Staying alert…
Hi Gang and welcome to the third issue of The Lugg Blogg.
It’s a real shame that Sheep Music is not happening but, to look on the bright side, at least we can stop worrying about the feud we were having with Farmer Phil’s festival up the road.
In December they had booked my friends from Amsterdam 'My Baby’ to headline their festival on the Saturday night. So when I called up Daniel in January to ask if they would headline Sheep Music he said he’d have to check with Farmer Phil. Farmer Phil said ‘No way’ and there then followed a month of toing and froing and pleading and phone calls and emails and ‘No we can’t have them on Sunday even if we leave them off the programme and advertising.’ Bummer!
But, as is the way of the world, it was all a tremendous waste of time. If you are in any doubt why we wanted them so badly, here are two videos. The first is a good approximation of what they sounded like when they first played in The Dukes five or six years ago. The second is a self made documentary about the band which, I’m glad to say, gives credit where credit is due to my infuriating, crazy, guitar genius old pal Frank Sutherland who performed one of his very few live gigs in the back garden of The (long departed) Bull on St David’s Street during Sheep Music 1994. He also taught guitar and the basics of funk to all three members of My Baby.
The last of this blog’s videos from me is a hilarious piece by Todd Snider, a country singer I know nothing about. So I called up Dave Luke to give me the low-down and he was surprising brief in his Davapedia rundown. “Oh Todd - he’s one of that bunch from East Nashville I don’t really have much time for them, but what I do know is his introductions are often funnier and longer than his songs!” You got that right Dave, this is a hoot.
Pete
NEW YORK - Dani Davies
After chopping through a few bags of carrots, picking kale or slicing a few pounds of chicken in the small kitchen tucked behind the bar at Petra in Brooklyn, I’d let Autumn know that I’m heading out for a few hours and we’d say our goodbyes and I’d be back to meet her at the end of her shift. By the time I’d left I’d decided roughly on my direction.
Autumn and I met in Bristol in 2018 and married in February this year. She runs the kitchen at Petra, a great bar in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and for the last two years we have been hopping back and forth, experiencing glimpses of each other’s current world. Autumn cooks really well and believes in a healthy diet and I support her with this for about two thirds of the day. I’m of the thinking that a balanced diet is a balance between healthy and unhealthy foods.
Normally I’d walk a few blocks and get the L train from Halsey. It heads down Broadway, clattering toward the Williamsburg bridge where it heads into Manhattan. Sometimes I’d get off before the bridge so I could walk over, decisions would often be affected by the need to have a pee.
Once sorted,it would normally be beer first. I like the beer there, it’s cold and fizzy and there’s normally a large choice. If there’s a Brown Ale I’ll normally go for that, they’re kind of like Newcy Brown but richer, higher ABV and more hops. The first beer of the day is important, I’ve had a couple of bummers. I was on my way to meet my mate Leo at Johns pizzeria on Bleecker Street when I realised I had half an hour to spare, so I revisited a bar in Alphabet City, a dive bar in an old laundrette that has beers and lots of them, and if there’s space I sit at the bar. There was one cask beer on, a bitter, that classic British style. You rarely get cask beer in America, or anywhere outside the UK, so I had to try it. It was piss, really vinegary. I couldn’t drink it, instead of complaining and feeling even more like a tosser, I left it there, it was nice leaving, out the door, on to the next place, no more suffering.
I cut through Washington Square Park on my way to Bleecker Street. I sat on a bench there for ten minutes. There’s a strange peaceful, human feeling in that square. Some youths were acting out a play with a small audience sat on some steps looking on - they looked like parents and friends. Skateboarders weaving in and out, people playing music... enough of that.
That day it was Johns pizzeria, a 50 year old establishment baking large pizzas in a coal fired oven. I try to visit one of the classic Pizzerias, but often get sidetracked, so have yet to visit them all - Di Fara’s, Scarrs, Best Pizza, Una Pizza Napoletana, Roberta’s, OPS loads of dollar slice shops.... there’s a list. When you know little of a city it’s nice to have a focus, I’m not pizza obsessed and wouldn’t recommend eating it every day, but a pizzeria is as good a place as any to start or interrupt an evening stroll.
There is a pizzeria in Bushwick called OPS, a good walk from Petra. The pizzas are sourdough and baked in a woodfired oven. The menu is short and the pizzas are of a very high standard, but what also stands out are the salads. Between two you get a large plate with a pile of large seasonal leaves, like a mixture of gem and radicchio and other colours. They make thick dressings for the salad by roasting right down vegetables or tomatoes and then blitzing them into a kind of vinaigrette, but less delicate, which is then tossed through the leaves. Unlike any salad I’ve had before, it’s more - a perfect accompaniment to the pizzas that come one by one for you to share, which I like. They have a lot of different wines and the people serving have a selection of different bottles open and by the glass. We often drink chilled light red wine.
There are so many places. There’s a dive bar on Malcolm X Boulevard called ‘Turtles All The Way Down’ and the bar-guy wears a leather waistcoat with nothing underneath and the WiFi password is TITTIES AND BONERS.
Photograph of us in the ‘Turtles All The Way Down’ Bar on Malcolm X Boulevard, Brooklyn on the 12/29/19.
MIXTAPE, A STORY WITH FIVE SONGS - Ian Marchant
Written by Ian Marchant and performed
by Ian Marchant, John Hymas and Dave Luke.
VIEWS OF THE WEEK @Andrea Gilpin photography
MUSIC - Alison Giles
Here's something special on Facebook and YouTube - a specially made Gramophone Magazine Charity Gala, with contributions from top award winners of the last few years. It's a one-off, in support of Help for Musicians, which is giving financial help to the many people whose work and income has dried up, across all genres of the music industry. The contributors have been making their own films. Rachel Podger (artistic director of Brecon Baroque Festival which is still programmed for October this year) has been filming, even taking her violin and mobile out to the woods close to her home in Abergavenny. Whether her solo Bach amongst the trees makes the final cut, or whether it'll be one of her clips filmed at home, we don't know, but she is certainly one of the featured artists.
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/classical-music-news/article/gramophone-charity-gala
If you'd like to be reminded of full on concert life pre-lockdown, there's a four part film made when Mirga Grazinyt-Tyla become the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's musical director. There are still pitifully few female music directors in the world, and not many, male or female, who are only 30 years old. This was an inspired appointment by the orchestra (and it really is 'by' the orchestra - the players are hugely involved in the process) that has proved very popular and very successful.
The link is https://cbso.co.uk/mirga-gražinytė-tyla-going-for-the-impossible.
OPENS AND EXHIBITIONS - Lois Hopwood
Jiab Prachakul: Will Gompertz reviews BP Portrait Award 2020 winner
In which he writes a nice piece about the history of portraiture, is a bit mean about the self-taught prize winner’s picture and probably cheers up the gutted losers.
I am not a self-taught artist, having someone standing behind you smoking a fag looking at your work and telling you it's boring or that you don’t seem to like paint are some of my abiding memories of the tutors in the Art Department of The University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
I do enter Open Art Competitions, just two a year these days, they usually charge and it could be death by a thousand cuts. It is a bit tough receiving more than one rejection on the same day Oriel Davies/Jerwood/John Moores, but on the other hand winning the ING drawing prize in 2013 was amazing .
In the long snowy winter of 2013/14 bored with snowballing, watching telly or making pots Tony Hall Potter made a portrait head of his daughter Kate, entered the Society of Portait sculptors’ annual competition and we had our very own Jiab Prachakul moment. Tony Hall Potter self-taught sculptor won the Society’s top prize.
I have been lucky to live in this area while Jo King was running the extremely glamorous ‘Ludlow Opens’ and there have been the series of brilliant Discoed Lent exhibitions with Charles McCarthy and David Hiam. The stress of turning up with a good enough painting of the Entombment/Crucifixion/The draught of fishes, ruined many a Christmas holiday for me because of my ‘just in time’ approach to deadlines (slightly better these days). But the private view always felt like the end of winter and life returning to the borders.
These exhibitions and Opens are a life blood to the artists living on the borders and it is very sad that h.Art has postponed until next year, but there is the Presteigne Festival far on the horizon.
Meanwhile back in Knucklas we all entered the RA Summer show on the understanding that the one who gets in cooks dinner for everyone else and so far that’s me, fingers crossed for the second sift and that it’s not cancelled.
I think that Jiab Prachakul entered the BP Portrait Award just hoping to get in, just like for all of us, it’s a bit of hope.
GARDEN @ No 3 - Sabina Rüber
With the narcissi going over, the tulips have come into their own. Tulips are an obsession of mine and the past two weeks have been an absolute riot of colour with hundreds of flowers coming into bloom. It has been an unusual season with early and late flowering varieties blooming at the same time making for beautiful colour combinations.
New scent in the garden:
The last of the scented narcissi giving way to our heavenly scented wisteria.
Some of my favourite tulips and colour combinations this year:
The yellow/red striped tulip ‘Helmar’ with a selection of dark tulips coinciding with an early flowering blue Iris. Tulip ‘African King’ a new discovery this year.
Narcissus ‘Bellsong’ with 'Candy Prince’ a favourite early tulip flowering at the same time as the late blooming 'Spring Green’. Tulip ‘White Dream’ with Lunaria annua ‘Alba’.
Early pastels: 'Candy Prince', 'Apricot Beauty', 'Gabriella' and 'Copper Image’. Bruised colours: 'Blue Diamond’, ‘Havran’ and ‘Antraciet’.
'Blue Diamond’ is one of my ‘must have’ tulips. Long flowering and fading beautifully with age. Or an exotic surprise 'Blue Diamond’ with tulip breaking virus.
‘Gorilla’ - a beautiful fringed tulip with a horrible name and ‘Angelique’ - another firm favourite of mine, introduced in 1959.
And then, just lush…
THE WHITE CROSS - Pete Smith
The White Cross is a recognised symbol of the plague food stations that were sited a distance from affected towns during 17th centry outbreaks of bubonic plague. A local example being the rare original White Cross on the western approach to Hereford, and although the white cross symbol is not necessarily historically accurate, the common knowledge of its purpose, is.
The process was simple; the affected town/city would erect a marker which would be where those living out of town left provisions for those inside the town, money was by all accounts left in a pot of vinegar. The deal was that the residents of the town, stay in town and those in outlying communities would provide for them, payment by the vinegar pot.
During 1636/7 such a plague visited Presteigne and the residents were instructed to isolate themselves in town and, in essence isolate Presteigne itself. Under the orders of the Bailiff, and enforced by the constables, residents were actively prevented from leaving and nobody was allowed in. Two markers were erected about ½ a mile out of town to the east where the Coombe Road roundabout now sits, and the other was sited to the north at the Letchmoor Lane, Chicken Lane and Brink Lane cross.
It seems odd that there were only two at defined compass points when the logic of the positioning suggests probably four existed originally, one up the Slough perhaps (south) the fourth (west) on the Discoed road possibly but no written or verbal evidence can be found.
Today, nearly 400 years later, we find ourselves fighting another plague and the rules are the same. Self isolate, don’t travel, stay at home, practice social distance and…wash yer hands afterwards. A community must unite at a time like this and find ways to deal with all of life’s various issues that are now in disarray. Back in 1636/7 Presteigne acted as a community by agreeing to keep the plague out of the wider scattered rural community by self isolation in exchange for food etc provided by the wider community that would stretch as far Wigmore.
It is that inter-community, community spirt that was created 400 years ago in the interests of survival that prompted me to place two white crosses on the sites of the originals. Not only to mark the historic parallel, by way of identifying the food stations, but also as symbols of the hope, resilience, trust and love of humanity that once again will make Presteigne people rise to the unfolding situation in an extraordinary demonstration of community self-belief.
© Alex Ramsay Photography, with thanks.
MUSIC - Tony Lawson
Sadly another wonderful African musician has died just recently, one of the world’s great drummers, Nigerian, Tony Allen.
Of drumming he said, “It’s like riding a bicycle, you have to use four limbs”
He’s mostly remembered for his collaboration with Fela Kuti in Africa ’70 and what became known as Afrobeat – a fusion of African high life, American funk and jazz. An exuberant pulsing music, marked by layers of intricate shifting rhythms. Guaranteed to make you want to dance.
After meeting The Black Panthers during a visit to America their music, becoming hugely popular throughout Africa, took on a more political edge. At the end of the 70s, Allen left Kuti’s band to follow his career forming his own bands and playing for many musicians including Manu Dibango, Kid Creole, Grace Jones and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Here’s a link to several live performances and albums.
Fela Kuti and Tony Allan - “Egbe Mi O” - live
Tony Allen Black Series - “Ariya” - live
Fela Kuti – “Roforofo Fight” – from album
Fela Kuti and Tony Allen – “Zombie” – from album
LIFE DURING LOCKDOWN - Alison Parry
When at the bottom of the drive clapping for the NHS, Pete and I got thinking about clapping patterns, and remembered this wonderful video.
If you fancy learning how to do it, here is a clear lesson!
And finally…
If you have something which you would like to contribute in the form of art, photography, music, travel, Presteigne history, literature, local lore, gardens, food which you think might fit into future issues, please send your stuff to luggblogg@outlook.com.
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