Luminaries

Firstly an immediate apology to who ever took the photo. It didn’t say on facebook but it did let me download it. Let me know who you are if you see this and I will amend.

I can’t move through today without thinking of Roy Bailey, Bill Caddick and others besides. My last blog was following my relationship with friend, Peter Uhlmann..also a luminary in terms of being someone who made things happen musically. But this one will concentrate on the two musical luminaries named above.

October/November is proving hard and if people would stop dying I would truly appreciate it. That’s not flippant but genuine. Winter seems to take a grip on those who are fragile and send them on their way. I, and many others I am sure, wish it wasn’t so.

At home in my teens, whenever we bought an album they were played and played and played. That doesn’t seem to happen in the same way anymore. Occasionally a Cd takes grip or happens to be the one sat in the car but I don’t listen as ‘religiously’ as I used to. I also don’t make the effort to support live music as much as I ought and if I don’t then how the hell can I expect others to do that for me. So, I make a pledge. I will go out…even on cold winter nights and support things locally when I am free and healthy enough to do so. Live music is so important and had it not been there I would never have had access to those albums that we played and played and played. I think also we had so much less money then that these were precious items. Does having more money make you value someones hard worked little jewel less? I hope not. I think with me it’s time and brain space.

The Bill Caddick play list was an album called ‘Rough Music’. I loved it all but it had two stand out things for me. One that touched me at the time and one that had a link much later in life. There was a track with a chorus like this,

“Pity me poor pig condemned to die

For butchering a beggars baby

They’ll take me out this cold cold morn

and hang-ed I will be” Bill Caddick

It was the story behind the song that grabbed me. This was true to history and I couldn’t believe that humans could be like this but we were. The story was that a feral pig had attacked a baby and consequently the pig was captured and  put on trial. Not only was the pig put on trial but it was dressed up as much like a human as they could manage. It was then found guilty and hanged. There is also so much unsaid just in the words ‘a beggars baby’ thus making it far more tragic. It allowed a baying mob to have justice for a tragedy that no-one was able to stop. I assume the pig was hungry. I also assume the crowd ate the pig afterwards.

The other reason this album always comes to mind was that I quite often do community music projects in Lincolnshire. Whilst researching one of those I came across the reference to rough justice and the bands of people banging pots and kettles who would stand outside the house of someone they believed to have done a misdemeanour in their community…adultery etc and make a huge raucous din which let the occupant to know, in no uncertain terms, that they were being watched and their antics would not be tolerated. You only hoped that where this kind of justice was metered out that people had their facts right as we know what whispers and rumours can do in a modern society and I’m sure it was no different then. So Bill…a man who made me think about history and people and culture and how culture developed etc Telling the stories that were already there but that many of us didn’t know existed.

“Communities used “rough music” to express their disapproval of different types of violation of community norms. For example, they might target marriages of which they disapproved such as a union between an older widower and much younger woman, or the too early remarriage by a widow or widower. Villages also used charivari in cases of adulterous relationships, against wife beaters, and unmarried mothers. It was also used as a form of shaming upon husbands who were beaten by their wives and had not stood up for themselves.^[2] In some cases, the community disapproved of any remarriage by older widows or widowers.

rough music. Parades were of three types. In the first, and generally most violent form, a wrongdoer or wrongdoers might be dragged from their home or place of work and paraded by force through a community. In the process they were subject to the derision of the crowd, they might be pelted and frequently a victim or victims were ducked^[vague] at the end of the proceedings. A safer form involved a neighbour of the wrongdoer impersonating the victim whilst being carried through the streets. The impersonator was obviously not himself punished and he often cried out or sang ribald verses mocking the wrongdoer. In the common form an effigy was employed instead, abused and often burnt at the end of the proceedings”.^[1]Wikipedia

Roy Bailey. Ah the lovely Roy. Aways up for a cuddle… at least from me and I assume most other people. I wrote him an email a couple of weeks before he died reminiscing about a particular concert of his that is forever tattoo’ed  onto my brain. It was Towersey – where else. Roy became a patron of that festival and was often there but this may have been well before that time. There was, even then, something about a Towersey audience and Roy. The term ‘eating out of the palm of his hand’ comes to mind.

This was probably the last number in a set. On to the stage came a whole bunch of people that included, as far as I remember, Val Bailey, Kit Bailey, John and Sue Kirkpatrick (shows how long ago this was) and more. He did the song about the witches being burnt, ‘Burning Times’ by Charlie Murphy. It was so powerful especially with this large body of people chanting in harmony the names of the Goddesses. The audience sang their lungs out too it built and built and built and built.

“Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inana…”

It’s an amazing song. I may start singing it again myself. Here is the man himself singing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXoLYj89qWY  glorious, chilling, powerful. everything it should be…and probably part of my obsession with the wrongs done in the name of religion. Hence why I sing XTC’s ‘Dear God’, William Blakes ‘Garden of Love” and more.

The above song coincided with my awareness of sexism and heterosexism and the prejudice and hate of many against those who do not fit in with the societal norms. Sadly, though some things have changed we all know that much hasn’t and right wing backlashes coincide with economic depressions etc. I’m not going into that here but it is yet another deep concern of mine. The statistic, in the song, of the number of women burnt for witch craft is eye watering…. have a listen and you’ll hear.

Then we come on to the deaths of those not famous in their own right who, out of respect for the family privacy, I won’t name as they are not figures in the public domain but several friends have all lost a parent recently. Roy, above. is the father of one of my friends and favourite people, Kit. I have my own relationship with Kit and my own with Roy. Not just as Kit’s dad I mean.  But these other parents, gone recently, I knew for differing reasons. Sometimes they had been around when I was young too, others I’d met because they supported the creative endeavours of their children etc. All wonderful people and all adding to my sense of loss but more pressingly to my bleeding soul that is weeping for the pain of people I love who are left behind. The fact that life goes on is so unhelpful really to those close to these losses and it’s immediate and intermediate effects. Of course it does and often, especially where death comes late in life, we can reflect happily on the long life they’ve lived and all they’ve done but for others there is the shock when there has been no time to prepare or even where they have had time to prepare, the pain is still great. As a friend of mine said recently, ‘nothing prepares you for this’ especially in a modern society where too many of us are too scared to even talk about it let alone face it head on whether that be the death of those we love or indeed our own mortality.

So, what shall I do to lift my gloom hey? There is no doubt that I am doubly unsettled by work being done in the house so nothing is quite where it should be and dust is everywhere it shouldn’t be. This means my haven is not the haven it should be. So I think I will go out and place myself in company and listen to music. I don’t much feel like it and if I had the option instead of going dancing I might have chosen that but I think it will do me good to be amongst people and live music is such a thought provoking connector of people, times places and emotions.

Thank you to Roy and Bill for the thought provoking songs you sang. Roy bringing the songs of others to our attention and Bill writing his. I am so glad I love music as it speaks volumes and fires the imagination. Thanks also to those parents for at very very least – bringing some particularly gorgeous humans into the world that I am happy to call my friends.

An odd blog I know…but I never said it wouldn’t be…is that a double negative?