A Day in Switzerland

I have come to a conference in Lausanne to present a paper- it would have been so nice to have spent longer here, but I thought that I would be paying for it myself (the University took a long time to approve funding and consented just before Christmas), so I'm doing it on a nano-budget.
I have seen things from the train (regrettably, not a double-decker, although they had those in Geneva).
It looks like a giant version of Northumberland.
There are huge pom-poms of mistletoe growing in lots of the trees.
There are chicken-yards next to robot factories.
The water in the streams and rivers is a beautiful shade of turquoise.
I have learned...
Swiss people are kind and considerate (a man leaned over to a stranger on the train and offered to lend her his iPhone battery charger when her iPod appeared to have run out of power).
Swiss Youth Hostels are like British hotels.
Quite a lot of French can come out of my mouth if I don't think too hard about it.
I can understand 25% of a French academic paper just with my school French, and because a lot of academic terms are very similar.
It's tiring working out what the remaining 75% means.

Last night I did an interview about my research for a Swiss radio station, so more about that when it its broadcast.

It's a bit cold and misty out there; the guy in the Youth Hostel recommended the beautiful views of the mountains if you walked to the University from the Youth Hostel, but nothing was visible today and a troupe of extremely hungry swans pursued me across the grass from the water's edge so I scooted up here pretty quickly. There's no snow in this part of Switzerland in spite of the avalanches in the Alps; its the same as January in London, minus the dirty drizzle and noise, although it's very much roads'n'rail.
Oh yes- there is some amazing graffiti here.

Countdown to presentation time....

Dick

Dick, who used to drum for The Piranhas in Brighton, has passed away. This is terribly sad because he was quite young and he was such a live-wire as a young man; everybody liked him. He was like everyone's kid brother.
He worked at The Malling Press in Lewes for a while as a printer and left, because the Piranhas started doing really well. I got the job after him, and we both had the experience of being shown the bottom drawer where the National Front letter head was.
'I ain't printing that!', declared Dick, which was brave because he must have only been about 17, in probably his first job.
He was a really good drummer, and when he joined the band they had the line-up that made them successful, partly because of his energy and good time-keeping (metre-wise; I have no idea if he was a teenage whippersnapper and showed up late for gigs and rehearsals).
Even his friends were nice. His best buddy worked for British Rail in Lewes and was always full of smiles if we bumped into each other. Big love to you, Dick xxx

Next Gig

Busy times- my next gig is Daylight Music at the Union Chapel, 12 noon till 2 p.m. with Judy Dyble, who sang with Fairport Convention, and the Perfect English Weather (that's The Popguns, acoustic).
An academic weekend for me this weekend though- my bag is stuffed with papers and my head is stuffed with thoughts. This is a short posting because I have a lot of travel to organise.
https://www.facebook.com/events/162706994339442/

Les

I bought a book of Punch cartoons from a charity shop but this one wasn't in it.
At art college we loved Les; I didn't realise he was a Daumier illustration. Still luv him.

France Gall, Blamed, Revisited

People are debating the late France Gall's claim that she didn't 'get' the innuendo behind Serge Gainsbourg's lyrics, and saying of course she did: that she wasn't naive.
It's much more subtle than that. What she didn't 'get' was the degree of manipulation behind getting a gamine female singer to sing lyrics that turned men on. Young women in the music industry have always been pressurised to sell sex to men, both through their appearance and through sexual sonic identities. Look at Annabella Lwin from Bow Wow Wow- fourteen years old and simulating sex sounds, told by Malcolm McLaren that she was making the 'sounds of falling off a tower'.
There is no choice; young women are on a production line in a fickle industry and if one woman won't 'do' it, then another one will. Despite her provenance as the daughter of a successful musician (and perhaps because of her providence as the daughter of a successful musician: did her father collude in this?), the young woman was duped into voicing the fantasies of a middle aged man.
Did I say 'dirty old git'? No, I wouldn't dare to. #WoodyAllen etc etc etc.....

Hannah Ryggen at The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

This is a really, really good exhibition that is well worth the trip to Oxford. The gallery is within walking distance of Oxford railway station; it is not an enormous exhibition, just two rooms, but it's well worth going.
The tapestries are huge, and full of humorous detail. Many of them are coloured using vegetable dyes and Ryggen was entirely self-taught as a weaver. She was a communist and both Hitler and Winston Churchill appear in her tapestries. She was a brave woman who stuck to her principles, even when it was dangerous. I loved the way she had woven her political activism into the work. The colours are vibrant and the composition is immaculate- all the more so because she worked freehand. They are full of character, but also have a sort of serenity about them that is really appealing. They look more primitive in photographs than they do when you're standing in front of them, partly because their size is quite extraordinary, but also because there is the impression of a lot of depth in them, which may be to do with the texture of the fabric. What an amazing woman.
I wish I'd taken more photographs especially of the one with the horse; there is no catalogue unfortunately. It's on till 18th February; these are very unusual artefacts for their time- she was an inspiring forerunner of today's craftivist movement. Go!
https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/hannah-ryggen/

Weekend Assortment

Everything is ready for the Working in Music conference in Lausanne on Thursday.
Everything apart from me that is, but I will be ready on Tuesday. Because of chaos in the house, nothing is where it should be. The morning was spent dismantling furniture; there are hundreds of Allen keys somewhere, but I could only find two and they were the wrong size, and I couldn't start work until the ironmonger's opened.
If there is a new year's resolution to be made, it is to put everything with all the other everythings; this works just fine, until the Offsprogs visit. There are three copies of the Toots and the Maytals CD (I think) because each of them took a copy off to college with them (I think) and brought them back when I'd replaced the copy that I thought I had, but didn't.
My nose is running because of the dust, and all that lifting and shifting was knackering.
There is more to do in a bit, and the washing machine is limping through its last wash before the replacement arrives tomorrow. I'm assuming that the new one will have an enormous manual and be impossible to programme at first, and in anticipation of that the old one is being forced to work for the last few cycles. It is very reluctant and is making a series of grunts and groans to express its martyrdom, but I'm a hardass Mum-type, resistant to emotional blackmail even from a machine. Every so often it stops and flashes all of its little lights at once, beseechingly, but it's no good.
It's no good.

It is also gig-booking time of year, and that's a bit like that game where you have a plastic square with random sliding letters, and you have to slide them around until you have made a word. It doesn't help that the list complied from what everyone sent last year went down with the ship before Christmas when the computer malfunctioned; however, last year was just so brilliant on that front that it has to be done again, and it will be.
Toodle pip!

Asbo Derek/Helen and the Horns, Brighton

This is a double-rescheduled gig! It will be great! Helen and the Horns don't play much any more.
Tickets: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/426899

Working in Music, Lausanne

After a 7.30 start, I have finished writing the paper on women producers for the conference next week.
Early morning news reports said that high winds in Switzerland derailed a train outside Lausanne, so I hope that's the drama over for this year.
I remember flying to Limerick about 5 years ago and landing in a hurricane-force wind. I couldn't work out why the pilot was twisting and wobbling until later, when the TV news reports at the hotel reported the freak weather conditions. If I'd known at the time I would have had hysterics.
To get away from the screen, I've been out in the rain to get a newspaper. Ring-a-ding ding! Such luxury. Next thing is to finish editing the article, but I think a bit of singing and songing ought to happen before that particular project.

Academical Thinking

Well, the problem is if you have to edit and adapt your own stuff.
I'm working on a paper for a conference next week that involves developing a paper that I presented a couple of years ago in Aalborg in Denmark, and also an article that I had submitted for one journal who didn't want it in its current form, and has now been accepted for another but has to be 1000 words shorter.
Over the hols I've read a couple of books that make a difference to both of them: Anne Karpf's book The Human Voice: the story of a remarkable talent, and Jennifer Fleeger's Mismatched Women: the siren's song through the machine. I got up at 7.30 this morning to start writing but ended up doing admin work before heading down to Gina's to do Art (oh how lovely that was!).
In the end I only wrote and edited for two hours, so I'll have to get up early again tomorrow and plunge into words again. It really matters to get these things right, and no amount of procrastination, and preferring writing songs to writing academic articles, will help.
Meanwhile we are trying to find a venue for Asbo Derek and Helen and the Horns to play at on Friday the 26th January in Brighton. Most of the people who read this blog seem to be Russian or French, according to the stats, so it's not much use asking you, is it?
Unless you simply want to send us good vibes across land and sea, which of course will be enormously appreciated by both bands.
😄

Hare

Written a 45 second song about hares. It's a bit squeaky but then so are hares.

From The Railway, Southend

Filmed by Rob Ellen, on his travels.

Westerns

Hooray for Westerns! John Wayne lives in Wayniverse, riding from film to film without so much as the blink of an eye. Pchhh! Pchhh! bullets; the whinnying of a panicking horse and the chaotic, asymmetric thumping of hooves on desert sand.
Thwack! The punch on the sweaty chin of the baddy.
You don't even need to watch. It all just happens anyway.
Hooray for Westerns!

A Popular Toy, Rebranded

If you are of a timid disposition, please look away now.
I was almost certain that I'd posted about this before but apparently not.
One of my friends bought me a plastic boy called The Farting Wee-boy at Deptford Market aeons ago. Even the packet was cool- there was a little speech bubble next to its nether regions that said 'Wee wee, boo boo'. When you pulled its little breeks down it squeaked, and if you'd filled up the water chamber, a stream of water simultaneously squirted out of a little hole in the front of its body.
It was dressed as a Just William- era schoolboy with a maroon plastic blazer, grey shorts and a maroon and grey peaked school cap. It had an innocent expression on its face- in fact, it was almost completely inexpressive. She told me at the time that the stall holder looked really embarrassed because he had nothing else on his stall except piles of boxes of Farting Wee-boys.
Eventually the boo-boo bit stopped working and I passed the little feller on, but I kept the packet because it was brilliant. Now she has been in touch because she has bought herself a Wee Wee Water Squirter and she is puzzled because there's no farting in the current model. Looking at the box, the boy now has a sinister and self-satisfied smile as a lurid stream emanates from his body. The actual toy itself no longer wears a school uniform, but instead has a casual yellow sweater and a yachting cap. The activation mechanism is a button on the base, rather than a pair of hard plastic shorts.
Oh, how times have changed.

About 2017

It's not always wise to look back, but it is good to identify a feeling that has come about through a sea-change in life. Last year was one of the most positive and happy years of my personal life, because I reconnected with the way that I felt when I first left home and went to Sunderland Art College to do a Foundation Course, where everything that had gripped me and controlled me as a child and a teenager just fell away. I was in an environment of misfits, for it seemed that everyone odd in the whole of the north-east of England had congregated there and started to blossom. It was exciting and liberating; we made our own community and although it was only temporary, it was thrilling.

It had felt like a slog sitting for hours and days trying to sort out gigs in January last year, but it was bloody worth it (I'm just about to do the same again). The tour was such an adventure. I had been fully prepared for all sorts of disasters and I suppose you could say that I'd set the bar really low; I just thought, 'What do I want to spend the year ahead doing?', to which the answer was, 'Playing my songs all over the place'.
The major thing that went wrong was buying a crappy car in an emergency. It continues to be a crappy car but I can't replace it at the moment because the washing machine has just broken, and I need clean clothes more than I need a car. The car was positively dangerous, and I almost got killed on the M6, but I had no passengers and I got to the gig and it was a good one, so what the heck.
The major thing that went right was realising that I have good, good, friends and the respect of my peers. I had thought that I needed a mediator for this, but it's been a complete revelation to realise that, to put it in a way that possibly only people with similar levels of low self-esteem might understand, I exist.
There has been time for writing songs and drawing, for learning new things (so many new things), and for thinking; all those hours travelling, all those troubles unravelling! I have so appreciated friendships and my two Offsprogs; I would name the angels, but I don't want any more wings torn off. One thing has risen to the surface after all the rubbish has been cleared away: that the greatest gift that you can give to an honest person is the truth, and beside that all other gifts are worthless.