3 Wyrd Things: J.M. Walsh

For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work - a book or author, a film or TV show and a song, album or musician.

This month: J.M. Walsh

Jamie Walsh is the owner / publisher of Broodcomb Press and under various guises the writer of books published under that banner. His works touch on many of the touchstones that we hold so dear here at Wyrd Britain such as Arthur Machen, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Algernon Blackwood exploring fictions hinterlands with an emphasis on the strange and the uncanny.

If you haven't already then we at Wyrd Britain heartily recommend that you dig into the dark delights of Broodcomb's catalogue at...
www.broodcomb.co.uk

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Book/Author
Neil M. Gunn 

Neil Miller Gunn wrote numerous novels, and the best of them are astonishingly immersive experiences of worlds that – even when recognisable – remain elusive and undefined. 

Part of this is a curious reticence in his writing to naming the numinous, which lends his narratives a consuming hesitance towards the exploration of wonder. I intuit a little embarrassment in the books as speaking aloud would run counter to the grain of his Highland gruffness, yet also a defiance because, for Gunn, aspects of being human that reach out of the ordinary are the chief part of life. 

For all its relative opaqueness, his writing is remarkable because the effect is of a ‘pointing towards’ that which in nature and human experience is (in a non-religious sense) sacred or divine, without ever coming out and naming it (if that is ever possible). Reading his books over the years, I became convinced he was a figure of Highland Zen only to find in his autobiography, ‘The Atom of Delight’, that he actually was deeply taken with Eugen Herrigel’s ‘Zen in the Art of Archery’, finding much in it that resonated with his world view. 

The numinous is found in most of his novels, particularly ‘The Well at the World’s End’ and ‘The Other Landscape’, yet an early loose trilogy of novels creates worlds of the human sacred that are among the most engrossing I’ve ever read. ‘Sun Circle’ puts the reader in Dark Ages tribal Scotland, Christianity newly arrived but in great tension with the old religion, at the time of Viking raids. It recalls William Golding’s ‘The Inheritors’ and, in a more oblique way, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s ‘The Corner That Held Them’, in the ability to see the world as the characters would have seen it. One character’s dawning realisation of what happens at the stones lives with me to this day as a moment of unfolding terror.

It is the second of the loose trilogy, ‘Butcher’s Broom’, that I return to. The novel is set in the Highland Clearances, but the heart of the book is less the historic and economic drivers than the effects on one community, which Gunn draws so carefully that the strangeness of how such communities worked becomes seductive, and the descriptions of the combined waulking and ceilidh feel familiar and deeply, deeply other at the same time – a human existence that is both within reach and lost forever. 

Even the novels that are resolutely of this world retain this sense of disquiet, as if the locations and events exist at least partly in myth. Plotwise, ‘The Lost Chart’ is a standard-for-its-time spy narrative… and yet the characters move in a twilight world that seems unconnected to our own. ‘The Drinking Well’ is about disgrace and change and the lure of politics and the modern… and yet the book begins and ends at a mythic source that makes all human concerns so much fluff. The scene where young Iain Cattanach is driving the sheep when the blizzard beds in is more dread-inspiring and consuming than any thriller. 

It’s doubtless overstating things, but Neil M. Gunn is a lost Nobel Laureate.

Film
Ratcatcher

I bought this for next to nothing, and you can still pick up copies for a couple of pounds, which seems remarkable. If ever there was a film deserving of the full pomp of a Eureka Masters of Cinema release, it’s Lynne Ramsay’s ‘Ratcatcher’.

What’s most remarkable is that I’ve seen this film a number of times, and even now the details of it swim about in my memory as if I’m viewing it underwater. Whenever I think about the film, what comes to mind are not films that feel thematically similar but Tarkovsky films: ‘Stalker’ and ‘Mirror’. If pinned down to explain why, I don’t think I could give a coherent answer.

Part of it is the sense I have that – for all ‘Ratcatcher’s anchorage to a particular time and place (and politics) – the film becomes archetypal. Set in Glasgow in 1973 at a time of strikes, redevelopment and relocation, I’ve the feeling I’m watching a film that has deep bones that reach far into human experience. Made in 1999, the film looks back a quarter of a century but equally could be a document of a centuries-old way of life.

There are two scenes in particular that stand out as moments that are both resonant and weird. I won’t describe them in detail. The first concerns one of the adult characters, seen after an act of violence (and I suspect retributive violence) that points to a world the young protagonist will doubtless inherit. It is a moment of glimpsed dread that worked its way into my dreams when I first saw the film.

The second concerns the fate of Kenny, a mouse, who goes on a journey, footage of which (strangely and impossibly) exists—

Music
Spoonfed Hybrid

I bought this on vinyl when it came out, and although the vinyl was lost the album has remained one I never tire of listening to, and still sounds inventive and new. The wealth of ideas in Spoonfed Hybrid is remarkable considering they were a duo; the album sounds as though Pale Saints, a string quartet, a coldwave outfit and Jan Švankmajer were in the same accident and they all walked away essentially unharmed—

I’ve never got to the bottom of the lyrics, and even today details are new. (In writing this, it’s only now (28 years later) that I’ve realised ‘Boys in Zinc’ must be a reference to the extraordinary book by Svetlana Alexievich about the experiences of Russian boys and men in Afghanistan.) The songs surprise me every time I listen to them: I’ve heard them so many times yet they always feel subtly different, new. I understand intellectually they haven’t changed in the meantime, but emotionally I’m not quite so certain—

‘A Pocketful of Dust’ is a case in point. I’ve no idea what it’s about, yet the tale the song tells is one I know at the level of my own lived experience. It’s a torch song, weird and committed, yet also a dark folk tale. ‘Boys in Zinc’ is beautiful, and the closing seconds spiral upwards. ‘Messrs. Hyde’ – only on the accompanying 7” – is (ironically considering the album was not released on 4AD) two minutes of disquieting piano-led anxiety that contains elements of ‘The Serpent’s Egg’-era Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil and Bauhaus. And I’m reasonably certain other admirers of the album would reject those entirely in favour of another three, perfectly-valid comparisons.

Strangely, the album did well in France, and I hear elements even today in bands like Audiac. If the record is referenced at all, however, it’s smoothed into ‘shoegazing’ or dismissed as ‘dreampop’. Spoonfed Hybrid is neither; it’s a beautiful and unsettlingly strange album that was never repeated.



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3 Wyrd Things: Nicholas Royle

For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work - a book or author, a film or TV show and a song, album or musician.

This month: Nicholas Royle

Nicholas Royle is the author of four short story collections, most recently London Gothic (Confingo Publishing), and seven novels. He is series editor of Best British Short Stories. Reader in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press, and is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize. His English translation of Vincent de Swarte’s 1998 novel Pharricide is published by Confingo and his latest book is his first non-fiction work, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector (Salt).

www.nicholasroyle.com
Twitter @nicholasroyle

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Musician
Tony Cottrell 

As an 18-year-old music fan in 1981, I read at least one of the music papers every week, so it was probably in either Sounds or NME or, less likely, Melody Maker, or even possibly the Sale & Altrincham Messenger, that I saw a small ad for a home-recorded cassette release, Another Dream, by Tony Cottrell. I must have been quick off the mark ordering a copy, because my TDK D-C60 is numbered, in ballpoint, No. 005. Cottrell lived at an address in Woodhouse Lane, Sale, only a couple of miles from where I lived on Ellesmere Road in Altrincham, so I got on my bike. 

All the music – six tracks on side A, seven on side B – was ‘written, arranged, performed and produced by Tony Cottrell’, it says on the inlay. ‘Recorded at home Feb–April 1981 on two stereo tape recorders. Engineered by Tony Cottrell. Cover by Tony Cottrell.’ He lists the instruments: ‘6 & 12 string electric guitars, 6 string acoustic guitar, bass guitars, organ, electric percussion, treated & untreated acoustic percussion, voice.’ There may be some voice in there somewhere, but it’s not singing, as such, and there are no lyrics, so I’ve used Another Dream – and the follow-up, Andmyrrh – hundred of times over the years to write to. 

The cover suggests Tangerine Dream might have been an influence – Cottrell even used the distinctive typeface used on the cover of their 1974 album Phaedra – but there’s more of a beat, perhaps a motorik beat, on several tracks. I felt at the time that it was original music and I still feel that now. Yes, Tangerine Dream were referenced, and I imagine Cottrell was listening to a lot of Can and post-Can solo projects. I don’t know if his albums got any radio play and I’ve never come across anyone who has heard them, but there must be at least a hundred or so of us, since my copy of Andmyrrh is No. 103. 

This second release was recorded between April and October in the same year; Cottrell was responsible for everything, again, save the cover, which is credited to Dawn Keig. I don’t know if Cottrell continued to record and release music – the internet doesn’t appear to know either – but those two cassettes are among my most treasured possessions and the mp3s that a friend made for me enjoy frequent-play status.

Author
Anna Kavan

The following year, 1982, I went to London to become a student and discovered, among other things, Picador books, specifically, to begin with, Ice by Anna Kavan. It was the cover that attracted me. Not because it features a female nude, but because the female nude is by Paul Delvaux. I already had the painting, Chrysis, pinned on the wall of my room in my hall of residence, in the form of a poster, so when I saw it on the cover of a book, I knew this was one for me. 

Ice (UK /  US) was published in 1967, only a year before Kavan’s death at the age of 68. It’s her best-known novel and has appeared in numerous editions with introductions and forewords and afterwords by the likes of Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Jonathan Lethem and Kate Zambreno. Picador also did an edition of her wonderfully strange dream-diary-cum-autobiography, Sleep Has His House (UK /  US), with another Delvaux cover, but it’s her short fiction I find myself going back to again and again, such as the posthumous Julia and the Bazooka (1970) (UK /  US), which collects gripping stories of isolation and unhappiness that are largely autobiographical, telling of the author’s poor relationship with her parents and husband and her ultimately lethal relationship with heroin, having flirted, along the way, with death by racing car – she had hung out with drivers, loving their way of life that was always only ever moments away from death. 

Entering the world of one of her stories can be like the moment of half-conscious realisation that you are dreaming. Her narrators are variously ‘always being confronted by a particular field’ or arriving in a town filled with streets ‘which seemed literally to have no end’ or walking on a cliff path watching gannets ‘diving like snow falling into the sea’ and within a few pages the strangeness escalates, the dream turning into a nightmare: the bright green field could become ‘a threat to all life, death-swollen, and horribly strong’; residents tearing down their houses to allow the construction of a fantastical building prefigure the end of everything; and the cliff-path walker is left wondering, ‘How did all this atrocious cruelty ever get into the world[?]’

Film
Aaaaaaaah!
UK /  US.

Having missed Steve Oram’s Aaaaaaaah! when it was released in 2015, I came across the DVD in a charity shop four years later, my eye drawn by certain names among the cast: Julian Barratt, Noel Fielding, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Toyah Willcox. Within minutes of putting it on I was hooked. Characters look human but vocalise and to some extent behave like apes. Toyah Willcox is superb; so are both Julians. I found it by turns disgusting, funny, disturbing and, weirdly, sexy, or perhaps I should say weirdly sexy. If Curt McDowell’s 1975 US black horror erotic comedy Thundercrack! could be viewed as a provocation, Aaaaaaaah! might be considered as British cinema’s somewhat delayed response, forty years on. 

Views of a familiar skyline suggest the action takes place in south London, but it could be set anywhere. Street scenes are shot with what appears to be candid camerawork, including when actor-director Oram wanders around carrying a severed arm. A young girl in the background has her face blurred out. Is it our world, in which the human apes are misfits, or theirs, to which we could never belong? Characters watch a cookery programme featuring a topless female who pant-hoots just as they do, and a sitcom that viewers finds hilarious, but which is incomprehensible to us, in our world, looking on. Aaaaaaaah! is a riot of body horror and toilet humour that I would never have expected to enjoy as much as I did had I read about it first. So I don’t really know why I’m writing this. But, trust me, it’s a masterpiece.



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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

3 Wyrd Things: Joe Banks

For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work - a book or author, a film or TV show and a song, album or musician.

This month: Joe Banks

Joe is a music writer with a résumé that includes Mojo, The Guardian, Electronic Sound, The Quietus, Prog and Shindig.

In 2020 Joe published (on Strange Attractor Press)  'Hawkwind:Days of the Underground' (Buy it here - UK / US) his exhaustive biography of the space rock legends.  Covering the years from inception (1969) to 'Levitation' (1980) with numerous side trips along the way it's a glorious and timely repositioning of this idiosyncratic band as one of the cornerstones of underground music in the UK.  To accompany the book Joe maintains a Hawkwind treasure trove at www.daysoftheunderground.com/

I am really pleased to be able present Joe's choices to you and heartily recommend you follow him on twitter at - JoeBanksWriter   

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TV
Dave Allen At Large (1971-79) 

Buy 'The Best of Dave Allen' here - UK / US.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970s, it was possible to stumble across all manner of unexpectedly strange and frightening programmes on TV, particularly if you were a child of a “nervous disposition” or just easily spooked. Indeed, an entire cottage industry based around memories of terrifying PIFs, Christmas ghost stories and scary kids’ shows has developed over the past decade or so – it sometimes feels as though the perceived uncanniness of the past is being used as a communal bulwark against the divisive, hyper-stimulated present.

But while I experienced plenty of cosy chills watching Doctor Who, and felt genuinely unsettled by ITV’s Quatermass, it was being caught off-guard by something nasty lurking in programmes that were ostensibly light entertainment that affected me the most. For instance, there was an item on early evening magazine show Nationwide that freaked me out for months, the appearance of a werewolf in a suburban house, which I’ve subsequently discovered was connected to the story of the Hexham Heads (Britain had an unquenchable thirst for all things paranormal in the ‘70s, and Nationwide regularly ran pieces on topics such as UFOs and poltergeists). And then there was this scene from a screening of Carry On Screaming, which again completely terrified me.

The board comedy of the latter should perhaps have neutralised the weirdness of that scene, but the context actually ended up heightening my sense of fear. And that was also very much the case with the first wyrd thing I’ve chosen. Irish comedian Dave Allen was a regular presence on British TV throughout the ‘70s, an intelligent and urbane raconteur with a uniquely laid back style of delivery – sat on a high leather chair, dapperly suited and with a tumbler of whisky (actually ginger ale) at his side, he didn’t so much tell jokes as weave stories with occasional laughs, the antithesis of the quip-spouting stand-up. I loved his presentation and the often fiercely irreligious sketches that peppered his shows, for which he’s perhaps still best known.

But along with the Catholic Church, Allen also had a dark fascination for the supernatural, with longer filmed pieces that accurately aped the gothic horror of Hammer, building real tension before the inevitable comic (and often ludicrous) pay-off. The ultimate manifestation of this was the horror-driven monologues that he would sometimes close his shows with, the studio lights darkening and the camera pulling in, as Allen revealed himself to be a master storyteller of the macabre. There was one in particular that really got to me – I remember nothing about it except the languorous, dread-filled tone of Allen’s voice, and the atmosphere in the back room where I was watching it becoming icy with an awful anticipation. And even when the punchline came, the spell wasn’t completely broken – there was still a horrible sense of unease, that something remained hidden in those words, and that this was a bloody odd way to make people laugh.

Book 

The Unexplained (1980-83) 

As noted above, Britain was completely nuts for anything of a paranormal or supernatural bent during the ‘70s, the floodbanks of credibility having seemingly been washed away by the countercultural enlightenment of the late ‘60s. With the authority of Church and State eroding, and with the country in the midst of both political and social flux, all kinds of strange ideas and belief systems began to creep in from the margins. If traditional institutions could no longer be trusted and/or believed in, then perhaps other, more mysterious, forces were abroad? It’s surprising how quickly and firmly this notion took hold of mainstream culture, with TV and newspaper items on UFOs, ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster vying for space with reports on the latest industrial dispute or IRA bombing, creating a wyrd imaginal dissonance.

This obsession with all manner of mysterious phenomena persisted well into the ‘80s – in fact, it was probably at its zenith when, in 1980, Orbis Publishing launched the ‘partwork’ magazine, The Unexplained. Partwork magazines, where each weekly issue built towards a completed set of large format, binder-bound volumes, were hugely popular during the ‘70s. My dad had bought and assembled an earlier Orbis series about WW2 – I remember poring over these volumes full of battle photography, cut-away schematics of Messerschmitt fighters, and the often disturbing propaganda posters generated by the conflict. I had also recently completed my own, slightly less troubling Orbis series, The Encyclopedia Of Birds.

But The Unexplained was something else altogether. Leaving the joys of ornithology behind, I had plunged headfirst into the murky underside of the everyday and embraced the world of possibility – or more prosaically, and no doubt like many other boys (and girls) of my age, I just really liked the idea of monsters and aliens and weird stuff in general, despite being quite capable of scaring myself witless (see above). As soon as I saw the TV ad for this new series – “How much do we really know, and how much are we allowed to know?” – I immediately badgered my mum to take out a subscription. The magazine looked great, with lots of colour pictures and illustrations, and each issue had five-six articles on an impressively broad range of topics, the first few editions taking in such unexplained phenomena as Bigfoot, black holes, ball lightning, and every child’s favourite, spontaneous human combustion. 

Despite the conspiracy theory posturing of the ad, the overall tone of the magazine itself was one of open-minded enquiry rather than tinfoil-hatted fanaticism, accessible to a general readership but hinting at a shadowy canon of arcane knowledge for those who wanted to go deeper… As it was, I was quite happy to stay at the popularist level, obtaining classic books such as Alien Animals, The World Atlas Of Mysteries and the frankly terrifying Photographs Of The Unknown, without experiencing any kind of occult epiphany. It was just what I was into, and certainly by the end of The Unexplained’s run, I had moved onto other things, music in particular. Yet The Unexplained remains a classic totem for those times, a window into a different way of looking at the world, and a gently eccentric corrective to the harsh realities of Thatcherite Britain.

Music
Peter Hammill – pH7 (1979)
Buy it here - UK / US.

As I’ve confessed elsewhere on the internet, I was a Teenage Prog Rock Fan. Having grown up in a market town in the East Midlands, it was practically de rigueur that the first genre of music I was seriously into was heavy metal. But after the NWOBHM, the early ‘80s saw a resurgence in that most hated, and downright feared (according to the NME anyway) genre of music: progressive rock. Hard now to convey just what a bogeyman ‘prog’ was seen to be by music’s cultural gatekeepers, but its return, even in a diminished and mostly derivative form, was a cause for much mockery and gnashing of teeth. And yes, we’re talking Marillion here.

However, from my perspective as a young rock fan looking to expand my horizons, neo-prog (as it subsequently became known) was a welcome development. Not only did it lead to me encountering the genuinely wonderful Twelfth Night, but it also sent me back in time to investigate where this stuff had originally come from. And after wading through the likes of Genesis, Yes and Camel, I got to the hard stuff: King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator. VDGG in particular presented a challenge to my rockist mindset, dispensing for the most part with guitars and promoting the saxophone to lead instrument. But I soon realised this was all essentially moot in the face of the band’s driving force and self-proclaimed “Jimi Hendrix of the voice”, Peter Hammill.

Hammill is an extraordinary figure within British music, and a cult hero of the wyrd. He’s capable of both raging with elemental energy and penning lyrics of remarkable sophistication, ranging from coruscating self-examination to meditations on the nature of existence, often with apocalyptic overtones. He’s also been incredibly prolific throughout his 50+ year career, and there’s any number of albums I could have chosen to highlight his unique talents. But for me, 1979’s pH7 is his finest solo achievement, a perfect melding of Hammill’s fiery intelligence, his commanding but never pompous vocals, and a stripped-back, new wave-channelling sound, austere yet utterly compelling. I also have a strong memory of being given a tape of this album just before going to university, and spending those first few weeks sat in my room, listening to it on headphones in the dark.

Its delights are many, and it’s one of Hammill’s most socially conscious, outward-looking albums, with topics covered including biological weapons (‘Porton Down’), disability (‘Handicap And Equality’), political corruption (‘The Old School Tie’) and the end of the world (‘Mr X Gets Tense’). There’s never any sense of earnest hand-wringing here, but instead a direct and visceral engagement with the issues in question. Musically, it’s often thrillingly intense as well: there’s the paranoid, machine-driven stomp of ‘Careering’; the electro-classical ‘Mirror Images’, like something from Wendy Carlos’s score for A Clockwork Orange; and most intriguing, the crunching yet expressionistic setting of ‘Imperial Walls’, the translation of a 9th century Anglo-Saxon poem. A terrific, mind-expanding record, and a great cover too.



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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

3 Wyrd Things: Matthew Shaw

For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work - a book or author, a film or TV show and a song, album or musician.

This month: Matthew Shaw

Matthew Shaw is a Dorset based composer, author and artist who has been releasing music since 2000 under his own name, as Tex La Homa, and with a variety of collaborators.

Matthew has recently worked with Shirley Collins on her new album Heart’s Ease for Domino Recordings. With Shaun Ryder and John Robb as Spectral & with Richard Norris composing the score to ‘The Filmmakers House’ a film by Marc Isaacs.

In 2019 Matthew worked with Mark Stewart and Gareth Sager on #BloodMoney as The Pop Group x Matthew Shaw, featuring a reworking of songs from the ‘Y’ album.

Atmosphere of Mona, a book of prose poetry and photography was published by Annwyn House in 2020 and is available here.

I first ecountered Matthew about a decade ago when he submitted some of his music for review in my old Wonderful Wooden Reasons music zine, later I released one of his albums on my Quiet World label and today I'm very pleased to present his choices in this months 3 Wyrd Things. 

You can find Matthew in all the usual places and via his website at -  https://www.matthewshaw.org/

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Album

Shirley & Dolly Collins

Anthems in Eden 

Buy It Here - UK / US

Folk Roots, New Routes and Anthems in Eden have both occupied a central position in my listening of Shirley Collins for many years. It is Anthems in Eden, probably more than any other record featuring Shirley, that continues to surprise and delight and to always sound fresh and unique.

I was a teenager when I first heard Anthems in Eden, and on first listening everything about the lp seemed strange and yet familiar to me. The cover art, the inside of the gatefold cover of Shirley and Dolly, the instrumentation and arrangements. This was an album that somehow combined the folk music I was discovering at this time, along with the hymns and choral pieces my dad would come home singing after his concerts with the Crewe male voice choir, and the classical LPs he would play at home.

The first side of the LP contained a suite of songs that are still unlike any other record I own. The combination of Shirley’s pure unparalleled singing voice lifts the emotion, emphasising the heartbreak and hope within each word. Dolly playing the partitive organ, cutting through with her unique style of playing, alongside David Munrow’s direction and early music orchestra of Crumhorn, Rackett, Sordum, Recorder, Sackbut and so on. This album is musical time travel, the alchemy of a narrative set after the first world war, pared with early music instrumentation and timeless vocals. It is as if the people in these songs are able to step through the music and into the present moment. A Dream, Lowlands is the one song that I love more than most. A ghost song about a dream of a dead lover returned, a tale of shipwreck, are we off the English East Coast towards The Netherlands, or even further back in the remnants of Doggerland?

Listening to this album on cassette walking around the Saxon crosses in Sandbach, and up around the ancient carved faces and patterns outside St Marys Church left a deep impression. The album has no connection that I am aware of with the town I grew up in, and yet it fits a walk by the ancient crosses, the churchyard, the Tudor houses and then out into the country perfectly. Maybe this just emphasises the point that this album reveals layers of time within England. The stories within the music are remembered by the earth, the stones, the trees and the bricks and mortar.

We have seen such a triumphant return from Shirley in recent years and with Lodestar (UK / US) and Heart’s Ease (UK / US) we have an artist as vital as ever. I hope we see a greater appreciation of Dolly as a result, as these albums the Collins sisters made together are all magical objects. Not to mention Dolly’s orchestral arrangements for Peter Bellamy on the fantastic The Transports folk opera. If you can find a copy of the original double album you are in for a treat.

Whitsun Dance has recently been reworked from the version on Anthems in Eden into a new version on Heart’s Ease. Here is a clear example of the songs adapting to new times through the same singer, recorded many years apart. Both versions are essential listening. On Heart’s Ease I worked with Shirley to recreate Crowlink, bringing this place to people’s ears and imaginations ,so that the listener may stand with us a while at Crowlink and look out to the sea. 

 

 

Book

Ithell Colquhoun
The Living Stones

Buy It Here - UK / US

I first discovered Ithell Colquhoun from an issue of the poetry journal Ore. It contained two of her poems, The Tree-Month Ruis and Here. Without The Living Stones by Ithell Colquhoun, I would never have written Atmosphere of Mona. In fact my work would be very different, as Ithell has informed a way of seeing and experiencing. I’ll explain more as we go.

The Living Stones explains Ithells experiences in words and line drawings, travels and thoughts of Cornwall. In particular the Lamorna valley and cove. It is this area that draws me back time and again. The Living Stones for me is the perfect guidebook to this area. I found my favourite walk there, from the sea and Lamorna cove, up the lane past the site of Vow Cave, Ithell’s home for a time. Then across the road and through the woods to Boleigh Fogou, then to The Pipers and the Merry Maidens, Tregiffian, Gun Rith, and up to the old stone cross with the figure with outstretched arms, the horizon and rising sun. The cross was illustrated by Ithell in the book, and I photographed it for Atmosphere of Mona. From here a walk across the fields to Boscawen-Un. Most of these sites are written about in The Living Stones. I find the combination of literature, walking and art fascinating, here all three are effortless to appreciate, the art in this case is the painting Landscape with Antiquities by Ithell herself, providing our map for this walk.

Reading The Living Stones reveals as much about Ithell’s interests and thoughts as it does about the physical world. It contains a whole worldview expressed through a place.

The sounds of Lamorna became something of an obsession over the years. Firstly with the band Fougou, underground music made with sound artist Brian Lavelle. Our albums made literally underground in a Fogou, and also at many of the places that Ithell writes about in The Living Stones. The name of our band came from the spelling of Fogou by T.C. Lethbridge which is ‘Fougou’. Then I went further into the footsteps of Ithell directly with the album Lamorna, recorded outside Vow Cave, at The Merry Maidens, Lamorna Cove as well as back inside the Fogou.

That first issue of Ore that I picked up also connects Ithell with The Druid Order, An Druidh Uileach Braithreachas. Ore was published and written in part by Eric Ratcliffe, poet, author, publisher and sword bearer for the order. Both Eric and Ithell often draw on imagery from ritual within their poetry, as Ithell also does on many of her pieces of art. Eric continues to publish poems by Ithell and went on to write a biography of Ithell, and there are some wonderful photos of them both in robes together from the late 50s and early 60s. All part of the quest beautifully captured in the pages of The Living Stones. The atmosphere and spirit of Lamorna and Cornwall more widely, a snapshot of a time long gone. Yet much of what you will read in The Living Stones is still there if you look in the right places, especially outside of the holiday season, and if you take in the area on foot, so let the book be your guide.

TV

Doctor Who: Logopolis (Part Four) 

Buy It Here - UK / US

At the age of seven the world changed for me through the BBC transmission of the fourth episode of Logopolis. 

 
Doctor Who had become a regular treat, one that captured my young imagination and was often as hilarious as it was deeply terrifying. It was in this final episode for Tom Baker though, that things took on a new meaning. The Master and his pantomime attempt to blackmail the universe was one thing, enjoyable as it was, the Watcher though was something else entirely. A ghost-like vision, not dissimilar to the kind of thing I would later see in Ghost Stories for Christmas was an unquieting presence on the screen. Who or what was this apparition? A spirit, a lost soul, an alien or a ghost? Then there was the telescope, or Jodrell Bank as I knew it to be. I could see Jodrell Bank from my childhood bedroom window, and just a few weeks before had visited and gone inside the centre for the first time. Now I was sat watching Doctor Who hanging off that very same telescope. I ran upstairs to look out of the window before remembering it was already dark. Back in front of the TV, I watched the combining of the real world outside my window and the invented world and characters in the story combine, like the acetate sheets on the projectors in every classroom of the time. So grown ups too could invent stories and characters in the real world, reimagining them as sci-fi temples, connecting the earth, outer space and the imaginal. And then it happened, the Fourth Doctor fell. The Watcher appeared and combined with the Doctor before regenerating as the Fifth Doctor. The death and resurrection show. 

 
Peter Davison was ok but he wasn’t Tom Baker, although I did continue to watch each week and got used to this regeneration idea. There were still great adventures to come and through the time travelling ability of broadcasting I could travel through time as well, to watch those earlier episodes where Tom Baker was still out there, as well as the previous Doctors.

My younger siblings around this time discovered Button Moon, another space drama, the theme tune was composed and performed by Peter Davison and Sandra Dickinson.  This show turning infants on to the idea of transforming household objects and waste for the purposes of space travel.. Not dissimilar to the alchemical process in the later years of Ithell Colhoun’s art collages and sculptural forms, using household waste and bright colour to striking and magical effect.



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3 Wyrd Things: Rosalie Parker

For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work - a book or author, a film or TV show and a song, album or musician.

This month: Rosalie Parker

Rosalie Parker co-runs Tartarus Press with R.B. Russell. She has written four collections of weird short stories, The Old Knowledge (2010), Damage (2016), Sparks from the Fire (2018) and Through the Storm (2020), out now from PS Publishing. Her stories have appeared in various anthologies, including Supernatural Tales, Uncertainties II, Shadows and Tall Trees, Best New Horror 21 and 30, and Best British Horror. 

It is our pleasure to present her selections for this month's 3 Wyrd Things.

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Film
Frank (2014)
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Frank is an extraordinary black comedy Directed by Lenny Abrahamson. It’s a British/Irish production inspired by papier-mache head wearing Timperley comic and pop star Frank Sidebottom, about an experimental band called soronprfbs, led by Frank (Michael Fassbender). Frank is not seen out of his aforementioned outsized head until the end of the film. The band go to Ireland to record their debut album in a remote cabin, which ends up taking more than a year. They are invited to play in Texas, where they continue to experience personal and creative differences and gradually implode. The final scene may or may not be a surprise. The themes of mental illness and creativity are handled with insight, integrity and delicacy. It’s moving, weird and very funny.

Music
David Bowie
Space Oddity (1969)
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I first heard this single at my friend Nina’s house in the small Buckinghamshire village where I grew up. We played it over and over again until I knew every note and nuance. It has an indefinable longing and infiniteness about it which I found myself able to slip into, aged nine. I can still recapture that feeling whenever I hear the song. I’ve always been fascinated by exploration, and although I have done some adventuring into the unknown, I’m a slightly nervous traveller. I’ve never wanted to be an astronaut.

Book
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights
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Bronte’s tale of mixed-race Heathcliff after he is brought to live, an abandoned orphan, on an isolated Yorkshire farm had a certain resonance for me. I read it first aged about 13 in my cold bedroom in the old, haunted farmhouse in which I grew up. It’s a tale of adolescent love and hate, class, rejection and vengeance, and the supernatural and horror elements are fundamental to the story. Heathcliff is the archetypal outsider (cf Frankenstein) and although Bronte’s portrayal of him as he seeks revenge for ill treatment is utterly unsentimental, her skill in the telling means that he retains some of our sympathy. His drawn out death as he seeks to be haunted by and reunited with his dead love Cathy is a Gothic tour de force. Aged 13, the book was like nothing else I’d read. For the last 20 years I’ve lived in North Yorkshire, not too many miles from the Bronte’s Haworth, so the book has gained a new resonance for me. When I re read it last I was struck by how well it stands the test of time.

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.