SALUTING SINGER/SONGWRITER JOHN STEWART

Here's a salute to one of my all-time favourite singer/songwriters, John  Stewart, born 5 September 1939 (died at 68, 19 January 2008).

He came up through the American folk scene in the 1950s and 1960s. He was in The Cumberland Three and then The Kingston Trio whose records included Tom Dooley and Greenback Dollar. In 1967, he turned solo and scored pop music gold by writing Daydream Believer, a massive hit for The Monkees.

I saw him at the Apollo Theatre in London in 1979, around the time his album Bombs Away Dream Babies came out. Some of the tracks on it feature Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.

There used to be a fanzine called Omaha Rainbow, after one of his songs, about John Stewart. The issue after the two nights at the Apollo contained a comment that the second night was the best show. The first night was a bit nervy and tense. The comment: "The first night was like getting a phone call in the middle of a fuck."

My favourite song of his by far is July, You're A Woman, from the California Bloodlines album (apparently recorded in the same studio at the same time as Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline.

July, You're A Woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p20OGw-PC3c

One of my all-time favourite live albums is The Complete Phoenix Concerts

Here's a gallery of some album covers.

Cheer up sleepy Jean............

SUCKING THE JOY OUT OF LIFE

What a strange era we live in.  It is an age of guilt, worry and fear. It is an age personified by the Eeyore news presentation of people like Huw Edwards and others. There seems to be (at least to this viewer) a kind of enjoyment in delivering news in a droll, downbeat fashion (furrowed brow essential, as is an occasional shake of the head or a dramatic glance away from the camera).  The overuse of the 'breaking news' banner on TV screens just adds to that sit-up-and-take-notice angst that we are subjected to whether or not the news story breaking is important, or is indeed news.

Radio phone-in shows just stir the pot and add to the problem rather than making much effort to ease minds about whatever topics of the day are deemed worthy of airtime.

Looking at the front pages of daily newspapers over a period of time suggests that, unless there is a big national or international story that captures the collective attention of editors and readers, there are diverse headlines about all sorts of stuff from celebrity boo-hoo stories to weather warnings to campaigns for whatever to a member of the Royal family sneezing without a hankie in sight.

Politics, media and business have always latched on to the guilt, worry and fear bandwagons to influence, persuade and convince people to part with their votes, their loyalties and, of course, their money.

We are now cursed with an avalanche of TV and gadget channels and, if you watch them long enough or regularly, there is a bombardment of advertisements about charitable causes, insurance, health, finances, etc that wave guilt, worry and fear in front of us along with, of course, product and conscience solutions that we must buy or sign up to or else we may as well get on the road to hell and final damnation.

Politicians love the guilt/worry/fear tactic because it is their job to change behaviour and shackle everybody to their ways of thinking.  Their job is not to serve the electorate (only important in the run-up to elections) but to do whatever they like once in power.  If you listen carefully enough in the days after a General Election, you can hear shredding machines sucking Rennies and burping because of indigestion from gorging on useless manifestos.

This is an era when the powerful and influential combine to suck all the joy out of life by ensuring through relentless drip-drip-drip brainwashing that we feel guilty, that we worry and that we fear for our lives, livelihoods and loved ones every day.

I am reminded of a couple of things. Go to YouTube and look up a clip from the film Network starring Peter Finch who plays a newsman pushed to the edge, urging us to stick our heads out the window and yell: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." Incidentally, Network came out in 1976, so guilt, worry and fear are not new.

There is a book, published in the 1950s, called The Hidden Persuaders* by Vance Packard. Look it up. It is more relevant today that it was back then.  Today, the persuaders are not hidden. They are out in the open and in our faces.

And then there is the depressing sight of UK politicians at their grubbiest and deceitful in their campaigns, lying, threatening, bitching, and showing that they really are hustlers out to con their way to victory and power - and most of these horrible specimens walk away rather than help clear up the mess they've made . Another thing, politicians should learn the art of shutting the hell up.

And don’t get me started on Trump!

Sod the lot of them as much as you can. Get up and go for a walk in the park, along the coast, out in the countryside and remind yourself that there is more, much, much more to life than the messages of doom and gloom that surround us.  Reclaim life's joys. They are still out there. Resist the agendas and campaigns, blatant or subtle, to make us feel guilty, to make us worry and to make us fearful.

I'm off to watch ducks on a lake for a while.

*
The blurb from The Hidden Persuaders:

"What makes us buy, believe and even vote the way we do?

Do you know:
How many of us are being influenced and manipulated in the patterns of our everyday lives?
How people's desires, needs, drives are probed in order to find points of vulnerability?
How the probers aim to influence the state of our minds and channel our behaviour as citizens?
How television (1957 remember) conditions children to be loyal enthusiasts of a product whether they are old enough to consume it or not?
How political parties merchandise their candidates and issues using the same methods that business has developed to sell goods?"

CARRY ON SIXTY!

What a Carry On! Carry On Sergeant launched the series 60 years ago in 1958. In their day, most of these films were well-scripted, very funny and beautifully performed by a brilliant troupe of actors. These days of instant insult, offence and apoplexy, some will find them appalling while those, like me, still find them funny. Not all of them, mind you, and certainly not the abomination that was Carry On Columbus in 1992.

So, today, I salute a pretty successful British film franchise, producer Peter Rogers, director Gerald Thomas, writers Norman Hudis and Talbot Rothwell, Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Connor, Peter Butterworth, Hattie Jacques, Terry Scott, Bernard Bresslaw, Jack Douglas and, of course, Barbara Windsor.



1958 Sergeant
1959 Nurse
1959 Teacher



1960 Constable
1961 Regardless
1962 Cruising
1963 Cabby
1963 Jack



1964 Spying
1964 Cleo
1965 Cowboy
1966 Screaming
1966 Don't Lose Your Head
1967 Follow That Camel



1967 Doctor
1968 Up The Khyber
1969 Camping
1969 Again Doctor
1970 Up The Jungle
1971 Henry
1971 At Your Convenience
1972 Matron
1972 Abroad
1973 Girls



1974 Dick
1975 Behind
1976 England
1978 Emmanuelle
1992 Columbus

FEATURE WRITING IDEAS SEPTEMBER 2018

Hello.

Here are ideas for September features. Some of them may be in your diary already. Some of them may be added to your diary after reading this. Some features may be written by in-house journalists. But maybe, just maybe, I can write something for you.

Let me know what you want, word count, deadline and fee and I will get to work. 

Here are some ideas and, if I can help, I look forward to hearing from you. If anything else comes up, I'll add to the list.

joecushnan@aol.com

FREELANCE WRITING IDEAS FOR SEPTEMBER 2018:

4 Search engine Google founded 20 years ago

4 UK Number One - I Just Gotta Get A Message To You by The Bee Gees 50 years ago

11 UK Number One - Hey Jude by The Beatles 50 years ago

10 Rin Tin Tin born 100 years ago (d. 1932)

15 Muhammad Ali became world heavyweight boxing champion for the third time 40 years ago

25 UK Number One - Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkin 50 years ago

27 The hippy musical Hair opened in London 50 years ago.

28 Alexander Fleming discovered 'mould juice' renamed penicillin 100 years ago.

29 Gustav Holst's The Planets suite premiered in London 100 years ago.

30 Little Women (volume 1) by Louisa May Alcott published 150 years ago

BANK BUILDINGS, BELFAST

In 1974 I was twenty years old and one of my very favourite haunts in Belfast was Smithfield Market. The musty smell was wonderful, stale, damp and sour, drawing me in to browse and to absorb some sense of the olden days. It had been standing in its unique untidy fashion for over 200 years displaying and selling all manner of stuff from livestock way back to furniture, antiques, books, bric-a-brac, everything queer and quaint you could think of and much more that had never crossed your mind. "I Buy Anything" said Kavanagh, McQuillan's "Records To Buy & Sell", Hugh Greer "Bookseller" for well-thumbed tomes on every subject known to man, key cutters, scissor sharpeners, clothes in heaps and old knackered tools that still had a few jobs in them. It was a gloriously evocative quadrangle of merchants and moochers.

Then came the fire in May 1974. What a blaze, what sadness in the ash. The fire was started deliberately and in a matter of hours Smithfield was gone. The new buildings hadn't a hope of recapturing what had been there before. I remember feeling very emotional about it all.

I was born and raised in Belfast. I worked in British Home Stores. I know the city well. I have pounded the streets many times. I have loved the architecture and the good history, the brilliant writers who have written great words in praise of the place. Recently, I read extracts from Cathal O'Byrne's As I Roved Out which has a sweet gloss to it but nonetheless underlines the character and characters of old Belfast.

So, it was with similar dismay and emotion that I watched the Bank Buildings engulfed in flames and smoke. It was and is heartbreaking to see (soppiness alert) another old friend facing total destruction. 
The building carried its own fair amount of history, transforming from a bank in 1785, to a bishop's house, to retail stores, most recently Primark. Like a lot of city centre buildings, it was a target for bombers and arsonists during the so-called Troubles. But repaired and refurbished, it was restored and opened for business once again. This time things look too far gone for restoration.

It is good news that no one was hurt. The cause of the fire will be revealed eventually. But (as I write I am unsure about the shell of the building's chances of survival) when I come home to Belfast on my next visit, if it is gone, then I might just shed a tear.

WHO ARE YOU?

WHO ARE YOU?

 

I am researching and writing a memoir. At its core is my father's disappearing act. In 1960, he left our Belfast home, his wife and seven young children and vanished. The next we heard of him was when we were informed he had died at 57 in Clapham, London, in 1982.

This is a mystery of 22 'missing' years.

The memoir, by default, has expanded into a family history story but my father is the main character.

I have discovered a lot of information about him from 1960 to 1982. I have communicated with people who knew him forty years ago. I know where he lived, where he worked, the pub he frequented, the church he may have attended and his burial plot.

But, a couple of photographs intrigue and frustrate me. In his possessions there was a picture of a woman and a picture of a young boy (below). I am estimating they were taken in the mid-1970s.

The woman may be called Mary English.

The boy might be her son.

My father may have had a relationship with the woman.

The boy might be my father's son.

The boy might be my half-brother.

The boy, when older, may have joined the Navy.

CLUES THAT MIGHT JOG MEMORIES

1960s/1970s/early 1980s

Clapham, London

John Cushnan aka John Kelly, my father

Orlando Road, Clapham, his bedsit address

Rose & Crown pub, The Polygon, Clapham, his local, landlord back then, Jim Nicholson

'Scottish' George, my father's friend

But...... who are the two people pictured.

If anyone has any information, please contact me via joecushnan@aol.com

SIX WRITERS AND ME ON BELFAST

Six writers and me reflect on Belfast:

Sean O’Faolain in An Irish Journey (1940) wrote: ‘Walk up Donegall Place any night about seven, passing the strolling poor, factory hands, clerks, mill-workers, shipyard workers, domestics, and go into the big hotel a few hundred yards up, where you find the higher executives and employers enjoying themselves in the best eat-and-swill manner of an English industrial town. You have before you an outline of Belfast’s social structure. There is no aristocracy – no culture – no grace – no leisure worthy of the name. It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskeys, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-filled poor. It is brutal.’

In 1983’s The Kingdom of the Sea, travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux wrote: ‘I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city. It had a bad face – mouldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences.’

The writer and critic V. S. Pritchett in Midnight Oil (1971) wrote: ‘Belfast was detestable. The only decent hotel at that time was grubby. The city is the most dreadful in Ireland. The Ulster accent, a bastard lowland Scots, is harsh and is given a sort of comic bluster by the glottal stop imported from Glasgow. The humour is boisterous, the fanaticism is brutal and relations between Ulster employers and workers is rough.’

The dramatist and poet, Frank Frankfort Moore wrote in 1914: ‘Belfast is really a wonder. It has been growing within the past seventy years as few towns in the world have been, but it has not outgrown its strength. It has been well looked after, morally as well as physically, and the result is that today it can do what few other cities can do. It can launch the largest ships that the world has ever seen; it can spend nearly a quarter of a million making a dock that will enable the biggest ships in the world to be repaired; it has the largest rope works in existence; and the largest spinning mill. There is no city in the kingdom that can compete with Belfast.’

Denis O’D. Hanna offered this from an architect’s point of view (slightly paraphrased by me) in The Face of Ulster (1952): ‘What shall I say of Belfast? First of all it is a beautifully set city, the best in the British Isles. Belfast is alert, efficient and dependable. What it sets its hand to it will ultimately do well.’

In 1843, writer William Makepeace Thackeray found ‘the town of Belfast to be really as neat, prosperous and handsome a city as need be seen.’

And this is what I wrote in an exile piece for the Belfast Telegraph in 2015: 'It is a city to shake a fist at and to embrace seconds later. It is stuffed full of creative people and more than a smattering of political slabber. Belfast is in my blood. It is where I began.'