Ten Teenage Albums

Four years ago there was a Facebook meme where people talked about the 10 albums from their teenage years that had most influenced them. I wrote most of this at the time, but then didn't post it, mainly to avoid pissing off the guy mentioned in album number 8, who does follow me on Facebook. Today I came across it while going through some old stuff on the flash drive that I store most of my life on, and thought... ah, might as well put it on the blog, as I don't post much there these days, and he doesn't read my Twitter feed/blog.

And so, very belatedly, here are the albums that defined me from age 13-19. Keeping myself to only 10 has been difficult, of course, so it's only fair to mention a couple that didn't quite make the cut, like The Golden Age of Wireless by Thomas Dolby, The Queen is Dead by The Smiths, and The Whole Story by Kate Bush. Anyway, here they are, in pretty much the chronological order in which I discovered/bought them. I apologise that they're not hipper, but what can I say? It was the 80s. It was not a hip decade.


1. Ultravox - Vienna (1981)
This was the first album I ever bought, at the age of 14. In those days you had to go to Sundown Records in Walsall, which meant a bus ride and a cramped shop full of muso afficianados looking down their hippie noses at you. I remember hearing the title track in early 1981, and deciding that it was like nothing I had ever heard before. I think my mate Ian had bought a copy before me and taped it onto an old TDK C-90 cassette (with Visage on the other side) for me, and I had decided that I had to have this record. Listening back to it now, those first notes of Astradyne still send shivers down my spine. I bought pretty much else they ever did, and even delved back into their punk phase, when John Foxx was fronting them, and they produced classics like Quiet Men and Hiroshima Mon Amour. I can't really listen to their later stuff now, especially Quartet onwards, but this album I still have a soft spot for, and its gloomy follow-up, Rage In Eden. Sometimes I listen to New Europeans and remember that optimism of the 80s (a counterpoint to our fears about nuclear war), and the idea that Europe had generated, via the likes of Kraftwerk, its own shared culture and ethos, separate from the USSR and Reagan-era USA. In spite of Brexit, I still feel European as much as I feel British, and that Connie Plank, Kraftwerk-influenced Krautrock that filtered into the New Romantic movement in the UK was definitely part of why that is.

2. Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark - Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (1980)
And talking of Kraftwerk, on to the band that were probably the closest British equivalent, OMD. I didn't know much about OMD, and think I pretty much only bought this and their second album Organisation on the strength of liking Enola Gay on Top of the Pops, and at first the albums were a disappointment and took me a longer time to get into. There was some very strange stuff like Red Frame, White Light - a song about a phone box - and the dissonance of Dancing, but there was also the more mainstream poppy stuff like Electricity and Messages. But in the end I think what really sold it to me were the longer tracks, the elegaic Pretending to See The Future and especially the ethereal, lilting The Messerschmitt Twins, which I still love. Of all of the crappy New Romantic stuff I listened to in the early 80s, OMD (and to a lesser extent Thomas Dolby) is the only stuff I can still listen to today.

3. The Police - Outlandos d'Amour (1978)
This was the first Police record I bought, and I'm not sure why I dipped into their back catalogue rather than going for Ghost in the Machine or whatever their contemporary album was at the time. Probably it was because it had Roxanne and So Lonely on it, which I recognised and remembered liking. So Lonely had actually been my first encounter with The Police, on TV - a brief clip on the BBC's Nationwide of all things, and played there only because it sounded like they were singing Sue Lawley. But I'm glad I did. I think for a lot of bands there's a freshness to their first album that gradually gets knocked/produced out of them in later, more polished works. I can remember playing this over and over again in my bedroom at home, headphones on, singing badly along to Truth Hits Everybody. I bloody loved it, and still do. Sting is one of those people we are apparently supposed to hate these days, but I did and do like his music, though I'd agree he was much better with Copeland and Summers.

4. ABC - The Lexicon of Love (1982)
This was one of those albums that everyone in my school year seemed to have (Ultravox's Quartet and U2's live album Under a Blood Red Sky also came close), and I probably only got it because everyone else did. Still, at the time ABC seemed impossibly cool and glamorous, and to a callow teen there was something somehow grown up about their songs about love and romance, probably a function of producer Trevor Horn looking backwards to Hollywood melodrama and the orchestral backing score for inspiration. I haven't really listened to this for many years, and it doesn't do much for me now, but for a couple of years it was part of the backing track to growing up in the 80s.

5. U2 - The Unforgettable Fire (1984)
My oldest friend got into U2, and played this album all the time when I was over at his house, and I absorbed it by osmosis. I had really liked New Year's Day, but hadn't really kept up with U2 through my New Romantic synth-pop phase (see Ultravox, OMD above). But the opening track, A Sort of Homecoming, just swept me up in its big chords and jangly guitar intro, and it seemed an interesting departure. Of course it was the start of Phase II of U2 - their 'American Phase', along with The Joshua Tree and Rattle & Hum, after the 'Irish Phase' of Boy, October and War, and then it was followed by the 'German Phase' of Achtung Baby and Zooropa, before they went on to their Bland International Megastar Phase. I know they're one of those bands these days that you're somehow required to hate, like Coldplay - a similar position that Genesis and Status Quo occupied back in the 80s - but it's worth remembering that even U2 were once quite an exciting Irish rock band, if a bit preachy and obsessed with Martin Luther King by the mid 80s.

6. Electric Light Orchestra - Eldorado (1974)
Paul, who got me into U2, was also responsible for my love of early ELO. My parents had a copy of Out of the Blue, but Paul had excavated their back catalogue, and we listened to all of it, even really weird stuff like The Battle of Marston Moor. He even got a copy of some stuff from The Move, the precursor to ELO. I think the fact that they, like us, were from the West Midlands appealed to him - his father knew someone who had gone to school with Bev Bevan or something. Eldorado was I think the album that really sold me on ELO - it was the perfect example of their trademark combination of rock and classical, and maybe one of my first introductions to the idea of the Concept Album. Eldorado still vies with On The Third Day as my favourite ELO album, and I think it was part of their mid-70s creative peak, before the disastrous swerve into disco that came with Discovery and their Xanadu stuff with Olivia Neutron Bomb. I know everyone likes Mr Blue Sky, but I much prefer the strangeness of Eldorado.

7. Dire Straits - Love Over Gold (1982)
I don't know where the whole Dire Straits thing came from. I remember being in Amsterdam in 198...3? And Industrial Disease seemed to be playing all the time on the radio. I think I also liked the noir-ish Private Investigations and the long slow build of Telegraph Road. Once I got this album, by the time I went to university in 1984 I had bought all of their previous albums - Dire Straits, Communique and Making Movies, and loving all of them, and then being cruelly disappointed when the next year they released the astonishingly bland Brothers in Arms, which became the backing track to every yuppie with a CD player. It was even more disappointing than when Spandau Ballet had gone commercial and released Gold. I still think of this as the last good Dire Straits album, but to be honest, I actually prefer the earlier, rawer stuff like Down to the Waterline these days.

8. Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery (1973)
Oh boy. A fine example of what peer pressure can do. So when I got to Uni, my social circle ended up congregating around the room of this guy. He was a hi-fi afficionado, coffee snob, public school rugger type and alpha male. He was also a keyboard player and devotee of Keith Emerson. I listened to far more Prog than I had ever imagined existed (and also The Beatles, which was an education I'd been sorely lacking up to that point). Much of it stuck - especially Pink Floyd, who I hadn't really listened much to before. And I also discovered that freshly ground coffee was nothing like the instant crap I had drunk up to that point - I really have that to thank him for. But he played a *lot* of ELP, and it seemed to be the thing to listen to. I look at my record box now and thanks to him there are Tarkus, Works 1 and 2, and Trilogy, but mainly I remember this one. I think the H R Giger cover really did it, with the mechanical pistons that fold out to reveal an enigmatic woman's face. Also I especially loved Karn Evil 9, a long concept track about a homicidal artificial intelligence. I find the bombastic excesses of ELP too much these days, but then this album does show that they could also pull off something like Benny the Bouncer and take the piss out of themselves too.

9. This Mortal Coil - It'll End In Tears (1984)
If any album encapsulates my first year at Uni then it's this one. Like The Unforgettable Fire and Brain Salad Surgery I absorbed it by osmosis, this time through the flimsy wall of my dorm room in Vanbrugh College, York University. I was billeted next door to a Scots music student from Glasgow. He played all kinds of things, no doubt to do with his course - Gregorian chant, lots of fucking awful accordion music - but his recreational stuff was Scots indie bands like the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance, bands I'd only vaguely heard of when occasionally listening to John Peel. This album in particular he played on hard rotation, and I was really taken with the incredibly pure sound of Elizabeth Fraser's voice on Another Day and the incomparably beautiful Song to the Siren (actually as I discovered much later a Tim Buckley cover), and I ended up buying this and Filigree and Shadow as a result.

10. Rush - 2112 (1976)
The closeout of my teenage years would probably be typified by this album. By now the prog types had finished their courses and left university, and I was hanging out with a slightly different group, and while much of the music we listened to was still prog, now it was Canadian outfit Rush that I started listening to and liking. Liking rather too much to be honest, and they stuck with me for the next ten years or so, though once I turned 30 their allure started to fade away. But back then I loved it. The first side of 2112 is a prog concept piece about a dystopian future society where conformity is enforced by the computers of the priests of the Temples of Syrinx, and non-sanctioned entertainment is banned, until one young man discovers an old guitar and learns to play it, and ends up leading a revolution. This is a plot later stolen by Ben Elton for his shitty Queen jukebox musical We Will Rock You. It's pompous, it's ridiculous, it's great. The rest of the album is a blander grab bag including a song about drugs (Passage to Bangkok) and another about The Twilight Zone. Still, there it is, at 19 I loved this stuff.

The Strange Death of Liberal Interventionism

In 1935, George Dangerfield published his (in)famous book: The Strange Death of Liberal England. The book concerned itself with the apparently abrupt demise of the Liberal party; prior to the First World War one of the two main governing parties of the UK, yet after it in a terminal decline and surpassed by the new emerging Labour party. Dangerfield placed the blame on the fights that the Liberal party had picked with its Conservative opponents; over Irish home rule and the 1911 Parliament Act (in effect the status of the House of Lords), while simultaneously being outflanked on the left by suffragism and the trade union movement. His thesis has been picked apart over the years, but whatever the merits of the book, he was putting his finger on something profound, a seismic shift in British constitutional affairs. Yesterday saw something just as profound; the strange death of Liberal Interventionism, with the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, amid an orgy of finger pointing. 

Liberal Interventionism was based around the idea that liberal democracies should try to make the world a better place by stepping in to defend citizens of other lands from domestic tyranny and the consequences of failed states. It's sometimes argued that as a concept it went back to US president Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points that emerged from the carnage of the First World War, alongside his call to "make the world safe for democracy", but it would be just as easy to draw a line straight back to the Liberal party itself - Gladstone's calls for humanitarian intervention in Bulgaria following atrocities in the war of 1875-8 struggled for mastery in Victorian England against Disraeli and Salisbury's realpolitik and fears of Russian expansionism. Earlier than that, British military (mainly naval) might was used to end the slave trade (albeit after many decades of having profited handsomely from it).

While the United States could hardly have been said to enter the Second World War due to Liberal Interventionism, its attempt to engage in 'nation building' in the shattered ruins of Germany and Japan after the war, and its creation of the United Nations - a second attempt after the failure of Wilson's League of Nations - to try and form a rules-bound framework for international affairs heavily biased towards the US and its (mostly) democratic allies certainly were. But the second half of the 20th century was obscured by the battle against communism, and a series of decidedly Illiberal Interventions in countries like Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and support for equally unsavoury regimes in Argentina and Paraguay, which were much more about traditional great power politics.

It was only with the fall of communism and an end to anti-communist interventions (some of them disastrous, like Vietnam) that Liberal Interventionism really got its second wind. President Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in the UK presided over a series of international Liberal Interventions, beginning in Somalia in 1992-5, Cambodia (1992-3) and Bosnia (1992-6), and then progressing through Haiti (1994), Kosovo (1999) and Sierra Leone (2000). While success was mixed at best in Somalia, the spectacle of US troops dragged through the streets after the Battle of Mogadishu leading Clinton to approve a hasty exit, the apparent success of each subsequent intervention paved the way for the next. It even led the American right, usually by inclination isolationist, to come up with its own variant on Liberal Interventionism, via the Project for the New American Century, which dreamed of a muscular neocolonialism, toppling pro-western dominos across the globe to secure what was still unironically referred to as a New World Order, a new Pax Americana.

If 2000 marked the apotheosis of Liberal Interventionism, then 2001 would begin its downfall. The Bush administration's (over-)reaction to the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington was repression at home and military adventurism abroad. Afghanistan was apparently won quickly, using the Northern Alliance as ground troops backed up by B-52 strikes. Emboldened, neoconservatives in the Bush government organised a sequel two years later in Iraq, and dreamed of rolling the tide onwards, perhaps to Tehran and beyond. But Iraq proved to be a bridge too far. The power vacuum left by the removal of the Ba'ath regime allowed first Iranian-backed militias to take the south, and then the terrifying fundamentalist state of ISIL to emerge in the north and west, spilling over into Syria and destabilising that state. The 2010-11 Arab Spring that seemed at first to be the neocon dream finally emerging was nipped in the bud in places like Egypt, and after a final Liberal Intervention in Libya went sour and degenerated into armed warlords battling for major cities, the West backed away from Syria and left it to the Russians and Turks.

The US is still deployed in Iraq, and after much blood, money and many setbacks has belatedly managed to scrape together some semblance of a functioning state, albeit with the Kurdish north in a de facto independence. But Afghanistan has been the conflict that has exposed most cruelly the limits to 'nation building'. The Taliban, aided and abeted by Pakistan and occasionally others, has emerged stronger than ever from 20 years of insurgency, while the US withdrawal, negotiated by president Trump but followed through by Biden, has exposed the house of cards that 20 years of corruption, warlordism and mismanagement had built. The collapse of the central government was so fast because Afghanistan never had a central government, just a collection of regional tribal warlords who paid lip service to the government in Kabul for as long as US dollars were flowing. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of imperial ambitions for the British and Russians in the past, and has proved the same for the United States today. Not that it will necessarily be plain sailing for the Taliban either; they are enmeshed in Pashtun society, but Pashtuns only represent 45% of the country, and there will be resistance from Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north, just as there was in 2001, and Iranian-backed Tamurs in the west.

Still, I think Afghanistan marks the end of Liberal Interventionism, certainly for now. There has been no attempt to corral even 'coalitions of the willing' into Yemen, Tigray or South Sudan, let alone Syria. France has a presence in Mali to fight Al Qaeda afiliates, but president Macron is scaling that back and there is no pretence at 'nation building' any more. The world has become more complex, with the re-emergence of global powers, mainly China, but Russia has punched above its weight via leveraging the internet and deniable guerilla operations, and India is also beginning to flex its muscles on the international stage. 

If the Strange Death of the British Liberal Party was as a result of picking fights it lost while being outflanked by new forces rising in the country, then perhaps the Strange Death of Liberal Interventionism is a similar story; picking fights in Iraq and Afghanistan that could not be won, while China and other major powers change the dynamics of geopolitics. I once told a disbelieving friend that future history books would date the decline of the post-WWII western hegemony to the financial crisis of 2008-9. I still believe that to an extent, though I admit I had underestimated the effect of China's demographic time bomb - resulting from the One Child policy - on dramatically slowing its seemingly inexorable rise. I wonder now if they might instead point to the inglorious retreat from Afghanistan as the final nail in its coffin.

"Everyone should be free (except the Common People)"

"This was the first of the famous Chartas and Gartas of the Realm and was invented by the Barons on a desert island in the Thames called Ganymede. By congregating there, armed to the teeth, the Barons compelled John to sign the Magna Charter, which said:
1. That no one was to be put to death, save for some reason (except the Common People).
2. That everyone should be free (except the Common People).
3. That everything should be of the same weight and measure throughout the Realm (except the Common People).
4. That the Courts should be stationary, instead of following a very tiresome medieval official known as the King's Person all over the country.
5. That 'no person should be fined to his utter ruin' (except the King's Person).
6. That the Barons should not be tried except by a special jury of other Barons who would understand.
Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England, and thus a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People)."

WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman - '1066 And All That'

I seem to have ended up in a series of online arguments with devotees of 'Article 61'. This was a clause of the 1215 version of Magna Carta which they believe entitles them to ignore British law as they see fit, especially as regards coronavirus restrictions. It has even been pasted up outside shops as some kind of warding talisman. Needless to say, this is almost as confused an understanding of history as the satirical version above. It has definitely had no effect on the police and courts carrying out their duties. However, as it touches on medieval history and law, and especially the history of the First Barons' War - my own speciality and subject of MA study - I've got interested in the arguments they've tried to make about its continuing relevance and validity, and that has led me down some strange rabbit holes. 

This post is as much as anything an attempt to corral all of the arguments into one place so that I can just post one link instead of having to write paragraphs of argument each time. If you're going to argue with me about Magna Carta, please read all of this, and then and only then come at me with your Q-Anon, Freemen on the Land weirdness. Thank you.

So, what is 'Article' (Clause) 61?

It's quite a long one, so I shalln't repeat it in full. There's a link to it on this webpage. To paraphrase:

The King (John) says that the barons can appoint 25 of their number to watch for breaches of the Charter. They must then bring this to the notice of the king (or his Justiciar if he is out of the kingdom), and he then has 40 days to make amends. If this does not happen, the barons are permitted to "distress and harass us by all the ways in which they are able" until the king gives in. During this time people must swear obedience to the barons, not the king. And there's some housekeeping about appointing new guardian barons once one of the listed 25 dies.

Now, Magna Carta is - in places - pretty radical stuff (I mean, it's also very mundane on places, talking about fish weirs and weights and measures). I've discussed it before, but to reiterate - Clause (nb - not 'Article') 61 is dynamite for a medieval monarch. Remember that back then, monarchy was regarded as being divinely ordained by God (which is why coronations are even today still done by bishops). This places a self-elected junta of 25 warlords above Royal - and therefore even divine - authority. No medieval king could have ever lived with this in the long term. It betrays the origins of Magna Carta - as a peace treaty to head off a civil war. It is clear from this clause that the barons don't trust John to keep his word. Therefore they are compelling him to agree that if he doesn't, then they can make war against him without the penalty of being regarded as rebels or traitors. This is not a trivial point - rebellion was serious business in medieval times. Rebelling against lawful Royal authority was treason, and could lose you your life, and your family all of its lands. It could even get you barred from heaven - rebels were routinely excommunicated by bishops - if God has anointed the king, then rebels are rebelling against God's will. So the Clause attempts to put rebellion on a legal footing, due to John's breach of the Charter. There's a whole argument that Magna Carta was at least in part the brainchild of Archbishop Stephen Langton, and he had studied Biblical precedents for lawful rebellion against Royal authority.

However, in practical political terms, that Clause is also clearly a step too far, and the fact that John put his seal even to this should have been a warning to the barons that he had no intention of ever complying with it. Indeed, within two months, John had been released from his vow to obey Magna Carta by the Pope, and was busy raising an army and seizing key castles. The 1215 Magna Carta died in August 1215. 

The war began in late 1215 and lasted for two years. During this time, John died of dysentary on campaign at Newark Castle in 1216. As his son Henry was only nine years old, the remaining loyalist barons appointed ageing grandee William Marshal as Regent. Marshal, a canny operator, went to the rebel barons (who now also had an opportunisitic French army in support) and made a proposal - he would reissue Magna Carta in King Henry III's name, conceding 75% of what the barons wanted, and promising further discussion about some other bits, provided they agreed to drop certain sections. The 'certain sections' included Clause 61. Most of the barons agreed - they didn't hate the monarchy, only King John personally, and he was now dead. So in 1216, Magna Carta was reissued shorn of its contentious clauses, and enough support fell away from the rebel cause that Marshal was able to defeat the remaining barons and the French forces in the field, at Lincoln and Sandwich, in 1217. Having had some time for more negotiations with the barons, another modified version of Magna Carta was agreed in 1217, and this finally settled the Baron's War. Magna Carta got another - again slightly modified - reissue in 1225, when King Henry came of age, just to confirm that he was still abiding by it. It is worth remembering, however, that Clause 61, the most contentious, had been quietly dropped in 1216 and was never, ever mentioned again.

Why Clause 61 is no longer valid

The 'Article 61' devotees seem to argue that the 1215 Magna Carta was a compact between the King and the People, and that it therefore can only be annulled with the consent of both parties. Since the People didn't consent, it's therefore still in force. Certainly it can't be annulled by an "Italian holy man". This is to completely misunderstand the nature of medieval law and kingship, and especially 13th century English kingship. So, here goes...

1. Pope Innocent III was not simply an "Italian holy man". We might think of the Papacy that way now, in modern Britian, perhaps even as far back as Elizabethan England, but in the 13th century everyone was a Catholic, and the Pope held the Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Innocent in particular had set himself up as an arbiter of disputes from Spain to Poland. Only a priest could relieve a man of a vow sworn to God, and John had sworn before God to uphold Magna Carta. Therefore only a priest could remove that obligation from him, and who better than the Pope to clear the conscience of a King?

2. In 1215, Pope Innocent was not only King John's spiritual superior, but also his feudal overlord. John had been in rebellion against Papal authority from 1208 to 1213, but part of the agreement he made in 1213 to be accepted back into the fold was to submit himself to Papal authority. England in effect had become a vassal state of the Papacy. This was not an uncommon thing - John's brother Richard had submitted England to the Holy Roman Empire in order to get out of jail in 1194. But again, it absolutely gave Innocent the right to veto Royal charters on a secular as well as a religious level. Innocent accepted John's argument that he had only agreed Magna Carta under duress, and therefore it had never been valid in the first place. By the way, England paid 1,000 marks annual tribute to the Papacy until 1333, when England was more powerful and the Papacy less so, and Edward III simply stopped paying.

3. There was no such thing as 'The People' in 1215. This is a concept of Englightenment statehood. It stems from the English Civil Wars and the French and American Revolutions - the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence. It involves concepts that people in the 13th century would simply not have understood. Magna Carta was a Royal Charter of rights granted by the King to his subjects. It dealt mainly with the rights of those holding lands from the King (barons), and Clause 61 dealt exclusively with the barons. As an agreement with the barons, the King and barons could change that agreement, and as I say, in 1216 and 1217, they did just that. 

4. Magna Carta did not become English statute law until 1297, when King Edward I headed off another baronial revolt by agreeing to yet another modified version of it. Needless to say, this version had no Clause 61 or its equivalent. Edward I, "the English Caesar", would have probably killed anyone who dared to even suggest it.

5. After that, no-one really cared much about Magna Carta until the 1640s, when those who opposed King Charles I were looking for a precedent for reining in Royal authority. It got a revival around this time, and started to achieve the legendary status that it has today.

6. However, it's worth remembering that it's just English law, and as such has no more force or validity than any other law. As a law, it can be changed, amended or repealed, just like any other law. We don't have a written constitution. Just laws. And laws can be changed, and have been. Parliament has had the sole power to make law since the 1689 Bill of Rights was agreed.

 

Which bits of Magna Carta are still law?

I think that a lot of the confusion over 'Article 61' stems from the fact that people have heard that some parts of Magna Carta are still British law. This is true, but it is not true in the way that they think it is.

Over the centuries, most of the 1297 Magna Carta clauses have been repealed as new laws are made. Today, only three clauses still remain on the statute books. These are:

- Clause 1, a framing clause, which just says that the Charter confirms the other liberties below (most of which have since been removed).

- Clause 9, which confirms that the City of London and the Cinque Ports still retain all of the Royal rights granted to them prior to the Charter.

- Clause 29, which rolls together two Clauses (39 and 40) of the old 1215 Magna Carta into the most important statement of English liberties ever made. This is the remaining radical core of the old 1215 charter, and it's worth restating in full:

 

"No Free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right."

 

This is the (only) part of Magna Carta that is still relevant, and which is seen by some as the founding principle of English law, and I think it's this that the Article 61 devotees have some hazy recollection of and want to invoke in their protection. However, on close examination it clearly doesn't suit their purposes, because it clearly states that judgement can be passed upon you "by the Law of the Land" (per legem terrae). Parliament makes the Law of the Land. It can close your shop or make you wear a mask to prevent the spread of a communicable disease.

Edit: Muddying the waters

Since starting to delve into this, I've found a couple of things that the Article 61 truthers like to quote to suggest that the 1215 Magna Carta is still valid.

The first is a report from the Daily Torygraph in March 2001. A BBC report also mentions the same incident. Four members of the House of Lords tried to present a petition to the Queen which cited 1215 Magna Carta allowing them, as 'barons' to tell the Queen that she shouldn't give assent to the 2001 Treaty of Nice, which increased the powers of the European Union. Of course, their petition failed, because 1215 Magna Carta is no longer valid, and besides, Parliament had given its assent to it, and the Queen has a constitutional duty to ratify the decisions of Parliament. The Article-ites seem to think that MAGNA CARTA WAS LAWFULLY INVOKED and therefore ALL SUBSEQUENT GOVERNMENTS ARE UNLAWFUL. This is, needless to say, not how anything works, not even Clause 61 of 1215 Magna Carta (the Treaty of Nice would not have been a breach of the Charter, and therefore Clause 61 would not have applied even if it were still valid, which, of course, it isn't).

The second was drawn to my attention by an Irish historian. In 2007 the Irish government annulled 1215 Magna Carta. The logical inference might be that therefore it had been valid up to that point. However, it was the result of discovering that some ancient English laws might still have some validity in Ireland, especially the one making King Henry VIII King of Ireland. So there was a move to just blanket annul every law prior to 1922 - the founding of the Irish Free State - just in case. In this case, they annulled a law they didn't need to, as the June 1215 Magna Carta had already been annulled in August 1215. Still, belt and braces and all that.

Neither of these things - over-caution by the Irish Republic, or an attempt by Brexit-supporting peers to block a European treaty - mean that 1215 Magna Carta is still valid. It isn't. Only three clauses of 1297 Magna Carta are, and they don't give you a lawful right to rebellion.

Now put your mask on and stop spouting nonsense.

Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.

I was listening this morning to Mark Kermode's movie podcast, in which he and Jack Howard were, in the wake of the recent The Rise of Skywalker, ranking The Nine in order from worst to best. This seemed like a fun and mildly diverting thing to do, so for the hell of it, here is my order:

9. The Phantom Menace
Mark and Jack were divided only as to whether this was the worst or the second to worst, and for me there is no real contest. I think perhaps it's the terrible disappointment that I felt on seeing it that has stayed with me. Is it the movie's longeurs, two people sitting around talking about taxes? Is it Jar-Jar Binks? An annoying kid who shouts "yippeeee!"? The 'comedy' Gungans in general - Boss Nass and all? Perhaps the fact that the villains are utterly non-villanous (and speak in racist cod-Japanese accents), with the army of robots with one 'off' switch (Trade Federation - clearly they contracted their military to the lowest bidder). Awful. Just awful. Darth Maul is quite cool, but he gets about five minutes of screen time.
By the way - this is worth a listen: the talented Peter Serafinowicz, who did the voice for Darth Maul, telling the hysterical story of his own involvement with the movie, and how we all felt when we saw it for the first time.

8. Revenge of the Sith
I was surprised how highly Mark Kermode rated this one. I can't agree, even if Anakin killing the younglings is a moment of genuine shock. This was a truly terrible end to a truly terrible series of movies. It is so bad that it almost falls into 'so bad it's good' territory. Lightsabre escalation (this one has six blades, to shave you even closer!), Jedi being idiots, a universe that can replace people's limbs with cybernetics but can't perform a c-section... it has a lot of stupid things, but worst of all are Natalie Portman and especially Hayden Christiansen as Amidala and Anakin. It's like watching two coffee tables. "I have the high ground!" You so don't. What can one say except: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

7. Attack of the Clones
Mark and Jack rated this lower than me, but only because I hated Revenge of the Sith more than them. This is tainted by all of the problems of the prequel trilogy - wooden acting, boring and meaningless dialogue, and - and this is a problem that isn't confined to the prequels - a complete nonsense of a plot. When the Clone Wars were mentioned in a throwaway line in A New Hope, they were a strange, mysterious thing that happened long in the past, and one could imagine almost anything. Lucas of course decided to remorselessly lay them out in front of us in the quest to build a new extension to Skywalker Ranch. But considering that they were just a word, think of the different directions he could have gone. How about senior politicians being replaced by cloned doppelgangers - infiltration agents from an insidious internal threat? No, instead we got an army of copies of Boba Fett's dad, fighting an army of robots - no tension, no emotional investment. And we had to sit through Amidala and Anakin's 'romance' (spare us!), and what the actual fuck was the factory sequence all about?
There were some good things - Christopher Lee, flying Yoda, some cool visuals. But it can't hide the emptiness at the heart of the movie and the trilogy. To those who say that Disney killed Star Wars - no, they didn't. George Lucas did.

6. The Rise of Skywalker
A month ago I might not have placed this quite so low, but the more I think about the movie, the less I like it. It's a theme park ride - exhilarating while you're sitting through it, but afterwards, you wonder why you did. Even though they had to rewrite because of Carrie Fisher's death, so much about the plot makes no sense whatsoever. A hidden planet that no-one can get to except via a flashing pyramid that can only be found using a serrated knife that only works from one vantage point, yet the planet has the largest - crewed - battle fleet in the galaxy and a stadium full of goths - how did they get there? There is no jeopardy - every time something exciting happens, it is narratively rewritten. Chewbacca is dead! - oh, no he isn't. C3PO's mind has beeen wiped! He got better. Poe's love interest sacrifices herself to save him! Lol no she's fine. And that rewriting is characteristic of the glaring flaw in the movie; it rewrites what happened in The Last Jedi. Now Rey is not everywoman, she is another of this bickering clan of space royalty. Bleah. What happened to Rose? What was Finn going to say? Why did Rey put Leia's lightsabre on Tattooine? Leia's only memory of the place was as the sex slave of a giant slug. A colossal missed opportunity, that feels like it was written by committee.

5. The Force Awakens
Possibly controversial to put this one so low (Solo?), but as with The Phantom Menace, I think it's about the disappointment I felt when I saw this at the cinema. There are some great bits. Seeing Han and Chewie and the Falcon again felt great. Luke throwing away the lightsabre at the end was a great ending. Rey, Finn and Poe are engaging characters. But. I don't share the love for Kylo Ren. He's a whiny teenager in a Darth Vader mask. And most of all - if you're going to make a Star Wars film, don't just remake the original. I mean, blowing up a Death Star? (Starkiller base, whatevs). FFS - haven't we done this to death already? I also find your lack of explanation disturbing. Who are the New Order - what happened to the New Republic? Can you really destroy a galactic Federation just by taking out half a dozen planets? WHAT IS GOING ON IN THIS MOVIE? What are the stakes? Is this the Empire reborn, or just a fascist insurgency? Tell us for God's sake!

4. Return of the Jedi
Everyone agrees that this is the weakest of the original trilogy, the only real question is - how bad is it compared to the sequel trilogy? It shows Lucas' descent into trying to capture a younger audience, that eventually reached its nadir in The Phantom Menace. Compared to that, the Ewoks are not too bad, but they are still annoying (we shall pass over Caravan of Courage and never speak of it again). The Force Awakens makes more narrative sense, but it doesn't have Leia in a slave girl outfit. Look, I was 17, okay?

3. The Last Jedi
I wanted to place this movie higher, because I really like what it did with the mythology. I won't hear the fanboy whingeing about Mary Poppins - Leia is Darth Vader's fucking daughter, for Chrissake - you think she can't do some Force tricks in extremis? The Rey plot arc is excellent. I love the fact that she is no-one and everyone - the Force wasn't supposed to be about monarchist bloodlines. It's in everyone and everything. Mark Hamil is great in this, especially at the ending, which is just brilliant. I like Benicio del Toro. Unfortunately, the Stupid is also quite strong in this. Why isn't Poe supposed to sacrifice himself to save the Rebellion? Why does the Empire need to bring a fucking big cannon down to the planet anyway? What's with the Casino scene? And Admiral Holdo's plan is crap, and she inspires a mutiny by refusing to tell anyone what it is, but Rose and Finn's isn't much better. Even so, Kylo Ren is much better in this film, and in general I think it's pretty good.

2. The Empire Strikes Back
This is a good movie - that's pretty well agreed upon, but is it the best? I can't quite say that, for two reasons. The first is the Dagobah training sequence, which feels too long and slows the action down. But the second is just that I love the first movie so much. Which of course brings me to...

1. A New Hope
I know that there are all kinds of flaws with this movie. Its pacing feels quite relaxed these days, which I think is what kills it for a younger generation; well it was made in 1976, I guess. But I was 11 when I watched it at Walsall ABC, and the initial shot of the star destroyer rumbling across the screen made myself and my friend Paul look at each other wide-eyed and literally go: "wow!" I know that my nostalgia clings to my memories of the film and perhaps stops me from examining it too closely. I know that it's a mashup of Hidden Fortress with the ending from 633 Squadron (those who say it is the Dambusters are simply wrong). I know it's Buck Rogers with a side order of samurai and space cowboys, and I don't care. It's still perfect and I can watch it over and over again. In spite of the name change that Lucas forced on it in 1981 when the obscene profits from this made him decide that there was going to be a trilogy of trilogies, for me it was and will always be... Star Wars.




For reference:
         My rating                                   Mark Kermode                        Jack Howard                     
1.      A New Hope                              The Last Jedi                          The Empire Strikes Back
2       The Empire Strikes Back           The Empire Strikes Back       The Last Jedi
3       The Last Jedi                              The Force Awakens               The Force Awakens
4       Return of the Jedi                       A New Hope                           A New Hope
5       The Force Awakens                    Revenge of the Sith                Return of the Jedi
6       The Rise of Skywalker               Return of the Jedi                   The Rise of Skywalker
7       Attack of the Clones                   The Rise of Skywalker           Revenge of the Sith
8       Revenge of the Sith                    The Phantom Menace             Attack of the Clones
9       The Phantom Menace                 Attack of the Clones               The Phantom Menace

You've Got To Fight For What You Want

Do you remember The Flashing Blade? You'd need to be of a certain age, I guess, and to have grown up in the UK, but basically it was the background music to every long, six week school holiday in the 1970s. As soon as the holidays rolled around, the BBC would wheel out a children's TV schedule for the weekdays to keep the little horrors entertained. And it was always the same schedule, it seemed. It would consist of seemingly endless loops of Why Don't You?, Robinson Crusoe, White Horses and of course The Flashing Blade.
Most of the others didn't interest me much, but a swashbuckling action series with swords and explosions and lots of riding around for no good reason? Sign me up! I used to love The Flashing Blade, and can still recite the lyrics to the theme tune word perfect to this day:
You've got to fight for what you want
For all that you believe.
It's right to fight for what you want
To live the way you please.
As long as we have done our best
Then no-one can do more.
And life and love and happiness
Are well worth fighting for.

I was vaguely aware at the time that it was dubbed and that it seemed to be set in some obscure war that we were never taught at school, where the French were fighting the Spanish and the French were, amazingly, the good guys, but not much else.

So in a fit of nostalgia a week or so ago I went and ordered the two-set DVD of the series from Amazon. It consists of 12 episodes, the last of which the BBC never showed for some reason, and which consequently is in French with English subtitles. It was of course a French TV series - Le Chevalier Tempête - the Storm Knight, I guess? - made in 1967. For the uninitiated it concerns the siege of a fortress - Casale - by the Spanish, and the attempts of the French Chevalier de Recci, the Knight of the title, to get through Spanish lines to organise a relief force. It is in the tradition of Dumas and the Three Musketeers, with lots of swashbucking action.

I had thought that I remembered a lot about the series - the dashing raid into the Spanish lines, the escape disguised as lepers, the beautiful Lady Isabella and the villainous Don Alonzo, the fall into the river that the Chevalier recovers from, but re-watching it has been an interesting experience, as I clearly only understood about one third - maybe not even that much - of what was going on. What - they were captured by a Croatian bandit called The Voivode? I didn't remember that. It was all about a peace conference involving the Abbe (later to become Cardinal) Mazarin? It was set in northern Italy? The Chevalier disguised himself as Harlequin in a Commedia dell'Arte troupe? Wow.
The plot was much more involved than I remembered, and even as an adult I needed my wits about me to keep up - no wonder so little had registered on the 10-year old me. There is politics, double-dealing, intrigue, romance... it is clearly intended as a fairly adult series. I'm not quite sure what the BBC were thinking, scheduling it for children. Presumably it was cheap, and maybe bought as a job lot with Robinson Crusoe, which was also French.
As an amateur historian, more interesting for me was that much of the historical backdrop was reasonably real. In fact the siege of Casale Monferrato (in the series they actually use the beautiful and impressive Chateau Gaillard in Normandy as a stand-in for the besieged fortress) was a real event and part of the War of the Mantuan Succession, one of the myriad sub-conflicts that formed part of the larger Thirty Years War in Europe. It ran from 1628-1631 and was indeed ended by a peace brokered by Mazarin, at the time a Papal envoy, and guaranteed by the Duchy of Savoy, where most of the action in the series takes place.
Mazarin is an interesting character. He was later the replacement for Cardinal Richelieu as the Chief Minister of France, and is the foil of the last Musketeers novels - Twenty Years Later and The Viscount of Bracelonne. But in fact he was an Italian, studied as a Jesuit but never joined, became a lawyer, and had a brief career as an infantry captain with Montferrat in the War of the Mantuan Succession before ending up as a Papal envoy. He is portrayed in the series, as he probably was in real life, as an admirer of Richelieu and French supporter.
The series is also very good at portraying the dilemma of the small state (here Savoy) caught between two, or perhaps three superpowers - France, Spain, and the Papacy. The equivocating of the Count de Sospel - in the series Savoy's chancellor - is very well caught.
And also - it took me a while, but I eventually most definitely started to get this vibe - the series also features French agents hiding people in barns and smuggling them past the black-clad Spanish troops, secret rendezvouses, betrayals... it's essentially a little play on the French Resistance, told only 20 years after the real thing. There's a bit in Episode 9 where the Maquis are basically delaying the Wehrmacht to let the British agents get to safety. It was at that point that the penny dropped. Of course, in the spirit of the nascent European Union, the actual Germans in the series are represented by a heroic mercenary captain, Kleist, who is on the French side, and who dies a noble death fighting for them.

So... what to make of The Flashing Blade? For all of its cheap 60s production values, it was clearly a fairly serious series, with French-Canadian, Belgian and Swiss money involved as well as French. It can easily hold its head up alongside offerings like the BBC's more recent Musketeers. It certainly didn't belong as children's holiday viewing, but instead, re-watching it, I was surprised how good it actually was. Maybe something of that impinged itself on my young mind. I'm certainly glad to have made its reacquaintance.

Bad Books

Someone on Twitter asked today: "What is the worst book you have ever finished?"

I found that quite an interesting question, as I am not one of those people who feels duty bound to plod through every single page of a book they are not enjoying. I decide the book isn't for me, put it to one side, and feel no guilt whatsoever. Very occasionally a book has surprised me and got much better as it went on, but more often than not the first 100 pages is quite enough to realise that what you are holding is garbage. So for that reason, there are many many bad books I've never finished. In my 20s, I tried, out of some sense of completing an unfinished education, to read books like Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, but quickly gave up. Marx is like reading a badly translated textbook on the dullest subject imaginable, and Hitler is like being trapped next to the person on the bus who won't stop going on about immigrants - if Rudolf Hess had edited it, I'd hate to have seen the original. Likewise fiction: L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth is probably the worst written book I have ever read, but I felt no compunction to slog through all 1,050 pages to make completely sure of that, and James Joyce's Ulysses may be a breakthrough work of modernist literature, but I have to agree with Virginia Woolf's verdict: "never did any book so bore me", and like her, I quit around page 200. By the by - some books that often make it into people's 'most hated', like Moby-Dick, I actually quite enjoyed. I guess you just have to find the technical stuff about whaling interesting.

So for me to finish a book, it has to have held my attention somehow, and surely that means that by at least one definition, it can't be that bad a book? The Da Vinci Code springs immediately to mind; like Jeffrey Archer, with whom he has a lot in common, Dan Brown writes terrible prose, but both authors have the saving grace that they can do plotting and pacing, like a lot of pulp fiction writers, and so they carry you along to the end in spite of themselves. For sheer incoherent muddle it's hard to beat the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, whose career with pulp imprint Badger Books spanned dozens of pseudonyms and literally hundreds of books, 'written' at the rate of one per week, actually dictated into tapes sent off to be typed up by little old ladies, who might call back to say he was approaching his word limit, leaving him to wrap up the story in about two incredibly confused pages of deus ex machina. His Galaxy 666 (written as 'Pel Torro') is the Plan 9 From Outer Space of pulp SF, but like that film it enters into 'so bad it's good' territory, as Fanthorpe desperately tries to pad his word count with thesaurus dumps or spends three pages describing the colour of grey, pink and white rocks. He's also a lovely man in person by the way.

I had to wrack my brains to think of the worst book I had actually finished. Full disclosure - I read a lot of very bad pulp SF and horror in my youth. Frederick Dunstan's Habitation One? A derivative SF tale of a post-apocalyptic society in a huge closed city that aims for JG Ballard via Logan's Run, but falls horrifyingly short. The entire corpus of Guy N Smith, sub-James Herbert low rent British horror writer, a kind of real world Garth Marenghi, with his tales of killer crabs and the seven plagues of Egypt unleashed upon Birmingham? Getting warmer. The Splatterpunk Anthology, an unremitingly disgusting feast of shock-lit that wanted to be Bret Easton Ellis when it grew up (or at least Clive Barker)? Certainly in the bottom ten. Incidentally - do not attempt to read any of these books. Really. To paraphrase the warning they used to give after Captain Scarlet - Sub-Editor is Indestructible - You Are Not.

But all fiction, no matter how bad, still has something to it - that human desire to tell stories and entertain. I think to really plumb the depths you have to consider factual (or notionally factual) writing. Below the 1421 - China Discovers the World and Holy Blood, Holy Grails of this world are reams of poorly thought-out works of pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology to make the blood of any rational individual boil with their cavalier disdain for 'evidence' and 'facts'. And then we come to self-help books. And then we come to those that try to combine them all with cod philosophy and act as a cheap way of cashing in on people's insecurities. I'd love to place Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health in here, but unfortunately that's another one that I never finished. So my own prize for the worst book I have ever finished goes to a piece of garbage I was given as a going away present to university by my eccentric aunt, herself a devotee of transcendental meditation, reflexology and various other forms of bullshit. Behold the wonder that is: Bring Out The Magic In Your Mind, by 'Al Koran'. To quote Angel Heart: "even your name is a dime store joke." 'Al' - I think we can assume this is not his real name - to quote the blurb, tells you how his incredible discovery of "Personal Electricity Within You" gives you "Magnetic Powers". With these you can "Learn How To... Send Out Dynamic Thought-Wishes, Silent Messages That Influence People To Like You, Trust You, And Help You." Boiled down to its roots, his thesis is - if you wish hard enough for something, it will happen. Naturally these wishes must be essentially selfish - a new car, an attractive girlfriend, a private plane. All is within your grasp, if you will it. Go through the world bending lesser mortals to your mighty will.

I didn't know then, but have since discovered, that Al was born in the rather more prosaic surroundings of Clapton in 1917 as Edward Doe, and after giving up his career as a hairdresser, he became a magician and "mentalist" in the 1950s and 60s, and he wrote the book in 1964 at the height of his 'fame', before he went to the US. You can see him performing in a very grainy recording of the Ed Sullivan Show here. He reminds me a bit of a proto-Yuri Geller, in that like him, he was clearly a talented stage magician who had decided to pretend he was a genuine psychic because it brought in bigger bucks, and I'm half certain that he was Geller's inspiration. The book was ghost written for him, and was clearly just a cheap cash-in. Looking back on it now, it seems one of many similar such things, and I'm not sure why it annoys me so much that it has become my Worst Book Ever, but I think chiefly it's not just how terribly written it is (and by God it is), but the lazy cynicism at the heart of it. At least Jehovah's Witnesses believe the rubbish they're spouting. Al Koran clearly didn't, and just wanted to squeeze some more moolah from some gullible marks, and I think it annoys me most that my aunt was one of them.

Anyway, that's mine. What's yours?

Homeward Bound

"There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same."
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the King.

I watched Peter Jackson's concluding part of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King again last weekend, and it set me thinking about the book, and what Tolkien was really driving at. I have always liked but never really loved Lord of the Rings, even when I first read it as a teenager. To me it had a strange, bloodless, rarified quality; oddly stilted, like a pre-Raphaelite painting brought to life, full of Solemn Councils and Chaste Maidens. The descriptions of scenery seemed to go on forever, and what was it with all of the bloody songs and poems? Get on with it already! I skimmed a lot of that.

Yes, I know, I know - it's supposed to be A Mythology for England, Anglo-Saxon epic mixed with Arthurian Romance, and all that, but it always felt to me more like the last dying gasp of English Romanticism, and I freely confess that I'm constitutionally more at home with the dirtier, lustier worlds of Swords & Sorcery - Robert E Howard and Fritz Lieber, and that High Fantasy has always somehow alienated me - it never felt like it was about real people with real drives and emotions. Nevertheless, I did very much enjoy Peter Jackson's films (at least, the LOTR trilogy, not the Hobbit films, which are, let's face it, the Star Wars Prequels of the piece) - incredibly long as they were - because they managed to avoid most of the problems I had had with the original books. Jackson did this by compressing and focusing the narrative; instead of the three page descriptions of mountains, now the sweeping vistas of scenery spoke for themselves, and the songs and poems were wisely mostly chopped away - especially Tom Bombadil, who I know some people think of with kindness, but who only ever irritated me. The ending of the final film could have benefitted from some judicious editing, but generally they were as a good a version as we're likely to see. With one exception.

Everyone has their pet gripe with the films, I know, but for me there was one area where I felt they had seriously mis-stepped, and that was by cutting out one of my favourite bits of the books; The Scouring of the Shire. This final reckoning with Saruman and Wormtongue was presumably cut from the films to allow them to kill Saruman at the end of the second film in order to provide an artificial kind of ending/closure there that it would otherwise lack, and perhaps because it would have been too anti-climactic a scene to end with after the struggle at Mount Doom, but I personally missed it being where it should be. It's the completion of the Hero's Journey; the return of the four hobbits to the Shire that they left at the start, and the realisation that they are not the same people that they were when they left, and that they can no longer simply just slot back into the roles they once filled. It's almost like the Trilogy's 'Deer Hunter' moment. It shows that they have been forged in a crucible of war, and now are unafraid to tackle the petty tyrants and bullies that Saruman's pint-sized police state represents. But it also brings home to the four how out of kilter they are with what was once their homeland - it is only via corruption and collusion within elements of the existing hobbit power structure that Saruman has come to power, after all.

This downbeat, melancholy ending was excised from the films because it is quite at odds with the epic quest that has gone beforehand, but to me it feels like the mask slipping from the upright world of elves and High Magic, and instead giving us a glimpse into the soul of Lieutenant John Tolkien of the Lancashire Fusiliers, a veteran of the Somme, and the feelings he had when he came back from Flanders. If The Shire is a bucolic fantasy of rural England, and the blasted, lifeless, ash-strewn wastes of Mordor are the horror of the trenches (yes yes, Tolkien's dislike of the Industrial Revolution, but come on...), then the Scouring of the Shire is what it feels like to come back to that rural idyll after four years of slaughter, and find that nothing is quite as you remembered it. Although the final book of The Lord of the Rings was not completed until 1949, Tolkien always strenuously denied that it was anything to do with World War II, that Sauron was not Hitler, and that the Ring was not the Atomic Bomb, and I believe him. Rather, I think it was very much to do with WWI and his experiences of it - with the passing of the Victorian/Edwardian world of his youth, diminshing and passing into the West, where the new rising power of the USA lay, and the birth of the new world of the 20th Century, and I think that leaving out that final chapter diminishes the whole.