Love and Liberty

Fifty days until the General Election. Fifty days of nothing but ‘why Britain is terrible’. Labour say it’s terrible now they’re in, so put back in the people who made it terrible in the first place. Tories say it was terrible when they were in, so don’t let them back in. UKIP say Britain has been terrible ever since we let any of ‘them’ in and hang up their ‘No blacks, no Polish, no gays’ signs. And the Lib Dems say it’ll be a bit less terrible if we’re a bit in. So, today, only things I love about Britain.

1 – My greatest Briton
…and Earthling, and citizen of the Universe, of them all, my husband, Richard Flowers

2 – Love and marriage
Having the right to marry the person I love, if they want to too, or not to marry at all

3 – That he did want to
…and that we did, after waiting only twenty years (to the day)

That’s all I need, really, but there are forty-seven more, including food, Doctor Who, more food, the Liberal Democrats (the whole bally lot of them), so much food… And that’s all just the other stuff that was at our wedding!

4 – Doctor Who
…of course

5 – Being a nation made up of several nations
…all distinct and all having each in common, and being a people that has always been made up of many peoples and still mixing in people from everywhere else

6 – Being a nation where we all have multiple loyalties and identities
…by definition, and not letting people tell us what one thing they think we are

7 – Being always open to change
…whether it’s new people in our streets, new words in our language (often from someone else’s) or newly being comfortable with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and all sorts of other people who no longer have to be like everybody else

8 – My parents
…My Mum, who wasn’t born here but has always put her all into wherever she is, and my Dad, who was born in Glasgow, did some more growing up in Watford, and made a life for his family in Stockport, because we’re lots of different places and all one country too

9 – Inspirational heroes
…The four greatest British heroic myths: King Arthur; Robin Hood; Sherlock Holmes; and World War II

10 – Doubt
…and asking awkward questions

11 – Great big cliffs
…and windmills on hillsides

12 – Great crashing waves
…and nudist beaches when it’s bloody freezing

13 – Picturesque villages
…like Aldbourne, East Hagbourne, South Oxhey, Little Bazeley-by-the-Sea, Summerisle (but I’m more of an Escape From the Country guy, so…)

14 – Thrilling cities
…like London, Manchester, Edinburgh

15 – Stockport Town Hall

16 – The Beatles
…and especially George Harrison who, like me, swung wildly from terribly earnest to taking the piss, but who unlike me played the most gorgeous slide guitar ever heard – plus the movie of Yellow Submarine

17 – Electronic music
…from the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, The Human League, Heaven 17 and Delia Derbyshire

18 – Kate Bush
…and whatever the hell she does

19 – Punk rock
…Especially Tom Robinson and, right now, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and the wish that I could make my lists scan as well as Reasons To Be Cheerful

20 – Dame Shirley Bassey

21 – The Avengers
…Possibly the most British thing ever, and which wasn’t just style and subversion but which mattered – introducing to a mass audience the idea of intelligent, independent women who flung men over their shoulders. A fantasy of Britain where old-fashioned tradition and high-tech, sexually equal modernity went hand in hand (a hugely successful Conservative-Liberal coalition, you might say)

22 – The BBC

23 – Quatermass
…combining British ingenuity and a wish to build rocket ships with sheer naked terror (but doing it anyway)

24 – The Clangers
…encouraging us to love the alien and gently laugh at ourselves

25 – 2000AD
…the comic, not the year, particularly, which turned out a bit samey

26 – Carry On Up the Khyber

27 – Alastair Sim
…in drag

28 – BRIAN BLESSED

29 – Shakespeare
…A great many of his lines, anyway (and Queen Elizabeth the First, at least according to Blackadder)

30 – The works of JRR Tolkien
…even the ones scribbled on bits of toast and painstakingly reconstituted by his son. Mmm, toast…

31 – Clasping strange new foreign foods to our bosom
…over the centuries, making them our own so we couldn’t imagine life without them, like – the potato – and tea – and chocolate

32 – Chicken Korma

33 – Roast lamb

34 – Scotch eggs

35 – Pies
…Pies. More pies. And especially appropriate today, Pieminister pies

36 – Margaret Thatcher, Tony Benn and Nicola Sturgeon
…and the gladly exercised right to say thanks but no thanks, never have, never will

37 – William Gladstone, David Lloyd-George, Paddy Ashdown, Nick Clegg and Jo Swinson
…and the gladly exercised right to say yes, and I will again

38 – Being more or less democratic for quite a long time

39 – Mostly giving up an Empire with less fuss than is usual

40 – The NHS
…which on balance makes me go “Aaargghh!” less than it helps stop me going “Aaargghh!”

41 – Fulfilling the UN target of giving 0.7% of our national wealth in overseas aid and development
…a target set a year before I was born. It’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve finally met it (one of only about half a dozen countries that does), and in the last few weeks set it in law created by the Liberal Democrats

42 – The gap between rich and poor narrowing
…at last, over the last five years, after widening hugely ever since the 1980s

43 – The Rule of Law
…meaning that those in power get frustrated by the law applying to them too

44 – Signing the European Convention on Human Rights
…And not just being part of it, but Winston Churchill commissioning British lawyers to create it, in order to protect and spread our values

45 – Traditional British values
…like creativity, eccentricity, tolerance, generosity, fair play, standing up for the underdog, and universal, indivisible freedom

46 – Not having ID cards
…or being snooped on by the state at will, and the Liberal Democrats constantly being on guard whenever everybody else suddenly thinks that would be a good idea

47 – Making lists instead of doing anything
…making tutting sounds instead of hitting anyone, and grumbling but never giving up

48 – Inventing the train and the Internet
…even when each sometimes goes off the rails

49 – Many of the things we used to have but don’t any more
…like welcoming immigrants, Woolworths, Texan Bars, how Blackpool was in my childhood memories, The Daleks’ Master Plan, Nick Courtney, Conrad Russell and my Grandad

50 – The future
…even more than those I’ve loved and lost, and that there will always be many, many more new wonderful, beautiful, innovative, unpredictable and aggravating but loveable things to put on a list.
And that any list will be quite different for you, or even quite different for me tomorrow (I thought the best way was to write the lot off the top of my head), but still blatantly and brilliantly British.


So in fifty days’ time, why not vote for a Britain that offers more things to love than merely against the bits you don’t?


Here’s Nick Clegg on things he loves about Britain. I applauded him delivering this speech on Sunday and suspect he may have spent a bit more time and thought crafting this version than I did mine, but I agree with most of his, too.

Labels: 2000AD, BBC, Brian Blessed, British Politics, Doctor Who, Food, George Harrison, Kate Bush, King Arthur, Liberalism, Personal, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, The Avengers

Waking much too early on the First of December, I’ve spent the morning in seasonal mood for the first day of Advent with a selection of festive songs – and, impossibly, aiming to list a full ten that won’t make me gag! So I racked my brain (nearly a Ringo Starr song, though not a Christmassy one) for the likes of Paul Simon, George Harrison, Kate Bush, Tom Robinson, Gerry Rafferty, the Pet Shop Boys and Timbuk 3 for songs of magic, money worries and total thermonuclear destruction at Christmas. The usual suspects, then. And what else do you spot…?

Paul Simon – Getting Ready for Christmas Day

You might expect Simon and Garfunkel’s famously jolly 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve mostly been listening to Paul’s most recent album, So Beautiful or So What, and while the title track is by far the best on it, I have to admit I enjoyed the stomping beat and sharp, bluesy guitar work of Paul’s song of Christmas worries in modern America that it quite put me in the mood for more Christmas songs. I’ve only found the video this morning, and that’s quite witty, too.

From early in November to the last week of December
I got money matters weighing me down
Well the music may be merry but it’s only temporary
I know Santa Claus is coming to town

George Harrison – Ding Dong, Ding Dong

Oh, I love George, and I can only assume this was a comeback at people who grumbled he only wrote deep and meaningful lyrics. Or that he wanted a minor seasonal hit. So why not get your new year in early and, ideally, watch the video, which is a lot of fun and has pirates, silly hats and George naked? What more could you want? Look, it’s better than Paul’s Wonderful Christmastime (though the redoubtable Mr Hickey, who spray-paints his beard white every December, has a brilliant defence of it), or that endlessly replayed dirge from John and Yoko. Has Ringo done one (checks. Oh, Jesus! Is that where Annie Lennox got the idea)?

Ring out the old, ring in the new
Ring out the old, ring in the new
(that’s half the lyrics already)

Kate Bush – December Will Be Magic Again

Oscar Wilde! Dropping down in my parachute! Coming to sparkle the dark up (I’m not doing a good job of covering the muck up)! Hurrah for twinkly Kate! Though the live version I’ve linked to’s OK, it’s worth looking for the proper ethereal studio one with her own backing vocals. All right, I’m strangely enjoying this Christmas lark, as long as it stays batshit-crazy.

December will be magic again
Take a husky to the ice
While Bing Crosby sings White Christmas… He makes you feel nice
December will be magic again
Old Saint Nicholas up the chimney
Just a-popping up in my memory

Tom Robinson – Merrily Up On High

Can I give a daytime TV link that Kate had a hit with Peter Gabriel and Tom wrote this (and a couple of minor hits) with Peter? It’s from Tom’s most depressed album, North by Northwest, with lots of early ’80s electronic instrumentation rather than his early punk sound. But don’t worry – this one’s lively and sounds like he’s having much more fun than the rest of it. That’s why I love it, because otherwise the lyrics wouldn’t be so funny. Discovering Tom in my teens, this festive epic of seasonal nuclear devastation was my favourite very ’80s Christmas song.

Let’s all party –
War has started
Let’s forget about days gone by
We won’t see another year like it
So drink your dinner tonight:
It's no use to face the future
Count to twenty –
Close your eyes
This year, next year
Thermonuclear
Merrily up on high!

Gerry Rafferty – Winter’s Come

Another mournfully seasonal song from the ’80s (tears, broken heart) and from my favourite Gerry Rafferty album, the utterly gorgeous North and South. Like most of the album, this is achingly beautiful, with its icy pipes as wintry a sound as you’re likely to hear. And though thinking of Christmas songs that don’t set my teeth on edge is starting to become a bit of a struggle, it’s cheering to see today that Gerry’s just been given a memorial street in his old home (shipyard) town.

Winter’s come – another year, another season begun
Every day brings a long cold lonely night

Pet Shop Boys – It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas

Slightly bad timing with this one – though not from the ’80s this time – released as a Christmas single just as the country was buried in blizzards. Oh well. The chorus is jolly and upbeat and the nearest to a Christmas love song I can put up with. And as well as making Bing Crosby! an exclamation, it still finds time to bitch about Christmas never being as good as it should be, so that’s all right. But, Neil… I thought you were a Doctor Who fan?

Christmas is not all it’s cracked up to be
Families fighting around a plastic tree
Nothing on the TV that you’d want to see…

Timbuk 3 – All I Want For Christmas (Is World Peace)

And back to the ’80s one last time for Timbuk 3, who I liked a lot ever since hearing their rationale for putting a nice piece of ass on the cover of their first album, Greetings From Timbuk 3, to sell more copies (look it up). I can’t say this is really my favourite of theirs – tragically, I still like toys with guns (particularly gun-sticks), and Tom’s similar message was much funnier – but their hearts are in the right place and, if you sing in an American accent, in amidst The Message the first verse closes on a spectacularly terrible pun. And I love those.

Transformers, superheroes
Thundercats in cast iron clothes
Rocket fingers, laser eyes
Cannon mouths and missile toes

All right, I know I promised ten songs, but that’s seven that I actually like and yet I’m already losing the will to live. And it’s still the morning of December 1st. That bodes well, doesn’t it, boys and girls?

I have a terrible feeling I may prefer to listen to some of the more stately old hymns and carols. Richard will be appalled and my Mum delighted – that can’t be right! I shall have to compile a more blasphemous Advent countdown later to restore the balance…

Labels: Christmas, George Harrison, Gerry Rafferty, Kate Bush, Music, Pet Shop Boys, Tom Robinson, Top Tips

Something exciting came out of that Olympics closing ceremony after all! Kate Bush re-recorded her second-biggest hit for the event and, astonishingly, Running Up That Hill shot up the charts to become her fifth-biggest hit as well, zooming in at Number Six, with lower but still improbable chart placings for the likes of the Who’s Baba O’Riley, the Kinks, ELO and Annie Lennox Vs Cthulhu (all discovered last week while laid up with painfully inflamed ligaments in my left ankle, a change from the occasional tendonitis: running up that hill? If I only could). But what’s the song about? Well…

All right, so she’s now running down the charts again this week, but it still seems miraculous that a twenty-seven-year-old song from Kate should suddenly be a smash all over again. And, this time, making a point of subtitling it “A Deal With God,” the original title refused by the record company for fear of airplay-death back in the ’80s, when it was the lead single from what turned out to be Kate’s most critically and commercially successful album, Hounds of Love.

Hounds of Love

Now, I have to admit that Hounds of Love isn’t quite my favourite Kate Bush album – I’d put The Sensual World ahead of it – and nor is Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) my favourite single from that album – I’d put Hounds of Love itself above it. All right, so Hounds of Love is a less complex, less ambiguous track, but its melodrama always thrills me, and between Kate’s famous two ’80s Doctor Who TV scripts and all her New Adventures it has more than a little Doctor Who feel, too – quoting from an old horror film, not entirely convincing monsters out to get you and an awful lot of running. Listening to her more recent work, I do wonder if Kate’s a particular Troughton fan, doing the Yeti with King of the Mountain and Wild Man, and on her Fish People label, to boot. But that’s another story. And Running Up That Hill is still a terrific, and a very powerful song.

Another minor miracle is that Kate’s new vocal on her remixed Running Up That Hill is a change from but if anything more gripping than the original; I’ve been a bit disappointed with most of her recent Director’s Cut revisitings of old songs, feeling they lack the power and excitement of the previous versions – and, heretically, I’d have said that the harsh, bombastic, very ’80s production on the Hounds of Love might have stood more revisiting than the more inviting sound of The Sensual World (though I don’t know how she’d unpick any of her Arthurian odyssey The Ninth Wave, a continuous piece making up the whole second half and a tour-de-force, much like her later Aerial’s A Sky of Honey).

Ironically, Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) may have had so many requests from people who weren’t born when it first charted and become a hit all over again because its powerful beat and chorus sounds like it symbolises the Olympics. I say ironically, because such a prosaic explanation runs against arguably Kate’s most layered and ambiguous lyrics for one of her hits.

Deeper Understanding… Yeah, Right

On the surface, it might sound like it’s about athletics – and it might be, of a sort – but Kate’s previously said when pressed for an explanation that it’s about a wish for a woman and a man in a relationship to reach greater understanding by literally changing places, and that she went for a deal with God rather than the traditional deal with the Devil because, obviously, that would be more powerful. So the meaning presented at the time, to ward off music-burners outraged at the mention of God, was a tender prayer for a more perfect union between a man and a woman. What could possibly be more praiseworthy for lovers of traditional values?

And yet… Some of the words may say that, but the music doesn’t. I’ve read people saying it’s an even more tender wish for a partner, that the “bullet” is about taking on his pain, a song of self-sacrifice. But it doesn’t sound like, say, Deeper Understanding or This Woman’s Work. This isn’t Kate in her tender, frail achingly beautiful mood; this is Kate sounding raw and powerful, and all the more so for not being as fabulously bonkers as she often seems in that style (though bonking may come into it). No – this isn’t a love song, but a march. Listen to those drums, banging away; watch the video, where Kate and a male dancer writhe hip to hip while miming shooting a bow and arrow. If the meaning’s what Kate said it is, then read between the lines and listen to the music: it’s Kate saying ‘How would it feel for me to fuck you for a change?’

“Come on, angel, come on, come on, darling,
“Let’s exchange the experience, oh…”

That’s the less ambitious version. But with Kate being so insistent that she wanted it called A Deal With God, and the ambiguity of some of the lyrics, on top of the pounding music…? This is about power. And it’s not just saying, ‘If I were a man, I’d make so much more use of that power than he would,’ though the physicality of the lyrics might well stand in for other goals. No, to me some of it suggests that Kate merely wanting to take a man’s place would be a chronic lack of ambition. You can read the chorus more than one way – is the “our” referring to an ‘us’ of Kate and her partner, or just Kate and the Almighty? It’s always sounded to me that Kate’s fed up with the lack of ambition on a cosmic scale, and if she only could, would swap places with God.

“And if I only could,
“I’d make a deal with God,
“And I’d get him to swap our places…”

But it’s probably about shagging.

Labels: Doctor Who, Kate Bush, Music, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Olympics, Patrick Troughton, Religion, Reviews, Running Up That Hill, Sex