It's a secular day and it will be even better tomorrow

Thursday music corner: Super Furry Animals are a Welsh indie-rock band formed in Cardiff in 1993, with Rhys Ifans as the original lead singer, who was soon replaced by Gruff Rhys when Ifans devoted his time to his acting career. The band have released nine albums between 1996 and 2009, with two certified gold albums and three certified silver. Their Rings Around the World album in 2001 was their most successful, reaching number 3 in the UK album charts. Super Furry Animals have released 26 singles, 18 of which reached the UK top 40; to date the most successful has been Northern Lites, which reached number 11 in 1999.

Inaugural Trams was the first single from the band's 2009 album Dark Days / Light Years. The spoken-word German phrases are delivered by then-Franz Ferdinand guitarist Nick McCarthy.

Super Furry Animals - Inaugural Trams (2009)  

See also:

Music: Super Furry Animals - Northern Lites (1999)

Music: Super Furry Animals & The Beatles - Peter Blake 2000 (sound collage, 2000) 

Music: Gruff Rhys - Loan Your Loneliness (2021)

As the crowds begin complaining how the Beaujolais is raining

Thursday music corner: Carmarthenshire-born John Cale has experimented with a wide range of musical styles over his long career, which was kick-started by his role as founding member of the enormously influential New York art-rock ensemble the Velvet Underground. He has released 23 solo albums, including collaborations with Terry Riley, Lou Reed, Brian Eno and Bob Neuwirth.

The euphoric, nonsensical baroque pop song Paris 1919 is the title track of Cale's third solo studio album, recorded in Los Angeles and released in February 1973. Cale has performed the entire album live with an orchestra, commencing in Cardiff in 2009.

John Cale - Paris 1919 (1973)  

See also:

Music: John Cale - The Man Who Couldn't Afford to Orgy (1974)

Music: John Cale - Crazy Egypt (Cale / Byrne, 1996)

Music: John Cale - I Wanna Be Around (2001)

Welsh Fargo

Former Goon Show legend Harry Secombe (1921-2001) wrote two novels in his career - Twice Brightly (1974) and Welsh Fargo (1981). I've not yet read the former, but the latter was a mainstay of my teenage reading. 

My paperback copy probably came via my grandmother because she lived in Rotorua at the time and the book was a remainder copy from the Rotorua Public Library (price 30 cents). Most likely she will have sent it my way due to the Goon Show pedigree of its author. As it happens, I didn't really know about the Goons at the time, apart from an odd visit to a primary school classmate's house where he played me his dad's record of The Ying Tong Song, which I found completely mystifying. 

I ended up reading Welsh Fargo so many times because it was a) short, b) funny, and c) my go-to insomnia read for my entire teenage years.

It was probably my first exposure to anything by a Goon, perhaps excluding Michael Bentine's Potty Time, and wouldn't really hear their material properly until many years later. But this sliver of Goon offshoot literature I certainly devoured, wholeheartedly. It also provided me my first exposure to Welshness, which was in relatively short supply in New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s: 

Now, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty three, there was a surplus of coal and the Depression bit as deeply into the lives of the people of Panteg as the drills which had carved up their valley. Old young men stricken with coal dust in their lungs walked slowly up the shabby streets, stopping for breath every few yards, whilst others lay coughing their lives away in front parlours on beds brought down from upstairs to save them the impossible climb, Mothers prepared meals they were ashamed to serve, pretending to their families that they had already eaten.

And yet there was love in abundance; a clinging together in adversity, and always humour - the sly Welsh humour - and, of course, there was the singing. In Ebenezer Chapel the walls shook with the sheer volume of sound produced by choir and congregation, and there was power in the plainsong at St. Peter's. (Welsh Fargo, p.8-9)

The nature of Welsh Fargo was admittedly not complex. It was aimed squarely at being a knockabout farce, in the style of a Hollywood or Ealing caper, with a wide and varied cast of Welsh oddballs set during the Depression. The main character was the much-put-upon, and rather down on his luck, bus-driver Dai Fargo, who ran the only bus service to the isolated, but thoroughly ungrateful, village of Panteg in the hills north of Swansea. Dai's nephew James Henry, a callow youth of twelve, was clearly a proxy for the author, who was roughly the same age in 1933. The village of Panteg is richly populated with a large cast of busy-bodies, gossips, and trenchant critics of public transport service disruptions, of which Dai's ancient and decrepit bus generally generated many.

With Dai's bus service struggling to make ends meet, the main engine of the plot is the one job he has that attracts any reliable money, which is transporting the wages of the nearby colliery once a fortnight. As Welsh Fargo is by design a madcap caper novel, the two-and-a-half thousand pounds are both destined to be the subject of a heist attempt, that heist attempt will be perpetrated by a singularly incompetent gang of Welsh criminals, and the entire process will be finely-tuned to result in a big finale of a nature as ludicrous as is singularly possible. A finale that would be virtually impossible to film on a UK film studio budget of the 1980s, sadly - HandMade Films' Beatles money included.

The large cast is given plenty of double-crossing, vindictive back-biting, rampant moral hypocrisy, general carping, and a multitude of varieties of incompetence to deal with. In the spirit of 'everything including the kitchen sink' there's a would-be Chicago gangster, a philandering manager, a punch-drunk boxer, an actual Welsh Zulu, and a sympathetically-written character that in contemporary 1930s terminology was known as a 'nancy-boy' and at the time the book was published was referred to as a transvestite. It's not a work of gifted literary prowess, but it's big-hearted, has a nostalgic affection for the Wales of its author's childhood, and it's genuinely entertaining writing in the way comedy professionals with decades of experience are able to offer.     

See also:
Wales: Dylan Thomas' Laugharne, 4 February 2022
Wales: The Bug Club, 23 September 2021
Wales: Aberystwyth, 12 September 2008

Dylan Thomas' Laugharne

Thomas's final home at Laugharne - roughly midway between Llanelli and Pembroke - isn't on a main road from anywhere to anywhere. But Thomas became fascinated by it on his first visit (by ferry, across the Taf estuary), at the age of nineteen; he lived there intermittently for much of his adult life and settled there in 1949. Used to the Swansea lilt, he was struck by the fact that, for complicated historical reasons, the residents of this tiny seaside settlement spoke with English accents; he described it as 'the strangest town in Wales' and 'a timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town'. Although New Quay in Ceredigion, where Thomas also lived for a short while, stakes a claim to be the setting for his great 'play for voices' Under Milk Wood, Laugharne undoubtedly provided the inspiration for many of its characters. Brown's Hotel, where Thomas used to drink, has been refurbished as a boutique hotel, but there's still a certain thrill to be got from rubbing shoulders with locals who might have been citizens of Llareggub.

Perched somewhat precariously above the waterside, the boathouse where Thomas lived is now a museum dedicated to his memory. Entering it feels like stepping back in time to the 1950s. There's a tiled fireplace with china firedogs and an old-fashioned mantel clock above it, a dropleaf table, a table lamp with fringed lampshade - all the sorts of things your grandparents had in their living room. Except that your grandparents probably didn't have a recording of Dylan Thomas reading his own works playing in the background, nor a bust of him that used to be owned by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (two other former visitors to Brown's Hotel). The house is frankly a little shabby, but then it's probably meant to be. Thomas, for all his success, never had money to throw around. Just up the hill, the 'writing shed' - the converted garage where he did most of his work - has an air of studied disarray. A jacket hangs over the back of the chair, the desk is strewn with papers, the wastepaper bin is two-thirds full. The poet, dissatisfied with what he is trying to write, has clearly just thrown down his pen in frustration and gone to the pub. But the view! Stare out the window or, better still, head back to the boathouse, have tea on the terrace and gaze out to sea and you'll see why any artist would have sold his soul to live here.

- Caroline Taggart, The Book Lover's Bucket List: A Tour of Great British Literature, London, 2021, p.188-9.

See also:

Wales: Under Milk Wood, 1954 BBC Radio production

Wales: You're just a bubble-blowing boy in trouble, 23 September 2021

Wales: Aberystwyth, 12 September 2008

You're just a bubble-blowing boy in trouble and annoyed with me

Thursday music corner: Young garage rockers from South Wales, The Bug Club are a three-piece who cite amongst their influences the sounds of Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman and Mike Bloomfield. The Fixer is sub-150-seconds chock-full of Supergrass-channeling glam-punk energy, and was released on 19 August. It's taken from the band’s upcoming mini-album, Pure Particles, due out in November.

The Bug Club – The Fixer (2021)

On the surprise UK general election result

So the results are in and a surprise small Conservative majority appears to be the situation. An inquiry is being planned into why the result was so different to the pre-election opinion polls, and why no-one saw it coming. Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage have all stepped down as leaders of their respective parties. Russell Brand has admitted that maybe he didn't have all or indeed any of the answers. Here's a few thoughts on the implications of the result.

This was a proportional representation election carried out under a first past the post system. Or to put it another way, the electorate is hugely fragmented and every party is either over-represented or under-represented substantially. This means, as many people have pointed out, that the electoral system that Westminster has clung to is not fit for purpose. Held up by its supporters in the two main parties (who naturally have the most glaring vested interest in advancing their own party's cause) as providing clear majorities for the largest party, I'd argue that despite yesterday's result first past the post has now handed the UK two elections in a row without a workable long-term majority.

The argument is therefore even clearer than before in favour of meaningful electoral reform in the UK to bring in a system of proportional representation. (Even Nigel Farage says so). The risible 2011 referendum on Alternative Vote was never going to deliver proper reform, which is exactly why the Conservatives forced it on their hapless Liberal Democrat coalition partners. Here's what the 2015 election result would have looked like under PR, and what's striking from these projections is that not just some but all of the main parties are receiving representation that is substantially out of whack. This is grossly unfair to voters. Both the Conservatives and Labour are gifted more seats than their support merits, although this effect is far more pronounced for the Conservatives, who received 36.9 percent of the vote but garnered 50.9 percent of the seats in the Commons. The SNP are also substantially over-represented due to their sweeping of the Scottish electorates. Both UKIP and the Greens return only one member, which means that their combined voices of five million British voters are represented by a mere two MPs. It's like the rotten boroughs of old.

The Conservatives, against all predictions, gained seats in 2015 - but this doesn't mean they have a sweeping mandate for continued reform. Their share of the vote increased by half a point over their 2010 result to a total of 36.9 percent - but that is a long way from 50 percent. The hard right will want to use the next parliamentary term to press on with hard-line policies in case they are not returned to office in 2020 (assuming the Conservatives retain the support of a majority of the House for that long). But given the thinness of Conservative support across the UK it would be foolish to adopt a hard-right strategy.

In one sense, Rupert Murdoch was right. Despite being a cartoonishly evil meddling tycoon puppet-master of the far right, Murdoch's tweet that the nearly four million voters who cast their ballots for the anti-Europe, anti-immigration, thinly-veiled racism of UKIP need to be heeded is, sadly, correct. The party has a mere one MP (Douglas Carswell in Clacton) but if the UKIP vote is combined with that of the Conservatives that is an enormous right-of-centre voting bloc. (Some left-of-centre voters do cast their votes for Farage's UKIIP, however). Over the next few years the UK may see a situation akin to the 1993-96 term in New Zealand before the first MMP election, during which members elected under first past the post decided to jump ship to parties that were closer to their own reactionary political views. The pressure will be immense for far-right Conservative backbenchers to defect to UKIP and soak up the love from those four million largely unrepresented voters. The Conservative majority may not last.

With this in mind, David Cameron should consider the New Zealand approach to coalition-building and provide himself a little security by - against all predictions - retaining the coalition with the Lib Dems. The Conservatives might not need those eight extra votes now, but at some point in the next few years they are likely to. And gifting a minor portfolio to the Lib Dems (or, with a spot of wishful thinking, a referendum on proper proportional representation) would be an ideal insurance policy, allowing the public opposition to the Conservative government to be diluted into a broader anti-Coalition sentiment.

Labour, unsurprisingly, elected the wrong leader - and perhaps even the wrong Miliband. The party seems to have been in denial about what was needed to win a popular vote. The polls suggesting a dead heat between the Conservatives and Labour may not have been 'wrong'; as in New Zealand in 1993, there may have been a concerted shift in public opinion right at the last minute, as voters questioned whether they felt Ed Miliband could actually pull off the job of being Prime Minister. And the Crosby Textor approach of polling for weak spots (i.e. the supposed dangers of a Labour-SNP coalition) and then relentlessly targeting them seems to have worked a treat in the electorate battles that mattered.

The SNP now have an African National Congress-like vicehold grip on the Scottish seats at Westminster. The question remains is how it will respond to the challenge of almost unfettered authority for the voices of Scottish voters in a Westminster system dominated by an English Conservative party government. By 2020 we may well be asking: will David Cameron be the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?

In a related problem, a new colonialism is operating in the UK. There is only one Scottish Conservative MP in the government caucus - one MP speaking for 5.3 million Scots. Also, the UK is now governed by a party with huge ties to provincial England but almost none to inner-city Britain, where some of the biggest problems the nation faces are playing out.

After all that drama, don't worry if the election result gets you down: the Guardian has concocted a wonderfully desperate list of nine things to be cheerful about, including the fact that Nigel Farage didn't manage to win Thanet South (and was photographed next to delighted comedian Al Murray when the result was announced), and the silver lining that the utter plonker George Galloway isn't an MP anymore.

Aberystwyth

There’s a Melbourne group I’m keen on, My Friend The Chocolate Cake, who released an excellent album of orchestral pop music called Brood in 1994. One of the more obscure tracks on that album is the moody song ‘Aberystwyth’, which has the feel of a ballad written by an Australian grandson for his Welsh emigrant grandparents. I was also familiar with the entry in Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's book 'The Meaning of Liff', a dictionary of borrowed placenames, which defined Aberystwyth as 'a nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for'.

Several years later in 1998 I visited the town itself briefly while touring Wales, but didn’t stay long enough to get a feel for the place. But this time around, my pal Lauren from Wellington happens to be doing her PhD at the University of Wales in the town, so it was the perfect opportunity for a quick weekend visit to see a little more of Aberystwyth’s isolated charms.

Yes, isolated. Despite its location in the middle of the sweeping expanse of Cardigan Bay, Aberystwyth (‘Aber’ for short) is just about as isolated as you can get in Britain without heading up to the Highlands of Scotland. Not only is it remote from London – it took me four and a half hours to get there by train, and considerably more getting back – but due to the undulations of the valleys and the fragmented history of Welsh railways, it’s also rather remote from both North and South Wales, particularly if you’re relying on public transport.

Upon arrival Lauren took me on a guided tour of town, along the waterfront promenade and through its side streets. We met up with some of her University friends to see The Dark Knight (which I’ve written about here), and paid a quick visit to a pub afterwards.

The next day after a morning stroll through the remains of the old castle we took advantage of the clear (if not balmy) weather to do a bit of walking with Lauren’s pal Tim. The hills surrounding Aber reminded me of the New Zealand countryside – grass that’s greener-than-green, undulating pastures, forest reserves with soaring pines, and sheep aplenty. Welsh sheep are usually allowed to retain their tails, which makes them odd to the eyes of Antipodeans used to sheep without tails (‘moutons sans queues’ – sounds like a menu item in a posh restaurant).




We walked down into a nearby valley and emerged in Clarach Bay, a pretty little stony beach with rival holiday camps sitting glaring at each other across a brook running into the sea. We hiked back around the cliff path to Constitution Hill with fine views overlooking Aber, and then returned down the steep path to the Aber waterfront, where a large collection of getting-on-a-bit line-dancers were shuffling about in front of the bandstand.






That evening we enjoyed some quality fish & chips from a shop near the station and pitched into a group for The Scholars’ pub quiz (which is at a pub called The Scholars, not a pub quiz solely for academics). It was fun, but let’s just say we didn’t set the world on fire! In fact, the most interesting piece of information I learned in Aber didn't arise in the pub quiz - it turns out that the new mayor of Aber, Sue Jones-Davies, is setting out to overturn the town's 30-year-old ban on screening Monty Python's The Life of Brian. And Jones-Davies is right to make overturning the ban a high priority. Not only is it a great film, but she also appeared in it in a famous performance as Judith Iscariot.

The next morning there was time to wander around the fishing port and to walk southwards up nearby Pendinas hill overlooking the town. An Iron Age fort used to occupy the summit of the hill; nowadays it’s only the home of a lonely 19th-century monument to the Duke of Wellington. Rumour has it that the long-running affair of erecting a memorial was meant to be capped off by placing a statue of the imperious general atop the column, but that this plan was aborted when his later premiership tarnished his reputation amongst the locals. Perhaps the extreme winds at the summit may have had something to do with it too – it was hard to stand up at times.



After a tasty café lunch it was time for me to take the train back to London. Well, the train to Birmingham, where I could change to the train for Reading, where I could change to the train for London, if you want to be pedantic. See what I meant about the isolation? It had been a pleasant visit and a great opportunity to both catch up with Lauren and enjoy some of the splendid Welsh countryside. Plus all that fresh sea air came free of charge!

The Meaning of Liff: Probably illegal (but still funny) transcript
News: New role for Python star - lifting ban on Life of Brian
More photos: Facebook