They actually mean yer actual working class people. Not 'unemployed middle class people', but the real McCoy.

How do they know there isn't a whole throng of working class people already posting? How would you judge? Grammar? Spelling? Having racist views? Being sexist, homophobic?

Breathe. Just breathe. Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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Layer 45 Voices, Time and the Floyd

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This is a double blog, as I won’t have time to write one tomorrow.

Wonderful Radio 4 today featured a writer, a novelist, I’ve never heard of - Kate Mosse. The interviewer mentioned that Kate has created a very good website, on which she has a whole section of advice for writers.

http://www.mosselabyrinth.co.uk/advice/intro.asp

He website also has very interesting interactive section, like a blog, where she shares what she’s doing as a writer whilst she’s actually working on a novel - the idea being that she gets feedback from a certain section of her readership as she’s writing her next novel, which affects the way she’s writing it.

This is pretty much what I’ve been saying to friends about my enthusiasm for blogging - if everyone comments on everyone else’s blog it really helps to generate new ideas, helps to refine your previous writing, etc. The interactivity is crucial.

I guess in years gone by when people had no telephones, let alone email, if they wanted to share their thoughts and their lives with good friends then they pretty much had to write letters - lots of them. These days we can just publish blogs - letting the whole world know what we’re thinking and doing, or just letting a select readership have access to our journals, and giving them a means of instantly feeding back.

I have several good friends who are good writers, though most of them have yet to officially publish anything. Some of them annoy the living daylights out of me because they are so talented and such good writers, and yet they make little or no time in their busy lives for blogging or writing a journal, or whatever.

They all recognise that the process of putting their thoughts into writing is incredibly enriching, like a meditation. And yet they don’t have the drive or the energy to do it, at least not regularly. Or maybe they don’t think it’s worth the effort, or maybe they have misgivings about sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings, and don’t see the point of keeping a journal that’s pretty much for their eyes only.

I’m now fascinated by the thought that the thing we might miss the most about somebody we don’t see frequently is their voice - meaning their unique perception, their take on the world, their way of expressing themselves, their sense of humour, their original thinking, and so on.

And the more I think about this the more I feel angry that our schools don’t recognise that this is the most important thing we can do for children - to help them realise that they have an individual voice, an individual take on the world, a unique perception, which they need to recognise and learn how to express to the full.

It’s all very well learning to enjoy the individual voices of great writers, through reading them as often as possible. But children usually take in an implicit message that only the voices of published writers are interesting and important and valid - i.e. their own voice is extremely unimportant and invalid. In fact they don’t even understand the concept of having an individual voice.

I remember coming across Harold Rosen’s efforts to address this issue back in the seventies, through his work as a secondary school teacher and researcher. And subsequently his son Michael’s continuation of this work, especially in books like Did I Hear You Write?

I remember my own time as a teacher, returning from a day’s outing with my class, and hearing them ask the dreaded question, “Do we have to write about it?” Well no, they didn’t. It took me only a few minutes to scribe on the board their recollections of the actual events of the day. What was the point of 25 - 30 children all writing a useless list of “We did this, and we did that; we went there, and we saw this, and we had our packed lunch . . . “

All that I asked of them, in return for a brilliant day visiting exciting new places, was to write down their individual impressions of their experiences. What was interesting? What was exciting? Funny? Scary? Puzzling? And then, having written their individual thoughts and feelings, their responses and their conclusions, they loved listening to one another read out their pieces. Lots of appreciation and laughter. Which then inspired another burst of writing - “Oh yes! I’d forgotten about that! That’s what I thought as well! I need to write about that!”

They soon learnt that what’s important in the process of learning is not so much recording the facts as recording their individual take on the facts, which is as true for a science experiment or the discovery of a new maths concept, as it is for a geography or history or art or geology field trip.

Being able to examine and reflect on our own unique and individual thoughts is a vital part of living and learning - about ourselves and about life in general.

It’s a waste of time being an individual human being unless we enjoy our individual humanity, and the individuality of others. Unfortunately our school system doesn’t care for developing children as individuals, and certainly not as individual writers, and it claims it has no time to do so, as it rushes each day to cover the ‘curriculum’ and prepare for tests.

A cracked record? Moi?

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Time and the Floyd.

Last night was Pink Floyd night on BBC4. A whole evening of brilliant TV, and music, and without a single advert. Pure magic.

The story of the Floyd is a fascinating one. There are so many elements that make their story so unusual. They were a unique band to begin with, thanks to Syd Barrett. I hadn’t fully appreciated what a strange, wonderful, courageous, charismatic and brilliant human being he was in those early days, before he lost his mind. I hadn’t realized either how much his talented peers had loved him, and how much they had missed him, both personally and musically, after he’d gone off with the fairies.

His whole spirit was unique, iconoclastic, anarchistic. And the band therefore didn’t give a damn about fashion and trends and commercialism. Sure, they wanted recognition and appreciation, but not as individual egos. It was all about the music, and what they had to say about life, the universe and everything.

I remember well their early days - the incredible live shows they performed just after “Arnold Layne” - coming into the mod haven of Coventry Locarno on the back of their chart hit, and playing unbelievable spaced out music that was nothing like Arnold Layne and nothing like anything anyone had ever heard; playing in semi darkness, with a liquid light show projected over the entire stage.

The audience wasn’t stoned, as such, but it sure felt that way. I guess people either loved it or hated it. Either you got it or you didn’t. I guess quite a few of my mod mates might have been unhappy that it wasn’t an evening of Arnold Layne type ditties, and headed off to the bar. I didn’t really notice anyone else. I was too wrapped up in the music and the performance. These guys were the house band of the incomparably trendy and freaky UFO Club, for chrissakes. Not that I’d ever smoked a joint, let alone taken LSD.

Arnold Layne, though untypical, was itself a great song. I still have a pristine 45 rpm copy of it. Such wry humour, such a strange thing to write a song about. Someone’s strange hobby. Collecting clothes. Moon shine, washing line. A see-through mirror. "He dug it". Lyrics and a tune you could never forget.

http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/p/pink_floyd/arnold_layne.html

That was the beginning of a lifelong fascination and appreciation, right through to my current enjoyment of David Gilmour’s ‘On An Island’, and his band’s brilliant performances of ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ on the DVD. Nobody else plays and sings like that. The Floyd completely stole the show when they invited Roger Waters back to perform at Live8 in Hyde Park in 2005. Which would have happened with or without Waters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/06/30/bmfloyd30.xml

Their very early stuff, though immature and relatively amateurish, on account of them being non-musicians (apart from Rick Wright), was totally original, totally off the wall. They maintain, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, that they weren't good enough as musicians to copy or imitate what other bands were doing, so they didn't. Following Syd's example they weren’t afraid to experiment, and improvise, and jam. Their gigs were all about improvisation and jamming. Nobody had ever seen or heard anything like it. And this was before Dave Gilmour joined the band.

By the time I saw them in Manchester in 1969, at a college gig, they were on their way to becoming megastars, and Gilmour was a well-established member. The light show was projected all along one side of the hall by now, as well as all over the stage area. They had well and truly mastered their instruments, and the stage was filled with their gear - a huge drum kit, amps, speaker units, even kettle drums and a gong.

Their catalogue of tracks by now included Astronomy Domine; Careful With That Axe, Eugene; Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun; and A Saucerful of Secrets. All of which are immortalized on the great live album recorded at that Manchester College of Commerce gig in June 1969 - Ummagumma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ummagumma

Coincidentally I was also at the first ever live performance of Floyd's Atom Heart Mother at the legendary Bath Festival in Shepton Mallet in 1970, but that’s another story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_Festival_of_Blues_and_Progressive_Music_1970

I also remember standing in the amphitheatre in Pompeii in the mid ‘80s and picturing the Floyd playing there, performing the amazing track Echoes from their album ‘Meddle‘, in Live At Pompeii. They showed clips from that last night on the TV, including shots of them strolling around the rim of Vesuvius, which is indeed an amazing experience. Awesome!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd:_Live_at_Pompeii

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2hFZ8KnsSo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sein6WnbY0

You can get a flavour of the film from the comment on the youtube video, posted by StripeyElephant - "Holy fuck this is the best thing I've ever seen."

My own favourite part of it is the middle section, where the camera tracks slowly around huge menacing black stacks of speakers - studying an unbroken black wall of speaker units, with protruding horn units looking like military grenade launchers, about to lob sonic bombs around the deserted amphitheatre. Roger Waters' bass thunders and throbs its incessant pulse

Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum

followed and accompanied by Gilmour's howling, wailing, pleading guitar; soaring and wrenching your spirit, demanding you go with it to some otherworldly place in his emotional universe, accompanied by Rick Wright's vibrating rotating wail of electronic organ and Dave Mason's precision drumming and splashing smashing cymbals. I still find electrifying the moment when Gilmour first cuts into the bass drone with the nastiest bluesiest most jagged chord imaginable, whipped into some previously unknown sonic dimension by his incredible mass of electronic gadgets and effects.

(There may be little point playing this video unless you're able to pump it through a good sub-woofer setup or some good headphones)

You may like to know that, according to an old book of mine about guitar players, Gilmour used to use (pre digital and Midi) an effects board consisting of a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, an MXR Phase 100, a Dynacomp noise gate, a Uni-Vibe, a Pete Cornish Custom Fuzz, a Jim Dunlop Cry Baby, and three sweep pedals. "This new state of the art board had sophisticated revolutionary switching capabilities - each effect could be individually by-passed or configured in any sequence, and there were three outputs for various amps." On the other hand, this may be too much information.

The centrepiece of last night’s broadcast was a documentary about the making of Dark Side of the Moon, which is now seen as their magnum opus, and which they are quite rightly extraordinarily proud of.

It was so interesting to find out that it was made in the Abbey Road studios, pre-computers and digital recording, and the sonic effects were all done on an early sequencer and using tape loops set up on banks of reel to reel tape players. Of course! And of course nobody else had ever tried to work in this way. Nobody else was so experimental and innovative.

Roger Waters’ lyrics might now be viewed as typically ‘angry young mannish’ (as he does himself), but he was able to encapsulate perfectly in words what so many of us were feeling in the aftermath of post-60’s disillusionment - feeling about materialism, about the rat race, about the lack of sanity in the world, about militarism, about mortality, about religion, and about ‘hanging on in quiet desperation’. Lyrics that were not wordy, lyrics that were economical and evocative and precise.

The programme told the story of how Clare Torry came to perform her incredible improvised wordless vocal over Rick Wright's brilliant ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’. They described how their old mate Dick Parry was invited to play his wonderful sax pieces on ‘Us and Them’ and ‘Money’. They also told the story of how the strange rambling voices and the manic laughter were specially recorded for the album.

I first heard Dark Side of the Moon lying beside a log fire in a darkened room in the house of a VSO teacher in Northern Nigeria in 1973. In the context of the time, and having just a week ago emerged from the Heart of Darkness, so to speak - from the jungles and rivers of Zaire and Central Africa - it was an unforgettable and mind-blowing experience.

Just listening to some new music on some good quality hi-fi would in itself have been mind blowing after all the time I'd been without it, after all those weeks of traveling across the Serengeti, through the mountains of Rwanda, and along the mud roads of the central African rainy season. Coming into contact with the Dark Side in those circumstances was a breathtaking sonic culture shock and mind-fuck of the first magnitude.

Dave Gilmour says in the documentary that he only wishes that he’d been able to have the experience of hearing the album for the first time, from start to finish, completely ‘out of the blue’. Well Dave, I can tell you, listening to it in its entirety in the stoned darkness of an African evening in front of a flickering log fire was spine-tinglingly overwhelming and incredible. And for that, many thanks.

It says something for the quality of the documentary and the strange brilliance of the band and their music that even my son, no lover of rock or the sixties or psychedelia, sat with me and watched it all through, even though he was dog tired after a double shift at work. There’s hope for him yet! He’s a wonderful young man, but has a lot to learn about music, which, by the way, he seems to have stopped listening to. He’s reached a hiatus. The day he plays and enjoys one of my precious vinyl albums on my turntable I’ll know he’s getting fully on message and fully on track.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398868/

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Having just re-listened to 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene', I'm still amazed by the insane power of Roger Waters' diabolical screaming, and recall vividly the effect of it during live shows. Thrilling, scary and and somehow liberating. I didn't realise at the time that you were allowed to be so full-on crazy and anarchic in public - so utterly emotionally over the top. If you were standing close to the stage it was as disturbing and disorienting as witnessing The Who smashing their instruments.

Sure, it was wild and anarchic and pointless and childish, perhaps. But then isn't this what art is supposed to be about, at least some of the time? Delving into our innermost darkest thoughts and feelings, and expressing them, in words, images, colour, movement and sound. As I say, a kind of liberation.

It's interesting that Michelangelo Antonioni was so determined to have this track in 'Zabriski Point', and I well remember what a controversial movie that was when it was first released.

And going back to Romeo and Juliet (see Layer 31) there an interesting image in Romeo's response to being told "From Verona thou art banished" -

"There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence banished is banish'd from the world,
And world's exile is death; then 'banished'
Is death misterm'd. Calling death 'banished,'
Thou cutt'st my head off with a golden axe,
And smilest upon the stroke that murders me.

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One final thought, Let Pink Floyd be an inspiration to all fledgling musicians and writers - don't be put off your desire to be creative and expressive by a lack of technical training and know-how. Don't worry about not being able to do what others can do. Do your own thing, create in your own way using whatever skills and abilities you have, and enjoy whatever you do. Be original and then you can't be judged by conventional standards. Start a new genre of your own perhaps. And the more you do it the better you'll become.
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