1965: The Birth of the British ‘Underground’

David Black

11 October 2023

In September 1965 Timothy Leary sent Michael Hollingshead, the Englishman who introduced him to LSD during the Harvard psychedelics project, on a mission. Hollingshead flew into London with 5000 trips of LSD and a list of things to do. Firstly, Hollingshead was to rent the Albert Hall for a psychedelic jamboree with rock bands and poets, with Leary himself hosting the event in his role as the High Priest of LSD. This plan never came off, because of Leary’s bust for marijuana possession in the US at the end of 1965.

Another part of the mission was set up a centre for running LSD sessions and promoting psychedelia in the arts. Hollingshead, with help from old-Etonians, Desmond O’Brien and Joey Mellen, turned a Belgravia flat into the ‘World Psychedelic Centre’. For their LSD sessions, they used the new Leary/Alpert/Metzner book, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as a guide. Hollingshead thought ‘that London would indeed become the centre for a world psychedelic movement’. According to Hollingshead, the World Psychedelic Centre clientele,

…represented perhaps the seminal non-conformism of England’s mid-sixties intelligentsia – not the evangelical non-conformism of such as the Millbrook sect, but an intellectualized form of psychedelic enlightenment, of which popularised Learyism was largely a culmination – that freed so many of England’s educated people from the rigidity of social and class and cultural patterns which had outwardly been solidifying into right-wing Toryism. Their rebellion was typical of this period; the Establishment was the enemy…

One of the reasons Michael Hollingshead gave for coming to London in 1965 was the tendency of the London acid heads – such as those around Alex Trocchi — to politicise, rather than spiritualise, the psychedelic experience. As he put it in The Man Who Turned On the World:

From what I had heard in letters and conversations, the psychedelic movement in England was small and badly informed. It appeared that those who took LSD did so as a consciously defiant anti-authoritarian gesture. The spiritual content of the psychedelic experience was being overlooked.

Hollingshead had been sending shipments of LSD to Trocchi, who distributed it to his contacts in what was to become the London cultural ‘Underground’. Trocchi, born in Glasgow in 1925, had moved to Paris in 1952, where he edited Merlin, an English-language literary magazine. In its pages, Merlin featured contributions from avant-guard writers such as Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Becket — who, at the time, were unable to get their work published anywhere else in English. Trocchi himself, surrounded by young expatriate American writers, such as Terry Southern and George Plimpton, was, in the words of Greil Marcus, ‘seen as a man of towering literary genius, fated to cut a swath through the world’.

Whatever his differences with Trocchi, Hollingshead certainly arrived in London at the right time for a ‘revolution in consciousness’. As Charles Radcliffe wrote in his memoirs:

“The possibility of real change no longer seemed remote. Towards the end of 1965, there was a definite, almost tangible quickening of the generational pulse, ever widening interests and excitement in myself and everyone I knew. Every day there were more of us to know… Many former ‘politicos’ sensed that ‘politics’ wasn’t over but was simply one of many items on the burner. More and more people were talking about LSD, the mind-expanding drug lysergic acid diethylamide 25 [as]… a serious inward voyage of discovery, not to be taken lightly… LSD was legal but for how long? And how could I get some?”

(Charles Radcliffe, Don’t Start Me Talking: Subculture, Situationism and the Sixties)

The British Underground achieved critical mass in June 1965 with the International Poetry Congress at Albert Hall, which drew 5,000 people. The event was hosted by Alex Trocchi who, having been expelled by Guy Debord from Situationist International, had launched a project called Sigma, which aimed to build

‘a new decentralised organisation of writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, physicists, bio-chemists, philosophers, neurologists, engineers, and whatnots, of every race and nationality’.

To co-oordinate a ‘catalogue of such a reservoir of talent, intelligence and power’ would be ‘of itself a spur to our imagination’. For London he planned to found a

‘living-gallery-workshop-auditorium-happening situation where conferences and encounters are to be undertaken… It will be our window on the metropolis, a sigma-centre… an experimental situation in which what is happening cannot be described in terms of conventional categories (which it transcends)… Certain hallucinatory properties of drugs make them central and urgently relevant to any imaginable enquiry into the mystery of the human mind. Unfortunately, ignorance, hysteria and sensationalism have contributed to making this largely a police matter’.

Trocchi believed that psychiatrist RD Laing’s ideas on the usefulness of LSD in treating schizophrenia were ‘entirely in line with those proposed by Sigma’. Trocchi planned to produce a book titled ‘Drugs of the Mind’ with Laing and Willam Burroughs; but like so many of Trocchi’s projects, it was never carried through. This was partly because Trocchi was distracted by his heroin habit, and proved incapable of keeping Sigma’s finances separate from his own. In 1965, Trocchi did, however. pull off the Albert Hall readings, which gave birth to the term, ‘Underground’. The event was filmed by Peter Whitehead, who entitled his 33-minute documentary Wholly Communion. It featured, in order of appearance (all men; such were the times): Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Horovitz, Gregory Corso, Harry Fainlight, Adrian Mitchell, Christopher Logue, Alexander Trocchi, Ernst Jandl, and Allen Ginsberg. It can be seen on YouTube HERE

Harry Fainlight

See David Black, Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD (London: 2022]

Finnegans Wake vs. Theory

Ben Watson writes about Finnegans Wake, the “incomprehensible” final book by James Joyce which he’s been poring over for five decades …

Ben Watson writes about Finnegans Wake, the “incomprehensible” final book by James Joyce which he’s been poring over for five decades …

Finnegans Wake is an experience, it’s not something “difficult” to be decoded by better brains than yours. I don’t read it with any more “comprehension” today than I did age 14, when I took it off the school library shelf and had a look. An older brother had been disparaging my precocity by saying “He’ll be reading James Joyce next”. I asked my mum who this James Joyce was: “Oh, a very difficult writer, also rather obscene”. Naturally, the very next day I ran to the school library at break, and looked up Joyce in the card index. Finnegans Wake was the first volume that came to hand. I read the first page, skipped through and loved it straight away! It resembled other things I loved – Lewis Carroll, The Beano, Molesworth, Afferbeck Lauder’s Fraffly – an explosion of rule-breaking craziness, naughtiness, anti-decorum. Sure, there are lines where I can now “explain” some pun or reference, but these have nothing to do with the book’s main pleasure: an outpouring of verbal energy which thunders and farts like a human body, like an emergent bewebbed cosmos, like a throbbing itching brain. You must suspend the quick flattery of your left hemisphere granted you by smart cultural products, and groove to the archaic and natural rhythms of the rhetoric – a flow never broken, unbrookable – which always adheres enough to the cadences and etymologies of the English language, whether derived from tavern or sewer, study, bedroom or church, to be read aloud with conviction. We might not know what’s it’s saying, but we know what these sounds mean. I never met a musical person who couldn’t enjoy a sentence of the Wake.

This sentence should be sprayed on the wall in letters of gold for all Wake readers:

No man can live the moral part of his psychical (soul) life on the truth of another any more than he can live his physical (body) life on the meals of another. Every one must have his own truths, even as he must have his own meals.” Bishop William Montgomery Brown, Communism and Christianism: Analysed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View (self-published in Galion, Ohio from 1920 to the Bishop’s death in 1937; 14th edition, 1932, pp. 46-47; copies rare because they are seized and burned by the Church of America).

“Incomprehensible”, yes. But each time you look at Finnegans Wake, you discover something … On this occasion, it was the absolute bankruptcy of post-structuralist Theory as it is known and taught in the Humanities today. Proof that Theory has clouded the minds of a generation of intellectuals, no longer able to look at what is immediately in front of them. You can’t “read” (=skim) the Wake, you have to slow down … and look. There is no ideological preparation that can help, and the text confirms no “theoretical” positions. It is anti-religion in active manifestation!

I was excited with a paragraph on pages 123-124, because I’d been thinking about scores, records and music. The weird way a spatial construct on a page or on a piece of revolving plastic can dictate a piece of time. A passage in the Wake connected this space-time relationship to the oldest known “writing” we know, Mesopotamian clay tablets …

Lot 52B: PHOTO: Mesopotamian Cuneiform Clay Tablet. Translated: $1,200 – $1,800 Sold: Artemis Gallery,Jan 18, 2017 Louisville, CO, US

Here’s the passage. Folks, slow down, peer at this thing. It’s ART. It requires your attention and it rewards your attention … as no published prose in English since the King James Bible, Milton, Blake or Capital. And of course, it’s talking about itself, as it ceaselessly does:

Lot: OTLXL5: Pseudo-Mesopotamian Hieroglyphic (Untranslated, As Yet) Est: $00 – $00. Unsold: Taigue-ze-piste Gallery Aug 5, 2023 Somers Town, London, UK

The original document was in what is known as Hanno O’Nonhanno’s unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, and following up their one true clue, the circumflexuous wall of a singleminded men’s asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina, — Yard inquiries pointed out – that they ad bîn “provoked” ay ˄ fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak — fast — table;   ; acùtely profèššionally piquéd, to=introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ’ ’ fàç’e’] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?! James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1922-1939, pp. 123-124).

What so many commentaries on the Wake miss (I except Len Platt’s wonderful introduction to the cheap paperback published by Wordsworth Editions) is how scurrilous, parodic and angry so much of it is. This is a portrait of ridiculous over-educated buffoon – a Slavoj Zizek – stabbing his toast with a fork in order to explain Space-Time. It evinces the same scepticism about world pictures which activated Frank Zappa and Philip K. Dick. Finnegans Wake is not High Art in the vein of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, it’s lowdown smut, an explosion of ribaldry versus privilege, as countercultural as R. Crumb – and similarly grotesque, obscene and hilarious.

And here’s a detail that escaped my attention for fifty years: just dig the way “fact” becomes a misprint of “fart” in Joyce’s composition: “Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush … its recto let out the piquant fact …“. This low view of “fact” chimes with Joyce’s attack on the closed minds of contemporary science graduates in the talk on William Blake he delivered in Trieste. The Wake adheres to the art politics of Blake in his preface to Milton: will everyone please stop serving the rich!

Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against 

lo the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & 

the University: who would if they could for ever depress Mental & prolong 

Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works.

Joyce’s sexual politics may be a little out of date, since we now have plenty of female “Brofèsors”, yet the accusation of spiritual miscomprehension by those who are paid to look at the letter remains. Joyce’s charge that there is a gender component in the replacement of wisdom by competitive pedantry (the “singleminded men’s asylum“) compares to Sabine Hossenfelder’s magnificent YouTube tirades against “Theory of Everything” tyros like Eric Weinstein. The revolution in Paris of May ’68 began as a protest against the segregation of the sexes; Joyce was well aware that oppressive gender roles suit life-denying scientism.

But the really devastating outcome of looking at these lines arrived for me when, after I circulated them, a friend Googled the passage, and sent me a link to a post-structuralist commentary. Here were readers totally unaware that that it’s they who are under attack in these lines!

When she was thinking for herself, my friend supplied me with a real insight: the “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina” atop the wall which surrounds the “singleminded men’s asylum” is something she remembered from her childhood in Lusaka, Zambia, and reminded me of my own childhood sighting of broken glass atop brick walls. Forget Lacan’s mirror stage – a theoretical figure which no-one actually remembers – this sight broke us out of the protected bubble of childhood, and we realised how cruel the world can be, especially when protecting private property. Do they really want to cut me up for wanting to see what’s on the other side? Burglars must be really desperate to risk climbing over that!

But to the reason for this Substack item: the abolute bankruptcy of the post-structuralist tradition for explaining anything, especially revolutionary art. Viz: Lydia H. Liu’s The Probability of Sense in the Hypermnesiac Machine (Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2017). The Internet promises access to all knowledge, but can quickly become a Bible of readymade answers which block creative thought, which invariably stems from personal attention to specifics. Darwin could never have devised the theory of evolution if all those nineteenth-century vicars hadn’t been collecting fossils on the beach as examples of God’s handywork.

“The Hypermnesiac Machine” is Lydia Liu’s coinage to describe the Standard English and computerization via information theory which accompanied technological breakthroughs in the Anglo-American war effort 1939-1945, and which kept up its pace in the following decades due to the USA’s perceived need to battle Communism, drugs, Islam, terrorism etc. Like Derrida and Lacan, the two post-structuralists she uses to gloss the Wake, Liu fails to see that Joyce was writing against capitalism, war and its “scientific” alienations. She uses “bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dsp itch ina” as a synecdoche of the whole book and Joyce’s method, comparing it to Claude Shannon’s conceptualization of the space as the 27th letter in the alphabet, which allowed development of the ASCII code and use of words in computing. Impressive sounding enough. But I can’t think of anywhere else in Finnegans Wake where a conventional piece of English is dismembered in this particular way! The outburst of diacritics in the same paragraph, taken by Liu as exemplary, is also unique. As a critic of the book, Liu is talking nonsense.

As usual, Derrida presides over this inability to respond to what’s there, this raid on the material to supply grist to Theory.  Liu uses Derrida to generalize/moralise Joyce’s method into the gruesomely predictable postmodern sermon – difference is good, disruption is necessary, linear thought is wicked, we must all be pious liberals “subverting power” in our art – whereas, like Marx, Joyce found ideas in the materials he dealt with, he was not applying a preconceived method or ideology. Every time I look at the Wake, I get new ideas. Every time I read the Wake to someone, or get them to read a passage, I discover new things. Joyce breaks up the words of “bits of broken glass and split china”, not in order to point out that parsing words is dependent on the spaces between them (one can examine his hundred-letter “thunder” words and still make out words inside them), but so that his row of letters resembles shards of glass and china set in cement.

Liu quotes Derrida saying: “This Anglo-Saxon commerce, these exchanges of a piece of merchandise (ware) in two languages, must pass through acts of writing. The event is linked to the spacing of its archive and would not take place without it, without being put into letters and pages. Erase the typeface, mute the graphic percussion, subordinate the spacing, that is, the divisibility of the letter, and you would again reappropriate Finnegans Wake into a monolingualism, or at least subjugate it to the hegemony of a single language.” (Derrida 1984, 147)”

Derrida’s vaunting of the written word makes him a household god for those make a living by interpreting words. Joyce used to read the Wake aloud, but this is interdit in the Derridean ideology, because making the page invisible reduces it to a monologue. Not so! If you read the Wake out loud it does NOT become Standard English, it’s a new tongue … like an English-speaker hearing Cambrian dialect today, we seem to be hearing from some prenational hinterland. Alexandre Kojève defused Hegel’s “German” dialectic for France’s Cartesian establishment. Likewise, Derrida’s insistence on the written rather than the spoken bespeaks a reactionary politics: the complexity of written French compared to spoken French is all about honouring grammatical relations which are inaudible today – i.e. dead – so only available to the schooled, a badge of distinction. It is the very opposite of Valentin Volosinov’s Marxist linguistics, which begin with the spoken, the living, the “concrete utterance”.

Liu asserts: “By manipulating typefaces, graphic forms, spacing, and an exhaustive variety of written signs, Joyce constructs a vast network of writing that interlinks up to allegedly 40 languages and stores numerous historical archives.” This is Jorge Luis Borges – a vision of an impossible total library – not the Wake, which stimulates the tongue to activity.

Liu makes simple blunders: “Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky” verse in the novel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). is one of the best-known nonsense poems written in the English language, relying predominantly on the play of sounds.” Only the first and last verses! “Jabberwocky” is a monster-slaying hero tale.

“Joyce’s nonsense word “iSpace”—coined long before the invention of the iPhone and the iPad—anticipated Shannon’s development of Printed English by assuming a radical rupture between writing and speech. It matters little if one can spell or pronounce this nonsense word, for our speech cannot reproduce the ideographic image of iSpace in sound nor can it assign a linguistic meaning to it.”

This is “the French Joyce”, a raid on the Wake to buttress post-structuralist preconceptions. There are pointed “unpronounceable”/visual elements in the Wake, sure, but no “radical rupture” with speech. The thing invites performance! Also, because of the iPhone and iPad, you can read out “iSpace” now, and most people will have a clear idea of what word you’re reading, even down to the camel case. The Derridean effect – like Slavoj Zizek finding the “objet petit a” in every movie he sees – is to reduce everything to the same, to blot out specifics, to hide reality, to mask exploitation, to fend off critique and politics. To deny me here, you there. Post-structuralism blinds people to what’s actually there. Like a Zizek YouTube, the “Brofèsor; àth é’s Brèak — fast — table” is funny, but only because he’s patently an idiot.

Liu then turns to Jacques Lacan on the Wake. Of course! The next tainted saint in the Canon. Opportunist vultures ripping up the corpse of a modernism designed for REVOLUTION! My better half berates me for going on too long about the evils of post-structuralism and postmodernism (“everyone in academia has forgotten about it now, it’s just your personal trauma, a fashion that denied you – neanderthal Marxist – a job in the Humanities in the 80s”), but if you Google my favourite things today – the Wake, Dada, Free Improvisation, sound poetry – that’s what you find. It’s like looking for Jesus … and all you can find is the Roman Catholic Church!

More Liu: “‘The real’, Lacan wrote elsewhere, ‘is completely denuded of sens [meaning]. We can be satisfied, we can be sure that we are dealing with something of the réel [the real] only when it no longer has any sens whatsoever. It has no sens because it is not with mots [words] that we write the réel. It is with petites lettres [little letters].’ (my emphasis)”

This is hard (stupid?) Cartesianism – duality between spirit and matter – and utterly in opposition to Joyce’s dialectical holism. What a doleful effect this hopeless doctrine has had on a generation of intellectuals! A smug nihilism about practical action, a Platonic contempt for the lowly artisan. The precise opposite of Hegel’s translation of Christian values into a progressive secular rationality, Marx’s discovery of the working class, Bishop Brown and Martin Luther King’s ideas of popular resistance …

As usual in this zone, a profound-sounding “conclusion” which is actually utterly inconclusive, inert, equivocal and predictable, an “I looked into something and discovered what I already knew, i.e. what has been canonised as the thought of my time.” Post-structuralism is a New Catholicism, with its own roll-call of saints, its own pious shibboleths … Finnegans Wake was designed by Joyce to undo the “instrumental reason” which produces capitalism, marketing algorithms, automatic stock-broking and war … but for Liu and her authorities, it’s all the same thing. This is how Liu concludes: “At a fundamental level, the communication machine can process nothing—certainly not words, in spite of its word-processing reputation—but the petites lettres of Printed English. That which gets processed guarantees no more—and no less—sense than does the ‘iSpace’ of Finnegans Wake.”

On the contrary, Joyce’s “iSpace” puts us back in space – just where Newton and Einstein (and cluster bombs sold to Ukraine for purposes of profit) deny our subjectivity and the naive empathy of our species being! Like Free Improvisation, the Wake challenges authority, and asks listeners to supply their own interpretation, unleashing our personal memories and associations like a psychoanalysis or a Rorschach blot (but not costing us a fortune). It’s a bustling market, a busting farrago, a verbal storm, a rush, a dream … it works. Unlike, say, Gertrude Stein, who also ticks the postmodern boxes, but has next to no content and – like orchestral Minimalism or Evan Parker’s circular-breathing turn – stuns the mind rather than causing it to pay attention to what’s there.

Out To Lunch, Somers Town 17-viii-2023

PS If you wish to follow up OTL’s polemic, find Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce (University of Michigan Press, 1992) comparable in polemical power to the Sokal/Bricmont hoax in revealing the Kojève/Derrida/Lacan/Foucault/Deleuze lineage as woeful intellectual charlatanism.

(Ben Watson presents Late Lunch with Out to Lunch weekly on ResonanceFM 104.4 )

(This article has been corrected to say that Lusaka is the capital of Zambia, NOT Gambia as first stated)

‘Another Language’ – How Walt Whitman’s Poetry Came to England

(January 2022)

How Walt Whitman’s Poetry Came to England

By David Black

Suddenly, out of its stale and drowsy air, the air of slaves,
Like lightning Europe le’pt forth,
Sombre, superb and terrible,
As Ahimoth, brother of Death.
God, ‘twas delicious!
That brief, tight, glorious grip
Upon the throats of kings.

Something entirely missed by biographers of Walt Whitman (1819-92) and poetry scholars generally is how his poetry found its first readership in England. His poem, ‘Resurgemus’, appeared in the 3 August 1850 edition of the Red Republican, a weekly paper of the English Chartists edited in London by George Julian Harney (1817-97).

Harney was a close associate of Karl Marx (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95), who as political exiles had moved from Germany to London and Manchester respectively. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto , first published in German in 1848, was translated by Helen Macfarlane (1818-1861), whose own writings for Harney’s paper were influenced by the German Idealism of GWF Hegel (1770-1831), the Unitarianism of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

The Red Republican was denounced by leading ‘opinion formers’ such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and the Times newspaper for its articulation of ‘dangerous’ ideas. The first-ever reaction by the Victorian ruling class to what became known as ‘Marxism’ is to be found in a Times leader of 2 September 1851 entitled ‘Literature For The Poor’. The Times found in the Communist Manifesto an alarming appeal to those people in the lower orders who form a sort of secret society, which is ‘close to our own’ but speaks ‘another language’:

‘… only now and then when some startling fact is bought before us do we entertain even the suspicion that there is a society close to our own, and with which we are in the habits of daily intercourse, of which we are as completely ignorant as if it dwelt in another land, of another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw’.

The Times chose not to name the paper – ‘we are not anxious to give it circulation by naming its writers or the works to which it is composed’ – but did extract some of Helen Macfarlane’s translation of the Communist Manifesto, as serialized in the paper. The selection included this passage as an example of outrageous cheek:

‘Your Middle-class gentry are not satisfied with having the wives and daughters of their Wages-slaves at their disposal, –  not to mention the innumerable public prostitutes –  but they take a particular pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Middle-class marriage is in reality a community of wives’.

The Leader, the weekly paper of Christian-socialism and ‘moderate’ Chartism, founded in 1850 by George Henry Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt, referred to the writers of Harney’s paper as ‘violent’ and ‘audacious’. Helen Macfarlane, writing under the pseudonym,‘Howard Morton’, responded in a Red Republican article,

‘It has lately been said by the Leader that the writers in the Red Republican are “violent, audacious and wrathfully earnest”… I should think we are. Just about as much in earnest as our precursor, “the Sansculotte Jesus” was when He scourged the usurers and money-lenders, and thimble-rigging stockbrokers of Jerusalem out of that temple they “had made a den of thieves”’.

How then did Whitman’s poetry come to make its first European appearance in Harney’s Red Republican? In 1848, Whitman moved to New Orleans to edit the Crescent newspaper. As there was considerable interest there in the politics of France, Whitman took a deep interest in the Revolution that began in Paris in  February 1848 with the overthrow of King Louis Phillipe. The revolutionary tide swept across Europe, overthrowing the despotic monarchies of Austria, Italy, and various German states. But by 1850 the old orders had been restored. According to Jennifer J. Stein,

‘Although the revolutions were fairly quickly squelched, Whitman had gained a taste of the revolutionary spirit. His development from newspaper journalist to democracy-proclaiming poet occurred most dramatically in the years between the mid 1840s and mid 1850s, and although some point to Whitman’s work against slavery as his motivation for becoming freedom’s poetic leader, others point to the revolutions of Europe as his inspiration. In direct response to the revolutions, Whitman wrote “Resurgemus,” a poem printed in the New York Daily Tribune on 21 June 1850… The nature imagery used throughout “Resurgemus” is an important artistic step for Whitman, since he clearly uses it to link the replenishing power of nature to the rejuvenation of revolution and liberation. This poem was among those chosen for inclusion in the first (1855) Leaves of Grass, and it continued to resurface in various forms throughout his later editions.’

‘Resurgemus’, like the Communist Manifesto and the writings of Helen Macfarlane, represented what the Times called ‘another language in which we never conversed, which in fact we never saw’. The New York Tribune was read in London by George Julian Harney, who lifted Whitman’s Resurgemus from its pages and republished it in the Red Republican on 3 August 1850.

Mike Sanders points out that Harney had a ‘continuing desire to raise the literary standard of Chartist poetic production’. To achieve this, Harney rejected a lot of poetry submissions from readers; his reasoning being that bad poetry couldn’t express good politics: ‘Put simply, Chartists argued that the capacity of the working classes both to recognise and produce good poetry demonstrated their fitness for the franchise’. Clearly, Harney regarded Resurgemus as exemplary.

RESURGEMUS.

Suddenly, out of its stale and drowsy air, the air of slaves,
Like lightning Europe le’pt forth,
Sombre, superb and terrible,
As Ahimoth, brother of Death.
God, ‘twas delicious!
That brief, tight, glorious grip
Upon the throats of kings.

Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh. ¶
You liars paid to defile the People,
Mark you now:
Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts,
For court thieving in its manifold mean forms,
Worming from his simplicity the poor man’s wages;
For many a promise sworn by royal lips
And broken, and laughed at in the breaking;
Then, in their power, not for all these,
Did a blow fall in personal revenge,
Or a hair draggle in blood:
The People scorned the ferocity of kings.
But the sweetness of mercy brewed bitter destruction,
And frightened rulers come back:
Each comes in state, with his train,
Hangman, priest, and tax-gatherer,
Soldier, lawyer, and sycophant;
An appalling procession of locusts,
And the king struts grandly again.
Yet behind all, lo, a Shape
Vague as the night, draped interminably,
Head, front and form, in scarlet folds;
Whose face and eyes none may see,
Out of its robes only this,
The red robes, lifted by the arm,
One finger pointed high over the top,
Like the head of a snake appears.
Meanwhile, corpses lie in new-made graves,
Bloody corpses of young men;
The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily,
The bullets of tyrants are flying,
The creatures of power laugh aloud:
And all these things bear fruits, and they are good.
Those corpses of young men,
Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets,
Those hearts pierced by the grey lead,
Cold and motionless as they seem,
Live elsewhere with undying vitality;
They live in other young men, O, kings,
They live in brothers, again ready to defy you;
They were purified by death,
They were taught and exalted.
Not a grave of those slaughtered ones,
But is growing its seed of freedom,
In its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds shall carry afar and resow,
And the rain nourish.
Not a disembodied spirit
Can the weapon of tyrants let loose,
But it shall stalk invisibly over the earth,
Whispering, counseling, cautioning.
Liberty, let others despair of thee,
But I will never despair of thee:
Is the house shut? Is the master away?
Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching,
He will surely return; his messengers come anon.

WALTER WHITMAN.

References

‘The Revolutions of 1848’, Jennifer J. Stein, in J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

Mike Sanders, ‘The Poetry of Chartism, Aesthetics, Politics’, History (CUP: 2009), p77.

David Black,  Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. Lexington Books: Lanham, Maryland (2004).

Helen Macfarlane: Red Republican. Essays, articles and her translation of the Communist Manifesto. Edited and annotated by David Black. Unkant Publishers, London 2014.

A.R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney.
Heinemann: London (1958).

Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Poetics of Hooligan Communism

Launch at Housmans bookshop  for Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language. Introduction by Sezgin Boynik (Rab Rab Press, Helsinki 2018) 22 May 2018

Dave Black

As Darko Suvin says in an afterword to this book, when the 2nd International collapsed at the outbreak of the First World War, Lenin retreated to the library in Geneva where he read Hegel for three months, after which he analysed the world situation and, a couple of years later, went back to Russia to organise the October Revolution.

110 years earlier Hegel said of the Enlightenment Spirit that produced the French Revolution:

“Enlightenment upsets the household arrangements, which spirit carries out in the house of faith, by bringing in the goods and furnishings belonging to the world of here and now.”

The Enlightenment is the negative which “brings to light its own proper object, the ‘unknowable absolute Being’ and utility.” If Kant was right and “God”  “unknowable” then whatever is divine essentially becomes privatised (as Marcuse, back in 1964, pointed out in One Dimensional Man, “spirituality” becomes commodified in the works of the guru of your “choice”). The absolute being becomes whatever produces the utilitarian “greatest happiness of the greatest number,” an idea which suits not only the ideologues of  the free market, but also of state-capitalism in the forms of social democracy and Stalinism.

As Walter Benjamin put it,

“Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”

In post-Stalinist Russia, there are of course, few liberated grandchildren of the millions of people wiped out by Stalin’s regime. But before Stalinism there was great positive energy in the Russian revolutionary experience. As Russia was largely a peasant society, dominated for centuries by the Church, landlordism, poverty, and rural mafias, “everyday life” was a turgid back water which needed revolutionising. Having overthrown the old order, under the slogan, “Peace, Land and Bread”, Lenin announced that “Socialism is Soviets plus Electricity”; a definite case of “bringing in the goods and furnishings belonging to the world of here and now..

Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language contains a selection of essays from 1924 by writers of the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), drawn from the schools of Futurism, Constructivism and Formalism. The editor, Sezgin Boynik, quotes the leading light of this group, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky:

“…the revolution cast the rugged idiom of the millions out on the streets; the slang of the outer suburbs flowed across the avenues in the city centre; the enervated burbling of the intelligentsia with their vocabulary of castrated words like ‘ideal’, ‘principles of justice’, the ‘divine origin’, the ‘transcendental countenance of Christ and Anti-Christ’ – all this kind of talk, once mouthed in the restaurants, has been wiped out. A new element of language has been liberated. How is it to be made poetic?”

Mayakovsky knew exactly how. He wrote an essay entitled How Verses are Made, which anyone who fancies themselves as a poet needs to read, and not because they’ll necessarily find in it the encouragement they might be looking for. Mayakovsky generously lays out his trade secrets, but they are not for the faint-hearted. The true poet is a poet all the time, alert to the rhythms and sounds of everything that can be experienced, whether standing in the rain on Brooklyn Bridge, riding a rickety Moscow tramcar, making love, or dealing with the trauma of a comrade and fellow poet, namely Sergey Esenin, having committed suicide.

When Mayakovsky sent Lenin a poem he had published, entitled 150 Million, Lenin commented, “You know, this is a most interesting piece of work. A peculiar brand of communism. It is hooligan communism.”  To be a communist poet is to heed what Mayakovsky calls the “social command.” A poet must renounce the “production of poetical trifles”, have “thorough knowledge of theoretical economics, a knowledge of the realities of everyday life, [and] an immersion in the scientific study of history…”

And,

“To fulfil the social command as well as possible you must be in the vanguard of your class… You must smash to smithereens the myth of an apolitical art.”

Mayakovsky’s identification with the “vanguard” was won in the harsh experience of revolution, famine and civil war. It is a far cry from the crazy logic of modern-day groupescules who think that, because their “line” on any given subject under heaven and beyond is more “correct” than that of any other groupescule, then they must be the vanguard.

Mayakovsky argues that “Poetry is a manufacture.” But, he warns, “You must not make manufacturing, the so-called technical process, an end in itself.”

There is thus a teleology in Mayakovsky’s aesthetic. In this sense he is a follower of Lenin in the true sense of  being a practising dialectician rather than a Lenin-ist. In 1924 he writes in protest against the canonisation of Lenin with mass-produced bronze statuettes and portraits. Mayakovsky does so because for him the Being of Lenin was, and remained, the Revolution. If you kill Lenin by making him into religious icon, you kill the Revolution by making a movement into a religion.

“Lenin is still our contemporary.

He is among the living.

We need him alive, not dead.

So:

Learn from Lenin, but don’t canonise him.

Don’t create a cult around a man who fought cults his whole life.

Don’t sell the objects of this cult.

Don’t merchandise Lenin!”

What made the canonisation all the more deadly, was the fact that Lenin’s legacy is ambivalent. As Darko Suvin points out, before Lenin read Hegel in 1914, his main philosophical contribution had been the notorious Materialism and Empirio-Criticism which “opened the door to a quite untenable theory of arts and sciences subjectively ‘mirroring’ and objectively reality, that is, to a mechanical materialism later warmly espoused by harmful Stalinist inquisitors  into sciences and arts and amounting to a ban on radical innovation within Marxism quite uncharacteristic of Lenin’s own major achievements.”

And what is especially tragic is that the collection of the LEF articles in Coiled Verbal Spring ends with a quote by Stalin, supplied by Alexei Kruchenykh, which argues that the party leader, who is by definition infallible, can override the majority opinion of the party, Within a few years, Stalin would destroy the Left Front of the Arts and all it stood for, in favour of a reactionary school of resuscitated romanticism called “socialist realism.”

All of the writers in Coiled Verbal Spring survived the purges of the 1930s. But Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930, after which Stalin imposed on his legacy the same fate as he imposed on the legacy of Lenin; he was ‘canonised’ as the great poet of the Bolshevik Revolution.

[ends]

This text first appeared in Militant Esthetix

Lockdown Xenochrony

(21,07,21)

“Xenochrony” is a musical technique associated with Frank Zappa, who coined the name from the Greek words xeno (strange) and chrono (time). According to Zappa, “In this technique, various tracks from unrelated sources are randomly synchronized with each other to make a final composition with rhythmic relationships unachievable by other means.”

Since the summer of 2020 the barbarism of pure culture has linked to archived weekly radio broadcasts from the Late Lunch with Out to Lunch show on Resonance 104.4 FM.

As in 2021 and the Covid Crisis and our favourite xenochronic musians are still alive and kicking, we are relaunching our support with the following links:

Ben Watson takes the Late Lunch House Band, honed via several years playing weekly at the Resonance studio and “xenochronically” during pandemic lockdown, to the Betsey Trotwood pub on Farringdon Road for a live session. The Lessons of Xenochrony are not forgotten, though, so you also get to hear the superb post-Bailey guitar of James Wilson of Music With My Insane Friend (“The Castro Eulogies (My Friend Fidel)” and “No Imagination (My Plastic Bottle Caught in the Strings)” from I Digress Indeed’s Retirement Music (SoundCloud, 2017) and “Leguminous Legroom Trio”  a xenochronic composition combining Peter Baxter “Pots, Pans & an Open Window” 14-vii-2021 8:13, Out To Lunch’s organ piece “Nachsteuererklaerungsjubel” and Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith’s “On Cloud Roland Nine”). Association of Musical Marxists All-Stars at the Betsey Trotwood 16-vii-2021: Peter Baxter – pots’n’pans and electronics; Guy Evans – percussion; Iris Watson – djembe hand drum, thunder tube, handclaps; Luke Davis – typewriter, poetry; Out To Lunch – vocals, thunder tube, handclaps, word jazz, yamaha organ, mix, xenochronics; Dave Black – electric guitar; Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – sopranino sax, tenor sax, baritone sax.

Twang Verbal 26-v-2021

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance (not counting excerpts in the theme tune opener): Graham Davis – synth, electric guitars; Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – saxophone; Out To Lunch – Splash’n’Klang, tap drip, recitation, xenochrony; Mike Watt – electric bass; Ben Moran Healy – acoustic guitar, electric guitar, recitation; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar, wah bass; Mike Watt – electric bass; Guy Evans – hybrid drumset.

0:00 Marc Guillermont’s “Make a Blues Noise Here” plus two excerpts from RSG’s “Response to Foistive Thirty Take One”; GE “Little of the Original Structure Remains” 0:29>>0:34; GD “Fat Bassist Ponders Life” 1:41>>1:56, 0:00>>0:22; GE “Posthorn Pat” 0:23>>0:53; OTL/BMH “Pesky Attic Dooda” 7:49>>8:16; OTL “Water3” 9-x-2018 4:06>>4:34 + EC/GD “Twixt the Shed & Here #3” 1:30>>1:59 4:30

4:59 Toilets or Marx – Don’t Make Me Choose (GD/RSG “Foistive Thirty Take One” 7:20>>10:15/OTL “Water3” 9-x-2018 13:26>>14:13/MW “Foist #12” 1:03 spaced) 3:13

8:46 Foistive Thirty feat. Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith on tenor sax (RSG/OTL “Tap Drip 12-iv-2021a” 8:47>>44:48/BMH “Biblical Rain” 4:17, “New Shapes Found in Hovel” 5:17/EC “Response to Iris & Finnegans Wake in London Zoo” 7-v-2022 10:48>>32:57/MW “Foists #112-118″/GE “Response to Here’s That Rainy Day” 2:25, “Response Chain (GE to EC) to PB’s One Splatter” 12:57>>32:03, “Response to EC’s Response to Beefheart Lecture 6&7” 0:27>>3:43/OTL “Splash’n’Klang” 10-vii-2018 1:51>>5:29) 35:51

45:35 Pesky Attic Dooda (BMH “Humped Dooda” (guitar), “June Attic Mildew” (voice)/OTL “Pesky Interim Fly” 23-v-2021/excerpts from “Splash’n’Klang” 4-xii-2018) 9:29

55:35 Shittin’ in a Bag … Again (BMH/OTL “Splash’n’Klang” 10-vii-2018b 1:51>>5:24) 4:38

Concerto for Graham

by

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars

Music assembled from contributions by AMM All-Stars during Covid-19 lockdown. Tracks 1-4 were extracted from Concerto for Graham, an hour (Late Lunch with Out To Lunch broadcast from Resonance 104.4FM 2-3pm 31-iii-2021) in which multi-instrumentalist Graham Davis (guitar, bass ukelele, vocals) responded to a collage put together by OTL. Tracks 6-7 were broadcast on The OTL Show (Soho Radio 8-9am 2-iv-2021): “Blob Stance” is an acoustic guitar improvisation by Ben Moran-Healy with responses from the Somers Town dawn chorus and OTL on piano and penny whistle; “I’m Bleeding Obedience” is a song by Peter Baxter with bass, Chapman stick and synth added by Jair-Rohm Parker Wells. “Clangs the Dearth in my Loins” (track 5), OTL performing Peter Baxter’s online review of Concert for Graham at the piano, is inedit jusq’ici.

All tracks by Xenochronic AMM All-Stars; in order of appearance: Graham Davis – electric guitar, bass ukelele; Out To Lunch – field recording of fireworks at Moss Hall School and dawn chorus in Somers Town, Splash’n’Klang, mouthnoise, piano, penny whistle, organ, xenochrony; Guy Evans – drums; John Roy – banjo; Ben Moran-Healy – guitar; Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – bass guitar, Chapman stick, synths; Mike Watt – bass guitar; Peter Baxter – vocals, drum machine, synth.

  1. GD/OTL/GE (sped-up)
  2. GD/OTL
  3. GD/JR
  4. OTL (“Tap Drip is Getting Faster” 29-iii-2021; “Organ Response to Mike Watt & Dave Black on 85th Street”)/BMH (“A Nimble Mop Is …”)/GE (“Sunday Piano Just Hybrid Kit 2:36>>7:20)
  5. PH (words)/OTL/JRPW/MW
  6. BMH/OTL
  7. PH/JRPW

Return of the Toby Jug 10-iii-2021

“Make a Blues Noise Here” from Marc Guillermont’s Zappostrophe) intercut with excerpts from: AMM All-Stars “Send Out Assent Dung”; Jair-Rohm Parker Wells “llcontrib060321a”; Dave Black “Blackheart Mountain”; Out To Lunch “Intimation” 11-vii-2020; Guy Evans “Sunrise Piano Response Hybrid Kit Response, Just Kit”; Eleanor Crook “Tiny Surf Hands Just Guitar (Clean Settings)”.

Compost Fetishisation 24-ii-2021

Topics audio esemplasm

LLWOTL 10 February 2010 <CLICK HERE

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Cloughie – electric bass; Mike Watt – electric bass; Out To Lunch – vocals, empty Turkish Delight box,Yamaha organ, Splash’n’Klang, djembe hand drum, xenochrony, announcements, master plan; Graham Davis – synth; Paul Shearsmith – trumpet; Eleanor Crook – violin, electric guitar; Guy Evans – hybrid drumset, wind capture; Robert “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – baritone sax, telephony; Peter Baxter – electronic devices; Ben Moran-Healy – acoustic guitar, semi-electric guitar.

LLWOTL 3 February 2021  <CLICK HERE

Polemic, politics, mouth jazz and spontaneous music with Ben Watson. Today: Out To Lunch and his crew address the current craze for sea shanties as Dave Black sings his version of the sea shanty “Haul Away Joe”, and sea water drips through strangely-possessed xenochronic realisations. With OTL on piano, djembe hand drum and xenochronics; Eleanor Crook on electric guitar and wah bass; Graham Davis on synth; Guy Evans at the drumset; Gareth Sager on various instruments.

Tagged

#resonance fm #arts radio #london #late lunch with out to lunch #sea shanties

EARLIER SHOWS

Margulis Forever 23-ix-2020

LISTEN HERE:The OTL Show 11-ix-2020

Episode of Ben Watson‘s Late Lunch with Out To Lunch dedicated to Lynn Margulis, the rebel biologist who lionised evolution via symbiosis and the lateral transfer of genes between species. Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – Chapman Stick, electric bass, processing; Out To Lunch – voice, piano, Splash’n’Klang, poetry; Rob “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – sopranino and tenor saxophones; Graham Davis – synth; Eleanor Crook – violin, electric guitar; Guy Evans – drumset; Cloughie – electric bass; Dave Black – electric guitar; John Roy – synth. All played this week unless otherwise stated.

0:00 Marc Guillermont “Make a Blues Noise Here” plus Intimations 3:00
3:00 “Ribbed Rubbish” (OTL/R”S”G) 5:27
8:35 “Bass Response to Splash’n’Klang of Saturday 12-ix-2020″ (OTL/J-RPW) 7:32
10:24 “Violin Response to Ribbed Rubbish” (EC) 5:42
16:12 Internet Archive Robot reads Lynn Margulis 1:49
16:18 “Do We Have to Do It in Here?” (GD, slowed down -33%) 2:35
18:32 “Little Ted Murders his Elderly Neighbour” (GD)
19:01 “Vespertilionid” (EC/GE) 8:52
23:06 “Bass Bells” (C) 4:18
27:44 OTL on Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from our Microbial Ancestors (1986) 1:50
29:34 OTL reads Margulis on spyrochetes 3:03
32:37 “Nine Seconds of Drum Samples” (GE) 0:09
32:46 “You Go to My Head meets Body & Soul” (DB/R”S”G) 3:45
36:19 “Korg’n’Drip 3” (OTL/J-RPW) 8:17
36:45 “Boing Craze Drip Threat” (OTL/DB) 7:45
39:42 “Procession of the Pocket Things” (EC) 6-ix-2020 4:17
44:25 OTL reads more Margulis on spyrochetes 1:01
45:25 “You Wouldn’t Want One in Your Ear” (GD) 2:02
45:59 “Guitruling Banjos” (DB/GD) 2:22
47:00 “Boingy Bonk” (C) 3:53
48:21 “Ogre Margulis” (OTL) 3:43
49:12 “Anal Probe” (GD) 2:03
49:56 “Jump Navel Asterix” (JR) 28-vii-2020 5:45
50:42 “Toy Drum Mutiny” (GE) 8:18
55:44 “The Vicar Insisted” (GD) 2:03
56:48 OTL reads Margulis on seawater 0:52
Factual Note: Margulis’s spyrochete theory, which generated some of the most colourful sentences of Microcosmos, has – unlike her symbiotic explanation of mitichondria and chloroplasts – not yet received corroboration by empirical research into the fossil and DNA record, although this is still ongoing. Modern spyrochete whips do not exhibit the “9 x 2” structure which characterises sperm tails and cilia in multicellular organisms.

The OTL Show is an hour of Internet DJing by Ben Watson on Soho Radio. This was a prerecord because the studio was closed due to coronoavirus lockdown, and was broadcast at 8am on Friday 11-ix-2020.

LISTEN HERE: Groove vs. Squeeze 26-viii-2020

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Peter Baxter – tabletop percussion; Out To Lunch – announcements, field recording, Splash’n’Klang, Google Gargle, piano, Korg ribbon synth, xenochrony; Ben Moran Healy – electric guitar; Guy Evans – drumset; Rob “Sugarlips” Goldsmith – tenor saxophone; Cloughie – electric bass; Graham Davis – Ladybird recitation, “WPLJ”; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar; Dave Black – acoustic guitar, vocals, harmonica, “Back Back Train” and “Jitterbug Swing”; Charlotte Whelan – tape deck fanny pack; John Roy – banjo.

Title Credit: Bob Cobbing, Lawrence Upton and Christopher Nolan

Image: “Painstaking Accretion” Out To Lunch, Doodle Buddy on Eleanor Crook photograph of oak fungus 29-viii-2020

LISTEN HERE:

DANburst of Dreams 2-ix-2020

By Xenochronic AMM All-Stars

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Cloughie – electric bass; Guy Evans – drumset, trumpet; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar; Graham Davis – jingles, synth; Out To Lunch – piano, readings from J. H. Prynne’s Squeezed White Noise, Splash’n’Klang, google gargle, announcements, xenochrony; Jessica Harper – rhythm mashes; Dave Black – bottleneck guitar; Peter Baxter aka The Baxterium “With Beyonce in the Bayou”, acid synth, percussion.

Drip Hop UK 12-viii-2020

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Peter Baxter aka The Baxterium – tabletop percussion, sound montage, “Does Anyone Have an Onion?”, “How To Escape a Place with Scree Walls”; Graham Davis – synth, “Mwaaaah”, “Scree”, “Tinkle”; “Sweep”; Out To Lunch – Splash’n’Klang, piano, announcements, xenochrony; Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – double bass; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar; Ben Moran Healy – electric guitar, Melodica, spoon’n’cup; Rob Jones – synth; Rob Goldsmith – sopranino saxophone; Guy Evans – drumset; John Roy – semi-electric guitar.

Groovy Fidget Muffin Rule 5-viii-2020

Xenochronic AMM All-Stars in order of appearance: Out To Lunch – piano, rural mouthnoise, Korg ribbon synth, acoustic guitar, xenochrony, urbane announcements; Ben Moran Healy – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, snuffles; Rob Jones – synth, Melodica, spoon’n’cup; Jessica Harper – harp; Graham Davis – jingles, synth; Paul Hession – drumset; Eleanor Crook – electric guitar, electric bass, pedal steel; Cloughie – electric bass; Dave Black – acoustic guitar, harmonica; Jair-Rohm Parker Wells – double bass; Guy Evans – samples, drumset; John Roy – baby hand drum, synth; Roy Castle – postponed.

Rhythmically Speaking 29-vii-2020

^^LINK^^

by Ben Watson

Iain Sinclair: Poetry with the AMM All-Stars on Resonance FM

Iain Sinclair reads extracts from his poem Fifty Catacomb Saints accompanied by Peter Baxter – percussion; Robert Goldsmith – baritone sax; Paul Shearsmith – trumpet, pipes, squeakers, Jew’s harp; Dave Black – electric guitar; Graham Davis – synths; Luke Davis – typewriter; and Out To Lunch  – splash’n’klang, piano, mouthnoiseThis session was broadcast live on Resonance FM 104.4, July 12th 2018.

https://archive.org/details/FiftyCatacombSaints12-xii-2018