Confessions of an eBay Trader #1: A Festival of Lessons and Carols

So there was I, keying in today’s offering for one-for-every-fair-and-rainy-day, my little eBay trading post. This is what I typed:

"KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL A Festival of Lessons & Carols OVAL ARGO 1959 orig RG 190 mono 

On offer is the 1959 LP A FESTIVAL OF LESSONS AND CAROLS as sung on CHRISTMAS EVE, 1958 in KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL, CAMBRIDGE, directed by DAVID WILLCOCKS w SIMON PRESTON, organ.  On ARGO, catalogue number RG 190." 

I scrupulously noted the details beloved by record collectors: 

"This is the FIRST PRESSING mono release, with the FULLY LAMINATED FLIPBACK THIN ‘CLARIFOIL’ SLEEVE, and the 1ST LABEL ARGO - dark blue, with the Argo motif enclosed in an OVAL design with a groove inside the perimeter." 

The record was playing as I wrote, “ From the arresting opening, a lonely boy chorister emerging from silence with a hushed ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, it’s evident that this is the ultimate Christmas record, and trounces Phil Spector’s Christmas Gift to You. In comparison, Wizzard and Slade are barbarians.”

I was warming to my task now, soaking up the atmosphere as the sweet little angels of King’s College Choir chirruped ‘I Saw Three Ships’: “Redolent of dusty chapels, dreaming spires, Choral Scholars in white altar gowns.” Now came a Lesson, a reading from St Luke. “The establishment at prayer,” I typed. Then another carol, ‘Gabriel’s Message.’ I deleted the previous line and entered: “A dream vision of Christmas from the dream city of Cambridge, preserved in aspic from Christmas Eve, 1958.” I pondered the significance of the date. At the time of recording, I was precisely two days old. 

Then I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll give them Sgt Pepper instead,” and hoped I wasn’t being disloyal to the cause of women bishops.  

A Brief History of Donal Maguire

Donal Maguire was born in 1948 in Drogheda, County Louth, and, in his own word, “interned” in Berkshire in 1963. Paradoxically, the move awakened awareness of his Irish heritage. In the early seventies, he bumped into Ewan MacColl and was part of the radical theatre group Combine, formed by disaffected members of the Critics Group. His first recording was made in Paris in 1977 - he contributed ‘The Bold Tenant Farmer’ to Folk Pirate Bis (ES54), for the French label Expression Spontanée.  

His debut album, The Star of Sunday’s Well (MUS 001) was released on his own label, Rossendale Records in the same year. It sets the template for future releases: stirring ballads and rattling reels. It’s successor, The Clergy’s Lamentation (Rossendale, MUSCD005) from 1980, added some beautiful Carolan tunes, with harp promoted to dominant instrument. 

Then came Gilded Chains & Sordid Affluence (Rossendale, MUSCD006) from 2001, and this might be my favourite, in terms of choice of material and feel. But it’s not for the purist. Maguire enlists the support of jazz guitarist Mike Walker. This, more by propinquity than grand design: Walker happened to move across the road from Donal’s place in Haslingden. The guitarist brought his saxophonist buddy Iain Dixon to the sessions and they play reels with a freedom that is utterly exhilarating. 

In 2006 Michael Davitt - The Forgotten Hero? gathered several songs with a connection to the Irish nationalist hero. It can be warmly recommended for both seriousness of purpose and ease of execution. About a third of the songs are sung unaccompanied in the traditional, timeless style. 

“The crucial note is that I’m a revival singer. Therefore, I couldn’t get up and sing songs from Connemara all night. Actually singers from Connemara never sang songs from Connemara all night,” Donal told me.  

“ I’m taking it from Darach Ó Catháin. He was born in Connemara but he worked in Leeds for the last I-don’t-know-how-many years. He died in the eighties, not that old. Darach was the greatest singer I’ve never heard in the flesh. I knew that he existed and he knew that I existed but unfortunately we never met, which was a great tragedy. 

“But I don’t want to be a Darach Ó Catháin tribute band. After a few renditions Donal Maguire will take over, I hope.”

I tried some names on him, wishing to benefit from his expertise and experience.  On Tom Lenihan: “A great singer from Clare, yeah.” He offered another Tom by way of response: Tom Costello, a singer from Connemara. “I sat at his feet in a metaphorical sort of way. His timing was wonderful.” 

To bring it all home, his latest is a pure expression of Irish traditional singing - Louth Mouths From Drogheda (Rossendale, MUSCD009) - being Donal and two old friends, Sean Corcoran and Gerry Cullen, swapping songs and singing unaccompanied. It’s at once casual - nothing could be simpler than letting rip with the bare voice - and a labour of love. Corcoran collected some of the songs first-hand. Donal is in fine form, and Gerry Cullen likewise impresses. It’s a disc that combines vitality - reflecting the excitement of the revival as it gained a foothold in County Louth in the sixties - with integrity. 

This brings us up to date, except that one disc has gone unmentioned. By The Hush (Rossendale, MUS003), from 1981, captures a cross-section of singers and musicians from North West England performing Irish music. “I lost my shirt on it,” Donal says, in a manner that pre-empts further discussion. 

www.donalmaguire.co.uk/

All good rock stars...

It's strange how everything leads back to Bill Leader, once you're in the mind-set. So Bill had an engineer at Leader Sound in Greteland called John Gill, who went on to become one of The Three Johns, and just now I was hovering over a Three Johns LP on a second-hand stall. It had a good quote from Richard Neville on the back, which began, "All good rock stars take drugs, put their penises in plaster casts and collectivise their sex..." and went on for a bit more in this vein. Now that I can't find the quote anywhere on Google, I might have to go back and buy the record. 

Alan Turing’s Teen Tragedy and the Difference Between Electro and Rock-Opera

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Alan Turing satisfies quite a few of the criteria for Jesus Christ. Tick them off: he saved the world (or hastened the end of WWII by cracking the Enigma code), he foresaw the coming of a second kingdom (the kingdom of computers; he came up with the prototype), probed the secrets of creation (morphogenesis), and was put to death (hounded for his homosexuality) and rose again: only now, a half century after his death, are scientists and biologists beginning to appreciate, partially and inadequately, the full range of his ideas. 

And now he has his own rock opera, or rather, a glittery synthpop tribute. Un digito binario dudoso comes from Hidrogenesse, an electronic pop duo based in Barcelona. It translates as A doubtful binary digit. The subtitle is recital para Alan Turing. 

And it’s entirely enchanting.

The style pioneered by Soft Cell and Pet Shop Boys has never sounded more delicious, tuneful or plain weird. The synthetic beats are groovy, the swooshes are silvery and not entirely from a human source (quite appropriately), and the fact that the sweet, heart-on-sleeve lyrics are mostly in Spanish adds another level of delightful dislocation. 

I can’t think of a better compliment than to say that Alan Turing would love this album, which mines his biography sensitively, yet with a frisson of camp. The first song, drawing on the Snow White imagery, conjures a kiss with which to wake Alan up. And ‘Christopher’ is not in the least exploitative but breathtakingly sweet, and, with one bound, Turing’s personal teen tragedy joins the pantheon of universal pop teen tragedies. 

Anyone who lives in Manchester, or works at Manchester University, whose field is Computer Science, who comes from Spain and what’s more contributed to the Alan Turing exhibition at Manchester Museum that’s going to close next week, is going to love ‘Love Letters’. Indeed, Eva Navarro was much amused and has been singing the chorus ever since. This bit is in English and it goes: 

“Manchester 

University 

Computer 

Love”

The album closes with ‘Historia del Mundo Contada por las Computadoras (History of the World Told by Computers)’. Far from being impersonal and sterile, it’s a beautiful, melodic, quasi-pop excursion. Artificial intelligence, it seems, has crossed the line into romance and discovered heartbreak. Love and logic are no longer incompatible extremes. The machine has learned to cry. Divine! 

http://www.austrohungaro.com/hidrogenesse/turing/

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~navarroe

Paddy on the Road Provenance

As I mention (monotonously) in each relevant listing, the records I'm currently selling on eBay come from the collection of the late Ian Chappell, and were acquired at Omega Auctions, Stockport, in late June. Amongst the more heavyweight lots at the Auction - far outside my pocket - was Paddy on the Road by Christy Moore (Mercury, 20170 SMCL), which was finally bought by a Manchester-based dealer called Nigel for the winning bid of £640. 

Donal Maguire, the great Irish traditional singer (the best, in my humble opinion), happened to be present because I alerted him to the event (he’s a fellow Oddfellows regular, and so, by definition, a friend). Maguire was flabbergasted at the price, and secretly thrilled, because he’s owned a copy since first release in 1969, and doesn’t particularly rate it. Indeed, he may have played it once, or twice at most. 

To make a hard story easy, after the failure of the ploy of distributing his card with a scrawled explanatory note amongst the serious dealers (suppressed by Nigel, I later learned), Donal asked me to sell it for him on my little eBay trading post, one-for-every-fair-and-rainy-day.

I'm not sure if Donal's stratospheric expectations of its value will be realised. It has, ah, three days left to run. 

Nigel finally sold his copy on eBay for £650, which represents a net loss after auction and eBay fees are taken into account. However, two Russian oligarchs looking for a new way of laundering money started a bidding war for his copy of Heavy Petting by Dr Strangely Strange, which finally sold for over £2000. Swings and roundabouts.

A Manifesto, Invisibles and Twenty Years-A-Growing

My politics? Not party political (of course). My manifesto would be a line from Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” That’s the ideal. My wrath is reserved for those who reduce them, or, worse, substitute with a number of horrific, horrible things, chief among them War, which fucks everything up in perpetuity. 

Eva has accused me of living in my own little world. “This is the difference in our worlds,” she said only this morning. “You live in an imaginary world. I live in the real world.” To which the only reply is, “But I’m very fond of it. Don’t knock my imaginary world.” 

So - here’s an illustration - we were each doing our own thing last night. She was watching Invisibles, a Spanish documentary, and I had my nose in Twenty Years-A-Growing, Maurice O’Sullivan’s autobiography about a childhood in Great Blasket, an island off the coast of Kerry, Ireland. 

Invisibles, produced by Javier Bardem, is a documentary in five parts by five different director. A synopsis of each section follows: 

1. A woman from Bolivia working in Spain receives a letter from her sister. As the film follows her in her daily round of low-paid work (nursery worker, cleaner), a voice-over reads the sister’s letter. The news is bad: her daughter has died from a virulent disease carried by bedbugs. The victims are so poor it’s not in the drug companies’ interest to develop a treatment. 

2. Women, travelling twenty or thirty kilometres in an isolated area of the Republic of Congo to feed and water their families, are systematically raped by police, army and rebels, sometimes by twenty-strong groups of men. The women organise together to combat the sexual aggression, but their vulnerability is highlighted by a cinematic device: they fade and become invisible before our eyes. 

3. In the north of Uganda, children sleep in communal centres organised by Médecins Sans Frontières to prevent them being kidnapped by rebel militia.  There is a civil war of some twenty years’ standing. Children kidnapped to become soldiers are commonly subjected to a trial of kill or be killed, and are forced to murder loved ones or siblings under pain of death. In this way, generations have been brutalised.

4. A sleeping disease transmitted by the tsetse fly is devastating areas of the Central African Republic, claiming up to a hundred victims a day. A side-effect of treatment seems to be hair loss on the upper lip: drugs are diverted to satisfy the demand of the female cosmetic market in the first world.   

5. The discovery of mineral wealth in an area of Colombia has led to ongoing conflict since 1948 and the displacement of the resident population. Now the community - led by strong women - are fighting to reclaim their homes, but the government offers no guarantee of security. This is the most hopeful of the episodes and it’s still as bleak as hell.

Twenty Years-A-Growing offers a contrasting side of human nature. An island childhood in the early decades of the twentieth century, it seems, offered unlimited freedom. Maurice and his best friend, Tomás, are as free as William Brown and his friends and the Swallows and Amazons children. So in Chapter V, ‘Ventry Races’, our hero rises early and slips away to the mainland on a curragh (a little boat) with Tomás on the occasion of the Ventry boat races. They encounter several adventures, including their first beer, a fight with a lanky fellow who tries to cheat them in a game of hoop-la, and the raid of a homestead for a loaf of bread. Then there is the triumph of the giant Tigue Dermod from the Cooas in the boat race, amongst cries of “My love to you forever, oh flower of men!” The grown-ups who come and go, ineffectual and benign, are all very demonstrative. “Musha, my heart,” and “God and Mary save ye, my treasures” are some of the milder endearments.  

Not that God and Mary were particularly effective either. Maurice O’Sullivan died in a swimming accident off the coast of Connemara in 1950, aged 46. Bill recorded his widow Cait, a fine Gaelic singer, but the tapes were lost. That’s a story I’m reserving for the book, which I hope will have some of the spirit of Twenty Years-A-Growing whilst giving the Invisibles their due. 

Not Counting Roberta Flack

I was thinking of significant versions of Ewan MacColl songs not by Ewan MacColl, and came up with the following:

'The Ballad of Accounting' by The Exiles
'Jesus Was a Carpenter' by The Johnstons
'Space Girl' by Shirley Collins
'The Thirty-foot Trailer' by The Watersons
'Sweet Thames Flow Softly' by Planxty
'Schooldays End' by John Faulkner and Sandra Kerr

This is only a provisional list, if anyone has any more.