With a cast of thousands (would you believe dozens? Would you believe a dozen?) including some Very Special Guest Stars, this panoramic steampunk tale of a somewhat inglorious episode in British/Chinese relations involves imperialism, drugs, nice cupsa tea, legendary historical personages of considerable eminence and distinction, eerie blurrings of centuries, Gilbert & Sullivan rap, Victorian heavy metal (in all senses of the term), musical contributions from yr humble servant on the newfangled electrified guitar and Mr Marc Jefferies on the electrified basso profundo, plus the very latest in 21st century Victorian fashion. Not to mention a Tea Ceremony like no other.

The lovely and talented Ms Chen herself has written, directed and costumed the production, assembled an ensemble glittering with talent, and will host the proceedings in her own inimitable manner.

All this and a very special Farrago Poetry Slam. Having been some months in preparation a splendid time is guaranteed for all. And … possibly best of all … admission is FREEEEE, MAAAAAN! The Museum would, however, like it if you booked online, so … Book early and often!

Oh yeah, one more thing … DRESS STEAMPUNK!

Much as I hate to disagree with the late and much-missed Fran Landesman, it ain’t spring … but winter … which hangs you up the most, because it’s the time when you end up saying goodbye to too many people who matter. F’rinstance
… in the last few days, we’ve had to say hail and farewell to both Christopher Hitchens, a great polemicist who gave maximum value even when he was totally WRONG (as he was about Iraq), a powerful ally when you agreed with him and a worthy adversary when you didn’t … and to Etta James, who was pretty much the greatest female R&B singer this side of Miss Ree Her Own Self, the mighty lungs and soulful sensibility behind epochal songs like I’d Rather Go Blind and Tell Mama.

One anecdote for each: I met Ms James just the once, very briefly, during that odd period in the early ’70s when Chess Records had been sold to the GRT corporation and was uprooted from Chicago and relocated to New York. She’d not been having a great time of late (despite having just issued the magnificent Come A Little Closer album) and was actually THIN for just about the only documented time in her life. She told me that she’d actually written I’d Rather Go Blind herself, but had been persuaded to copyright it in the name of a man she was seeing … who’d then left her and continued to collect royalties not just from Ms J’s original but from the Chicken Shack cover version which had been a hit in the UK a few years earlier. Hoarse-voiced and chainsmoking, she was NOT a happy bunny. Later years saw her restored to physical and vocal health and receiving the props and acknowledgement she so richly deserved.

As for Hitch: I recall an epic confrontation with the massed forces of UK Trotskyism at the Bookmarks shop when a debate on Iraq became the verbal equivalent of a barroom brawl. Hitch, ciggy in one hand, wineglass in the other, was standing on a chair, taking on all-comers, quoting huge slabs of Trotsky from memory and defending his indefensible position with such enviable erudition and eloquence that you had to admire the sheer verve, style and conviction of the performance … even though he was TOTALLY WRONG.

His final ‘performance’ – an interview with Richard Dawkins – can be found in this week’s New Statesman, guest-edited by Professor D.

A world without Hitch and Ms Etta is smaller, colder, drier, duller and a LOT less soulful.

A world without Kim Jong-Il, on the other hand …

Maybe the Cosmic Balance is attempting to realign itself.

In more detail:

The Hellhound Sample, by Charles Shaar Murray (WordPress, £12.99)
Veteran music journalist Murray, author of biographies of John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix, has tremendous fun with this over-the-top novel based on the enduring myth of Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson. It shuttles back and forth at an alarming pace between 1938 (the year of Johnson’s mysterious death) and 2004, when the fictitious music legend James “Blue” Moon, who as a boy once heard Johnson play, is dying of cancer in his Californian mansion. Moon enlists fading English rock star Mick Hudson (a hilarious mix of Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart) to help record one final album with his estranged daughter, soul singer Venetia Moon, and her hip hop mogul son, Calvin. The result is a jumble of excessive incident, though Murray’s interpretation of Johnson’s alleged pact with the devil compels, and the whole is ludicrously enjoyable.

… which is all very cool, except that my lovely publisher, Headpress, has somehow become ‘WordPress’ … a classic Grauniadism, gotta love it, etc.

Recently attended The Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards – first person I saw when I arrived was Ian Hislop, almost went up to say hey and then remembered that I didn’t actually know him; got reacquainted with John Walsh and Ruth Padell, missed Nicholas Blincoe (shame!); chortled at the absurdity of the cited extracts and got to know the charming and urbane AC Grayling, who reminded me of someone I couldn’t place until later, when I realised it was Kelsey Grammer as Hank McCoy in X-Men: The Last Stand, only … ummm … NOT BLUE – and now I’m itching for Hellhound to be a contender next time around.

Can’t wait to hear certain passages declaimed aloud by an AK-TOR with a heavy vocal thumb on the ‘sardonic’ button.

There’s a trail on my Hellhound!

And it’s gonna be a wee bit different this time: since The Great Pete Miles will be unavoidably elsewhere, we’re bringing in a special guest drummist in the formidable form of The Rajah Of Rhythm, the Master Of Mood, the Groovemeister … Dick Jude! During an earlier phase of my existence, just about every gig I played for about fifteen years had Dick behind the kit, so the reunion should be … ehhh … a BLAST.

Plus! The live debut of the New Strat — the Rataecaster! Marc’s got a new bass! Bill might even have a new hat! If you’re South Of The River and at a loose end that Saturday night, come rock with us. In the words of BB King: we’re gonna try our best to move you … and if you like the blues, I think we can.

Now for the detaily bit:

Abbeyfest is a four day Blues Festival from Friday 26th August – Monday 29th August.

Tix: £8 in advance and £10 on the door: for more inforama, see www.abbeyfest.co.uk

Full address: Colour House Theatre, Merton Abbey Mills, London SW19 2RD … Tube: Colliers Wood

Well, gotta give a(n elderly) boy some credit for at least trying. I managed to extend my recent 60th to run a possible-world-record of around six weeks. And here’s how we did it …

My ACTUAL, OFFICIAL birthdate is June 27th. However, for boring technical reasons the event thrown on my behalf by my small but immaculately hip publisher Headpress as a combined 60th birthday party and launch for my novel The Hellhound Sample (as reported in a blog post you’ll find not to far south of here) took place on June 22nd. Smaller, less formal and more intimate events took place closer to the time … but one thing was missing: my BIG SPECTACULAR PRESENT.

Which started as a vaguely indulgent ‘gift to self’ and then escalated. (Warning note to non-guitar-geeks: your eyes may be about to glaze over.) I’d considered swapping the Hot Noiseless pickups in my Fender Custom Shop Jeff Beck Stratocaster for a more vintage-toned set, preloaded into a scratchplate so I could preserve the originals in situ, and raised the topic in a discussion on Harmony Central’s Electric Guitar forum. Then a friend who posts under the name of Ratae Coritanorum, lives in Bath (so I don’t see him nearly often enough) and builds Fender-style guitars of intimidating quality stepped in and made an offer I couldn’t refuse: that for very little more than the cost of a plate loaded with a set of premium vintage-style pickups and a qualified guitar tech’s fee for installing same … he would assemble me an entirely new Strat-style guitar, constructed to my specifications and using the finest parts he could scare up. As he put it, ‘A guitar that money couldn’t buy for less than half the cost of an American Standard Strat.’

I mentioned this to my sweetie … and instead of saying, ‘Are you nuts? We can’t afford it and you already have too many guitars!’ … she offered to buy it for me.

It didn’t happen overnight: he has a day job, a family who need to see him once in a while and a backlog of other builds to complete. Nevertheless, last week it arrived … and it was everything he said it would be, and more: Fender Custom Shop quality at the very least. So we bust out a bottle of the Birthday Champagne we’d been saving … and declared the birthday finally complete.

So the longest birthday party is finally done … and the next time Crosstown Lightnin’ surface, that guitar will be front’n centre. It may well be the best single birthday present I’ve ever received in my life.

So here’s to my baby … and here’s to Ratae Coritanorum (making the world’s tone better one Partsocaster at a time) … and here’s to all y’all!

Let’s break it down: Stuff MEANS stuff. Things have meaning. Part of the way we figure out what stuff means is to see/hear/experience it in context; part of the way we destroy or redefine meaning is to recontextualise stuff … or decontextualise it altogether. Part of the ongoing effect of digital technology on broader culture is that recontextualisation, or indeed outright decontextualisation, is easier than ever before … but all the digisphere has done has been to accelerate and facilitate a process that’s been observable for decades.

Case histories? Glad you asked. Walk this way …

First off: it was announced a few days ago that the Official Song of the 2012 Olympics will be London Calling by The Clash, that apocalyptic epic which provided the highwater mark of the midpoint of their career (or, at any rate, the career of the REAL Clash: the one with Mick Jones in). It’s easy to see why it was chosen: that intro is both catchy and monumental and the opening line – ‘London calling to the faraway towns …’ – would seem to fit … except that that’s where the selection committee would seem to have stopped listening (just as Ronald Reagan’s handlers only registered, back in 1984, the – bitterly ironic – chorus of Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA when they co-opted it as a campaign song).

After all, all that stuff about nuclear errors, junkies nodding out and ‘London is drowning and I live by the river’ would seem to be somewhat inappropriate. Or rather: it IS appropriate – to the real world as Londoners experience it at the present time – but possibly not in the manner a tourist board would consider comfortably attractive. In other words: it tells you rather more about London both in 1979 – when Joe Strummer and Mick Jones wrote the song – and right now than those who helmed its repurposing might find convenient.

But then the song is no longer about what it was about, or even what it’s still about: detached not only from context but from values, it’s simply a free-floating signifier, and not for the first time, either: the song also appeared in Die Another Day, the last of the Pierce Brosnan 007 movies, as Bond flies home after escaping captivity and torture in North Korea.

Second off: another recent news story provides another disquieting example of detachment from values and context. The family and estate of master comic-book auteur Jack Kirby, whose creative work forms the basis of no less than three of this year’s Big Movies – Captain America (launched in the 1940s by Kirby and Joe Simon), Thor and X-Men: First Class (based on 1960s collaborations with Stan Lee) – have just lost a court case against Marvel Comics (now owned by MouseCorp … sorry, Disney) for a share in the corporate profits thereby generated. Under the Old Rules of Comics – before the institution of creators’ rights and royalty schemes (which meant that a Spider-Man artist like Todd MacFarlane could make more from a single Spidey comic than co-creator Steve Ditko EVER made from the character) – the work-for-hire contracts meant that the writers and artists earned simple one-off page-rate fees, the company owned all rights in perpetuity and that was IT, baby.

Now: if superheroes – those brightly-clad metaphors on legs – are about anything (other than fights-in-tights), it’s about truth and justice, doing the right thing and protecting others (Alan Moore once told me that the origins of his own value-set came from Superman comics). Whether motivated by guilt (Batman, Spider-Man) or simple altruism (Superman, Fantastic Four), the heroes risked their lives for a simple but straightforward moral code based on the principle that while might did not make right … it could serve it. Meanwhile, the publishers operated on the principle that under capitalism, comrade, anything you could get away with was yours.

Thus it was that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold all rights to Superman to National Periodical Publications (that’s DC to us … now part of Warner Brothers) back in 1938 for $130. (Yes, you read right … ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY BUCKS AMERICAN.) That contract, flagrantly unjust though it was, nevertheless stood up in court … and it was only when a public campaign, spearheaded by artist Neal Adams, shamed DC into paying up purely to avoid bad publicity around the launch of the first of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies back in 1978, that Siegel & Shuster received creator credits and pittance-level pensions. DC conceded that whilst they had no legal obligation to look after the by-now penniless old men and their families, some moral obligation DID exist.

It’s time for Marvel/Disney to do likewise, and do right by Jack Kirby’s family (interestingly enough, Stan Lee doesn’t get royalties for HIS creative work, either … though he does own Marvel stock and, as former Publisher and Chairman, a no-doubt reasonable pension) … but it’ll take a modern equivalent of Neal Adams and a major public stink to embarrass them into acting more like Supes or Spidey … and less like Lex Luthor or Dr Doom.

This is a mission for the Justice (for Jack) League of America … and all the faraway towns. Otherwise, not only will Kirby have been robbed of money, but the meaning of his work will have been diminished.

If – in a world where meaning itself has been drained of meaning – that still matters. To some of us, anyway … it does.