Dancing to Steve and Miquette

A very productive week away from the dayjob is coming to an end. A ton of work done on the new album: lyric writing, keyboard parts and two new songs that are both strong enough to make it on there. One of them in particular should be quite simple to record, thus saving money rather than working on one of the more complex full band productions. I should be hyper-prepared to make the best use of the studio time by the time I go in next month. I have to be.

The highlight of the last few days has been going to see dance act System 7 at The Concorde II venue along Brighton sea-front. A fantastic night! Much to my genuine surprise, it was the best I have ever seen Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy since they have been doing dance music.

I am of course a big fan of their music from the seventies, having absorbed all the Hillage solo rock albums from “Fish Rising” through to “Open” as a result of obsessional and excessive teenage listening. I think they formed System 7 in the early nineties, and I must admit I wasn’t that impressed for the first few albums, even though I wanted to like them. By the mid to late nineties when I first saw them play live, they were getting it together a bit more (for my taste anyway), although still not on the same level as some of the best nineties dance acts such as Orbital, Underworld and The Chemical Brothers.

Before last Thursday, the last time I saw System 7 was at the amazing Gong Unconvention in Amsterdam last year. They were good then, but unless someone slipped an ecstasy tab in my guinness (you never know!) they seem to have gone up a whole notch since. So much so, that I was getting the same kind of positive energy from them as I used to when jumping up and down to their rock gigs with a full band way back, nearly 30 years ago. It was really obvious that they were enjoying themselves too, much more so than in Amsterdam. Perhaps it was the Brighton atmosphere, or a younger crowd, who knows? The promoters of the event, a launch party for local(?) act Temple Hedz, were obviously good people. The whole System 7 sound seemed to be more integrated and creative, more interesting bleeps and noises than before, and there was even a healthy burst of lead guitar from Hillage at the end of the set. Great crowd, the whole thing was generally magic!

It was nice to be out clubbing in Brighton again, something I only finally lost interest in about 5 years ago, round about when I turned 40. Apart from anything else, dancing one’s bollocks off is a fantastically good form of physical exercise! If the music and atmosphere are right, it can be a psychologically and spiritually liberating experience. Not everyone’s cup of tea though. None of the musicians in my current band have any enthusiasm for dance/trance/techno music whatsoever. They can’t stand the 4/4 beat, it’s the old “repetitive beats” criticism, once used by the police and more conservative members of society in banning “raves” I seem to remember.

Currently listening to the new albums by Marillion and Porcupine Tree, both good in different ways.

Learning disabilities for Jesus

Having recently skimmed through the American bestselling “Letter To A Christian Nation” by Sam Harris again, I have been reminded of the many millions of people in America who believe that the earth is 6000 years old and every word in the Bible is God’s absolute truth and all other religions are blasphemy and so on and so on. Although Sam Harris’s book occasionally comes across as a bit arrogant and patronizing, I recommend it to believers and non-believers alike.

I had some unexpected first-hand exposure to a bit of evangelical Christianity a few weekends ago through my dayjob. I turned up in Haywards Heath for an afternoon shift looking after people with learning disabilities, and was asked if I would mind escorting some of them to a local church service. So off a few of us went in a mini-bus. We were greeted very enthusiastically at the church, and we were soon in the middle of an entertaining slide-show demonstrating different types of rescue operations. Firemen, lifeboats, and Thunderbird 2 were used rather well to lead towards the main point, that Jesus has saved us all from “God’s angry judgement” by dying on the cross. A bit of singing followed, a brief play, then some tea and biscuits that the learning disabilities clients appreciated… well it woke one of them up anyway!

I had a brief chat with one or two people before we left and I must say I was struck how genuinely friendly everyone was, which has not always been my experience of Christian church services over the years. Having been asked for a viewpoint, I attempted to explain in an unpatronizing way as possible why the idea that the Bible is the literal Holy Word of God strikes me as total bollocks. Apart from anything else, surely there is a ton of evidence that this is simply just not so e.g. mis-translations, editing for political means by the early church, exclusion of passages and texts (such as the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas) that could undermine the power and authority of the church. I was met with a rather blank look.

According to staff at the home for the learning disabilities people, this evangelical church is the only local church that is genuinely welcoming to people with learning disabilities. Apparently more moderate churches and other religious groups are not really interested and/or find the dribbling, sudden outbursts and general noisiness too disturbing. However, even though its a break for them from their rather institutionalized existence, I couldn’t help but wonder what relevance being saved from “GOD’S ANGRY JUDGEMENT” and “WE ARE ALL SINNERS” (flashed up on the overhead projector on several occasions) had for individuals with learning disabilities? Perhaps fortunately, most of them aren’t really capable of paying too much attention or thinking about such messages in any depth. All the same, what’s that all about!?

Hmmmmm… apparently those kind of thoughts are uppermost in millions of American minds? Not to mention the immanent Rapture and Second Coming of Jesus, yes it really is all written in the Bible folks, so no need to worry about the consequences of bombing other countries, amongst other things. God Bless America! Oh dear, no wonder we are in trouble.

How does one square a deeply held belief in religious tolerance and freedom, with a deeply held belief that religious fundamentalism is dangerous nonsense?

Maybe all of life is nonsense.

Pimms o’clock

“Two of you, one of me… I make that Pimms o’clock!”. If you look very carefully in the right places in the next T.V. adverts for the drink Pimms, you will/might see me in the background. Tuesday was spent working as a paid extra, filming on Brighton seafront.

A glorious day it was too. About twenty of us met at 8.30 just along from the pier, and after a quick check that we were all dressed appropriately, we made our way to the first scene at the miniature crazy golf course. I was playing a bit of frisbee way off in the background with two of the others at first, but then I got to play a bit of “golf” quite close to the main camera action near actor Alexander Armstrong as they were filming another bit. I’m hoping you will be able to see me quite clearly if they use this bit of the filming!

By the time of the beach scenes in the afternoon the sun was blazing, absolutely perfect weather. Four scantily clad girls were arranged around Mr. Armstrong, and he ran off some of his typical wacky Pimms lines while they massaged him with sun-tan lotion. At various points I was either walking across the beach in the background, or again playing frisbee. By now quite a large crowd had gathered on the beach to watch the filming, and I had to pinch myself to remember that I was actually being paid for having a very nice sociable day on the beach in glorious sunshine.

Towards the end of the day, the final scenes were set in and outside a fish and chip shot just along from Brighton Pier. I didn’t play any part in these, which suited me fine as I was completely knackered by then. I didn’t catch it close up, but the sketch looked quite similar to Monty Python’s cheese shop sketch (a favourite of mine), but with different types of fish instead of cheese.

The whole day was great fun. First class food provided by the caterers at lunch, nice crew, assistants and fellow “extras” all round. It certainly made a change from my usual nursing and care work!

Toasted teacakes are back

The sun is shining and toasted teacakes are back in the little cafe I sometimes go to down the road. Hooray and yippee! I have had to make do with rather sugary alternatives with my coffee for the last couple of visits.

As friends can confirm, I have never stopped living the rock’n'roll lifestyle.

My letter in The Independent today

NHS: THE REALITY BEHIND THE FIGURES

Sir: Patricia Hewitt is brave to defend the Government’s position on staff and recruitment in the NHS (letter, 26 March). Undoubtedly there have been many improvements in some areas of the NHS over the past 10 years, but this is hardly the whole story.

“Staff are getting paid more for doing more,” she says. This depends on which staff you mean. Doctors, IT consultants, management and, to a much lesser extent, staff nurses have benefited, but others such as the lowly healthcare assistants are still earning about £6 an hour, which is a scandal. Housekeepers and cleaners, who play an important role in eliminating superbugs such as MRSA, have also had their pay kept at extremely low levels. In the NHS, as in Britain as a whole under Tony Blair, the rich have got richer and the poor have got relatively poorer.

I have recently worked in five NHS hospitals, two of which are under threat of closure, and my experience there suggests that Patricia Hewitt is living in a self-congratulatory New Labour fantasy world that bears little relation to reality. On wards such as those for the elderly and mentally ill, the cynicism and despair among staff is easily the highest I have encountered in the past 10 years. This has been caused by ongoing cost-cutting procedures, often with an accompanying bureaucratic nightmare.

A statement such as Ms Hewitt’s “We’ve been able to eliminate these recruitment difficulties and reward hard-working professionals with the pay they deserve” is nonsense in this context, although it may make sense in some areas of the NHS.

Her good news is that “vacancy rates are at an all-time low”. What she does not say is that this situation has arisen at least partly from freezes on much-needed new nursing and physiotherapy jobs, leaving many newly qualified potential staff stranded. Why continue to train so many staff if they are no longer required? And the latest treatment of newly qualified junior doctors seems designed to leave many of them unemployed too.

Everyone in the NHS is fed up with the obsession with “modernisation”, which continues to involve badly thought-out systems that waste astonishing amounts of public money.

Tim Burness,
Lancing, West Sussex

There has been a slight and appropriate edit of my original letter by the newspaper.