Do It For Your Mum
With a father and older sibling this devoted to the cause, and the members of British Sea Power an agreeable combination of dreamy outsiders, graduates, ornithologists and all-round 21st century adventurers, their output was always going to be memorable and leftfield, and this book mirrors the band’s career. It took the beautiful wild remoteness of Cumbria — a place with almost zero rock previous – to produce such a band. The Lake District shaped BSP, just like the glaciers of the Ice Age shaped the cliffs, crags, ridges, rocks, escarpments, peaks, precipes, parapets, bluffs and chimneys of the Lakes. Ian Brown was wrong: it’s not where you’re at, it’s where you’re from.
Ben Myers reviews Roy Wilkinson‘s biography on British Sea Power.
A decadent millionaire corrupting the son
William Burroughs on meeting Allen Ginsberg (via Biblioklept).
Jenkins
We came across Derek Jarman’s wooden beach house with its strange natural, sculpture garden. Jenkins said he’d met him once, that he’d been something of a local character. I was eleven when he died, and I remember his film, Blue, being shown on television: a beautiful blank Klein-blue screen with only his commentary for explanation. My mum had turned it off saying it was ‘filth’, my stepfather adding that it was ‘a waste of a fucking licence fee’ — his words. ‘It’s channel fucking four, actually’ — my words as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, leaving them to their whisky and shouting. I lay on my bed, sinking my head back into the pillows to drown them out, and looked up at my poster of the southern oceans, and dreamt of swimming, swimming way out to sea.
By Alan McCormick.