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To quote the great Lindsay Anderson “Onwards!”

(Holy F**k on The John Peel Stage)

Where better to hide from national ignominy? If England’s football prowess has been – to put it politely – uneven over the decades, there are two cultural forms in which we lead the world: legend and pop music. Happily, they converge in Glastonbury. Here, the talk is less of scorelines than of the festival’s 40th anniversary. Even in early middle age, it shows no sign of slowing down, thanks to the prodigious energy of Michael Eavis – surely one of the greatest living Englishmen and a shoo-in for a knighthood if the Coalition means what it says about encouraging creative entrepeneurship.

At the John Peel stage, I saw Holy F**k and the Gang of Four, and, as the bad news from South Africa grew worse, took heart in the seemingly limitles capacity of these islands to produce epic pop. In between, I managed to catch some of Ray Davies and now I am waiting at the Other Stage for the mighty LCD Soundsystem.

After which I shall scurry as fast as my high-tops can carry me to the Pyramid Stage to hear Stevie Wonder play out this glorious festival: a defiant little republic of canvas, face paint and extraordinary shorts that will leave little trace in a few days’ time – other than a hundred thousand memories and the certainty that, like the mythic King who may lie buried within walking distance from here, it will all rise again.

(The Other Stage between bands)

(LCD Soundsystem on The Other Stage)

Radiohead at Glastonbury in 2003- With their best ever live version of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. Thom’s beautiful emotional voice is so wonderful on this track. And When Jonny and Ed’s guitars come in, well, its as good as it gets.

I hope everyone going to Glastonbury this weekend has a brilliant and safe time. I Just wish I was going too!

‘Field Grey’ written by best selling and prize winning author Phillip Kerr will be published by Quercus in October 2010. It will be the seventh in a series of modern historical novels featuring Kerr’s very novel creation of a German detective. Bernie Gunther is tenacious, and uncompromising, smart but cynical and insubordinate.

These stories chronicle Bernie Gunther’s chequered police career as a homicide cop in Berlin’s Kriminal Polizei (KRIPO) in the early 1930’s and then, as a Private Investigator, his often hair raising career throughout the late 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s. They are an engaging and compelling blend of historical characters and events skillfully woven together with Kerr’s fictional characters and ingenious interlinked plots. They are, in fact, anything but grey. Kerr’s meticulous, one might say almost German, research will place you on the streets of a 1930s Berlin in a state of political and moral decay with its gangsters, political and criminal, murders, sleaze and disease. Through Bernie Gunther you experience the full menace and brutality of the rise of the Nazis, the final collapse of the Weimar republic, establishment of the Third Reich, and the corruption surrounding the Olympic Games of 1936. You will tread very carefully through the streets of a destroyed and divided post war Berlin before moving on to Munich, Vienna, Buenos Aires and Cuba.

A veteran of WW1, the last thing Bernie wants is to experience the horrors of another one. He hates the Communists and the Nazis in equal measures. When his boss,Police Commissioner Arthur Nebe joined the National Socialist Party on July 1st, 1931 the process of Nazification of the KRIPO began and it continued until in July 1936, the KRIPO was eventually merged with the Gestapo forming the Sicherheitspolizei (SIPO) under the command of Reinhard Heydrich. Refusing to join the Nazi party was guaranteed to get you chucked out of the department if not murdered. As Bernie, cynically, observed to a colleague at the time, “How can we be expected to solve murders occurring on a daily basis when most of them are actually committed by the police?” He becomes a hotel detective at the Adlon and then a Private Investigator specialising in missing persons – plenty of missing persons – especially Jewish ones.

As a P.I. Bernie has a perilous relationship with the Nazis who often need a real policeman to solve real crimes or to obtain evidence against their rivals in the party. He survives the intrigues of Arthur Nebe, Heydrich, Göring and then the war. Afterwards, after being framed as a war criminal, come the dangerous, sometimes murderous, attentions of the Americans, the Russians, the Jewish death squads, the Perons, Baptista, Meyer Lansky and even Castro! For Bernie Gunther survival doesn’t get any easier!

Now that ‘Jack Bauer’ is taking a long rest after his exertions in 24 Day 8 I think that some enterprising film company should approach Philip Kerr and Kiefer Sutherland to discuss filming these high tension thrillers. Kiefer has the physical attributes and is just the right age to be able to play both the younger and the older Bernie. Kiefer has also played a German before. He was Dr Schreber in the Sci-Fi thriller’ Dark City’, Alex Proyas, 1998, – and, hopefully, he has perfected his limp by now!

Here’s Philip Kerr talking about Bernie:

The Germans are fascinated why Phillip Kerr created Bernie Gunther.
Here is his interview with Deutsche Welle (the German equivalent of the BBC World Service) where he explains why he did it.

Philip Kerr’s previously published Bernie Gunther novels are:

Berlin Noir:

( ‘March Violets’
( ‘The Pale Criminal’
( ‘A German Requiem’

‘The One From The Other‘
‘A Quiet Flame‘
‘If The Dead Rise Not’

You have time to read ALL these before ‘Field Grey’ is published – so get on with it!

I live with a lapsed Woody Allen fan (it was the tennis film set in England that did it – ‘rubbish’, apparently, though that’s just a summary).

She noted today that the advert for his latest film (below) – ‘Whatever Works‘ – is a cunning piece of marketing. As you can see, it features the great Larry David doing a trademark ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm‘ shrug of incredulity with the stars above and the production credits below, the latter almost unreadably small (even on the poster).

Now, the title is written in the same font in which the titles of Woody Allen films are almost always written (EF Windsor, again, apparently); this means his still-loyal aficionados will know it’s by him and make a mental note to see it.

But this is the only clue – and an obscure one – to the film’s Allen origins for the casual browser; his name only appears at the far right of the unreadably small production credits. So, people like me – a fan of ‘Curb‘ but unversed in the semiotics of film poster fonts – will think: ‘Great, a film with Larry David in it – if I could get a babysitter I might go to see that’. Rather than be put off by it being written and directed by someone who must have filmed nearly as many turkeys as he’s eaten at Thanksgiving, since the ‘Bullets Over Broadway‘ / ‘Mighty Aphrodite‘ period.

An elegant bit of segmented marketing, if a bit humbling for Woody. But whatever works, eh?

Last week my Twitter buddy, Spencer from Rough Trade, tweeted a link to an old Afrika Bambaataa mixtape he had found on some far-flung corner of the interweb. As a collector of mixtapes, and as lover of early hip-hop and electro, I downloaded it with great excitement, and knew at once that Spencer had stumbled across something very special.

In the winter of 1983, Afrika Bambaataa and his Soul Sonic Force walked into a studio in NYC, spun up the Wheels of Steel and warmed up their mikes to record a live mix for Alan Bangs’s show on British Forces radio in Germany. What they played over the airwaves, and committed to tape, that day was something remarkable and rather wonderful and deserves a prominent place in hip hop history.

In simpler and more innocent times, before the tyranny of the genre police and regimented BPM, Afrika Bambaataa created a loose and free- ranging mix, joyfully crossing musical borders with no thought apart from the rightness of each track and its perfect place in the whole. It slides effortlessly between rap (‘hip hop’ hadn’t even been invented), electro, go-go, funk, reggae/dancehall and soul. With characteristic skill and bravado, Bambaataa even manages to drop a Don Henley track right into the middle of the mix.  (Not something I heard matched until Spank Rock managed a similar feat with Yes’s ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ on their seminal Fabriclive’ mix 25 years later)

The mix contains some huge dance floor-fillers – such as Man Parrish’s early electro gem ‘Six Simple Synthesizers’; the DeBarge Family’s gorgeous Soul ballad ‘All this love’; Nicodemus’s playful classic ‘Boneman Connection’; Malcolm McLaren’s genre- defining ‘Buffalo Gals’; Trouble Funk’s go-go anthem ‘Drop the Bomb’ – and finishes with Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘If You Want me to Stay’. (To which the only sane response is ‘YES PLEASE!’) All of this is presented with the Soulsonic Force freestylin’ over the top just enough to bring the mix to life but not overpower it.

But, as with any great mixtape, it’s not one track that stands out but rather the whole that makes it so special. To quote Thom Yorke, “Everything in it’s right place“– and that applies not just to the tracks, but also to the mix’s place in time: just as East Coast hip hop was poised to take over the world.

Tracklist:
Trouble Funk – ‘Trouble Funk Express’
Fab 5 Freddy ft. B-Side – ‘Change the Beat’
Phase 2 – ‘The Roxy’
Don Henley – ‘Dirty Laundry’
D-Train – ‘D-Train’
Planet Patrol – ‘Play At Your Own Risk’
Soul Sonic Force – ‘Planet Rock’
Bar-Kays – ‘Do It’
Instant Funk – ‘No Stoppin’ That Rockin”
Man Parrish – ‘Six Simple Synthesizers’
Soul Sonic Force – ‘Looking for the Perfect Beat’
Mr. Biggs & IKC (maybe Keith from Funky Four) – ‘Rap Attack’
Falco – Der Kommissar’
DeBarge Family – ‘All This Love’
Nicodemus – ‘Boneman connection’
Michigan & Smiley – ‘Diseases’
unknown
Malcolm McLaren & World Supreme Team – ‘Buffalo Gals’
Trouble Funk – ‘Drop the Bomb’
Parliament – ‘Flashlight’
unknown
Smurf That Body – unknown
unknown
Sly and the Family Stone – ‘If You Want Me to Stay’

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Afrika Bambaataa Mixtape 1983 Vol 1

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Afrika Bambaataa Mixtape 1983 Vol 2

You can download the mix here

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Big Audio Dynamite : Sightsee M.C.!
Mick Jones, Uncle Joe and Don Letts, lay down some Jamacian basslines, east coast hip hop beats and west LDN jangley guitars – Back in the eighties B.A.D pointed the way!

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L.S.K : The Takeover
Before Skinner came down from Birmingham and put on his LDN accent, there was L.S.K in Leeds doing their thing and getting totally ignored. But, ‘The Takeover’ is a thing of mockney beauty and could someone please tell me where the sample is from? It’s doing my head in!

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Groove Armada : Superstylin
Trip Hop pioneers, Groove Armada drop this huge choon from the summer of 2001, and it always went down a storm at their live sets at Lovebox and Glasto.

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Lily Allen : Smile
Okay, I admit it, I didn’t get Lily first time round. I thought she was just another celebrity dad, Bedales girl who couldn’t sing. How could I be so wrong? Lily is quickly gaining “national treasure” status, and ‘Smile’ gets to the heart of the human condition and all with a wonderfully summery and gentle reggae rhythm section.

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Diplo feat Santogold : Guns Of Brooklyn
Brazilian master remixer Diplo, teams up with Jamaican superstar Santogold to deliver a gorgeous dubby reworking of The Clash classic, taken from Diplo’s 2008 mixtape of the year ‘Top Ranking‘

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Killing Joke : Turn to Red
Gareth was right, what was I thinking leaving out this dark, dubby and dangerous track from ‘Joke’s’ first EP? I saw Killing Joke at the Forum in Kentish Town last year, and witnessed the rather surreal sight of Michael Meacher going for it in the mosh pit…..Brilliant band!

Five Really Quite Decent White Reggae Tunes

Think White Reggae and you come up with horror images of The Police or Boy George. But look hard enough and there are a handful that pull off the feat while maintaining their dignity intact. Of course most of it arises from that brief creative flowering between punk and reggae in the late 1970’s and the Rock Against Racism movement where both music styles stood shoulder to shoulder on the tour stages.

I don’t mean cover versions of reggae tunes, of which there have been several hugely successful and creative interpretations: Blondie’s “The Tide Is High” being perhaps the best exemplar of this. I mean original tunes written by white bands, but played reggae stylee. The list is far from exhaustive, so I’d love to know of any of your favourites.

“Love In Vain” by the Ruts

The saddest song I have ever heard, despite its uplifting, jaunty reggae backing. Malcolm Owen sings “Don’t want you X3 / in my arm no more” referring to his heroin addiction which eventually consumed him. A musical paean to a love he just couldn’t do without. The Ruts were very closely allied to Misty In Roots and their creative musical exchange was a fruitful one.

“Bankrobber” by The Clash

Since the Clash were steeped in it from their West London roots, they could do reggae with full integrity. Of all their original reggae-inspired tunes, this is the best of them and the lyrics also straddled both the realities of Jamaica and London. This is so authentic, I felt sure it had to be a cover version.

“Newtown” by The Slits

Definitely on the dubby end of reggae, The Slits also hailed from West London and seeped their avant garde soundscape in reggae rhythms. Singer Ari Up quit the band to relocate to Jamaica. “Newtown where everybody goes around sniffing televisena/Or taking footballina”. Fantastic.

“King Without A Crown” by Matisyahu

I am genuinely nonplussed by this, so reason enough to give it some props. Hassidic Jew does dancehall reggae and toasting. I don’t know if this some sort of oblique ‘proof’ of the Lion of Judah, the Twelve Tribes of Israel and Zion as common to both cultures. He seems to have been accepted and approved by the reggae world, Bill Laswell and Sly’n'Robbie being noted producers of his music. But god knows what the Jewish community make of him. It’s not a proselytising religion that seeks converts and there can’t be too many wavering Jews who might be swayed by Matisyahu’s call to faith? Baffling.

“I Understand” by Angelic Upstarts

Even Geordies got in on the act. Your basic Oi/pub rock punks with no reggae track record at all, suddenly pull out this black and white prisoners unite anthem and carry it off without making prats of themselves. “A candle without a flame/Destroy what you don’t understand” and this was years before Lady Diana…

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Fleetwood Mac : Everywhere (psychmagic re-edit)
How a re-edit should be done this draws you in with nothing more than an extended intro and atmospherics.

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Paul Simon : Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes (Todd Terje re-edit)
Looped percussion and delayed vocals all make Paul Simons original track of the ‘Gracelands’ album into a soothing tribal groove.

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Phil Collins : I’m Not Moving (Idjut Boys re-edit)
please give this one a chance, idjut boys turn a slighty controversial choice of song into a chugging piece of slo – mo house .

Mark Alexander has never lacked ambition. I’ve known this since I suggested back in the early ’90s he fund his remarkable painting talent by going to art school and he decided Oxford University’s Ruskin School fitted the bill. He didn’t regard having just the two ‘O’ Levels as an insuperable obstacle.

Of course, he got in – an achievement that was reported by the Daily Mirror as if they’d discovered a latter-day and rather happier Jude the Obscure (I think their headline was something like ‘Factory Worker Goes to Oxford’). It wasn’t a fluke: he got a First, even in his art history paper. And he’s not lacked ambition since, his work being exhibited in London, Basel and Berlin and appearing in some of the world’s most prestigious collections.

So it came as no surprise to find myself at a private view yesterday evening talking to him under the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral whilst admiring his two latest works – together The Red Mannheim (below and bottom), two non-identical twin, four metre-high paintings in a red monochrome palate. They each feature an image of the ruined Mannheim Altarpiece, a masterpiece of rococo carved from limewood in 1739-41 by Paul Egell, probably the outstanding German sculptor of his age. They do much more than hold their own in this impressive setting.

Mark’s work is difficult but perhaps not just in the sense often intended by contemporary art critics. That is, it’s difficult to make, often involving craft techniques and skills that are little different from those used by the Old Masters. His sometimes staggering technical virtuosity doesn’t, however, preclude his works from being as conceptual and philosophic, and sometimes as playful, as anything more obviously contemporary. A remarkably successful attempt to make a flat, painted surface resemble beaten Aztec gold comes to mind. His latest work is no exception

How the Mannheim Altarpiece came to be ruined is still partly mysterious. Mark used to visit it regularly in Berlin’s Bode Museum – he lived in the city for a number of years and a friend of his, a German master-carver who sometimes makes his frames, was helping to restore the base. His fascination eventually impelled him to consult the museum’s curators. In his words:

During the Second World War it was thought that for safekeeping a number of the most valuable German artworks should be stored in the Friedrichshain bunker. But towards the end of the war, in the confusion of the Soviet advance, there was a fire after which many of the works were lost. It may have been started by an air raid or perhaps by some Red Army troops. We also still don’t know for sure whether the items were destroyed in the flames or taken and never returned by the Russians.

In the case of the Altarpiece, originally there was much more to it: Christ on his cross, palm trees, attendant figures including the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene. These had been removed and stored separately – but were they consumed in the fire or were they spirited away by the Russians, not being sent back unlike the damaged backing and surround that’s all we have left on view in the Bode Museum?

The Mannheim Altarpiece, then, was a victim of the war, making its presence in St Paul’s this year, the anniversary of the 1940 Blitz, appropriate and even resonant. St Paul’s is a famous survivor of the conflict: “At all costs, St Paul’s must be saved,” believed Churchill. And saved it was, the image (below) immediately becoming an icon of national survival and defiance. The contrasting fate of the altarpiece makes for an interesting juxtaposition – even if it too survived, albeit as a fire-damaged fragment.

Mark’s work is displayed as part of St Paul’s Art Programme, which also features artists such as Anthony Gormley and Bill Viola. It ’seeks to explore the encounter between art and faith’. But The Red Mannheim’s relationship to religious faith – certainly the Christian faith – is surprisingly oblique, even subversive, particularly given the source of its image and its current home. Mark:

When I first saw the altarpiece in Berlin religion wasn’t on my mind. I was more interested in how it’s elaborate rococo had been mostly erased leaving some sort of sexual negative, really an image of pagan sexuality. In the Bode Museum in Berlin the altarpiece is hung so that it seems to float on the wall, an ever-ascending icon. It seemed to be an extremely primitive scene. Christ had gone, and taken his cross and mourners with him. The only figures left were the distraught cherubs in the bottom corner – representing Adam and Eve. So in a way all we’re left with is Original Sin, a black hole and this phallic negative.

The allegorical significance doesn’t need spelling out. So is the red an accentuation of this sort of latent sexuality?

I got the colour from the Pina Bausch production of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which I saw last year or the year before at Sadlers Wells. The dancers came on wearing some sort of absorbent, flimsy pink material. As they perspired the pink was saturated into red and it ended up sopping, clinging. It was incredibly sexual. I think I’ve managed to replicate that colour in the Red Mannheim. God had left the building.

And you can get a sense of what was left after ‘God had left the building’ from this review of the 2008 production:

On a stage covered in tons of peat, 16 women and 16 men carve their ritual sacrifice out of the weight and duty of Bausch’s frighteningly visceral choreography. It’s rare to see her dancers in unison – especially on such a scale – and the impact is absolutely thrilling.

The sexual overtones are threatening and driven by biological instinct: the men are predators, the women are prey and the fear of rape is their unspoken bond

Sex and violence. I wonder whether the St Paul’s authorities are entirely comfortable with this reading of the work? But it’s not all sex and violence. Mark again:

I also like the red as it corresponds to the story of the Mannheim – I wanted to represent this ambiguity in the red – sometimes it represents the flames, sometimes it might be the Red Army.

Probably more political than it seems at first blush, too.

Like a lot of Mark’s work The Red Mannheim resists being encapsulated in a few neat, summary phrases. It transcends the often trite conceptual gimmicks, the unamusing punch-lines, the hackneyed philosophy of too much contemporary art. It’s layered, referential, allusive and resonant. The critic Craig Raine, a long-time supporter of Mark’s, was at the private view, his presence emblematic of the almost literary qualities of Mark’s work, I wonder

But even if you knew nothing about The Red Mannheim’s history or its creation you would still surely be struck by both its power and its delicacy: the scarlets, crimsons and charcoals are redolent of heat, sexual, diabolic or restoratively warming to taste. One also senses the lick of flames, kindling, consuming and charring. The odd drip of black paint suggests it might be melting.

It evokes more than an ultimately destructive heat, however. Its vividness in parts is lively, literally so: it’s the bright blood of childbirth or the softer glow of embryonic flesh illuminated by the probing camera of a thousand TV documentaries. And it’s inevitable that a palate of reds and blacks, by turns vivid and sombre, will communicate diverse emotions: rage, desire, despair and even hope.

It’s hardly an entirely reassuring work. But it’s one with a subject that despite being literally charred and ruined is nevertheless infused with life and energy. It’s a remarkable transformation, as Mark suggests:

I think it looks more powerful now than when it was this rather cute rococo work. What’s happened to it has made it more powerful, more primitive. It’s interesting how history and time act on things – the altarpiece in this way is a palimpsest. Through the disasters of the 20th century we can still see the 18th century and, I think, a lot more than that.