[Rejjed by Cherwell and Isis]]...

Stornoway at the Sheldonian, 31st Oct

In one of those feeble bits of filler copy that consitute G2, I recall once reading some loser whose proudest vaunt was that he had known Joy Division when they were Warsaw, back in a Salford establishment called Eric’s. If all else fails, I fully expect to eke my moments through by reiterating, similarly, that I knew the most lyrical, melodic body of musicians in Britain back when they were just Stornoway, performing to a humble diehard audience of 600 or so Oxford students and residents in the Sheldonian Theatre, with only an orchestra apiece to back them up.

The brag, I accept, falls a little flat. Stornoway have arrived already, and I cannot discover them, only depict them as accurately – and hence as glowingly – as I can. In the invidious classifications of their industry, this band have easily been subsumed under the banner of the “alternative”, and it is important to express first just how effective an alternative to the alternative Stornoway in fact are. Their lyrics in such beautifully assembled songs as Boats & Trains and Fuel Up make sense by the standards of music, poetry and fiction, are largely audible, always articulate, and unfailingly moving. Their instrumentality falls into a number of broad approaches; the slow moving, quiet backdrop, the frenetic, almost military jig, and in the case of The November Song, relatively rarely played and harder to find online than much of the band’s output, a solo vocal effectiveness more reminiscent of singer-songwriters and troubadours than a band at all.

That last number, which I had never heard before, is written and performed by Brian Briggs, a man with one of those names welded for alliterative fame who nevertheless seems to have a taste for a tranquil private life. Especially given that he was performing to his core following of chronically romantically unfortunate Oxford undergraduates, Briggs took a risk in displaying a chanson d’amour of inner contentment and advertising it as such, even, it must be said nauseatingly, dedicating The November Song to “everyone in the audience lucky enough to have a soulmate”. It is a proof of the song’s quality that it overrode even this reviewer’s scepticism, and instead of acting as a tonal gloat captured the idea of love as an all-important but vulnerable aspect of life.

Brigg’s November Song preamble also displayed an element of Stornoway’s characteristic technique that is evident in their name; a folkloric connection to imaginative geography, that leaves every place name to embody a significance that is emotional, literary and traditional all at once. When Jarvis Cocker sings “she came from Greece”, he is gesturing to a vague idea of spivvy opulence. A folksong like Fairport Convention’s Sir Patrick Spens mentions Aberdeen for legendary reasons without significance outside tradition. Stornoway go for the heritage and the associations at once. November Song’s connection to the Pembrokeshire hills associates successful love with isolation from the world, but Briggs was also clearly, specifically, in the Pembrokeshire hills at the time and wanted to pin them down. It is this specificity about Stornoway’s songwriting that has allowed them to create what might be called the local national anthem of Cowley, Zorbing. When this band name a place they hallow it.

The magnetically popular Zorbing and the far more lyrically accomplished On The Rocks were deployed in what Briggs called “a really experimental moment”. The band were thrilled to be in the Sheldonian but aware of the changed atmosphere it imposed upon them; playing under a restored Baroque ceiling three centuries old with strict orders against standing or stamping in the audience. Stornoway reacted with an appealing combination of reverence and subversion. They combined operations, and shared their platform, with the Oxford Millennium Orchestra, one of whose violinists they are in the habit of borrowing. But Briggs kept a thumbnail on his rock-star’s honour by leading his audience in a group scream at the event’s conclusion.

As for the orchestral contribution, it was a musical experiment but perhaps also a qualitative risk. In a way that felt slightly allegorical of Music Today, our “alternative” pop heroes never failed to prove themselves more competent musicians than the smartly accoutred ensemble. The Millennium Orchestra momentarily resembled a classical bribe that had bought Stornoway the Sheldonian, and their warm-up act of some drearily rendered Mendelssohn and rather better Vaughan Williams instigated some audience impatience. But they redeemed any such charge by the excellence of their support to Zorbing and, particularly, On the Rocks. When an obviously deeply affected Briggs muttered it was the “best night of his life”, few in the audience had any doubt he was referring to the unforeseen and overwhelming success of this peculiar synthesis.

I’ve long had doubts about whether Zorbing deserves its place as the most widely circulated and reputed part of Stornoway’s achievement. When overlistened to, the song exposes wilfully trite rhymes and emotional truisms that fall short of much of the band’s originality. The Oxford resonances will ensure this song never fails to be welcome round here, however.

To secure their national standing (and this is not an absurd statement – Stornoway have just had a spin with Jools), the band are more likely to hit home with the song that provoked the wildest positive reaction from the audience, the funny and frightening We Are The Battery Human. This reminds its hearers of Stornoway’s consistent protest credentials; an early masterpiece, not alas performed in the Sheldonian, was the fabulously unmusical Good Fish Guide, a ranting sermon upon what fish we should and shouldn’t eat. We Are The Battery Human strikes simultaneous targets – by imagery, of course, shackled poultry, but explicitly, in a Luddite and Romantic vein, the present servitude of humanity to technology – “We were born to be free/…Range”. It has, inevitably, become a hit on the internet.

Administrative Decree

I've so many bits of unpublished nonspecific article/ etc that this website is going, very shortly, to feature prose for the first time.

Actually, I suppose strictly speaking it features prose for the first time now.

Fairy story

To be certain, he'd gone for a long enough way,
When they stopped by the priory's quiet.
And then he put aside some appeasement for time,
Pausing to strip at his stained saddle bags.

It was as they'd told him,
One of the calm places
In Cumbria with uncalm ends,
So he knew what to do with the glass box within.

Such a prince - he's the eldest, not the runt, of three -
And his talents and powers are where you can see them,
In his, like Arthur's, scabbardless, sword,
In his, like Talbot's, armed, company,
In frank blue eyes like Richard's,
Or Laszlo Corvinus',
Eyes atop the shape of Kornilov - you see.

But you have a night train to join and you catch it,
You knew - did you mind? - that was the last you'd see.

The prince cannot read and marks charters with crosses,
Or crowns, or some strange rampant creature he's put
In his fancy, when heralds put it in his arms;
So the curse that must frown from the priory lintel
Is read only, silently, by the dark cardinal,
Who's the old king's bastard, and a wicked man.

The cardinal has no hand telling this story,
But Powell and Pressburger say what the curse said.

The prince led the way down the priory aisle -
Forget about bridesmaids - the unhappy brideless
Are faithful and fatal bachelors for love
And bachelor doesn't for nothing mean knight,
So the prince's knight's rearing, well it could not pale him,
Standing beside the void in the glass box.

You are going away in a very strange carriage,
You sit in the midst of an ill-fitting train,
Such mien, such attendants, for king's or queen's daughter,
Even in the shadows...as small difference made
As the tablet in water you sink, mouth, eyes, glutting,
Your stare in the rest that seems such sure aggression.

The prince has displaced you in your display case,
His last gasps are silking up the demure crystal,
The cardinal's planning the regency council,
But only the farrier, local informant
Know's quite what's awry -

That his liege lies cold in sleepless beauty's eye.

Neo-Calvinism

Cowper and Hogg had a modus vivendi
A frame for it just so –
They missed each other at the crossroads,
though.

I’d prefer to take that assumption
Just a little bit, little bit further,
And closer, the clouds, after all, being clouds,
And the honey an enamel wrecker,
Just so.

I believe that this only world is populated
With base and with noble, distinguished by note.
The base aren’t worth discussion, they only discuss,

(But I know what they dream about, sadly, and dream it,
Somewhere where higher gravities don’t worry
At thoughty sinews, a warm dirty lair
For healthy and furry animals to roll in)

I see them, I walk with the powerful children,
I know they’re possessed of no power to destroy,
They make wonderful transient glory all day,
Might they let me tell them they’ve made it?

Canna say.

Arya Darlings

Well, there were different absences;
Not the bonny Irish (Danish) Swain -
He stood suppressing Sumorsaete - no, not
The snare of her dark hair, which, swaying
Outshone on. These songs
Can illustrate a kind of fitness yet -
That is the absence, and it can't transpire;
The ships are standardised, the tides are gone,
Lanegan keeps the ring and cannot tell
A dance where Calidore gets Pastorell.
Remember always where the sound was lain;
I love to listen where things aren't for long,
There where (big Gothic building at the back)
The Fairy King can ride you to the rack.

Goethe's Erlkonig, translation

Who rides so late through Night, Wind Wild?
It is the Father with his Child;
He has that Fry tucked in his arm,
He keeps him sicker, holds him warm.

‘Why hidest thou, son, thy pretty eyes?’
‘Seest thou not, sire, the Erlking arise?
The Erlking, crowned, amidst his train?’
‘My son, ‘tis fog doth presage rain.’

O Child beloved, follow me!
And sportive oddments shall ye see –
Many and bright be the Blooms of the Shore,
Golden the Garments my Dam hath in store.

‘Papa, o papa, didst thou not attend
To the vows of the Erlking, to make and to mend?’
‘Be of good cheer, staid cheer, my Child,
For Leaves feel wind just so, in Wild.’

Won’t you come, lovely Knave, won’t you come with me now?
My darling girls wait for thee; ask them not how
They be trim in the dance that is danced all the night,
But take their white hands, and rest in their eyes’ light.

‘O daddy, dear daddy, seest thou still but naught?
Not the Erlkonig’s girls in their house grimly wrought?’
‘O dearest, thy fancies! For I see them well,
And marvel you make Willows bevies from Hell.’

I love thee! for the glance in thy pretty eyes:
And if you resist me, well, force I’ll devise…
‘My father! my father! full hard is his grasp!
And hard be the Wound I have borne in his clasp…’

Though Papa be spooked, yet he presses the Horse,
He cradles the Boy with preemptive remorse,
Thus hampered, he wrests them almost to their Home,
But the Child has gone seeking the rest of the Tomb.

Ronsard Amours 74, draft 1

Translated in all, my Circean enchantress
Holds me belayed in her massed irons bound
Not through, though, spiked wine with its spoor or its sound,
Nor yet by some grass aphrodisiac mess.
The sword of revenge - the good Grecian's, none less -
And the tonic the winged doctor found
In the merest of nicks that a chime can resound
Well, it countermands countercharms that she may press
So that national sty at the end of the line
Regain all the stature not granted to kine,
Sagacity, crassly earned pause;
But for myself - that self, soul, this thing - to lodge her
It mightn't avail the signet of Roger
So darkly my reason gropes into my flaws.