Memories In Future Tense

London Fields # 64
First published Inpress, Melbourne on 29 April 2009
NB: Each column has a name, but these do not appear in print; printed versions may differ slightly to those displayed here

When was the last time you walked on St Kilda Pier? Or took a stroll through the Botanical Gardens, or a gander at Cook’s Cottage? When you live in a place, you tend to take the local attractions as part of the background. There’s no imperative to see them, as they’ll always be there (as perhaps may you). So you get on with your life, tied up in the patterns of the daily commute, where to get lunch, and what housework probably needs doing but you can put off for just one more day. lf both life and work are based in suburbia, you can become so absorbed in all that entails that you lose sight of where you actually are.

This is true of adopted homes too. On a glorious autumn day last week, I travelled down to Brighton to catch Ultravox on their Return To Eden tour, which sees the commercially successful line-up of the band playing together for the first time since Live Aid some 23 years ago. Getting out of London can prove difficult, and once you do it’s still a long way to any beach, but seeing the sea made me wonder why I didn’t more often. While Brighton did have a pretty dingy period of faded glamour in the nineties, now its myriad streets of small and varied shops seems a world away from the recession-hit capital where the only new outlets seem to be bookies, pawn brokers and money lenders – some taking over the abandoned offices of real estate agents. Yet prices are steep down on the Suffolk coast – even a simple round of drinks was more than I’ve ever paid in London.

I had temporarily forgotten it was St George’s Day, until a labourer-philosopher on a nearby table in the pub started to lecture his mates on the subject (this just after his lengthy diatribe on the particularly outstanding qualities of the breasts of that day’s Page 3 girl). Now every English pub will have one or more of these chaps, and today’s outrage centred on how he wasn’t allowed to celebrate being English; especially as all these foreigners got their special religious holidays (obviously he’d momentarily forgotten that four-day Easter weekend a few weeks back). So here he was, wanting to celebrate a Roman soldier born in Turkey who may never even have existed. And while England should have a national holiday to match Ireland, Scotland and Wales, some nasty racist factions have appropriated this flag as England for the English, so it’ll be a difficult balancing act to get right. Maybe April 23 should be celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday instead?

I’m glad to say Ultravox weren’t a disappointment; Midge’s voice is still outstanding, and it was joyous to see onstage the one reformation I feared would never happen. I still remembered every lyric, and was glad I was in a place and time I could see this limited reformation. Recently it’s been hard to know what decade this we’re living in here. The reformed Spandau Ballet are appearing on chat shows, ABC just played the entire Lexicon Of Love album with an orchestra, and lame Life On Mars sequel Ashes To Ashes has returned for a second series, set in a imagined 1982. Meanwhile, highbrow digital television station BBC Four commemorated the 25^th anniversary of the miners’ strike with a series of documentaries. The heavy-handed response by the police at some of those pickets is still shocking today, and while you’d hope such things are remnants of a dark past, the kettling tactics and assaults on some people in the vicinity of the G20 protests is a sad reminder that the world has not progressed as much as you’d hoped it had.

Anyway, so the train pulled into London Bridge from Brighton late at night and I had about twenty minutes to make the connection to Liverpool Street, which involved crossing the river that really divides the city in two. The Thames is not a sedate meanderer like the Yarra; it’s wide, turbulent, fast, and unpredictable; it’s unlikely you’d survive if you fell in. To my right I saw Tower Bridge for the first time in a few years, and it struck me that I was living in a place I had seen nightly on TV programmes on the ABC as I grew up. Unreal city indeed. Off to the left the huge dome of St Paul’s was still dominating the skyline as it has for hundreds of years. With so much despair around, it can be difficult to see the simple beauty that surrounds us. This floodlit colourful vision snapped me out of my reverie and left me vaguely awestruck, a feeling which as clung to me for several days. As the late Grant McLennan once sang, “If you spend your life looking behind you, you don't see what's up front”.

© James McGalliard 2009

Flying The Flag

London Fields # 2
First published Inpress, Melbourne on 16 June 2004
NB: Each column has a name, but these do not appear in print; printed versions may differ slightly to those displayed here

“Mixing pop and politics, they ask me what the use is”

Billy Bragg – Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

It wasn’t until I’d been living here a while that I came to appreciate the differences between England and Britain. Yet the question of nationality has been fuelling debates for months, and couldn’t have been more apparent over the last few weeks. Is a political awakening of the masses behind this sea change? Partially. It’s a response to Iraq, the rise of the British National Party [BNP – think of a nastier One Nation] and the build up to the Euro 2004 Football Tournament.

More than ever, national identity has become a key issue in the UK today. In the lead up to Euro 2004, there are St George’s cross flags EVERYWHERE – pubs, fronts of houses, flying from cars. This ties into the debate over the call for official recognition of St George’s Day. But who was St George? No-one can be sure of any facts, but it appears England’s patron saint was born in Turkey in the third century, lived in Palestine and fought in the Roman army.

In a strange way the debate can be seen in recent events at XFM, where Breakfast DJ Christian O'Connell decided to put out his own football song, inspired by the rumour that the Football Association [FA] were going to have Blazing Squad record the official anthem. A competition ensued where listeners submitted songs for approval. The winner was ‘Born In England’, by The Wheatleys. Under the moniker of Twisted X, this was re-recorded featuring Bernard Butler, members of Delays, The Libertines and Supergrass, as well as 500 listeners of the Breakfast Show, with profits to go to the charity ‘Help a Local Child’.

XFM was hoping to get the FA’s official sanction for their song. The FA wouldn’t grant it, and released a new version of The Farm’s 'All Together Now'. So how does all this tie in? Well, personally, I think that the FA were wary of being seen to support a song that could be taken as a nationalist anthem at a time when the BNP are trying to make their presence felt. Now, I’m not for a second suggesting that ‘Born In England’ was guilty of any such thing; yet people are terrified of being misconstrued in a time of mistrust and doubt. It’s these very sentiments that feed the paranoia that are a part of the Little Britain mentality, and used by anti-European fearmongers.

It’s worth relating the story of the Unity Festival, part of the ongoing campaign by the Anti-Nazi League. Love Music Hate Racism was due to be a free event held in Finsbury Park two weeks ago, headlined by The Libertines. When Police then insisted that a fence be placed around the area; this made the event financially unfeasible, forcing it to be scaled down and moved indoors to the Hammersmith Apollo. To cover their new costs, they then needed a minimum donation of £5 per person to pay venue hire costs. Then, with Pete Doherty in rehab in France, the whole thing fell though, and had to be cancelled.

With events like this being buried, and then disappearing, most people I know did felt that they had to bother to vote this time around. With non-compulsory voting, the turn-up was around 36% - still this was amongst the best in Europe. The thing was that their votes were always against something; the majority of people I spoke to just wanted the BNP to be stomped on, but also to register their feelings over the continuing situation in Iraq.

In May, Morrissey returned to the charts singing

“I’ve been dreaming of a time when to be English is not to be baneful
To be standing by the flag not feeling shameful, racist or partial”

Then last weekend in Dublin he commented on the death of Ronald Reagan, saying that the wrong President had died. He may well find that the Americans are far less tolerant of criticism of their country, than is the case with the UK’s reaction to his mythical Little Britain sentiments that he writes of from his Hollywood home.

In case you’re wondering, here are the final scores:
Charts: “Born In England” at #9, “All Together Now” at # 5, “Come On England” at # 2
Euro 2004: France 2 England 1
Vote 2004: BNP 5%, UKIP 17.7 % {9 % gain}


© James McGalliard 2004