birdland (patti & max)

'But if I see before me the nervature of past life in an image, I always think that this has something to do with truth. Our brains, after all, are always at work on some quivers of self-organisation, however faint, and it is from this that an order arises, in places beautiful and comforting, though more cruel, too, than the previous state of ignorance. How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?' (W.G. Sebald, 'Dark Night Sallies Forth', After Nature) 

On Saturday, after the funeral of an old friend in a witheringly cold north Norfolk, we drove to Aldeburgh to see Patti Smith at Snape Maltings. She was performing 'Max', a spoken word and song tribute to WG Sebald, as part of a symposium to mark the 10th anniversary of Sebald's death - with Richard Mabey, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane and others - and the launch of Patience (After Sebald), Grant Gee's new film essay in response to The Rings of Saturn (which includes contributions by Tacita Dean, Iain Sinclair, Adam Phillips, Dan Gretton etc.).

Patti was astonishing. At the age of 64, in white dress shirt trailing cuffs, black jacket, jeans, boots, and Lennon glasses, she looks like a cross between Keith Richard and an Easter Island statue, her long face breaking into a disarming smile, her voice a blowtorch. Her marshaling of blooded energy in songs that she heats over time and brings incrementally to a shamanic boil wholly belies her apparent 'age'. At times she vibrates and burns like magma, at others she's like a wistful kid, then in a flash ancient, weathered, beyond the clumsiness of gender, a voice from elsewhere.

'Whispering madness on the heathland of Suffolk. Is this the promis'd end?' (Sebald, After Nature).

At one point, a woman near the front shouted, 'Patti, you're a goddess!' 'A shabby one', she replied, with a quiet laugh. ('With a laugh that's a rustling turned inwards', Sebald, After Nature). At another point, a young pissed guy shambled up to her at the lip of the stage, shouting and flicking v-signs: 'This is shit, man. And your audience is shit!' With an exquisite softness and without judgement, she tried to give him his money back. The young punk and the mother of punks; it was clear where the radical energy, openness, humanity and attack lay. After he left, bundled unceremoniously out of the door by an unnecessarily assertive punter, she said: 'Too bad he left when he did. Cos the next song features 27 punk guitarists, and it's specially for him'.

She combined readings from Sebald's associationally layered meditation/poem After Nature ('what is this being called human?') with accompaniment from her daughter Jesse on piano and a young composer Michael Campbell on guitar and vibraphone, with songs (including the song she wrote with Springsteen, 'Because The Night', 'Pissing in a River' and 'Ghost Dance', and a startling cover of Neil Young's 'Helpless' - 'Big birds flying across the sky / Throwing shadows on our eyes'). In addition she read a poem she'd written about Sebald, and shared musings on her own circuitous links to this place via Herman Melville and Billy Budd, Benjamin Britten, her Norfolk ancestry (the Harts), her love of Sebald - her friend Susan Sontag had first recommended him to her - and of the sea.

She opened up the quiet apocalypse of Sebald's poem, made it immediate, available, pulsing, an animate and fluid landscape of memory, illumination, displacement and loss edging towards lament and song. And - a white-hot highlight for me - she sang a staggering, ecstatic version of 'Birdland' from Horses, her wing-flutter hands articulating and sculpting space, taking flight, lifting us all up up up in to the belly of the spaceship within a theatre whose beamed roof mirrors the ribcage of some vast upturned sea vessel:

His father died and left him a little farm in New England.
All the long black funeral cars left the scene
And the boy was just standing there alone
Looking at the shiny red tractor
Him and his daddy used to sit inside
And circle the blue fields and grease the night.
It was if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars
'Cause when he looked up they started to slip.
Then he put his head in the crux of his arm
And he started to drift, drift to the belly of a ship,
Let the ship slide open, and he went inside of it
And saw his daddy 'hind the control board streamin' beads of light,
He saw his daddy 'hind the control board,
And he was very different tonight
'Cause he was not human, he was not human.

And then the little boy's face lit up with such naked joy
That the sun burned around his lids and his eyes were like two suns,
White lids, white opals, seeing everything just a little bit too clearly
And he looked around and there was no black ship in sight,
No black funeral cars, nothing except for him the raven
And fell on his knees and looked up and cried out,
"No, daddy, don't leave me here alone,
Take me up, daddy, to the belly of your ship,
Let the ship slide open and I'll go inside of it
Where you're not human, you are not human".

But nobody heard the boy's cry of alarm.
Nobody there 'cept for the birds around the New England farm
And they gathered in all directions, like roses they scattered
And they were like compass grass coming together into the head of a shaman bouquet
Slit in his nose and all the others went shooting
And he saw the lights of traffic beckoning like the hands of Blake
Grabbing at his cheeks, taking out his neck,
All his limbs, everything was twisted and he said,
"I won't give up, won't give up, don't let me give up,
I won't give up, come here, let me go up fast,
Take me up quick, take me up, up to the belly of a ship
And the ship slides open and I go inside of it where I am not human.
I am helium raven and this movie is mine",
So he cried out as he stretched the sky,
Pushing it all out like latex cartoon, am I all alone in this generation?
We'll just be dreaming of animation night and day
And won't let up, won't let up and I see them coming in,
Oh, I couldn't hear them before, but I hear 'em now,
It's a radar scope in all silver and all platinum lights
Moving in like black ships, they were moving in, streams of them,
And he put up his hands and he said,

"It's me, it's me, I'll give you my eyes, take me up, oh now please take me up,
I'm helium raven waitin' for you, please take me up,
Don't let me here, the son, the sign, the cross,
Like the shape of a tortured woman, the true shape of a tortured woman,
The mother standing in the doorway letting her sons
No longer presidents but prophets
They're all dreaming they're gonna bear the prophet,
He's gonna run through the fields dreaming in animation
It's all gonna split his skull
It's gonna come out like a black bouquet shining
Like a fist that's gonna shoot them up
Like light, like Mohammed Boxer
Take them up up up up up up
Oh, let's go up, up, take me up,
I'll go up, I'm going up, I'm going up
Take me up, I'm going up, I'll go up there
Go up go up go up go up up up up up up up
Up, up to the belly of a ship.
Let the ship slide open and we'll go inside of it
Where we are not human, we're not human".

Well, there was sand, there were tiles,
The sun had melted the sand and it coagulated
Like a river of glass
When it hardened he looked at the surface
He saw his face
And where there were eyes were just two white opals, two white opals,
Where there were eyes there were just two white opals
And he looked up and the rays shot
And he saw raven comin' in
And he crawled on his back and he went up
Up up up up up up
Sha da do wop, da sha da do way,
sha da do wop, da sha da do way,
Sha da do wop, da shanna do way,
sha da do wop, da shaman do way,
Sha da do wop, da shaman do way,
We like birdland.

A spirit passed, and the hair on my flesh stood up.

Yes yes, my god, we like birdland too. A (not so) shabby goddess took us there by the hand, a force of nature, an old old soul.

This being called human.
___________________________________________

W.G. Sebald, After Nature (trans. Michael Hamburger), New York: Modern Library, 2002

For Aida Edemariam's Guardian interview with Patti Smith (22 January 2011), see here. For Stuart Jeffries' Guardian article (25 January 2011) about Patience (After Sebald), see here. For a Guardian podcast of a conversation with Grant Gee about Sebald, see here. For the original 1975 recording of 'Birdland', see here

Photo of Patti Smith by Annie Leibovitz

Text first written in January 2011

shuttle 19: naming

‘The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before’ 

(Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, London: Picador, 1992) 
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North American deserts  (north to south)

Carcross, Fraser, Thompson Country, Nk’mip; Channeled Scablands, Snake River, Craters of the Moon, Red, Owyhee, Yp, Alvord, Oregon High; Great Basin (Black Rock, Forty Mile, Smoke Creek, Great Salt, San Raphael, Sevier, Escalante, Bisti Badlands, Painted); Mojave (Death Valley, Amargosa); Sonoran (Colorado, Yuha, Yuma, Lechuguilla, Tule, Gran Desertio de Altar, Baja, Vizcaino); Chihuahuan (Trans-Pecos, White Sands)

Some American winds 

Auger (dust devil, sometimes stationary, in California), Black Roller (dust storm), Cat’s Paw (strong enough to ripple a pool), Chinook (a foehn wind also known as 'the snow eater'), Chocolatero, Chubasco, Collada, Cordonazo (‘the lash of St Francis’), Coromell, Diablo, Duster, Kabeyun (‘the father of winds’, Algonquin), Kibibonokka (‘the fierce one’, Algonquin), Maria (fictional), Mato Wamniyomni (‘whirlwind’, Dakota), Mono, Norte, Norther, Papagayos, Pruga, Santa Ana, Shawondasee (‘the lazy wind’, Algonquin), Sonora, Stikine, Sundowner, Surazo, Taku, Tapayagua, Ta Te Kata (chinook, Sioux), Tehuantepecer, Tezcatlipoca (‘the divine wind’, Aztec), Tornado, Virazon, Wabun (‘the morning bringer', Algonquin), Williwaw, Witch, Zonda 

Aeolian processes
- abrasion: the process of physical weathering
- deflation: a process in which the finer grained material is removed, and the level of the land surface is lowered
- desert pavement: forms when wind removes all of the fine-grained sand from a system, leaving only the coarser gravel behind
- desert varnish: the patina of iron and manganese oxides left on rocks after they have undergone long periods of chemical weathering in the desert
- ventifacts - stones that have been sculpted by the wind 

Sonoran Desert plants & animals

Flora: cave primrose, desert Christmas cactus, desert lupine, desert willow, devil’s claw, fairy duster, ghost flower, hedgehog cactus, jimson weed, night blooming cereus, prickly pear cactus, saguaro cactus, showy four o’ clock (Mirabilis multiflora), tumble weed, western wildflower

Fauna: Allen’s big-eared bat, Arizona pocket mouse, Bezy’s night lizard, black-tailed jackrabbit, cactus mouse, California leaf-nosed bat, Chihuahuan striped whiptail lizard, Chuckwalla lizard, common desert centipede, desert bighorn sheep, desert box turtle, desert pupfish, desert recluse spider, desert spiny lizard, desert tortoise, desert woodrat, flat-tail horned lizard, fringe-toed lizard, Gila monster, golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), horned lizard, kangaroo rat, lesser long-nosed bat, little striped whiptail, long-tailed brush lizard, Mearns coyote, Merriam’s kangaroo rat, Mesquite mouse, Mexican grey wolf (el lobo), mountain king snake, mountain lion (cougar or puma), Mexican big-eared bat, Mexican black king snake, Mexican long-tongued bat, Mexican jumping beans (frijoles saltarines), Mexican tree frog, Pacific burrowing wasp, pallid bat, Pinacate beetle, rattlesnakes (genus Crotalus), ring-tailed cat, round-tailed ground squirrel, Sonoran desert toad, Sonoran shovelnose snake, Sonoran sidewinder, spotted bat, tiger centipede, Trans-Pecos striped whiptail lizard, western pipistrelle, white-throated woodrat, Yuma myotis vesper bat, zebra-tailed lizard

Birds: Abert’s towhee, Anna’s hummingbird, Bell’s vireo, Bendire’s thrasher, black-chinned hummingbird, black-chinned sparrow, black rail, black-tailed gnatcatcher, black-throated sparrow, brown-crested flycatcher, burrowing owl, canyon wren, Cassin’s vireo, Chihuahuan raven, collared peccary, Costa’s hummingbird, Crissal thrasher, curve-billd thrasher, desert cardinal, Ferruginous pygmy owl, Gambel’s quail, Gila woodpecker, gilded flicker, greater roadrunner, great horned owl (Bubo virinus), lark bunting, Lawrence’s goldfinch, Le Conte’s thrasher, Lucy’s warbler, mountain plover, mourning dove, phainopepla, Plumbeous vireo, sage sparrow, spotted owl, vermilion flycatcher, yellow-headed blackbird
__________________________

Rebecca Solnit: - 

'Naming is a form of claiming. Parents name their children, priests baptise their flock, husbands confer their names upon their wives, explorers name what they come across - whether it's Fremont naming the Humboldt River after another explorer or Martin Heinrich Klaproth naming the element uranium after the god of the underworld. To name a thing is to assert that a new identity has begun ...

In Genesis, Adam wants a helpmeet, but God instead brings forth all the animals for him to name, and only after the fowl of the air and the beasts of the field are named does his Creator get around to making woman out of his rib. According to Robert Graves and Raphael Patai's Hebrew Myths, naming is a euphemism or substitute activity. In the original version Adam couples with all the creatures in quest of a satisfactory mate, and when his experiments with the animals prove unsatisfying Eve arrives for his use ...

The scattering of names across the land is a cipher of its history. As Utah is sprinkled with the Old Testament names that gave resonance to the Mormon emigration there, so California is overlaid with the sanctifying names of the Spanish missionaries, from the sacrament itself in the state's capital to the list of saints trailing down the coast. Other Spanish names are descriptive: Mariposa for the butterflies that menaced Moraga's expedition, the Sierra Nevada for their snow ... The names of the peaks in a western mountain range often sound like the roster of a board of directors. Josiah Whitney, director of the state's Geological Survey, named the tallest peak yet found by his men in the Sierra after himself, then hastened to transfer his name to the taller mountain that turned up afterward, the current Mount Whitney ...

Had the old names been kept, the newcomers would have been emigrants, not discoverers. The great charm of the Belgian gold miner Jean-Nicholas Perlot is that he came to the Sierra foothills as to a foreign country rather than a manifest destiny, came to it as a place in the middle of a story rather than waiting for one to begin, without the sense of himself as a new Adam or the Indians as obstacles to a new Eden. As befits an immigrant, he learned the languages, English, Spanish, and Miwok. Changing the names is a symbolic substitute for wiping out the people, and in looking at the language of the newcomers, particularly in Yosemite, the constant conjunction of the words extermination and aboriginal captures this. Exterminate comes from terminate, to end, ab-original means from the beginning, and so the phrase means to terminate the originals, end the beginning, and begin again in the middle, making Adams out of Europeans in an Eden wrested from some people who didn't fit into the new story'.

Extract from Rebecca Solnit, 'The Name of the Snake', in Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999
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Photos (from top): Jan Janssonius, anemographic chart, 1650; USA wind map; Steve Evans - desert cactus flower, Arizona; rattlesnake rattle; Matt - Saguaro cactus; desert cacti, Chelsea Flower Show, London, 2013

For driving music,  'I've been everywhere', performed by Willie Nelson & Hank Snow, listen here
 
For further details of Jean-Nicholas Perlot (and his canine companion Miraud), see his Gold Seeker: Adventures of a Belgian Argonaut during the Gold Rush Years, ed. Howard R Lamar, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985

For a wonderful book about winds - with chapters on wind and earth, time, life, body and mind, and a 'dictionary of winds' - see Lyall Watson, Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, London: Hodder & Staughton, 1984 

instar

'People thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle.In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who "knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay". But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming ... The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt'. (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006, 81-3)













'But the changes in a butterfly's life are not always so dramatic. The strange resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts, for as it grows, a caterpillar, like a snake ... splits its skin again and again, each stage an instar. It remains a caterpillar as it goes through these molts, but no longer one in the same skin. There are rituals marking such splits, graduations, indoctrinations, ceremonies of change, though most changes proceed without such clear and encouraging recognition. Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far'. (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 83).

All photos from the Butterfly Farm at Buckfastleigh, Devon
© David Williams 2008

acts of public dreaming (2)

To mark the ending of Donna Shilling and Tim Vize-Martin's walk from London to Dartington (see my earlier post from 27 August here), they asked me to say a few words while they laid out objects and traces from the walk: their route maps, sticks, compass, water bottles, and other items from their rucksacks. The following text is a version of what was said. More than 100 people had gathered to greet them, and to launch the Dartington MA show. An hour or so earlier, about 50 others walked with them up the hill from Totnes, visiting various sites at the college in silence before finally stopping in the evening sunshine behind Lower Close; they were guided by Augusto Corrieri and Pete Harrison, and included Mary Bartlett, Joe Richards, Simon Murray, Alan Boldon, Tracey Warr, Emilyn Claid, Paul Clarke, Sue Palmer, Claire Donovan, Bob Whalley, Misri Dey, Teresa Grimaldi, Klaus Kruse, Mary Southcott, Vicky Major, Emma Bush, and Giles Brokenshaw. En route through the college we encountered elusive fragments of ongoing work being rehearsed and other processes: Andy sitting with an electric guitar and amp in a storeroom doorway, plectrum poised; Ellen's moving shadow projected on to the wall of a studio; the sound of a piano on the breeze by the music studios; familiar black & white cows drifting and munching in the fields. Life goes on, apparently oblivious to the knowledge that soon we will all be gone from here. The layerings of present and past(s) at every turn, as we looped through buildings and courtyards and fields on a perfect late summer's evening ...

So, 222 miles in 21 days, from London to Dartington. The mirror image in reverse of a walk Donna first made in 2001 as part of a remarkable 3rd year project. En route this time, Donna and Tim have been joined by a number others, to accompany them on sections of the walk and to share conversation: thoughts about Dartington, memories, associations, anecdotes, perceptions of its pasts and possible futures. These co-walkers have included former and current staff and students, as well as others with a close association with the college. And now many of you here on this last leg from Totnes …

In some ways, the closing of a loop, an ending of a cycle. A slow, embodied and mindful return for Donna to a very different Dartington, itself, as we all know, about to migrate in some unknowable form or other a little further south-west. And an almost-ending of Tim’s MA. A gathering before a dispersal. A farewell. But the walk itself has also been – and remains - an invitation to new meetings, exchanges, reflections into the future about location, context, community, change as the only real constant, about ‘home’, displacement, new beginnings, and at its heart, focused questions about what is important. Perhaps above all it invites us to inhabit something of the paradox of change: hold on tightly, let go lightly.

When Goat Island were here a year or so ago, as part of their last tour of their last piece The Lastmaker, they talked with us about endings and about how one might go about managing one’s endings. The Goats said: “As a company, we came to the conclusion that it was time to come to a conclusion … We needed to take control of our ending before our ending took control of us. We considered the possible endings we did not want to define us, endings of burnout, internal conflict, self-repetition, or diminished quality. We wanted to reject these, and to reject the notion of their inevitability. Thus we decided to approach our ending as we have tried to approach all our changes: creatively”. At that time many of us at Dartington felt we had no ownership of our 'ending' here, it didn’t belong to us and it was both disorienting and painful. After a while we started to look for ways to approach this ending creatively. Donna and Tim’s walk is a brilliant example of one such creative approach; and as an event it resonates strongly with Dartington’s longstanding engagement in acts of walking as a reflective, creative and performative practice.

Earlier this week, Sue Palmer and I joined Tim & Donna for one leg of the walk, 11.5 miles, much of it on the coastal path, from Sidmouth to Starcross; near the end of the day Josie Sutcliffe joined us on the esplanade in Exmouth. Many things came up for me on this peripatetic day of walking and reflecting and talking in the sunshine. In particular, a focused sense of some of those colleagues and students who have been closest to what’s really important about Dartington for me: as possibility, as open invitation, as human encounter, as continuous and sometimes precarious unfolding. Some of them are here today. Some aren’t, but in other ways of course they always are. And secondly, some clearer perceptions about what I have valued most and still do: perhaps in particular, the ways in which sometimes here at Dartington teaching has become so much more than some dumb claim to possession of knowledge to be conveyed – at those times it has been about not knowing, about experiencing, being present and attentive and open to the extraordinary and often unpredictable creative possibilities of other human beings. In the best of times I have been utterly inspired by the engagement of some students, completely blown away by the quality of their work: unsettled, knocked over, rearranged, lifted up. It has changed me. What could be better than a teacher wide-eyed and joyous at something really taking place, and at the knowledge that after all he knows bugger all, and is only just beginning …?

So, I want to thank you, my teachers, my friends – Donna and Tim, Augusto, Pete ... You are beautiful. You practice hope, it’s a thing you do with imagination, attention, and grace. And as Patti Smith once wrote, the air – this air - is filled with the moves of you. Our conversations will go on and on, I know.

In a moment I will invite you all to share a cup of tea and a home-baked Persighetti scone, and to talk, with Donna and Tim and with each other. But before that, some final words from the Goats, on the work of ending:

“There is much to do: the work of ending. At the moment we find it difficult to imagine work more rewarding than that. Isn’t it, after all, the work of our lives? ... We will try to live up to the words we have spoken to you today: to keep our promises, to be the people we said we were, to stage what we know in the stillest hour of the night to be true, to remind ourselves of the impossible, the historical, to choreograph a dance to repair the world, to say, “We have become human again””.

5.30 p.m., Thursday 25 September 2008, Dartington

(For further details on Donna and Tim's walk, see the 'walking to dartington' blog here).

say your goodbyes

When I was 5 or 6, I watched my dad performing the role of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. I thought he was brilliant. I lived richly. At the end of the play, after some sort of trial and some fine last words of which I have no memory beyond a kind of calm jaw-jutting defiance, my dad slowly dropped to his knees and placed his head on a block of wood; then a drum roll kicked in as a large man with a black hood raised an enormous axe … A still point in silence. Then, as the axe came down, sudden black out, a thud of metal on wood, and the sound of something rolling slowly across the stage … Oh no. My dad’s head had just been removed. That was the end of him.

I was distraught, outraged at the sudden horror and injustice of his demise. My mother tried to console me and shush me and wipe away my tears, but I wasn’t having any of it. Perversely, other people were turning round and smiling at me and my widowed mother. And my mother was laughing. It was very weird ... Minutes later, my dad reappeared for the curtain call, his head miraculously reconnected to his body. I was astonished, and gradually my sobbing gave way to relief and a wide-eyed incredulity. How did they do that? Later in the bar, I inspected my dad’s neck in great detail, but there was no trace of the axe’s passage. Honestly. You couldn’t even see the join. How did they do that?

‘In the realm of the naked eye nothing happens that does not have its beginning and its end. And yet nowhere can we find the place or the moment at which we can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is where it begins, or this is where it ends. For some of us, it has begun before the beginning, and for others of us it will go on happening after the end. Where to find it? Don’t look. Either it is here or it is not here. And whoever tries to find refuge in any one place, in any one moment, will never be where she thinks she is. In other words, say your goodbyes. It is never too late. It is always too late’ (Paul Auster, 'White Spaces', in Selected Poems, London: Faber & Faber, 1998, 83).

(Extract from 'how do you say goodbye? last songs': an invited presentation given at the symposium 'Goat Island: Lastness, raiding the archive, and pedagogical practices in performance', Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University, 2008:
© David Williams)

it's time

I start this blog with an ending, which is also a beginning.

Last night I watched Julien Temple's film about Joe Strummer, The Future is Unwritten. Near the end of the film, after we have been told about Joe's sudden death (a heart attack while 'reading the Observer'), Joe conveys the outline of a credo in a final emotional plea, with a voice that starts to crack. He says, with some heartfelt urgency: 'So now I'd like to say, people can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world. People are running around following their little tracks - I am one of them. But we've all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything. This is something that I'm beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. It's because they are being de-humanised. It's time to take the humanity back into the centre of the ring, and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain't going anywhere; they should have that across a big billboard in Times Square. Without people you're nothing. That's my spiel'.

I cried silently when I heard his voice, these words. I remembered meeting him on the train from London to Devon, in the buffet car. 'Are you Joe?' 'Who's asking?' His shyness when I told him how much his music had meant to me, how important it was. He smiled and looked a little wary. Then he shuffled off back to his seat, with his battered guitar, his hat and his cowboy boots. I remembered seeing the Clash play in Brixton: the energy, the attack, the joy of it. I remembered Nicky M playing me her early Clash records when I was at college; vinyl 45s that woke me up, shook me around. I remembered getting stoned and listening to London Calling and Sandinista over & over again, learning the words, the hooks and beats and yelps. Playing the drums on my knees.

I remembered. And all this through silent tears. For Joe. For waking me up again. For reminding me.

The future is unwritten ... It's time to take the humanity back into the centre of the ring, and follow that for a time.