Ken Loach’s ‘I, Daniel Blake’ – a personal response

Ken Loach is a British film director, reputed for his presentation of stories concerning oppressed and impoverished men and women and their struggles to gain any measure of respect, fairness and decency from the agencies of State.  Yesterday, I went to see his latest film, ‘I, Daniel Blake’ and came away with both mixed and troubled feelings.

I cannot fault its message.  Recovering from a serious heart attack, its central character – a Newcastle joiner – is refused Employment and Support Allowance payments on the basis that he does not meet the utterly rigid criteria on which payment decisions are currently judged.  Although under doctor’s orders not to work, he is therefore forced to apply for Jobseeker’s Allowance and so finds himself in a ‘Catch-22’ situation in which he nevertheless has to go through the façade of job seeking for 35 hours a week - and then provide detailed proof that he has done so.  The film is the story of this and his attempt to appeal against the ESA decision.  Decent, honest but with little educational advantage, it becomes clear he is extremely ill-equipped to make any progress.  His fragile health begins to fail as he sinks into a situation of rapidly escalating destitution.

Through Blake’s story, and that of a number of other characters in similarly troubling situations, the film quite meticulously details the impact of an inhumane system on the health and emotional wellbeing of those who are – frequently through no fault of their own – caught in the ‘poverty trap’.  In the words of an old folk song: ‘There but for fortune go you or I.’

It’s a harrowing watch, as Loach’s films tend to be.  Though in the past he has effectively made use of humour (I have fond memories of Ricky Tomlinson in ‘Riff-Raff for example), it does not play a strong part in this story.  Of course, it’s no laughing matter.  It’s the best part of a couple of decades since I last applied for Jobseeker’s Allowance and I could tell which way the wind was blowing even in the ‘New Labour’ era.  Under recent Conservative governments in the UK, the misery and lack of fair treatment has escalated.  Now 80, Loach, I’ve read, came out of retirement to make this film and I can only applaud his commitment.
But in terms of my personal response to ‘I, Daniel Blake’ I have to strike a more critical note.  To me, the very meticulousness with which it details the dire situations facing these characters is to its detriment.  It provokes empathy certainly – most of us, even the wealthy, have some experience of dealing with difficult bureaucracy – but for me the characters were not sufficiently well portrayed to evoke strong feelings of sympathy.  Almost every scene seemed designed to highlight some aspect of their plight.  I could almost imagine the tick-boxes being filled in.  “Impact on children of displaced families.  Right, we’ve got that one in…”

All important boxes to tick.  Of course.  But the film comes over too strongly as a piece of propaganda, the characters as cyphers – adequately but not effectively drawn.  It’s a dramatised documentary in many ways (as some of Loach’s work has been in the past).  As a story, there’s really not much to it.

Does this matter?  I think it does.  For a start it’s too easy for those with a vested interest in this hideous system (no names but the initials IDS do spring to mind) to dismiss it as such.  “There’s old Loach banging on again.”  But maybe too there’s a disrespect in this work, a failure to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions in human experience.  This leads to some distortion.  In the Job Centre scenes, we see every worker (with one exception) presented as a rather unpleasant ‘jobsworth’ – seemingly unable to deviate from the script that accompanies the rules they have to enforce.  In my experience, and that of people I know who’ve done the job, it’s a bloody tough row to hoe working in a Job Centre.  And for some, it’s the only job they could get.  I’d say a much higher proportion than are shown in the film, do try at least to be sympathetic and to assist their clients as best they can.  I’m sure this was not Ken Loach’s intention, but in his film they come across far too much as people you want to boo and jeer at.

All this tended to alienate me.  There were scenes that should have brought me to tears and they didn’t.  As such, it’s my guess that ‘I, Daniel Blake’ will tend to preach mainly to the converted.  There’s not enough about it to grab the attention of and perhaps open the mind of anyone who hasn’t already experienced or at least considered these appalling conditions that successive governments (and commercial interests) in the UK and much of the rest of the world have perpetrated .  If a piece of art is going to do this kind of political job, I think it has to use more subtlety, it has to find a way to get further under your skin.  It has to put a lot more emphasis on depth of character, even if that’s at the expense of a few tick boxes.  In the case of a film like this one, it has to work better as a story.

I’ll mention in passing Alan Bleasdale who, in his best work at least, has succeeded in this endeavour.  I was going to go on to discuss another film from two or three years back that really had a powerful impact on me.  Same sort of territory in many ways, but one hell of strong story.  But alas my blogging time has run out for this week, so consider this part one of a two parter…

The Allure of Dub

I can’t remember exactly when I first heard dub music.  Goes back for sure to a time when it was what they did with reggae records only, at a guess during a year spent living in London, 1976/7.  For the first 6 months I was living in Shoreditch as a volunteer helper in a hostel for people who had been released back into the community from psychiatric hospitals, for the remainder in Tufnell Park with a guy who was living in and rebuilding the interior of his house.  Dub music crept up on me from various sources.  Heard on the streets, source unidentified.  On local radio shows – the name David Rodigan springs to mind.  In the hostel – a young Jamaican guy, quite disturbed, haunted by duppies, possessed this one early album by melodica man Augustus Pablo.  Record shop windows – Prince Buster ‘The Message Dub-Wise’, said by some to be the first album of dub mixes.  Lee Perry interviewed on the radio (perhaps by Rodigan) giving it large with his incomprehensible, vaguely biblical patter.  These are fragments I remember, how it seeped into me.

I’d been a bit snooty about reggae up until a year or two before, associating it with skinheads and cultures beyond my ken, then won over by Marley and the Wailers somewhat.  Oh, and Desmond Dekker, ‘The Israelites’.  But this dub stuff, it was huge, stately, booming.  One minute it’s just the steady throb of drums and the bass, then bursts of magnificent, heavenly horns, laden with reverb, exploded by flashing fingers on the equalising slide-bar.  Ghostly voices way down in the mix, suddenly hitting the foreground, trailing off in echoes and distortion.  To me it was about as psychedelic as psychedelic gets.  When the mood for it takes me, still feel that way, forty years later.

First dub album I bought  was called ‘Rasta Have Ambition’, a compilation album featuring mostly d.j. cuts on side 1.  But on side 2 – what I was after – five dubs by King Tubby, one of the great dub production artists and another claimant for the originator title.  It started with a track called ‘Invasion’, which had all the qualities of those many unidentified dub tracks I’d heard on my rounds in the Smoke.  Got to admit, the album trailed off a bit after that.  Some dub stays on the spot for too long, forgets to startle, lacks resonance.  But ‘Invasion’ was the business.  I’ve heard other mixes of it since, under different titles, claimed by different artists.  With what appears to be a blurring of the roles of producer, mixer or engineer, and a plethora of ‘versions’ to boot, it’s hard to know what’s what.  Best to just find what you like and enjoy it.

Bit further down the line came Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and the Upsetters’ ‘Super Ape’, which was the business from beginning to end, made me a devotee of Perry’s Jamaican ‘Black Ark’ productions, and remains a favourite to this day.  Mixes like thick soup, the sound rolling through layers of distortion, constant unexpected insertions…  But also tunes, riffs, melodies that lodge in your memory.

Within a few years, dub techniques were in common use well beyond reggae.  Plenty to be found on the web about the history of all that, I’m sure.  Just wanted to relive and share that first thrill.

On the Face Of It

On the Face of It

In human experience, the face is critical.  In each of our brains a vast proportion of clustered neurons is devoted to facial recognition.  Those with conditions in which this ability is compromised suffer, as do all who lose what the rest of us take for granted.  In language, we enshrine the facial image with significance.  If we fail to maintain our social standing, we speak of ‘losing face’.  When we do not wish to comply, we ‘fly in the face of’ whatever we choose to challenge.  But we recognise its superficiality, perhaps, when we ‘put on a brave face’ or assess a situation ‘on the face of it’.

And we possess so many faces.  Freeze one frame per second of a minute’s footage and you’ll see some portion of the parade.

Joy is radiant, clear, open as an ocean in satellite view.  Anxiety’s a clench, a knot work of furrow; taut, twisted and strained.  Grief ups the ante, filling anxiety’s template with pale skin tones, red edged eyes and a darkened swell below.  Confusion contorts the eyebrows, engenders rippling creases and slightly parts the lips.  Love is a softening glaze, lost eyes, the face of a question.

We’ve all looked at photos of ourselves and regretted their existence, perhaps admitting that there is something about them that we do not recognise.  Or do not wish to recognise.  We want what we think we see in the mirror, but more often than not, that’s just our looking-in-the-mirror face that no-one sees but us.  We want what we want, but here on the screen or in the print are strangers, canny devils who have stolen our clothes and approximated our features.  They look back at us and laugh.

Some faces can close and hide, in poker poses of utmost self-control.  For as long as the situation requires, those faces resist change.  When freed of the need, do they burst into paroxysms of gurning?  Others cannot hide.  We say what they feel is ‘written all over their face’, a graffiti of anguish, a scroll of pleasure or a document of despair.  Faces change.  Sooner or later, all faces change.

Look at those you encounter as you clamber through another day.  Watch them for long enough and they do not stay the same.  Light and shadow play games of chance with them.  Muscles tense and relax.  Flesh re-arranges around them.  The old for moments look young.  The young for moments look old.  Everyone has a repertoire.  Beauty has an ugly look.  Disfigurement’s exquisite in its originality.

Perhaps this is an indication that the face is not so superficial – that the soul or the psyche of the person possessing the face can influence its features.  If those with what we define as ‘beauty’ also have a hardness and a harshness within, does this harden and harshen the face with its habitual expression?  Similarly, if there is beauty where many see the lack of it, maybe inner beauty can shine through – beauty of thought and intention, of compassion.

When I was young, I thought that age brought only decay.  Now I’m here, that’s not so clear.  It’s so with some, that can’t be denied, but others find a fine sort of form that in youth was denied them, a grace they never knew before.  A gauntness or conversely a thickening of flesh can enhance a face that once, perhaps, lacked character.  (Compared to such a process, plastic surgery seems a crude tool, botox the bluntest of instruments.)

Change can also bring loss.  The face of the child, for example, does not always survive into the face of the adult.  A woman I know spoke of her three sons: in two she can still see the child face; in the third, she says, changes at puberty were so drastic she can never again find the features she knew before.

But maybe still, despite any losses, the repertoire tends to build.  We store more faces with time.  At least until time brings that parade to an end, and our one final face is composed.

Charles Eisenstein – A Glimmer of Hope

Charles Eisenstein – A Glimmer of Hope

I have some good hearted (no, really…) but somewhat cynical friends to whom I would hesitate to recommend a book entitled ‘The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible’.  I had some doubts myself when the book was recommended and lent to me.  But its author, Charles Eisenstein, won me over.

You can find out about him and his ideas on his website ( charleseisenstein.net ) – so I’m just writing this to outline some of the stuff I found myself connecting with in his thinking.  His basic riff is that we humans have shunted ourselves into a state of what he calls ‘separation’, where we are disconnected from awareness of our truer, deeper and better natures.  This to me bears some resemblance to what I was told in sociology lectures long ago about the concept of ‘alienation’.  Eisenstein uses this term also, so I infer that in his mind there is a distinction.  Maybe so, but whatever you want to call it, it’s the root problem we need to sort out before we can deal with our current fan-load of shit.

A good many people I consider friends tend to be of a liberal disposition.  Post Brexit, facing the oncoming US presidency of Donald Trump, looking on with horror at what’s unfolding in the Middle East and the giddying acceleration of global warming, they tend to be pretty depressed as 2017 begins.  Me too, much of the time, and maybe I’m clutching at straws but in the thinking of Eisenstein I see some remaining cause for hope.

Eisenstein writes that, globally, we are embedded in a story we have created for ourselves.  That story includes many aspects of what capitalism has wrought – the idea that economies must ‘grow’, that planned obsolescence fuels trade, that we must build and deploy arms, that we must exploit fossil fuels, that we need ‘strong leaders’ etc.  It embeds us in the feeling that this is just how it is.  Human beings can’t get along any other way.  That’s how we’re wired.  It blinds us to the consequences of our flawed activities.

Within this story, mindset or whatever you’re going to call it, change cannot happen.  You can campaign, you can lobby – but you are still playing a part in the existing story, so cannot achieve real change.  Change cannot come about until we change the story, change our consciousness, accept responsibility etc.  Eisenstein suggests that the old story is becoming less robust now.  Although the democratic decisions for the UK to leave Europe and for Trump to become US president seem pretty disastrous for the world, they were brought about in part by a growing disillusionment with politics and politicians amongst a growing number of ordinary people.

The hope this engenders is by no means of a blissful, Aquarian nature.  As our current knee-jerk decisions lead us into instability, breakdown and chaos, people will suffer and people will die on perhaps unprecedented scales.  Nevertheless, he foresees the possibility that ‘the public’s frayed loyalty to the existing system could snap’.  (I’m quoting not from the book here but from a recent online essay titled ‘The Election: Of Hate, Grief and a New Story - http://charleseisenstein.net/hategriefandanewstory/ )  This is a point of opening possibility.  Something better could emerge from this turmoil.  In the closing chapters of the book, Eisenstein at least sketches in how this might come about.

What I like about him is that he makes it sound possible, but does not shy away from the likelihood that the new story might never be established.  He is pointing to a chance, not a certainty.  He may have something of the guru about him, but he does not trade in false confidence.  Throughout the book he is constantly putting a check on his own statements, questioning the thought processes that have led to them.  He makes no pretence that he has everything sussed out.

The occasional contentious statement does pass unchallenged – but the feeling I get (wrongly or rightly) is that if one pointed this out to him, he would at least listen and consider.  The virtue in his approach, for me, ties back to something I considered tentatively in my first series of blogs concerning the genesis of the ideas behind ‘Wilful Misunderstandings’.  If my stories in the book share any such virtue, it is because they are intended to promote what I termed, back then, ‘mental flexibility’.  They invite us to consider that consensus reality, no matter how solid and certain it may seem in our present world, is not the only version.  Get to this point and the opportunity to create a better reality seems just that little bit more available.

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Wilful Misunderstandings gets a review in the latest issue of online magazine 'Gonzo' .  Check it out at:

https://www.flipsnack.com/9FE5CEE9E8C/gonzo215-6.html

Then, when suitably impressed, go to http://lepusbooks.co.uk/wilful-misunderstandings/ and treat yourself to a signed copy.  There will be no regrets.

Rebuttal

Written a few years back (after our last cold winter in the UK) but still seems to hang together...

                                 Rebuttal

There is no global warming – we’ve no reason to think twice:
Last winter all our city streets were paved in gleaming ice.
You tell us that’s just ‘weather’ – a claim we find surprising:
Should summers not be long and hot, if temperatures are rising?

We’re in denial, we’re in denial – let’s get this off our chest
And cherry pick the evidence to suit our thinking best.
We’re in denial, we’re in denial – we’ll be the loudest criers…
You ‘experts’ think you know it all, you ‘experts’ are all liars.

There is no global warming – so let’s run each last appliance.
If power goes short they’ll find us more, for that’s the role of science.
The world’s so vast we’ll find the oil – our enterprise just thrives –
‘Neath Arctic ice or locked in shale, to fuel our four-wheel drives.

We’re in denial, we’re in denial – there’s still so many trees…
‘Deforestation’s one more of those ‘Green’ conspiracies.
We’re in denial, yes, in denial – we think this fear is forced:
Biodiversity’s just fine; there’ll be no holocaust!

There is no global warming – it’s investment policies
That underpin earth’s status quo, not people hugging trees!
You say we need to change our ways, conserve this world’s resources…
But you’re just out to snatch our wealth and disrupt our market forces.

We’re in denial, still in denial – can’t stop consuming now
We’re doing what we’ve always done and milking our cash cow.
We’re in denial, yes, in denial – this planet’s life support
Can take care of itself, you’ll see, exactly as it ought.

There is no global warming, we think the idea’s crazy.
It’s all built up on ‘if’s and ‘but’s, and frankly rather hazy.
You can’t decide amongst yourselves on ‘safe’ amounts of CO2,
So why should we take notice when you tell us what to do?

We’re in denial, oh, in denial… Don’t buy this climate gloom!
We think it paranoia, when you predict our doom.
We’re in denial, we’re in denial – your logic we’ll deride.
You must concede our point of view,

     for God is on our side!

Martin Stone - A Friend I Knew But Never Saw

Martin Stone – an appreciation.

It’s been a rough year in too many ways.  In the world of popular music, household names have been dropping like ninepins, bookended by Messrs Bowie and Cohen.  At round about the time the latter left the planet, Martin Stone succumbed to cancer and made his own quiet exit.  I only picked up this event a few days ago.  Even amidst the buzz and chatter of online news there isn’t much to be read about it.  Wikipedia still has him in the present tense.

Whatever his other talents may have been, Martin Stone excelled in two fields.  He was a superb guitar player, a contemporary to and – to me and many others – an equal of Clapton, Beck and Page.  Then at some point in the 1970s he turned his back on rock’n’roll to become a book dealer.  Or perhaps to be more precise a ‘freelance book scout’.  In that arcane field he earned an extraordinary reputation also – celebrated by litterateurs such as Iain Sinclair and John Baxter.  It is said that he had an ability, that some found near uncanny, to locate rare first editions of often extraordinary works.  Google his name and you’ll find this legend embellished by a good many folk who’ve had dealings with rare books.

But it’s for the former artistry I shall chiefly treasure Martin Stone.  I first heard him play guitar on the debut album by the band Mighty Baby, with its vivid Martin Sharp sleeve design.  At that stage the band combined a hard rock sound, influenced – I would think – both by Cream and West Coast American psychedelic music, with unusually philosophical lyrics that seemed to indicate a deep and serious search for meaning in life.  Some of the titles give you the flavour: ‘A Friend You Know But Never See’ or ‘House Without Windows’.  They played around with allegory and paradox. I know a lot more about the band now than I did then, and amongst the facts I’ve read that Stone himself was the lyricist.  In part, I’m sure, directed by extensive experience with LSD, he’d become immersed in the writing of G.I. Gurdgieff, an influential early 20th-century mystic, philosopher, spiritual teacher, and composer.  This led Stone, and subsequently all bar one of the band to Sufism and, as he put it, ‘we all turned muslim’.

 The influence of Sufism was deeply entrenched in the band’s second album ‘A Jug of Love’, with the musicians – increasingly bearded and dressed in ethnic togs – posing on Arabic rugs on the front cover and a quote from Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī on the back.  It was the first Mighty Baby album I owned and after a few plays I fell in love with it and have remained so ever since.  It’s a mellower listen than the first album, new influences such as The Band filtering into the mix, but explores and lingers amongst a variety of sonic textures.  That said, it’s not without its flaws as various band members themselves have admitted.  The vocals have charm but are not what you’d call powerful, the songs tend to ramble a bit and mostly lack much in the way of hooks.  It’s the atmosphere it generates that sucks you in, that and the constantly inventive ripple of Stone’s ever-fluid guitar work, weaving in and around the music.

Not long after that album’s release, Mighty Baby disbanded, and apart from a reunion gig or two around 2005/6 (recordings of which I’d love to hear), have not played together since.  Stone, with old friend Phil ‘Snakefinger’ Lithman, then found his way into country rock and western swing band Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers – who were stalwarts of the mid 70s ‘pub rock’ scene.  Actually, the Willis played quite a variety of styles, including some hard grinding blues tunes.  This, I found out as I researched Stone’s pre Mighty Baby career, was very much at the roots of his style.  He’d been a member of the Savoy Brown Blues Band, playing on their first album, and had had his own band, Stone’s Masonry, who played in a similar vein.  He’d also been a session musician on recordings by visiting black bluesman Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton.  Such was his reputation in the blues field that he was on the list of Alexis Korner’s recommendations for a guitarist to replace Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones.

The full band Willis can be heard on the very fine ‘Bongos Over Balham’ album and live on the Zigzag Magazine 5th Anniversary Concert box set (available by mail order from RGF records).  Stone’s guitar is less prominent in the mix, but now and again he steps forward and shines brightly.  They were managed by Jake Riviera, who went on to be a founder of Stiff Records, and after the band called it a day, Stone became associated with that label.  For a while he joined anarcho-rockers the Pink Fairies (‘I was so pleased to don the black leather jacket and shades’), releasing a single on Stiff.  He also, I think, reformed Stone’s Masonry for a track on a Stiff sampler.  And then played with Joe Strummer in the 101ers towards the end of their run.  Thereafter, he disappeared off my radar for a good many years.

It was only when I was re-introduced to the work of Iain Sinclair, whose poetry I had encountered in the mid 70s, and read ‘White Chappell – Scarlet Tracings’, that I discovered Stone’s subsequent career (if that’s the appropriate word) as a book scout had commenced.  The book begins with a graphic description of Stone (as ‘Nicholas Lane’) vomiting copiously in a state of extreme bad health.  I doubted then that he had long to live, but survive he did to reappear in subsequent Sinclair books.  Sinclair even has him, in ‘Landor’s Tower’ playing a gig in a waterfront bar in Port Talbot to an audience including several local gangsters.  If that account is true, I wish I’d been there, as I lived nearby at the time.  Stone as a books man also featured in Sinclair and Chris Petit’s ‘The Cardinal and the Corpse’ film and added some fine rootsy acoustic guitar picking to the soundtrack.

He’d relocated to Paris around that time and had been drawn back into making music, playing in a band with Wreckless Eric (another émigré) and forming a couple of bands of his own – Almost Presley and the Tallahassie Rent Boys.  Best of all, from my point of view, he recorded again – as Les Homewreckers, with French colleague Laurence Bama and with older friends appearing on some of the tracks.  It’s a long way from Mighty Baby, that album, taking its cue I think from ‘Beggars Banquet’ era Rolling Stones and maybe Iggy Pop and James Williamson’s ‘Kill City’.  The songs – all written by Stone apart from a tidy cover of Donovan’s ‘Hey Gyp’ – no longer feature enigmatic aphorisms but tend to be downbeat reflections on matters of the heart.  But the guitar fills and solos are as immaculate as ever.  It’s a bit of a rarity now but can still be tracked down on Casino Music.

I know from Googling that, thereafter, Stone occasionally played gigs in London with surviving colleagues from various points in his career and presumably continued to play live in France, but I largely lost track of him again until hearing of his demise.  As mentioned, there’s not much in the way of news about it – though I trust Mojo and Uncut will be giving him obits in their upcoming issues.  There’s a couple of online obits that are worth reading on:

https://blog.vialibri.net/martin-stone-1946-2016/

and:

https://greatwen.com/2016/11/10/rip-martin-stone-guitarist-bookseller-hustler/

with some heartfelt comments by those who knew him as to his personal charm, wit and generosity.  Myself, I’m writing as a fan, so from a greater distance than those people, but the love is shared.

(Info sources include Brian Hinton’s extensive 1995 Ptolemaic Terrascope interview, Mighty Baby and Chilli Willi CD reissue sleeve notes and the work of writers and obituarists referred to above.)

Mail Order Fun

Richard-

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

PLEASE NOTE: For domestic parcels: Your tracking number, whether UPS or USPS, can be tracked through UPS.com. Your package will have tracking information within 24-48 hours.

For international parcels: USPS International Air Mail tracking numbers only confirm receipt of the parcel and no further updates are available. Your order should arrive between 1-4 weeks. UPS and DHL provide comprehensive tracking numbers.

(1) David Nelson Band: Once in a Blue Moon

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our world-renowned packing specialist lit a local artisan candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, December 9, 2014.

We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...
We miss you already. We'll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.


Hi

Thank you for your message.

A second satin pillow will be placed beneath my front door letterbox to soften the landing of my CD upon its arrival.  The package will then be reverentially lifted and placed on a sheet of purple velvet, surrounded by scented candles and gently burning incense, on my dining room table.

I have notified my neighbours of its impending arrival and they will be summoned to gather therein and witness the opening of the package, which will be accomplished by the deft use of my finest gold-plated scissors.

We will then pass on a group message of solidarity and gratitude to the people of Portland, which will be carried across the Atlantic and most of the American continent by a relay team of carrier pigeons (though, for health and safety reasons, I would suggest that no one holds their breath whilst awaiting this).

I and my neighbours will don white cotton gloves, and pass the CD with absolute care from hand to hand so that each of us, in our own way and according to our religious beliefs, can worship and adore this sublime artifact prior to its placement on the newly cleaned CD tray of my state of the art stereophonic system, perfectly confident that - such is the care with which CD Baby employees have inspected, polished and packaged it - the CD will play from beginning to end, without skips or distortion of any kind.

We will boogie long into the night and finally retire to our beds, each of us culturally enriched and grateful for the cordial entente that exists between the peoples of the UK and the USA.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, indeed!

Richard

Best bit of mail order correspondence I ever had.  Eat your heart out Amazon!

great album, too, by the way