Wanderland - Jini Reddy

 WANDERLAND - JINI REDDY

The past is another country but in nature is where you'll find the weird. Foreign countries can be referred to as being 'exotic' but in the depths of an English city or even out on the weather-eaten council estates you'll also find exotica and mad fauna along with quark, strangeness and charm. There is mystery and city hobgoblins in our man-made environs but in the English countryside dwells monsters, demons, life-force. magick and essence rare. That's my opinion at least, and that's the reason for me reading Wanderland by Jini Reddy.

In her book, Reddy takes heed of her inner voice and sets off on a personal quest to find the arcane and the mystical, or what she calls the 'Otherness' of the landscape. Indeed, the strapline of the book is 'A Search for Magic in the Landscape' but right there straightaway in the way she spells 'magic' is a clue as to where she's coming from and where she's going wrong because as any good alchemist would tell you, the way to spell 'magic' is with a 'k'.

You would have thought spirituality and 'New Age' would be classless, egalitarian and non-hierarchical, but it's not. It's absolutely riddled with class prejudice from a mealy-minded, entitled, middle class perspective and Jini Reddy's position in it is a prime example. She would deny it vehemently of course but that's because she's unaware of it herself, which is mightily ironic if not tragic for someone who has written a book on 'awareness'.

Wanderland is chick lit for New Age steppers. There's a very girlish-gosh!-dashing-hither-and-thither feel about it with a lot of anecdotal mentions of where the author was last week and who with. All along the lines of 'I was talking to a friend of mine, an ex-barrister who now lives on the foothills of Tibet drinking nothing but a finger bowl of water a day, and I mentioned that I'd recently spoken to our mutual friend, a neuro-brain surgeon from Hampstead who in her spare time is a tree hugger'. It's tedious, to put it politely. 

She contacts a woman who owns a labyrinth in Cornwall, who has a longhouse on 70 acres of land with her own beach. 'Just whizzing off to set up the Festival of the Sea in Looe' the woman tells Reddy 'But it's all yours for three nights.' And you just know Reddy is telling these people that she's a journalist on The Times or some other newspaper she freelances for who's writing a book and can she come and visit? Which is why everyone she contacts says 'yes'. The fact that she's on a quest for the 'Other' on the back of a book deal casts a shadow of inauthenticity over the whole thing, however, as in even if she doesn't find anything at the end of the Yellow Brick Road it will all be a jolly jape anyway and she'll get a book out of it at least.

In the process, unfortunately, she has to suffer the indignities of travelling to 'boringly tame' places such as Hastings, sharing train carriages with Sun newspaper readers. Can you imagine? For someone who throughout the book gushes about previous places she's been such as remote river valleys in Iceland, the desert in northern Namibia, remote tree-lined valleys in Australia, and so on, it must have been terrible.

But a book out of it she got, published by Bloomsbury and available at all Waterstones. And what a book it is. What a disappointment. What a let down. What a boring load of middle class, self-serving, pretentious piffle.

If nature is a language then it's one that Reddy neither reads nor speaks. At one point in her book she admits to feeling no connection to tales of King Arthur, Merlin or The Green Man and that's fine but then she also admits to having never been to Stonehenge or Avebury which is pretty incomprehensible given the subject matter of what she's writing about. At another point she admits to having never taken magic mushrooms. Well, perhaps she should try them one day? Or at least watch Ben Wheatley's film A Field In England? Or the film Enys Men? Or even Lars von Trier's film, Antichrist? 

Near to the end of her book Reddy writes of meeting musician Nitin Sawhney who quotes from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance where Robert Pirsig says Buddha is not to be found only in the petals of a flower, but also in the circuits of a computer. 'I think that's absolutely true' Sawhney tells her and Reddy admires him for his honesty. But does Reddy actually understand what he's saying? Possibly not, because if she did then her book may not have ended up being so rubbish.

Sometimes I read these books so that you won't have to. I sometimes literally read 'em and weep.

John Serpico

A Diet Of Treacle - Lawrence Block

 A DIET OF TREACLE - LAWRENCE BLOCK

More pulp fiction, this time from 1961 and involving 'sex, drugs, and murder in the land of the lotus eaters', as it says in the blurb on the back cover. What this means is that it's set in Greenwich Village when that particular area of New York was being newly populated by Beatniks and stoners who, of course, over the coming years would evolve into hippies. Written by Lawrence Block, A Diet Of Treacle takes its name from a line in Alice In Wonderland where the dormouse is telling Alice about three sisters who lived at the bottom of a well.

'What did they live on?' asks Alice. 'They lived on treacle,' the dormouse replies. 'They couldn't have done that, you know,' Alice remarks 'They'd have been ill'. 'So they were,' the dormouse says. 'Very ill'.

A Diet Of Treacle is a sort of morality tale, but also by accident rather than design it's very much an Existentialist novel from almost the same school as works by Camus and Sartre. That's not to say it's in any way philosophical but there are passages that are clearly echoes of Camus' The Outsider and Sartre's general brooding in any of his Roads to Freedom trilogy.

A college girl from Uptown New York visits Greenwich Village because she's bored with the life on offer to her and feels there must be something else, something more. She finds it in the form of Joe, ex-Korean War veteran who after two years of dodging bullets in Korea has returned home and after a short spell at New York University has dropped out and is now part and fixture of 'the scene' in the Village.

In reality this means hanging out at down-at-heel cafes, living in a rented hell-hole of a single room with his soon to be heroin dealing friend, and contemplating being, nothingness and what Joe refers to as 'immobility'. The girl moves in with Joe and his friend forming a sort of anti-Jules et Jim menage a trois, whereupon she's one day raped by Joe's roommate before him killing a police officer forcing all three to go on the run.

For a pulp fiction novel such as this, the allusions to Existential thought are quite surprising although the morality it espouses not so, in fact it's a little disappointing. The treacle the title of the book refers to can be interpreted as either the Beatnik lifestyle it describes as in the mythological lotus eaters' preoccupations, or more specifically - drugs.

The first time the girl tries marijuana, for example, is at a house party where she becomes so stoned that she takes off all her clothes and has sex with Joe in the middle of the floor, watched by all the other party-goers. As you do whenever you first smoke weed.

Smoking marijuana also leads on to taking heroin, which then leads to murder and prostitution, apparently. All good, American 1950s moral majority type-stuff and conservative to the hilt. But apart from this, so long as you can keep the morality from eclipsing everything else,  A Diet Of Treacle is a decent enough book and is worth anyone's few cents at the dime store.

John Serpico

The Guns Of Heaven - Pete Hamill

 THE GUNS OF HEAVEN - PETE HAMILL

I thrive on this stuff and I don't read enough of it. Pulp fiction. Dime store novels from the '50s, '60s and '70s. The problem is that you don't see them on sale much these days and when you do they're quite expensive because they've become so collectible. I have a theory, however: Because they're so well-designed in an eye-catching, clickbait style I think people buy them only for their covers but that they don't actually read them. Which is fine, of course, because the covers are always really good and you can't blame people for wanting to collect them but it's also just another sign of the times and of the age we live in where the world is like an iceberg that we only see the one third that's on the surface and the other two thirds under the surface are not even considered.

Hard Case Crime is an imprint that specialises in crime fiction, republishing lost pulp classics alongside publishing new work by new writers. In the world of book publishing they've obviously spotted a gap in the market and have come along to plug it. And very welcome they are too, I might say.

The Guns Of Heaven by Pete Hamill is an example of modern day pulp fiction written and presented in the classic style of old-fashioned pulp fiction. It doesn't actually demand any reflection, consideration and least of all analysis because it's written to be simply read and enjoyed. It helps, of course, if a book of this kind isn't ludicrous or badly written and in the case of The Guns Of Heaven it's not either of these things, in fact it's really well-researched and most importantly of all, it's really well-written.

'Tomorrow, the struggle will be fought on our streets', says the blurb on the back cover and that was enough to straightaway tickle my fancy. The plot - and yes, there is one - involves the IRA, the UVF, Christian apocalypse fundamentalists, a cameo by Ian Paisley, a lone reporter and the largest shipment of arms in the history of the IRA, with all the action hopping from Belfast to Switzerland to New York.

'That was the way it always seemed to go,' ponders the lone wolf reporter at one point 'You believed first in normal abstractions, in God, or country, or Karl Marx. And then you believe in guns. The guns of liberation. The guns of the dialect. The guns of heaven.'

And that's pretty much the tone and style of the writing throughout the whole book: Snappy, succinct, with a heavy dose of panache. Boys Own stuff quite possibly, but great stuff all the same.

John Serpico

Occupy - Noam Chomsky

 OCCUPY - NOAM CHOMSKY

When Piers Morgan recently interviewed Noam Chomsky, to everyone's surprise Morgan actually allowed Chomsky to talk without interrupting him constantly or trying to challenge Chomsky's answers. It's unclear what drove Morgan's change of interviewing technique but it would have been a pretty unedifying sight had he tried to get one over on Chomsky or tried to come out intellectually triumphant over a 91-year old man. In the end, however, because he was allowed to talk rather than to try and reduce ideas into 30-second soundbites, Chomsky wiped the floor with Morgan, practically turning Morgan's worldview upside down and leaving him with a somewhat glazed look in his eye like some computer having blown a fuse and left on a 'does not compute, does not compute' loop.

Actually, it may not have been Morgan's intention (for only he would truly know) but rather than trying to claim the crown for being the first ever interviewer to bring Chomsky down on an ideological or intellectual level, Morgan came across as being the person trying to bag the 'prize' of being responsible for the last ever interview with Chomsky before he croaks it. In that sense, it was still unedifying though unwittingly in approaching a Chomsky interview from this angle it was what allowed Chomsky to so demolish the questions. By accident rather than design we sometimes have much to thank Morgan for, it would seem. Then again, on second thoughts - fuck him.

Occupy is another one of those books composed of interviews with Noam Chomsky and transcripts of speeches he has delivered, this time in regard to the Occupy movement. It's presumed that everyone is aware of what the Occupy movement was and if anyone isn't then it's yet more evidence of how well managed the mainstream narrative is, and how well developed are the mechanisms of propaganda. What may not be so well known is what became of Occupy? What happened to it? Where did everyone go?

Social movements swell and ebb like waves crashing upon or even gently lapping at the shore, and the Occupy movement was an example of both. It was always a very broad church under whose roof gathered a very disparate number of people of various political temperaments. The common denominator was an awareness of the inequality in the world where the wealthiest 1 percent influence and near-control the lives of the other 99 percent. Not that this statistic was any great revelation at all, it was just that Occupy managed to push it onto the agenda and bring it to the fore so as to become almost a standard framework of discussion. People already knew it but for the first time in years rather than an Ayn Rand-type ideology being the prevalent spirit of the age as promoted by politics, business and mainstream media, Occupy simply said that another world was possible.

Similar to the Sixties mantra of 'All we are saying is 'give peace a chance'', Occupy said that it was okay to care for one another. Subsequently, rather than the wealth of the world being mainlined straight to just one percent of the population, Occupy called for a change and that a more egalitarian society be built where the wealth of the world is more evenly distributed. It was never exactly a radical request that was being made but more a natural one, more a normal way of life already being lived by most people yet usurped and kept at a distance from the levers of power by the one percent and all those who worked to aid and abet them in keeping things just as they are.

So what happened? Well, the tactic of 'occupation' as a means of throwing a spanner in the works was easily quashed by the police merely wading in with truncheons and pepper spray and evicting the occupiers from the space they had taken over be it on Wall Street, in Zuccotti Park or indeed outside of St Paul's Cathedral. As a tactic, on the physical level it failed but on a metaphysical level it succeeded in sending out a message to not only the one percent to let them be aware that the pitchforks are coming but to the 99 percent to let them know they are not alone. That to those even with the smallest of niggling doubts about whether it's fair that children starve while the rich live lives of luxury beyond the dreams of Solomon - that they weren't wrong in having that doubt.

Ultimately, those actively involved with Occupy fell back into the woodwork and went back to whence they came but importantly though no longer holding a presence on the streets they would still hold a presence in their communities and in their work places and this was where, according to Chomsky, the real work for change is made: in the building of communities and in the creation of change from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

To the well-known Karl Marx quote where the great bearded one said 'the task is not just to understand the world, but to change it', Chomsky adds that 'if you want to change the world in a constructive direction, you better try to understand it first. And understanding it doesn't mean just listening to a talk or reading a book, although that's helpful sometimes. It means learning. And you learn through participation. You learn from others.'

It's important, then, to understand how the world got to where it is today in regard to the terrible inequality and the 99 percent equation. According to Chomsky, it mostly started in the 1970s and the falling rate of profit in manufacturing, causing major changes in the economy. Manufacturing shifted to overseas, which became very profitable once again though not so for the work force. The economy shifted from productive enterprise to financial manipulation leading to a concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. Subsequently, this concentration of wealth led to concentration of political power that yielded legislation such as tax changes, rules of corporate governance and deregulation that simply increased and accelerated the cycle.

And so there you have it. In a nutshell. As advised by one of the foremost intellectuals in the world today: it's corporate business and financial institutions that rule this fucked world with the profit motive being the main driving force. There is no real party political solution to it either, as all political Parties are committed to maintaining the machine as the machine is their paymaster. In America in particular where election campaigns are absolutely dependent on corporate funding, with the better the funding the better the chance of electoral success.

So where does that leave you? Where does that leave me? Where does that leave us? Well, have you ever wondered why there are so many dickheads around spouting constant Right-wing rhetoric to the point of high comedy? Droning on like an audio version of Daily Mail and Telegraph newspaper editorials? Colonised to the point of obsession with such notions as anything to the left of Right-wing conservatism being 'woke'? This is where the ideas of Antonio Gramsci come into play where Gramsci talks about cultural hegemony being established by systems of power.

'I like Gramsci,' Chomsky says at one point in the book 'He's an important person'. And I concur. If voting for a change in how the world is run isn't an option, if those protesting are simply moved out of the way for being a nuisance, and if revolution isn't on the horizon, then all that is left (beyond mass rioting on an unprecedented scale) is a battle for hearts and minds. You can see this happening now in the form of so-called 'culture wars' though it's far more pervasive than just issues of gender and race, it's all to do with acceptance of the depicted normality and how palatable that normality can be made and how unpalatable can any alternative be made?

The world is up for grabs now even more so than ever. Though we're made to feel powerless when it comes to anything beyond what brand we choose to buy in a shop, nowadays more than ever people have the power to redeem the work of the one percent and all those in their employ, and to wrestle the world from them.

People have the power. Power to the people.

John Serpico

Gee Vaucher - Beyond Punk, Feminism And The Avant-Garde - Rebecca Binns

GEE VAUCHER -

BEYOND PUNK, FEMINISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE -

REBECCA BINNS

Art and culture is thrust upon us though it's never of our making and always defined by others. Culture is a commodity and so too is art and we are sold it with a nod, a wink, and a proviso that this kind of culture and this kind of art is for us and that any other is either pretentious, above our station, or just plain weird. There is high art and there is low art and never the twain doth meet and if by some fluke it ever does then it's quickly recuperated, contained, accommodated  and packaged into something else to be bought and sold, ensuring the market always wins out.

Gee Vaucher was the visual artist for Crass and was responsible for all the record sleeves, the posters, the graphics for the International Anthem newspaper, the banners hung at gigs. Everything, essentially, apart from the actual Crass logo that was designed by a friend of Penny Rimbaud called Dave King.

Crass were a band who were never 'sold'. They were never hyped, they were never packaged, they were never advertised via adverts in the music press. Instead, they just suddenly appeared one day over in the corner making a lot of noise, with much swearing and talking about things that everyone knew and thought and felt but had never before expressed. 

Crass were the punk rock equivalent of the little boy pointing out that the king wasn't actually wearing any clothes. They were the punk rock equivalent of the mirror that Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex in their song Identity asked if when we look into it do we smash it quick? 

Integral and essential to the music Crass created and the concerts at which they performed was Vaucher's graphics and imagery that combined photomontage, pop art and collage that was often not collage at all, but 'intricately painted, photorealistic depictions of a skewed reality masquerading as collage'.

Interestingly, up until 2005 political photomontage artist Peter Kennard when teaching at the Royal College of Art was presenting Vaucher's art to his students as fine examples of photomontage and it was only when Vaucher showed him the originals that he realised they were actually paintings.

Interestingly too, Vaucher's art and graphics for Crass had always been presented in black-and-white and this very quickly became part of the Crass image although the originals were often in colour, and it was only because it was too expensive to reproduce  everything in colour that it ended up as black-and-white. This means that but for a lack of money in their early days that Crass could have been a lot more colourful if not outright dayglo? And whilst on the subject, the same goes for their clothes. Apparently, Crass only dressed in black because it made for mixing their clothes in the washing machine that much easier. According to Penny Rimbaud, that is.

If Crass were a band who were never 'sold', the same too applied to Vaucher's art. It was just 'there', as part of the whole Crass package and no more important than the words or the thrashing, fuzzed-out guitar at the heart of the music. It didn't presume anything and it was neither subtle or in your face but simply taking its place as part of the whole. The whole when fully combined, however, creating a near unstoppable battering ram unlike anything that had gone before, full of anger in the extreme, intricacies, bludgeoning passion and love. Yes, love. Paradoxically, Vaucher's art was stuffed full of subtleties and so in your face that it had you near pinned against the wall.

Vaucher's art has been showcased in book form in the past, in her self-produced and self-published book Crass Art And Other Pre Post-Modernist Monsters. Rebecca Binns' book, however, entitled Gee Vaucher - Beyond Punk, Feminism And The Avant-Garde, is the first serious study of Vaucher's work that has ever been written, which for an artist of Gee Vaucher's status and reputation is pretty mad though not altogether surprising given the art world's accent nowadays upon media profile, collectability and monetary and investment value. All things, of course, that Vaucher has very little interest in. 

You may not have noticed but none of Vaucher's artwork is ever signed. Given the propensity for Crass members to take on pseudonyms, is Gee Vaucher even her real name? It turns out that her birth name is actually Carole, and it's the kind of detail that's interesting due to the fact that very few people would know this and inadvertently this says a lot about her. In comparison, most people who know anything about Banksy (who is a friend and long-time admirer of Vaucher) would know his real name even though there's this big mystery about who he is. When Banksy first started out, all he ever seemed to do was to paint up his name 'Banksy' all around Bristol. His name was his 'tag' and subsequently his name became his brand even after he began diversifying into stencils of rats and monkeys.

Vaucher has no such thing as a 'brand' nor even such a thing as a particular style. She is mostly known for her work with Crass, of course, and the stark black-and-white imagery of the band but this was but a period of her whole life as an artist and as mentioned, the limited palette was down to budgetary demands not artistic choice.

For most people, their first contact with Vaucher's art came with the cover of The Feeding Of The 5000 EP, the seminal first record by Crass, released on the Small Wonder label. It's an unusual piece and in hindsight a somewhat strange choice for a cover. There's a lot going on in it. It's very busy. There's no name of the band on the cover and no title - it's on the back cover instead. A much more obvious choice for the front cover would indeed have been the image used on the back, of the flag bearer on the horizon of the churned mud landscape, and it's almost as if there has been some terrible mix-up at the pressing plant.

The Feeding Of The 5000 cover is a cover that's pretty confusing and makes you look twice, which in a way was what Crass were all about. Which means Vaucher's art was the perfect match for the whole Crass ethos. Or should that be the words and music of Crass was the perfect match for Gee Vaucher's ethos?

Rebecca Binns in her book drills down into Vaucher's art and discusses various pieces in detail, revealing meanings, subtext, context and subtle touches that make you look again and to even see them in a whole new light. That Bloody Revolutions record by Crass featuring the Pistols transposed into the Queen, the Pope, the statue of Justice, and Thatcher that you've looked at a thousand times before? You'll be looking at it again. 

So too Binns puts Vaucher's life into some form of context, touching upon her childhood, her time at art school in the Sixties, and her pre-Crass days in both America and the UK. There is a lot of joining of dots as well, such as her being fully aware of such things as so-called 'anarchist' ideas well before the formation of Crass due to various anarchist magazines in circulation among her associates. This being in contrast to Penny Rimbaud's assertion that pre-Crass he thought Bakunin was just a type of vodka.

There's mention of her time pre-Crass and pre-Dial House when she was living at another commune-type place in Essex called Stanford Rivers Hall with Eve Libertine, where she was a member of the seminal and much influential music collective Stanford Rivers Quartet. Pre-Crass as well, there's also her time with the avant-garde performance group EXIT, featuring among its many members Penny Rimbaud, Dave King and Steve Ignorant's elder brother.

Importantly, Binns covers the movements and the people that have all been influences upon Vaucher and her work as well as herself as a person, one of the most interesting being not an artist or a musician or a writer but radical psychiatrist R D Laing.

Rebecca Binns' book was eight years in the making and it shows. It's incredibly well researched and is probably the only book I've read involving the story of Crass that doesn't contain glaring mistakes or is full of revisionism. As much as it might ever be possible to do, the best book on Crass is still yet to be written but then Binns' book is not about Crass, it's about Gee Vaucher and in that sense it's the best book we're ever likely to get about her. In that sense, and due to Vaucher's genuinely deep impact upon a generation, Rebecca Binns' book is an important one.

John Serpico

Ten Years in An Open Necked Shirt - John Cooper Clarke

 TEN YEARS IN AN OPEN NECKED SHIRT -

JOHN COOPER CLARKE

The question that arises and therefore the question that needs to be asked is how come John Cooper Clarke has not yet been knighted and made an OBE, CBE or MBE for his services to poetry and subsequently his services to British culture? If you think of all the people who have had such an award bestowed upon them and what it is they have done to deserve it (or what they haven't done?), the mind boggles.

Not that I place any importance or any value upon such awards and perhaps John Cooper Clarke doesn't either but the gesture would be nice. And if indeed he doesn't care for such things at least he might be able to flog it on e-bay for a few quid or have it inspire a few lines for a poem? Not that he needs any such inspiration, of course, as his poetic cup already doth runneth over though no doubt a few extra quid in his pocket wouldn't go amiss? And 'Sir John Cooper Clarke' does have a certain ring about it, does it not?

Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt is a collection of Clarke's poetry and let us not beat about the bush: there are flashes of near-genius here - comedic genius, that is, transposed into poetic form.

Much of Clarke's persona is down to his appearance and his delivery but it would be as nothing without his wit and his words. Man cannot live by a hairstyle, shades, and a skinny suit alone as it would be like an empty vessel making a lot of noise. Ultimately, Clarke's appearance is but a vehicle for his art. A jeepster not for his love but his talent. The icing on the cake, however, is his Mancunian accent and the way it wraps itself around his words, enhancing and elevating them to form their own cynical but very musical incantation.

On the written page it's impossible to read Clarke's poems without hearing his voice and how many poets can you say that of? On the written page his jokes and one-liners come thick and fast but it's when performing live on stage, when his poems are accompanied by endless ad-libs and anecdotes that he comes into his own. Interestingly, it's also when performing live that the difference between lyrics and poetry is laid bare.

Ten Years In An Open Necked Shirt isn't an essential purchase at all but more like a confirmation of John Cooper Clarke's near-genius. Like a memento almost, akin to buying a T-shirt from the merch stall at a concert, or a stick of rock from a day out at Brighton. Rather than the town's name running through it, however, it has 'John Cooper Clarke' and in slightly smaller text - 'The Bard of Salford'.

John Serpico

Adge - King Of The Wurzels - John Hudson

 ADGE - KING OF THE WURZELS - JOHN HUDSON

There's an anecdote in John Hudson's Adge - King Of The Wurzels about the time Adge Cutler went to London with his friends to watch a football match at Wembley Stadium and whilst in the foyer of the hotel they were staying at he was approached by a girl who, curious about his and his friends' accents asked Adge what nationality he was? "Nailsea." Adge replied, and this one anecdote speaks volumes in regard to who Adge Cutler was and what he was about. 

Nailsea, a town near Bristol, was where he was from and like all places in the West Country it has its own specific peculiarities and foibles as distinct, unique and as separate from any other town or place. Just as distinct, even within the confines of Bristol itself, there are huge differences between areas within a town or city as for example between Bristol's Clifton area and the Southmead or Easton areas. With this in mind, it's always been problematic to talk of something like 'the Bristol Sound', which is what Massive Attack's style of music is referred to as.

The only meaning this term 'the Bristol Sound' has is when referring to a specific time, a specific period. Therefore, if Massive Attack's style of music is 'the Bristol Sound' then it's only applicable to when they were active during the Nineties and then only for a few years. In this light, 'the Bristol Sound' of the Noughties was arguably Drum 'n' Bass along with its undertow of violence, for a period during the Eighties it was hardcore punk rock in the form of Disorder and Chaos UK, and for a few years during the Seventies it was the cider-fueled songs and lyrics of Adge Cutler and The Wurzels. From these it's easy to see which one would make for the best soundtrack to gentrification.

"If Chuck Berry can write about Memphis, Tennessee," Adge is quoted as saying "then why can't I write about Easton-in-Gordano, Somerset?" And there you have it. The impetus for him singing the songs that he did was the manor to which he was born, and with such rich material to inspire him, the sky was the limit.

Adge Cutler's influence upon the culture of Bristol and the West Country as a whole is immeasurable though if you were to ask people in Bristol nowadays about it a lot of them would probably be perplexed but only because a lot of them wouldn't be Bristolian born and bred, with 'Virtue et Industria' meaning nothing to them. If you were to question the members of Massive Attack and their fellow travelers about it they would probably guffaw and deny it wholeheartedly. On the other hand, if you were to ask members of Chaos UK they would without any doubt nor hesitation say 'yes, absolutely' and then probably raise a glass to him. Or a tankard.

Could Massive Attack ever have existed were it not for Adge Cutler? Of course. Could Chaos UK? Of course. These bands, however, didn't just appear out of nowhere and if Massive Attack haven't been directly influenced musically by them, The Wurzels were still a stepping stone toward their formation however subtle. 

An obvious characteristic of Adge Cutler was his sense of humour, one that is also shared by the likes of Chaos UK and with any luck if you dig deep enough Massive Attack have the same even if it doesn't show in their music or lyrics. Again, it's a very distinct sense of humour very local to Bristol and the West Country. As one of his friends relays about a time when Adge was in a pub in Clevedon and he ordered a pork pie: "Mustard?" asked the barmaid. "No, I'll have it straight," Adge replied.

John Hudson's book tells the story of Adge Cutler and in a way it's an attempt to re-raise the Cutler flag and have it flying again high and proud over Bristol's cultural history. Does it succeed? Only in as much as a book published by a not-for-profit book publishing house with a small print run might be expected. What it does very successfully however is to remove Adge Cutler away from only being associated with places like Nempnett Thrubwell and going to Barrow Gurney (to see his brother Ernie), and events like the World Cider Drinking Championships or the World Muck Spreading Championships and puts him right at the heart of Bristol.

There's a whole slew of Bristol pubs and street names that are mentioned, even at one point the 'world-famous' Dug Out Club on Park Row where Adge met his wife. There's Tyndall's Park Road and Pembroke Road where Adge used to live, the pawnbroker's on Old Market where Adge first bought the corduroy trousers that the band wore, the bench on the edge of Clifton Downs just across from Christ Church that's dedicated to the memory of Adge's wife, Yvonne; and even South Bristol Crematorium at Bedminster Down where Adge's funeral service was held.

Were you aware that The Wurzels were named after Wurzel Gummmidge? Were you aware that Adge was very interested in the Spanish Civil War and for a time actually lived in Guernica? Did you know Adge spoke Spanish fluently? Did you know that when Adge's Wurzel stick went missing it was on the television crime reporting programme Police 5? Did you know that by their manager simply phoning up promoters and clubs and telling them he's got a band that sings about "cider and manure and stuff" that it got them a load of gigs? It's the stuff of legend. You couldn't make it up. 

And Adge Cutler was the man. The man, the myth, and the legend.

John Serpico