JULIAN COPE/ PETER GABRIEL (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GET CULTISH)

JULIAN COPE

Concorde, Brighton, 18th Oct

“I was thrown out of the crib into the snow
I was born to entertain so here I go”

How do you define a cult act?  Well, when a frontman promises “near-hit after near-hit, plus a few obscure B-sides and unreleased stuff” and receives an uproarious cheer... that’s a pretty good sign. (The frontman being the only man on stage might be construed as another clue.) It was perhaps a peculiarity of the early Eighties that so many chart-topping pop stars became cult acts shortly after. But of course most succumbed to the lure of reforming. Even Howard Devoto reformed Magazine, (though he baulked at rejoining the Buzzcocks). Beyond Cope, it may only be Morrissey and Paul Weller who have resisted.

Yet Cope stands steadfast even in that select company. You would guess that most of Morrissey’s cult fans would be secretly delighted were the Smiths to reform. Yet stock in Cope’s original outfit the Teardrop Explodes has if anything gone down in the intervening years. Those that still think of Cope tend to think higher of him now, that he got better as he got weirder. (For example, I think that.)

Ironic then, that this must be the most Teardrop-derived set I’ve seen him do! Admittedly, most of these come from their second album. (Which in retrospect, along with his first solo work, seems transitional to his solo years proper.) His haunting version of the Teardrops track ’The Great Dominions’ was a particular highlight. (Shown below, in Brighton but from his previous visit.)

In point of fact, there’s very few new songs. There’s a very Fugs-influenced drum-basher which rails against Cromwell. (A protest song about Cromwell is surely something only Cope would try to do and only Cope would get away with.) That may have been it! Instead he tells us about his forthcoming book about the prophets. (“Messed-up dudes”, to a man, so we hear.) A friend suggests the gig’s whole purpose may be that the book advance is now all spent. But it was still a worthwhile night.

Cult appeal may lie in seeing someone stride like a star in a small room, interact with his audience, extemporise, change his mind. Which is actually something that suits Cope down to the ground. As I’ve argued before, the very purpose of the rock star is to be saviour and screw-up, tragic hero and clown, all simultaneously. I quoted John Lennon: “part of me thinks I’m a loser. The other that I’m Christ Almighty.”

But I may as well have used the quote from ’Las Vegas Basement’ above, for Cope may be the epitome of this more than any other man. He has said himself, “What I'm trying to do is strike a balance between triteness and greatness.” In his leathers and cap, he looks simultaneously like a rock star on a cover shoot and someone on their way to a fancy dress party. There’s lots of laughter, yet any with-him vs. at-him distinction soon erodes.

Why should Cope epitomise those early Eighties era so well, perhaps even better than Weller or Morrissey? Punk had still believed it could act as a radical and transformative force, an idea soon lost to musical commodification. Early Eighties types could still take to the Top Of the Pops studio yet still feel like musical outsiders. Pretty soon after that, you were asked to choose.

I will admit to slightly mixed feelings about the solo shtick. A song like ’Great Dominions’ benefits from the spotlight intimacy, but the set as a whole might gain something in variety were the occasional extra hand aboard. Cope’s appeal, after all, isn’t as a singer or player. In fact, what he’s really good at is being Julian Cope. I reckon he wouldn’t lose much of that in a crowd.

But don’t expect any objective assessments from me. I found myself smitten many years ago. As, I would guess, was everyone else here...

PETER GABRIEL

With the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Mermaid Theatre, London, 19th Oct ...oh, okay, I only heard this one on the radio!

Peter Gabriel rediscovers his back catalogue with the assistance of symphony orchestra... no, thankfully, not what you’re thinking. Of course we have Simon Reynolds to tell us that music has become too self-referential and backward-looking of late. But worse, when singers use orchestras they’re not normally interested in using the orchestra. The orchestra is just like the stretch limo that takes them to their award ceremonies, it’s not about taking them any better or any differently. It’s merely musical bling (except perhaps for that musical part). Barely altered arrangements wrap themselves round a saccharine approach to melody, a regressive attitude even compared to the things Stravinsky was doing with orchestras more than a century ago.

But here, take for example ’Rhythm of the Heat’ (see vidclip). After the final line (“the rhythm has my soul”), the recorded version breaks into a frenzy of African drumming. This version neither emulates nor diminishes that but strikes off somewhere new, a cacophonous cross-currents of lines, a veritable jungle of sound. (It sounds almost like Stravinsky now I come to think of it, but at least that takes us within the last century.)

Perhaps we should have guessed we were in for something better than nostalgia given a gimmick. Gabriel is not one for looking back, pretty much eschewing his back catalogue with Genesis from the day he left the band. So it may be significant that the only track from the first two solo albums, his first single ’Solsbury Hill’, is the only significant mis-step. It’s one song which simply isn’t suited to being dressed up in orchestration, it pretty much is the simple flute line and spirit of jaunty innocence. Gabriel, I would guess, felt obliged to include his hit.

Coming Soon! More of this sort of thing...

ELIZA CARTHY/ JUNE TABOR & THE OYSTER BAND/ LE MYSTERE DE VOIX BULGARES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GO FOLKY)

ELIZA CARTHY

Ropetackle Centre, Shoreham, 12th Oct

I’d only seen Eliza Carthy once before, some three years ago, at the Daughters of Albion night. Though for some reason I don’t seem to have mentioned her at all in my write-up, she made an impression on me – a wild card, leaping on stage and stirring things up with her rousing fiddle.

So, while the Ropetackle Centre in Shoreham is perhaps not the rockiest of venues (and rarely gets confused with the ABC No Rio), I was initially surprised by the sound of this set. It was all very songwritery, the words witty and urbane, the music more notable for nice arrangements than foot-stompin’ tunes. It all felt strangely un-folky, with (in perhaps the biggest surprise) Eliza playing very little of her trademark fiddle.

I may have something of an agenda here. When music is raw and raucous, people tend to look for a black influence. And of course much great music has come from exactly this influence. But, beyond all the prinnying about the happy past, folk gives us a reservoir of raucousness beneath our feet.

Equally, I may have simply been confounded by my own expectations. (For all I know she has sounded like that on record all along, with the last time I saw her the exception to the rule.) I did find myself getting into it more as it went along – to the point where the very final track, ’Thursday’, I liked a great deal (check vidclip). That may be partly because it is built around a simple and effective tune, rather than a fancy arrangement looking for a home.

But also it made respective sense of (if such there be) her change in musical direction. Rather than hiding or excusing away the mundanity of a middle-aged life, it instead finds a poignancy in a mundane situation. Having become confused about the day, she believes she has more time at home with the family, and doesn’t have to take to the road. It’s rather like Joni Mitchell’s ’Chinese Cafe’ upside-down, rather than reflecting on the troubles of adapting to middle-aged life it struggles to raise itself out of them. (“The baby she distrusts my suitcase/ So I put it away in a safe place.”) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life is too short to waste on trying to recapture your youth.

I wondered if that song was the key to it all, and if I could hear the rest of the set again I would glom on to it. But alas live sets cannot be replayed, and instead I was on a bus taking a bizarrely circuitous route back to Brighton...

JUNE TABOR & THE OYSTERBAND     

St. George’s Church, Brighton, 27th Oct

’Freedom and Rain’, the 1990 collaboration between June Tabor and the Oysterband is of course a classic album, rated both by folk fan and not. Yet of course after it the two went their own ways and, having missed the moment, there was no way to see them again. Until twenty-one years later, when they reunite for a successor (‘Ragged Kingdom’) and... yes, really!!!... embark on a tour which takes in Brighton.

Judging by this night, the new album draws from more contemporary styles. It’s predecessor included contemporary songs, true, but they generally already came in folk styles. (For example Shane McGowan’s ’Lullabye of London’.) This night featured versions of more modern-sounding numbers, including PJ Harvey’s ’There Was My Veil’ and even Jefferson Airplane’s ’White Rabbit’. (Though the latter doesn’t seem to be on the album.)

As I’ve said before, Tabor must surely be one of our finest folk singers. Her voice is so full of feeling, yet so free of affectations or showy flourishes. Some attendees baulked then when Oysterband frontman John Jones took over a fair portion of the singing. (As Tabor plays no instruments, she’d then slip off to the side of the stage.) Unfamiliar with the band beyond this collaboration, I couldn’t say whether these were tracks from the new album or band classics enlisted to fill up the set. I suppose time will tell.

Personally, I found myself enjoying these numbers enough. The only parts which didn’t work so well for me were when Jones and Tabor traded vocals (such as their cover of ’Love Will Tear Us Apart’), which didn’t seem to marry so well.

Naturally we all focus on the vocals, but seeing the band live I wondered if the drumming was just as integral to the sound. It’s not rock’s regimented “factory beat” which Matt Groening has railed against, more a series of circular rolls and rhythms which stop the sound slipping into lockstep. Check them out in the vidclip below. Ironically, I noticed this on the military-themed opening number, ’The Bonny Bunch of Roses’. (So different to the Fairport Convention version that it took me a while to recognise it as the same song.)

If I had one complaint, it might be the choice of venue. The natural acoustics and size-defying intimate feel of St. George’s Church might have been better suited to a solo, acoustic Tabor. A standing venue, with the standard brightly-lit stage, might have served this night better. But still, a combination I never hoped to see, armed with brand new material... I simply would not have missed this one.

This is from the first reunion at the Roundhouse last year, performing ’All Tomorrow’s Parties.’

LE MYSTERE DE VOIX BULGARES

Dome Theatre, Brighton, 1st Nov

Thirty singers, all unmicrophoned, lined before a plain background in bright traditional dresses, colour-coded for their section in the harmonies, looking like pastel crayons in the box. The image is bold and simple yet striking and containing variety – the perfect visual correlative of the sound.

Though I first heard them during their Eighties popularity and have music by them at home, it’s not until now that I notice something quite fundamental about them. As you most probably don’t remember at all, a recent installation led me to discover the Renaissance music of Thomas Tallis. Having then found a Tallis LP in a charity shop, I had been playing it recently and (as you are supposed to) noticing the intricacies of the vocal lines. Yet the lines here are no less intricate, it’s merely the harmonies sounding so... well, harmonious that allows you to miss that.

However, if the music rewards attention it doesn’t necessarily encourage it. Perhaps it’s the foreign language, perhaps the relative shortness of the pieces (some stopping just as they seemed to be getting going), perhaps just something in the style, but it somehow becomes rather chill-out. It’s like trancing out to someone’s mellifluous voice, then only noticing as they stopped speaking that they could have been saying something interesting. (A friend said he found the same thing, so it wasn’t just the mood I was in.) In a way this is odd because the successions of held notes on first impression sound rich and resounding. I am not entirely sure whether this is a disadvantage or not. Perhaps folk music should sound simple and heartfelt, and disguise its sophistication in smocks.

Coming soon! Gig-going gets culty...

DOCTOR WHO: THE (NOT-SO) SPECIALS

(aka ‘Who’ fan in obsessive behaviour shock)

Planning to create a special one-stop page for all my ’Doctor Who’ reviews, (which in fact lies here), I came across something I’d started then forgotten – reviews of the ‘specials’ which finished David Tennant’s run. Though I’m fairly sure I lost enthusiasm for them originally through the ‘specials’ not actually being very... well special, I decided to polish up and post them anyway. This is part of my idle fancy that I might one day have a comprehensive list of ’Who’ storylines covered. I haven’t re-watched any of the episodes (which I don’t currently have any access to), so they are slighter pieces than normal. As they date from some time ago, I’ve given them ’Friends’ style subheads as a memory jogger.

I did think of saving this to post in the ‘timey wimey’ hour when the clocks go back, until it occurred to me that saying that was easier than doing it yet had a similar result.

’THE NEXT DOCTOR’

(aka ‘The one where the Cybermen go Victoriana Cyberpunk and David Morrissey plays the Doctor who isn’t the Doctor’)

I think I probably enjoyed this one more than the average fan. (In fact for some reason I’ve tended to like ’New Who’s Cybermen episodes more than the average fan.) Maybe I just liked the underbelly of Victoriana being broadcast on Christmas Day.

I wasn’t even bothered by David Morrissey so obviously not being the Doctor from the off. (Or from earlier. It was really given away in the trailers, by showing off his conventionally heroic personality. Even when fools don’t know what to do with the Doctor they don’t make him conventionally heroic. Instead they give him question-mark lapels.)

But did it have to assert so vehemently that this Doctor is the actual Doctor? Couldn’t it at least have flirted with the idea that anyone who wants to be the Doctor can be? (At least, you know, sort of.) The invitation in a character like Rose is that you can be a shop girl one week and sailing the universe the next. Does that have to stop dead at the companion? Does copying the Doctor inherently involve a cargo cult mentality?

It professionalises a character whose appeal rests so much on his gifted amateurism. Worse, it shifts the role of heroes in stories from inspiration to delegation. And it renders almost meaningless all those big-up speeches about how much the Doctor values humans. ...actually, if it’s going to stop those irksome audience backslaps perhaps its not so bad after all. Okay, forget I said anything...

’PLANET OF THE DEAD’

(aka ‘the one which has flies drawn to it for some unaccountable reason’)

A London bus, with its vivid colour coding, marooned in the desert is a strong image. Not necessarily a different image from the Tardis being anywhere at all, but strong nonetheless. So enjoy it, because unfortunately that’s all this least-special of all the specials has to offer.

Ripping off films is fine, in fact its virtually a ’Who’ tradition. But simultaneously ripping off ’Flight Of the Phoenix’ and a caper movie is simply dumb. Unlike the bus in the desert, it’s not an interesting juxtaposition but an oil-and-water clash. Caper movies have an almost de rigueur gravity-defying scene, normally where the fabled jewel is nicked despite the laser wires, and in fact that’s exactly what we get here. ’Flight of the Phoenix’, conversely, is precisely about the effects of gravity. It’s set in a world of real physical rules, it closes in on the sweat of people’s brows, on ropes fraying with strain.

One suggested improvement - Lady Christine’s stolen cup was made from a rare metal from a meteorite, and is what the aliens were after (rather than the Triotian MacGuffins). She ends up having to give up her precious booty to the Doctor, as it’s unique properties make it essential to their escape.

Okay then, two. Enough of these info-dump psychics. Carmen was the most egregious one yet. Do London buses usually have a resident medium on board? Wouldn’t a cleaner or call centre worker be more common? And her powers played no part in the story, just ostentatiously foreshadowed a later one. Why not just have a telegram arrive from the scriptwriter? “Doctor in peril. Stop. Foreshadowing. Stop. See episode after next. Stop.”

’WATERS OF MARS’

(aka ‘the one with a base under siege, soggy zombies and where the Time Lord Victorious is wrong’)

Despite the generic plotline, this one nearly gets away with it, through a combination of speed and style. Two scenes stand out. After the Doctor has refused to help he stands still in the airlock as the chaos is unleashed behind him in the control room. This plays the normally frenetic Tennant against type, the stillness in the middle of all the noise shouts louder.

And yet there’s still something very New Who about this moment. Not only do we know full well he will turn and intervene, that this is just Campbell’s Refusal of the Quest from Screenwriting Basic. But there’s also the whole high-sounding business of “some fixed points in time” is just an excuse to have it both ways – moments can be decreed ‘fixed’ or ‘unfixed’ as is convenient. In short, this moment isn’t being milked for its emotional weight but the very reverse – the emotional weight is found a useful hook where it can be hung.

The coda scene (with the ‘Time Lord Victorious’) admittedly goes some way to remedying that. (Also, as we think the first scene was our statutory twist, we’re not expecting another wringer.) Of course it refers back to ’Voyage of the Damned’, with Mr. Copper’s line “if you could decide who lives and dies, that would make you a monster.” (Somewhat presented as  A Significant Line at the time, but at least not delivered by another bloody psychic.)

’THE END OF TIME’ (Parts 1 + 2)

(aka ‘the one where Russell T Davies started writing more like Russell T Davies than we had previously thought Russell T Davies capable’)

More than anything else in ’New Who’, this two parter succumbed to the lure of ’The Matrix’, throwing lots of crazy-sounding concepts and wild images at the

screen in such a hectic way that you don't really notice their not

joining up. In a way it was all summed up by an early line - "we see so much yet understand so little."The whole Donna subplot, for example, was pretty much superfluous.

At the same time, the Master replacing everyone with himself is Davies’ writing par excellence. It’s not just a dramatic cliffhanger, it’s quite a neat image of megalomania that he would literally rework every other person into his image. I guess the general idea is to establish the two rival kinds of megalomania, the Master wanting dominion and the Time Lords deciding to destroy what they couldn't control. But in terms of story logic it doesn't really make much sense - how exactly does it aid him, more than would taking over everybody?

And once he’s stuck himself with that image, Davies, isn’t sure what to do with it – and in fact just reverses straight out again. The Master doesn't know the guard's been replaced when the guard is him? That'd take a fairly hefty no-prize to explain!

In general, having more developed three-dimensional characters, like a Doctor who can cry at the idea of his forthcoming death, fits poorly with "in one bound he was free"-style get-outs. ’The Matrix’ has ciphers for characters and intends nothing else. Can you ask the audience to buy into those emotional payoffs, then say “oh, it’s only sci fi, of course lots of it doesn’t make much sense”? Davies seems confused about what kind of thing he’s writing at quite a fundamental level.

But one thing which annoyed me was the theme of the Doctor's own megalomania, so heavily foreshadowed in ’Waters of Mars’, suddenly being so absent. Of course the Time Lord Victorious gets projected onto the Master, as the Doctor’s shadow. But it all feels like a cop-out from the idea that the Doctor himself might go baaaad. However, it is to some degree brought back in the end, and brought back fairly well, when the Doctor must sacrifice himself for the “not very important” Wilf.

VISUAL ART REVIEWS PAGE

Reader please note I have added a page which gathers links to my visual art reviews in one handy go-to place.

(I may do a similar thing for my 'Doctor Who' reviews if I find the time...)

SON OF THE RETURN OF ‘DOCTOR WHO AND THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND’

Previously on ‘Lucid Frenzy’, in a two-part piece, I tried to transcribe what I saw as the essence of ’Doctor Who’ and ascertain how well the revival was preserving and updating that essence. As the title might suggest, this looked into the political philosophy of the show, but of course that wasn’t the piece’s raison d’etre.

Except this time it is. No more sitting on the fence. The Doctor has probably hung around England long enough now to acquire voting rights, so it’s time to pin down just where he pins his rosettes. (Just in case anyone ever figures which constituency the Tardis should be counted in.)

“I think that I shall not listen to reason.”

-       Madame du Pompadour

Let’s start with ’Girl in the Fireplace’, if for no other reason than it lets me use this line – what was it that made those clockwork robots tick? They not only had mechanisms in the place of brains, they were forever attempting to make the organic into components of the machine - eyeballs into spy cameras and so on.

Of course they turned up during the Ancien Regime for a reason. They came to represent the imagination-deficient revolutionaries, the uprising of shopkeepers who, lacking the aristocratic grandeur of imagination, take everything literally – “thickies from thick-town.” In this literal-mindedness, they attempt to remove the head of the Madame de Pompadour, gormlessly unaware that her head was only ever symbolically important.

The Doctor, meanwhile, falls in love with that head, countering their clockwork noggins with the beating of both hearts. He was never more the dashing romantic hero (well at least not since ’The Christmas Invasion’), charging through mirrors on horseback and risking all to save her.

And she is saved – only to die anyway. Rescued from the robot’s beheading she simply dies of old age, and their life together can never be. We’re reminded that a whole history dies with her. The bureaucrats the Doctor forever encounters, the bean-counters and rule-followers who disbelieve his tales and clog his path, these analogues of the clockwork robots come to inherit the world she leaves behind. It’s a pessimistic view of history, in which the present is only a grey delineated sequel to the more colourful carefree past. It’s a fantastic episode, it topped polls and won awards. It’s also almost the very definition of reactionary.

So big it doesn't need a name; just a great big ‘the.’”

-       The Doctor, ’Silence in the Library’

Of course it’s absolutely in character for the Doctor to both choose love over operating system, and choose a mate within class confines. He is full of aristocratic signifiers – titles instead of names (the Doctor, Time Lord), costumes instead of clothes, has neither need of nor interest in money or work, and above all inhabits an air of mystery which suffuses his ‘specialness.’ The Doctor first visited the French Revolution in his first ever season, in ’The Reign of Terror’, and he took the aristos’ side then as well.

But then that’s hardly the sort of thing we should be surprised about. We’re talking a long-running prestige BBC drama, not some agitprop theatre company operating above a pub in Haringey. The BBC is government-funded, so what to expect from them except the art of the state?

But let’s look at it from a different angle...

“Everybody lives! Just this once! Everybody lives!”

- The Doctor

’The Empty Child’ was from the previous season to ’Girl in the Fireplace’, when Christopher Eccleston was still the Doctor. He stumbles upon a collectivised child group  stealing a slap-up feed from a hoarding nuclear family, who have been cheating on the rations. Enthused he cries “I’m not sure whether it’s Marxism in action or a West End musical!” (Though even here the group is notably a pretend family, with the mother figure Nancy at the head, insisting upon table matters.)

Yet beyond that family there are no real villains. Problems arise from good intentions misdirected, which the Doctor is called upon to re-route. This applies not just to the nanobots, who are only trying to fix up the injured, but also to Nancy. Unable to care for her own child, born out of wedlock, she sublimates this urge into looking after the gang of street urchins. To quote myself (well no-one else does)...

“Evil in [the Doctor’s] universe tends to be less an absolute force and more a product of the misguided or misunderstood. It’s less about kicking bad guys and more about healing the sick. In ‘The Empty Child’, for example, the malevolent monster disguised as a child crying for his mummy turns out to be nothing other than a child crying for his mummy.”

This time the future is coming up roses. Almost the last line is the Doctor calling “Don’t forget the Welfare State!” Wars will cease, poverty be reduced and single mothers given public assistance not ostracisation. (“Twenty years to pop music! You’re gonna love it!”) It’s almost the polar opposite of the previous story.

Okay, but what do you expect? A long-running series stretching back to the early Sixties, invented by committee, written in relay... that’s scarcely a recipe for consistency, is it? Yet, as you’ve probably guessed if you didn’t already know, both storylines actually came from the same author – Steven Moffat. What gives? Maybe we could go for a third example from him, establish a triangulation point to try and sort this sorry mess out.

“This dream must end, this world must know,
We all depend on the beast below”

’The Beast Below’ is perhaps Moffat’s most explicitly political storyline so far, and is a much closer successor to ”The Empty Child’. With the absence of anything resembling a West End musical, we are forced to conclude it must be Marxism in action. (I am only half-joking there.)

Society ‘above’ is predicated on both repression, and on repressing the very knowledge of that repression - which itself sends shock-waves through everything. The ‘beast below’ on which we all depend is the slave subject of imperialism, the sweatshop workers who clothe us, the migrant labourers who put food on our plates even as we grumble about them. The whole notion of England, pulled from its white cliffs and green fields, as a city thrusting itself through space, powered by the labour of others reeks of colonialism. (Even if we weren’t tipped off by our intruders being “Scottish.”)

Of course I was half-joking when I said it was Marxist. As in ’The Empty Child’, everyone really wanted what was best for everyone else. Problems can be solved by a push of a button rather than a messy revolution, and life goes on much as before only more nicely. (If I was that space whale who’d been tortured for decades after turning up just to help out, I might be a bit miffed about the whole thing.) It might make an interesting comparison to the SF classic ’Metropolis’ and it’s call for “a mediator between head and hand.” But it’s clearly packing an inclusive, socially progressive message. Two onto one, Moffat’s a liberal, Job done. We even got to finish early.

And yet... what about the character Liz10, who later turns out to be Queen Elizabeth 10th? She not only becomes their key ally in fixing the problem. It’s notable what a Queenly role she plays within the storyline, she is simultaneously above her subjects and represents them. Her button is simultaneously the same as everyone else’s and vital. First it appears the truth had been kept from her, that her power is actually only symbolic. Then it transpires she is as in denial of that truth as anyone else – and has held the power to fix up everything all along.

Her character is a clutch of contradictory signifiers; regal, commanding, decisive, while at the same time black and street-talking. (“I’m the bloody Queen, mate. Basically, I rule.”) Which makes her an interesting companion for the Doctor - who himself epitomises a similar set of contradictions, aristocratic saviour and social leveller.

As George Orwell once said of himself, the Doctor “preserves the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible.” Of course his most regular foe was always the Master, a fellow Time Lord. But this is even truer of the revived show. Three times now the enemy have been not a species but a family group who felt they should be running things (‘Aliens of London’, ‘Family of Blood’ and ‘Vampires in Venice.’) And the Time Lords themselves are seen in a schizo, polarised way, either a sober, regulating force who keep us from the abyss (’Father’s Day’) or malevolently destructive megalomaniacs (’Death of a Time Lord’).

“Hang on a minute. Who put you in charge? And who in the hell are you anyway?”
“I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord. I'm from the planet Gallifrey... and I'm the man who's gonna save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?”
- ‘Voyage of the Damned’

Of course it would be pointless to take all the episodes in the show’s history and separate them into little lists marked ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’. Art is not about getting the right answer, and art criticism is not about accountancy. The point is that the two things are intertwined, that this is not some paradox or error on the show’s part but a reflection of the British society which spawned it.

This is enhanced by the fact that we most compare our popular culture with a New World nation – the US. In attempting to define and defend what is special about ourselves, we tend to reach to (and then rewrite) our past. But this only exacerbates a tendency that is already there. It’s something which would still be true if we compared ourselves to another West European nation. Can you imagine a French Doctor, proffering baguettes instead of jelly babies? A German Doctor? Think how smoothly that would make the Tardis run!

To dig deeper, we need to not only look at what is present but what is absent. Though there’s been two takes on the French Revolution, the show only touched on the English in a short two-parter transmitted a decade into the show’s history. This is indicative of our culture in general, the English Revolution is not held as a totemic event the way the French one is across the water. There is no English Bastille Day. It is not held up even by the mercantile class who it took to power, even under the cosier rebranded name the English Civil War.

Arriving much earlier than the French, this event was never as root-and-branch. It’s not simply something like our monarchy being retained (at least after a brief inter-regnum), for even other European countries with monarchies do not match ours for status or grandeur. Aristos retained a stronger symbolic importance in no small part because they retained their actual existence, heads attached to shoulders and everything.

But there’s another, more recent factor. Britain escaped much of the social turmoil that swept the continent in the early Twentieth Century, not just the great wars but the worker’s movements. As well as no Bastille Day, we have no May 1968.

So, from the anti-French antics of the Scarlet Pimpernel through to today, we retained our fondness for aristocratic heroes. And it must be admitted that, functionally, toffs make for effective heroes. An aristo is not promoted according to merit, his superiority is held to be inherent and self-evident. He is constrained from acting out his will by no day-job. (There’s a strong overlap with the emblematic hero, a point I argued here.)

Plus there’s a twist. Since the medieval Robin Hood ballads had noble origins grafted onto them, the aristocratic hero has tended to be an outlaw. Created in the era of the Welfare State, the Doctor was first an exile then the only one left. This threw the aristo off his antique furniture and into the maelstrom, like Robinson Crusoe forced by events to reassert his essential superiority.

”Planet Earth. This is where I was born. And this is where I died. For the first nineteen years of my life nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not ever. And then I met a man called The Doctor. A man who could change his face. And he took me away from home in his magical machine. He showed me the whole of time and space. I thought it would never end.”

Rose, ’Army of Ghosts’

Moreover, an aristo who disdains social dues might even one day brefriend you, and take you on a life of adventure away from clocking-in cards. This was true of the Doctor even during the ban on hankey-pankey in the Tardis, but is out in the open now. The new Doctor’s companions have all been taken away from jobs rather than careers, a shop worker, an office temp, a kissogram. (Martha, true, was a trainee Doctor. But then she was a different colour to most aristos.) A tall, dark stranger takes them away from all that.

Of course to think of the Doctor in this way is tantamount to suggesting that he occupies a fixed point in the narrative, that he merely appears mysterious to the rest of us. True, he often operates on a meta-level to the mere humans around him – possessing secret knowledge, pulling off impossible feats. But he is not and never was a short-cut to a copycat morality. He’s also prone to expressing doubts, making mistakes, even feeling regret. This departure from conventional hero status is a major attraction for the show.

Yet this apparent departure from the description actually confirms it. An aristocrat in a post-aristocrat world, he still has his privileged birth but no longer occupies the same place in that world. Stripped of his formal status, he is forced to extemporise.

Some take this character as a signifiers of a golden past where all knew their place. Others turn him into critiques of the post-war era; the target culture, the snooping, the petty regulation. Yet such characters were not a result of these divergences so much an expression of a paradox in our culture, one which expressed itself within as much as between ourselves. Popular characters like the Doctor are not offered as a solution to social concerns so much as a signifier, as a worrying-tooth which we might use to worry them through.

I ended the previous piece by quoting him saying “you need a Doctor.” But perhaps all this time he's merely been a symptom...

"NO TONGUE CAN TELL": RIP BERT JANSCH

"In Baffin's Bay where the whale fish blow
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Lord Franklin along with his sailors do dwell"

Alas news is in of the death of legendary folk guitarist and ex-Pentangle member Bert Jansch. I saw him live precisely once, after Pentangle reformed three years ago. Reports suggest his personality matched his music - he described himself as "not one for showing off", and his guitar-playing is understated and unassuming. Listen to it for thirty seconds and it can pass you by, listen to it for three minutes and it becomes transfixing.

From back in the day, Bert playing 'Rosemary Lane' solo plus the Pentangle classic 'House Carpenter'...

DOCTOR WHO: ‘THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG’

“You could have told me all this the last time we met.”

As you’ll know if you made it through my review of ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’, I haven’t found it easy to write about Moffat’s recent episodes. That’s partly because I don’t find them very coherent, which makes them hard to respond to coherently. Those pre-credit sequences where we jump about all over the place, staying just long enough to take in one wild set-up before being whisked off to the next, I’m starting to think they’ve become the show in microcosm.

In fact quite a few things in the show are starting to remind me of the show. The finale of the last season, when there were no stars in the sky, I took that as a metaphor for life without wonder or imagination. Get to the finale this time (let’s forget it being chopped in two), and all I could think was “it’s not just in this episode that time never progresses.”

Because things aren’t even consistently inconsistent. It’s a strange mixture of stuff flying off in a thousand directions and a feeling we’ve all been here before. Take that oft-repeated lake in Utah and picture it on a windy day. The surface is an almost feverish succession of ideas, mad details sometimes on the screen only for a few seconds. (Pterodactyls! Dickens! Balloons!) But beneath that disturbed surface there’s no tides. We’re just cycling round the same stuff. Time is collapsing – again. The Doctor is imprisoned in a straggly beard – again. “All of history is happening at once.” Or at least the last two seasons are.

Some of this seems to be working to a purpose. Whatever reality they end up in, Rory still has to hang around hoping Amy will notice him. Some of it... well, it just feels like time’s stopped ticking.

You could of course get all zeigeisty about it. In the Hartnell era, time was one fixed point. You stood in its way at your peril. Now time is all in flux, except for the fixed points ... except they aren’t even really fixed in themselves. And inhabiting this flux is a postmodern landscape of quotes and quips. And quoted quips.

Let’s be clear, I don’t care at all about being asked to accept a poetic, squinty type of truth. If “all history is happening at once”, London would be ruled not just by Romans but by Normans, and the Daleks of 2150, all in one big logjam of order-giving. Except that wouldn’t have many practical consequences because without time no-one would be able to move. That matters not one whit. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – if that sort of thing bothers you, then this sort of thing will bother you.

But on a bigger level - this plotline we’ve been following since ‘Silence in the Library’ hoping for resolution, did it really make much sense? Some of the answers were precisely what we guessed all along, while others were... well, what exactly? We’re told (and have it repeated here) “the Silence is not a species. It is a religious order.” But then why do they look so much like a species? We’re told Madame Kovarian is one of their “human servants”, and she’s offed in the classic Who tradition of collaborators who outlive their usefulness, so she’s presumably not in on the order. The Headless Monks look pretty much like a religious order, but what’s their connection to all this anyway? Are they all acting from their own idea of high motives, trying to defend reality by stopping the question being asked? If it was all about the Doctor, why were they hanging about the whole of Earth for so long anyway?

I suspect we’re supposed to be distracted from those unanswered questions by the raising of new ones, “the fields of Trenzelor” or whatever it was. I worried before about the show being “lost in Lostness.” I don’t have to worry any more about that coming. It’s already happened. Its rules are hasty rush and perpetual deferment. Watching it is like a donkey charging after a carrot.

Of course if you look long and deep enough you’ll find nice themes in there, as is almost always the case with Moffat. It looks like I was right about the Easter motif. (Good Friday was the date played prominently up on the screen.) The underlying plotline is reminiscent of ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, trying to step away from your destined sacrifice to just live your life, and ultimately being unable to.

Except the one doing the dodging isn’t the victim but the would-be assassin. The Doctor and River are the star-crossed lovers who cannot be apart but can never touch. He calls her the other pole and I started to think of them as the twin poles of existence, wanting to unite yet with the whole of creation being predicated on their staying apart. (I was probably getting carried away by that point.) You could have taken that core and built an episode around it, just as you could the core of ’Let’s Kill Hitler’. But it all just gets crowded out by so much other stuff. Sometimes quite cool stuff, like a room of chattering skulls. But stuff, nonetheless.

Even within all that we have problems, though. River is of course the ultimate femme fatale - only she can save the Doctor, but at the same time only she can kill him. She’s been appearing to consistently upend the Doctor’s life, most seriously not when she poisons him but when she demolishes his self-image in ‘A Good Man Goes To War.’ Yet here it’s all reversed, her role is now to big up that self-image by telling him how much the universe loves him, and her ambition is to tie the knot with the handsome hero. It’s like the dark side of her role has been hived off and handed over to Madame Kovarian, the anti-River who arches her black eyebrows and scoffs as they flirt.

Admittedly this tends to be the way of things with femme fatales. Like pirates, they’re cool figures to introduce but no-one knows much what to do with them once they’re there. And if they do go anywhere, that’s where they go – back into the dutiful spouse. (Think of the risible ending tacked onto the marvelous ‘Gilda.’)

But that criticism pales to nothing when compared to the Doctor’s death dodge, a misdirection and copout that would make Chris Claremont cringe. Robot duplicates are like something from a Fifties Superman comic. Maybe there’s some lawyer’s defence, that when we’re firmly told “that is the Doctor”, he is technically aboard the Tesselactor. (And somehow avoiding getting first zapped and then burnt.) Someone somewhere will be posting to a message board how a robot could start to regenerate.

But it makes a nonsense of the pathos of what has gone on before. “I died to save you all. But don’t worry, as it happens I slipped out the back door.” That fixed point turned out to be timey-wimey after all. And wasn’t the point that reality couldn’t cope with a fixed point being altered, not that Madame Kovarian had kitted River out in an obedient suit?

And the final question turns into a kind of metafictional gag that underlines how much this show has become about itself. It’s not the ultimate question of our universe, but it’s universe, the one implied by the title. Doctor... who? I doubt we’re supposed to care what the Doctor’s actual name is, or even imagine we might get told. It’s a signifier of the central character’s mystery.

The Doctor “stepping back into the shadows” is more interesting, however. It would have made more sense if he’d been reincarnated at the end; people still know what he looks like, don’t they? (Though the “fall of the Ninth” stuff suggests that’s all to come.) But it does suggest they intend to do more with the ‘legendary Doctor’ stuff than just raise it and return to business as usual. I’m not sure they are going anywhere with this. But it’ll be nice to have the incognito stranger replace the celebrated galactic hero for a bit. Jaded of cracks and Silence and time ending, it’s good to have one element that seems genuinely intriguing.

Moffat wasn’t always this way. ’Girl in the Fireplace’, ‘Blink’ even as recently as ’Beast Below’, all were fairly coherent, self-explanatory and self-contained single episodes. (In fact the point all this started to change was the day River showed up.) Those simple, happy days when we thought the show was some sort of modern fairy story, when horses showed up on spaceships and Amy floated from the Tardis in her nightie, where did they go?

You can almost see him taking the road of the old show, only in accelerated fashion for our broadband-speed times. Remember how that went? At first everything was stand-alone, stories only joined at the edges. Only monsters and aliens recurred, so only monsters and aliens recognised the Doctor, and that rarely counted for anything. Then we got a few through-lines thrown in. An extra inducement to keep watching, they seemed a good idea. But it’s like introducing ivy to a garden, pretty soon its erupted and tangled together and is choking everything else. It was around then that the show got cancelled.

There was a distinct jump from last season to this. Nerds of a certain age will remember scouring cheap shops for science fiction paperbacks. These would often be cheaper if they had a hole punched through them. (An accident of shipping, according to legend.) The previous season was like a science fiction anthology from such a shop, cobbled together from quite different authors. The crack was like the hole, you’d be reading one story then another and it would appear at regular intervals. But it was just an intrusion on everything around it, breaking into separate realities.

However, this season wasn’t cut from whole cloth either. Particularly in its second half, it was more like a Cubist painting; the same themes, tropes and concepts seen from a succession of new angles. I’m not quite sure why that should be. Was Moffat imposing more of a remit on his writers? Or were they becoming more accustomed to what he was after, like workers trying to second-guess and appease the boss?

So a through-line which I liked less the more dominant it became, which cast its shadow more on the incidental episodes. And yet the irony is that they came to be the episodes I liked! Last season, I favoured precisely one non-Moffat episode (‘Amy’s Choice’) and regarded the rest of them pretty much as filler. This season I only found two episodes to be filler (‘Pirates of the Hollywood Ripoff’ and ‘Son of the Lodger’, though admittedly ‘Night Terrors’; avoided the label only through judiciously applying aplomb.) This season it was non-Moffat episodes which I found the twin highlights, ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ and ‘The Girl Who Waited’.

What they had in common was a deployment of SF tropes and tricks in order to see a known character from an unexpected direction. As such, you’d get more out of them the more of the show you’d watched. But you didn’t have to have watched the rest of the show to get them at all, the episodes were explicable within themselves. Moffat and the Ninth, I would guess, will give us one more season of all of this before ending everything again except for not really. But it’s those two episodes which signpost where the series now needs to go.

FRIDA KAHLO & DIEGO RIVERA: MASTERPIECES FROM THE GELMAN COLLECTION

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, to 9th October

Reacquainted with the past

We tend to think of Modernism as something bold and almost brash - loudly proclaiming its own importance, dynamic to the point of being pushy, ostentatiously foregrounding its own style. Which, in Europe and North America, it largely was. But perhaps things were all different over in Mexico. These works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera are bold, true, but also simple and unshowy. They sit and wait for you to notice how good they are.

Why the difference? The earlier Mexican Radical Prints exhibition at the British Museum gave us a chance to contrast the Mexican and Russian revolutions. In Russia, earlier folk art influences were purged by its rupture; like a seismic shift, it propelled artists forwards, into a clean break with the past. But in Mexico, not imperial power but victim of conquest, it led to people reacquainting themselves with their past. The phrase ‘Mexicanidad’, or pride in Mexican heritage, recurs throughout this show.

In some ways the works look as much like naive as folk art; they’re simultaneously simple and hyper-real. There’s a rigorousness to the way objects are flatly delineated, even when the imagery becomes surreal, like a joke told deadpan. Expressions are largely impassive (even in those among Kahlo’s self-portraits where she is injured and bleeding). Check out, for example, Riviera’s ’Sunflowers’ (1943, below). It looks straightforward, almost as simple as the children it depicts. But there remains something indefinably unsettling about it. Children are supposed to be open books and yet their games can elude us.

Contrasts and contexts

For all these similarities of style the show tells us “the contrast between the work of Riviera and Kahlo could not be a greater one. Riviera is focused on the outside world of history, politics, science and a Socialist utopia, Kahlo’s work is small and self-exploratory.”

We could quibble with some of this. We know Kahlo was interested in politics before she met Riviera; indeed it’s hard to see how she could not have been. (She essentially grew up during the Mexican revolution.) And many of her self-portraits were made after she was invalided after the infamous bus crash, when the only subject available was the mirror.

However, it would be truer to say they go for the right nail but don’t quite strike it straightly. To see the difference between them, we can compare their portraits of Natasha Gelman (one of their patrons, from whose collection this show comes), both completed in ’43. Riviera depicts the actress lolling alluringly on a sofa, her frame echoed by the lillies around her (below). It’s like a publicity photo. Eschewing this public persona, Kahlo closes up on her to paint a more private face. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t find this image online, but please take my word for it!) It would be easy to miss these were two works of the same person.

Kahlo’s painting style tends to be a little more sophisticated, more realised than Riviera. But the crucial distinction is that for Riviera people are generally there to epitomise types. When he paints the daughter of his housekeeper, (‘Modesta’, 1937) she is named but you feel it’s her Mexican identity he’s aiming to capture. Riviera worked principally in the symbolic medium of the mural. For Kahlo, and starting with her self-portraits, they’re people with all their complexities.

Kahlo’s self-portraits were influenced by the indigenous tradition of 'ex voto paintings'; though stripped of all the original religious content, they keep this form. (For example, though no saint’s dedications there still tends to be written inscriptions.) Like the originals they’re often painted not on canvas but on metal, wood or masonite (a kind of hardboard). This seems to emphasise their ‘drawn-ness’, work against the illusion of pictorial depth. (The gallery’s permanent collection has a room on naive art, where it’s notable that Alfred Wallis paints on often the roughest board, and his imitators all on canvas.)

The result is that, like Jesus’ crown of thorns, every object depicted (her dress, adornments and so on) become as delineated as her face, and so ask for the same attention. In Lucienne Bloch’s ‘Portrait of Frida Kahlo with Necklace’ (1935, upper above) she’s photographed sitting under her own portrait. This portrait is displayed next to it, ‘Self Portrait with Necklace’ (1933, lower above). Looking at the photo, as we would with a real person, we are drawn into her face. With the portrait the necklace is as present as anything else. (Which is once more there to emphasise her Mexican heritage.)

Kahlo painted many self-portraits, and you wonder if at times she’s deliberately trying to make them repetitive. She depicts her face from the same angle, a three-quarters view, with her hair up in a bunch. (See for example ‘Self-Portrait with Monkeys’, 1943, above.) It becomes a repeatable icon, as recognisable as the Queen’s head on a stamp.

It may be illustrative to contrast Kahlo’s self-portraits from Gauguin’s, as seen in his recent Tate exhibition. Like Gauguin, her personality and appearance seem as much part of her art as her art is. (She seems to have constantly worn the traditional Mexican dress of the portraits.) But Gauguin’s different faces come at you in a succession, like David Bowie’s cycle of alter egos. With Kahlo the same face returns in different settings and surroundings; we’re asked to put them all together, a compound image for a multifaceted personality. This repetition is an invite to compare the works rather than contrast them.

Happily this shared show isn’t like Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, where even us progressive types were forced to conclude that the woman artist couldn’t match the male for quality. Kahlo is not only given first billing but perhaps two-thirds of the exhibition. However, my suspicion is that Riviera’s heart was in the murals, with the result that galleries never quite capture him. We’re told here that his paintings and drawings often echoed scenes from the murals. (To see some of these go here. Alas, they don’t click to enlarge.)

However, there is a similar sense to the one found in Rodchenko and Popova in the ‘Defining Constructivism’ show, a division into male and female spheres. Riviera covers public and historical events, where for Kahlo it’s the private and psychological world. His world is grand, hers intimate. His muse his history, hers neurosis.

Ancillary photography

Unbeknownst to me, there are two small ancillary exhibitions, taken from the same collection, encountered here like Easter Eggs on a DVD. Frida’s father Guillermo was an architectural photographer, and we’re shown a series on churches. These are good enough, but the main point of interest is that they look like studies of - rather than contributions to - Mexican culture. (Guillermo was German by birth, Frida Mexican from her mother’s side.)

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, however, “the poet of the lens” and “a child of the Mexican revolution” is quite a different kettle of fish. He worked on the ’Mexican Folkways’ magazine of indigenous culture, but was equally influenced by the Surrealists. Contrasting Kahlo’s self-portraits from the photographs, I innocently imagined this literalism was some inherent feature of photography. Yet it’s certainly not for him! The title ‘The Washerwoman Implied’ (1932) sums up his style.

Like Kahlo’s paintings his photographs slip between realism, surrealism and sometimes semi-abstraction, sometimes within one work, like they know no bounds. (Compare his ‘Snail’, 1928, to her fruit still life ’The Bride Who Becomes Frightened When She Sees Life Opened’, 1943, up top.) Modernists are often keen to fly off to the extremes of a style, as if there’s prizes for being the first one to get there. But the interchange is often where the unexpected stuff happens.

Lola was both Manuel’s wife and assistant but gave up both to become a photographer herself. Her photographs are good but more straight documentary, such as ‘Ruth Riviera Moran’ 1950). (There’s precisely one surrealist collage, ‘The Dream of the Drowned’ 1945.) These divisions tend to underline what a multiplicity Manuel was capable of.

Sampled goods

Shows based on private collections can tend to the scattershot. It’s like swapping bubblegum cards as a kid, you never quite got the set you wanted and end up with an incomplete picture. We’re told Riviera painted about two hundred Cubist works (roughly equal to Kahlo’s total output), but we only see one. (The chronology suggests he abandoned it and returned to figuration in 1917, which is roughly when he converted to communism. Could these be connected?)

Kahlo dominates proceedings, which leave them feeling a little like a footnote to her 2005 Tate retrospective. Over a third of her works were self-portraits, and of course I get that their apparent simplicity is deceptive. But even so I tend to prefer the symbolist and surrealist paintings – and there are simply less of those here. We do see some of the Forties sepia ‘Carma’ series, created while she was ill, automotive drawings like fever dreams. If these had been in the Tate show they’ve since slipped my mind. Alas, though, we see only three of these.

But of course its an opportunity to see works by two great Modernist artists, and this show functions as a useful primer. Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s unexpected appearance was a definite benefit. 

Coming soon: Well, let's not say this up-to-date stuff will become a habit...