The Rusty Sword of Truth

In the graveyard of St. Mary Magdalene church in Whatlington, a village hard by the A21 two miles north of Battle, there is a small unassuming gravestone bearing the legend “valiant for truth”. Having ploughed miserably through John Bunyan’s allegorical A Pilgrim’s Progress a few years ago, because I thought I should, I recognised the phrase as the name of a character appearing towards the end of the pilgrim’s journey to the Celestial City: Valiant-for-Truth is engaged in a single-minded pursuit of the truth.

The trusty sword of truth was not something I associated with the occupant of the grave, the writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge. As someone born just over fifty years ago, I was familiar with Muggeridge for his regular appearances on television in the late 1960s and 1970s. But, picking up on the responses of my mum and dad, I formed the impression that he was a figure of fun.

My view of him as a pompous moraliser was cemented around the time I became an adult, when he famously appeared with the Bishop of Southwark on the television chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning to take on two of the Monty Python team and denounce their film Life of Brian as blasphemous and “tenth-rate”.

However, having read Muggeridge’s obituary – he died in a Hastings nursing home in 1990 at the age of 87 – I realised that his Christian evangelism was something that only developed in the late sixties. Prior to that, he had been an acerbic and rebellious journalist, challenging the social order of Britain and the world in the middle part of the 20th century.

Born in Croydon to socialist parents – his solicitor’s clerk father later became an MP in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government – Muggeridge was fervently left-wing in his youth. And when the Manchester Guardian posted him and his wife, Kitty, to Moscow in 1932, the Muggeridges’ admiration for the Soviet Union was such that they intended never to return to Britain. However, the widespread famine he discovered that year, and the censoring of his journalism, quickly disillusioned him. On his return, he wrote Winter in Moscow, a fictionalised condemnation of Stalin’s system.

Continuing his journalistic career before and after the Second World War, there was no target too sacred for Muggeridge - his agnosticism and republicanism were constant themes. In a 1957 article entitled Does England Really Need a Queen? he denounced the monarchy as “a royal soap opera” and caused an international controversy. And in 1965 he courageously attacked the virtual sainthood bestowed upon the assassinated John F. Kennedy as hypocritical. However, in 1969 he hung up his sword, published Jesus Rediscovered and began to attack the permissiveness of society, hanging-out with that monumental figure of fun Mary Whitehouse and her Festival of Light reactionaries.

Picture by Lori Oschefski

Born To Be A Rebel

It is surely a testament to the brilliance of Vic Godard that, nearly forty years - and almost as many incarnations – after the first gig by his band, Subway Sect, he still has the enthusiasm to be an energetic and creative musician and performer. On stage at the Brass Monkey in Hastings last night, as part of the Trash Cannes punk festival of music, film and art, the ever-contrary Godard threw himself into both the Northern Soul sound of his new Edwyn Collins-produced album, 1979 Now, and the raucous coruscations that made Subway Sect the most interesting of the crop of bands from ’76.

After a tentative start with an instrumental-cum-soundcheck, the first half of the set was mostly made up of a selection from the new album, which is a re-working of songs that Vic and the Sect wrote in 1979. Some – Holiday Hymn, The Devil’s in League With You – surfaced on later albums, but others, Happy Go Lucky Girl and the amazing Born To Be a Rebel, appear on the new album after a 35-year hibernation. Having been performing the tracks live, and recording them at Collins’ studio, over the last couple of years with the core band of Mark Braby, Kevin Younger and Yusuf B’layachi, they sound tight and impassioned.

When Vic announces halfway through that things are going to sound rawer from here on in, you realise why Edwyn Collins describes the Subway Sect as “the best punk band - fact.” They rip through early classics such as Chain Smoking and Parallel Lines and, as Vic straps on his guitar, he recounts a Spanish soundman telling him “the band make the music, you make the noise.” Introducing the debut Sect single, he says to forget about Mark E. Smith and How I Wrote Elastic Man, he wrote Nobody’s Scared as a distillation of an essay on Jean-Luc Godard he penned at college in Ealing - that’s how. With the line, “no-one knows what they’re for, no-one even cares”, he could have written it today for our listless times. It is the song’s second outing of the evening: fantastic support band, the New York Dollies, a female ukulele doo-wop trio (oh, yes!) covered it in their set of punk classics. If that seems improbable, the Dollies reminded me that the sound of the Ramones and the New York Dolls was more rooted in the 50s and early 60s than in the 70s.

When I saw Vic Godard last year at Brighton’s Green Door Store, 2010’s We Come As Aliens supplied the majority of the set; but only two numbers, Best Album and Music of A Werewolf, featured from that album last night and there was a little gem in the appearance of Common Thief from “an obscure album, Log Term Side-Effect”. Not obscure round our house, Vic! And as befits the headliners of a festival that is a celebration of art school punk, the nihilism of legendary Rough Trade single, Ambition, brought down the house.

1979 Now is released on 6th October on AED.

Brown Sugar

Walking through my local orchard, I noticed that the rows of heavily laden Discovery and Cox’s Orange Pippin apple trees were interspersed with the odd Russet tree. Distinctive for their leathery brown skin, they stood out, not just for their appearance, but for their infrequency. Growing odd cultivars from the same flowering group amongst the main crop ensures good pollination and a better yield. Being my favourite apple for its nutty aroma and sweet white flesh, I scavenged a few windfalls even though they were not yet quite ripe.

When I asked the fruit farmer why he does not grow more Russets, he said that at Farmers’ Markets they are popular, but the supermarkets will not buy them from him. The average shopper has become so conditioned to the idea of a shiny rosy apple that they baulk when confronted with a dun-coloured fruit with a matt finish.

The alienation of the Russet is not confined to its fruit. When I arrived at the fag end of a fruit tree sale at a local nursery recently, there were only two apple varieties remaining – a Laxton and a Herefordshire Russet. Even my own kids, who I thought were free of aesthetic prejudices when it came to food, pleaded with me not to buy the tree with “the brown apples”. The thing is, they had eaten peeled Russets as toddlers and loved their sugary taste. So I ignored their sensibilities and bought the Russets. If they were good enough for Shakespeare ("there's a dish of leather-coats for you" - Henry IV) and the Victorians, who knew them as the best tasting apple, they should still be good enough today.

Trash

In two weeks’ time the Trash’d New Wave Festival 2014, the third Trash Cannes festival, will be coming to a close with RAW, a showcase of local young punk bands. Not that this is just a music festival: Trash’d also incorporates art, literature, film and fashion over four days at a variety of venues in Hastings.

An independent festival, it is directed by filmmakers and writers Keith Rodway and Garth Twa. Rodway was part of Mark Perry’s The Good Missionaries and is a product and resident of Hastings. Twa has written for, and about, film and has worked at Universal studios. With a mandate of ‘informed irreverence’, the pair founded Trash Cannes in 2012 with festival patron TV Smith, one-time frontman of first-wave ‘one chord wonders’, The Adverts.

This year’s not-for-profit festival begins at the Memorial Art Gallery on the evening of Thursday 4th September, with a free exhibition of artist Cat Rosseiter’s work, and continues at the Stade Hall on the Friday night with an alternative fashion show, a programme of film talks and a screening of Sam Harris’s film, Arthur Sleep, with a live score. The following afternoon sees a return to the Memorial Art Gallery for Saturday Salon, a set of talks on literature, music and Garth Twa on twenty years in Hollywood.

The festival’s set-piece, Punky Monkey Night at The Brass Monkey in Havelock Road, looks like a real treat: there will be a Q&A with Nina Antonia, music journalist and author of books on the New York Dolls and their guitarist Johnny Thunders, and a screening of Danny Garcia’s recent documentary, Looking For Johnny, telling the story of Thunders’ life, career and early death in 1991. Live music will be supplied by The New York Dollies, a ukulele doo-wop punk covers trio, and headliners the sublime Vic Godard and The Subway Sect, who were on the bill of the seminal punk festival at London’s 100 Club in 1976. Godard’s 1993 solo album, The End of the Surrey People, featured a tribute song entitled – of course – Johnny Thunders. There’s a theme there…

The new bands appearing on the final night will play to a panel of musicians from Alabama 3, Ruts DC and The Wedding Present, and the festival will be brought to a close with a gig by locals The Fabulous Red Diesel and DJ sets until late. Shot through with the spirit of art school punk, Trash’d promises to be diverse, original and affordable.

The festival runs from 4th – 7th September 2014. Times, venues and ticket information can be found on the Trash Cannes website.

Over The Hill

When the marriage of Glaswegian folk and blues singer John Martyn, and his wife Beverley, broke up at the end of the 1970s, they were living in Heathfield. Interviewed in 1981 by Chris Salewicz of the NME, Martyn reflected on the fact that he had returned to Scotland whereas his wife still lived in the East Sussex town. “I don’t know how she can stand it,” he ruminated, “I suppose she has learnt to live with middle class ponces.” Hmm…

If that sounds as though Martyn was never at home so far from Glasgow, it could not be further from the truth. From the age of five, he had divided his time between his estranged parents’ homes north of the border and in the home counties. And in the first half of the seventies, Martyn and his own young family lived on the Sussex coast. Indeed, his time in Hastings probably saw Martyn at the peak of his creative and commercial powers.

Having already been an important figure in the British folk scene from the mid-1960s onwards recording as a duo with Beverley, Martyn’s sound took a distinctive turn when he experimented with guitar delay effects and a slurred vocal style, and teamed up with jazz bassist Danny Thompson. This new and unique sound was first fully heard on the 1971 album, Bless the Weather; but it was the next album that was his apotheosis: 1973’s Solid Air, with its title track dedicated to friend and regular visitor to the Martyns’ Hastings home, Nick Drake, was a huge critical and commercial success.

However, Martyn’s prodigious appetite for alcohol and drugs had become a central feature of his life and, on the beautiful Over The Hill, his paean to Hastings’ West Hill, he was at his most confessional:

Can't get enough of sweet cocaine, get enough of Mary Jane/Going back to where I come from, going rolling back home again/Over the hill

Although his lifestyle had caused the family’s life to become increasingly chaotic, Martyn was still self-aware enough to realise where his priorities lay:

Been worried about my babies, been worried about my wife/ Just one place for a man to be when he's worried about his life/ I'm going home, over the hill

The image of the troubled troubadour, returning home over West Hill, is a powerful one.

In an attempt at a new beginning, the family moved 15 miles inland to Heathfield in 1975. But what was intended as salvation was merely a postponement of the inevitable; by the end of the seventies, Martyn had left Sussex behind. He continued to record, perform and consume consistently throughout the following decades, until his death in 2009.

Once their young children had grown, Beverley also returned to music, latterly with this year’s The Phoenix and the Turtle album. And most recently, the young man who visited the Martyns’ hill-top Hastings home to stare out to sea for hours on end has propelled Beverley into the headlines. The ownership of early demo tapes, long in the possession of the Martyns, has been called in to question by the estate of the legendary Nick Drake.

Art and Ice Cream

The East Sussex Open is an annual exhibition, at Eastbourne’s Towner contemporary art museum, to showcase artists from across the county. Based in the largest gallery space in the area, the ground floor Exhibition Halls, it always provides a wide and interesting mixture of artistic forms; and the 2014 selection, ranging from traditional painting to large installations, does not deviate from this stimulating breadth of media.

Having to entertain the kids for the whole day on Saturday, I gambled on children’s intuitive appreciation of art to help me navigate this year’s collection. Whilst I was taking in Susan Crossett’s watercolours of rural landscapes, and Tom Banks’ eerie dark and depopulated St. Leonards’ street scenes, the kids were fighting over who should wear the headphones to accompany Flats, Gallit Shaltiel’s stop motion animation of a man trapped in a concrete structure.

It is perhaps a given that moving images and three-dimensional pieces will appeal more to younger minds; but whilst I was drawn to David Jones’ video installation, Jacob’s Ladder, an endless loop of empty London Underground escalator advertising frames, and the humour of Sam Carvosso’s Sculpture Falling on Lemon, the children were studying photographer Alex Currie’s urban landscapes, in particular the “sausage of snow” covering the stairs of the M61 Rivington services.

When it came to the installations in the centre of the gallery space, the children all enjoyed Anna Gonzalez Noguchi’s Tsumumi: To Wrap, a scarlet binding between the two main gallery pillars; but it was her arrangement of a chair, table, armbands and coffee cup that prompted a furious debate between the kids on the nature of conceptual art. The middle one was particular fervent, and a little too Daily Mail for my liking, in his questioning of the artistic nature of the piece; and when the oldest offered the suggestion that the title, Support, meant that it was about things we need to get by, he was still not satisfied.

The youngest came to the rescue by dragging us off to see contributions by two artists from Project Art Works in Hastings. Albert Geere is an 80-year-old artist with profound learning difficulties, who has lived in institutions since he was two. The primary geometrics of his painting Storm, Sky, House had especially appealed to her seven-year-old eyes. Then there was an exhibit in the name of Andrew and Eden Kotting. I had first come across this father and daughter team after reading an Iain Sinclair essay about them in the London Review of Books in 2006. I had then seen Andrew's 1996 film, Gallivant, documenting a coastal journey around Britain by his grandmother and seven-year-old Eden. Eden was born with Joubert Sydrome, a rare neurological disorder, and has collaborated with her father on a number of projects. Now 26, Eden’s series of canvases on show at the Towner – Stargeezers - depict religious zealots gazing at the heavens and is accompanied by a short film, shot by her father, showing Eden at work.

Wrapped up in the film, I had let the kids give me the slip but I quickly found them again, at the making table in the foyer, expressing their own artistic talents; fairies, war and Daleks abounded. The debate about Gonzalez Noguchi’s installation was still raging, so we took it across the street to the Favoloso ice cream parlour and worked our way through four large helpings of support.

The East Sussex Open runs at the Towner contemporary art museum until 14 September 2014. Entry is free.

The Greenhouse Effect

Nestling at the bottom of the garden, squashed between the fence and the vegetable patch is our greenhouse. It’s been through quite a bit in the time we have had it - footballs smashed through it, glass blown out during storms, numerous coats of Coolglass applied and removed – and it’s looking a bit worn these days: one pane of glass is held together by tape and the door has to be practically picked up to get in or out; but it is probably the most valuable piece of technology we own.

If a vegetable can be started off in the greenhouse it hugely reduces the risk of failure due to frost or pest, so pretty much everything we grow starts here: carrots, leeks, beetroot, sweetcorn, pumpkins, squash and brassicas begin life in trays or pots before being planted out at the allotment. Potatoes, garlic and onion sets are obviously sown straight into the soil, as are parsnips which never survive transplanting. And crops for the kitchen garden at home – broad and runner beans, peas, courgettes, lettuce – all start out on the greenhouse shelves to keep them clear of mice and slugs in their early days. Only radishes, rocket and spinach are sown into the soil.

Once the seed operation of late winter and spring is over, the shelving is cleared and the greenhouse becomes a jungle of summer produce. There was a time when we planted sweet pepper, aubergine and plum tomato plants but, even in the greenhouse, their fruits were slow to reach maturity and we decided to concentrate on faster growing plants – cherry tomatoes, such as Sweet Million, and several varieties of cucumber – that we could eat at the height of summer, rather than in September. A small corner is given over to Cayenne pepper plants to feed the family chilli addiction.

I cannot remember how much our greenhouse cost but I know that we got it at a cheap price in the winter from an ailing DIY and garden chain. It was a painstaking process assembling it, and it is a job for more than one person, but it has been worth it as the heart of our vegetable growing for the past eight years.

Greenhouses are generally available at no cost on Freecycle or the Friday Ad if you are prepared to dismantle and re-assemble yourself.