DEFRAGGING THE SCANDISK
All this talk about the mathematical concept of infinity
As if it was a numbers game
Real numbers, that is
Not those sets of integers
Or Cardinalities
Favoured by the current crop of God-botherers
Lemniscate my arse
Stop going on and on and on
Infinity is not a number
When you’re gone, you’re fucking gone
I’LL TELL ME MA – THE LIAM CLANCY STORY – NOW ON AT PENTAMETERS THEATRE, HAMPSTEAD UNTIL 29TH NOV. TUE-SAT 8pm SUN 5pm.
BE THERE!!!
The Clancy Bros. and Tommy Makem were bigger in the USA in 1963 than the Beatles. Bob Dylan to this day claims that Liam Clancy is the best ballad singer he ever heard.
Yet they may never have existed if it wasn’t for Diane Hamilton (Guggenheim). She was a wealthy American divorcee with money and influence, and she loved music.
In the mid 1950’s she toured Ireland, searching for talent for her new record label, and discovered, amongst others, Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem.
As a result, Liam Clancy found himself in the USA, aged 20, learning the music and acting business, courtesy of Diane Guggenheim – and in between trying to keep Diane out of his bed. Diane was so smitten that she attempted suicide one night, after Liam literally kicked her from of his bed in her house in Connecticut. That was when Liam lit out for Greenwich Village, and the Clancy Bros were born.
BOB DYLAN, to this day, says Liam was the best ballad singer he ever heard.
I I was at the Royal Court today and saw Harold Pinter
2 Oh yeah?
I He spoke to me.
2 What did he say?
I Asked me where the loo was.
2 No, he fucking didn’t.
I You’re right, he didn’t.
2 He asked that American shitbag Le Butt…Le Bute…Labute
I How do you know?
2 He told me.
I Who…Labute?
2..Yeah.
I No, he didn’t.
2 You’re right, he didn’t. He wasn’t even there. Fuck, I wasn’t even there.
DOING THE CONGA
The cows were in the fields again today,
Lowing softly
As they grazed their lives away.
What thoughts did they possess
As they chewed their grass so sweet;
Did they think about their comrades
That they did daily meet;
Or the colour of their skin
As they passed in the noonday sun;
With their patchwork blankets skin-tight
As they congaed past as one.
OLD MATTRESSES
They have raised a highway
Across our valley
And landscaped it
With blocks of windowed concrete.
Beneath, the river strangles itself
With shopping trolleys
And bits of old bicycles
Worn-out mattresses
And smashed-up pallets are everywhere
While a bloated condom
Flutters by on a piece of driftwood.
Painted hoarding-women
With rotating eyes
Compete for attention
With pram-pushing young love,
Their stilettos tap-dancing the hard shoulder
On a clear day
Juggernauts gleam in the sun
And rolled-up tabloids
Tell tall tales about Royalty
Or football….and Sex
ON A RUINED FARM NEAR HIS MASTER’S VOICE GRAMOPHONE FACTORY by George Orwell
As I stand at the lichened gate
With warring worlds on either hand —
To left the black and budless trees,
The empty sties, the barns that stand
Like tumbling skeletons — and to right
The factory-towers, white and clear
Like distant, glittering cities seen
From a ship’s rail — as I stand here,
I feel, and with a sharper pang,
My mortal sickness; how I give
My heart to weak and stuffless ghosts,
And with the living cannot live.
The acid smoke has soured the fields,
And browned the few and windworn flowers;
But there, where steel and concrete soar
In dizzy, geometric towers —
There, where the tapering cranes sweep round,
And great wheels turn, and trains roar by
Like strong, low-headed brutes of steel —
There is my world, my home; yet why
So alien still? For I can neither
Dwell in that world, nor turn again
To scythe and spade, but only loiter
Among the trees the smoke has slain.
Yet when the trees were young, men still
Could choose their path — the winged soul,
Not cursed with double doubts, could fly,
Arrow-like to a foreseen goal;
And they who planned those soaring towers,
They too have set their spirit free;
To them their glittering world can bring
Faith, and accepted destiny;
But none to me as I stand here
Between two countries, both-ways torn,
And moveless still, like Buridan’s donkey
Between the water and the corn.
INSPIRATION
The midnight muse does not wait
For the lure of silver at someone’s gate
Nor the rattle of chains in rust-red splendour
As the moonlight beams on the night so tender.
The midnight muse has something strange to tell;
‘Silence is violence’
Say the damned in hell
To speak is to live not bound by chains
When an empty silence is all that remains
Discovered and mentored by the great band leader Bert Ambrose, Kathy Kirby was groomed in the image of his ideal woman – a kind of late 1950s hybrid of Marilyn Monroe and Diana Dors, with crisply styled peroxide hair and startlingly glossy red lips. Ambrose’s concept was dated even by the time Kirby became a major television star on the strength of her early 1960s appearances inStars and Garters. But somehow – largely thanks to a winning and cheerful personality that knew instinctively how to reach a television audience beyond the camera and, crucially, a voice of spectacular power and emotional force, which commanded attention whatever she was singing – she transcended the stylistic straightjacket he imposed on her.
As so often in the annals of show business, Kathy Kirby’s life eventually came to mirror the more dramatic lyrics of some of her songs. This, combined with the unique qualities of her voice, dusted her with an almost mythical fascination, long after her active career had waned.
Ambrose had given Kirby her first break as a teenager, employing her on a short contract as a vocalist for his dance band after she had persuaded him to let her sing for him at the Palais de Danse in Ilford when she was just 16, in 1954. She spent the next few years paying her dues on the club circuit, singing with Ambrose on and off, and gaining valuable show-business experience. But it was not until he became her manager and took control of her recording and television career that things really took off, culminating in hit singles and albums for Decca, and some hugely popular television series. Their relationship soon developed privately and they would be together until his death in 1971, an arrangement that would have disastrous consequences for Kirby.
A new play, KATHY KIRBY: ICON, running at THE WHITE BEAR theatre, Kennington, sets the record straight about Kathy’s life,both in and out of the glare of publicity.
Listen to an interview by the actress who plays kathy on BBC Radio London. The interview is apprx 2hrs 13mins into the programme
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03412rf
There once was a man who said, “Damn!
It is borne in upon me that I am
An engine that moves
In predestinate grooves,
I’m not even a bus I’m a tram.”
NORTH CAROLINA TREES
Tall pines, straight as railway sleepers,
Stun me with their skinny beauty
Some of these were old
When Abraham Lincoln was barely knee high.
And it is even possible that George Washington
Touched one or two as he rode by.
Durham was young when these pines first sprouted life
As were Raleigh, Charlotte, and Queensboro et al
Perhaps it was the Redcoats who seeded this lush terrain
Beauty shipped all the way
From England’s green and pleasant land
To conceal the carnage of their long and murderous campaign.
My Writing Life 