BIFOCALS / RITUAL EXCHANGES

https://vimeo.com/461636449 Me and my pal JD in Sheffield have played music of one sort and another for most of our lives, at least until this part of them when we havn't at all. Having put a song together using toy keyboards and drum machines it struck me as good idea to send it to him for a bit of  distanced collaboration. What came back was great, he surrounded my track with some things that provided good  options and others that once you heard them were instantly right and part of the thing. Jim Alexander is a pal from Ulverston, we seem to have done a fair bit of work together without really meaning to,,,either for his Fine Art degree or on community drama projects for Dalton Litfest and  Kate Davis. Jim told me of his new animation figures and showed me some exercises and lighting tests he'd done with them.  I was struck by how closely they seemed to follow the narrative of the song, and so I cut the files to fit the first couple of verses, using the same few f...

  The full Radiophrenia Broadcast of  "The Tide Will Turn":  https://soundcloud.com/bifocals-2013 About a year ago I was heading over the North York moors to talk to Margaret Noble, nee Hutton, whose family planted the Whitby Horngarth for the best part of a century in the muck of the North Harbour.   Margaret lives in Fylingthorpe, where I'd just spoken to Lol Hodgson, Court Leet Bailiff and the current custodian of the service since the turn of the century, the Court Leet having taken it on in the 80's. Lol talked me through the routine I'd seen him undertake earlier in the  year ; the finding and cutting of the hazel, the meeting with Hornblower Tim Osbourne on the harbour wall, and the planting and the hornblast and  the chanting. He talked around the service; you saw him as a kid bemused by it, and felt it arrive in his life through his office and grow into him, he carries his  care for it and his commitment to it like muck on his boots that never...

 There is something to be said for pulling an  event before someone else tells you have to.   The Hallowe'en Candlelit Walk looked do-able for a while..the will was there...a fewer tickets, groups of 6 and under, more space . ..all options were explored  but it became hard to imagine the bustle of a mustering crowd without also seeing the possible cost. But the will was still there, and The Walk became a welcoming and responsible shuffle around the Gill, with throbbing LED mushrooms, music and projections , fire dancers,  displays like bright shrines in front of houses near the Mill, and  waxy sentinels watching from the trees.    I took the big witch for a cackling walk around town, provoking screams  from Chippy Bank Customers huddling in front of the carpet shop and an attempted good-natured piggyback launched from the alley at the side of Tesco. There were people around; I danced in Market Street with kids and parents and, at ...

  When you get above a certain level football sees supporters as an inconvenience, there to be patronised, fleeced, sold crap, and whipped up until they burst into tears on Five Live as evidence of their 'passion'. The passion expended on safely securing broadcasting income is the one expenditure that no club minds incurring. Which is why players are currently playing to empty stadiums under testing regimes  unavailable to the rest of the population. The broadcasting money musn't be given back. Get 'em out on that pitch.,                                                            Even when Newcastle stank the place out with their mooted  takeover by the journalist-murdering Bin Salman gang, it was only when he was seen to be profiting from bootleg sports broadcasting that anyone in football got worked up about it. Left to bu...

Ulverston's gentleman anarchist Martin Gilbert was a student in the USA during the late 60's and early 70's. During this time he did a bit of what you might expect and a bit of what you might not. To supplement his studies Martin sold the alternative press on the streets of  Atlanta and San Franscisco. Haight-Ashbury.  Short, sweet, illustrated  and in no way the whole story, Flypaper 4 looks at the times through the papers, flyers and community newsletters  he brought back with him, excerpts from a chat with Martin and from email exchanges with Stephanie Coffin, co-founder of The Great Speckled Bird.  Available here..along with gratifyingly small numbers of issues 1, 2 and 3 . https://www.johnhallartist.com/product-page/flypaper-4

  Despite lockdown, HORNGARTH has been seen at Furness Tradition Festival, Whitby at Home and is currently on offer to members of the Folklore Society via a link on their blog.   https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o3Wxv-eB3ivi4b5KM3sKNrkZ2HSP_Wlx/view?usp=sharing An audio piece " The Tide Will Turn' will offer another angle on the service hacking down and weaving interviews, field recording , archive material and cassette recordings made by participants to evoke the mixture of superstition, social obligation and inconvenience that has followed the Whitby Horngarth Service from its roots in rituals of rogation to the present day, through 900 years of recorded observance. It includes the voices of hear several generations of the family that delivered the service on pein of losing their land, the current Court Leet Bailiff of Fyling, various explainers and commentators, and of the service itself.

In 1971 logos were usually the preserve of  the prog bands.  Angular, heraldic or biomorphic, they spoke to male fixations of sex, power,  superiority and complexity.  Using graphic styles inherited from the 60's  underground and then diluted to be at least readable, they lent themselves to careful analysis and faithful reproduction. Rendered halfway accurately,  they could signal across a crowded comprehensive school playing field  from the back of an army store rucksack. In the world of pop,  logos were rare. The Jackson Five's wasn't always used even by their record company, but the fans picked up on it and drew it into their own vocabulary of intimacy and  emotional investment in the groups joyuous, consoling music. You saw it on smaller, personal items; Pencil Cases, Diaries and School Jotters where it jostled with coded messages and names of friends picked out in a soft-block lettering. This was appropriated from the bubblefonts...