Spring Blogg
Hi Everyone
This month the new video is about “a catchy tune which persistently stays in a person’s mind, especially to the point of irritation” - earworms. I suffer, as I expect many others do, from an acute form of the condition, which means that I have a constant musical accompaniment to all my waking hours. Most of the time I am hardly aware of it but as soon as the rest of life goes a bit quiet it comes to the fore. How do I know its there? You might ask. I know it’s there because like the Muzak in SPAR all I have to do is stop looking for the tea bags and chocolate biscuits for a second, to hear it. Quite often it’s one of my own songs especially if I am working on a tune or some lyrics, but it can also be any song triggered by seeing a random headline in a newspaper or something someone has said or just a snatch of music heard anywhere.
I have tried writing a song about the condition before and failed, but this time I began writing by trying to remember when it might have started and then the first music that inspired me. I ended up thinking about Lonnie Donegan and his version of The Rock Island Line. Released in 1955 with Jazz bandleader Chris Barber on bass (Lonnie was the banjo player in Chris’s band). Chris, who died last week, was without doubt the most influential Jazz bandleader of the post-war years as, apart from his jazz band, he was also a prime mover in the skiffle boom, the emerging British blues scene and Barber was mainly responsible for arranging the first UK tours of blues artists Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Muddy Waters.
So, to get round to the video although the chorus is a bit ear wormy the rest of the song turned out to be just a glorified list of some of my favourite musicians and music. Still, it did inspire me to do a couple of things I have never done before and probably will never do again i.e. dress up as a schoolboy and buy a Beatle wig on eBay.
These videos I have been making for the blog have been a great way of finding a musical outlet that is not live gigs, and it has also forced me to try and get my head round the intricacies of Adobe Premier Pro. Apart from the odd Little Rumba film, I haven’t had a concentrated period of making videos since 2010/11 when I was trying to get the website Broadsheep TV off the ground. At that time I was very taken with some of the alternative YouTube music channels like Balcony TV, Songs from the Shed and my favourite Amsterdam Acoustics. Here is Rue Royale who were the first band I saw on Amsterdam Acoustics and who later came to play for us in the Dukes.
The BroadSheep TV plan was to make live films of all the bands we booked to play at The Dukes or The Assembly Rooms, not at the gigs, which proved to be less than successful, but invite them to stay overnight and then record them (plus their hangovers) the next morning.
We did manage to film quite a few bands in our front room this way and most of them are still up on YouTube. My favourite film was of Moishes Bagel who weren’t even playing in Presteigne on this occasion but were about to drive back to Scotland after playing in Hereford or somewhere close by.
But by far the most watched video is of slide guitarist Martin Harley:
Pete
LEV’S VIOLIN - Helena Attlee
Does anyone else remember Moishe’s Bagel’s gig in the Assembly Rooms on that hot summer night? It was the inspiration for my new book, Lev’s Violin, which comes out on 1st April, and will be broadcast at 9.45 every morning as Radio 4’s Book of the Week from 29th March to 2nd April.
“A beguiling quest that draws its author from the Italian heartland of the violin to the edge of Asiatic Russia, told with a passion that is at once gentle and compelling.”
Colin Thubron, author of A Mountain in Tibet.
Prelude
I still remember everything, the warm night, the rows of seats, all taken, and mine right at the front. Music filled the darkened room, overflowing through open windows onto the streets of a small Welsh town. It doesn’t matter now what Klezmer tune it was that made us restless on our chairs, or pulled some people to their feet and had them dancing in those narrow spaces. What matters is the moment when two steps took the violin player to the front of the stage, and all the other instruments, accordion, piano, drums and double bass, fell silent. For that is when I heard the violin speak for the first time, with a voice powerful enough to open pores and unbuckle joints, and a shocking intimacy that left us all stupid with longing for emotions larger, wilder, sadder and more joyful than we had ever known. And after the applause faded and the lights came up, my old friend Rhoda turned her laughing face to me and said ‘How dare he speak to us like that? We’re married women!’
As we left the building I saw the violin player standing outside and so I went straight over to pass on Rhoda’s joke, explaining she was an old friend in every sense, being well over eighty at that time. I suppose I expected him to laugh and move on, but instead he drew me aside and muttered something about what he called his violin’s ‘mongrel history’, as if this could be an explanation, or perhaps even an excuse, for the seductive depth and unsettling power of its music. ‘I’ve been told it was made in Italy at the beginning of the eighteenth century,’ he said, ‘but it came here from Russia. Everybody calls it Lev’s violin, after the guy who owned it before me.’ An Italian violin called Lev? It could hardly have been more unlikely. Then he turned away, saying ‘Have a look if you like’, and pointing at the case leaning against the wall beside me. When I opened it and looked inside, my immediate impression was of an object so weathered and streamlined that it looked like something you might find on the tideline of a beach, a bit of driftwood perhaps, a water-worn pebble or the sleek remains of some sea creature. Glancing at violins in the past, I had always perceived them as a mix of curves and corners, crisp edges accentuated by a dark line of inlaid wood. But life had worn away the edges and knocked the corners off this nomad, so that in places its seams were almost flush with its sides, as if music lapping at its outline for centuries had eroded them like a fragile coastline.
WONDERS ARE PASSING - John Jones
As a full time musician living in the area, I can empathise with the feelings of frustration and isolation in the creative community during lockdown and the desire to find our audiences again. It is reassuring for some to think that we are ‘safe’ and ‘writing’ but, to be honest, that first flow of songwriting last spring ran dry during the summer and, as slow-motion days shortened and darkened, so did my mood. So much for the uplifting songs we are known for … does the world really need our sombre reflection and musical tears?
Others tell us on social media to be angry again like you used to be, but if, like me, you are angry about everything, just what do you focus on?
So, I may feel trapped inside my head but with the freedom each day to walk and take to the hills that surround us here on the border (Welsh rules this week, English next!) I can feel the light returning.
This is the one home recording and video we have managed in that time.
Song/images, Wonders are Passing - Oysterband
FUN 4 SOME - Ian Marchant
Fun For Some grew out of a documentary I presented for ITV Border about Thomas Telford. The producer/director Holly Blackwell was nominated for a Royal TV Society award for it, so we were allowed another go; which was the four part series 'Fun 4 Some.' In those days, (2008) the ITV regions still made some of their own content - most famously, Border made 'Mr and Mrs'! At about 4.30 on a Sunday afternoon, the various regional companies dropped out from the ITV national schedule, and showed their own content. 'Fun 4 Some' was almost the last series made for that slot before the regional structure of ITV was changed.
ITV Border covered most of Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway, the Scottish border, the very north of Northumbria - and the Isle of Man.
Holly Blackwell has given up making TV, because she's a rock and roll star instead. The theme music is by The Lovely Eggs, which is Holly and her husband David. They are one of the great rock and roll bands of the moment - if you don't believe me, google them and watch one of their videos - you can see that they were made by a real film-maker. And how did Holly find me? Old school tie, my friend. She was at Lancaster Girls Grammar School with my daughter, and was a fan of senior loungecore legends, Your Dad.
ABSTRACT EDGE AT ORIEL BLEDDFA - Lois Hopwood
Formed in 2004 by Rae Harrison, Abstract Edge is a group of artists who have a shared interest in painting in an abstract or semi-abstract way. With a variety of backgrounds, individually they have exhibited widely throughout the UK. Collectively their work has been shown in different local venues, aiming to raise the profile of abstract art by bringing it to a wider public.
Some of the work is semi-abstract, taking a landscape, organic form or still life as its starting point. Some of it is purely abstract, making no explicit reference to the external world but relying on shape, colour, line and texture to create an image that is engaging its own right, to which the viewer can respond. Most people feel more comfortable with shapes that bear some resemblance to reality - the interest of abstract art is that each person brings his or her interpretation to it.
No image has only one meaning.
The artists who have kindly contributed to this (first all online) exhibition in the time of Covid are; Tottie Aarvold, Jacs Collins, Sue Firmin, Rae Harrison, Lois Hopwood, Maggie Jones, Ciara Lewis, Alison MacGregor Grimley, Jane Thomas, Cheryl Williams, Bronte Woodruff.
The works can be seen online by clicking on this safe link to the Bleddfa website:
COAL AND GAS - Nigel Dodman March 2021
PART ONE: COAL
For quite some time before I read Peter Wright’s lovely article “In praise of the US of A” in the November 2020 edition of this blog, I had been trying to understand what transformed so much European folk music into foot-tapping, joyous dance tunes when it crossed the Atlantic and landed in the Appalachian Mountains. This vast area of the Eastern USA became home to coal miners, share croppers and distillers of strong whiskey. Many had brought with them their musical instruments amongst their meagre possessions, and the music they remembered. Of course, a great deal of the Irish, Scottish and Scandinavian tunes already had swing, but there are countless examples of dreary folk songs and tunes that have been changed into what a close friend describes as “moving music”. Thanks to filmmakers like David Hoffman, one of whose films Peter used in his article, and field recordists like Alan Lomax, a lot of the music and musicians of the Appalachians have been recorded and the recordings are easily accessible through The Library of Congress, The Smithsonian Institute and, lately, YouTube. Barrie Gavin, the distinguished documentary filmmaker, who now lives in Radnorshire, directed a lovely documentary about Doc Watson for the BBC Omnibus series in 1976, called “Three days with Doc”, which gives an intimate portrait of life and music in North Carolina.
The music was often performed at gatherings and dances by bands made up of family members. Here’s an early recording of the Watson family doing just that.
Appalachian Old Time music goes back centuries, whereas Bluegrass, whilst closely related, was “invented” by Bill Monroe from Kentucky, in the late 1930’s. Old time tunes are usually played on a lead instrument like the fiddle, banjo or mandolin, with a guitar and bass rhythm section. Occasionally the autoharp features in a line up. It is mostly repetitive dance music. Traditionally, Appalachian Ballads are often sung unaccompanied. Bluegrass on the other hand sees the lead played in rotation on all the instruments, often as fast as possible.
One of the most striking things about this music is the way it has been perpetuated, expanded and, arguably, improved by younger players. Peter Wright mentioned Molly Tuttle in his article, and many of you will have seen her dazzling performance in Presteigne a few years ago. She often plays with young mandolin virtuosos Sierra Hull and Tristan Scroggins. Their technique, speed and accuracy is absolutely mind-boggling, but they have all been honing their skills since childhood. As for Justin Moses guitar playing here with Sierra Hull, well it almost makes you want to give up!
After years of just watching these videos on YouTube in wonder, I recently discovered the magic button in the top right screen which enables you to slow the whole thing down whilst retaining the pitch. It certainly makes learning these tunes much easier.
Some of the best string bands manage to incorporate the different genres into their performances, and survive financially by being flexible enough to cater for many different tastes. There’s no better example of this than the Foghorn String Band, who many of you will have seen perform in Rob Dawson’s workshop at Castle Ring a few years ago. They play Old Time, Bluegrass, Cajun and Country. They were delighted and amazed to see so many members of the large audience flinging themselves around randomly, but rhythmically to their lively music. They were booked to come back last year, but international travel and live performances were unfortunately put on hold. They will be back as soon as things settle down. Here’s a reminder of the joy they generate.
Many of the American musicians who come to Wales to perform for us, tell us how much the landscape reminds them of home. Their music is somehow evocative of the densely wooded hills visible from their porches and verandas, and many great tunes, and their titles, have been made up in that setting. The great open spaces are often used for filming and recording some outstanding performances. One of my favourite clips is that of the Paine Family performing one of my favourite Old Time tunes, “Sal’s Got Mud Between her Toes”, right above the Colorado River near Moab, Utah.
A CURIOUS INCIDENT ON THE ROAD OUT OF LOCKDOWN - Tony Lawson
Presteigne Festival | 26-31 August 2021
George Vass
Trying to organise anything at the moment is a bit like trying to write in water and in the case of Arts Festivals things are particularly difficult. Presteigne is dealt a double-whammy, being so close to the Powys/Herefordshire border, with Government ‘road-maps’ from Cardiff and Westminster being sufficiently vague that we are not yet able to announce our full programme, but the dates are fixed for 26-31 August.
The Presteigne Festival team have worked tirelessly to bring together a striking programme for the 2021 Festival. Our plan being to present a range of live performances to a socially-distanced audience, offering additional online ‘streamed’ content as an alternative.
Recently honoured at ‘The Ivors’ Composer Awards and celebrating her 70th birthday year, Cecilia McDowall is composer-in-residence.
The Festival’s advocacy of new British music continues with a corpus of exciting new works from a hugely talented roster of British composers – James Francis Brown, Nathan James Dearden, Sarah Jenkins, Cecilia McDowall, Luke Styles, Adrian Sutton, Hilary Tann, Matthew Taylor and James B Wilson, our 2021 Royal Philharmonic Society Emerging Composer.
Other important programming elements see the Festival celebrating the Malcolm Arnold centenary, a mini-feature of music by Michael Tippett and a French music focus centred on Ravel.
Opening the Festival, Nova Music Opera present the premiere production of Luke Styles’ chamber opera Awakening Shadow – a re-imagining of his 2013 Glyndebourne Festival Opera commission, which interweaves his own music with Benjamin Britten’s five Canticles.
As always at the Festival, performance standards are upheld with a first class artist line-up – the Heath Quartet, Ensemble Perpetuo, violinists Fenella Humphreys and Francesca Barritt, pianists George Xiaoyuan Fu and Timothy End, oboist James Turnbull, baritone Jonathan Gunthorpe, cellist Cara Berridge and bassoonist Catriona McDermid.
The hugely popular Choir of Royal Holloway will be in residence conducted by Rupert Gough, whilst the Festival Orchestra undertake two programmes under my direction.
There will also be a collection of supporting events including music talks, exhibitions, literature, poetry and Open Studios.
The final programme isn’t likely to be confirmed until mid-May and, as a result, tickets will not be on sale to the general public until June. Please bear with us on this – we want to be able to give our audience the best experience possible this year.
We hope we’ll be able to supply plenty of brilliant live performances in August – something greatly missed by us all throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
LOCAL VIEWS - Andrea Gilpin
SHE’S A RAINBOW - Dave Luke
GARDEN @ No 3 - Sabina Rüber
March
The garden has been waking up. Snowdrops, hellebores, primulas and a variety of small spring bulbs - all tentatively flowering, ahead of the rush.
I love snowdrops, who doesn’t, but I have a very soft spot for hellebores. Self-seeding freely they grew in abundance in my Mother's garden. But, it wasn’t until I photographed them at Ashwood Nurseries, in the West Midlands, that I developed my first plant crush. The humble garden hellebore morphed into something altogether more exciting: perfectly shaped single or double blooms, anemone-centred (with little ruffles), clear colours, speckled and freckled. So much playful variation - they are a promiscuous and flighty flower, genetically unstable and therefore highly individual - making them perfect for collecting. The ones that really did it for me were the dark sultry ones, the slate greys, the almost blacks with a hint of blue or a purple sheen ….. I was hooked.
One day, walking in Hereford, I came across some outstandingly beautiful plants outside Fodders, on Church Street. I discovered they were bred by a local man from Ullingswick, one Basil Smith. Visiting him was hellebore heaven. I spent many happy days photographing his collection. This was too many years ago to mention but it cemented my love for this early, ever-evolving gem.
….. these are some of his:
Moving on - early bulbs are a must for any garden at this time of year. Whilst small, they sparkle with interest at the beginning of the year, as well as being an important food for bees on those few warm, sunny days. Planting them in small pots and containers allows the flexibility to arrange and rearrange them outside, but also to bring early Spring indoors.
The rather splendid Galanthus 'Ketton’ is one of the few special snowdrops we have. Puschkinia scilloides var. libanotica also called the Russian snowdrop.
One of my faves - the very early flowering Scilla mischtschenkoana and the more dainty Scilla siberica.
The glowing mid blue Iris reticulata ‘Alida’ and, whilst not a bulb, I couldn’t resist this little beauty - Viola odorata 'The Czar’.
At this time of year, my collection of small glass bottles and vases come into their own.
Crocus vernus 'King of the Striped’.
Viola odorata var. sulphurea and Crocus ’Snowbunting’.
REFLECTIONS - Christine Hugh-Jones
Love the Lugg Blogg...Love the Lugg!
Our Welsh rivers are dying. The Lugg needs our help.
Brecon and Radnor Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales would like to set up a citizens’ science project to understand what is happening and how we can save the Lugg.
If enough people help, we can all join in a project run by Cardiff University for the whole Wye catchment in England and Wales. The university scientists are giving great technical support and advice to local groups with enough enthusiasm to get going.
A Welsh Lugg project would team up with other ongoing citizen’s science projects for the Wye.
We want to hear from anyone who cares enough to help. We need people who would like to take part in a program of citizens’ science water-monitoring of the Lugg and its tributaries. We also need people to help organise this.
We can all work together to make a difference. Please offer support and get to know your river. Contact Christine Hugh-Jones at secretary@brecon-and-radnor-cprw.wales.
(The Friends of the Upper Wye project for the Upper Wye can be seen here www.fouw.org.uk. The FOUW monitoring does not cover the Lugg but if you live closer to the Wye, Ithon, Irfon area please contact FOUW).
Photo: Lugg near Presteigne with many thanks to Gareth Rees-Roberts.
EDNA, BELOVED WIFE OF ARTHUR
A Lugg Story - Hugh Colvin 2015
Mrs Entwhistle, widow, drops the catch on her front door and turns to survey the High Street before sallying out on her daily constitutional. Undercover of smelling the air she checks that the police are not waiting for her. But the coast is clear so off she trots, a little Jack Russell at her ankles. She is made of twigs, weighs less than a child, although she has the same complement of organs, limbs and nerve cells as the rest of us.
A baggy-trousered 14-year-old zips past on a seatless bicycle and does a wheelie on the wrong side of the road. He has a loutish lower lip and is riding a machine that is several sizes too small for him. He is showing off to the other boys gathered under the clocktower. Girls have not yet intervened in his life. The town drunk is also there making yowling noises, and a love-lorn teenager in a heavy great coat and Doc Martens bangs his head against the stonework until, satisfied with his display of self-pity, he returns to his blameless middle-class home. Old boys sit in a line on a bench, chins resting on hands folded over the tops of their walking sticks, sieving the world through their toothless gums, occasionally nudging each other and chuckling at some distantly remembered adventure with someone such as they imagine Mrs Entwhistle might once have been.
Mrs Entwhistle sees none of this.
She hears the clock turning in the tower, and the pigeons flying off swiftly as it winds up to strike. She hears her own silence. She hears her boot-heels click-clacking across the stone slabs, and she feels the wind, but the cars and the buildings and the people are merely a cardboard backdrop to her everlasting situation; for Mrs Entwhistle is free - free of Mr Entwhistle at last, but not free, whose grave she will pass on her way to the bridge but not visit.
The rushing water of the little river is the best moment of each day; the sparkling reflections mesmerise her and gradually erase her darting thoughts.
If you were to remove her widow’s bonnet - it can only be called that - and then cut around her scalp below her salt and pepper hair, still long although tied conveniently in a bun, and carefully trepan her skull to peer inside without disturbing the contents, you would find the following thoughts swimming around her brain.
Well, I couldn’t be doing with it.
And he was such a fine fellow when we married.
Well, I couldn’t be doing with it.
And then a shudder as she recalled the drooling as he ate, and the noises that he made with his ill-fitting dentures so that he, Mr Ent-whistle, whistled when he spoke and could not even pronounce his own name without unintentionally suiting the action to the word. Mr Ent-whistle had gone to seed. His belly had expanded and his muscles had turned to flab. His eye had clouded and his mind had focussed increasingly on food, more and more food.
No, she could not be doing with it. …. He had had to go
And so she had peremptorily poisoned this untidy wreck of a once handsome man with slug pellets purchased from the ironmonger just down the road, Spillers’ No. 3. It had been that simple - and she could not help feeling – so appropriate, for he had indeed turned into a slug.
She would never have thought of it if she hadn’t read an article in the newspaper about a French woman who hated her boorish husband so much that she had murdered him, - not however before cooking him his favourite dinner and setting it in front of him and indeed waiting for the day when he would be watching his favourite television programme, the last of the series before she beaned him from behind with an axe. Temporarily Mrs Entwhistle had been shocked but realised quite soon that it was the mess that bothered her more than the murder - so she resolved to do the same thing but without the blood. Or the police and the publicity. She read a number of crime novels and concluded that slug pellets would arouse the least suspicion, since the symptoms mimicked appendicitis, and at his age no-one would think twice about it.
The water smooths away these thoughts, and when she walks back up the street she is refreshed - if only the nagging thoughts would stay away………
But Mrs E does not sleep well …...
She had been terrified that he would wake up at the funeral, and start beating on the coffin lid, and rear up from his box and accuse her … even now six months later she still fears against all reason that he will rise from the grave and come back to live with her - but of course he didn’t know he’d been poisoned, did he? - that was some comfort. If he didn’t know - then he’d have no reason to haunt her, would he? No ghost had appeared yet, although in actual fact her guilt was reaching the quantum level for an apparition to be expected quite soon…. She should have had him cremated she realises. Too late now. And strewn his ashes with gay abandon into the Lugg. Pah! Entwhistle!
Mrs Entwhistle neither saw nor heard the truck that careered across the street and hit her as it avoided the youth on the bicycle.
She was buried beside her husband. “Edna, beloved wife of Arthur. Reunited” is engraved on the headstone.
In a certain light, you may see Mrs E walking her scrofulous terrier down to the water and sitting on the parapet of the bridge in a little patch of terror all her own.
THE QUIZ!
(Answers here)
If you would like to contribute something to the next Lugg Blogg in the form of art, photography, music, local lore and events past, literature, poems, gardens and food which you think might fit in, please send your stuff to luggblogg@outlook.com.