Sir Mick Jagger goes back to Exile

Forty years ago, the Rolling Stones decamped to the South of France, living as tax exiles as they recorded their tenth album.
The sessions became notorious for their bacchanalian excesses, taking place amidst a nine-month, non-stop cocktail party in a sprawling villa that had supposedly once been a headquarters for the Gestapo.
The result was a sprawling double album, Exile On Main Street, which has gone down in history as one of the band's best.
Next week, they are re-releasing the record with 10 new tracks - including several recently rediscovered songs. An accompanying documentary, Stones In Exile, will premiere in Cannes, before screening on BBC One on Sunday, 23 May.
Frontman Sir Mick Jagger met up with BBC arts editor Will Gompertz to explain why the band had gone back to the archives - and whether the band would ever get back together.

---

The new tracks on Exile On Main Street have been promoted as "recently rediscovered". How lost were they?
Well, they weren't really lost. It was just no-one had really looked at them. There wasn't a bag at the bottom of someone's drawer.

The patchwork album cover was created by photographer Robert Frank

Where were they?
They were in our tape store, mouldering away. Tapes don't have a very good shelf life - so you bake them in the oven, get them out, play them and transfer them to somewhere else.
And then the process started of listening to them and going, "that's really a good one".
What sort of state were the songs in?
They were mostly instrumental tracks with no vocals on them. They didn't have vocals, they didn't have melodies... because I wasn't there. I was playing maracas or I was playing harmonica or something.
But some of [them] were complete. There's a track called I'm Not Signifying and all I did was play harmonica on it. It's quite an early track.
It sounds early. It could fit onto the Beggars' Banquet album.
It might have been recorded for Beggars, but it was definitely re-recorded in the [Exile] period. A lot of these songs were done more than once.
Did you put them to one side because you didn't like them at the time?
We had so many tracks, and you can only do so much. You'd say, "we'll save that one, or put it aside" not knowing that we'd put it aside for 40 years!
So I just found some of these ones and finished them off - I wrote the words and the lyrics.
Would you describe these records as new ones or old ones?
They're both, really. [Record producer] Don Was, who's a real Stones aficionado, said, "you've got to do them in the mood of Exile". We had tremendous arguments late at night about whether that was correct, artistically.

Work on the album started in 1969, when Jagger was dating Marianne Faithfull

How do you get yourself back into the mood you had in 1971?
By listening to Exile, of course! But it's not particularly difficult, technically. It's just an attitude in your head when you're singing. Don Was said that in those days there wasn't a tremendous amount of subtlety. You just started and then, wham, barraged on 'til you finished.
But what about writing the lyrics now, as opposed to where your head was then?
Now that's a different thing. Of course it's totally different. But you can put your head in a "mood". That's what any writing is like. You've got to be able to.
People say, "is a song written from your own experience?" The answer is "of course it isn't!" Bits of it are your experience, bits of things you've learnt off other people, bits you've nicked from other people's lives, and bits you read in a newspaper. And all this goes to make a song, a novel or a play.
And so with all this, you're playing a part. And in a way, I suppose, I was playing the part of myself in 1971.
How accurate is the mythology surrounding the recording of Exile On Main Street?
The wild nights, the orgies, the drug taking! I remember it well. Every bit of it!
I mean, it was a lot of fun - but there were a few bumps. It was a bumpy period, historically. There was a war going on, the Nixon thing was happening. Tax was through the roof. It was very difficult. The end of the '60s felt very strained.
But despite all the excesses, it was quite a creative period. When you're quite young, you can get away with that.
What was the environment like down at the house?
I think it was quite simple, really. The basement was for work, and nobody came in there who wasn't working.
Upstairs was quite a lot of socialising and carrying on. All day.
It was great fun and it got a bit out of hand, and then we left. It felt like forever, but actually it was only six or seven months.
How much did the environment contribute to the album?
It was very social, we had a lot of children. They weren't singing on the record, but there was quite a family thing.
If you record in that atmosphere, you're going to get a different kind of record. It's almost impossible to quantify how that is, but you just are going to get a different record. Every endeavour is influenced by its environment.
How was your relationship with Keith at that time? This was his house…
It was his rented house! He rented it for a year and he never went back!

The Stones' Bigger Bang tour earned $558m - the highest-grossing tour ever

What was the hardest point in those years?
It was really problematic getting into the United States. It was massively difficult. The uncertainty of knowing whether you could go to America to tour was one of the major uncertainties of that period.
Things have obviously changed a great deal since those sessions. What's your feeling on technology and music?
Technology and music have been together since the beginning of recording.
I'm talking about the internet.
But that's just one facet of the technology of music. Music has been aligned with technology for a long time. The model of records and record selling is a very complex subject and quite boring, to be honest.
But your view is valid because you have a huge catalogue, which is worth a lot of money, and you've been in the business a long time, so you have perspective.
Well, it's all changed in the last couple of years. We've gone through a period where everyone downloaded everything for nothing and we've gone into a grey period it's much easier to pay for things - assuming you've got any money.
Are you quite relaxed about it?
I am quite relaxed about it. But, you know, it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don't make as much money out of records.
But I have a take on that - people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.
So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't.
What about the future. Are you going to get back together and write more music?
I think that would be a very good idea. I've been writing quite a lot of music.
Is Keith keen to get the guitar out?
I'm sure he is. And I'll be seeing him next week, so I'm sure we'll get together and start doing that.

@'BBC'

You can watch the video of this interview there.

City of London security guards told to report 'suspicious' photographers

A security guard on patrol in Canary Wharf. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

More than 5,000 security guards in London's financial district have been instructed by police to report people taking photographs, recording footage or even making sketches near buildings, the Guardian has learned.

City of London police's previously unseen advice singles out people who may appear to be "legitimate tourists" to prevent reconnaissance by al-Qaida.

The document, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, helps explain a number of recent cases in which photographers have been stopped and searched by police using section 44 of the Terrorism Act, after first being approached by security guards.

There has been concern over the misuse of section 44, which allows officers to stop and search anyone without need for suspicion in designated areas. It has been repeatedly used to question tourists, photographers and film-makers. Cases have also been documented where artists have been stopped from painting in the street.

The police advice to security guards states: "In this period of heightened alert, we must report possible reconnaissance to the police and develop a culture of challenging suspicious behaviour."

Under "examples of suspicious behaviour", the document lists people spotted in stationary vehicles watching buildings or who ask "detailed or unusual questions" about a location. It was warns about people seen "loitering at or near premises for long period" and advises guards to be alert to "overheard conversations that indicate suspicious intent".

Another category of suspicious behaviour is described as: "People using recording equipment, including camera phones, or seen making notes or sketches for no apparent reason". One line in the document, marked in bold, states: "The person you think is a legitimate tourist may be somebody else!"

There is no reference to the legal rights of photographers, or the need to treat members of the public cordially.

The advice is part of Project Griffin, a police initiative to ensure private security personnel function as their "eyes and ears" to combat crime and terrorism. Most police forces and several ports across the UK have co-opted the scheme. City of London police alone have held 67 training days under the initiative.

Both the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and John Yates, Britain's most senior counter-terrorism officer, have warned that police risk losing the support of the public through the inappropriate use of section 44.

Earlier this year, the European court of human rights ruled that the "arbitrary" stop and search under section 44 without suspicion was illegal.

But while many senior police officers have sought to rein-back the use of the powers by encouraging their officers to use "common sense", City of London police, which has jurisdiction of London's Square Mile, has sought to defend the action of its officers and highlight the importance of vigilance.

In December the architectural photographer, Grant Smith, was stopped while photographing the spire of Sir Christopher Wren's Christ Church. This week he was stopped again as he took images of the skyline at One Aldermanbury Square.

He said two uniformed officers detained him, one by grabbing his arms behind his back, and they refused requests to record the stop and search on his camera. On both occasions, Smith was first questioned by a security guard who asked him not to photograph a nearby building.

Paul Lewis @'The Guardian'

Arkell v Pressdram (1971)

More on the Johanna Kaschke libel trial :

"...Check out the links here, here, here about the whole sorry silly tale of how a former Labour Party member who failed to be a Parliamentary candidate defected to Respect then turned to the Communist Part of Great Britain then the Communist Party of Britain then the Labour Party again and finally (for now) joined the Conservative Party - all within a few months. Who then went on to waste tens of thousands of pounds of public money by taking out multiple libel actions and court applications that were doomed to fail. There has probably by now been millions of pages of documents wasted and thousands of hours of court administration officers and officials time used up. An incredible number of different expensive direction hearings, applications and appeals. Imagine how much Royal Court of Justice Masters and Judges are paid per day and how much nonsense they had to read and listen to!..." 

John Gray @'John's Labour Blog'

Oh and if you want a really good laugh then google the title of this post!

Hey I get a mention in her blog...

Liverpool FC fans set to take Premier League to task over Gillett and Hicks

Liverpool supporters battling George Gillett and Tom Hicks' ownership of the club will meet with senior Premier League officials in the next 48 hours.
 Representatives of Spirit of Shankly, the Liverpool Supporters' Union, will travel to London today to meet with chief executive Richard Scudamore and a number of key personnel at Gloucester Place to discuss their 'fit and proper' person test for new owners of clubs.

Members bombarded League chiefs with emails in March, demanding answers into how the test failed to expose the irregularities in the Americans' dealings prior to their Anfield takeover, particularly Hicks' controversial spell as co-owner of Brazilian side Corinthians.

James McKenna, spokesperson for Spirit of Shankly, said: “The Premier League have a duty to run the game properly, to regulate it and make sure it is protected.

"However, they don’t seem to take this duty seriously, allowing the debts at Liverpool to pile up, with owners who are far from fit and proper.

"Sadly, we aren’t the only club this is happening to, it is happening to many others, and the fans are the ones left to fight for their clubs.”

It emerged that new Reds chairman Martin Broughton has refused to meet with the group to discuss the progress of the club being sold, claiming he would 'continue communicating with all fans collectively'.

Accounts published last week revealed that the club's debts have risen to £351million following loans taken out against it by Gillett and Hicks, and McKenna called for accountability from the Premier League to avoid a repeat of the problems at Liverpool, Manchester United and Portsmouth.

He added: “We would like to the Premier League to better protect clubs and put in place regulation that stops what has happened with Hicks and Gillett from happening all over again.

 "It isn’t right or proper that a club should pay for it’s owners to actually own them, and it isn’t proper for the future and the finances of a club to be put in jeopardy for the sake of business and making a profit.

"Those in charge need to act, and they need to act now, before its all too late.”

As Broughton prepares to meet manager Rafael Benitez for further showdown talks in London tonight, Hicks has suffered a crucial blow in his bid to sell his controlling stake in the Texas Rangers after Major League Baseball stepped up its efforts to reclaim the club.

Hicks had agreed a deal with Pittsburg attorney Chuck Greenberg and the club's former pitcher Nolan Ryan but current lenders of the franchise are reportedly planning to file papers to involuntarily place the club into bankruptcy.
Richrd Buxton @'Liverpool Click'

"Fookin' banks on fookin' sherts!"

I still have a Crown Paint, a Candy and countless Carlsbergs but...think I will give this one a miss!

'This is beyond sports' - Chuck D on the fight in Arizona

When Arizona passes an unjust immigration law, Chuck D is on hand to criticise it. After all, the Man from Public Enemy once rapped “By The Time I Get To Arizona” when state officials refused to recognise Martin Luther King’s birthday.
Chuck D. The Hard Rhymer. The man on the mic for the most politically explosive hip-hop group in history, Public Enemy. With albums like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” “Fear of a Black Planet,” and anthems like “Fight the Power” and “Bring the Noise” along with the breathtaking production of the Bomb Squad, PE created a standard of politics and art.

Perhaps their most controversial track was “By the Time I Get to Arizona” (1991) about seeking revenge against Arizona political officials for refusing to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday [Lyrics include: ‘Cause my money’s spent on The goddamn rent/Neither party is mine not the Jackass or the elephant.]

Today, in the wake of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration Senate Bill 1070, “By the Time I Get to Arizona” has been remixed and revived by DJ Spooky. Chuck D also recorded his own track several months before the bill was passed called “Tear Down That Wall.” I spoke to Chuck about the music and the nexus between immigration politics and sports.

DAVE ZIRIN: Why did you choose to record “Tear Down this Wall?”

CHUCK D: I had done “Tear Down this Wall” four or five months ago because I heard a professor who works with my wife here on the West Coast speak in a speech about the multi-billion dollar dividing wall between the U.S. and Mexico, so, therefore, I based “Tear Down that Wall” on the policy of the United States border patrol in the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.

I just wanted to put a twist of irony on it saying if Ronald Reagan back in 1988 had told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall separating the world from countries of capitalism and communism, we have a billion dollar wall right here in our hemisphere that exists that needs to have a bunch of questions raised. Questions like: “What the Hell?”

I wrote the song about five months ago and I did it coincidently, with all that’s brewing in the state of Arizona. Immigration laws and racial profiling is happening right here and I think the border situation, not only with the U.S. and Mexico but the U.S. and Canada, on both sides is just out of control. It’s crazy.

You did “Tear Down This Wall,” we have the DJ Spooky remix of “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” and with your wife, Dr. Gaye Theresa Johnson, you wrote a syndicated column on SB 1070. What’s the response been to you being so out front on this issue?

Well the response is the usual, but I make it a habit not to look at any blogs, because I think the font of a computer gives as much credence to ignorance as it does to somebody who makes sense. So I try not to read those responses, because anybody can respond quickly. Back when people had to write letters it took an effort, especially if someone didn’t have decent penmanship and handwriting.

I try not to look at the responses. I try to do the right thing. I tell you this much, there is a rap contingent, a hip-hop contingent from Phoenix, who did a remake of “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” I think that needs to be recognized because these are young people. The song is about eight minutes long. There’re about 12 MCs on it, and they are putting it down. They are talking about how ridiculous this law is. They are speaking out against it and they are putting all the facts on the table, and they need to be acknowledged and highlighted. There is a stereotype about young people and young MCs [being apolitical]. They break it.

It’s remarkable how the original “By the Time I Get to Arizona” has been resurrected from the early ’90s now that the struggle has picked up. Did you hear former NBA player Chris Webber before the Suns/Spurs game say, “It’s like PE said ‘By the Time I get to Arizona’”?

[laughs] My dad told me about that, you know Chris Webber is the man. I wasn’t tuned into TNT at that particular time.

He said more than that. He said, “Public Enemy said it a long time ago. ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona.’ I’m not surprised. They didn’t even want there to be a Martin Luther King Day when John McCain was in [office.]. So if you follow history you know that this is part of Arizona politics.’” So he brought it all together with Public Enemy at the center of it.

Unfortunately when it comes to culture, the speed of technology and news today makes things out of sight, out of mind. While these situations [the MLK fight and the immigration fights] are different, the politics of both things stay around like a stain… Once again Arizona has put themselves into this mix.

Immigration laws and racial profiling is happening right here and I think the border situation, not only with the U.S. and Mexico but the U.S. and Canada, on both sides is just out of control. It’s crazy.

I don’t know what the hell was on Gov. Jan Brewer’s mind or what contingent is behind her, but, you know, to make a decision like this and to be told to ignore the people who have been in this area on this earth the longest period of time. It just kind of resonates with me as being crazy.

Do you support an athletic or artistic boycott of Arizona until this gets settled?

Dave, you know I do. Artists and musicians can say we’re going to play Texas, El Paso, New Mexico, Albuquerque, and we gotta play L.A. But we’ll skip Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tucson and the like. But you know what this is really a challenge for: that’s Major League Baseball.

You’ve got nearly a third of the players that are Latino. If they don’t stand up to this bill, they will actually be validating the divide amongst Latinos [between documented and undocumented immigrants]. At the same time they’ll also be lining themselves right into the stereotype of what an athlete is if they don’t speak out: a high-priced slave that doesn’t say anything.

And, to me, it’s beyond just boycotting the All-Star game. What are those Latino players on the Diamondbacks going to do? What are the players going to say who go into Arizona to play against the Diamondbacks? What are they going to say and what are they going to do? Major League Baseball has to step up.

The NBA has very few players of Latino descent and [the Suns] are saying something. But Major League Baseball, if they don’t say anything, it’s crazy. The owners, the team, the league, and especially the players, whether they come from the Dominican Republic, whether they come from Venezuela, whether they come from Puerto Rico, they better step up.

If they don’t step up, the music industry, at least from my area, we’re going to clown them. For us to speak out against this law, and basketball stepping up, and Major League Baseball not stepping up at all?! Come on now, give me a break. And I know a lot of the cats they live in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico or whatever, there’s like a trillion years difference between them and their high salaries and the average people living in the streets.

They might build themselves a castle with a militia to protect them, but this is the time to unite yourself with the people and at least live in the legacy that [Major League Hall of Famer] Roberto Clemente set of uniting people just to protect against the nonsense that the other side can come up with. They need to know that it’s going to spread if they don’t come up and say something about it.

Any final thoughts? Perhaps about Major League Baseball pulling the All Star Game out of Phoenix?

At the end of the day man, sports is really not that important compared to people living their everyday lives. Say you have a Major League player, and he happens to play for another team, or he happens to play for the Diamondbacks and he gets pulled over because people think he’s an illegal immigrant. Then all of a sudden that’s when the “ish” finally hits the fan? Come on. This is beyond sports.

We want athletes to speak up because they have advantages. They have everyday coverage. They’re covered by a person that has a mic and a camera in their face, and this is the time to step up. Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star game out of Arizona should be the least of it.

Dave Zirin @'Edge of Sports'
Click here for a free download of Chuck D and DJ Spooky’s “By The Time I Get To Arizona.”

قدرت مطلق بدون هیچ نظارتی فساد

 آور است

BTW

Just checking the stats of 'Exile' related stuff that went up at (Son of) yesterday and to date just over 320 downloads w/ not one 'thank you'. Could be a new world record...

Willy Vlautin - Lean On Pete

Another great novel from the Richmond Fontaine frontman, reminding me more and more of Sam Shepard's writing (a compliment.) Looking forward to catching him at the end of the month.

A Cult Artist’s Cult Artist - Who’s Jackie Leven? Ask Johnny Dowd, or Ron Sexsmith, or Pere Ubu's David Thomas

I've been a devout fan of legendary Cleveland art-rockers Pere Ubu and their leader, David Thomas, since I first heard their debut album, The Modern Dance, on college radio in Winnipeg in 1978. The following year I invested with equal passion in lamentably unlegendary London art-rockers Doll by Doll and their leader, Jackie Leven, when I heard their brilliant (but not at all similar) debut album, Remember, on the same station.

I'm going to assume that you've heard of Pere Ubu and Thomas but not Doll by Doll and Leven (rhymes with "even"). The fact is, I've never met a Doll by Doll fan who wasn't also from Winnipeg, my hometown. It's a funny place, where odd things catch on that die aborning everywhere else. Does anyone remember a British prog band called Audience? No? Well, I swear they could sell out Winnipeg's downtown arena tomorrow on word of mouth. Ever seen Brian De Palma's 1974 glam-rock horror-musical, Phantom of the Paradise? Exhibitors couldn't get rid of it fast enough—except in Winnipeg, where it played to packed houses for four and a half months. Given half a chance and three Molsons, most middle-aged Winnipeggers can and will sing along to its awful Paul Williams soundtrack with 98 percent lyrical recall.

I realize these examples aren't buying me or my hometown any credibility, but the salient point here is that Winnipeg has a track record of pop-cultural idiosyncrasy. Even there, though, Doll by Doll was never a local phenom on the level of Audience or Phantom. They were embraced by a subset of the city's punk-rock/new-wave cognoscenti, but they seemed to have as many detractors as fans. I can still hear one of my high school buddies, a hulking, beer-fueled hockey monster whose concepts of the sublime overlapped with mine when it came to Pere Ubu, Can, and the Residents, denouncing Doll by Doll (in the charming parlance of our Neanderthal milieu) as a "fag band."

I knew he was being an idiot, but I also recognized what he resisted about Doll by Doll. Though the noisiest passages of Remember are a match for any Krautrock guitar meltdown, and Bill Price's abrasive production fit the cultural moment—he'd already worked with the Sex Pistols and the Clash—Doll by Doll were otherwise completely out of step with punk and new wave. God knows they were usually dark and moody enough in their lyric—violence, death, humiliation, heartbreak, the works—but Leven, an avid poetry reader since his teens, had no use for what he calls the "cartoon violence" of punk. "Especially on that first album, we were interested in exploring much heavier emotions than just a fixed adolescent sneer," he told me in an interview last month.

It didn't help that Doll by Doll weren't shy about flexing their technical chops, or that Leven's melodies had a sweeping, Morricone-ish scope—which, in combination with his unfashionably sophisticated song structures, invited fatal charges of prog influence. Then there was his voice: a rich, controlled, supremely undemocratic instrument that violated every tenet of the DIY ethos under which Gary Numan qualified as a singer.

Regardless, the first three Doll by Doll albums—Remember (1979), Gypsy Blood (1979) and Doll by Doll (1981)—are for my money among the three greatest and lostest of great lost rock albums. (Their fourth and final record, 1982's Grand Passion, isn't really up to snuff.)

When Rhino reissued Doll by Doll's catalog on CD in 2007, I learned from the liner notes that the band had polarized listeners in Britain as well. They'd attracted an ardent cult of fans and minority support in the music press, but punk tastemakers like the BBC's John Peel and rock critic Paul Morley positively loathed them. Their unclassifiablility is summed up by the best gigs they got as a supporting act: Devo and Hawkwind. The hard-drinking, hard-drugging Doll by Doll was fired from both tours, not for bad shows but for friction with the headliners. "One of the funniest things that ever happened to us was being thrown off the Devo tour," Leven writes. "They hated us, beyond endurance. Once we got over being stunned . . . we sat in our hotel in Newcastle and tried to trace where it started. [Guitarist] Jo [Shaw] decided it was because he went and asked them if they had any beer, because we'd already drunk ours at the Glasgow Apollo. And they were so wary of Jo they gave him all their beer. He came back laughing, but that was what did it."

History issued an unexpected aesthetic verdict in my favor in 2000, though, when Leven and David Thomas came together to form a short-lived touring project called UbuDoll. I actually didn't learn this till the news was seven years old, and when I first encountered it online, I entertained the possibility that I was dreaming—especially about their cover of the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," which is exactly the sort of absurd detail that brightens my occasional non-nightmare.

Long story short, the revelation inspired me to follow up on what Leven, now 59, had been up to since Doll by Doll fell apart in 1983. Upon answering that question, I've concluded that, note for note and album for album, he just might be the most underappreciated songwriter alive today.

 That said, I'd be hard-pressed to specify what genre he's been quietly excelling at. He recombines the raw materials of country, soul, blues, Celtic balladry, girl-group pop, art-rock, found sound, spoken word, and, once or twice and with quite respectable results, even hip-hop. Critics lazily tag his music either as "folk rock" or "Celtic soul," though Leven hates the first ("What the fuck is folk-rock about anything I've ever done?") and says the second is "better than nothing but probably doesn't do me any favors, given that I don't sound anything like Van Morrison."

His latest record, Gothic Road (Cooking Vinyl), a characteristically somber blend of folk rock and Celtic soul, is his 13th solo studio release since 1994's The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death—itself his first solo album since 1971's Control, recorded under the pseudonym John St. Field. That count excludes umpteen fine live recordings and Chip Pan Fire, a profanely hilarious 2007 spoken-word release whose stories are based in part on Leven's youth in the Scottish coastal region of Fife. But it includes the three albums he's recorded as Sir Vincent Lone, a persona he created in 2006 to absorb a surplus of songs that exceeded the carrying capacities of his record company. "My label, Cooking Vinyl, said that the dynamic laws of market phasing require 18 months to properly market a Jackie album," Leven explains. "But the songs are too good to waste, so I just hand them off to Vince, who unlike me can record an album in three or four days."

Over the years he's kept some diverse artistic company. In addition to David Thomas—who contributes to three tracks on the excellent 2000 release Defending Ancient Springs, including that improbable, wonderful Righteous Brothers cover—he's collaborated with alt-country hell-raiser Johnny Dowd, melancholy Canadian popster Ron Sexsmith, best-selling Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin (who's also from Fife), and poet Robert Bly, whom Leven has known since the 1970s, long before he came to fame as a guru of the "men's movement."

This is how the notoriously autocratic Thomas explains his creative relationship with Leven in an interview on Leven's 2004 concert video, The Meeting of Remarkable Men: "I envy his voice. He's a great singer, he's a great storyteller, and he's a man's man, and therefore he's a lot of fun to work with, because you get that male poetic bonding right away, and that's a lot of fun artistically. . . . He's got a deep connection with the land, with geography, with landscape, and we connected immediately on that level. And working with Jackie is . . . When you're working with people who are your equals, then you're willing to be submissive to their way. It's like dogs. Dogs immediately recognize where they are in a hierarchy. They don't object to being in a hierarchy. . . . If I walk into a room I know pretty much immediately where I fit into the hierarchy of other arty types. I know whether I'm an alpha male in that room or whether I'm somewhere else down the line."

As a cult artist's cult artist, Leven has been obliged to make his living by relentless touring, playing small club dates with just his guitar or with a drummer and keyboardist. Until recently it wasn't unusual for him to be on the road 200 days a year, though lately he's been touring less—he says he wants to "spend more time writing songs at home and less time pillaging minibars." When Leven leaves Hampshire, England, where he lives with longtime romantic partner Deborah Greenwood, it's mostly to play in Germany and Scandinavia, where his biggest fan base lives. "It seems that these countries with gloomy reputations are also the places where people think that what I do is funny," he says. Most of Leven's lyrics could compete with Townes Van Zandt's and the Handsome Family's for sunlit cheer, but he's also recorded a rousing cover of the country-and-western chestnut "I've Been Everywhere" rejiggered with German place names.

Doesn't it sometimes drive him crazy, doing all this good work to so little notice? "Yeah, sometimes it does," he allows. "But then, I know so many musicians who complain that they're bored out of their minds with what they do, and if they only they had a choice, they'd be doing something completely different. To which I say, 'What the fuck do you mean? Of course you've got a choice, you've just got to be willing to pay the price.'"

Which leads me to a sly little joke Leven inserted into the lyrics of "Last of the Badmen," an atmospheric downer on Gothic Road. "I hold an ace of sunlight / In this weatherbeaten game / It's the card that saved me / From the injuries of fame." It's sure to have them rolling in the aisles in Germany and Scandinavia.

Cliff Doerksen @'Chicago Reader'

The New War Between Science and Religion

Look at yourself after watching this...

...you are beautiful!

(Thanx Fifi!)

Twitter to the rescue

Great bit of Twitter toilet humour from Japan.

Seems a man was using the public facilities at a large camera store in Tokyo.

When he reached for the toilet paper he came up empty handed.

Major problem I'm sure you'd agree.

So he posted about his predicament on Twitter.

That's his tweet above.

Amazingly somebody saw it and slipped him a roll of toilet paper under the door.

Classic!

And who said social media was a waste of time?

@'BrandDNA'

If jumps racing continues, it will kill itself

Time for a little mathematics. Promise it won't be boring, rather it will frighten your socks off. It will explode the myth perpetrated by the jumps racing community that last week's Warrnambool carnival was a wonderful success.

Sirrocean Storm, for one, thought it a failure. His horrible, tortured death is proof enough. If you have the courage you can see it on YouTube but be warned it is sickening vision. But listen to the jumps racing community and the sycophants that trail around behind it, a swell time was had by all.

That irreverent newsletter, Jumping Informer reported that RVL chief executive Rob Hines praised the effectiveness of jumps racing's new obstacles following the three-day carnival.

"We are confident that the new obstacles are working and believe they have been a positive measure in improving the safety of jumps racing for riders and horses this season," Hines said. He added that six jumps races were conducted with one fatality. Hines also praised the Warrnambool Racing Club for its conduct of the carnival and thanked the fans of racing for supporting the three days.

"The racing was exciting across all three days and the atmosphere generated by the big crowds certainly added to the experience for those trackside," he said.

Oh, yes it was a ripper all right. Sydney's megaphone Richie Callander thought it the best darn thing he had seen outside a city racetrack. All the journalists raved about it. Veteran Herald Sun racing writer Tim Habel gave the meeting an overwhelming pass mark.

Well, let's do some serious analysis rather than cheerleading. A little mathematics. If one death per six races is a pass mark, a statistic that more than pleased Hines, the man who runs Victorian racing, then we should apply the formula to races across Australia yesterday and to be run today and tomorrow.

The Australian Racing Board website lists 14 meetings around the country for a total of 113 races over the three days. If it is acceptable for a horse to die on Australian racetracks every six races then the fatality count come tomorrow night will be near enough to 19 horses. By any measure that would be a disaster and the sport of racing under national review.

So Warrnambool's carnival does not look quite as wonderful as the jumping people would have you think. Let's look at it another way then. In those six jumps races 49 horses went around, all or part of the course. So Racing Victoria thinks one death in 49 starters is an acceptable ratio. Apply that formula across the races yesterday, today and tomorrow where the ARB website tells us about 1500 horses (allowing for scratchings and emergencies) could have gone round.

The one-in-49 formula so admired at Warrnambool would bring a fatality count over three days of at least 30 horses. Give it six months and there would be about three horses left alive in the country.

To suggest that one fatality per 49 horses is acceptable really does underline that racing uses horses for no other reason than to make money no matter what the consequences to the horses.

Add in the factor that the ARB has collapsed under the lobby of breeders, owners and auction houses to increase the legal use of the whip to about 17 strikes per horse per race, jockeys will have been entitled collectively to strike horses 25,500 times over three days. How do you reckon the sport is going?

The racing industry is uncomfortable that you are told this information because it challenges the idyllic environment in which it seeks to portray racing. The Melbourne Cup carnival of pretty girls and fast horses, bush racing with its earthy people and picturesque courses, of jumps racing with its brave animals and brilliant horsemen and women. It is an illusion, a public relations trick.

If racing really wanted you to know what happens on the track, it would not have put up a sign at Warrnambool that read in part: "A person may only take images of activities at the racecourse for personal use only and must not make available any images for commercial exploitation, sale or distribution by any persons unless accredited by the RVL."

Even that heavy handed attempt at damage control could not stop the public exposure of the grotesque vision of Sirrocean Storm, back leg swinging at nearly 360 degrees, being dragged to his death.

Patrick Smith @'The Australian'

The sickening demise of Sirrocean Storm 

(Thanx Leisa!)

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Cocaine Treatment & The Stroop Test

@'Addiction Inbox'

Jackie Leven - Single Father & Working Man's Love Song

A live appearance on late-night Italian music show 'Taratata' around 2000. Two songs, 'Single Father' & 'Working Man's Love Song',' and some typical deadpan Leven verbals with comedian presenter Gene Gnocchi.
His new album 'Gothic Road' is as usual superb. This man deserves to be so much better known, but isn't that always the way?

Cigarette Butts Make Steel Stronger

This statistic is just mind-blowing: every year, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded.

Given that just one butt with a little leftover tobacco attached is enough to poison a liter of water and kill half the fish living in it, a few trillion could potentially do a lot of environmental damage.

Efforts to recycle butts are few and far between, probably because one person doesn't tend to smoke them by the thousand -- and even a pack's worth of spent smokes only make a tiny, insignificant-looking pile of trash.

But boy do they pack a punch. Cigarettes contain all kinds of foul chemicals, including cancer-causing benzenes and heavy metals, to say nothing of the toxicity of nicotine, a natural pesticide produced by tobacco plants. When smoked, at those lovely bits go into the butt (and your lungs, too).

With that in mind, a group of Chinese researchers set out to see if this noxious brew had any beneficial applications in the industrial world -- something that, if it existed, would give people a reason to recycle the butts.

Oddly enough they did. Chemical extracts from cigarette butts were found to bolster N80 steel -- commonly used in the oil and gas industry -- against corrosion.

The results were pretty dramatic. In a near-boiling solution of 10 and 15 percent hydrochloric acid (HCl; same stuff as stomach acid), the cigarette-derived cocktail reduce corrosion by between 90 and 94 percent.

Is this a perfect idea, using cigarette butts to help shore up industrial steel? Maybe, maybe not. It's possible that a big chemical company could come along and find a cheap way to produce this protective coating that further damages the environment.

Interestingly though, the team led by Jun Zhao of Xi’an Jiaotong University found that nicotine was among the active ingredients protecting the steel. So if people are going to smoke anyway, we may as well stop their polluting ways and help out steelworkers in the process.

Michael Reilly @'Discovery News'

Via: American Chemical Society 

(Thanx BillT!) 

HA! As a Chelsea fan put it...

"...this blog moves faster than Theo Walcott on amphetamines!"

Johann Hari: This is not what the British people voted for

We are all supposed to now laze back and watch the latest Richard Curtis film: Politics, Actually, a charming tale of two 43-year-old rich men who have to run Britain together despite having different colour ties and eccentric armies of supporters tossing buns at each other in the background. Larks and hijinks no doubt ensue. But before you reach for the popcorn, can I briefly refer back to the will of the British people, before our ballots are so casually binned?

David Cameron went into this election with every conceivable advantage – a half-mad Labour leader randomly insulting his core vote; a comically biased media; a massive financial advantage over his rivals, flowing from a tax haven in Belize; 13 years out of power; a major recession – and yet he got only 36 per cent of the electorate to endorse his vision. To be fair, let's assume the 3 per cent who voted Ukip also broadly prefer it, and call it 39 per cent. Against this, 55 per cent of us voted for parties of the (relative) centre-left – the same proportion who say they want a country that is less unequal and less unfair. In any other European country, where they have democratic voting systems, it wouldn't even have been close. This would have been a centre-left landslide, with Cameron humiliated.

Elections are supposed to be an opportunity for the people to express the direction in which they want the country to travel. By that standard, this result is an insult. Don't fall for the people who say the Lib Dem vote was "ambiguous": a YouGov poll just before the election found that Lib Dem voters identified as "left-wing" over "right-wing" by a ratio of 4:1. Only 9 per cent sided with the right. Lib Dem voters wanted to stop Cameron, not install him. So before you start squabbling about the extremely difficult parliamentary arithmetic, or blaming the stupidly tribal Labour negotiators for their talks with the Lib Dems breaking down, you have to concede: the British people have not got what they voted for.

So what kind of government will we now get? There are two possibilities – and nobody (including Cameron and Clegg) knows which it will be yet. The first is a muzzled and castrated Conservatism, where the Lib Dems stop the Tories doing their worst, and smuggle some progress under the radar. There is some evidence for this. As part of the coalition deal, Clegg got the Tories to ditch a few of their ugliest policies – like giant inheritance tax cuts for double-millionaires – and got them to accept some excellent Lib Dem ones. Schools will now get a big cash bonus for taking in poor children, reversing the social apartheid in our playgrounds. There will now be considerably higher taxes on Capital Gains – the shares and second homes owned by the rich. Planes, the most environmentally destructive form of travel, will now face higher taxes. It's a shaming indictment of New Labour that they didn't do all this years ago.

Clegg deserves real credit for these changes – although it will be very hard to get any of this past the parliamentary Conservative party, who are now even more right-wing than before. To pluck just one example: an incredible 91 per cent of them don't believe man-made global warming exists. This oddball rabble are five times bigger than the Lib Dems, despite getting only 13 per cent more support.

Which leads to the second possibility: that the Lib Dems can only splash a few yellow dots on to a deep-blue juggernaut. This is what a lot of the Conservative right are gleefully anticipating. Fraser Nelson, hardcore Thatcherite editor of The Spectator, boasts this will be "a radical reforming Tory government with Lib Dem backing vocals". Indeed, it may be worse. Startlingly, during the negotiations, the Lib Dems actually talked the Tories out of their commitment to ring-fence spending on the NHS, dragging them to the right. Nelson smirked: "You gotta love these Lib Dems." In this vision, Clegg's sweet smile makes it easier for Cameron to drop the Rohypnol into our drinks.

In this febrile Dave New World, the Labour leadership election matters even more. Cameron and Osborne are committed to turning off the stimulus and cut-cut-cutting now, even though we aren't safely out of recession: check out the history books for 1937 to see what happens next. All their instincts are to cut services for people at the bottom and the middle. So long as the President of Argentina doesn't invade the Falklands, they must be odds-on to lose the next election – provided Labour gets this right.

So before the personality parade begins, Labour needs to ask – what did it get right over the past 13 years, and what did it get wrong? The right-wing policies pushed by the Mandelson Tendency that were supposed to make them "electable" were, in the end, albatrosses dragging their support down – from the City-licking that made us so vulnerable to the crash, to the one million killed in Iraq. By contrast, it was the true Labour achievements that remained popular: redistributive tax credits, doubled spending on the NHS, the minimum wage.

David Miliband is the candidate of the people who poisoned the New Labour years with right-wing fantasies. Peter Mandelson is merrily pushing him as the Blairite who can most attract wealthy donors and remains unrepentant about Iraq. His brother, Ed, is much more appealing: he gets global warming more than almost any other British politician, and injected some social democratic steroids into the Labour manifesto. Yet both Milibands – raised in a cerebral, highly political family – speak with a peevish anti-populism that doesn't communicate well.

While everyone is concentrating on the drama of two brothers standing against each other, there's a family battle that should matter more. It looks like Yvette Cooper is standing aside for her husband, Ed Balls – but she is a far more impressive candidate, and should be urgently pressed to reconsider. The politics of the next few years will feature a bunch of wealthy men shutting down SureStart centres, ending Child Trust Funds, sandpapering down tax credits, and increasing unemployment. Who better to oppose that than a down-to-earth young mum who has herself spent time on the dole when she got ill?

Cooper is rooted in the Labour tradition – her grandfather was a miner, her father was a trade unionist – but she has the ability to speak beyond it to the real Middle England, who earn on average £23k a year. In government, she piloted some of its most popular progressive policies, from SureStart to free fruit for all schoolchildren to tax credits. She defended them on TV in the election better than anyone else I saw: she's clever (a First from Oxford) but entirely normal, an unusual combination. Labour hameorraghed female voters at this election, while women in all parties were relegated to the role of silent beaming wives. It ended with a cabinet that has only one more woman than Afghanistan's. Isn't Cooper a great attention-grabbing antidote? Or do we still live in a 1950s world of brilliant women stepping aside for their less impressive husbands?

But whoever Labour chooses, it looks like we are about to face years of a ConDem coalition we didn't vote for and don't want. I hope I'm wrong and Clegg really will tame the Tories – but I'm braced for this movie turning into One Shotgun Wedding and A Bloody Long Funeral.

 HERE

WTF??? Anti-porn provision sinks Dem jobs bill

House Democrats had to scrap their only substantive bill of the week Thursday after Republicans won a procedural vote that substantively altered the legislation with an anti-porn clause.

Democrats had labeled their COMPETES Act -- a bill to increase investments in science, research and training programs -- as their latest jobs bill. It was the only non-suspension bill Democrats brought up all week.

But the Republican motion to recommit the bill -- a parliamentary tactic that gives the minority one final chance to amend legislation -- contained language prohibiting federal funds from going "to salaries to those officially disciplined for violations regarding the viewing, downloading, or exchanging of pornography, including child pornography, on a federal computer or while performing official government duties."

That provision scared dozens of Democrats into voting with Republicans to approve the motion to recommit. After it became clear the GOP motion was going to pass, dozens of additional Democrats changed their votes from "no" to "yes." In the end, 121 Democrats voted with Republicans -- only four fewer than the number of Democrats who voted with their party.

But because of additional changes contained in the motion, Democrats decided to pull the bill from consideration immediately following the passage of the motion to recommit.

The GOP motion also stopped all funding authorizations in two years as opposed to the five years contained in the original bill, abolished each new program established through the legislation, and froze all existing programs at their current funding levels until the federal budget is balanced.

Democrats accused Republicans of playing politics with a bill designed to create jobs through investments in research and development.

"For anyone that is concerned about federal employees watching pornography, they just saw a pornographic movie. It's called; 'Motion to Recommit,'" Science Committee Chairman and bill author Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn) said. "It was a cynical effort to undermine an important bill for my 9-year-old daughter, for your kids and your grandkids."

"It's absurd," Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) said. "It's specious, and it's disgusting. And those are the nicest things I can say about it."

During a colloquy with House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Democrats would bring the COMPETES Act back to the floor next week.

Jared Allen and Russell Berman@'The Hill'

Block on dissolving parliament is an outrage - Adonis

The coalition government's move to make it harder to dissolve Parliament is a "constitutional outrage", ex-Transport Secretary Lord Adonis has said.
The Lib Dem-Tory plan will mean that 55% of MPs must approve such a move to get it through the House of Commons. A simple majority is currently enough.
Labour's Lord Adonis said it raised doubts over the coalition's legitimacy.
But Lib Dem Andrew Stunell, who helped frame the deal, said it was needed to prevent an "ambush" on the Tories.
The coalition agreement between the Lib Dems and Conservatives promises a "strong and stable" government, with elections held on fixed dates every five years.
'Ganging up'
The raising of the threshold for a dissolution vote is intended to prevent a move to hold an election earlier than that.
The Conservatives currently have 306 out of 649 MPs - a 47% share.
One seat, Thirsk and Malton, is empty, pending a by-election on 27 May, while Sinn Fein's five MPs have not taken the oath of allegiance allowing them to sit in Parliament.

We have a quasi-presidential system here, without the checks and balances Charles Walker Conservative MP for Broxbourne

It would be impossible for opponents, even if fully united, to muster the 55% needed to dissolve Parliament, unless at least 16 Tories rebelled against their party leadership.
Lord Adonis said: "This is a brazen attempt to gerrymander the constitution which calls into question the legitimacy of the coalition from day one.
"If the legislation ever gets to the House of Lords, it will meet opposition of an intensity and bitterness not seen for many years. This is a constitutional outrage."
However, Mr Stunell, the Lib Dem MP for Hazel Grove, told BBC Radio 4's PM programme: "What the prime minister has given up with a fixed-term parliament is the right to go to the Queen at any moment and just call a general election. Obviously that's what a fixed-term parliament stops.
"On the other hand, if your threshold for a special case is only 50%, in theory it would be possible for the Tories to be ambushed by other parties, including the Liberal Democrats, ganging up against them...
"Although nobody in the partnership has any intention of doing any such thing, it was a small matter for us to say 'No, we accept your concerns and if we raise that threshold to 55%.'
"That gives you the safeguard you want and that's the way we've proceeded."
Charles Walker, Conservative MP for Broxbourne, said: "It is for Parliament to decide when it's lost confidence in the government and I think we have to look at this very closely...
"This is perhaps just a little too much for our unwritten constitution to bear."
He added: "Parliament actually runs this country, not the prime minister. Over the past 100 years, Parliament has given away huge powers to the prime minister.
"We have a quasi-presidential system here, without the checks and balances. This would be the loss of an enormous check."

@'BBC'

http://twitter.com/Solar_7Grand

When Guru died there were immediate questions asked about his supposed deathbed diatribe against his old Gangstarr colleague DJ Premier, a diatribe that also seemed to just be bigging up his latest collaborator Solar.

The other day I posted some emails that had been hacked from Solar's files regarding Solar selling Guru's house and getting royalty payments changed to his personal account from EMI all while Guru was in a coma. They also proved that Solar was the author of that deathbed letter. Now the hacker speaks to 'Vibe'
You can get nearly all the hacked e/mails here and the password is #fucksolar.

Tim James - American English

Original

Facts are an inconvenience to the manufacturers of outrage.

The right wing blogosphere is cultivating more outrage. It seems the new A-Team movie portrays the US military as the bad guys. What's peculiar here is the original TV series was was about a group of vets who the military framed for a crime they didn't commit. While this writer insists he's aware of this, there must still be indignation
The Outrage

For Longy! XXX

Good luck on Saturday!

(Thanx Richard!)

HERE

Pamphlet prepared by the U.S. First Army Headquarters in 1955

How to Spot a Communist
(Thanx BillW!)

Disaster unfolds slowly in the Gulf of Mexico

A pod of Bottlenose dolphins swim under the oily water Chandeleur Sound, Louisiana, Thursday, May 6, 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The Big Picture

(Thanx Walter!)

Do you see where I'm coming from you jive motherfugger?

Girlz With Gunz # 101 (for Joe Strummer!)

Tho' I say so myself a magnificent segue...

Judge throws out libel action over Baader-Meinhof link in journalist’s blog

A political activist today failed in her libel action over a journalist’s blog which referred to her “Baader-Meinhof" link.

In a ruling that gives bloggers some protection against libel actions, Mr Justice Eady rejected a claim by Johanna Kaschke , a Tower Hamlets-based Conservative, against David Osler, a Labour Party member, over an article that was written in April 2007.

Ms Kaschke claimed that some of the comments linked her with terrorism. The judge at the High Court in London, however, struck out the claim as an abuse of process.

Mr Osler, a journalist and blogger, said that he only posted the material after seeing an article on Ms Kaschke’s own website and had never suggested that Ms Kaschke was involved in bank robberies, violence or terrorism.

He accepted that, although she came under suspicion in the 1970s and was imprisoned for a time, she was not guilty of any criminal offence and was paid compensation in Germany for her wrongful arrest.

He said that he had given Ms Kaschke a right of reply, which appeared on the blog in May 2007, and was prepared to join in a statement reaffirming his acceptance of her innocence.

Ms Kaschke issued proceedings in April 2008, just over a year after the blog was originally published.

Mr Justice Eady agreed with lawyers for Mr Osler that the claim should be limited to a publication proved to have happened within the 12 months leading up to the issue of proceedings.

They also argued that the claim should be struck out because the passages relied in part on words from Ms Kaschke’s own website.

Robert Dougans, a media lawyer with Bryan Cave, said: “This ruling is good news for the online media, as Mr Justice Eady was clear that ‘stale’ blog posts and articles available online but not actively linked to a site will not be deemed to have been published without actual evidence that someone has read them.”

He said that would provide some protection for bloggers and online media pending any legislation to tackle the problem of the internet and “multiple publication” giving rise to endless potential libel lawsuits.

He said that the “multiple publication rule” still existed and that meant that each time a blog posting was downloaded there was a separate cause of action, no matter when the posting was originally put online.

However, he added: “This case means bloggers now can rest assured that just because a posting is available on the internet it will not be deemed to have been published. A claimant will need to put forwards real evidence that an old blog post has actually been read.”

The judge said that he was quite satisfied the posting did not link Ms Kaschke to terrorism in the sense of suggesting in any way that she was directly linked with it or that she approved of the extremist activities.

Mr Osler, he added, was merely choosing to highlight an unusual event in the history of someone who was at the material time active in politics in London.

Striking out the claim, he concluded that if a jury found in favour of Ms Kaschke, the damages would be very modest and out of all proportion to the time and money spent on the cost of a two-week trial.

He added: “It is an important consideration for the court to have in mind on any abuse application that the fact of being sued at all is a serious interference with freedom of expression.

“That may be appropriate in the majority of libel actions, where it is necessary to countenance such interference in order to vindicate the rights of another person in respect of whom a real and substantial tort has occurred.

“But the court must be vigilant to recognise the small minority of cases where the legitimate objective of vindication is not required or, at least, cannot be achieved without a wholly disproportionate interference with the rights of the defendant.”

Frances Gibb @'The Times'

Well done to Dave Osler, JackofKent & Robert Dougans...

Are there any pics of Justice Eady in his 'Brigade Rosse' t shirt LOL?
*Justice Eady is Sir David Eady!!!

When Britain's lost Rock Star met his old schoolmate, the Prime Minister

Jackie Leven & Gordon Brown, alumni of Kircaldy High

Despite his clunky name-dropping of Arctic Monkeys early in his premiership, its hard to think of Gordon Brown as a rock and roll man. It was amusing then to learn at a gig last night that Brown is an exact contemporary of Jackie Leven, a great musical maverick who I often think of as Britain’s lost rock star. Leven is probably the most talented singer-songwriter never to have become a household name, producing neglected masterpieces since 1971, while leading a dramatic and colourful life.

Both Leven and Brown are 59 years old and hail from Kircaldy in Fife, where they attended Kircaldy High School. One of the pair became the first schoolboy in Scotland to be busted for drugs, formed cult band Doll By Doll, was nearly murdered in a vicious mugging which left him unable to talk or sing for a year, became a heroin addict, lost his girlfriend to the Dalai Llama’s bodyguard, self-cured and established an addiction charity of which Princess Diana became patron and has released over thirty albums rich with poetry, melody and the metaphysics and mysteries of life. The other became Prime Minister.

At an intimate gig at the Slaughtered Lamb in London to launch his latest wonderful album, ‘Gothic Road’, Leven (one of the great raconteurs, though not always the most reliable of narrators) described a recent encounter with his old school mate (who, it must be stressed, Leven considers a “political hero”).

On his new album, Leven collaborates with that great English troubadour, Ralph McTell. In October, 2009, McTell was honoured by the UK Parliament’s All Party Folk Music Group at a special award ceremony in the House of Commons, to celebrate his lifetime’s contribution to folk music. Leven was invited as McTell’s guest. It was, according to Leven, an extraordinary event, in which grown MPs started to sniffle and blubber during McTell’s iconic Streets Of London, until a wave of weeping swept through the room and reached the stage, causing McTell himself to break down in tears.

Afterwards, Leven claims he was standing with McTell when the Prime Minister approached to be introduced to McTell. Obviously he needed no introduction to Leven, who was greeted (to judge by Leven’s comedic performance) with a slightly suspicious “Oh, hello Jackie.” “Hello Gordon.”

Brown had a question about McTell’s classic ballad. “I have heard that when you originally wrote Streets Of London it was actually Streets Of Paris. I suppose you changed it to London for sound economic reasons?”

“No Prime Minister,” responded McTell. “I was living in Paris at the time I wrote it, but half way through I realised that I was really writing about London.”

Brown was not to be dissuaded from his theory, however. “All the same, I am sure that sound economic reasons must have played a part in the change.”

Despite the status of his interrogator, McTell was getting politely annoyed with this suggestion. “No, Prime Minister,” he insisted. “I was a young man and I wasn’t thinking about things like money, I was just trying to write the best song I could, and express my feelings about London.”

Brown was, apparently, not entirely satisfied with this version of the song’s creation. “That’s as may be,” he said. “But, of course, I assume you are aware that many of the conditions you describe in that song have been alleviated under New Labour.”

Where some hear poetry, others hear only statistics …

‘Gothic Road’, which will be released by Cooking Vinyl on April 4^th. It contains a beautiful duet with McTell on ‘Cornelius Whalen’, a tribute to the last of the Jarrow marchers.

If you haven’t yet heard Leven’s work, despite my many entreaties in the Telegraph, then I urge you to put that right. You could start with ‘Gypsy Blood’, his lost masterpiece with his band Doll By Doll, and then catch up with some of his remarkable solo work, perhaps ‘The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than Death’ (1994), Fairytales For Hardmen (1997), Defending Ancient Springs (2000) or ‘Troubadour Years’ (under his alter ego Sir Vincent Lone) (2009).

Neil McCormick @'The Telegraph' 
(Thanx Tony!)

Hear some of the unreleased 'Exile' songs

 @'NPR'