SO

I started writing this over a year ago when I got hold of a 25th Anniversary release of Peter Gabriel’s 1980s album “So” because it was a record which I used to play all the time back then, but which I then never re-bought on CD. Suddenly, I found myself with an incredible desire to hear it again, but had nothing to play my old vinyl version on, and so I finally “double-dipped” and got myself a copy, one which, due to the anniversary nature of such things, had expanded to three discs, two of which were recordings of live performances of the concert tour which backed up the original release.

Then I got all embarrassed and thought that nobody would care about my fairly non-valid opinions on such an old record anyway, and went off and wrote other things for a while, as that year’s phase of rediscovering Peter Gabriel faded away.

However, I’m currently experiencing this year’s phase of rediscovering Peter Gabriel, having worked my way through “Scratch My Back” and “And I’ll Scratch Yours” back in May and then rediscovering “Peter Gabriel” (the third album) on CD earlier on this month, as well as exploring “Us” and “Real World Live” after I found them wallowing in the big box of CDs waiting to get back on those shelves I keep putting off building, and getting myself a copy of “Up” to see what the old boy had been up to about twelve years ago when I was not paying him all that much attention. So, with all that going on, and a copy of “Hit” still in transit, those thoughts seem to have become ever-so-slightly valid again.

Also… I suppose that, in a very tiny way, I’ve recently been revisiting the twenty-three year old version of me, which is the version of me that first bought this album back in the heady, scary days of the 1980s when I still had ambitions despite the evidence which was already accumulating that such ideas might be severely misplaced in my case.

It was a time when Peter Gabriel looked less like Gandalf, or indeed a flower wearing a leotard, and more like some bloke in a suit who might have looked a bit like me (if the lights were down very low and I was wearing a suit) because in those days he even had hair and everything…

After the success of his first four solo studio albums, “Peter Gabriel”, “Peter Gabriel”, “Peter Gabriel”, and, er, “Peter Gabriel”, Peter Gabriel released his latest album which, thanks to his record company, had to have a “proper” title, and so, because of a tendency Mr Gabriel had towards minimalism when it came to such matters, “So” was born…

Despite the fact that I haven’t bothered to check whether the track listing order matches the vinyl version on that well-buried shelf, the CD version of the album (because, kidz, I may be the last person in the universe who still prefers to get his music that way) opens with “Red Rain” which is a thumpingly good track that seems born out of the same cold war angst that most of us not then in the government were feeling at the time.

The all-conquering smash hit “Sledgehammer” is next, possibly the rudest ever song to get regular airplay on the American music stations, and, possibly, the track most associated with Peter Gabriel by the general public, not least because of the amount of airplay that impressive video got back in the day…

“Don’t Give Up”, the now well-known and slightly mournful duet with Kate Bush (whoever she is…) is next up and remains a haunting triumph of a song about unemployment , especially as it bursts out, as indeed it did, from the cynical “Me! Me!” years of the mid-1980s…

The rest of the album is possibly less familiar to many, once they’ve got the hit singles out of the way in this era of downloads, but I do like “That Voice Again” and “Mercy Street” despite their low key approach. There’s something about the latter song that always makes me feel like it’s about three o’clock in the morning and I’ve just arrives at a service station. It’s that slightly “dead” sound that it makes on the eardrums, if you can understand what I mean by that, because it’s not mean as a criticism.

Meanwhile, of course, those lyrics are sublime... “The tremble in the hips…”

This leads us into the powerhouse of “Big Time” a critique, I believe, on the whole of celebrity culture made a couple of decades before celebrity culture became the monster it currently is, and which I always like to persuade myself is really about Phil Collins, but it probably isn’t.

The album concludes with the lyrically beautiful mournful chants of “We Do What We’re Told” and the slightly surreal “This Is The Picture” which is a collaboration with Laurie Anderson whose “Big Science” album remains an avant-garde favourite from the slightly less mainstream end of my old vinyl collection. To be fair, that particular collection is so mainstream, that it might just be the one album sticking out like a sore thumb, but there you go.

The final track, “In Your Eyes”, has been described (not by me, but it has been said…) as the best song that Peter Gabriel has ever written, and it’s certainly a bit of a doozy, and appears to have become one of the concert-closing anthem favourites in recent years, if the two live recordings I now have of it are anything to go by. They sound pretty impressive, of course, but still aren’t ever going to be quite enough to persuade me to start attending live rock music events any time soon.

Concerts all just look so hot and sweaty, and full of all those wretched people… and I maintain that I’ll always prefer the studio sounds made in a controlled environment over the rough and ready concert versions, especially with all of those people joining in and bellowing away tunelessly and ruining the songs, and making it impossible to hear the person I would be paying to hear if I went (which I won’t…)

After all, you don’t get a fiddler bringing along their fiddle to join in at the Philharmonic, do you…?

Last week “New Blood” arrived, and has really blown me away with its combination of PG and an orchestra. The opening track, an astonishingly bombastic and theatrical version of “The Rhythm of the Heat” almost made me want to go back to the theatre and offer to direct something, just so that I could use it for the intro because it really seemed to be that impressive.
So, I felt that I simply had to order up “Hit” because, whilst it covers much old ground, there’s some other stuff in there that I might have missed, and my completist instinct is tingling again and that might just keep me away from getting all of those obscure soundtrack recordings…

For a while, anyway.

THE SLIDE

Another week, and another audiobook gets picked from the shelf and put into the CD player in the car to keep me entertained on my journeys to and from work.

Having decided that continual spending on new stuff is generally a bad idea, I have recently been "revisiting" some of the things which have been gathering dust since the first time I played them and, in certain cases, even longer than that.

Such it was with "The Slide" a seven-part "science-fiction serial for radio" written by Victor Pemberton and first broadcast on BBC Radio in 1965. I'd bought the audio CDs relatively cheaply in a sale a couple of years ago, but never successfully made it past episode two, so this time I was determined to stick with it and see how it all unfolded.

The difficulty of getting past part two was not, incidentally, the serial's fault. When I first got it, I was working full-time from home and, whilst I rarely found the need for audio stimulation, when I did, I quite often found that audiobooks didn't really work for me under such circumstances. I would start to concentrate upon some knotty little problem or other and, perhaps an hour later, I would realise that the CD had stopped and I'd barely heard a word. This doesn't help when it comes to comprehending a plot, so I used to just put music on instead, if the mood of loneliness was overwhelming me that day.

This, incidentally, is why "Test Match Special" was always such a Godsend for me, as it would burble away all day giving me a sense of companionship without me necessarily having to concentrate fully on every word.

Interestingly, audiobooks in the car I seem to be able to follow quite easily, which might explain something of significance about my driving...

Anyway, as a piece of 1960s science-fiction written for the radio, how did "The Slide" hold up nearly fifty years on?

Well, it was all right, I suppose... I mean, it wasn't great, but it wasn't awful either. The seven half-hour segments rattled along at a fair old pace, and it told its story clearly enough in a brisk and entertaining manner, and, to modern ears, gave the tiniest of insights into how attitudes have changed over half a century, as well as how performing styles have moved on. For some of the time it really felt as if I was listening to "The Archers" with added monsters, and yet, with a few changes to the pacing and relatively few tweaks to the script, I actually think that you could remake it today and it would still make a rather gripping radio serial.

The acting style is very much of its era, because everyone talks V-E-R-Y C-L-E-A-R-L-Y and with proper cut glass accents, or with the generic "rough types" accent that presumably used to be taught at RADA…

The stars are the rather marvellous Maurice Denham playing a very complicated role as an MP whose entire world starts to literally crumble around him, and Roger Delgado, the original "Master" from "Doctor Who" playing a more heroic role as a Chilean earthquake "expert" with a rather tragic past, and there's also a small but significant role for a presumably very young Miriam Margolyes... as well as plummy intros courtesy of a young Brian Perkins...

Strangely, this tale of intelligent killer mud was apparently first pitched to the "Doctor Who" production office way back when young Billy Hartnell was holding the keys to the TARDIS, but was deemed "unsuitable" for their needs.

Instead it was reworked as a radio serial with another kind of doctor playing a very key role, and, a couple of years later, the writer would end up working on "Doctor Who" itself, so it must have made one heck of a calling card.

Sadly, some of the "science" being talked about seems pretty "hinky" now. Some of the firmly held opinions about geology seems pretty strange especially because this serial was broadcast at about the time when theories about plate tectonics were first being accepted in the wider scientific community, and the solution to the problem, which I'm not going to explain here, seems to counter-intuitively rely upon the mysteries of the infra-red part of the spectrum which now seems a little implausible.

Still, it passed two or three days of commuting quite adequately, and despite being part of the "aliens in an english domestic setting" subgenre of science-fiction, it wasn't really too silly and did, of course, allow me to experience the various "terrifying" sound effects courtesy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which is always a good thing.

And really, I couldn't have asked any more of it than that.

DYLAN

The "Audio CD of the Commute" last week was "The Essential Dylan Thomas", a four CD collection bought for me one Christmas a few years ago after we'd spent a damp autumnal evening watching A.N. Actor performing some of the great Welsh poet's works during his tour with a one-man show.

I'd listened to one or two of my favourite pieces at the time and then put the box on a shelf to gather dust, as these things do, and, having never played it through in its entirely, decided that it wasn't a bad starting point in my search to fill the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shaped hole in my journeys to work.

Coincidentally, when I finally put the first disc into the machine and pressed "play", it was a little over sixty years and three weeks since the main work recorded on these discs, the now rather legendary play for voices that is called "Under Milk Wood" was first performed by Richard Burton and the rest of the cast, way back in January 1954.

It's a bit of a smutty old piece really, at least it is on the quiet and if you listen between the lines. I don't know whether some of the expressions being used have become ruder since it was first broadcast, or whether Thomas was just trying to slip a few things past the censors because that's just the way he was, but it's definitely chock-full of innuendo for the modern listener. Although, seeing as most generations think that they were the ones who first discovered sex, perhaps it comes as some surprise to discover how much it remained on the minds of those living in those impoverished communities way back before even our parents were twinkles in somebody's roving eye.

The words Thomas uses are mostly very bleak and cynical, born as they were in the pitiable poverty of South Wales between the two World Wars. This seems especially true on the first two CDs which seem to be made up of the more melancholy works and end with a collection of poems which include the famous titles "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", phrases which both sent something over a shiver down my spine as I drove homewards across the bleak hill tops on that recent midwinter evening.

The language really is very doom-laden on the whole, maybe because of being born from the fire and brimstone of regular attendance at Chapel, and brewed in the crucible of war, but given that Thomas died at the age of thirty-nine back in 1953, it's just plausible that his own mortality was very much on his mind as he went about his work, perhaps most noticeably in pieces like "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" and the exceptional "Return Journey to Swansea".

Things brighten up when the subject of his stories turn to Thomas's childhood in Wales, although often still laced with a melancholy streak, although my favourite piece, the one which stuck with me long after that evening watching and listening to that lone actor, was "The Outing" a hilarious take upon Welsh Life involving a boozy day out in a charabanc…

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born almost a hundred years ago in Swansea on the 27th of October, 1914 (So I suppose there'll be some sort of centenary celebrations later on this year), and he died the death of a "Roistering, drunken and doomed poet" in New York, just over thirty-nine years later, having become a popular writer, performer and broadcaster during his tragically brief and somewhat turbulent life.

Since his death he has been acknowledged as being one of the most important Welsh poets of the last century, despite his work being originally written in English, and his works are much studied in schools across the world and yet, despite this air of respectability and association with the more formal end of the educational spectrum, aspects of which might have surprised the old Welsh Dog himself, he remains one of the more popular and well-known of the modern poets.

I had a friend who claimed a, perhaps illegitimate, connection to this great modern Welsh poet and, given that she came from the Mumbles, an area much name-checked in his works, and shared a surname which played a large part in his personal history, who am I to doubt it…?

To be honest, I've always struggled a little in appreciating written poetry, but I do rather like the sound of Thomas's works, both for  the rhythm and the original imagery, and I do love the sound of voices reading it. Perhaps this is also because the sound of these readings, especially when being read in those dour Welsh tones, have triggered something very evocative, something that is perhaps a little nostalgic, and reminded me of something very personal which is buried deep within me. Perhaps a sense of "home" (if that's not too pretentious), but certainly not least, I imagine, because they remind me in some ways of how my own father, the lay preacher, used to speak, although he was born ten years later than Thomas, in a different part of South Wales, and lived a very different, and possibly far more God-fearing, life.

I'm sure that Thomas's writings are not for everyone. The emphasis on the fleeting nature of happiness and the impermanence of life are probably not the most uplifting of themes, and, despite the fact that aspects of such thinking can still be seen in the people and towns he was describing, nor is the abject poverty being talked about in much of his work likely to resonate as much as it once did with our modern materialistic, narcissistic and hedonistic culture.

But I bloody love it…

THE LAST OF HOLMES

My journeys to work are about to get a little "different" again, but not for the reasons you may have imagined. We remain in the grey box next to the sewage works, the nightly clearing of the room of all valuables (and consequent lugging of them back and forth) continues, and the mornings themselves remain dark, although there is the occasional glimmer of sunlight in the sky which implies the much-welcome eventual arrival of spring.

No, it's the bit in the car to which I am referring. Specifically the entertainments which have been soothing my nerves and pleasing my ears for the past few months since I realised that I could no longer handle the sadness of the tales being told on the "Today" programme each morning, or the various exciting afternoon programmes which accompanied me home.

Oh, don't get me wrong, the "Infinite Monkey Cage" was a delight, as was "A Good Read" but the former always seemed to outlast my journey, and the latter always seemed to cost me a bundle in Amazon orders.

I am, of course, referring too the fact that I have finally reached the end of my epic “Complete Sherlock Holmes” audiobook commuter run, as the final disc has now been listened to now, and now that I've travelled from "A Study in Scarlet" through to "The Retired Colourman", there really is nowhere else to go.

More than sixty discs have been popped into the player and all fifty-six short stories and the four novels have accompanied me to and from work during a most difficult period of my life, and I really think that I'm going to miss them, not least for the occasional childish cheer which I simply cannot resist hollering whenever there is some kind of ejaculation.

Well, you have to find whatever means you can to brighten up your days, don't you…?

And the language, even if it is somewhat archaic, is also so very rich and evocative that it can become rather addictive, and the smooth and silky tones of Sir Derek Jacobi, the reader of the versions I acquired, has felt absolutely like the perfect voice with which to tell them.

That said, time and again as I've been driving along, I've wondered whether I could persuade any tame actor of my acquaintance to pull up an armchair, don a smoking jacket and recite one or two of the tales for a tame audience. Would people be interested…? Would anybody turn up…? Would that serve as a suitable evening's entertainment in this rough and tumble world in which we live…? Perhaps more to the point, do I know anyone with that kind of voice and who might want to do it...?

After my sterling (and probably very unwise) efforts to track all of the collections down when the company producing them went into administration, it has been quite nice revisiting the canon once more, having read the complete works way back in my late teens when I first got my - now very battered - copy of the Penguin "Complete Sherlock Holmes" edition, which drew me into a definite interest in the many worlds of "Uncle Sherlock" on film and television, some of which still slip perfectly into the DVD player on cold, dark winter's evenings when a cosy, familiar tale from a strangely comforting - if remarkably violent - world is required.

I really do love the language of these adventures, and the stories have distracted my mind from far darker thoughts as I’ve been driving to and from work during these past few months, but now I’m wondering quite what to replace them with.

I could, of course, just start again from the very beginning, but I think that it may be slightly too soon to try doing that. Equally, there are many other books on CD just sitting and gathering dust upon the shelves at home already, many of which are definitely worth revisiting, even if they wouldn't quite be transporting me back to similar worlds, I might instead find other worlds to explore.

However, if I choose to take these other diversions, this could be enough get me through the summer and might just mean that I can return to Baker Street with the onset of winter again, which might be quite appropriate.

After all, the chill winds and the fog do rather suit the mood.

STUFF AND NONSENSE

I'm so sorry, but I've been buying "stuff" again. In these austere times, I really ought not to, and I certainly ought not to bleat on about it when so many people haven't got two brass farthings to rub together, but I'm weak, I'm feeble, and I don't spend my hard-earned on beer or fags or whisky or narcotics. No, my addiction is to passive entertainments, and it's far more weird given the lack of ultimate pleasure I get out of it once the thrill of the hunt, and perhaps of the delivery, has passed.

I know that I order far too much shiny rubbish via the internet, just as I know that most of the films will be watched once, the CDs played once and the books, maybe, read once, unless they're all stacked up in a pile somewhere to be read "later", in which case, "later" could turn out to be perhaps "never" given how my limited span upon this Earth is slipping away so rapidly.

Most of the time, the things that I'm deciding that I really simply have to have in my nasty, brutal and short life, are cheap enough, and presumably disposable enough, that they don't cause much in the way of fiscal hardship. Individually at least, they're all cheap enough not to cause too huge a dent in the precarious finances of our little household.

Collectively, however...

However, last Monday, four (yes, I said four), separate items got dispatched on the very same day and suddenly those four individually tiny sums suddenly felt like they'd been consolidated into one large wadge of cash, not helped by the fact that each of the four had been individually pre-ordered in each of four distinct and separate months and had only been brought together by the shifting plate tectonics of circumstance and fluidity of release dates. In my head they remained far enough apart not to trouble the scorers, but in reality, the fiscal piranhas are feasting as one at my bank balance.

Not only that but, because of an exciting new packaging policy, instead of each tiny item being able to slip neatly through the letterbox here at Blogfordshire Towers, they will have been bundled together into one large and "slot unfriendly" parcel which will mean the coming of another of those much-feared red cards, and another trek over to the far and distant place which is now our "local" Post Office to go and pick it up.

This actually occurred far more rapidly than expected, actually, with the whole stonking lot turning up the day after despatch which is, quite frankly, unheard of in my penny-pinching "Super Saver Delivery Option" lifestyle of choice, where the twitchiness of non-manifestation often goes on at least one day beyond my tolerance levels.

And then there's also the slightly galling knowledge that, by the time I do get around to watching my nice shiny new films, the price will most probably have dropped to about a third of what I paid for them by ordering them for distribution on or about the release date, even though I'll normally spot them cheaper in one of the supermarkets anyway long before the parcel finally gets into my actual house and I'm getting (quite rightly) scowled at for buying more tat and whilst I'm still in the "It hasn't turned up yet" zone...

So that's a bit of a "lose-lose" then...

The fact that two of the items are meant as gifts, and the other two are merely fulfilling my need to attain completion of a collection which has been building for decades, should and will cut no ice. It's still basically rubbish that we don't really need, even if I would miss it so if it wasn't there...?

After all, does anyone ever slip away off this mortal coil just wishing that they'd bought more stuff...?

This continual acquisition of "stuff" has become a bit of an "issue" lately as we look around our tiny little house and realise that it's got far too much "stuff" in it, and so the accumulation of more of it seems ridiculous, especially given that the number of remaining available years in which to read, watch or listen to them all feels as if it's diminishing rapidly.

Look... I know it myself, if I'm being totally honest with you.

I'm weak...

I'm feeble...

I'm surrounded by far too much tat...

I'm expecting an "Intervention" any day now (not that anyone's actually interested enough in my well-being to actually stage an Intervention, I'm sure...) or at least a quiet suggestion that I head off to a meeting of "Tat Buyers Anonymous..."

Meeting TBA...

THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES

I know that it's deeply shallow of me, but I can only say how utterly chuffed I am to be able to take this photograph and share it with you before spending hours and hours and hours listening to the wonderful voice of Sir Derek Jacobi reading all of those beautifully atmospheric tales of crime fighting in the late Victorian era.

It's been quite a battle, if only a tiny one, to track them all down you know, and complete the collection, but, given that it's these small but significant achievements which can make each day worth facing, I am feeling rather pleased to be able to look at the shelf that they live on and not see the gap-toothed look of the space which had been staring at me right from the middle of them for far too many weeks now since I'd found out that they might just start to get rarer than hen's teeth, given the problems that the publishing company were going through…

Naturally, after all of the angst and woe that my completist inner self had endured, it will be quite typical to find that there'll be an absolute glut of the things and I'll be spotting them everywhere I go, but that's not a problem just as long as my own little set remains complete and unabridged.

I did get a little twitchy when it failed to turn up as expected on Wednesday after the cheerfulness of the previous Friday's "Dispatch Notice" and consequent cancellation of the "alternative" order that I'd put in "just in case" which risked me ending up with two of the things... and its lack of an appearance on Thursday had me positively climbing the walls, but Friday turned out to be the charm and my morning commute for the next few weeks can now be safely assured to include swirling yellow fog, fiends in the night, a comfortable armchair sitting next to a roaring log fire as the world's first consulting detective puts the wrongs of the world to rights at the start of my working day.

But first, there will have to be a pause in the battle against evil as "A Christmas Carol" beckons and will spend a few days hogging the CD player...

HOLMES UPDATE

I was explaining recently about the difficulties that I was likely to have completing my Audiobook collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (as read by Sir Derek Jacobi), given that the company producing the range which I had found that I particularly liked had "gone under" in that unfortunate way that businesses have of doing so nowadays.

I had, of course, only discovered them far later than the rest of the world seemed to have and had been "treating" myself to one a month for about three months when the hammer fell and it became apparent that I would have to gorge upon them in order to acquire the remaining ones which I might have wanted.

Well, despite my fears, my Audio CD collection has already become far more complete than I really deserved, having clicked on a few orders that very day and then been left wondering whether they would actually be able to be fulfilled.

"A Study in Scarlet" arrived first, having been despatched within the day, and despite it being one of those tales about which I wasn't quite as fussed about hearing. It was almost as if they had mountains of them in the warehouse, but, given that my other orders remained steadfastly at the status of "Not Yet Dispatched" I began to suspect that the rest would remain in that perilous state for a while until I received the inevitable "We are sorry but we are unable to fulfil your order" email...

Still, I would inevitably check my outstanding orders regularly, clinging on to the sliver of hope that Amazon (the UK version) might just be in close enough contact with Amazon (the US version) to get some supplies from them shipped over to complete any orders that they had. Actually, realising that they even had that connection saved me from hours of internet drudgery and despair, at least for the time being.

In the meantime, I took a punt on ordering a copy of the "Casebook" from a Marketplace seller who described the copy that they had as being "new" but with a ripped cover, and that was swiftly sent to me, with the "ripped cover" turning out to be little more than a tear in the shrink-wrap wrapping which I would be throwing away anyway.

Of course, on one level I had already decided that I wasn't completely bothered if I actually acquired the supposedly rather lacklustre "Casebook" anyway, but I was happy that it actually showed up.

Meanwhile, the "Not Yet Dispatched" status of "The Sign of Four" mysteriously changed to "Preparing For Dispatch" and I did a little mental jig when later on that day it changed again to "Dispatching Now" and, to my eternal surprise, "The Valley of Fear" went through much the same transformation a couple of days later and both are now "In Transit" although, given the strange tale of how I had to order the "Adventures" twice back in September because they were "unable to deliver it" (???), I'm not counting either of those chickens yet.

Sadly, the "Return" remains, as it has for over a week now, at the status of "Not Yet Dispatched" which is, of course, fairly typical, as it was the one which I was most keen to listen to, given that Mr Sherlock Holmes had just plummeted to his apparent doom whilst grappling to the death with the fiendish Professor James Moriarty.

I know, of course, that I could just read the books myself but, given the current circumstances, that really just is not the same thing at all.

Which brings us to the knotty problem of "His Last Bow", a collection which seems to always be rather over-priced for the eight stories which it contains, and yet which includes "The Bruce-Partington Plans" and, given that the rest of my plans work out for the best, the gap will stick out like a missing tooth when all of the rest sit upon my groaning shelves.

I've not yet ordered a copy, having already decided that the later "lesser" works from the canon enclosed within both "His Last Bow" and the "Casebook" were not quite as "essential" as all of the others, but then, you see, I did get hold of the "Casebook" despite myself.

Decisions, decisions...

What would Holmes do...?

Well, of course, I am in the unique position of knowing precisely what this particular Holmes is likely to do, but I am trying my best to learn that I don't actually have to be a completist...

Or do I...?

Well, of course, you know that I do. That gap-toothed smile on the shelf was always going to be more than I could bear, but I will justify my final purchase on the grounds that Sir Derek could have just read out Sir Arthur's old shopping lists and make them sound entertaining and exciting, even if most of those "adventures" seem to take place mostly from an armchair situated next to a blazing log fire.

Actually, that sounds like a perfectly acceptable way of going about things to me...

Still, in the grand tradition of the Victorian adventure story, we'll end upon a note of purest false jeopardy. After all, there are still no guarantees that the necessary volumes to fill those gaps will actually ever turn up, are there...?

Which does of course mean that the useful expression "And with one bound, Holmes was free..." may yet not prove appropriate...

WHENEVER I LIKE

It does seem to be the case that, whenever I discover something that I like, the world seems to do its level best to deprive me of it.

So that when, as for example, I recently discovered Sir Derek Jacobi's sublime audiobook readings of the various Sherlock Holmes stories, I bought one or two and had been enjoying listening to them in the car so much as I drove through the daily commute that I thought I'd order a couple more, only to find that life was conspiring against me doing so.

Again.

As ever with these things, I'd come to them rather late, because they'd been around for quite some time before I happened to stumble across them, and when I did, of course, I had still approached doing so with a certain amount of dithering.

After all, I reasoned, I'd already read the complete canon when I bought my copy of the massive Penguin paperback edition when I was in my late teens and, since I'd invested in the tappitty-tap device earlier on in the year, one of the most essential and immediate of the free downloads had been an electronic copy of the complete works, so forking out a self-indulgently large amount to get each of the individual volumes all over again didn't seem all that wise.

But I'm nothing if not a pragmatist. One fine summer day, earlier on in the year, and when there was no T.M.S. on the radio with which to fill my journeys, I decided to take a punt on "The Hound of the Baskervilles" on CD.

Now I know that all of you young (and perhaps not quite so young) whippersnappers out there might be wondering why I didn't just download the files to my tappitty-tap and bypass the problem, but I still prefer to have a tangible, physical copy of the things that I buy and, what happens to your ethereal copy if, for example, the company that you are safely storing your "cloud" copy goes into something like administration, or something else equally unlikely happens...?

Anyway, my venerable vehicle is still very much an analogue device and has a CD player in it, so it still seems to be the best option to this old fuddy-duddy as he tootles back and forth going about his business.

So, the "Hound" arrived in due course and I was, as the saying goes, "blown away" by it, and Sir Derek gives a rather wonderful performance of this fiendish tale of the grim occurrences upon the moors, and I was persuaded enough by the quality of that to order myself a copy of the "Adventures" and, once I'd woven my way through that dozen stories, it seemed obvious that the "Memoirs" should follow, and so a collection began to build, and, as we reached the Falls at Reichenbach, it was almost inevitable that I would click upon an order for the next volume, the "Return..."

At that point, I was still dithering as to whether I'd stop getting any more of them after the "Return" because both "His Last Bow" and the "Case-book" have never been amongst my favourite collections, even though there are still one or two gems amongst these later tales and I do have a rather terrifying "completist" urge with which I constantly have to battle.

Anyway, the order was put in and I began that delicious anticipatory wait that the instant gratification of downloading somehow seems to bypass, when I first got the inkling about the dreadful news coming from Bath about the company which produces these products. Because, it appeared that, in the meantime, (and of course because it's just bloody typical), the company producing these audio delights has slipped sadly into administration and it looks as if my hopeful order will now remain unfulfilled and my collection is destined to remain incomplete...

Obviously the news is far worse for the employees of that company than it is for me being deprived of another of my treats, although it's also bloody typical that they were also the same company which had produced the "James Bond Reloaded" range which I'd also happened upon recently and had found, to my amazement and surprise, that I was also rather enjoying them and had expanded my initial tentative purchase into the three or four which I'd since decided to try out as well. Once you realise that Fleming was, like Doyle, writing in different times and that the attitudes on display were of their time, modern day sensibilities shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of what are actually rather well written and cracking little adventure stories, although I am more resistant to completism in that case simply because of my own distaste for some of his racial stereotyping.

Nostalgia, you see, really isn't what it used to be...

Whatever happens to the company, and the intellectual property, and all of the thousand and one possibilities which might ensue from the disappointments of others, the moral of this tale might be that you should be very careful if you find that I like you, for no good is likely to come of it...

TOO SOON FOR YULE…?

It’s an early evening in November when I put my key into the front door of my dark and empty house and open the door only to discover that a small parcel from Amazon has been posted through the letter-box at some time during the day, and is now sitting full of hope and optimism upon the doormat.

Eagerly, I tear at the brown corrugated cardboard packaging to dicover the contents within and am delighted that, rather than being some nonsense that I’ve ordered as a Christmas present for someone else, the contents are actually for me, and are the CDs making up an audio-book of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” which I pre-ordered months ago and had all but forgotten about.

Now I could go into a long and protracted explanation here about why I still prefer the tangible object that is a CD over purchasing the more enigmatic, esoteric and abstract option of the “download” but I’m not going to. After all, it’s taken me a long, long time to accept that brevity might really be the source of wit, and I’m not going to let that precious nugget of wisdom escape from my grasp now that I’ve seized it.

“The precioussssss…..!”

But now I have a small dilemma. Is it still far too early to start listening to those CDs as I drive in to work the following morning? After all, despite the greatest efforts of the supermarkets to convince us otherwise, Christmas is still quite some time off and even they might just consider that it’s still a little too early to be cranking up the “Slade” yet.

So, the dilemma remains. Is it not really the time of year to be listening to a Christmas tale…? After all, because of the time delay between US first transmission dates and those programmes being sold to the rest of the world, and of course the endless reruns afterwards, we often get “Christmas themed” episodes of many of our favorite TV shows at all times of the year, and nobody seems to be all that bothered by that kind of festive cheer when the sun is baking down onto the barbecue in a normal summer month.

This year, of course, the term “summer” had to be applied rather loosely…

Then, of course, we also need to accept that, in those parts of the world that choose to celebrate Christmas, a great many of them end up celebrating it under blazing sunshine anyway, and the snowy, damp tradition of the winter equinox is really only a bit of Victorian tradition made fashionable by the likes of Mr Dickens himself.

There seems to be a very narrow window of opportunity to enjoy our seasonal treats. I once received a CD of “Goon Show” Christmas editions in my Christmas stocking and, because I was distracted for much of the day by other duties, didn’t get the chance to listen to it that day and afterwards it never really felt like the “right” time, and I suspect that there are an awful lot of similar gifts that ought really to be presented a couple of weeks in advance in order to get the full and most appropriate use from them.

Otherwise you just get into that knotty problem that I’ve touched upon before. That vague sense of the guests who don’t seem to realise that it’s time to leave, of that “Christmassy” film that’s still clogging up one of the screens in the multiplex whilst the cherry trees are coming into bud around the vast and empty car park.

Nope, the decision is made. I’m going to listen to it anyway, and Tom’s rich and fruity tones are going to be booming out of the speakers in the car as I drive through another rush hour, and I don’t care that it’s still not even the middle of November, because that’s what a rebel I am…

“Marley was dead…”

HOW VERY “MODERN”

A colleague told me the other day that they had downloaded “a couple of tracks” from an album they liked and, as is the nature of all things mildly bewildering in this exciting world of (y)ours, this caused me to start thinking (and perhaps pontificating just a little bit...) about the differences between how previous generations used to buy things and how these things are done in this big and brave new world we’re all shuffling along through as best we can.

Because, how we buy music nowadays is very different to the way it was when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, and that way was, of course (because of developments in the creation of vinyl in the 1950s), just as different to the generation before it. The world does not stand still (no matter how much some of us way want it to...) and things change, and those changed things are perfectly “normal” to those who grow up with them as the “status quo” as our old ways were to us.

We must adapt or die, even though it sometimes seems bewildering to the next generation of knee-high grasshopper botherers that we ever managed to survive at all without a telephone in our mitts at every given moment, the entire history of popular music in our pockets, and the opportunity to only play games after weeks of planning to get enough people to play it, hours spent hunting around for the missing pieces, and a PhD in reading the instructions.

“In my day” (and oh, how I hate to have become someone who uses phrases like that one…) you listened to an L.P. in the order it was intended and you bought the whole thing, and the only to most radical of individuals would go about playing side “B” before they had already played side “A” and those who merely played a single track off an L.P. usually did so because they were making a living by doing so, or were busily putting a “compilation tape” together so that they could inflict a “running order” of their own choosing upon somebody else.

Musicians who managed to get to the almost “giddying heights” of their career that they got themselves a “record deal” would spend week and months and sometimes even years honing their tunes and carefully creating a “track listing” for their “album” that was supposed to carefully thought out in terms off precisely what went where and which track blended most effectively with the ones both before and after it.

Some would even go as far as to release the almost ridiculous sounding “concept album” which would try and tell a musical “story” across its perhaps “epic” seeming forty-minute running time. I think that might be, in part at least, why the surviving members of “The Beatles” were, for such a long time anyway, resistant to their records becoming available as downloads. Their notion that the track running order of the concept album was rather sacrosanct and that a masterpiece like “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is rarely improved by listening the tracks in the wrong order, no matter how wonderful (or not) you might think that the two minutes of “Eleanor Rigby” is...

After all, that’s what singles were for...

Nowadays you can pick and choose the tracks and the running order and musicians have to try a lot harder to put together enough tracks that they can only hope will all appeal to the fickle public and which might just mean that those “eccentric” little pieces, those “experimental” or “off the wall” pieces of music might just die on the vine instead of having the chance to “grow on you...”

I tend to think that it was having the “shuffle”  option on CD players that started it and, to an old style music listener like me, I’d be the first to admit that it was refreshing to be able to listen to certain albums that I’d possibly tired of in a new, original and exciting way. Later on, this option would, of course be available on devices that contained a large number of different albums so that you were able to not only change the running order of that old “greatest hits” album, but just get to hear random tracks from records that you might not otherwise have considered listening to, and which might sometimes mean that you hear tracks you might normally avoid.

Sometimes those tracks will take you completely by surprise, but they can only really do that if they’re there in the first place, of course. If you’d not chosen to download them in the first place, you wouldn’t have that option and this is where the whole concept of creating an album now starts to fall apart for modern era musicians. You can no longer rely on the fact that you might have some kind of “vision” if there’s only one track on your album that anyone likes or buys. Everything has to be an “instant classic” otherwise it might never get heard at all, and the notion of the “concept album” has to be very strong if you’re hoping that the public will download the entire thing, strangely weird and wonderful tracks like “When the Tigers Broke Free” and all.

I am after all, like many people I suspect, a hopeless “track skipper” myself. Even if I love every track on a “greatest hits” C.D. I will still find that I “might not be in the mood” for, or “can’t actually be bothered to listen” to certain tracks, and I’m a bit of an old traditionalist, so what hope is there if you’re trying to appeal to a music buying generation who will decide to buy their tracks based upon what they hear on the radio, what their friends tell them is good, what they just happen to find on the internet or based on a ten second sample on a music downloading site...?

Strange times, but probably not as strange as the way that music is sold to us in ten years time might seem to us...

SHADA

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, during my journeys to and from work, instead of demoralising myself with the generally depressing outpourings on Radio 4  confirming to me that society as we knew it really has gone to hell in a handbasket, I have instead been listening in the car to Lalla Ward, Mrs Richard Dawkins no less (and former Romanadvoratrelundar Mk II to explain the connection), reading Gareth Roberts’ recent adaptation of Douglas Adams’ so-called great “lost” work based upon his scripts created for the episodes which were never completed in 1979 due to “industrial action at the BBC” of a six-part tale called “Shada”.

Douglas Adams was a rather unique and amazing talent, if not a prolific one. Over the course of less than a dozen books he manage to spark the imaginations of a generation and made a name for himself as one of the literary giants of the late 20th century, but sometimes I think that it is his thoughts and his essays that are actually his most important legacy, because his ideas and writings about science, computing and our own place in the environment and the wider universe are certainly the things which have stuck with me during the decade that has passed since his death in California, ironically following a bout of healthy exercise, at a ridiculously youthful 49.

In those long, dark depressing days after graduating from Cambridge, failing to become John Cleese as he wished to, but before his greatest success finally made his name, in between taking walk-on parts in “Monty Python” sketches and his eventual achievement of finally persuading Radio 4 that science fiction could be funny, Douglas Adams wrote three teleplays for Doctor Who adventures, two and a half of which actually got made, and two of which actually managed to be broadcast: “The Pirate Planet” and “City of Death”.

The third of these was called “Shada” and was struck down, as I mentioned earlier, by that scourge of many things creative in the late 1970s, “industrial action”, and was subsequently abandoned, stuck on a shelf, supposedly never to see the light of day and forgotten about, which is all rather ironic really, when you consider some of the themes and tropes being played around with were precisely about that very thing.

Douglas himself, it is said, was never all that impressed by “Shada”, not least because it has the air of being a bit of a “rush job”, but he did recycle one or two of the ideas for the first of his “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” novels a few years later.

But “Shada” was never really forgotten. A few years later, a video version was cobbled together using the location and studio footage that had already been filmed, alongside the scripts in book form, and the proceeds all went to Comic Relief, so the story was at least “out there”, knowable and was actually doing some good, instead of merely sitting on that shelf, gathering dust and no-doubt gaining the reputation of being a solid gold “classic” as things that we cannot see usually do.

Later still, a new version was adapted and created as an audio adventure which was released on CD and starred Paul McGann as the Time Lord standing in for the Mighty Tom, who wasn’t much prone towards doing such things in those days. Suddenly, having been a bit of an unknown quantity, the story was rapidly becoming one of the most adapted and well-known of Mr Adams’ lesser works.

Recently, to mark a decade passing since the death of Mr Adams, the story was released again, this time in novel form, written by another author, the aforementioned Mr Roberts. It is an adaptation which, at least occasionally, actually manages to at least echo the style of Adams himself whilst also, sadly, only reminding us of what a nimble wordsmith the original was. It’s not a bad adaptation at all, in fact there are a few pages where the Adams of old comes blasting off the page, but it does tend to start to show up the shortcomings of the TV show scripted version, as the fascinating opening premise rather transforms into lots of people running around inside various spaceships and asteroids and making miraculous escapes from moments of false jeopardy. There is also in the manuscript a rather annoying tendency to overuse the word “naughty” for my tastes, but I can’t have been that unimpressed by it. After all, I did buy it twice, once to read and again to listen to in the car.

This was because, once I’d read the book myself, I happened upon the audio-book version going cheap and ordered it up so that, for ten exquisite days, my journey to work was enhanced by something more stimulating than the economic deficit, pension reform and electioneering amongst the devious and the not-so-good.

My main gripe was practical, as the book was spread across 10 CDs, all mounted on one little spindle like when you buy a batch of blank ones from Tesco. Getting the first one out of the box was fair enough, but there was a question of where to put that one whilst you tried to extract disc 2 from the box and so on. That takes a certain amount of preparation to deal with when you know that you’re going to be stuck in traffic at the end of a disc, making sure that the next one was handy, and that the ejected one could be plonked somewhere where it wouldn’t get scratched to buggery until you had a chance to park the car and tidy things away.

I’m sure, if he were still alive to work on “The Meaning of Liff” there might now be a word for that, but I’m going to dub it a “Dukinfield” until I find out that it’s already been taken.

Anyway, rather sadly, I completed the last disc on my way home last week and now it’s finished and, do you know, I’m rather missing it as I return to the morning inquisitions of John and Jim (or whoever) on the radio. I may have to start re-exploring the less-than-impressive music collection for a while instead, which should lead to some embarrassment as someone pulls up next to me at traffic lights to overhear it. Also, for a few weeks at least, the boys from TMS will at least be able to accompany me on my journeys home, so all is not lost.

It’s not that I mind John and Jim (or whoever) personally, you understand…? In fact, in many ways they have been my accompaniment to travel for many a long year, perhaps contributing to the lugubrious air of futility that I used to exude as I arrived at various work places, but also adding to that sense that I used to have of “knowing what’s going on” that I seem recently to be rather less impressed by. No, it’s not that. I think it’s just that having had my mind expanded once again courtesy of Mr Adams and Mr Roberts, putting it back inside the box each morning seems just a little bit sad.