And another left........

That's the title of a chapter from Dornford Yates' "The Courts of Idleness", a bitter-sweet and elegaic volume of short stories about the era that ended in the cataclysm of The Great War.......

Worth a read if you can find a copy. I have a feeling it's long out of print. But Yates writes beautifully, even if he's dismissed now as a purveyor of sub-Bulldog Drummond spy stories or sub-Wodehousian yarns with his 'Berry' series.

Ian 'Lemmy' Kilmister might have approved: perhaps surprisingly, he was, by all accounts, a great fan of Wodehouse..........

For this fell January continues to cut a swathe through the talent that delighted and amazed us though the seventies, eighties and nineties.

Dale Griffin, drummer with Mott the Hoople and Glenn Frey of the Eagles will, in Yates' words, 'haunt the Courts no more'.........

You might find my pre-occupation with these sad passings a rather morbid topic to choose after so long an absence from blogging.

Perhaps it is.

Those of us in our fifties and sixties, who were around when the music of Bowie, Mott the Hoople, The Eagles, and Motorhead was brand spanking new, are having to face up to the fact that with the death of these musicians, our youth, though long fled, has truly become history.

And that in little more than the blink of an eye, we shall be history too.......

It takes some facing up to........

In the meantime, I'd like to share the following clips. It's the usual left-field mix of oddness, but is my little tribute to those who have left the stage this January and will haunt the Courts of Idleness no more. (You'll have to cut and paste into your browser as I'm too thick to make a link work.......)

Some cheesy Swedish vibe is goin' down in Groovetown, but I think it's important to say "Thankyou" all the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dcbw4IEY5w

Now who can deny the central premise of this? David, Glenn, Ian, and Dale......... We didn't know what we had until now......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlNZN94_u-s

This one's really out there: I think he came third in the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest with this.

You're about to see why....... though I still think Cliff was robbed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otWLDkKC-VY

Yes....... The music WILL never end......

Power to you all, you boys who played rock and roll, and made our lives so sweet, and power to you, though we never met, my lovely, lovely friends.

X

The Time of Endings

I suppose any time is a Time of Endings......

It just depends on where you are standing in relation to the beginnings.......

So, callow youth of this day, hearken ye unto the musings of this old codger, nay, indulge him with a hearing.......

For soon, so soon, time's fleet foot will have marched the seemingly impossible distance between your "now", at your Absolute Beginning, and will have taken you right to the very threshold of your "then", that far-off, nebulous, theoretical-seeming door marked 'Exit'............

I speak as one who knows only too well he is standing if not in the doorway itself, then much closer to the approach to it than is in all conscience comfortable.

And I wish to clap, whoop, cheer and applaud those who pass through it before me.

David Bowie is dead.

No-one born after a certain date will have any idea of how influential he really was.

No, really.......

Consider.

I watched him on TV as Ziggy Stardust in the early Seventies. My parents were watching with me. They had lived through World War Two. Of my grandparents, then living, two were Edwardians and one was a Victorian..............

Imagine then, their reaction to Ziggy.

"Slack-jawed disbelief" doesn't even get close.........

Ian Kilmister is dead.

If ever there was a life lived at full throttle, all the way to eleven, maximum overdrive, then his was that life.

Ed Stewart is dead.

As far from being a pop/art/acting/style-icon or fully flipped-out sex and drugs and rock and roller as it is to imagine, yet dear in the memories still of those of us who were Children of the Seventies.

And I will cheer and whoop and holler to the skies for them all.

As one ages, time appears to accelerate. The years go by much faster, it seems.

I have considered why this is so: when we are twenty, a year is one twentieth of our lives. At sixty, one twentieth of our lives is three years. So what took a year when you're twenty lasts only four months when you're sixty.......

Thus, do we and our little lights accelerate ever the more quickly toward the heart of the BlackStar?

And vanish into a naked singularity?

If so, let us be kind, and comfort each other while we may.

And be not afraid of The Dark.