It seems that only yesterday (give or take the last month or three) we were being told that the Right were taking over in Europe. Frau Merkel had cleaned up in Germany. Sarközy was walking tall in France. The loathsome Berlusconi had nailed down Italy. Cameron was the coming-man in Britain.
The Left, everywhere, were on the defensive.
Suddenly, all is changed.
Angela Merkel had stated that she wanted her coalition to be judged on creating employment: at the turn of the year German unemployment was 3.43 million. Unemployment continues to rise, and the IMF reckon it could go to 5 million.
The IMF have a mission in Italy this week, doing the books. Meanwhile, the grossly-overdue review of the Italian tax system is still three or more years into the future.
All the opinion polls have David Cameron's Tories dead-in-the-water, and desperately hoping for a hung Parliament as their best hope.
HE MAY have steeled himself for a poor result in the first round of French regional elections, held on Sunday March 14th. But the outcome for France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, must nonetheless have felt crushing. Polls had suggested that his ruling UMP party would be neck-and-neck at this point with the opposition Socialists. Instead, the Socialists bagged fully 30%, with the UMP trailing at 26%. At the second round vote next Sunday, Mr Sarkozy can now hope at best simply to hold on to Alsace and Corsica, the only two regions out of 22 in mainland France which the UMP governs. At worst, he might even lose both.
For once (and after a long, dreary period of drought), Iain Dale drags a better bucket from the well, inviting his window-lickers to improve on his "Top Ten" of Westminster novels.
Predictably, this being Dale and Torydom, the general tendency is dross of the airport fiction genre. And, apparently (since he includes Buy it HERE hot links) another Dale money-spinner. The only yeurgghh! missing is "Lord" Archer.
Fame is the Spur
Malcolm felt motivated to suggest what has to be the ultimate Labour political novel: Howard Spring's Fame is the Spur, originally from 1940. Hamer Shawcross rises from the slums of Ancoats (with a flash-back to Peterloo) to cabinet rank, a home in Westminster and the red benches of the House of Lords. On the way he betrays most of his principles, and his best friends. The title is, of course, from Lycidas:
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of Noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes.
[Oh, the subtle joy of being able to reproduce Milton's spelling, without it being pointed as a "typo"!]
The irony of a liberal leader who forsakes his youthful ideals and finally abandons his old constituents as he acquires political power is the theme of a long, episodic and unmistakably allusive British film, "Fame Is the Spur,"... Even though boldly directed to British interests and memories, this life story of a political turn-coat should prove widely fascinating over here.
For its subject, a British labor leader, is not only made to bear a strong resemblance to the late Ramsay MacDonald, which makes for taut insinuations by itself, but he is drawn to a definite human pattern that is generally prevalent and recognized. He is the type of individual who bravely and loyally proclaims the rights of the working classes while he himself is poor but loses his high enthusiasm when his own way begins to grow smooth. He is the hot and reckless rebel who thumps for Freedom in his youth but who drifts into cold conservatism as he moves into high and responsible realms.
Based on a Howard Spring novel, this chronicle of a man's life begins with the impoverished youth of the subject in a sleazy Manchester slum and takes him to fame and a title—and a lonesome old age—in a London home. On the way, it observes him agitating for the welfare of the laboring class in the grim and depressing environment of nineteenth century industry; it follows his romantic marriage to a sincere blue-stocking girl and his rise as a Laborite in Parliament to the first Labor government in 1924. And it ends with his bleak surrender to the corrosive influences of fame and his denial of the interests of those who loved him and made him the champion of their weal.
In its sharp pictorialization of the aspects of the Labor movement and British politics in a period of historic ferment, this John and Roy Boulting film has vivid authority and fascination. Some of its episodes, such as a Welsh strike meeting and demonstration, are explosive and exciting to the full. And some of the scenes between the leader and his wife are emotionally fine. Particularly does one sequence, in which the husband permits his wife to be arrested and hauled from a meeting in which he is speaking because she shouts for the woman's vote, make as taut and revealing a personal crisis as a film such as this could contain.
But, unfortunately, a full comprehension of the principal character in this tale is missed in the broad and extended panorama of his life that is displayed. Yes, we see him as a youngster, turning in his romantic mind the glowing legend of the Peterloo massacre, as his grandfather has told it to him. We see him abandoning the project of storming a lock-out factory's gates when one of the braver demonstrators is suddenly and shockingly killed. We see him submitting to the flattery of a manifest Tory's wife. But we do not get from these appearances a clear discovery of why the man is what he is.
The moral weakness of Hamer Shawcross, the failure to discover why the man is what he is, is integral to the sophistication of the novel itself, but is implicit in that Milton quotation.
The MacDonald connection
Every reviewer seems to identify Shawcross with Ramsay MacDonald. Malcolm suggests he is a hybrid of MacDonald and Philip Snowden. Snowden, incidentally, this last week, was rescued from his obscurity by Andrew Alexander in the Daily Mail, using him as a bench-mark for George Osborne:
Chancellors who care little about their image are rare birds. Indeed, one has to go back, coincidentally, to the early Thirties era to find such an unusual creature: Philip Snowden, who became Chancellor in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government of 1929.
Now, Malcolm has struggled for several days to respond to that (the propensity for Wordpress to lose his Great Thoughts is why we are back on Blogger). So, a bit down the line we may have that rehearsed here.
Howard Spring
Writers come into and slip out of fashion, almost with the changing of the tide. Spring is one such present victim.
He is a writer of classical orthodoxy, telling a story in well-honed prose, thoroughly readable, but — apparently, for modern tastes — too measured and wordy. He was born in Cardiff, as the son of a jobbing gardener from the County Cork: his soon-to-be-widowed mother brought up a Victorian brood of nine children by working as a washerwoman and menial floor-scrubber. At the age of twelve, Spring was at work as a butcher's boy. A job in an accountants' office introduced him to the typewriter, and from there it was a small jump to a local newspaper. The old stand-by of evening classes gave him the basis of an education; and he moved on to being a reporter, in Yorkshire and finally to a berth on the Manchester Guardian. Poor health restricted his war service to the ASC, rising to a Warrant Officer in the Intelligence Corps. He witnessed the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, and the destruction of the Four Courts.
By the 1930s he was a book-reviewer for the London Evening Standard (then a publication of some quality: his predecessors were Arnold Bennett and J.B.Priestley), and his novels were accepted by Collins. He was now financially able to remove himself to Cornwall for the remainder of his life.
Out of the blue, in August 1941, he was commissioned to undertake a mission, and found himself aboard HMS Prince of Wales, off the coast of Newfoundland, as a witness to the summit between Churchill and FDR.
Novels continued regularly until a stroke in the early '60s. When he died in 1965, he had a useful corpus of work to show. These (especially Fame is the Spur and Shabby Tiger) became a staple of BBC televised serials, possibly because of their "Upstairs, Downstairs" mixture of the genteel drawing-room and the "grim oop north" working-class roots.
If there were a British "social realism" school of writers, Spring would qualify as its doyen.
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Thursday, September 17, 2009
Homework for Mary
Up early (Robbie the painter due before 8 a.m.) and on with the morning news.
We were expecting it; but it still shocked: the death of Mary. In the end, it seems, the leukemia didn't get her: it was the side-effects of the chemotherapy.
Perhaps, to aid the younger generation, the BBC now can be induced to dig out those original performances, and the documentary on the "folk revival":
Grossman's construct
The fourth original member of PP+M was Albert B. Grossman. Grossman saw the possibilities of commercializing "folk", opened up by the likes of Burl Ives, Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio.
This was the moment the baby-boomers hit town: college enrolments were booming -- a plurality of the white population in that key target age-group. This was their music. Joan Baez (another Grossman "asset") was already making a name. Bob Dylan (another one) was coming over the horizon. In creating PP+M Grossman inserted the tall, slender, photogenic blonde between two hirsute, but preppy, guitarists. Travis lived across Macdougal Street from Clarence Hood's Gaslight Cafe, a folk club where Noel [Paul] Stookey was the MC. Stookey, in his turn, had fallen in with the legendary Dave Van Ronk, the "Mayor of MacDougal Street", and traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic Martin. In another club, the Cafe Wha?, also on Macdougal Street, Grossman saw a singer-guitarist, Peter Yarrow, who had graduated from Cornell's psychology classes into a third-level course on English folksong and folklore (a.k.a. "Romp and Stomp"). Yarrow had adapted a lyric composed by Leonard Lipton, one his Cornell friends, and included it (and still does) in his regular songlists, a song everyone allegedly detested, a song no childhood should be without: Puff, the Magic Dragon.
Grossman now had his notion of a trio: an intellectual, a girl (to take the rôle patented by Ronnie Gilbert in The Weavers) and a humourist (as patented by Lou Gottlieb in The Limeliters). And then, after a successful preview when PP+M depped for solo Yarrow at Folk City, with supreme timing and placement, he launched them at the epicenter of cool that was Fred Weintraub's Bitter End in Greenwich Village.
On 29 January 1962, according to Billboard at the time, PP+M signed to the nascent Warner Bros (significantly not the "traditional folk music labels -- Vanguard or Folkways), for an advance of $30,000.
Grossman may have put together his idea of a pop-folk trio: what he bought were three hard-headed, highly-principled, committed liberals. The repertoire was collectively agreed: for example, when Stookey became a convinced Christian, Lemon Tree (their first single) was dropped. The first eponymous album [left] released on 1st March 1962, was the number 1 seller for seven weeks, and was in the charts for a total of 185 weeks. It has been calculated as the 36th top-seller of the all vinyl-mad 1960s.
Hammering out the message
If PP+M were meant to be a straight commercial act, they blew that with their follow-up single. The less-savvy college kids may not have noticed why: their elders certainly should have done.
Back in 1949 Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had come up with The Hammer Song for the "fellow-travelling" People's Songs. The target was the red-baiters, already developing into full MacCarthyites of the late 40s. It didn't help when the song was the cover for Sing Out! magazine's first edition [left]. Although the Weavers had recorded it, in 1949, for the minority Harmony label, it never appeared on any of the commercial recordings they did for Decca. Indeed, they were selective about when and where they performed it.
Largely because of PP+M, for whom it won a 1962 Grammy, If I Had a Hammer quickly became a musical cliché. Yet, as that Newport version above shows, PP+M made it, in live performance, a matter of anger and intent.
The March on Washington
Jumping over a fair bit of history, Blowin' in the Wind (apparently, PP+M's version remains the most commercially-successful of any Dylan song), Puff (which was quickly corrupted by the Vietnam War into one nick-name for a DC3 gunship), the 1963 Newport Festival, any of which could provide a blog entry, let's move on apace to the August, 1963, March on Washington, for which Yarrow was a co-organiser. The two songs the group sang were Hammer and Blowin' in the Wind. They would later also be alongside Martin Luther King at Selma; and remember him at the 1971 anti-war March:
Conclusion
This diatribe has gone on too long already.
A good woman, a true comrade has died. It would be gratifying, here, to throw in some palliative, to make a trite parallel between Garry Trudeau sending off Andy Lippincott to Pet Sounds:
and Mary Travis living to see a Black American President walk down the road, the white dove sleeping in the sand, the mountain washed to the sea ... all on just the spot they belted that song out in 1971 [see the YouTube video above].
And yet, she wouldn't see it that way. Her acerbic tongue (too long silenced on stage) would have snappily told us not to be ridiculous: this is just another cautious, underperforming President, failing to deliver on his mandate. Cue Noel Paul Stookey's tribute:
Witty, politically savvy, she was the master/mistress of the cutting exit line. Once I was attempting to defend Ronald Reagan's educational policy. She interrupted me with "Oh, for heaven's sake, do your homework", turned on her heel, and walked away. Need I say it turned out she was right?
Measures of time and distance 2: Peace in our time?
A recollection:
Years gone by, as darkness set in, Malcolm and His Lady pulled into a motel, north of the 101 Ventura Freeway in north Los Angeles. Showered and pizza-ed, with a thirst, they ventured into a local bar in Van Nuys. The ambiance, by a long way, was not the most pleasant: needs must when the demon drink drives.
Once inside, Malcolm and His Lady recognised they were in a Vets' bar: the walls were covered with memorabilia. Not just any Vets: Vietnam Vets.
The tight group around the bar itself included a wheelchair. This was just before Gary Sinise made the point in Forrest Gump.
At that time, these were, very much, the forgotten men. The alienation, the hostility and the distrust were palpable. It was not a happy place into which to venture. It was not the most enjoyable drink of Malcolm's life.
Out of that, Malcolm made a re-appraisal and discovered a new sympathy.
A thought: Malcolm has just heard his daughter, the Pert Young Piece, remark on the death of Harry Patch, the last survivor of Passchendaele. May she comment to her children and grandchildren on the passage of time, and remind them that her great-grandfather is in Doullens Cemetery.
From the mud of Flanders to those new poppy fields in Helmand, the Poor Bloody Infantry did not decide the cause or determine the events.
Along with the families of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, whatever our preconceptions and prejudices, we should remember -- and honour -- them.
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Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Whore's soapera Rousting out junk cupboards, the most peculiar things (and memories) emerge. Malcolm's brain seems to work on a similar arrangement.
Wakened, no doubt, by the 4.30 a.m. flight from Hong Kong arriving into Heathrow, the synapses began to snap into contact. Out of nowhere, Malcolm found himself recalling a film from 1979.
One stimulus might be those misplaced Willie Nelson mp3s he located the previous evening, when fossicking around his back-up hard drive. The film he recalled was Nelson's first outing as a credited film actor: The Electric Horseman, from thirty years ago. It is an essentially ideological movie.
Malcolm attempts a film-synopsis
The story-line is simple: Robert Redford is the lead, Norman "Sonny" Steele, a champion rodeo rider now on the skids. There is nothing complex about these rôle-namings. Steele is converting his Ampco Corp brekkie-cereal sponsorship into a hard liquor habit. Another on the Ampco hay-roll is champion horse, Rising Star. Falling Steele and Rising Star are brought together in Las Vegas. Steele realises the horse is being bulked with steroids while being tranquillised to disguise a tendon injury. He liberates himself and the horse by riding out of the Las Vegas show, through the casino, along the neon-lit-Strip, wearing his eponymous illuminated suit, and then -- lights out -- into the wild:
Ampco have a public relations disaster on their hands. Revelations about their treatment of the horse endanger a take-over bid. Steele and Rising Star must be found; and any hostile publicity suppressed (the Ampcobaddy is named, pointedly, as "Hunt Sears"). Cue the statutory Hollywood chase:
The romantic interest is played by Jane Fonda, as a celebrity television reporter, Hallie Martin (is that an echo of the naïf "Holly Martin" of The Third Man?). She has made her name, and her fortune, by exposing media manipulation and hype. She uses her wiles to locate Steele: having escaped one form of media exploitation, he doesn't want another.
Big Biz has other ideas: to denigrate Steele, on the grounds of his alcoholism, thus neutralising his threat to the Ampco's reputation. So Martin, the Fonda character, gets her story, representing Steele as an archetypal Western hero.
The reporter needs the icing on the cake: Steele filmed in the moment of releasing Rising Star into the wild. In the process of Martin's and Steele's journey into
Land, lots of land, and the starry skies above
Steele takes her video-camera (this is late '70s technology, so it's a hefty avoirdupois, besides having symbolic weight) and throws it away.
Deprived of her lens, Martin starts to see him as a person, not another story; and emotional bonds develop. She agrees to keep secret where Rising Star is released. Back in the wider world, her earlier efforts have won Steele public support, and Ampco are obliged to fall into line, with a face-saving approval of Steele's horse-napping. Hence the opening credits (see below) and the emotive moment when Rising Star is shown racing across the grasslands to join wild horses.
"Old West" versus new Glitz
What the director, Sidney Pollack, establishes is a parable of media manipulation. The motif is itself an artifact, the core of the whole Western myth: the cowboy. The story invites us, the manipulated audience, to share Steele's journey from image to nature, out of illusion into some sort of "reality", out of falsehood and manipulation into simplicity and honesty.
Beyond that, the corruption of the media is being depicted -- not argued -- by the medium which most corrupts. The message is being promoted at an emotional, not an intellectual level. Specifically, the news media are depicted as distorter (but, at heart, well-intentioned), while the dream-merchants (who invented the "Wild West" in the first place) are ambiguously corrupt (Ampco) or upright (Fonda's Martin).
So we have squared the ideological circle. The media can manufacture a false image (Ampcoexploiting Steele and Rising Star) or it can expose the reality behind the false image (Martin), while the film about this (directed by Sidney Pollack) is both revelator and manipulator. And the fourth participant is the public, who are manipulated alike by Ampco, by Martin, and by Pollack's movie.
And then there is Malcolm's take, here, on the whole thing. Another level of manipulation.
Still, Nelson is something different:
Oh, and Malcolm did find a video of The Electric Horseman, at the bottom of a pile, in the attic.
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Words, idol words [sic]
Brian Murphy was then Education Officer of the TUC. It was in his home that Malcolm first saw the coming wonders-of-the-age: CEEFAX and PRESTEL. So that means we are back in the mid-1970s.
Brian and Liz Murphy's home in Woodland Rise, Muswell Hill, had no obvious need of wallpaper. Every unglazed, undoored, vertical surface was book-shelved. And the shelves were over-populated.
Now, the higher authority at Redfellow Hovel insists books or magazines are not to be left in the jakes. That makes the works of Ben Schott, so portable and episodic, the ideal companion to necessary moments of evacuation.
Schott has become a minor, but highly successful industry. Apart from the annuals, the ever-ready solution to "What shall we give Grandad?", he crops up with spreads in the Times and elsewhere. However, he has found a regular home at the New York Times, where he introduces us to the new vocabulary:There is little original about the concept. Every lexicographer has been both kept in useful employ and plagued by the propensity of the populace to devise, adapt and discard words. Each new technology that comes along invents and re-invents a peculiar dialect. "Dot Wordsworth" is doing something very similar to Schott for The Spectator.
No, it's not the same thing that the Oxford English Dictionary, and its rival heavy tomes, attempt to do: they are more reflective, more considered. What Schott and Co are doing is grasping at the Zeitgeist, that we may momentarily reflect on modern instance, as it is plucked fresh and raw. Many of the fleeting terms that Schott describes will be forgotten in days or, at most, weeks: they are, or were little more than metaphors conceived in some fertile brain to explicate or decorate a gossamer moment.
What is intriguing about Schott at the New York Times (go see for yourself) is just how politically he manages to concoct his ingredients: recent entries have been:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's incendiary use of cruel and repressive racist regime to describe Israel's policy to Palestine;
the so-called “pottery shop” argument – we [the Coalition Forces] owned Iraq because we (helped) break it;
Nursery of Terrorism: the Nickname for Azamgarh, a district in Uttar Pradesh, India, which is the birthplace of a significant number of people arrested for suspected involvement in terrorism.
A Gathering Storm: The title of a “religious liberty ad campaign” challenging same-sex marriage, released by the National Organization for Marriage.
And many more.
Young Ben Schott is getting away with murder at the Gray Lady. Long may he be licensed liberally to do so.
Lefties and people of a strong liberal disposition might be well advised to catch him now before they shut him down.
Brian Murphy would have raised a glass (or three) of malt to cheer him on.Sphere: Related Content
Sunday, April 5, 2009
The not-so-good and not-so-great, number 13
Unlucky for some: William Burke He was born near Strabane in 1792, and (for the son of a Catholic cottier) well-educated. As a boy, he served in the local Manse, then as a baker and weaver, before some seven years in the Donegal militia. By then he was married, with two children. He quarrelled with his father-in-law over rights to a piece of land, and did a bunk to Scotland, leaving wife and children behind.
Burke found employment as a navvy on the Union Canal; and set up house with Nelly McDougal. Since both partners had living spouses Burke, as a Catholic, was excommunicated, and Nelly, a Presbyterian, denounced from the pulpit.
By 1827 Burke was in Edinburgh, trading in second-hand clothing, when he lost everything in a fire at his lodgings. He and Nelly went out of town, to work on the harvest at Penicuik, where they became drinking pals with William Hare and his doxy, Maggie. Hare may have done for Maggie's husband, to get possession of the lodging house business as well as the lady.
Burke and Hare
The career for which Burke and Hare became famous began on 27 November 1827. A pensioner in Hare's lodgings died, owing Hare £4. To recoup the debt, the two sold the corpse for £7 10 shillings to Professor Robert Knox, for use as a dissection specimen. Realising they were onto a winner, Burke and Hare refined their operation. Live specimens were intoxicated and smothered (Hare covered the mouth, Burke applied a body press). At least 15 more corpses were delivered to Professor Knox, at sums between £8 and £14 each.
The last of their victims was a Mary Campbell (or Doherty), done to death on 31 October 1828. Neighbours' suspicions reached the police, who found the body in a box in Knox's cellar. Hare turned king's evidence, and was acquitted.
Sir Walter Scott was in the throng to witness Burke's public hanging (see left) in the Lawnmarket on 28 January 1829. It was further ordered that Burke's corpse, too, be dissected: souvenirs of his skin were distributed quite widely. His skeleton is still on display in the anatomy museum of Edinburgh University.
Some vocabulary
Out of that came the verb "to burke", meaning as the OED has it:
To murder, in the same manner or for the same purpose as Burke did; to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim's body for dissection.
By 1830, in one of the Last Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb is using the word to describe the schoolboy's Saturday Nightscarifying, as he is made ready and presentable for Sunday:
Cleanliness, saith some sage man, is next to Godliness. It may be; but how it came to sit so very near, is the marvel... But to be washed perforce; to have a detestable flannel rag soaked in hot water, and redolent of the very coarsest coarse soap, ingrained with hard beads for torment, thrust into your mouth, eyes, nostrils positively Burking you, under pretence of cleansing substituting soap for dirt, the worst dirt of the two making your poor red eyes smart all night, that they might look out brighter on the Sabbath morn (for their clearness was the effect of pain more than cleanliness), could this be true religion?
From there it is a small leap in metaphor to a secondary meaning:
To smother, ‘hush up’, suppress quietly. Also, to evade, to shirk, to avoid.
Those who spoke in favour of the poor men, were what the reporters call burked.
One expression that definitely does not derive from William Burke is "to look (or feel) a right Burke". This is often, and more correctly spelled as "berk". As Eric Partridge, in his marvellous 1937 Dictionary of Slang, showed, this is abbreviated from the rhyming slang "Berkeley hunt". As Partridge had it:
Berkeley, the pudendum muliebre: C. 20. Abbr. Berkeley Hunt.
The Berkeley Foxhounds are the oldest pack of foxhounds in the country and can be traced back to the 12th century when they were used to hunt both the stag and the fox until the late 18th century onwards when they hunted the fox alone. The 5th Earl of Berkeley could hunt his hounds from Berkeley Castle to Charing Cross in London. He had kennels at Berkeley, Broadway, Nettlebed, Gerrards Cross and Cranfield. The season would start at Berkeley and progress to each of his kennels to London and then in stages back to Gloucestershire.
That would suggest the Berkeley was the hunt operating closest to the Londoner's experience. How he changed the pronunciation to match the spelling is another matter. However, in view of the rhyming argot, it is as well to know:
THE BERKELEY HUNT WILL ONLY BE CONDUCTING LEGAL ACTIVITIES!
Malcolm, back around 1962 or so, signed up for the Irish Labour Party/Dream an Lucht Oibre, The Party Constitution went far beyond Sidney Webb's Clause IV. Clause 11 or 12 (the precise number now eludes Malcolm's recollection) called for the nationalisation of banking and insurance.
‘The Keir I Know’
-
Politics can often feel like a contest between personalities. The loudest
voice. The sharpest soundbite. The quickest route…
The post ‘The Keir I Know’ a...
Ersatz Elgin
-
The V&A has a superfluity of plaster casts of sculptures. I haste past them
as fast as crowds permit. The BM has a hall full of damaged carvings off
the bl...
Malcolm featured in the columns of "Trinity News", the student weekly of Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1960s.
He worked in public education. He was a borough councillor and parliamentary candidate. He retired. He was bored. He blogged.
Homework for Mary
an may have put together his idea of a pop-folk trio: what he bought were three hard-headed, highly-principled, committed liberals. The repertoire was collectively agreed: for example, when Stookey became a convinced Christian, Lemon Tree (their first single) was dropped. The first eponymous album [left] released on 1st March 1962, was the number 1 seller for seven weeks, and was in the charts for a total of 185 weeks. It has been calculated as the 36th top-seller of the all vinyl-mad 1960s.
e meant to be a straight commercial act, they blew that with their follow-up single. The less-savvy college kids may not have noticed why: their elders certainly should have done.
A recollection:
Words, idol words [sic]
There is little original about the concept. Every lexicographer has been both kept in useful employ and plagued by the propensity of the populace to devise, adapt and discard words. Each new technology that comes along invents and re-invents a peculiar dialect. "Dot Wordsworth" is doing something very similar to Schott for The Spectator.
The Berkeley Foxhounds are the oldest pack of foxhounds in the country and can be traced back to the 12th century when they were used to hunt both the stag and the fox until the late 18th century onwards when they hunted the fox alone. The 5th Earl of Berkeley could hunt his hounds from Berkeley Castle to Charing Cross in London. He had kennels at Berkeley, Broadway, Nettlebed, Gerrards Cross and Cranfield. The season would start at Berkeley and progress to each of his kennels to London and then in stages back to Gloucestershire.
