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My top 10 so called “punk” albums, which I was listening too in the 1970s that have remained influential to this date.
1. Pink Flag – Wire
2. Entertainment! – Gang of Four
3. Rattus Norvegicus – The Stranglers
4. Fun House – The Stooges
5. The Clash
6. Never Mind the Bollocks – Sex Pistols
7. The Ramones
8. The Undertones
9. Germfree Adolescents – X-Ray Spex
10. Singles Going Steady – The Buzzcocks
Voting is now open for UK’s Best Park, as voted by YOU! 2017. Voting closes at 5pm on Friday 3rd November and the winner of UK’s Best Park 2017 will be announced at the Fields in Trust Awards at Lord’s Cricket Ground on Wednesday 29th November. Please vote for the Northern Slopes, Bristol in the Best Parks competition under the South West region.
The Northern Slopes, Bristol: This is beautiful open space in Knowle has a stunning view of Bristol, which is not usually seen. It is little-known to people who do not live in the area. There is increasingly less space in this area so Northern Slopes needs love and respect. Please vote using this website link: Northern Slopes Scroll down the webpage to find the Northern Slopes and press the button. It’s as simple as that. If you would like to find out more about the Slopes – then click here.
Somethings have explanations, some things take belief, while others just leave you pondering for a rational reason for them to exist. They capture a moment, like stars when they align. On this damp, chilly September morning in the corner of my kitchen, a corner where the plants do their best to thrive, of all these days, a blooming flower stretches out seeking the sky. It’s the last flower, my father planted before he died on the 3rd March 2017, which is exactly, to the day, 12 months after my mum had passed away. The significance of this solitary flower that blooms on this damp, chilly September morning is what causes the pause, as I make a breakfast tea and say happy birthday to my mum.
In a decade peppered with cultural and economic change, the 1970s certainly churned out a vast array of musical genres. While TV sitcoms reflected the mundane of life there was also documentaries that sought out injustice and the mysteries of the world, (John Pillinger, The World in Action, Whicker’s World). In this national psyche emerged the oddity of Jake Thackray’s Yorkshire baritones penetrating the fray of well tuned southern accents, which still dominated broadcasting. My first memory of Thackray was as a young child during a magazine TV programme called That’s Life, a machine gun etiquette of consumer protection, light entertainment, performing dogs, funny shaped vegetables sitting alongside hard-hitting investigations into wrong doing. Thackray was brought up in a working-class family and enjoyed the pleasures of pale ale, rugby and pipe-smoking. After moving to Lille in France, where he taught English, Thackray became an unlikely disciple of French artists like Georges Brassen and Jacques Brel.
A poet songwriter and solitary singer Thackray’s songs were pitted with humour, satire, and social observations of everyday life. A person who shied away from the limelight, referring to himself in the 1970s, “I turned into a performing dick” after his popularity propelled him to regular TV appearances Thackery withdrew to smaller venues and pubs where he felt a connection with his audience. Aspects of this work have dated, but his importance is often overlooked, and while some lyrics may not find favour, it can be sluggish to cast off artistically given his observations are so humorously ludicrous, and light years away from them misogynism we witness in today’s music scene. It would be like trying to sensor Tom and Jerry cartoons for modern video game violence.
In his later years, Thackray was beset by health and financial problems: he had become an alcoholic and was declared bankrupt in 2000. He died of heart failure 24th December 2002. To a young child, he was an oddity. He stood out because there was no reference point to place him but he remains to this day one of those artists who is captured in glimpsed childhood memories of my parents chuckling along to the double meaning of this lyrics.
The subject matter is and always will remain challenging. Homelessness: The Reality on the Ground is the type of issue that can generate fear and ignorance in equal proportions. Those who may have believed they were at little risk of the housing crisis are increasingly being sucked into the vortex of a perfect storm. Inaccessible market values, extreme rent levels, a lack of supply, the return of poor landlords and the paralysed inability of government has placed the fundamental human need of shelter into the hands of the speculators and spivs. As we discovered during the panel presentations and discussion (Downs Festival 2017) homelessness once considered the blight of those on the fringes of our society is now showing its ugly face amongst paid workers, especially the working young. There is a broken promise in any social contract between individual and state when homelessness rears its ugly head. The crisis we now face sits at the feet of those who have governed for the past 40 years and willingly encouraged the breakdown of decency towards humanity. Homelessness on the scale we witness has not happened by accident. It is a deliberate policy designed and orchestrated by the government.
So what is to be done as we sit in self-imposed ignorant bliss, knowing the causes, but claiming to be ‘powerless’ to do anything? Being powerless can, of course, be a convenient excuse and one that in its worst condition seeks self-reflected pity on oneself. The cold reality is that some people vote to be powerless. The first step in demanding change is the realisation that you are not powerless and by actually doing something, no matter how little, you become a small, but integral part of a social movement and movements change things on a big scale. The words ‘political struggle’ in one of the wealthiest economies, had until recently, become an almost embarrassing term to use given the abundance of riches at our disposal. It is clearly back on the agenda for a younger generation who are quite rightly increasingly restless and angry at the inheritance being offered to them by a tired and self-imposed ‘powerless’ older generation. While government (nationally and locally) is blindfolded in a downward spiral of spin, apportion blaming and rebranding their diminishing resources as new. Informal networks of self-motivated people armed with nothing more than compassion and love are seeking solutions. On one hand, a growing number of people are not prepared to ‘walk on by’ and ignore the injustice staring them in the face and on the other hand young people are increasingly motivated to get involved in direct-action and structured politics. It’s too early to say if this is a fad and it may suffer the relentlessly grind wheels that have often warm many a good person down, but positive seeds have been sown.
It was an absolute honour to have co-hosted the panel on Homelessness at the Information Stage, Bristol Downs Festival with friend and film director Anthony Tombling. The panel brought together people and groups who did not fall for the self-indulgent notion of ‘powerlessness’ and did the right thing. They got engaged and became part of the solution rather than the problem. Ordinary people from a variety of backgrounds, faiths, genders and cultures. My deepest respect goes out to Bristol Reconnect, Brixton Soup Kitchen, Homeless Heroes (Birmingham) Feed the Homeless, St. Mungo’s, Help Bristol’s Homeless who are doing some amazing work often off the radar. If you would like to find out more about these groups and get engaged with what they are doing then just click here.
There will always be armchair cynics in life who can’t, don’t want to be won over, or are only comfortable with the status quo. My advice is equally simple. Following the words from one generation to another…. “come, councillors, MPs and Government please heed the call don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall……come mothers and fathers throughout the land and don’t criticise what you can’t understand your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly agin’. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand.”
If you are heading to The Downs Festival on 2nd September 2017 myself and good friend film director Anthony Tombling will be hosting a panel discussion on homelessness in the UK. The purpose of the panel discussion is to encourage a greater understanding of community-led action aimed at tackling the stigma and negative attitudes towards those who find themselves homeless in the UK. The panel will explore the impact of national and local government policies by asking if they are helping or hindering a sustainable solution and what are the alternatives. We will be hearing about the reality on the ground from some truly inspirational people.
Panelists include representatives from The Brixton Soup Kitchen, St. Mungo’s, Homeless Heroes – Birmingham, Feed The Homeless – Bristol, Bristol ReConnect and Jasper Thompson from Help Bristol’s Homeless. The panel will be giving us their take on the current situation on the ground. Do we have a crisis? and if we do, what can we do about it? So if you are around please come along, say hello, Join the discussion, offer support and hear from the people working at the sharp end trying to help those most vulnerable in our communities. The panel is due to start at 3:15pm. For more information on the community groups involved click here: I AM HUNGER
Over the past few months, I have been helping three small volunteer-led community groups in Bristol working on issues as diverse as enhancing public spaces, homelessness and inner city youth services. All three groups have little or no funding, which is not the immediate problem. They are all asking me to assist them with the development of a plan that will help guide their work into the future within the resources they currently hold, which I am happy to do. The back drop is they are all being increasingly asked to do more as local government does less. I am setting the rights and wrongs of this aside for the moment.
Here is the snag. Most if not all the examples of plans are seriously over the top and seem to have been designed by megalomaniacs, or consultants who have tried to be far far too smart (and expensive). I guess what I am talking about here is something that is practical, proportionate and designed around the needs of the groups. I have started to develop some ideas with the groups but was wondering if anybody out there knew of some good practice examples? I would like to produce something that is self-administrative, open source and free for any small ‘grass roots’ volunteer group with little or no funding wanting to develop a practical plan.
8 pm, the alarm in my head, “make that call.” The football, sport, TV, news, and weather, how are you feeling today? Idol chatter consumes us both. Speak to me, but there are no answers now. Just the silence of echoes searching for a home.
The distance between now and then is measured in memories like the steps of Whitby Abbey 199 up, 199 down. The miss you words are the easiest to find and father’s day is but a pole in these shifting sands. All my life I wanted you to stay, that is selfish, I know.
Standing on the garden decks, looking over the city lights, the very place we spoke about life, the joys of incidental happenings. The fragments of our personal jigsaw puzzle, which build our picture called life. The relationships, a love lost, a love found, passions, lessons learned and the regrets that can consume if not addressed while taking a breath. So I try to reflect before letting harsh words make a sound, I seek to understand, to leave doors open and not burn bridges as I did when growing from being your child. Things are still out of focus Dad, I guess they will be for a while, but sadness is set aside when I speak to your daughter, watch your grandchildren, their offspring building their own jigsaw puzzle where your smile can be found.
5 am, and God only knows why I’m laid here flicking through social media updates, snapshots of opinions, life, and wisdom projected through an assortment of embarrassing photographs of politicians, historical figures, celebrities, cats, dogs or cartoon characters. You think you know somebody until that awkward post pops up, a regurgitation from a reactionary nutter who has managed to hijack sweet moderation by sensationalising, simplifying complex tragedies and to invade the common sense I associated with the person in question. It’s nothing more than fast food convenience politics, shipped in and shipped out messages tailored to primal emotions. Before digestion of one message concerning welfare scroungers…..bing….another appears about jolly foreigners, the terrorist next door; stop our culture from being diluted. How did that person, I thought I knew, end up re-posting this nonsense?
In truth, I guess there is no simple answer, disempowerment, laziness to think, willingness to participate, misguided. I’m not sure; maybe these rent-a-slogans are desperate measures to scramble together a meaning, a notion of pride, loyalty or even identity in a world where borders are falling in a virtual world to access cheap food and goods, but increasingly pursued in a physical sense. Seeking protection like a boxer caught against the ropes, awaiting the knockout punch. The best, I feel, you can do on Election Day is remember your roots, the struggles of your parents to give you a better life. That one day you will be that older person reliant on care and support and if your family fail to step up, who will? It’s also about your integrity, values, and intelligence. A whole host of pound shop economists will tell you there is no alternative because, well you’ve guessed it, ultimately the prospect of change may disturb their status, wealth or power. Protection of the status quo is their priority, albeit they will tolerate a few crumbs to offset and polish over the harder edges. No matter how we may seek it, there is never any easy way to deal with complex problems. Compassion may not seem in fashion, but without it, we turn inwards, into a spiral of darkness, blaming those less fortunate.
Whatever the outcome of the Election in the UK I take heart that more young people seem to be increasingly engaged, given I trust their judgment far more than my generation and it genuinely feels that a generational change is starting to take place. In the meantime, my only hope is that my generation does not cause irrevocable damage to our eco-system and social welfare infrastructure. My history, values, and integrity lead to the Labour Party, but I cannot help but reflect that on days like these we are all seeking strong and stable leadership, which is for the many, not the few and to change Britains future for the good.
Irregular Frequencies 