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Thanks Le J. I’m staying in bed and getting through as much of my film watchlist backlog as I can! (Though annoyingly I’m still having to do my job… the joys of being part time and working from home!)
Hope you’ve been keeping well, by the way. Good to hear from you!
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Before I begin, I hope you are feeling better, DensleyBlair.
After a whole week of binge reading, I have finally caught up with this AAR. I thoroughly enjoyed the ride through 40 years of alternate history, told in a variety of styles and covering different aspects. It does feel like this AAR has something for everybody. Like detailed economic policy? This AAR has it. Like architecture? This AAR also has it. Like seeing a screenshot of some guy on a roundtable TV show smoking a pipe? You have come to the right place.
I particularly enjoyed the looks at pop culture in the Commonwealth of Britain. I got a kick out of seeing Cary Grant starring in spy films. I enjoy British music (Phil Collins and Rod Stewart especially), so the look at music in the Commonwealth I was particularly fascinated by.
Then there's Redadder. Those updates were hilarious.
First, I thought it was cool to have a co-author.
As for @99KingHigh's USA updates, I thoroughly enjoyed them. The 1960s was an especially tough time for the United States, with social unrest, the war in Vietnam, and other problems. @99KingHigh took all that and injected them with steroids. "You think the 1960s was a tough time to live through? Watch this."
I thought using William Buckley as a narrator was a smart move, looking at the decade from his perspective. I chuckled when I read his opinion of Gore Vidal.
Personally, I got really excited when I saw this guy:
Given that Scoop was Vice President and then President in my AAR, I felt like I was seeing an old friend again.
I am looking forward to seeing what comes next. I conclude this post with this little gem:
"I shall vote for Chairman Mosley because I am a dog."
After a whole week of binge reading, I have finally caught up with this AAR. I thoroughly enjoyed the ride through 40 years of alternate history, told in a variety of styles and covering different aspects. It does feel like this AAR has something for everybody. Like detailed economic policy? This AAR has it. Like architecture? This AAR also has it. Like seeing a screenshot of some guy on a roundtable TV show smoking a pipe? You have come to the right place.
I particularly enjoyed the looks at pop culture in the Commonwealth of Britain. I got a kick out of seeing Cary Grant starring in spy films. I enjoy British music (Phil Collins and Rod Stewart especially), so the look at music in the Commonwealth I was particularly fascinated by.
Then there's Redadder. Those updates were hilarious.
You may have seen from the Contents that wrapped up within this project is a history of the USA during the Cold War written by my good co-author @99KingHigh . I'll be particularly eager to hear your reaction to this when you get to it!
First, I thought it was cool to have a co-author.
As for @99KingHigh's USA updates, I thoroughly enjoyed them. The 1960s was an especially tough time for the United States, with social unrest, the war in Vietnam, and other problems. @99KingHigh took all that and injected them with steroids. "You think the 1960s was a tough time to live through? Watch this."
I thought using William Buckley as a narrator was a smart move, looking at the decade from his perspective. I chuckled when I read his opinion of Gore Vidal.
Personally, I got really excited when I saw this guy:
Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson announces his candidacy for President (April 1968).
Given that Scoop was Vice President and then President in my AAR, I felt like I was seeing an old friend again.
I am looking forward to seeing what comes next. I conclude this post with this little gem:
"I shall vote for Chairman Mosley because I am a dog."
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Certainly got to be a wild ride from start to current! Glad to see more people getting on the bandwagon that you started, @DensleyBlair !
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Glad you enjoyed! Looking forward to our resumptionBefore I begin, I hope you are feeling better, DensleyBlair.
After a whole week of binge reading, I have finally caught up with this AAR. I thoroughly enjoyed the ride through 40 years of alternate history, told in a variety of styles and covering different aspects. It does feel like this AAR has something for everybody. Like detailed economic policy? This AAR has it. Like architecture? This AAR also has it. Like seeing a screenshot of some guy on a roundtable TV show smoking a pipe? You have come to the right place.
I particularly enjoyed the looks at pop culture in the Commonwealth of Britain. I got a kick out of seeing Cary Grant starring in spy films. I enjoy British music (Phil Collins and Rod Stewart especially), so the look at music in the Commonwealth I was particularly fascinated by.
Then there's Redadder. Those updates were hilarious.
First, I thought it was cool to have a co-author.
As for @99KingHigh's USA updates, I thoroughly enjoyed them. The 1960s was an especially tough time for the United States, with social unrest, the war in Vietnam, and other problems. @99KingHigh took all that and injected them with steroids. "You think the 1960s was a tough time to live through? Watch this."
I thought using William Buckley as a narrator was a smart move, looking at the decade from his perspective. I chuckled when I read his opinion of Gore Vidal.
Personally, I got really excited when I saw this guy:
Given that Scoop was Vice President and then President in my AAR, I felt like I was seeing an old friend again.
I am looking forward to seeing what comes next. I conclude this post with this little gem:
"I shall vote for Chairman Mosley because I am a dog."
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Thank you! I’m glad to say I am all better now.Before I begin, I hope you are feeling better, DensleyBlair.
First of all, thank you for taking the time to catch up with the entirety of this saga! I’m glad you enjoyed it. And I’m fairly sure you’ve set a new Echoes catch-up speedrun record!
Welcome to the thread, and I’m glad to have you along for the ride. I love pop culture, so I really can’t resist adding bits and pieces in. Really happy to hear that you got a kick out of it too! (Phil Collins and Rod Stewart will probably turn up at some point or another, too.
) The next chapter is actually a massive music one, so I hope you enjoy it whenever I finally get around to finishing and publishing it!Thank you! I’ve been continually heartened to see those get such a warm response. Writing the handful of episodes were some of the most fun I’ve had with this thing.Then there's Redadder. Those updates were hilarious.
It’s been a pleasure and a privilege having @99KingHigh lend his talents to the timeline.First, I thought it was cool to have a co-author.
Yes, our own version of the American 1960s is a particularly troubled one. And not about to get any better in a hurry, I understand.
Buckley is a delightfully deranged narrator. I’m still eagerly waiting to see him face off with Gore in this timeline.
He just doesn’t go away!Given that Scoop was Vice President and then President in my AAR, I felt like I was seeing an old friend again.
It continues to humble me that in its third year people still take time out of their lives to read this whole thing. Not even I’ve been back cover to cover – though I enjoyed reading along with @Nathan Madien a bit over the past week as I saw various “like” notifications come in. Even if I do say so myself, with fresh eyes I was pretty happy with how a lot of the plot hung together!
Me too. After the next couple of weeks are done with, uni-wise I only have my dissertation to think about until the end of August. So I may well be able to steal away a couple of days to bang out the end of the next chapter.
Then once that’s up there’ll be no excuse but to hear from old WFB Jr.
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I can't believe I'm saying this, but after eight-and-a-half long, long months, I am finally able to give you all the announcement you've (presumably) been waiting for: the next chapter is done!
It is incredibly long. (And I mean incredibly. The footnotes alone run to more than 2,000 words…) Owing to this it may take some time to format and upload, but rest assured it is coming within the next couple of hours. So find your comfiest reading chair, get your refreshments at the ready, and prepare for the ride of a lifetime[citation needed] in chapter one-hundred-and-something of Echoes of A New Tomorrow:
It is incredibly long. (And I mean incredibly. The footnotes alone run to more than 2,000 words…) Owing to this it may take some time to format and upload, but rest assured it is coming within the next couple of hours. So find your comfiest reading chair, get your refreshments at the ready, and prepare for the ride of a lifetime[citation needed] in chapter one-hundred-and-something of Echoes of A New Tomorrow:
In Place of Strife: Lewis in the minority
Part One: A History of 'Common Beat'
Part One: A History of 'Common Beat'
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In Place of Strife: Lewis in the minority (Part One: A History of 'Common Beat')
Chapter Six
In Place of Strife: Lewis in the minority
Part One
All You Need Is Love: A History of ‘Common Beat’
On the evening of Friday July 14 1967, a crowd of around 120 people had gathered at Vinny’s, a small jazz bar in Islington, just a short walk away from the old Angel Hotel, for a night of jazz, folk and beat music. At the top of the bill was Jimmy Campbell, a young singer-songwriter from Liverpool – one of a number of acts from the town whose careers had received a boost following the demise of the Beat Institution in January, satisfying a listening public still hungry for the ‘Merseyside sound’. Campbell’s show at Vinny’s, in front of a relatively small crowd, was to be his first headline appearance in London. He would be supported by a young guitarist called Les Clapham, whose formidable skill as a player was given an edge by his preference for playing American-style blues.[1] Although a ‘London Blues’ scene had established itself briefly a few years earlier, the anti-American sentiment that had taken hold among the taste-making youth of the capital in the aftermath of the world crises of 1964 had cooled enthusiasm for the genre among the general music-loving population. By 1967, expressing a preference for the blues marked one out as something of a maverick figure among music fans, who in general were beginning to move towards ‘homegrown’ styles. That many of these styles remained strongly coloured by imported idioms seemed not to matter; the simple fact of going beyond imitation – the preferred mode of the London Blues – ensured that groups playing the new style soon gained a following. Meanwhile, the old style, now disparaged as derivative or formulaic, came to be associated with a certain boorish countercultural fringe, not dissimilar to the ‘Ozzie Boys’ of the decade before – though then it was the Ozzies, with their disdain for jazz, who had been motivated by a contempt for ‘subversive’ foreign fashions. Now a preference for the Blues often formed part of a conscious effort to identify with American cultural standards, against a British establishment ‘in decline’.
Clapham himself was not a member of any political group, either for or against ‘the establishment’, but his style of playing could not help but stand out when paired with the relatively mainstream folk-tinged beat music offered by Campbell. For the most part, the crowd received Clapham’s playing without incident, appreciating his technical skill even if not wholly enthusiastic about his ‘sound’. The atmosphere in the room was not, however, without its hint of tension. Throughout the performance, Clapham had to contend with sections of the audience who continued to talk amongst themselves while he played. By the end of his set, the guitarist had grown visibly annoyed. Addressing the room after his penultimate song of the night, Clapham sarcastically thanked the crowd for their ‘melodious backing vocals’. The quip provoked a prickly reaction from the audience, who responded with jeers and heckles, mostly encouraging the musician to get on with his performance. Obliging, Clapham initially attempted to brush off the agitation, ignoring the jeers and beginning to play his final tune, a rendition of the 1920’s blues standard ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’. When the crowd showed no signs of calming down after the first few bars, however, he abruptly stopped playing and resumed his monologue.
(His, for me, is the definitive interpretation.)
Clapham’s first target was the audience itself, whom he accused of showing a ‘lack of respect’ for his music. He continued – unprompted – by making a series of derisive remarks about the London music scene, mocking folk-style players as ‘untalented’ and folk-beat music in general as ‘lazy’. The audience responded with ferocious booing and jeering, although an unconcerned Clapham made a second attempt to perform his final song over the noise. He stubbornly played the first verse before stopping and breaking off into another rant, this time taking aim at youth culture more broadly. Clapham, who was himself only 23 at the time, declared that the youth did not ‘want to work for anything’, which he attributed, grandly, to changes in society that had taken place since the downfall of Oswald Mosley. Apparently taking little notice of the increasingly angry mood in the room, Clapham heralded Mosley as ‘the best thing that had ever happened to Britain’, saying that he had ‘not [been] afraid to put Britain first’. By contrast, he said, the politicians of the day were letting the country go to ‘ruin’, not least by allowing ‘coloured people and foreigners’ into the country. Over a chorus of booing and jeering, Clapham finished his tirade by endorsing the racialist politician Enoch Powell before leaving the stage.
Les Clapham, 1967.
(Shortly before disappearing off the face of the earth.)
In contrast to Clapham’s outburst, Jimmy Campbell’s performance was, expectedly, a more lighthearted affair, and after some initial awkwardness the Liverpudlian singer-songwriter was able to restore a more congenial air to the room. But Clapham’s theatrics could not be dismissed wholesale, and a fraught atmosphere lingered on under the surface. After Campbell had finished playing, members of the crowd leaving the venue erupted into urgent discussion about the night’s events. In the street outside, scenes tottered uneasily on the brink of violence when scuffles broke out between two groups of young men divided by their reactions to Clapham’s endorsement of Enoch Powell. Wider disturbances were averted only after the pro-Powell contingent had been chased off by the larger number of opponents, and in the local area tensions remained palpable over the following days. On Sunday morning, Vinny’s proprietor Joe ‘Vinny’ Wener woke up to find pro-Clapham and pro-Powell slogans painted over the front door of his club. Within the week, the words ‘Clapham was right’ could be seen scrawled on walls, bus shelters and construction hoardings all around Islington, repeated with a frequency that suggested the phrase had travelled beyond those who were in attendance for his initial outburst. More often than not, the slogan would be appended with another: ‘Powell for Premier’.[2]
(The album, also Half Baked, is a much richer sound than this rather spare acoustic performance suggests. Have a listen to the studio version of the title track, or else album-closer 'Don’t Leave Me Now'. Campbell never really made it big in our world, but one clip of him on television does exist from the period. Have a look here, if you’re curious.)
The extent to which pro-Powell feeling permeated through London’s youth culture in the wake of Clapham’s performance is hard to judge accurately. To be sure, those who first painted the words ‘Clapham was right’ on the door of Vinny’s were, more likely than not, committed supporters of his message, but beyond this it is harder to say conclusively whether the spread of the graffiti equaled a spread in Powellite sentiment. The association between youth cultures and ‘anti-establishmentarianism’ is well recorded in the Commonwealth, going back at least a generation beforehand to the underground jazz and folk cultures sustained by left-wing youth groups after the Wars. Since Mosley’s fall, these formerly underground cultures had come into closer alignment – though seldom total agreement – with the reformist political establishment, and as a result their ‘dissident’ appeal had been somewhat dimmed. ‘Partisan-style’ jazz had shed its Mosley-era edge to become ‘the sound of Bevan’s Britain’ – no longer incendiary, even when paired with the wry social commentary of bands like the Radars, who took the idiom to new levels of popularity by blending it with popular ‘beat’ sensibilities.[3] At the same time, the ‘folk-beat’ sound that had emerged contemporaneously, though independently, in London, Liverpool and other places had not yet followed the lead of American-style ‘folk-rock’ in marrying its free-spiritedness with a dissident political inclination. As a result, Les Clapham’s ‘anti-establishment’ attitude drew admiration from many who, regardless of its content, approved of its ethos: that music should rise above its recent apolitical complacency. The question, for those with opposing politics – anecdotally, the large majority within ‘the scene’ – was how to prevent an ‘infiltration’ of the musical culture by more committed Powellites (and others) seeking to put down roots in what they saw as newly-fertile soil.
In Islington, answering the question quickly became an urgent task. Within days, news of Clapham’s outburst reached the ears of the London branch of Enoch Powell’s Movement for Economic Reform, who soon mobilised in an attempt to capitalise on their local notoriety. Since its formation in May 1967, the MER had struggled to turn Powell’s personal notoriety into a coherent political base. Now, party leaders hoped to leverage unexpected local notoriety in Islington by carving out a foothold in an otherwise solidly left-wing area of London. Informal pro-Powell graffiti was given a more authoritative heft in the weeks following the concert by the appearance of printed posters supportive of the MER as a whole. Shortly after came canvassing volunteers, setting up stalls on streets corners and spending their Saturdays handing out campaign literature. By the end of July, the effects were beginning to make themselves clear. Reviewing a night of rhythm and blues music at the Searchlight Club in Pentonville on July 25 for the left-wing underground magazine Where It’s At, writer Marion Brent described how ‘every third person in the crowd seemed to have a purple “Powell for Premier” badge fixed to their coat’. On July 28, a fortnight after the fateful incident at Vinny’s, the MER formally announced the formation of a new branch in Islington – their first in central London. The branch secretary, Christopher Hannon, was a 24-year-old office clerk who played guitar with a rhythm and blues covers band in his spare time.
'Powell for P.M!!' graffito, Pentonville, 1967.
In the face of this growing threat, the local anti-racialist contingent was not inactive. Within the music scene itself, diverse figures came together to oppose the onset of Powellism in the community. Vinny Wener, himself an active volunteer for the CPCB, announced a week after the Clapham concert that on July 29 Vinny’s would host an ‘anti-racialist beat night’ (eventually billed as ‘Beat Back!’) for the benefit of local immigrant associations. The seriousness with which the folk-beat scene took the fightback against Powellism was evident from the depth of talent on the line-up, which included such luminaries as Marianne Faithfull, Bert Jansch and the duo Seeger & MacColl – all mainstays of the feted Soho folk-club culture. Indeed, Wener’s assembled roster was noteworthy in uniting artists from the rival ‘Partisan’ and ‘Les Cousins’ sets, usually divided over questions of stylistic ‘purism’. The Partisan circle, true to their New Left heritage, were more politically engaged, though tended towards stylistic conservatism so far as concerned their music. Les Cousins, meanwhile, was a centre of musical innovation, where ‘traditional’ folk idioms blended freely with jazz, beat and world musical influences, though this ecumenical attitude towards style rarely if ever accommodated direct political engagement.[4] Wener’s savvy was to book acts from both camps, therefore not only giving the impression of a ‘united front’, but generating significant extra press attention with the promise of an unprecedented programme.
Despite attempts by MER activists to disrupt the event through picketing, Wener’s gambit paid off, and on July 29 a packed crowd at Vinny’s succeeded in raising over £120 for local immigrant welfare groups.[5] The money was split dually between the London Guyanese Workers’ Association (LGWA), a young trade union notable for organising Guyanese immigrant workers simultaneously across multiple industries, and the London branch of Group 66, an anti-racialist ‘monitoring group’ first set up by a multi-ethnic coalition of workers and organisers in Luton after Powell’s ‘Great Betrayal’ speech the previous October. Using tactics including intelligence gathering and direct confrontation, Group 66 formed the vanguard so far as concerned the fight against the re-emerging far-right in the Commonwealth. Following the success of ‘Beat Back!’, Group 66 became intimately involved with the growing anti-racialist tendency within the London folk-beat culture, setting up a London office in the rooms above the Partisan Coffee House and often acting as ‘security’ at gigs where organisers anticipated a troublesome Powellite presence. At the same time, a number of artists grew more overtly political in their songwriting in response to the racialist threat. Marianne Faithfull, whose traditionalist Partisan background belied an openness towards more ‘experimental’ forms of folk music, recorded a radical reinterpretation of the Scottish standard ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, scrapping the suggestive ‘love among the heather’ narrative in favour of a back-and-forth between lovers caught up in Powellite violence on a night out. In Faithfull’s reimagining, the refrain – ‘will you go, lassie, go?’ – gains political significance as a call to arms against street-fighting racialist groups.
As the political moment grew within the folk scene, a number of people began to imagine ways to capitalise on opposition to Powell and his racialist followers. On August 3, Vinny Wener convened a meeting in the Group 66 rooms above the Partisan Coffee House in order to discuss what next step to take in the battle against the MER. In attendance were: musicians and Partisan organisers Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger; Les Cousins impresario Andy Matheou; Harold Knopik and Rita Jones of the Group 66 London branch; and Nadira Basir and Ronald Amos of the LGWA. Between them, the group agreed that a second, bigger concert, expanding upon the success of ‘Beat Back!’ would send a powerful statement that not only was folk music united against racialism in London, but that music more broadly was a place of community and cross-cultural exchange. For maximum impact, the group agreed on two underlying points: first, that the concert should be open to as many people as possible, therefore it should be in the open air; second, that the programme should reflect a wide range of music in the Commonwealth beyond the folk world, including particularly music from Black and Indian cultural traditions.
On the first point, the group picked out the People’s Park, straddling the border between Tower Hamlets and Hackney in East London, as a natural location, blessed as it was with masses of open green space and a lively history of hosting left-wing popular meetings.[6] (The fact that it also boasted a fine bandstand, readily available for the organisers to appropriate without having to construct a large stage, would have surely only added to its appeal.) The second point would require a more coordination, involving gathering together musicians from communities beyond the politicised (and politicising) London folk scene.
Swing dancer Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson (b. 1914; Georgetown, Guyana), pictured while recording for CBC TV in 1940.
Johnson and his band the Emperors of Dance were among the first prominent Black musicians in the Commonwealth, with a residency at the hip Café de Paris in the West End. As a bandleader, Johnson, who had perfected his dancing skills in Harlem before coming to Britain, was a key link between swing, calypso and the ‘hot’ bop and jazz music that followed in the Commonwealth. (Try the ‘Snakehips Swing’ on for size.) His career declined in the 1940s as swing fell out of favour and political pressure forced many Black-run clubs to close, but his band’s influence on the jazz of the 1950s and ’60s was seminal. By 1967, Johnson was practicing as a GP in the village of Bray, Berkshire, where he lived with his life partner, the former CPGB fixer Gerald Hamilton (b. 1890). A resurgence of interest in his work after Common Beat led to a revival of his career, and his band was recognised as a key group in British musical history.[7]
By the final years of the 1960s, Britain – and London in particular – was home to a small but lively collection of immigrant musical subcultures, reflecting the increasingly ‘multicultural’ character of the Commonwealth in its so-called ‘post-imperial’ state. Black and Indian communities calling London home was nothing new by the time of the arrival of Guyanese refugees in the first months of 1967; the foreign-born population of the Commonwealth as a whole was estimated at 240 thousand people at the end of 1966, of whom about 100 thousand had settled in London. Naturally, among these were musicians. West Indian calypso was undoubtedly the most established of the ‘foreign-born’ genres, present in the Commonwealth since at least the early 1930s, when musicians newly-arrived from Jamaica and Trinidad found work playing with dance bands in Soho nightclubs. The gradual establishment of dedicated underground calypso clubs in Notting Hill and other places by the end of the decade did much to catalyse Britain’s own ‘hot’ dance music scene, feeding into the jazz and bop of the 1940s and ’50s.
In the process, calypso clubs became prime targets for repression by the Mosley government, who had long seen dance music as a destabilising threat to the social order. Much has been written (a lot by those who were there) about the political battles fought between Mosleyites and their opponents in underground dance clubs, and the intimate relationship between jazz music and groups like Socialist Youth and the Partisan movement are well-documented. Less has been written about the role played by race in these ‘subcultural’ battles – perhaps because at that time the movement for racial equality in Britain was less well defined or understood, though this is not to say that it did not exist. Calypso (and its Trinidadian cousin, mento, often subsumed within the calypso label) is undeniably political music, combining up-tempo polyrhythms with caustic, socially-engaged, often improvised lyrics about daily hardship and political scandal. Certainly, it is a far more biting tradition than anything offered up by the politically-conscious folkies of the Partisan, whose movement in the 1960s towards folk revivalism and away from the hot jazz of the 1950s marks a strangely reactionary turn (easily explained, perhaps, by the smooth integration of the Partisan tendency into the Bevanite cultural elite).[8] The racial and political battles fought within (it would be inaccurate to say ‘between’) London’s musical cultures in the latter half of the Sixties were hardly novel, rather a recurrence of old battles fought a generation before. The difference in this case was the level of publicity and open scandal, the dominant political mood in 1967 being more ready than it had been a decade prior to acknowledge and align itself against the racialist prejudices shaping cultural attitudes.
Since the days of swing and calypso, West Indian music had undergone significant changes of its own, and by 1967 ska and reggae were the popular styles. Influenced more directly by American rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll, characterised by electric guitars and a strong, syncopated beat section, ska – then still more popular than the more relaxed reggae sound – provided a curious alternative to American RnB, affecting many of the same ‘cool’, ‘macho’ poses without being hindered by the cultural baggage of US–Commonwealth relations. Jamaican ska musician Desmond Dekker had scored a hit on British radio earlier in 1967 with his song ‘Israelites’, whose plaintive lyrics about hard labour and heartbreak spoke perhaps on a higher level to CBC programmers with an anxious eye on tensions in the Caribbean. Dekker, whose record company back in Jamaica had sent him on a tour of Britain to capitalise on the success of ‘Israelites’, was conveniently still in the country in August, and through contacts in the London music promotion world Andy Matheou managed to secure him for the bill for the second ‘Beat Back!’ event. This was a major coup, almost guaranteed to ensure that the event would resonate far beyond the confines of the London folk world, and giving real cross-cultural heft to a line-up otherwise so far dominated by white folkies.
Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, 1966.
For all of the event’s growing multi-racial credentials, however, one musical tradition was notably absent: the blues. The question on how to approach the blues (which in its ‘London’ iteration was often, inaccurately, conflated with R&B or even rock ’n’ roll) threatened to split the organising committee. The lines of the split were often jarring. Peggy Seeger, who as an expatriate American folk revivalist came from a musical lineage in which the African-American tradition featured prominently, was reluctant to credit the blues in its ‘urban’ incarnation as worthwhile. For her and husband Ewan MacColl (whose own revivalism, while favouring the English, Scottish and Irish traditions, nevertheless accorded with Seeger’s political conclusions) the ‘strength’ of folk music was its ‘common-man’ storytelling quality, which presupposed a certain (morally unimpeachable) politics. In its urban form – from where it had crossed over into the mainstream, comingling with jazz to birth R&B – the purists saw little political value in the blues, perhaps disdaining the less-than-upstanding morals on display in its frequent tales of sex-and-drug-related woe, perhaps hearing in its concern above all for ‘the music’ a rejection of political commitment.[9]
As the manager of Les Cousins, Andy Matheou took a predictably less hardline approach. The blues, even in its electrified form, was by no means uncommon at the club. Progressive folk guitarists like Bert Jansch, Davey Graham, Roy Harper, and the young Richard Thompson of Fairport Convention all drew on traditional blues influences in their use of ‘finger-style’ technique – a sort of approximation of boogie-woogie stride piano for the acoustic guitar. Harper and Thompson went further still in their embrace of the electric guitar as a folk instrument, playing amplified sets any bit as loud as those that might have been heard in ‘straight’ London Blues clubs a few years before. The jewel in Matheou’s crown, however, was Jimmy Hendrix, a young American ex-paratrooper who, like many of his fellow servicemen wary of returning across the Atlantic to a country unable to confront its shortcomings on racial justice, had chosen to stay in Europe after being discharged in 1962. Settling first in Germany with fellow paratrooper and musician Billy Cox, the two had eked out a living playing as sidemen with various jazz, blues and R&B combos, first at bars on American bases, then at civilian nightclubs in cities where the youth had developed a taste for ‘der Amerikanische Sound’. In 1963 the duo had moved on to Paris, home to both a thriving homegrown jazz scene and a lively community of Black American émigrés. But Hendrix fast grew tired of life as a supporting musician, unwilling (if not unable) to fit his playing to the demands of bandleaders, and something of an outsider in a city largely suspicious of imported rhythm and blues. Cox left Europe for his parents’ home in Pennsylvania in the summer of 1964, and soon after Hendrix relocated to London.
Jimmy Hendrix ([sic]) playing at Les Cousins, early 1967.
Hendrix could not have timed his move to the Commonwealth better had he been equipped with the power of foreknowledge or the benefit of hindsight. By the autumn of 1964, just as tensions between the capitalists and the socialists in Europe began their sharp ascent to a climax around the German Missile Crisis, a section of London youth had received their first, explosive taste of American rhythm and blues thanks to the US Armed Forces station Radio Free Europe, which broadcast out of Bonn and could be picked up as far away as London or Paris. In hindsight, suggestions that RFE’s musical output formed part of a sinister plot to drench syndicalist Europe in superior American culture seem alarmist.[10] While the broadcasts of Canadian anti-communists like Roald Dahl and Evelyn Waugh certainly fulfilled an obvious propaganda role, comprising plain denunciations of ‘Red Europeans’ and Gothic, anti-syndicalist cautionary tales alike, the cultural-warfare capabilities of Buddy Holly, Muddy Waters and Ray Charles seem more accidental – music chosen to entertain homesick servicemen inadvertently sparking a rock ’n’ roll revolution behind enemy lines.
Nevertheless, spark a revolution it did – albeit a minor one, confined to the underground. In London, imitation blues, R&B and rock ’n’ roll groups soon sprang up in the old jazz, folk and beat clubs, sometimes enthusiastically received and sometimes virulently denounced – though more often than not simply tolerated with a broad indifference. Acts spanned the spectrum from pious students of the urban blues to energetic rock ’n’ rollers. Devotees of B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf and Otis Spann with formulaic names like the ‘Bluesbreakers’ and the ‘Blues Incorporated’ rubbed shoulders with acts like the Rolling Stones – as notorious as they were short-lived – who combined an affection for the Chicago sound with a love of the theatrics of performers like Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Equally, individual levels of commitment to the scene varied. Some, like the guitarist Peter Green and the organist Steve Winwood, discovered a genuine talent for blues-style playing, becoming respected musicians in their own right, ultimately graduating to the highest honour of playing with their heroes when, a few years later, the sharp-suited elder statesmen began trickling over from the United States to give Europeans a taste of the real thing. Others – the Rolling Stones’ suburban frontman Mick Jagger being perhaps the prime example – seemed attracted more by the shocking, anti-establishment quality natural in a sound and a scene sparked and nourished by illicit, alien radio broadcasts. Skipping the practised, politicised ‘cool’ of the blues’s Black American origins – a necessary weapon in the arsenal of a Black performer navigating white America – these practitioners of the London Blues gravitated entirely towards scandal, hoping no doubt to goad establishment moral certainties, or even, perhaps, to expose inevitable hypocrisies endemic in an establishment still undergoing ‘liberalisation’. Jagger, whose persistent attempts at fame – first through music, then, with more success, through film – suggest an attraction first and foremost to that singularly American conception of ‘stardom’, is undoubtedly an extreme example.[11] Most followers of the scene sat, happily and without great expectation, somewhere in between, enjoying the style and the craft without giving themselves over too greatly to either.
Formed by John Mayall in 1964, the Bluesbreakers soon gained a reputation as the most accomplished of London’s numerous blues bands – though for all of the calibre of their line-up, their repertoire erred towards the dutiful rather than suggesting true originality. Counterintuitively, this commitment to the blues tradition afforded them a staying power that escaped groups favouring shock over substance, and after its opening in August 1965 they were frequent guests at Les Cousins.
After an electrifying birth in summer 1964, the London Blues’s prodigious decline after the international events of early winter 1965 reads in hindsight like a convenient fiction, designed to reassert the primacy of homegrown, politically-engaged styles against the boorish American challenger. In reality, that the phenomenon – unthreatening and sincere at one end, flashy and superficial at the other – was able to elicit so stern a response from the folk-beat establishment reveals more bit the establishment than it does the blues enthusiasts. Growing conservative with the security of position, closely allied to the highest cultural organs of Bevanite and post-Bevanite Britain, those for whom art and music demanded a certain level of what Adorno termed ‘commitment’ to a social or political ideal saw only bad things in the emergent culture, which favoured musicianship over politics on the one hand, and which promoted an aesthetic of ‘cool’, ambivalent amorality on the other. Bluntly, by the high Sixties the luminaries of the Partisan cultural milieu – those who had not completed the shift into the political world, that is, or who had otherwise kept apace with changing artistic fashions – were less relevant than they had ever been.
In the broad view, the first half of 1967 was significant in British music history not because of the reawakening of the debate over political engagement – the stirring of the movement against that perennial bourgeois artistic shibboleth, ‘l’art pour l’art’ – but as the period immediately succeeding the break-up of the Beat Institution, and the end of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership which had so spectacularly revitalised British popular music in the middle of the decade. Yet the two points of crisis shared more common ground than may be first supposed. The circumstances surrounding the demise of the Beat Institution have been well recorded and endlessly argued, but suffice to say the question of politics hung heavily over the deterioration of relations within the band. John Lennon reserved a famous distaste for the way in which the group’s music had been openly championed by cultural arbiters at the CBC as a ‘homegrown’ alternative to brash American imports, once shocking an interviewer by citing his biggest influence as Buddy Holly in November 1964, at the height of the Transatlantic missile crisis.[12]
Buddy Holly, out for dinner in the Village with wife Maria (left) and Phil Everly (right), 1958.
Having first shot to fame in the 1950s performing in rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll and country and western styles, after moving to Greenwich Village in 1958 and signing for Atlantic Records in 1959 Holly began increasingly to experiment with orchestral arrangements, finger-style flamenco guitar and gospel influences. Developing a friendly rivalry with Ray Charles at the start of the 1960s, motivated on both sides by a deep mutual respect, Holly cemented his status as one of rock ’n’ roll’s first great innovators. Although continuing to release albums of his own into the new decade, from 1962 onwards he focused much of his energy into producing and releasing albums by others under his ‘Village’ imprint at Atlantic. He also embarked upon an intermittent career in film, having studied under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio between 1959–61.
Lennon had been shielded from the worst of the politicking by the band’s manager Brian Epstein, a former stage manager and radio producer whose experience working at the CBC had proved invaluable in first securing and then maintaining the band’s success. With Epstein’s tragic death in a car accident in December 1966, Lennon not only lost an intimate friend and confidant, but also felt himself newly exposed as never before to the grislier machinations of the British music industry.[13] Epstein’s death came five months after the release of the Beat Institution’s provocative fourth and final album, Not For Sale, which was itself a trenchant, minimally-veiled dig at the politicisation of the group’s music. The media circus that surrounded the tragedy sparked a rift between Lennon and McCartney; McCartney, who had not been as close as Lennon to Epstein, advocated for the band to focus on the writing of their next album in order to process their grief, offering that they relocate to a farmhouse in rural Scotland whose lease he had recently taken up.[14] Lennon objected, and in January he left the group. At the time, he announced that he was quitting music altogether, telling an interviewer in March 1967 (however seriously, one cannot be sure) that he wished to pursue a dual career writing poetry and illustrating comic books. In May, he became romantically involved with the dissident actor Vanessa Redgrave, who had been imprisoned between 1960–63 as a member of the ‘Heatherden Twelve’, and through her soon became increasingly involved with numerous groups of the oppositional left.
John Lennon, 1964.
A founding member of the Beat Institution, among whose ranks he had been known, in the language of the teenage periodicals, as ‘the clever one’, Lennon’s departure from the group in January 1967 was a key moment in the inception of a musical counterculture in Britain in the late Sixties.
The only outwardly visible sign that Lennon still held any interest in music was his attendance at Les Cousins, where he kept up a lively regular patronage without ever giving in to Andy Matheou’s frequent invitations to play. It was thus something of a miracle when he agreed to Matheou’s request, delivered without any expectation, that he play at Common Beat. Lennon agreed to play a brief, fifteen-minute set of new material – his only condition being that his name not be listed on the bill ahead of time. Amazed, the organising committee readily agreed – albeit after some strong-arming of Ewan MacColl by Matheou. (MacColl had at first objected to the presence of a ‘pop starlet’ among proceedings on the grounds that it would distract from the underlying political cause.) When fly-posters advertising Common Beat began to appear on the lampposts and construction hoardings of North and East London from the middle of August, there was thus no hint of Lennon’s planned appearance – only feverish anticipation for a line-up already packed full of big names.
Anne Briggs performing at Common Beat.
Born in a village on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border in 1944, Briggs was first ‘discovered’ by musicians touring the country under the auspices of Current 42, a TUC-affiliated group formed in 1962 dedicated to expanding the Commonwealth’s cultural landscape beyond London.[15] She joined the Current 42 touring roster in its first year, at the age of only 17, and soon after established herself as an influential, if unorthodox, presence in the British folk revival. (Bert Jansch was an intimate friend, collaborator and sometime lover.) Despite her strong reputation, Briggs was ambivalent about the prospect of achieving commercial success or wide recognition, only playing occasional gigs and recording sporadically. (Listen to 'Sandman's Song', 1971.)
Common Beat began at midday on August 26, with folk duo Silly Sisters opening proceedings with a set of traditional English ballads. The backdrop for the event was the bandstand at the People’s Park, where the first few acts (including American ex-pat Hedy West, Vinny’s veteran Jimmy Campbell and subversive folk interpreter Anne Briggs) played to a polite, enthusiastic crowd of a few hundred people, including local residents, friends and family of performers and organisers, and members of groups affiliated with the Common Beat committee. At the same time (and somewhat more memorably) a group of comparable size congregated outside Angel Tube station, where a dance band led by the acclaimed Afro-Guyanese jazz clarinetist Rudolph Dunbar were installed on the back of a flatbed truck. From 12.30 p.m., Dunbar and his band were to lead a procession from Angel, along the City Road and Old Street, up Hackney Road, down Cambridge Heath Road, onto Old Ford Road, and finally into People’s Park, where at about 3 p.m. the two crowds would merge. The intention was for East Londoners to join in with the procession as it passed, with organisers hoping (grandly, perhaps) for anywhere in the region of 5 thousand people to join the march to the park.
In order not to alert the MER to their plans, the Common Beat organising committee had decided not to inform the authorities of the procession, circulating news of Dunbar’s initial presence at Angel through strictly underground channels of communication, and relying upon the subsequent spectacle to draw sympathisers out into the streets. (For the festival itself, the organisers had the enthusiastic approval of both Hackney and Tower Hamlets local councils.) This is not to say, however, that the organisers were wholly unprepared for the possibility of confrontation with right-wing forces; Group 66 members were in ample attendance, both on the procession and in the park itself, acting as a plain-clothed bodyguard around the truck as it ferried Dunbar and his band around the edge of Central London.
(OOC: The real-life ‘Rock Against Racism’ festival, which took place in Victoria Park in 1978 and has heavily informed our own Common Beat, did indeed include a march to the park – this time from Traflagar Square (seven miles away!) – headed by West-London reggae band Misty in Roots. A reported 100 thousand people marched that day, and being punks rather than folkies the atmosphere was somewhat more trenchant. Have a look at some (amazing) concert footage here, featuring the Clash playing ‘White Riot’. The above photo is from one of the subsequent RAR ‘Carnivals Against Racism’, this one I think in Manchester, where 40 thousand were in attendance. The band on the lorry are – again, I think – Steel Pulse.)
On the day, the march exceeded even the most fanciful hopes of the organisers, attracting 10 thousand people over the two hours – many of whom raced across London by Tube in order to meet the procession as it advanced. Despite initial tensions, including a confrontation with a frustrated bus driver on the City Road, who threatened to call in the WB to disperse the crowd to alleviate disruption to his route, the size of the march soon swelled to many times that which could be effectively controlled by the authorities, or intimidated by racist counter-protesters. The atmosphere was joyful, even carnival-like, and the music of Rudolph Dunbar’s pointedly anachronistic jazz band only added to the event’s unusually festive character, lifting the mood beyond pious anti-racialism. This is not to say that the procession treated its ultimate target flippantly; at the junction between Old Street and Hackney Road, the march stopped traffic for ten minutes to hear Nadira Basir of the LGWA speak forcefully about the injustices faced by Guyanese and other Black workers in Britain, Basir ending her address by leading the crowd in chants of ‘Black and white, unite and fight!’ – a chant which reappeared sporadically as the procession continued into the East End.
When the march reach the People’s Park, as scheduled at 3 p.m., Dunbar and his band played a half-hour set to the united crowd, by this point about 15 thousand strong, giving the organisers the chance to set up the main stage for the rest of the evening’s programme, moving from the bandstand to a specially-constructed platform erected around the People’s Fountain in the centre of the park. The striking fountain structure, designed by the highly-influential Soviet emigre Berthold Lubetkin in 1932 at the behest of the ruling Communist Party, formed an impressive backdrop to the evening’s proceedings, decked for extra impact with banners and flags bearing anti-racialist and anti-Powellite slogans.[16] First to grace the stage was Les Cousins regular Martin Carthy, whose embrace of electric amplification marked him out as a pioneer of the London folk circuit.[17] He was followed by the young, equally eclectic group Fairport Convention, featuring the virtuoso playing of 17-year-old guitarist Richard Thompson. Bert Jansch then for half an hour from 5.15 p.m., before at a quarter to six Andy Matheou – on compere duties – took to the stage to announce a special, secret guest performer.
Andy Matheou (right), alongside singer-songwriter John Martyn on stage at Les Cousins, 1967.
The last time that the British public had seen John Lennon, it had been as the nattily-tailored, impeccably groomed vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Commonwealth’s most popular beat group. When a scruffy-haired, plainly-dressed Lennon thus walked without ceremony onto the stage at Common Beat on the evening of August 26, it was to the shock of all in attendance – many of whom expressed visible confusion at the appearance of an unfamiliar man whom Andy Matheou had declared, only moments earlier, needed ‘no introduction’. Lennon dispelled all confusion with twelve unassuming words: ‘My name is John Wintringham Lennon. I hope you enjoy my songs.’ To a mixture of astonished gasps and cheers, Lennon gave his guitar one last tune before launching straight into his first song, a reflective piece titled ‘I Read The News Today’, whose enigmatic lyrics spoke of a man despairing at reading a series of tragic, absurdist vignettes in the newspaper. Its single-line refrain, ‘I’d love to turn you on’, hardly resolved the question of what comment exactly Lennon was making – whether he was advocating, perhaps, for some sort of raised political consciousness, or else simply making a suggestive non-sequitur.[18] Whatever the song’s true ‘meaning’, it struck a chord with its audience (though this was surely inevitable); Lennon’s words of thanks after the song’s conclusion were easily drowned out by the enthusiastic cheers and screams of the crowd, now well over 20 thousand strong.
If Lennon was affected, it was impossible to tell; with minimal fuss, he launched into his second song, on the surface a more optimistic number (‘Getting Better’) whose bouncy chorus (‘I have to admit, it’s getting better / getting better all the time’) and jaunty, major-chord guitar accompaniment seemed, if anything, to suggest a return, perhaps parodic, to the pop-oriented music of the Beat Institution.[19] But hidden behind the song’s lighthearted surface were yet more indications of darkness, with Lennon wryly referencing a number of persistent social problems (racialism, industrial disputes, international crises) alongside advances, and even making an apparent admission of mistreating romantic partners in previous relationships. With its frank, even uncomfortable, questioning of the extent to which society was improving, it was quite unlike anything else performed by other artists at the festival – arguable even unlike anything then seen in British popular music: a strident, uncloaked attack on political hypocrisies, tempered by Lennon implicating himself in past violences, all the while clinging on to a bruised, unshakeable belief that progress remained possible. It was, simply put, the defining song of the moment.
(Seen here in his ‘scruffy’ phase. Standards of what constituted ‘lax grooming’ were far, far stricter in the past…)
After ‘Getting Better’, Lennon announced that he had a ‘secret special guest’ of his own, bringing girlfriend Vanessa Redgrave on to the stage to sing with him. Redgrave and Lennon were then joined by the other members of the ‘Heatherden Twelve’, who appeared holding banners and placards bearing various anti-Powell, anti-fascist statements – some (‘Disembowell Powell!’ [sic]) carrying on the sometimes violent absurdism of the songs. Lennon acknowledged his unorthodox backing band only by making punning reference to their ‘impeccable acumen for telling truth to Powell’, before launching into his final song, which he dedicated to ‘all those out there who know that the only way to get through to Powell and his goons is a punch in the face’. As the crowd gave their assorted reactions to Lennon’s aside (ranging from enthusiastic and appreciative to scandalised) the music recommenced with the Heatherden Twelve performing a scatted, a cappella rendition of the opening bars of ‘La Marseillaise’, which, as Lennon began to strum his guitar, transitioned seamlessly into a repeated chant of ‘love, love, love’.
Lennon’s lyrics soon revealed the song to be heavily ironic, announcing pessimistically in the verses that: ‘There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done . . . There’s nothing you can say / but you can learn how to play the game.’ The chorus then swung into a rousing refrain of ‘All you need is love!’, the song’s title, evidently a comment – when taken with Lennon’s prefatory statement – on the limitations of fighting injustice through ‘the system’, and the inutility of fighting racialism through kind words alone. As the song continued in the same vein, Lennon and his chorus soon found their voices supplemented by 25 thousand others, as the crowd carried on for themselves – with how much of Lennon’s intended irony, who can say? – chants of the ‘All you need is love!’ refrain. Lennon left the stage promptly at the song’s conclusion, declining to overstay his fifteen-minute guest slot, though thanking the audience for their attention (adding, in playful Lennon style, that he hoped they had ‘passed the audition’) and announcing that he was working on a new album, whose working title was ‘Institutionalised’. No sooner had this announcement slipped under the waves of adulatory cheering and applause than Andy Matheou returned to the stage to introduce the next act, Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl – MacColl barely able to disguise his lack of enthusiasm for the departing Lennon’s performance.
After Lennon’s performance, the rest of the programme passed for the most part without serious controversy. Neither Seeger & MacColl, nor Marianne Faithfull after them, troubled prevailing mores in the manner of Lennon. At half-seven reggae star Jimmy Cliff brought a welcome change of mood from the prevailing folk gentility, notably premiering an early version of his enduring protest song ‘Vietnam’, while Shirley Collins and Davey Graham proved a late highlight with their compelling blend of plain-spoken traditional influences (Collins) and virtuosic musical eclecticism (Graham). They were followed at 9 p.m. by Jimmy Hendrix, who prefaced his set with a short address on the importance of recognising the Black roots of the blues, before launching into an explosive, psychedelic half-hour of astonishing guitar music, ending with a punishing, distortion-laded rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The performance captivated the crowd, most of whom, strangers to the ‘freakier’ edges of the Les Cousins sound, had never heard anything of the like before. Some (including many of the more conservative commentators who wrote up notices of the festival in the press later on) found Hendrix’s style horrifying. Far more were enthralled.
Ska sensation Desmond Dekker was well-positioned to return the mood to a calmer ebb, delivering an energetic performance that confirmed his position as a genuine talent. He was followed by the progressive folk duo Harper & Page, who delivered the night’s final minor scandal in the form of their new song ‘I Hate The White Man’ – a blistering, eight-minute tirade against racialists and fascists past and present, which gave the far-right a new cultural bogeyman in the form of Roy Harper. Following Harper & Page, closing the festival after twelve hours of music, was Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson, who delivered his first public performance in over two decades, dancing in his inimitable way to his band’s swing-inflected jazz music until midnight. It was a spectacular finale to an event which, without hyperbole, may justly be called a landmark – not just in the history of British popular culture, but also in the politics of the time, planting the seeds of a newly-energised, politically-engaged youth culture (and, indeed, an offshoot counterculture) whose influence would, in the final accounting, spread far beyond the confines of popular music.
Final estimates suggest that somewhere in the region of 40 thousand people were in attendance at the People’s Park over the course of Common Beat’s twelve-hour programme.
Unusually for an event whose ultimate impetus was extremely localised, and whose chief protagonists were, with a few exceptions, underground musicians with little in the way of a national reputation, Common Beat succeeded in its goal in shaking the musical world out of its complacency in the face of far-right influence. Almost a month to the day after her alarmed dispatch from Pentonville, where ‘Powell for Premier’ badges had been totally en vogue, Marion Brent was able to write in Where It’s At magazine on August 29 that ‘with the triumph of Common Beat, one has to imagine – certainly, to hope – that beat’s brief fling with Powellism has been totally and irredeemably discredited.’ In later years, Ewan MacColl would reflect, ill-humouredly, that the media’s focus in the festival’s aftermath had settled too heavily on the dramatic re-appearance of John Lennon, and on the antics of Roy Harper and Jimmy Hendrix. No doubt, in MacColl’s mind, any mention of these sorts of non-musical details was one mention too many. Nevertheless, a survey of the contemporary press coverage reveals how skewed MacColl’s recollection was. Of the national papers, the Daily Herald, Tribune and The Mirror all ran stories reporting on Common Beat as a stand against racialism, with comment on the music reserved for the colour supplements. Negative notices (hardly absent from the mainstream press) tended to reserve most of their criticism for the ‘disruptive’ march through central London, mentioning the more outrageous musical moments only in passing.
In many ways, however, MacColl’s anxiety that Common Beat be remembered for the music was misplaced. Common Beat was about music only in the sense that elections are about the ballot paper: music was the medium used to continue a deeper, broader political battle. The success of Common Beat in August 1967 established the mass popular music concert as a legitimate method of political engagement in what might be termed the ‘cultural skirmishes’ of the 1960s and ‘70s. In the years after 1967, the model was imitated far and wide as a convenient vehicle for simultaneously raising awareness and (perhaps more crucially) funds – perhaps most notably in Manchester, only months after Common Beat, at the height of the student unrest, where money went towards strike hardship funds and legal support for those implicated in the battle against the Industrial Relations (Concilliation) Bill.
Enoch Powell, 1966.
Undoubtedly, however, Common Beat’s most important short-term legacy was to discredit Enoch Powell and his policies at a time when his Movement for Economic Reform seemed poised to win large new territories of influence among a new constituency. Declining to ignore even the apparently minor threat of an unknown blues guitarist championing Powell’s ideas, refusing to trust that the ‘Powell for Premier’ incursion would dissipate in the end like all the trends, the community around Common Beat acted quickly and decisively to regain the impetus in the cultural battle, uniting a varied coalition of interested and sympathetic parties to undermine Powell’s credibility and resist the influence of his followers. On both of these fronts, they were successful. Having failed in their attempts to oppose Common Beat in any meaningful way, the Islington branch of the MER was forced to wind up its activities in autumn 1967 after only a few months of operation. At the same time, so total was the association made by Common Beat between Powell and racism that, in order to restore his jealously-cultivated image as a ‘reasonable dissident’, Powell was forced into a pattern of repeatedly emphasising his programme of economic reform over and above his campaign for harsher limits on ‘coloured immigration’.
While the racialist policies never in fact left the MER’s platform, with Powell’s insistence upon his Movement’s ‘economic focus’ certainly being made in bad faith, key Powellite lieutenants were sufficiently spooked by the move away from overt racialist messaging to have an effect on party stability. John O’Brien published an article in the underground MER periodical Renewal in early September, in which he expressed a fear that Powell’s focus on ‘proving wrong idle communist layabouts’ was distracting from the Movement’s duty to ‘defend Britain from her true enemies at home and abroad’. Powell seems to have been able to allay O’Brien’s fears, as O’Brien remained a loyal lieutenant well beyond 1967, though his thinly-veiled insubordination caused ripples elsewhere; in Coventry, Powell suffered the embarrassment of having one of the Movement’s largest branches vote to disaffiliate from the national organisation. Branch chairman Colin Jordan re-emerged later in the year at the head of a new, clandestine group, operating under the sinister name ‘England First’, whose name appeared on explicitly racialist and anti-immigrant literature circulating in Coventry in the winter. (Jordan was later imprisoned in February 1968, following an attempt to organise an ‘English Defence Patrol’ through an area of Coventry home to a sizeable Indian community.)
(OOC: Music, race and anti-Nazi politics have a proud shared history in Coventry in our own world. The pioneering label 2 Tone Records emerged from Coventry’s ska and punk scene in the late Seventies, bringing together Black, white and multiracial musicians and fans unite against racism and hard-right politics in Thatcher’s Britain. Pictured above are leading 2-tone group the Specials. Those who don’t know them should check out ‘Ghost Town’, a number-one hit in the UK in 1981, at a time when a number of cities had recently seen serious rioting.)
The MER thus emerged from the summer of 1967 heavily bruised and deeply uncertain of its character and its future, having revealed a naïveté, not to say a vulnerability, in its dalliances with large-scale attempt at cultural influence. Powell himself, evidently shaken, spoke of Common Beat in two minds, on the one side proudly boasting of his pride at being disliked by ‘such objectionable people’, on the other unable to denounce quickly or strongly enough their depiction of him as a ‘racialist caricature’, and their ‘gross misrepresentation’ of his ideas. By no means were the Common Beat attacks fatal – Powell’s subsequent history is well known – but they were highly effective at a critical time for the re-emergent far-right in the British Commonwealth. In a year when Britain had been rocked by crises in politics, industry and international affairs, the firm rebuttal of Powellism stands as a high point, culturally and politically, that makes also the beginning of a wave of youth organisation and countercultural politicisation that would carry over into the last years of the decade and beyond. As the dawn rose on People’s Park on August 27, evidence of the previous day’s festivities still immediately obvious, it was not yet clear how what lasting effect – if any – Common Beat would have upon the wider Commonwealth’s wider political landscape. Which vision for the future would triumph: the harmonious solidarity on display in the united front of folk-beat luminaries, or the angry restlessness for change, evident in the stark absurdism of John Lennon’s new style?
This was not a question to be answered on that sunny Sunday afternoon, but clear even then was the unavoidable fact: that the summer was now running on its last legs. With the coming of the autumn and the resumption of working calendar after the long vacation, the Commonwealth braced itself for a renewal of the political battles that had wracked the nation before the recess. From the coal crisis in Wales to the precarious health of the new government, eager – perhaps too eager – to push on with its reforming agenda, trouble menaced the late summer’s last balmy days from many directions. No one could predict with any certainty which of the threats would manifest itself first, only that none could be held at bay for long. A long and difficult autumn, surely, was just around the corner.
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1: OOC: Some may be put in mind here of a certain musician in our own timeline, whose name, playing style and indeed political views share a passing resemblance to those of Les Clapham. I make no comment on the intentionality of these similarities, except to point out that Les Clapham’s father was not a Canadian serviceman…
2: ‘Powell for Premier’ was the name of a self-styled ‘campaign group’, founded by Shropshire fruit farmer John O’Brien in October 1966, whose aim was the establishment of ‘a government of free-thinking, patriotic individuals’ under the leadership of Enoch Powell. More broadly, the group espoused a reactionary, anti-communist philosophy. It came to national attention in April 1967, when group members harassed and assaulted Indian residents of the Blakenhall area of Wolverhampton following a demonstration against non-white immigration. Although Powell continued to support the group’s anti-immigration stance after the Blakenhall demonstration, he subsequently attempted to distance himself from their violent tactics by founding his own movement, the Movement for Economic Reform (MER) in May 1967. In spite of this attempt to prioritise his platform of economic liberalisation over his anti-immigration stance, Powell continued to associate with O’Brien, who merged Powell for Premier with the MER following a ‘purge’ of those members who had been convicted of violent offences at Blakenhall. Many members and supporters of the MER continued to use “Powell for Premier” as a slogan well after the original group had ceased operation.
3: Four-piece from Muswell Hill who shot to fame in 1965 with their single “A Well Respected Man”, whose satirical, anti-bureaucratic lyrics and cheery pop sound proved a hit with programmers at newly-independent CBC Radio. Throughout 1966 they vied with Liverpool quintet the Beat Institution for the title of ‘biggest band in the Commonwealth’. Formerly active as minor exponents of the RnB-influenced ‘London Sound’ under the name ‘the Ravens’, before which they were known simply as the Ray Davies Quartet.
4: The major exception to this rule was Roy Harper, a resident performer at Les Cousins whose compositions set strident political and psychological lyrical themes over his virtuosic guitar playing. Alongside guitarist Jimmy Page, Harper had a national hit in summer 1966 with the topical song “The Wreck Of The Isabel Flores”, which gave sharp comment on the Guyanese Crisis.
5: OOC: To put this small-sounding figure into perspective, the average weekly wage in the Commonwealth in 1967 is £22/9s, hence the money raised is equivalent of about five weeks’ wages for the median worker. In OTL modern money, it would be around £2,250.
6: OOC: More commonly known as Victoria Park, though the People’s Park is not an entirely invented name. Rock Against Racism held a concert there in 1978, headlined by The Clash, Steel Pulse and other luminaries. (Some paraded six miles from Trafalgar Square to reach the park, led by the West London reggae band Misty In Roots who performed from the back of a lorry.) For those who’ve seen the film Pride, Victoria Park is also where the penultimate scene takes place (the subsequent scene showing a march down Whitehall and over Westminster Bridge suggesting that Pride 1985, in the film at least, did a similar six-mile stint.) These days I live just down the road in Bow. (As of uploading, I was actually stood where that scene takes place about five hours ago.) Write, as they say, what you know.
7: OOC: In our own history, Johnson’s was a more tragic fate. In 1941, Johnson was one of 34 people killed when a German bomb detonated on the club dancefloor at the Café de Paris during the Blitz. He was 26. His lover Hamilton carried Johnson’s picture with him for the rest of his life, continuing to refer to the bandleader as ‘my husband’. (Incidentally, Hamilton is a fascinating character in his own right – one who perhaps deserves to have played a greater role in proceedings here. A friend to figures as diverse as Winston Churchill, Christopher Isherwood and Aleister Crowley, Hamilton gained a reputation as a savage critic and salacious memoirist, later associating himself with groups equally as varied as Sinn Féin and the Special Branch. After the war he turned increasingly towards the far-right and became an associate of – guess who – Oswald Mosley. It doesn’t seem altogether important to speculate on an alternate biography for the Echoesverse, but I dare say that living here in something approaching rural domestic bliss with Johnson may have forestalled any move towards fascism.)
8: Not for nothing was the Partisan club mocked by some progressives as the ‘Puritan’… For more on the relationship between Partisan jazz and West Indian musical cultures, see: Francis Newton (Eric Hobsbawm), ‘Leaving Behind the Astoria: Memories of Dance Music in the Early Commonwealth’, New Left Review, 1956. For more on ‘trad jazz’ and its troubled journey from underground menace to cultural pre-eminence, see: Kenneth Tynan, ‘Nye Bevan’s New Britain: A Retrospective’, New Partisan Review, 1978; ‘Louis Balfour’s Jazz Club’, Commonwealth 1965.
9: OOC: This problematic approach to race was a real problem of the American folk revival movement in our own timeline. Ian Penman, writing about the troublesome outsider-folky John Fahey in his 2019 collection It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, describes how Fahey disdained the ‘high condescension and low reverse racism in how the folk-revival people preferred their old blues guys barefoot and waring dungarees – even if they now dressed in sharp suits and often preferred to play amplified, electric urban blues.’ (Anecdotally, I understand that it was actually on tour in Britain and other places that many of the old bluesmen were best able to play the electric stuff – but not to the folk puritans.) I leave the specifics of the American folk revival to @99KingHigh, but I think it is worth mentioning that the ‘unimpeachable’ folkies certainly had their shortcomings – mostly in their (IMO mistaken) belief that politics came before music. For the same problem manifest slightly differently, one need only read Ewan MacColl’s scathing, short-sighted denunciation of Bob Dylan: ‘I am still unable to see in him anything other than a youth of mediocre talent. Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such drivel.’
10: For an exemplar of the more alarmist view, see David Widgery, ‘1964: Annus Mirabilis’, New Partisan Review, 1974.
11: It seems telling that Jagger’s breakthrough film role, in Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970), came portraying a faded star of the London Blues scene, working as a cabaret performer in self-imposed exile in the United States. Jagger’s sense of self-awareness is evidently as finely-attuned as Roeg’s sense of irony.
12: The irony would have been lost on CBC functionaries, no doubt, that Holly was equally venerated among members of the Greenwich Village folk-revival counterculture, whose efforts towards a socially-engaged ‘folk-rock’ style neatly mirrored the folk-beat CBC orthodoxy. Indeed, Holly’s position in the history of the ‘Village sound’ cannot be overstated; by the end of 1964, under his imprint of Atlantic Records, Village, Holly had overseen the release of seminal records by such folk-rock mainstays as Dave Van Ronk, Odetta, Fred Neil, the Clancy Brothers, and even Bob Dylan (whose 1962 debut ‘Mixed-Up Confusion’ Holly had produced). A boundary-pushing tour of the American East Coast with Ray Charles in 1963, in which the pair refused to play segregated venues, cemented Holly’s progressive political credentials, and the anti-war stance he adopted in the face of the nuclear crisis itself should have had the CBC rushing with open arms to claim him as a model dissident. Alas, cross-cultural exchange at this time was neither sufficiently nuanced nor freely-flowing…
[OOC: It will be clear by this point, I’m sure, that Buddy Holly never died in the Echoesverse. I’ve written a whole sketch-history of his life between the years of 1959–64, which will inevitably see daylight in the future. In part this is just a nice divergence to help make up for all the horrible divergences, but it’s also simply, brazenly, because I love Buddy Holly – and what use is it spending three years writing a whole alternate history of the Cold War years if not to indulge in my most profoundly wished-for musical what-ifs? (This is one instance where I have intruded a little upon @99KingHigh’s turf, although not without his collusion. I won’t be making a habit of this.) Buddy Holly’s Village Records have a pivotal role to play in shaping British music, which I may elaborate upon in a future chapter. Simply put here, the records hardly sold in the US (except Dylan’s), but did well in overseas markets – notably Ireland. Those of you familiar with the historic relationships between Liverpool and the island of Ireland may see where this story leads…]
13: Epstein (b. 1934, Liverpool) had a fascinating, varied career within the cultural life of the Commonwealth, cut tragically short by his death at the age of only 32. A trained actor, Epstein attended the National Academy of Dramatic Art (NADA) from 1953–55, where he was a contemporary of Ian Holm, Glenda Jackson, Peter O’Toole and Joe Orton. Enjoying a short career as a theatre producer in London, Epstein settled in Soho and was involved, if not overly active, in the area’s underground political and musical scenes, contributing £5 [£100, 2020] to the establishment of the Partisan Coffee House. He re-settled in Liverpool in 1958 after a scare with the authorities, when a man with whom he had been in a casual relationship was arrested outside a public toilet in Swiss Cottage. In 1960 he declined an offer to produce radio plays for the CBC, privately admitting to being unable to work for the state so long as Oswald Mosley remained in power, instead working as a stage manager at the Liverpool Playhouse. In 1963, he was again approached to work for the now-reformed CBC under Chairman Bevan, this time accepting the offer and joining the team preparing for the launch of Radios 1 and 2 in 1964. Shortly afterwards he spotted the Beat Institution for the first time while in attendance at the Casbah jazz club. Although unimpressed by their ‘adolescent’ style, which included slapstick antics and raucous banter in between songs, and equally turned off by their ‘scruffy’ countercultural image, Epstein was captivated by what he later called their ‘magnetism’. In spite of a total lack of managerial experience, he convinced the group to sign with him on the basis that he would be able to get them radio play – at the time a prospect entirely unheard of for a busk group. Encouraging the group to ‘take themselves more seriously’, he pushed them to develop their musicianship and helped to nurture Lennon and McCartney’s talents as writers of original songs. In May 1964, he fulfilled his original promise to the group when ‘All My Loving’, a promotional single from their debut LP Welcome to the Beat Institution, became the first song to be played on CBC Radio 2.
In December 1966, while the group were on a tour of the European Syndicate to promote their fourth album Not For Sale, Epstein received the news that his father had died. He returned home in order to sit shiva, informing the group that he would meet them in London once the tour had finished. It was on the drive from Liverpool to London that he crashed his car, the subsequent autopsy revealing that he was under the influence of barbiturates, prescribed to treat stress-induced insomnia. This fact about Epstein’s death was widely reported at the time, casting an unseemly pall of scandal over the tragedy, and compounding Lennon’s disgust for both the music industry, which he blamed for pushing Epstein to his death, and its attendant media, which he disdained for vulgarising a personal tragedy.
14: Uncharitable historians of the Institution’s brief life suggest that McCartney wished to take control of the group’s creative direction, having taken a backseat during the Lennon-dominated Not For Sale sessions. Ultimately, he and remaining bandmates George Harrison, Duff Lowe and Johnny Hutchinson did move to Scotland to record the album that would become Abracadabra, released in September 1967 under the name ‘the Magic Circle’.
15: Current 42 took its name from the 42nd motion passed at the TUC’s 1962 annual conference, which resolved to encourage the development of the Arts across the Commonwealth as part of a programme to reverse Mosley-era restrictions on cultural expression.
16: OOC: In our world, the fountain at the centre of Victoria Park is a grand Victorian affair endowed by philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, given to the people of the East End but inscribed nevertheless to a love of ‘God and Country’ and dedicated to Queen Victoria (see Wiki). Burdett-Coutts was a fascinating figure, who predeceased the Commonwealth by 23 years, but who would nevertheless I think command some sort of lingering respect. She may therefore continue to be memorialised in some way in the People’s Park – but I can’t see the fountain itself surviving, hence the description of a Modernist piece by Lubetkin. For an idea of what this might look like, here is a fountain he designed as part of the scheme at Highpoint II in Highgate, 1938.
17: OOC: Carthy was a friend of Dylan’s, and one of his staunchest defenders after he ‘went electric’. Some sources have Carthy teaching Dylan how to play the medieval ballad ‘Lord Randall’ (Carthy’s striking 1972 arrangement is required listening for enthusiasts), which in time formed the basis – with its ‘Oh where have ye been all the day, my own dear darling boy?’ refrain – for Dylan’s seminal ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’. I won’t speculate about the fate of the latter song in the Echoesverse…)
18: OOC: For an idea of what ‘I Read The News Today’ might sound like in studio form, have a listen to this McCartney-less demo of ‘A Day In The Life’.
19: OOC: A reference on my part to the fact that ‘Getting Better’ as we know it is a quintessential ‘Beatles’ composition: ie, each brought something to the writing process. It was mostly a McCartney song OTL, except for Lennon’s infamous lyrics about domestic abuse, but here I have switched things up.
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Finally.I can't believe I'm saying this, but after eight-and-a-half long, long months, I am finally able to give you all the announcement you've (presumably) been waiting for: the next chapter is done!
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I don't follow much of the music ins and outs, but it didn't much matter, as it's so well-written as to seem absolutely plausible.
I do have to ask if MER is OTL, as they totally missed their chance to do "MOVER." Because that would have been funny.
I do have to ask if MER is OTL, as they totally missed their chance to do "MOVER." Because that would have been funny.
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Tell me about it!
I hope it was worth the wait.
You know, the challenge still remains to write an Echoes version of this old chestnut…
(Good thing we’ve still got a while before Mr Joel pops up.)
Thank you Wraith! As this chapter got longer and longer over the past months, I did keep questioning whether it was just a stunning act of indulgence on my part to expect people to follow me into the intricacies of the London music world. But it doubled as an excuse to write that long-promised musical overview, so I gave in to temptation.
Most of the performers and relationships are drawn from our own history. The differences are mainly questions of who is more prominent. (Though the main divergence so far is of course the alt-Beatles)
It isn’t. Powell in our world was a Tory, then (somewhat eccentrically) he joined the Ulster Unionists. ‘MOVER’ is a missed opportunity I’d never even considered!
That said – the more I think about the name ‘Movement for Economic Reform’, the funnier it becomes to me. It’s just so bland. It could hardly be any less blatant of an attempt to convince people it is not a group of racist nut jobs. They may as well have called it the ‘Movement for Legitimate Concerns’…
Thanks both for your rapid-fire comments, by the way. It is a very privileged position to be able to leave readers hanging for the best part of a year and still come back to discussion.
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Another brilliant treaty on alternate musical history that has the lovely side-effect of introducing me to tunes and people I did not know about.
This reminds me of a history teacher I had in year two of secundary school (year 8 of 12 following kindergarten) who devoted two entire lessons to the history of Jazz, Blues, and rock and roll in America, I loved his passion for it and vaguely recall there was a bonus question on the exam about it. His teachings definitely help me in my reading of your alternate version. My personal musical culture being mostly 'classical'.
It's hard to imagine that tens of thousands of people would congregate for a massive free concert in a park and that their motives would be so openly political, at least in part. The only thing that came close was maybe the clandestine lockdown-breaking parties in a park near my university early on in the pandemic, but even then you're talking about maybe 5,000 people, and their political statement amounted to little more than "We're young and we want to party, covid and society at large be damned"
This reminds me of a history teacher I had in year two of secundary school (year 8 of 12 following kindergarten) who devoted two entire lessons to the history of Jazz, Blues, and rock and roll in America, I loved his passion for it and vaguely recall there was a bonus question on the exam about it. His teachings definitely help me in my reading of your alternate version. My personal musical culture being mostly 'classical'.
It's hard to imagine that tens of thousands of people would congregate for a massive free concert in a park and that their motives would be so openly political, at least in part. The only thing that came close was maybe the clandestine lockdown-breaking parties in a park near my university early on in the pandemic, but even then you're talking about maybe 5,000 people, and their political statement amounted to little more than "We're young and we want to party, covid and society at large be damned"
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The wonderful spin to OTL personalities in an alt-reality is a treasure. Any Vic2 update that occurs before Vicky3 is on time and never late. Thank you for your hard work.
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Thanks rover! Glad you enjoyed it. I discovered a few figures I hadn't known about before while writing, so I'm glad to pass them on. With the exception of the notorious "Les Clapham", everyone I've included otherwise has at least something I'd say is worth checking out. (Even the curmudgeonly Ewan MacColl…)
That sounds like an amazing couple of lessons. Hopefully lots of listening was involved too.
There isn't too much divergence in the Echoes world until the 1940s-ish. As per our world, the Second World War era sees a lot of cross-pollination as US and Commonwealth troops fraternise during the wars in the Pacific. But after that things go off in different directions; no rock'n'roll coming over to the Commonwealth until the early Sixties, and no first British invasion going over to the States and kick-starting all sorts of countercultural stuff. Things are correcting a little bit now that the world is opening up again towards the 70s, but no worldwide Beatlemania etc is pretty significant.
Keeping Buddy Holly alive to help pioneer a folk-rock sound in the US is in part a sop to help redress the balance. But otherwise momentum in American rock is headed towards people like Gram Parsons and Gene Clark, probably outlaw country too. And Brian Wilson could still feasibly be doing his thing. It's a strange world to try and imagine to be honest, but a fun challenge.
Crazy, right? The amazing thing is that the OTL Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park had something like 100 thousand people in attendance. And the entire thing was coordinated alongside the Anti-Nazi League. (A few years later, some of the same people went on to be involved in something called Red Wedge, which was another openly leftist musical collective featuring some big names.)
OTL around the same time in the UK various free festivals were starting up. The Glastonbury Festival happened for the first time in 1970 (attended by 1,500 people). But all of these things were barely 'political', at most professing a hippyish libertarianism. In this world, as we will eventually see in the next chapter, things are going to get a bit heavier than simple peace and love…
Thanks Midnite Duke! It's a pleasure thinking up what all of these familiar faces might be doing in a different world. Glad you enjoyed reading.
Haha very true! It's a low bar, but at least I can clear it. Hopefully a fresh chapter won't take quite so long (and probably won't be quite so long, either.)
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Well a welcome return for Echoes, even if it is for a subject of which I know very little, namely 60s music. I haven't really anything to say of the music events, I never really 'got' Lennon during my youth in the 2000s and continue to find his veneration baffling.
But as ever it's superbly written, @DensleyBlair - I'm not sure how intentional it was, but the sense of things existing on a knife edge is palpable in this update. The sensation of the roller coaster about to plunge, which is reflected in some of the cultural pieces coming out of the TL, is very powerfully conveyed. Of course, sat here in Paddington station heading home on one of the few trains running, with an oblivious PM and the cost of an M&S Simply Food sandwich broadly the same as a small family home pre-pandemic, perhaps we know a thing or two about crises!
But as ever it's superbly written, @DensleyBlair - I'm not sure how intentional it was, but the sense of things existing on a knife edge is palpable in this update. The sensation of the roller coaster about to plunge, which is reflected in some of the cultural pieces coming out of the TL, is very powerfully conveyed. Of course, sat here in Paddington station heading home on one of the few trains running, with an oblivious PM and the cost of an M&S Simply Food sandwich broadly the same as a small family home pre-pandemic, perhaps we know a thing or two about crises!
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Thanks Mr J! You are in a sense right – the music itself is sort of immaterial (just a chance for me to flesh out the cultural canon, which I've been waiting to do for a while) but the gathering, radicalising political climate – particularly among the young – is more important.
As for Lennon… Growing up, my favourite Beatle was always George. I was always a bit suspicious of John for various reasons – though I'm more sympathetic to him these days, even if I don't think he's anything remotely like a prophet etc. Here, having left the band four years early and for explicitly political reasons, his status as an icon of the burgeoning counterculture is, perhaps, a little more substantiated. But at most he will be an amusing side character.
Fully intentional! And thanks for picking up on it. Things are about to plunge sharply off into the deep end, as we shall see in the next chapter once I get around to writing it. Although we've taken a bit of a cultural detour, the number of unresolved issues still on the table is fairly considerable: unsatisfied miners, growing racial tension, an unstable governing coalition, anger in Wales, radicalising youth movements, a right-wing opposition movement growing in confidence… Rest assured, this doesn't end with some backroom parliamentary deals and a magic cure-all legislative agenda.
And you're right – Echoes does seem to have become uncannily relevant. I went to Kings Cross yesterday to see Mick Lynch speak, and all the talk of a 'simmering summer' of industrial action did rather pout me in mind of certain aspects of this timeline. But then a project this big is a bit like a stopped clock in that regard!
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Obviously couldn’t pass up the opportunity to remind people of Dahl’s somehow even more outrageous career path in the Echoesverse.
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Now that I begin to think again, in idle moments snatched between dissertation work, about embarking upon the next chapter, I wonder if I could canvass the thread’s opinion…
The last chapter was obviously exceptionally long (near enough a whole dissertation in itself, in fact!) which to my mind was at least partly justified by the very long absence that preceded it. For both my own sake and yours, I probably won’t put out another one that long any time soon – but the question did get me thinking. Seeing as the end of the first volume is about 18 in-game (in-universe?) months away, and as I’ve been approaching near-Pippian speeds of late (11 months of action covered since last June!), I thought for people’s general sanity a change of pace might be desired. So:
I think I know which option I’m leaning towards, but I thought I’d open it up in case anyone has an opinion.
As for the next chapter itself… I’ve been planning and structuring it for literally a year. It’s got a lot of action happening very quickly – and I’m very excited to start writing. Here’s a little cinematic teaser:
The last chapter was obviously exceptionally long (near enough a whole dissertation in itself, in fact!) which to my mind was at least partly justified by the very long absence that preceded it. For both my own sake and yours, I probably won’t put out another one that long any time soon – but the question did get me thinking. Seeing as the end of the first volume is about 18 in-game (in-universe?) months away, and as I’ve been approaching near-Pippian speeds of late (11 months of action covered since last June!), I thought for people’s general sanity a change of pace might be desired. So:
- Would people be interested in multi-part chapters with shorter updates, each covering one section of a story arc, to be published (let’s be optimistic) monthly?
- Or are people happy for me to post lengthy, completed chapters every quarter or so?
I think I know which option I’m leaning towards, but I thought I’d open it up in case anyone has an opinion.
As for the next chapter itself… I’ve been planning and structuring it for literally a year. It’s got a lot of action happening very quickly – and I’m very excited to start writing. Here’s a little cinematic teaser:
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