Wishbone Ash not what they used to be shock

A post in the Graun's Notes and Queries section the other day about a "forgotten prog rock masterpiece", Wishbone Ash's 1972 album Argus, brought in the predictable replies from nostalgic hippies and took me back to the days when I sat in my study at school, loon pants at the ready, nodding appreciatively at the opening chords of Throw Down the Sword.

I searched for Argus on Spotify and was indulging in some Proustian moments when my son came in. "God, Dad", he said, "is this the kind of crap you had to listen to in the prog era?"

For the uninitiated (and like most initiations, this is one you probably don't really want to have), Wishbone Ash were a guitar-based four-piece from Torquay, and Argus was a sort of concept-album (a term which should have the cautious heading for the hills at top speed), on whose cover a helmeted centurion type figure wearing a cape looks out over a misty landscape, probably somewhere near Basingstoke. I never owned a copy, but it was ubiquitous amongst the record collections of my friends, and I can still hum bits of it now. Wishbone Ash did quite good business in the mid-70s, but were fading already when 1976 came and punk swept prog rock away.

In considering the pitfalls of nostalgia, you have to remember not just how bad a lot of the music of your youth now seems, but how bad a lot of it seemed even at the time. Whilst liking Argus quite a bit, I also knew that it was pretty naff. For one thing, the idea of a collection of rock songs that might have been sung around the campfire by Dark Ages warriors (had they only been possessed of Marshall amplifiers, a Gibson Flying V guitar and an electricity supply) required some suspension of disbelief. For another, although Wishbone Ash wrote some reasonable tunes, the band's lyrics are up there with Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak - "Tonight there's going to be a jailbreak / Somewhere in this town" (perhaps at the jail, chaps?) - teetering atop the pinnacle of bad songwriting.

"I thought I had a girl", sang bassist Martin Turner on Blowin' Free, their heads-down rock-a-boogie crowd pleaser. "I know / because I seen her". Pretty conclusive evidence, you may think. And elsewhere, "There were times when I stood at death's own door / only hoping for an answer", a piece of existential reportage that stood in sharp contrast to my own moments of teenage-angst, times when I stood waiting in the rain for the bus into Pontefract on a Saturday afternoon. "And there's a time", burbled Turner on Time Was, "waking up / and feeling down / it's when you have to pick your feet / up from the ground". Well I guess the libretto of Der Ring des Nibelungen has some less than starry moments.

Was anything good about Wishbone Ash? If like me you think the sound of the electric guitar played pretty loud is one of humanity's more compelling musical creations, the band provided a fairly hefty dose. Andy Powell, of the Gibson Flying V, was a competent riff-meister of the thousand-notes-per-minute variety. Throw Down the Sword, for all its portentous folly, opened with an ominous minor key ostinato over a snare-drum roll, and morphed into a stirring threnody that exalted at the same time as making your own life seem utterly mundane by comparison (a bit like Mahler then). Leaf and Stream had a beautiful pastoral lilt, borne along by the glowing tone of Ted Turner's back-pickup Strat. Warrior was a defiant stomp, which you could just about imagine being shouted out by hairy-arsed Saxons, huddled in a muddy round house looking out at the rain. Listen to the opening of Sometime World - the similarity to Television's classic Marquee Moon, a record of stratospherically higher stature, is uncanny.

Wishbone Ash are still going; or rather, there appear, curiously, to be two versions of the band going - one led by Martin Turner and one by Andy Powell. And they have both been playing Argus live, in its entirety. It must be a funny life, a bit like being a musical Ancient Mariner, keeping on playing half a dozen songs that briefly made you famous nearly forty years ago.

My son has been born too late. Aged 16, he yearns to be growing up in 1977 during punk's brief hey-day: a couple of weeks ago he went with friends to see Stiff Little Fingers, a band I saw play in Nottingham over thirty years ago, but who are still apparently doing the rounds, paying the mortgage. He is dissatisfied with pop music now. "It almost seems", he said, "as if it's like it was before punk, and we're just waiting now for punk to come and sweep it all away".

There's a moral here, but I'm not sure what it is. Listening to something that was new thirty years ago is a funny way of coping with the staleness of now. And if something comes to sweep it all away, it won't be punk, because that's already happened.

And even if it is swept away, don't imagine that's the end - it might well come creeping back one day, a bit older and fatter, playing live somewhere at a medium-sized venue near you.

More red noses

Policy madness has spread from Red Nose Day to the Coalition government. Hot on the heels of Comic Relief's wilful blind-eye turned to the damage done to Kenyan health-care by the country's doctors' exodus abroad - to the UK, amongst other places - comes news that David Cameron has given a couple of hundred million quid to Pakistan for new schools.

The obvious question here is whether the government should be giving money for schools to another country at a time when it is making cutbacks in its own education programme; Cameron would perhaps say that he needed to mend fences after his remarks to the effect that Pakistan has faced both ways when it comes to terrorism (a statement as undiplomatic as it was true); he might also point out that educating young Pakistanis away from the madrassas might lessen the chances of their turning to extremism (although our home-grown terrorists seem to be thriving amidst the further educational opportunities provided by Britain's universities); whatever, I doubt that a cost-benefit analysis has been done.

The other less obvious point relates to my recent Comic Relief post. A Pakistani MP I heard interviewed on the radio defended Cameron's gift, as you might expect. The interviewer, Aasma Mir, pressed the MP on why Pakistan couldn't pay for schools itself - after all it was a country with a lot of very rich people, in which corruption was rife and tax evasion routine; Mir might have added that it was a country which could afford a nuclear weapons programme. The MP blustered. What, Mir, asked, was Pakistan's top rate of tax? Amidst more bluster came the answer: 35%.

So there you have it. Britain, a country with a marginal tax rate of 50%, presently cutting its education programme, is funding schools in Pakistan, a country with a marginal rate of 35%.

Just as it might be better for the UK to train its own doctors and encourage Kenyans to practice medicine at home, perhaps it might be better for the UK to show Pakistan how to set up a functioning tax system.

effing Ferguson

Wayne Rooney's "foul-mouthed" (copyright tabloids everywhere) outburst to Sky's cameras on Saturday was no doubt wrong and reprehensible. Despite my Man U sympathies I have never found Rooney a likeable character - typical Scouser actually, were it not for the fact that he has never to my knowledge ever said anything remotely charming or funny.

Inevitably the press are calling for his public evisceration. But who should do the punishing? The FA? The Premier League? Hardly. Bad language is used daily in professional football to, about and in front of referees, by both players and fans alike. As with many other aspects of a game in which cheating is rife, the authorities know perfectly well what is wrong and do absolutely nothing to prevent it. For them to punish Rooney would be the grossest hypocrisy. For all its ritualised violence, rugby does the discipline job much better.

Meanwhile, United march on towards a record 19th title. On Saturday their comeback had the mark of champions; their closest rivals Arsenal on the other hand, away at Blackburn, played like eunuchs. If Ferguson's team is successful again, he will truly have fulfilled the promise, made all those years ago, to "knock Liverpool off their perch".

OK, what he actually said was, "knock Liverpool off their fucking perch". So perhaps Ferguson isn't the man to punish Rooney either.

the schlock of the new

Two recent visits to the Opera - one Opera North, the other at the RNCM - have had me thinking about novelty in art. Samuel Barber's Vanessa is a late-romantic melodrama in which the eponymous heroine, having waited twenty years for her lover to return, finds herself competing with her niece for the attentions of his son. Mieczyslaw Weinberg's The Portrait, on the other hand, concerns a struggling artist who compromises himself for fame and fortune, with disastrous results; Weinberg, a friend of Shostakovitch, is enjoying a resurgence, although on the face of it it's hard to see why - his opera I thought badly structured and paced, the music of uneven quality.

The two pieces had one thing firmly in common. They both sounded dated. Of course the Barber, first produced in the early 50s, was firmly out of step even at the time - a lush mixture of Strauss and Berg, with even some Puccinian flourishes at the emotional climaxes. But the Weinberg, much more aggressive and modernist in tone, had suffered just as much: I found myself thinking, "Ah yes. This kind of musical language", and without much pleasure.

The BBC producer John Walters once said that he ceased to be working class the first time he tasted an avocado. Thus the transforming power of novelty. But what did Walters think the second time he tasted one? Or the third? There's an old story of an 18th century gent showing a friend round his newly landscaped grounds. "The theme of my garden, sir," he says, "is one of surprise". His friend, a wag, replies, "But what, sir, is the theme the second time one walks around it?"

For the new is only new once. When it is no longer new, we are left with a thing's inherent qualities, be they avocado or opera. I didn't enjoy the Weinberg much. Once I might have been knocked backwards by its novel savagery. But now the music-loving public has heard a fair bit of this stuff. Shostakovitch did it better (and even Shostakovitch wrote some dross). The Barber, for all the muddiness of its plotting, I enjoyed a lot more. For my taste, it is over written and over-orchestrated, but Barber has a compassion for his characters (which I am afraid I find hard to detect in Britten) and an ability to write memorable music which suits their predicament. I can still hum some of the tunes 36 hours later.

Bernard Keeffe, my old conducting teacher, used to say that what makes music last is the quality of the invention. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, I prefer a more utilitarian explanation. Music lasts if people will keep on paying to hear it. Newness and originality are not on their own enough. On this score, dated or not, Barber's music will survive; but Weinberg should enjoy his day in the sun.

myth busting #4

It's time we had another one of these.

The Coalition is taking a reckless gamble with the economy.

Like many myths, today's contains an element of truth; but it is an incomplete part of a larger picture, and the larger picture renders it misleading.

Yes, cutting spending at a time when the economy is emerging from recession is a gamble. To be clear, the coalition risks a double-dip recession if taking demand out of the economy makes it start shrinking again. But what about the alternative? Labour's policy - smaller cuts, and slower - involves a different kind of gamble, namely that the gilt markets will be sufficiently convinced that we're serious about reducing the deficit to carry on lending us the money, at rates we can afford, or at all.

There are two reasons for thinking that the Coalition's gamble is in fact much less reckless than Labour's. The first is that the consequences of losing the gamble are much worse if we don't cut fast enough. Losing the confidence of the gilt markets will either drive us into the arms of the IMF, in which case you will see cuts which make Osborne's efforts resemble the proverbial vicarage tea party, or, worse, will force the UK to default on its debts: if that happens we will be living within our means not in four years or ten, but now, today. Because no-one will lend to us any more. Then the money truly will have run out.

But it's not just that the consequences of Labour's gamble failing are worse. The mechanism on which they are gambling is so much more febrile. For Labour proposes gambling on the patience of the gilt markets. A market is a human construct, dependent on human qualities, ruled by greed at the top and fear at the bottom. A market can change its mind twice in the same afternoon. And in this case it is a market that was making anxious noises about Britain's credit rating more than a year ago.

The coalition on the other hand is gambling on something slow moving and to some extent quantifiable, namely the ability of the economy to grow its way out of recession at the same time as a certain amount of demand is being withdrawn in spending cuts. It's not just that this is a more impersonal mechanism than the excitable gilt market: it is also a mechanism that can to some extent be measured and tweaked as it operates - by altering tax rates for example or, in a last resort, by more quantatitive easing.

Although I have no idea whether George Osborne has got it right, or whether we'd be better off in the hands of Ed "no cuts are necessary" Balls, for these reasons, given the choice of where to put my money, I'd bet the farm on the Coalition any day.

Economics is not an exact science. As Irwin Stelzer said, "Decimal points were invented to show that economic forecasters have a sense of humour". So whatever we do now is a gamble.

institutionally rubbish #2

A lot of hot air in the paper yesterday marking the 10th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's death at the hands of racist thugs. Was the Met Police force still "institutionally racist", as the Macpherson report had it?

In a former life I used to be a solicitor in East London, working with largely black clients, in and out of its police stations in the early hours of the morning, dealing with mostly white police officers. Yes, many of them were racist; but that was not because the institution was racist - in fact it had tried strenously at management level to do the right thing - it was because Met police officers tended to come from lower middle or working class backgrounds, often outside London, and thus tended to be from the social class most likely to be overtly racist and to have least personal experience of living and working alongside black people. Moreover, because the areas in which they worked were largely black, most of the criminals were black too. So it's not hard to see how the black = criminal equation grew up in the minds of these officers. Not that that's any excuse, mind.

I thought of this today because an independent report has looked into the death of Stuart Lubbock in Michael Barrymore's swimming pool. And guess what? It says that the police failed to secure the site and failed to secure crucial items which might have been used to assault Lubbock and which later "disappeared". In all, six complaints by Lubbock's father were upheld.

For anyone used to seeing the way the police work from the inside, the real lesson of both these cases is that the police are very often mediocre at what they do. The Met were probably never institutionally racist, but they were certainly institutionally rubbish.

PS This post was originally put up in February 2009. I've posted it again in its entirety because of news yesterday that the Met have had to apologise for failing to nick the rapist and robber Delroy Grant, aka the Night Stalker, on one of many previous opportunities. After the most egregious lapse - witness sees Grant's car leaving crime scene, Grant's wife confirms that it's his, lead then not followed up - Grant is estimated to have committed over 140 further offences.

Red noses all round

Like most people, I have deeply equivocal feelings about giving to beggars. Fork out, and you're funding someone's drug habit; keep your hands in your pockets and you're off to hell via the entrance marked "Scrooge". So it was that last Friday I sat down with my children to watch Children in Need with the usual sensation of unease.

In between the segments where celebs were mildly / very / not at all funny, simultaneously soothing their consciences and boosting their careers (the apotheosis of the win/win situation), were heart-rending films of terribly poor people, mostly in Kenya, living in shocking circumstances. David Tennant reported from a hospital where one young doctor, bespectacled and earnest, laboured in inadequate conditions to treat a never-ending stream of anxious parents bearing glassy-eyed infants, most in the final toils of malarial infection. "Give a fiver", said Tennant. "Give a tenner. Buy mosquito nets. Buy malaria testing kits".

Graham Greene once said that every artist's heart contains a sliver of ice, and, aware of the perhaps justified emotional manipulation going on, I said aloud, "Where are all the old Kenyan doctors? Why is it you only see the young ones in these programmes?" And then amidst a horrified silence, "Probably working in the NHS, that's where".

When I repeated this remark around the dinner-table with friends the following night there was an audible intake of breath. I had no idea whether it was true or not, which was clearly reckless. But I do now. If you google "kenyan doctors in uk" the first thing that comes up is an article published on the Bio Med Central website by some World Health Organisation academics, which confirms extensive migration of Kenyan doctors, not just to the UK, where about 70 seem to be working, but to other western countries as well.

"Our study", says the conclusion, "estimated the economic loss incurred by Kenya as a result of emigration of one doctor to be about US$ 517,931 and one nurse to be US$ 338,868. However, we suspect that the magnitude of the socioeconomic loss due to brain drain is likely to be even larger than our estimates.... Developed countries continue to deprive Kenya of millions of dollars worth of invaluable investments made in the production of health workers.... Economic arguments notwithstanding, ultimately the price of emigration of human resources for health from Kenya to developed nations is paid in unnecessary debility, morbidity, human suffering and premature death among Kenyan people. This unacceptable situation should be urgently reversed..."

No kidding.

African poverty is attributable to a variety of political factors, including past and present interference by the West, the lack of effective democratic institutions, the lack of fair trade, and a widespread culture of corruption. It is arguable that giving money on Red Nose Day does no more than spread a small quantity of sticking plaster over the gaping wounds.

The people from Comic Relief would no doubt say, "Fair enough; but we are putting the politics on one side; we aren't interested in that bit of it; we are only interested in helping individuals whose plight is desperate". To which I would say, "OK, but by applying the sticking plaster you are helping to sustain a fiction, which is that Africa's problems can be made alright if we in the West give a tenner here and there. But that is untrue. At root, Africa's problems are political. Migration of skilled medical staff is a political issue. How can you ignore it when it's right under your noses? In your own flipping film?"

It may be a small point amidst the general misery, but as far as I know there is no shortage of British people who would quite like to be doctors. Why then do we have to import them?

Towards the end of the evening we gave Comic Relief £50. Better to be a mug than be mean. But I still feel a mug.