George Harrison: Living in the Material World, dir. Martin Scorsese (Lionsgate)

Ringing Roger, November 2011

‘Who’s your favourite Beatle?’ Those of a certain age may recall that that was once the burning question for secondary school pupils everywhere. Reflecting on it now, I suppose I’d try and evade the question by simply saying that the one I increasingly find most interesting is George Harrison. I am pleased to concur in this with the great film director, Martin Scorsese.

The first third or so of Scorsese’s film is a reminder of the Beatles’ rise to fame. It’s a story that’s often been told, but Scorsese has been allowed access to family letters and photographs which give us an intriguing picture of the young Harrison coming to terms with the burden of fame. Also, new interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and others help bring home the quandary posed by being a member of the ‘fab four’.

It’s a quandary that affected Harrison most deeply. While we all know that the group grew tired of performing for fans who would rather scream than listen, we often forget how early on he had become disillusioned with the pop world and with the trappings of celebrity. Crucial here is the meeting in the mid-sixties with Ravi Shankar: not only the most important exponent of Indian classical music in the world but also a man of profound spiritual wisdom. Scorsese conveys how strong was Shankar’s affection for Harrison, whom he regarded as a genuine seeker after enlightenment.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the rest of the film focuses mainly on Harrison’s turn to the East: his efforts to master the sitar under the guidance of Shankar; and his rejection of his childhood Catholicism in favour of Hinduism. Even those who have little interest in the Beatles know about the episode of their trip to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s retreat in Rishikesh in 1967, to perfect their recently acquired skill of ‘transcendental meditation’; and the general consensus is that it was just a passing phase, typical of their restless sensation-seeking. But Harrison stuck with the Maharishi, who comes out of this film rather well. Certainly, it is clear that Harrison, prompted by both him and Shankar, became a serious student of Indian philosophy from then on.

Central to the film is a celebration of the still-impressive album, All Things Must Pass, released in the very year of the break-up of the Beatles (1970). Looking back, it was remarkably brave of Harrison to release an album of sacred music at a time when flower power had turned sour, and the whole idea of an alternative spirituality had become associated with drug abuse.

Not that Scorsese is out to paint Harrison as a saint. Indeed, the singer’s lapse into addiction is addressed head-on. Again, his widow Olivia speaks freely about the difficulty of living with a man who could be both angry and amiable. There’s a whole other story behind her wry recollection of what she used to say to people who asked what was the secret of a long marriage: ‘You don’t get divorced!’

But perhaps there are two sequences that linger most in the mind. The first is the description by Olivia of the near-fatal attack by a deranged intruder at their home in December 1999. It is hard to get out of one’s head the fact that Harrison sought to dissuade his attacker by chanting the Hare Krishna mantra, nor that he retained his sense of humour in the aftermath of the intrusion when, being taken to the ambulance by new medic recruits, he enquired of them, ‘So what do you think of the job so far?’

The second is the sequence in which Ringo Starr recalls visiting George in the final weeks of the latter’s life, when he was dying of cancer. I defy anyone not to be moved by this. It’s a fitting end to a documentary which stands up well next to Scorsese’s much-praised celebration of Bob Dylan, No Direction Home. Surely these are  the two most important films about popular music ever made …

Of Gods and Men, dir. Xavier Beauvois (Armada Films) & Winter’s Bone, dir. Debra Granik (Fortissimo Films)

Ringing Roger, July 2011

Two films recently made available on DVD seem at first glance to have nothing much in common. One is about the murder of nine monks in Algeria; the other is about the search by a teenage girl in backwoods America for her drug-dealing father. But let’s see…

Of Gods and Men is based on a true story. A small Cistercian community establishes itself in the Algerian village of Tibhirine, tending to the needs of a grateful Muslim population. Despite warnings from the Algerian army that the monks had better leave because of the growing threat of terrorism, they decide to stay. Sure enough, a violent Islamist group eventually captures them and leads them off to their deaths. A superficial objection might be that the film endorses fatalism and passivity, but the actual experience of watching the film reveals a deeper theme. It is essentially a study in fortitude guided by faith. It celebrates the courage of the monks, and it forces us to ask what values we ourselves might have that are stronger than death. In that sense, it is a religious film: a study in collective sainthood. At the same time, it faces head-on the dangers of fundamentalism, as represented by the Islamist terrorists. Yet it does so without being at all anti-Muslim: one is left in no doubt of the love felt by the locals for their Christian helpers.

At first sight, Winter’s Bone seems to complement another recent-to-DVD film, True Grit (reviewed here last month): a teenage girl fights for justice in a harsh environment. But on reflection, it seems to mirror just as much, if not more, Of Gods and Men in that it celebrates devotion. The protagonist, 17-year old Ree Dolly, single-handedly looks after a mother who is incapacitated by depression and at the same time manages to raise her young brother and sister, all in a run-down shack in the Ozark mountains that traverse southern Missouri. Her father, Jessop, is a producer of ‘crank’, or crystal meth. Having been caught, he has used the family home as bail, while awaiting trial; but he has now gone missing, so the house will be taken away from the occupants unless Ree can either find her father alive and persuade him to give himself up, or else locate his dead body to provide grim proof that he is not jumping bail. The film is about her search, and the hostility she faces in the ‘white trash’ neighbourhood – including that of some of her distant relations, who are keen to take revenge on Jessop, reputed to have been informing on fellow-dealers to the local police. The tale is a harrowing one: the poverty, prejudice and violence are represented with stark, unyielding exactness. Yet somehow Ree keeps going, determined to protect her mother and her siblings.

Both the Cistercians in Of Gods and Men and the young heroine of Winter’s Bone demonstrate a strong, unyielding commitment to their principles. The monks believe in Christian fellowship; she believes in domestic loyalty. Her faith seems secular; theirs is explicitly religious. But both films are about the triumph of spirit over circumstances. Taking this idea further, we may note that Winter’s Bone, being set in backwoods America, inevitably draws on the residual Protestant worldview that helped settle and shape those areas. In case we forget these Christian origins, they’re evoked in the country music that punctuates the film – not just as background but as part of the story. For instance, in the course of her quest Ree at one point drops in on an impromptu hootenanny gathering at which bleak songs of yearning for salvation are sung. Then, finally, we hear over the closing credits a great traditional American song which is both hymn and country standard: ‘Farther Along’. Credited to J. R. Baxter and W. B. Stevens, who put it into its final form in the earlier twentieth century, it asks a timeless question:

Sometimes I wonder why I must suffer,
Go in the rain, the cold, and the snow,
When there are many living in comfort,
Giving no heed to all I can do.

The answer of the song is given in the refrain:

Farther along we’ll know more about it
Farther along we’ll understand why;
Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,
We’ll understand it all by and by.

True Grit, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen (Paramount)

Ringing Roger, July 2011

In 1969, Henry Hathaway directed John Wayne in a film version of Charles Portis’s cult novel, True Grit. I wouldn’t rank his performance with those of his in the great western films directed by John Ford, such as The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. True, his depiction of the ageing, unscrupulous marshal, Rooster Cogburn, was enormously entertaining, but it had far too much of the loveable, grumpy rogue for my liking. Now we have the Coen brothers’ new version on DVD, what will we say about the performance of Jeff Bridges in the same role? Muttering and cursing where Wayne would declaim his lines self-consciously, this Rooster is a much meaner, nastier character – which is fitting, given the dark depths which the story plumbs.

It is because of those dark depths that the directors have decided to make central the 14-year old female protagonist, Mattie Ross (played with remarkable panache by the young Hailee Steinfeld). She is the means by which we come to understand them. In the Arkansas of the late 1870s, she is outraged by the fact that her hard-working father could be shot in cold blood in the centre of Fort Smith, Arkansas, and that the authorities are not interested in pursuing the matter because the murderer, Tom Chaney, has escaped into the dreaded ‘Indian territory’. She therefore hires Cogburn to pursue the culprit, and after much argument persuades him to take her with him. Cogburn’s background is criminal rather than legal: he has a history of robbery and violence, and it is clear that he has not become a marshal out of idealism – rather, it is due to his taste for violence and his need for a regular income. What we see as the film progresses is the  pious, precise girl and the thuggish, slovenly marshal come to terms with each other. Their companion, LaBoeuf, a conceited Texas Ranger chasing Chaney for another murder (played by Matt Damon), also moves from resentment of Mattie’s presence and hostility to Cogburn towards acceptance and admiration of both.

It is the adult Mattie, decades later, who narrates the story in a sombre voice-over – matched by the austerely authentic cinematography, which conveys the harshness and bleakness of the landscape in which she has learnt to make her way. This narration device is important, as we need to understand that her Christian faith is tested by her experiences with Cogburn and LaBoeuf in the wilderness. They are all three on a quest, but it is Mattie’s spiritual journey that will preoccupy us as the film closes. For it is then that the musical theme, played throughout the film, takes on new meaning as we hear the country singer Iris DeMent singing the words of its source – a late nineteenth-century hymn, ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’. The title of that song comes from Deuteronomy 33: 27: ‘The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. He will drive out your enemy before you, saying “Destroy him!”’ Thus speaks a God of compassion who is also capable of righteous revenge when either he or his chosen people are offended.

If we can catch the resonance of this, we will see that True Grit addresses the Biblical theme of the nature of the law.  Mattie believes in God’s law; Rooster Cogburn believes in the law of the gun. Are they related, and does the reconciliation of the two characters tell us anything about the relationship between those two principles? The western film genre, after all, derives from the legendary years in which Christian settlers moved westwards across the North American continent, trying to tame the wilderness as they went because they believed they had a God-given right to do so. This process could only be carried out by force; and many western films have glorified the macho, aggressive stance of characters like Cogburn. Mattie herself starts with an idealised view of him, as she has been told that he is a man of ‘true grit’. She soon begins to see through the swagger and the swearing, but she is obliged to go along with the law of the gun which he espouses, in order to see justice done.

We might, then, wonder where is God’s order to be found, in all the conflict and chaos that we see depicted on the screen. The final use of the hymn certainly suggests that the religious theme is being taken very seriously by the Coen brothers – as does the quotation which forms its epigraph, appearing on the screen at the very beginning: ‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth’ (Proverbs 28:1). Again, this is the language of the law. But to understand the film as a whole, we have to make an important differentiation. For let’s not forget that the most important character of the Christian Bible is the man who, while claiming to fulfil the law, also claims to take us beyond it, issuing in an era of grace.  In this light, a crucial statement of Mattie’s may come back to us as we hear DeMent’s poignant delivery of ‘Everlasting Arms’: ‘You must pay for everything in this world one way or another. There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace.’ It is a powerful statement, which must affect the way we interpret the film. But how?

Well, Mattie’s own journey is, as I say, spiritual; but it involves her acquiring the ‘true grit’ of the film’s title: she proves herself the equal of Cogburn in the violent world of the wild west. By the same token, we see Cogburn being blessed by what we might call ‘true grace’, as espoused and embodied by his young companion. The Coen brothers’ True Grit is the creative exploration of the tension between both principles, without in any way attempting to impose a resolution. As such, it is far more rewarding than the earlier film version, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes widely regarded as their greatest work.

Songs Lost and Stolen by Bella Hardy (Navigator Records)

Ringing Roger, June 2011

Nobody of a certain age can forget the impact of first hearing the original songs of Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They had already shown, along with Ashley Hutchings and others, that traditional folk music could be revitalised and given a contemporary sound. Now, with wonderful works such as ‘Farewell, Farewell’ and ‘The New St George’ (Thompson), or ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’ and ‘Fotheringay’ (Denny), we began to appreciate what might happen when an individual talent with a sense of tradition sets to work. We lost Denny far too early, but Thompson continues to come up with songs of great relevance to our age that also have the authority of both craft and continuity.

I’d heard the first two albums by Bella Hardy and was impressed by her interpretation of traditional songs: for instance, her version of ‘All Things Are Quite Silent’, that moving lament by a wife over the husband press-ganged into the navy, seemed a match even for Maddy Prior’s outstanding version. But I was also intrigued by the original material that she included – not least because, on first hearing, I thought they were traditional. Now she has produced a third album which is composed entirely by herself, and listening to it gives me a similar sensation as I had when I first heard those songs by Thompson and Denny.

The sound of Songs Lost and Stolen is mainly acoustic guitar, fiddle and concertina, with Hardy’s voice being both strong and subtle, both invigorating and intriguing. You can – such a relief these days! – hear every word. Again, it is a voice that is unmistakably English, not gratingly mid-Atlantic; and it is unapologetically regional, not blandly metropolitan. But even when the sound is augmented by several other instruments, including drums and slide guitar, the lyrics come across clearly and cleanly. In every song the music perfectly matches the words, and in every song the sound is simultaneously traditional and contemporary.

It really matters that the lyrics are enhanced by the sound, because they are always worth thinking about. ‘Labyrinth’ is an ingenious retelling of the myth of Theseus, with the singer taking the part of Ariadne, the woman who helped the hero to find his way out of the underground maze once he had slain the Minotaur, only to be subsequently abandoned by him. Here, though, the labyrinth is that of life, love and loss, and the suggestion is that we all wander through it without making connection. It’s a bleak song, but it’s briskly told, and matched by a daring use of instrumentation which becomes increasingly edgy. ‘The Herring Girl’ is a ballad about the young women who worked in the fishing industry along the east coast of both Scotland and England: no use of myth here, but stark social realism, with the protagonist being put on trial for defending herself and her friend against a rapacious stranger. If I hadn’t read the credits, I would have sworn it was at least a century old. ‘Jenny Wren’ is a reflection on the lives of the homeless: here located in New York, with their day-by-day suffering set against the catastrophes of history – the stoic message being that ‘It all comes round again.’ Perhaps the least ‘folky’ of the songs on the album, it has a quietly compulsive effect.

Throughout the album, we are invited to see life as story, life as song – the recurrent wisdom being that one has to accept one’s part in the story and sing as best one can. This is perfectly persuasive, given her narrative skills and her distinctly expressive voice. For me, one of the most memorable tracks is ‘Full Moon Over Amsterdam’. It’s a vision of all the to-ing and fro-ing of life, as people travel the world while ‘clocks dance back and forward / as time shifts so recklessly’: this is all seen under the aspect of eternity, represented by the moon shining down. Of course, that moon always has to appear in a specific time and place: here it’s the time when the moon is full, and it’s Amsterdam; but the beautifully simple refrain, which is so exquisitely sung, lifts us out of time and place, so that we sense the beautiful natural order against which our lives are lived. If I say I’ve not heard anything quite like it since ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’, I trust it will be clear how highly I intend to praise it. But then, I’m confident that this whole album will be widely listened to with pleasure forty years from now.

The Infidel, dir. Josh Appignanesi (Revolver)

Ringing Roger, September 2010

Is it wrong to make fun of religion? If religion represents what its adherents take completely seriously, has anyone got the right to mock their beliefs? Debate usually ends up with a discussion of the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian. Some say that it undermines the Christian faith by laughing at the whole idea of a Messiah; but others say that its real target is the unthinking obedience of his followers. I’m inclined to the latter view, not forgetting a third, all-important consideration: is it actually funny? Well, I still consider that its witty challenge to mindless discipleship stands up well, and moments like this still raise a smile:

BRIAN: Look, you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t need to follow me, you don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for your selves! You’re all individuals!

CROWD: Yes! We’re all individuals!

It’s worth noting that one of the Python team was Terry Jones, who in his spare time was (and is) a scholar of medieval literature, with a special interest in the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Here one thinks of the scathing descriptions of the corrupt clergy of his day which Chaucer included in the ‘General Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales: for example, the worldly, self-indulgent monk. There again, Chaucer makes sure he includes a positive portrait, that of the poor parson, which suggests that the church is not entirely corrupt. By implication, of course, Jesus – whom the parson does his best to imitate – is himself the revered and unnamed inspiration behind the poet’s vision: it is not he who is the target; rather, those who have debased his teaching. You might say that The Life of Brian does something similar: it mocks the very sort of people whom Jesus himself denounced, that is, those who dogmatically follow the letter of religion while entirely missing its spirit.

So how does The Infidel, now out on DVD, compare as a humorous critique of  what can easily go wrong with religion? The main thing to bear in mind is that this film, written by David Baddiel and directed by Josh Appignanesi over thirty years after the Pythons’ masterpiece, addresses a much more difficult context. The Python team only had Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge and the odd Anglican bishop to worry about. Baddiel and Appignanesi are having to make their way across a minefield of religious and cultural anxieties. Here Christianity isn’t the focus, but those other two Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam. All three have witnessed an alarming rise in fanaticism and fundamentalism, but the film carefully avoids criticising the beliefs of either Jews or Muslims; it pulls no punches, however, in addressing the issue of extremism.

The main protagonist of the film is Mahmud Nasir, played with panache by the comedian Omid Dijali. Living a comfortable life as a partner in a minicab company, his faith is so moderate as to be almost non-existent: he seems more devoted to the memory of a 1980s ‘synth pop’ singer than to the teachings of the prophet. His problem is that his son wants to marry into the family of radical jihadist preacher, and so he is expected to convince this dictatorial patriarch of his devoutness and doctrinal purity. If this situation weren’t bad enough, he discovers that he is, in fact, Jewish by birth and Muslim only by adoption. Much of the film is about his quest for identity. Failing to impress his son’s prospective father-in-law with his Islamic credentials, he hardly does better in his attempt to gain access to his dying Jewish father by adopting the mannerisms and expressions taught him by a local taxi driver – initially a hated foe, as a Jew and as a rival for a parking space, but subsequently a dear friend.

Things go from bad to worse when Nasir attends a Free Palestine demonstration, and his Jewish identity becomes known to the Muslims present – and thereafter to the whole nation, thanks to television reporting. It is a real achievement on Baddiel’s and Appignanesi’s part that they can extract so much humour from the increasingly dark world which Nasir plunges into. I won’t reveal the ending, but suffice it to say that the final sequence of the film, in which this very ordinary man proves himself a cultural hero, is quietly impressive – even if the message of the film, about the evils of extremism, is spelt out a little too deliberately.

Without spoiling the plot, it’s worth pointing out that a motif of the film is the idea of having difficulty in seeing. This turns out to be dramatically significant, but it also reminds us of the film’s concern with the way a sense of religious righteousness can blind us to our own weakness and to the needs of our fellow-humans.

Where, though, does it leave us with regard to the choice between Judaism and Islam? Again, I won’t disclose the details of Nasir’s final stance, but in their moderate forms both emerge comparatively unscathed. As far as the experience of watching the film is concerned, though, I’d have to say that the humour belongs mainly to the Jewish side of the equation. To see Omid Digali mime, mumble and moan his way into his new ethnic identity, including an impromptu speech at a Bar Mitzvah ceremony, is hilarious. Not that the humour is an evasion of difficult themes. For instance, when Nasir causes uproar in an office of his local town hall, upon discovering his identity, and is escorted out of the building by a security guard, he laments: ‘You find you’re Jewish and then suddenly a man in uniform is leading you away!’ It’s a one-off joke, perhaps, but it reminds us that, while we all know that fanatical believers in God have always caused trouble, it is what we might call secular religion that lies behind most of the atrocities of the last century: Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism. That’s a sombre note with which to end a review of a very funny film; but since when was comedy not a serious business?

Listening to Van Morrison by Greil Marcus (Faber)

Ringing Roger, August 2010

Forgive me if I start by quoting some of my favourite lines of poetry. They come from T. S. Eliot’s great religious sequence, Four Quartets: ‘Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness.’ Eliot is talking about the way art gestures towards a sacred meaning beyond itself. In the case of music, the sound makes sense only because of the silence – the healing emptiness of the divine – which surrounds and sustains it.

It may seem a far cry from one of the greatest religious poets of the last century to one of the most famous rock musicians, especially if our theme is silence. Popular music has become the inescapable soundtrack to all of our lives – leaking from headphones in railway carriages, blaring from speakers in restaurants, thumping out of passing cars, echoing from next door’s sound system. It is as if the general assumption is that life without noise is unbearable; for many of us, it’s the other way round, of course! But Van Morrison has, throughout his forty-odd year career, been obsessed with what lies on the other side of sound. In ‘Summertime in England’ he sings: ‘And you listen to the silence. Can you feel the silence?’ We know that he is talking about mystical communion, which relies on a willingness to sit quietly without being, in Eliot’s phrase, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’. In case we don’t get the point, he even has a song called ‘Hymns to the Silence’, in which he implies that all his music is written in honour of the sacred soundlessness which lies all around us, but which we seldom hear because we’re addicted to noise.

All this may sound pretentious, but there are a lot of people who take Morrison very seriously. Greil Marcus is one of them. The author of probably the best book ever written about American popular music, Mystery Train, and of one of the most interesting on Bob Dylan, Invisible Republic, he has taken his time to get round to the world’s most famous Irish singer-songwriter. Is Listening to Van Morrison worth the wait? Yes, if you’re of the opinion that the early albums are the best. Marcus is very good at conveying the atmosphere and significance of Astral Weeks, of Tupelo Honey, of St Dominic’s Preview, and of Into the Music. His approach is to use one or two particular songs as keys to the whole albums: eg, ‘Madame George’ for Astral Weeks.  His thesis is that Morrison’s greatest gift is a voice which has what the Irish tenor John McCormack once claimed is a sure sign of genius: the ‘yarragh’. The question to ask of any singer, explained McCormack, is this: ‘is the song singing you?’ Marcus believes that with Morrison this is the case: his voice ‘strikes a note so exalted you can’t believe a mere human being is responsible for it, a note so unfinished and unsatisfied you can understand why the eternal seems to be riding on its back.’

Putting it in the terms we’ve used above, Marcus could be interpreted as saying that the sacred silence is being made manifest in the sound which Morrison makes. Why, then, does he ignore, or even dismiss, most of the explicitly religious music of the past three decades? He doesn’t really explain, but I suspect that he considers that in the later work Morrison is singing about ‘the eternal’ rather than conveying it directly through his voice; in other words, he has lost the yarragh. If so, then I think Marcus is being unfair: true, there is something self-conscious about some of those later albums. But it’s quite an achievement to incorporate into one’s music the traditional wisdom of Zen Buddhism and Christian mysticism, or the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, while still producing music that can inspire, console and, to use a favourite Morrison word, heal. I certainly wouldn’t want to jettison Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, or No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, or Avalon Sunset.

Nor should one forget that that last album afforded Morrison one of his very few ‘hits’, namely ‘Whenever God Shines His Light’ – for which he deserves special praise for proving himself indifferent to the whims of his trendier admirers by (a) releasing an explicitly religious, almost evangelical  ‘single’, and (b) asking Cliff Richard to sing it with him. If the task is to produce ‘hymns to the silence’, that born-again stalwart of British rock’n’roll has as much right as anyone to sing from the same hymn sheet. I think that Morrison’s manifest lack of concern about image and reputation, about who’s in or who’s out, is a good sign that he is concentrating on what really matters.

Though I’ve written about Morrison elsewhere, I’ve often found it difficult to put my finger on what is distinctive about his art. I’m grateful to the author of Listening to Van Morrison for bringing into play that word ‘yarragh’ – suitably indefinable, but having the advantage of actually sounding like the way Morrison sings. My only difference from Marcus is that I think I can hear the yarragh in more work of Morrison’s than Marcus can. Perhaps you can too?

Music on YouTube: Dominic Williams

Ringing Roger, July 2010

Dominic Williams has been appearing in folk clubs for about three decades, performing his own and other people’s songs, as well as traditional material. He has played at the Edinburgh Festival, and has also appeared several times on Radio 2. To me, the way he delivers his own lyrics is very striking: a mixture of fragility and resolution. I would strongly recommend looking up some of his performances on ‘You Tube’. If you’ve not tried such a thing before, take it from someone who’s only just started himself that it’s really easy! I’ll just offer three examples which you might want to search out.

1) ‘Tommy’s Lot’

This is Williams’ classic lament about the Great War – and, by extension, all wars. If I say that the song and its accompanying film constitute a brilliantly economical history lesson, that might make it sound too dull. Put simply, I’ve rarely come across such a vivid reminder of the price paid by millions of ordinary men for the incompetence and hunger for power of their so-called betters. The idiocy and horror of war are conveyed in sharp, searching lyrics, accompanied by skilfully selected images and a sound that can only be described as superb – delicate but deliberate, lyrical but incisive.

Go to Dominic’s YouTube Channel. Once you’re there, you’ll find links for most of his other material, including:

2) ‘Blue Skies Gone’

Here we move from historical disaster to ecological catastrophe. This is an elegy for nature, in our age of planetary crisis, as well as an expression of a personal sense of loss and bewilderment. The songwriter wonders what has happened to the land, to the climate, to the seas and to the very heavens above our heads, registering his own disorientation both sensitively and succinctly. Although the title might just be an ironic echo of Irving Berlin’s uplifting ditty, made famous as performed by Fred Astaire, I suspect that what Williams has chiefly in mind is Marvin Gaye’s ‘Mercy Mercy Me’, with its simple, searching line: ‘Where did all the blue skies go?’ If so, then this song makes a worthy pairing with that: each is a classic ‘Ecology Song’, to use Gaye’s subtitle. The accompanying film, complete with sound effects, moves between images of family & friends and of the natural world. The effect is poignant and thought-provoking.

3) ‘Prime Cut Meat and Fine French Wine’

If ‘Tommy’s Lot’ is about history, and if ‘Blues Skies Gone’ is about ecology, then this song is about ideals. It explores what it feels like to be alive now, having come of age in the 1960s – the decade of flower power and the rise of the counterculture. The question it asks, essentially, is what went wrong? Williams addresses an old friend whom he used to think was really radical and alternative, but who has ended up as a pillar of the establishment, enjoying an affluent way of life and espousing reactionary principles. Yet there is compassion, both in the lyric and in the delivery; and Williams is canny enough to include himself in this shrewd assessment of how ideals get abandoned. Moreover, there is more than a hint that, in the first place, those ideals had been adopted by both of them, like so many others, as a matter of fashion rather than conviction.

In all three songs, the songwriter manages to explore what we might call the big issues while registering their impact on individual lives. The political and the personal are brought together, to powerful effect. The songs can stand perfectly well on their own, but I do think that ‘watching’ them is really worth the effort – even if you have to unravel the mysteries of the internet in order to do so. Do have a go!