Gale Force

The persistent December rain has meant that orchards and fields, hillsides and woodlands have become sodden quagmires, almost impossible for walking. When I proposed to the family that the final walk of the year needed to be a rain-soaked coastline trek on sturdy pebbles, to blow away the Christmas cobwebs, my idea was met with dumb incredulity. Only the dogs seemed interested: but the short-legged one is Scottish and stubborn and I knew he would renege on his word as soon as he felt a stiff breeze; the long-legged one will go anywhere, in any weather, if it means being out of the house and getting sight of a sausage-flavoured dog treat; so only he made the cut. Luckily, he cannot understand the shipping forecast: “Thames, Dover, Wight: southwesterly gale force 8 increasing severe gale force 9 imminent; rough becoming very rough; rain or squally showers; moderate becoming poor.”

With trees blown down, homes flooded and power out in a host of places, there is much for people in south coast counties to worry about. If the litany of the shipping forecast can usually make the threat of force 12 hurricane winds appear benign, getting Alan Bennett to read it on Radio 4 this week was a masterstroke of panic management. His soft Leeds cadence made it sound as though we will never know fear again, even if the forecast was one from October. The roll call of sea areas – Forties, Cromarty, Forth…Sole, Lundy, Fastnet…Shannon, Rockall, Malin – is poetic balm to soothe the soul.

My plan was to start early on Cooden beach, in sea area Dover, and walk far enough west until I was in sea area Wight. If a trans-sea area walk seemed ambitious, the location of the boundary between the two, at Sovereign Harbour in Eastbourne, made it a reasonable round trip of 10 miles. But when I arrived at Cooden, it was high tide and the gale forecast for the coast was already battering the beach. The strip of pebbles between the crashing waves and the coastal road was so narrow that I thought the dog might be swept away or run over; but we made it through to the safety of the broader beach.

There is something strangely attractive about a coastal walk on a wild winter day: the lowering sky, the salty sea-spumed air limiting the vision, and the lack of any other people all make it a beautiful but desolate experience. And this morning’s Beaufort scale force 9 gale, although not quite full in the face, made westerly progress slow; even a solitary gull struggled. But we carried on past the caravan parks of Norman's Bay - as deserted as cemeteries - and the residents of beach-front houses, peering out anxiously at the turbulent swell.

I felt exhausted as we neared Pevensey Bay, but a fortifying glimpse of brightness between the clouds spurred me on. The tide having receded a little, we were able to walk on the more compacted surface nearer the shoreline and the dog even attempted a frolic or two. But as we left Pevensey, the coast curved southwards and the relentless gale became a headwind. With the return walk in mind, my resolve deserted me and, a mile from the harbour, we turned around.

With the wind behind us, we veritably sailed back to Cooden; and, of course, by the time we returned the weather was abating: “Thames, Dover, Wight: southwesterly 5 to 7; moderate or rough; rain then showers; moderate becoming good.”

The Ghosts of Christmas

Sussex duo, Vile Electrodes, have produced a seasonal slice of pop, with their latest offering The Ghosts of Christmas, that beautifully combines the Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack, Soft Cell’s Say Hello, Wave Goodbye and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. With a name punning the bohemian writer of erotica, Anais Nin, vocalist and sometime-milliner Anais Neon intones, in an unmistakably English accent, a festive tale of death and break-up to Martin Swan’s backing of swathes of shimmering analogue synthesiser.

Not being reality television contestants or having their track featured in an advertisement, the St. Leonards-on-Sea group are unlikely to trouble the Christmas number one slot; but not all festive songs are aimed at the mass market, especially ones about your true love dying on Christmas Eve.

The Past is a Foreign Country

About a thousand years ago – well, thirty five but it feels ever so much longer – I wrote a punk fanzine, called Intrusion, with three of my mates. It started in 1978 and lasted for eight issues. It was standard Sniffin’ Glue-inspired fare: the first few editions were single-sided Xerox and it then moved on to the sophistication of double-sided printing. Pages were a mixture of hand-written and typed, with felt pen and Letraset headings. Photographs were rarely original and covers were generally cryptic collages. We mainly sold it through a small ad in the back of the NME, but Rough Trade and a couple of other record shops stocked it successfully on a sale or return basis.

Looking at the excellent Essential Ephemera recently, a blog that unearths forgotten fanzines from the punk era, I came across a post on a fanzine called Toxic Grafity. It prompted me to recall that we had helped its writer with his earlier version, No Real Reason. When I say helped, I think we were involved in getting the first issue photocopied; it then developed into a strong Crass/Poison Girls anarcho-punk fanzine with much more direction than our own. But it made me search online to see what place Intrusion fanzine had secured in the annals of punk. There were three results of my Google search: it had made it into that exhaustive document of punk, Bored Teenagers, and then there was a review, taken from issue 5, of a gig at the Croydon Greyhound on a Penetration fan website. The last result was on eBay; a punk memorabilia seller was offering a copy of issue 7 and there had been one bid of £10. Delighted to see that our modest offering still had currency in the modern world, I went up into the loft and found the bundle of fanzines that I have carefully kept. There, amongst copies of Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn, was one of each of the eight editions of Intrusion fanzine.

If the past is a foreign country, having your sixteen-year-old self reflected back at you through your juvenile punk ramblings is an uncharted corner of the solar system. It is a mixed experience - at once heartening, baffling and embarrassing. The writing was generally good and the content shows that we were not just playing at it. There were interviews with John Peel, the cartoonist Savage Pencil, band members from Siouxsie and the Banshees and Penetration, and lesser known south London local bands Rodney and the Failures and The Vamp (the latter featuring drummer Max Splodge, soon-to-be lead singer of top ten-hitters Splodgenessabounds). There were live gig reviews of all of those bands, and The Clash, Adam and the Ants, The Adverts and The Mekons, as well as quite perceptive pieces on the recorded output of Alternative TV, Wire, PIL and even David Bowie.

For a reason I have no recollection of, I was writing under the name “Andi Recondite” and some of the pages were nothing more than a puzzling collection of random images and scribbles. More embarrassingly, there was a lot of conflicting and shouty “punk’s dead/punk’s not dead” polemic, which got worse in the later editions and was probably the reason that the fanzine floundered. Interviews were generally typed-up verbatim, like a script, and were not that incisive. Cleary running out of questions, the Banshees started to interview us. (SEVERIN: What’s your favourite Banshees song? ME: All of them!) Oh, dear. But it was passionate, angry and – most importantly – self-produced. And there was some well-intentioned, but naïve, politics. Items on Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, articles on the Persons Unknown anarchist trial and an apposite picture of an imminent Premier Thatcher with a swastika on her forehead and the Mekons’ lyric “we know what we know and tomorrow is an empty day” underneath.

Issue 7, the one up for sale on ebay, does not stand out. Strangely, it has a cartoon drawing of the four writers on the cover (that’s me, second left) but, that apart, it does not seem to be different from any of the other editions. Maybe it is collectable because of the Peel interview, something he did not do that often. I remember we arranged to meet him in a pub around the corner from Broadcasting House, and he was mortified that The Adverts and Wire were in the pub. He was at great pains to point out that it was a coincidence, that he did not hang out with bands. This is borne out by the rather churlish revelations of Mark E. Smith and Morrissey that, despite being championed by Peel, they had little contact with him. I think they are rather missing the point; as are some others: when I went back to eBay, the winning bid, for an original edition of a fanzine produced by some teenage punks on a council estate, was an inexplicable £124.

Hedge Fund

When you live on a hill – and a hill that has a windmill, to boot – common sense tells you it is going to be windy; and it is. Every October, when the change of season starts to make the air currents even stronger, stuff starts getting blown about: allotment sheds, greenhouse windows, television aerials - anything that sticks its head above the parapet. But instead of any forward-planning to make these features windproof, we instead have a retrospective emergency fund to cover whatever disasters winter can throw at us and, after the St. Jude’s day storm, we had to raid the shoebox under the bed yet again.

When an unstoppable force - such as the wind - meets an immovable object - such as a solid fence - one thing happens: the immovable object becomes movable. With a whole line of fencing down, we would usually have got the panels replaced but, realising that we have been repairing this ugly edifice every year for eight years, this time we opted for a more sustainable solution. The penny finally dropped, and the emergency fund became a hedge fund.

We could have taken the easy option and planted the dense and rapid growing cupressus x leylandii, but with 60 million of these conifers - one for every person in Britain - there are already too many dense, lifeless shrubs blighting the lives of people up and down the country. I once walked along the Tanat Valley to Lake Vyrnwy in mid-Wales, and the route took me past a Forestry Commission plantation of leylandii. It was eerily still and quiet, something I mistook for a calm serenity until I realised that it actually repelled wildlife - I could not hear the cry of a single bird.

Instead, we went for a mixed native hedge. Taking advice from English Woodlands, at the Burrow Nursery in Cross in Hand, we planted a mix of traditional deciduous trees such as hawthorn, hazel, hornbeam and beech, and included some laurel for year-round greenery. Planting was hard work but, with reasonably mature plants rather than bareroot stock, there should be a hedge that is established – and immovable - within two years; and it will be attractive to humans, birds, insects and small mammals alike.

In the Belly of the Beast

Being the best band in the world that most people have never heard of, The National are now probably too big to repeat their 2010 visit to the Brighton Dome, or last year’s curating of an All Tomorrow’s Parties at Camber Sands; so, it’s to North London’s Alexandra Palace on a school night to catch the Brooklyn band’s major cities-only visit to Britain.

With a capacity of 7,500, Ally Pally is huge. My only previous visit was sometime in the 90s when Black Grape and 808 State topped an endless bill on a night that I dimly remember as a scene from an Hieronymus Bosch painting. Outside on Wednesday night, it was like a scene from the Pilgrimage of Grace as the grey and black-clad hordes traipsed soberly up the hill from Wood Green tube. Inside the venue, it felt like an evacuation centre: huddles of overcoated refugees spread out as far as the eye could see, patrolling high vis stewards everywhere and the smell of frying meat wafting through the air.

Being near enough to the front, it was possible to imagine that this was an intimate gig if you ignored the massive screens, either side of the stage, beaming images to people at the back. There was always a danger that the band’s subtle and melancholic sound, and Matt Berninger’s sombre baritone in particular, would get lost in such a large venue, but his voice is gratefully high up in the mix and the brothers Dessner and Devendorf sound terrific when they kick off with Don’t Swallow the Cap and I Should Live in Salt from this year’s Trouble Will Find Me album. Over half of the 25 songs played come from this album and its predecessor, breakthrough album High Violet, but favourites such as Mistaken for Strangers, Squalor Victoria and Slow Show from 2007’s Boxer get an airing too. There is the surprising inclusion of Apartment Story with Cardinal Song from the Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers album of ten years ago, the gorgeous Pink Rabbits and a very pertinent England – “you must be somewhere in London” – before they finish with the sublime About Today, from the Cherry Tree EP, and the obligatory Fake Empire.

The five-song encore includes a new song, Lean, recorded for the soundtrack of the latest Hunger Games film, a raucous version of Mr. November - the only song played from my favourite album, Alligator – and a heart-warming acoustic sing-along finale of Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks. After a two hour set, we are disgorged from the belly of the beast out into the chilly night air, to a spectacular view south across the capital, spirits lifted for the journey home.

Les Enfants Sauvages

When the debut single by Savages was released in 2012, one review said that it “makes us dream of what it must have been like to have been around to hear, in real time, the debut releases by Public Image Ltd, Magazine, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division, to feel, as those incredible records hit the shops, that unearthly power and sense of a transmission from a satellite reality." As someone old enough to have been around to hear and buy all of those records in real time, I sometimes feel that music is no longer tangible and rooted in experience, but is rather some sort of virtual heritage concept that can be plundered from any age; and it makes me feel old.

Savages, a London band who played Brighton’s Concorde 2 last night, are not old - they are very young; but their sound could have come straight from those defining years of post-punk at the end of the 70s. And it is a fantastic sound: thundering percussion from stand up drummer, Fay Milton; a rumbling bass that hits you straight in the sternum, from Ayse Hassan; powerful and strident - but highly emotive - vocals from Jehnny Beth; and stylish, coruscating guitar work from Gemma Thompson. It is Thompson’s playing that stood out for me: the searing and soaring trebly urgency of the Banshees and PIL, combined with a startling array of effects and noises straight from Martin Hannett’s box of production tricks; there was never a moment’s silence in the set as her guitar fed back and warped, even in between songs.

Most of the tracks from their debut album, Silence Yourself, were played last night and, with the addition of two new songs - the pleading and desperate I Need Something New and, closing track, the radio-unfriendly Fuckers - the pace was frantic from the start. The only change of speed came in the middle of the set: the mellow and atmospheric, Waiting for a Sign, was followed by a surprising cover of highly influential electronic duo Suicide’s single, Dream Baby Dream, from 1979. It was a vibrant and exciting performance and, watching the band last night - black-clad, gender-neutral, wreathed in dry ice, indifferent or diffident in front of the audience – I could have easily been in a reality from the satellite of 34 years ago.

End of the Pier Show

Earlier this year, when Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds announced their autumn tour dates, I was relieved that they were not playing the awful Brighton Centre, where I saw them on their last tour in 2008. But the absence of any date in Cave’s adopted home town meant that I was forced to get a ticket for one of their London performances – a regretful decision when they subsequently added a date at the Brighton Dome.

Standing in the bar at the Hammersmith Apollo on Saturday night, I worked out that the last time I had been there it was called the Hammersmith Odeon and it was to see Lou Reed. That was 34 years ago to the month and, in the light of Reed’s death last weekend, it would be easy to be sentimental; but that gig did not go well: prominent in the backing band was cowboy-hatted bassist Ellard “Moose” Boles and his millinery seemed to have influenced Reed’s readings of his classic songs that night. Us young punks, there to worship at the altar of the Velvet Underground, fled into the night at the mellow country arrangements. Lest we forget, though, the first Velvets album was recorded in 1966. Go and listen to it again: while they were recording ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’, Britain was listening to Dusty Springfield.

Things have not changed that much; in fact, they have probably got worse. While Cave and the Bad Seeds are admired enough to sell out three nights at Hammersmith, Miley Cyrus is popular enough to top the charts; and it is Cyrus’s body that Cave imagines floating in an LA swimming pool in one of six songs from this year’s nine-track album, Push the Sky Away. But it is not just a new album set: Cave leads the Bad Seeds through a set of hell and damnation, from his back catalogue, that is exhausting. As well as brooding perennials Tupelo, Stagger Lee and Red Right Hand¸ we get the darkness of The Mercy Seat and Jack the Ripper, and a screamingly intense version of From Her to Eternity that is the climax of the first half of the performance.

It would seem churlish to complain when Cave is putting so much energy in as the full southern gothic preacher: prowling the edge of the stage, by turns frightening – “You! With your fucking iphone!” – and flirting with the audience, he shimmies and prances like Trinity in The Matrix about to do Kung Fu. And Warren Ellis’s demented fiddler, slashing at his violin, hair and horsehair flailing, is almost a match. But it is something of a relief from the fire and brimstone when Cave sits at the piano and plays the sublime Love Letter, from No More Shall We Part, and the little heard Far From Me, from The Boatman’s Call. These are the only songs from these two gorgeous albums before the darkness returns - “here comes Lucifer with his canon law” - with Higgs Boson Blues.

After a five-song encore that includes one of the Bad Seeds rare floor-fillers, Deanna, Cave has played for two hours at a mostly frenetic pace. At 56, this might be the last time he gigs night after night with such verve and intensity and, perhaps signalling the way ahead, he returns to the piano for the final encore, a beautiful new ballad that could have come straight from the end of Brighton Pier, Give Us a Kiss.