{"id":281,"date":"2019-08-09T11:28:50","date_gmt":"2019-08-09T10:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=281"},"modified":"2019-08-09T11:30:55","modified_gmt":"2019-08-09T10:30:55","slug":"__trashed-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2019\/08\/09\/__trashed-3\/","title":{"rendered":"HOLD THAT POSE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Track\nlistings<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kodachrome                                  by Paul Simon<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Borders                                           by\nJust Poets<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flash\nBang Wallop                      by Tommy Steele<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photographs\nAnd Memories        by Jim Croce<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two\nThousand Feet                      by\nLendanear<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nBoy In The Photograph        by The\nStereophonics<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strange\nFruit                                  by\nBillie Holiday<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My\nFavourite Picture of You      by Guy Clark<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photograph                                    by Ed\nSheerin<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photograph\n                                   by\nRingo Starr<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The facebook page of Rochdale For\nPhotography shares photographs between almost a thousand members. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One photograph so perfectly encapsulated\naata that if our virtual playlists were corporeal I would choose it as the\nalbum cover. Taken by Jeff Johnson, the picture is of a long-white-bearded guy\nplaying a blues guitar in The Flying Horse in Rochdale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"

hold that pose<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

There are rustic and town centre\nphotographs, too, on this site, reminding me vividly of the town I left four\nyears ago after forty years as a resident. I still also remember Rochdale\nCamera Club, where I visited exhibitions and heard interesting talks on all\ntopics photographical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have images on my walls here in\nLanzarote of a Rochdale created, rather than captured, by John Cooke\u2019s innovative\nand magical style and treatments of photographs by Emmerdale and Coronation\nStreet actor Bill Ward, who I interviewed at an Annual Rochdale Literature And\nIdeas event about the hobby that is his life-long passion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We all take photos on our rambles all across\nthe arts, and most of listen to music, too, as we travel, so welcome to Hold\nThat Pose, a playlist to accompany you as you follow our Side-tracks And\nDetours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creative writing groups\u2019 members who\nattended any sessions I facilitated would well remember my constant advice to\nplay with their words and to create puns or sound-alikes that might give\nclearer direction to their stories. That was what happened to Paul McCartney\nwhen his three syllable doodle of \u2018scrambled eggs\u2019 suddenly set into Yesterday\nto become a song that will be sung on a million tomorrows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also playing with a three syllable piece\nwas Paul Simon when he arrived at his title for Kodachrome. He had been trying\nto write a work called Coming Home when suddenly it transposed itself to the\nregistered trademark of the Kodak company. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It became an upbeat number, supported by\nThe Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. He had originally visited their studio to ask\nfor support on the similarly celebratory Take Me To The Mardi Gras that, like\nKodachrome, reminded us that \u2018our memories are framed to fit our world view.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if throughout this lyric Paul Simon\nseemed unable to decide whether things look better in black and white or in\ncolour, songs and photographs are nevertheless, a perfect fit. Each captures\nits own time and shows us or tells us something we had missed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018They are curled, at the edges, of\nlooking back\u2019 is the opening line of Borders, written by my former writing\npartner Pam McKee. We recorded it under our \u2018stage name\u2019 of Just Poets on a cd\ncalled Time Travels, more than a decade ago now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I see it again at the start of this\narticle I think perhaps I first loved the line for its echo of Robert Frost.\nThere is a murmur of \u2018something there is that does not love a wall\u2019 evoked by\nthe absence of the word because and by the similarly vague \u00b4something\u00b4 with\nwhich Frost begins Mending Walls and the lack of definition in Pam\u2019s opening\npronoun. It transpires later in the poem that \u2018they\u2019 refers to a collection of\nphotographs and we see them in our mind\u2019s eye because of the strength and\nclarity of \u2018curled at the edges.\u2019  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, I currently love the line\nbecause it resonates increasingly as time passes by. These days, at sixty six\nand having recently left behind my country of origin, I have come to see that\nit is not only \u2018actual\u2019 photographs that curl at the edges but also those\nborders we hold in our minds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The genius of Flash Bang Wallop is that\nits lyric, about a photographer, reveal as vivid a picture as any photographer\never could. Tommy Steele, once viewed as a teenage rock n roll rebel had, by\n1967, become a darling of mums and grannies, who merely tutted gently at the\nsong\u2019s inoffensive innuendos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once leader of a rock group called The\nCavemen (a fact perhaps inadvertently referenced to in the lyric) was by now\ncreating a new role as star of stage, screen and cinema and on his way to\nbecoming a National Treasure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The song Flash Bang Wallop came\noriginally from a David Heneker musical, Half A Sixpence, and when the musical\nwas turned into a film released in 1967 it became a vehicle for Steele, who had\nstarred as the show\u2019s central character, Kipps, both in the West End and on\nBroadway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrative may be predictable but\nHalf A Sixpence, and Tommy Steele, delivered a real feel good factor as the man\nwho had forsaken his love for wealth until realising the error of his ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m pretty sure I first heard the name of\nJim Croce spoken in our folk club at the Kings Head in Heywood in the late\nseventies. As with so many of the hundreds of other singer writers in the\nSidetracks And Detours play lists, it was probably Pete Benbow who introduced\nme, through either Photographs And Memories or Time In A Bottle or perhaps even\nthrough Big Bad Leroy Brown, to the man\u00b4s wonderful music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pete would regularly cover those songs\nin his open mic floor spots in the dozen or do folk clubs around Rochdale at\nthe time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, by the time I learned about his\nmusic, Croce had already met his untimely death after releasing five albums\nbetween 1966 and 1973 of exquisite songs of love and yearning and some, too,\nthat introduced us to larger than life, almost cartoon like characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an understanding amongst\nfootball fans that there is a difference between a great goal scorer and a\nscorer of great goals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jim Croce died, when only thirty, in a\nplane crash, as a man who even in that short life had created a handful of\ngreat songs. Had he lived, he would have become a great song-writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We now inaugurate the song Local Boy In\nThe Photograph to this Side-tracks And Detours recommended playlist,\ncelebrating photography as an art form in Rochdale. Photographs evoke wide\nranging emotions, and this song was generated by a press photograph, in much\nthe same as was my own song Two Thousand Feet, written after a fatal coal\nmining accident in Golborne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Local Boy In The Photograph was written\nin response to a newspaper story about a boy from Flint in North Wales.\nStereophonics\u2019 lead singer, Kelly Jones, recognised the boy, who had committed\nsuicide by jumping in front of a train. The two had played on the same amateur\nfootball team and Jones had thought of him as \u2018the good looking kid who had it\nall.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Comments by Jones at the time of writing\nthe song suggested he had been appalled that the photograph accompanying the\nnews of the suicide showed the boy smoking a joint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the song was more a celebration\nof life than a condemnation and is notable for its reflections of nature\u2019s\nseasons and Jones admits he was trying to achieve some \u2018descriptive writing\nthat people would stop and listen to.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nowadays huge concert audiences sing\nalong with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many front pages of The MEN Media Group\nhave etched themselves into the memories of its readers. Munich air crash\neditions certainly did, and a later, awful mining disaster near Wigan saw\nharrowing front page stories and photographs published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 16th<\/sup> 1979 three men\nwere killed in an underground explosion at Golborne colliery and eight others\nwere seriously injured when a fireball shot 200 yards along a tunnel, which was\nalmost two thousand feet underground. By 2nd April the number of dead had\nrisen to ten. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A front page photograph of the time\nshowed wives and girlfriends waiting at the pit head for news of loved ones. I\nwas, then, a young newly-wed and Colin Lever, my song-writing partner, and I\nwere moved to write about the tragedy. Whilst I wrote about the horror of being\ntrapped two thousand feet below the ground Colin wrote about the terror on the\nfaces of the women \u2018caught in the grip of a camera\u2019s sigh.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We combined our two pieces and performed\nTwo Thousand Feet live on the BBC Radio Manchester Bus that came to our\nneighbourhood later that week. We would later often play the song at funding\nevents in mining communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our local town of Rochdale lived then,\nas now, in relative ethnic and racial harmony, but we should never forget the\nbravery of those that have helped generate cultural awareness and tolerance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All across the arts therefore. inducts\ninto this Side-tracks and Detours playlist, celebrating photography, the late\nblues singer Billie Holiday. She had a tough life, depicted in rose tinted spectacles\nin the Diana Ross film vehicle Lady Sings The Blues. Billie\u2019s substance abuse\nwas, perhaps, a way of dealing with her social conscience and revulsion by a\nworld torn apart by racial hatred and class segregation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She must have been brave, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have spoken here before about the\npower of press photography. Billie saw not only newspaper pictures, but real\nlife examples too of lynchings that left coloured people \u2018hanging from a tree,\nlike strange fruit.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just such a photograph inspired a poem,\nStrange Fruit, written by Abel Meeropol and published as a song in 1937. Holiday\nwas one of the first to record it and almost forty years later her work was\ninducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Covered by many artists since, including\nNina Simone, Jeff Buckley UB40 and Siouxsie And The Banshees, the song remains\nhaunting and powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And no one will ever sing it as she did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pete Benbow used to sing Guy Clark songs\nnearly every Tuesday at The Gallows in Milnrow for several years, when Rochdale\nwas a folk-music hot bed of almost a dozen clubs across the borough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Never in that time, even as I was\nbeginning to collect albums Pete was recommending by the Texan song-smith, did\nI think I would ever meet Guy in person and conduct several exclusive\ninterviews with him. And not in my darkest fears did I ever think that the man\nwho wrote and performed all this beautiful music could be so intimidating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Standing well over six feet tall, and\npretty broad too, with shoulder length hair, dark eyes and a penetrating stare\nthat could pin you to a wall until he lowered his eyelids, Guy somehow scared\nme to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His song, My Favourite Picture Of You\nwas written long after most of our town\u2019s folk clubs closed down so I have\nnever heard Pete cover it. Of course, I have it on Guy\u2019s albums, and its lyric\nof \u2018my favourite picture of you is where you stare straight at the lens\u2019 always\nbrings back my own remembered pictures of the late Texan master-craftsman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growing up I would often be listening in\nmy bedroom to \u2018The Beatles And The Byrds And The Beach Boys humming\u2019 whilst my\ndad would be in the shower singing something stupid about what Frank Sinatra\nwas ooby dooby doing to Strangers In The Night. Much of the music I have added\nto this edition of our playlists, celebrating Rochdale\u2019s arts scene, will sound\nas ancient to younger readers as my dad\u2019s favourites did to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I looked through my playlist for\nsongs about photography, though, I almost found myself \u2018down wid da kids\u2019 in\nselecting Photograph, a song registered as written by Ed Sheeran and Johny\nMcDaid from Snow Patrol. Sheeran and producer Jeff Bhasker then spent months in\na studio building on the basic piano loop that McDaid had created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The song, about a photograph Sheeran\ncarried on tour to remind him of a long distance relationship, went to number\nfive in the charts in 2014 supported by a music video of images and photographs\nof Ed\u2019s childhood, revealing his early interest in musical instruments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The song was not without controversy,\nhowever, and saw Sheeran sued for twenty million dollars for copywrite\ninfringement, a claim settled privately, according to wikipeadia, \u2018with no\nadmission of guilt.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is quite legitimate in the music\nindustry, however, to employ previously used titles. So when Ed Sheeran chose\nPhotograph as his title it mattered not that it had also been the name of a song\nwritten by former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, in a rare writing collaboration\nwith George Harrison, giving him this song for his Ringo album of 1973<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A staple of his live performances, the\nsong became number one in several countries including USA, with some critics\ncalling it \u2018among the very best post Beatles song by any of the \u2018fab four,\u2019 so\ncomparing it with My Sweet Lord, Imagine and Mull Of Kintyre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The song has interesting features,\nthough, with echoes of Spector\u2019s \u2018wall of sound\u2019 technique and a lyric that\ndiscusses a photograph as the only reminder of a former relationship. From my\npoint of view I was very interested to learn that one of the session musicians,\nJim Keltner, played also on several John Stewart albums<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Concert For George, held on 2002, the year after Harrison\u2019s death, Ringo\u2019s offering of Photograph was an emotional zenith of the show and the song was also covered by Englebert Humperdink and the late Cilla Black who, like The Beatles, was part of Brian Epstein\u2019s management. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Track listings Kodachrome                                  by Paul Simon Borders                                           by Just Poets Flash Bang Wallop                      by Tommy Steele Photographs And Memories        by Jim Croce Two Thousand Feet                      by Lendanear The Boy In The Photograph        by The Stereophonics Strange Fruit                                  by Billie Holiday My Favourite Picture of You      by Guy Clark Photograph                                    […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}