Film, TV, and Theatre

The Two Ronnies’ Mastermind Sketch (1980)

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Like Morecambe and Wise before them, the comedy partnership of Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett as the Two Ronnies was one made in heaven. Two strikingly affable guys with naturally funny bones, remarkable chemistry, and an obvious mutual deep friendship, the Two Ronnies’ legacy has happily been besmirched by neither time nor scandal. Their TV show was a hugely popular feature of Saturday night entertainment from 1971 to 1987 and everyone growing up during this period will remember their shows with great fondness, and perhaps conjure a mental picture of the Ronnies as newsreaders, reading spoof news items and ending each show with:

Corbett: That’s all we’ve got time for, so it’s “Goodnight” from me.

Barker: And it’s “Goodnight” from him.

Both: Goodnight!

The Ronnies had met each other back in 1963 and first appeared on television together in 1966 in The Frost Report with David Frost and John Cleese. However, their big break occurred as a result of an eleven-minute technical hitch at a BAFTA awards ceremony at the London Palladium in 1970, in which they filled in, unprepared and unscripted, with such aplomb that two audience members, Bill Cotton and Sir Paul Fox (the Head of Light Entertainment and the Controller of BBC1 respectively), offered them a show on the BBC!

The Two Ronnies show was filled with sketches, either standalone or featuring recurring characters, and often involving clever word-play (their Four Candles sketch being a case in point). Many of the jokes revolved around Corbett’s lack of height, with the self-deprecatory Ronnie C delivering many of them himself:

Barker: This next part does suit Ronnie C. right down to the ground.

Corbett: Mind you, that’s not far is it?”

The Ronnies also had their own solo section: Ronnie B usually appearing as the head of some ridiculously-named organisation, and Ronnie C delivering a discursive monologue to camera from his famous armchair. Each series also had an ongoing comic serial featuring private detectives Charley Farley and Piggy Malone (remember The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town?), giving ample scope to guests such as Diana Dors and Kate O’Mara to ham it up.

My favourite sketch though is this classic from 1980, the hilarious Mastermind sketch, which you can enjoy below and then perhaps go on to read the transcript of the revised, expanded (and in some places even corrected) version which was performed as part of their 1983 London Palladium residency.

Transcript:

MAGNUS: And so to our final contender. Your name, please?

SMITHERS: Good evening.

MAGNUS: Thank you. In the first heat your chosen subject was Answering Questions Before They Were Asked. This time you have chosen to Answer the Question Before Last each time. Is that correct?

SMITHERS: Charlie Smithers.

MAGNUS: And your time starts now. What is palaeontology?

SMITHERS: Yes, absolutely correct.

MAGNUS: Correct. What is the name of the directory that lists members of the peerage?

SMITHERS: A study of old fossils.

MAGNUS: Correct. Who are David Owen and Sir Geoffrey Howe?

SMITHERS: Burke’s.

MAGNUS: Correct. What’s the difference between a donkey and an ass?

SMITHERS: One’s a Social Democrat, the other’s a member of the Cabinet.

MAGNUS: Correct. Complete the quotation, “To be or not to be…”

SMITHERS: They’re both the same.

MAGNUS: Correct. What is Bernard Manning famous for?

SMITHERS: That is the question.

MAGNUS: Correct. Who is the present Archbishop of Canterbury?

SMITHERS: He’s a fat man who tells blue jokes.

MAGNUS: Correct. What do people kneel on in church?

SMITHERS: The Most Reverend Robert Runcie.

MAGNUS: Correct. What do tarantulas prey on?

SMITHERS: Hassocks.

MAGNUS: Correct. What would you use a ripcord to pull open?

SMITHERS: Large flies.

MAGNUS: Correct. What did Marilyn Monroe always claim to wear in bed?

SMITHERS: A parachute.

MAGNUS: Correct. What was the next new TV station to go on the air after Channel Four?

SMITHERS: Chanel Number Five.

MAGNUS: Correct. What do we normally associate with Bedlam?

SMITHERS: Breakfast television.

MAGNUS: Correct. What are jockstraps?

SMITHERS: Nutcases.

MAGNUS: Correct. What would a jockey use a stirrup for?

SMITHERS: An athletic support.

MAGNUS: Correct. Arthur Scargill is well known for what?

SMITHERS: He puts his foot in it.

MAGNUS: Correct. Who was the famous clown who made millions laugh with his funny hair?

SMITHERS: The leader of the mineworkers’ union.

MAGNUS: Correct. What would a decorator use methylene chlorides to make?

SMITHERS: Coco.

MAGNUS: Correct. What did Henri Toulouse-Lautrec do?

SMITHERS: Paint strippers.

MAGNUS: Correct. What is Dean Martin famous for?

SMITHERS: Is he an artist?

MAGNUS: Yes – what kind of artist?

SMITHERS: Erm… pass.

MAGNUS: Yes, that’s near enough. What make of vehicle is the standard London bus?

SMITHERS: A Singer.

MAGNUS: Correct. In 1892, Brandon Thomas wrote a famous long-running English farce – what is it?

SMITHERS: British Leyland.

MAGNUS: Correct. Complete the following quotation about Shirley Williams: “Her heart may be in the right place but her…”

SMITHERS: “Charley’s Aunt”.

MAGNUS: Correct, and you have scored 22 and no passes!

The Two Ronnies
Poetry

Alexander Pope’s An Essay On Criticism (1711)

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When it comes to literary “wits”, two names are often bandied about, namely Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde, but honourable mention should be reserved for a veritable club of wits that thrived in early 18th century London. Founded in 1714, The Scriblerus Club was an informal association of writers comprising prominent figures of the English literary scene such as the satirists Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay. One of the club’s purposes was to ridicule pretentious writing of the era which they did through the persona of a fictitious literary hack, Martinus Scriblerus. They were the Private Eye of their time.

Swift would become famous for his 1726 prose satire Gulliver’s Travels; John Gay for The Beggar’s Opera in 1728; and Alexander Pope for a series of erudite mock-heroic narrative poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism. Despite its dry title, the latter was indeed poetry, one of Pope’s first major poems, in fact, and one which had already been published prior to the coming together of the Scriblerati. It is the source of the famous quotations “To err is human; to forgive, divine“, “A little learning is a dang’rous thing“, and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread“, which is a pretty impressive set of additions to the lexicon for just one poem.

An Essay on Criticism was composed in heroic couplets (pairs of rhyming lines of iambic pentameter) and written in the manner of the Roman satirist Horace (65–8 BCE), known for his playful criticism of the many and varied social vices of Roman society through his light-hearted odes. Essentially, Pope’s poem is a Horatian-style verse essay offering advice about the chief literary ideals of his age and critiquing writers and critics who failed to attain his (evidently pretty high) standards.

Pope’s opening couplets contend that bad criticism is even worse than bad writing, thus signalling that even critics should be on their guard, not just pure writers. Dare I say, it has an element of contemporary “rap battles” or “roasts” with its gentle ribbing of inferior writers; it’s not too hard to imagine a modern-day rendering of these lines, perhaps with a mike-dropping flourish at the end:

‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

Pope points out common faults in poetry such as settling for easy and clichéd rhymes:

While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees;
If Crystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.

The couplets are impeccably and relentlessly delivered, 372 in all, each rapped out in that steady da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum iambic pentameter. Pope only breaks out of iambic pentameter once, and that’s deliberate:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along

The second line of this couplet is itself an Alexandrine, which is iambic hexameter, a form that Pope evidently regarded as laboured and inelegant with that extra da-dum and which this line demonstrates (geddit?). The whole piece is a masterclass in poetry, and all written when Pope was just twenty-two, so take that, pretentious and turgid writers of the 1700s!

Alexander Pope
Music

Sam & Dave’s Soul Man (1967)

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In the sixties, just as Berry Gordy up in Detroit was driving the Motown sound, down in Memphis the most influential creator and promoter of that crossover of blues/soul/pop music known as the Memphis sound was Stax Records, founded in 1957 by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton (Stewart/Axton = Stax). Unprecedented in that time of racial tension and strife in the South, Stax’s staff and artists were ethnically integrated, including their legendary house band Booker T & the MGs, who played on hundreds of recordings by artists including Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Bill Withers.

Booker T & the MGs c. 1967 (L–R): Donald “Duck” Dunn, Booker T. Jones (seated), Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr.

Another successful Stax act was Sam & Dave, made up of harmoniously-compatible soul singers Samuel Moore and David Prater, and today let’s enjoy their 1967 recording, Soul Man, written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter. Hayes had found the inspiration for the song in the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement. In July 1967 he had watched a television newscast about the aftermath of the 12th Street riot in Detroit, Michigan, and noted that black residents had daubed the word “soul” onto their buildings in the hope that the rioters would pass them by – analogous to the biblical story of the Passover, it was their way of saying “Please don’t wreck my building, I’m one of you” (so to speak). The idea morphed in Hayes’ mind into an expression of pride and defiance: “I’m a soul man!”.

The MGs were drafted in to record the song, with the help of horns from that other reliable Stax house band, the Mar-Keys, and the result was an instant smash that would enter the Grammy Hall of Fame. Sam and Dave take it in turns to sing the verses, joining in together for the choruses, and complementing each other seamlessly. One of Steve Cropper’s guitar licks is introduced by the exclamation “Play it, Steve”, a nuance that was repeated some years later when Soul Man was included as one of the soul classics paid tribute to by the makers of 1980’s The Blues Brothers movie (in which Cropper makes an appearance).

Here’s a TV appearance by the duo singing Soul Man (sans Cropper and thus sans the “Play it Steve” snippet but hey…) to an audience that doesn’t quite yet know how to move to the rhythm!

Sam and Dave

 

Art

Wassily Kandinsky’s Yellow-Red-Blue (1925)

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My appreciation of art spans many centuries. I’ve marvelled at the Greco-Romano art of the classical world; contemplated frescoes adorning Byzantine monasteries and churches in Turkey, Armenia and Cyprus; spent hours in galleries musing over paintings from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, through the eras of Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism to late nineteenth-century Impressionism and on to…well to be honest, when we hit the twentieth century, my enthusiasm starts to wane. Sure, Art Deco was a bona fide, aesthetically pleasing and innovative art movement, and Cubism had its place, but when I start to consider Surrealism, Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, I’m less impressed.

Sure, sure: it’s eminently possible to sit and enjoy a monumental and vibrant Jackson Pollock canvas in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art – and I have done – and there will always be exceptional and intriguing art to be found throughout the twentieth century. But my contention is that overall these tend to be outliers, and that in amongst the gems there is a broad seam of distinctly uncaptivating art. You can enjoy a Mark Rothko but can you really be captivated by it? I can’t. And don’t get me started on the truly modern “art” of the last four decades, the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, the Chapman Brothers, Martin Creed et al…please!

Having said that, I’m going to give a free pass to one of the head honchos of Abstract Expressionism, the Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). With Kandinsky I can embrace the new century vibe and be inspired by all that art theory behind colour and form. Kandinsky wrote voluminously about art theory: his writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the 1910 treatise On the Spiritual in Art were bold affirmations that all forms of art can reach a level of spirituality. He founded the short-lived but influential Blue Rider group (Der Blaue Reiter) with like-minded artists such as August Macke, Franz Marc, and Albert Bloch, who experimented boldly with colour, lines and form, and gave priority to spontaneity and improvisation.

Kandinsky’s paintings are expressive explosions of colours, lines and shapes that have an extraordinary force and musical quality about them. Kandinsky recognised that there were important connections between music and abstract art: music is abstract by nature and does not try to represent the exterior world but instead expresses the immediate inner feelings of the soul. That is why Kandinsky referred to his works as “compositions”. I get it. I seem to remember having this composition – 1925’s Yellow-Red-Blue (Gelb-Rot-Blau) – on my kitchen wall in the nineties, and, to extend the musical metaphor, I find it rather jazzy!

Kandinsky, Yellow-Red-Blue
Wassily Kandinsky
Music

The Eagles’ Hotel California (1977)

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December 1976 saw the release of the Eagles’ Hotel California album, with its eponymous single released in the following February. This was right in the middle of a seminal time for me in terms of musical flowering (the release of the records straddled my 14th birthday) and it hit the spot just as surely as songs by the likes of Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens and David Bowie had in the year or two previously. I loved the way the song told a story (a slightly discomfiting, odd story at that) and how it audaciously included an exquisite and lengthy guitar solo (2 minutes and 12 seconds) that would become the bane of radio producers bred to keep musical offerings short and sweet (the whole song is six and a half minutes long).

Hotel California was the Eagles’ fifth album and they were already the biggest band in America when they embarked on its recording. Sadly, personal relationships in the band had already broken down (a repeating theme in the life of the band, despite which, amazingly, the band endured); nonetheless, personal enmities never stood in the way of the band creating ground-breaking music. Guitarist Don Felder came up with the Hotel California riff, which was then developed by Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Frey’s lyrics were inspired by an attempt to “expand our lyrical horizons and try to take on something in the realm of the bizarre, like Steely Dan had done”.

He certainly nailed it: the brooding imagery around this faded hotel in the middle of nowhere (the hotel in The Shining about sums it up in my head) is magnificently evocative and the lyrics are peppered with killer lines. I cannot conceive of a better line, given the preceding lyrics and leading into the iconic guitar solo, than “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave”. Then again, have there ever been two opening lines – “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair” – so evocative of a place and milieu? I could go on (“some dance to remember, some dance to forget” et al), but let’s instead just enjoy the whole piece and its wonderful duelling guitars at this live performance at Largo, Maryland, in 1977.

The Eagles
Film, TV, and Theatre

John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972)

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At my school we were encouraged to join one or more of the many extracurricular clubs and societies, and I recall a bewildering array of choices from archery to playing the zither (not really, but it begins with Z and illustrates the point). I chose Film Club because it didn’t involve any more effort than sitting in the lecture theatre and watching a movie, and this seemed like a fair extracurricular activity to me. Some students must have been in control of the actual film selection because I can’t imagine any of our teachers suggesting 1975’s violently dystopian sci-fi flick Rollerball (set in the then-distant future of 2018) or 1972’s gritty and nudity-containing mob movie, Prime Cut, yet both these movies figure prominently in my Film Club memories. Another movie that somehow made the cut was Deliverance.

Deliverance was a landmark 1972 movie produced and directed by British filmmaker John Boorman, and chronicles the story of a group of city slickers embarking on a canoeing adventure in the remote wilderness of northern Georgia. Burt Reynolds plays Lewis, the most seasoned outdoorsman and leader of the group, with Jon Voight playing his friend Ed, and newcomers Ned Beatty and Ronnie Cox appropriately playing novices Bobby and Drew. Unfortunately for all concerned, things don’t turn out quite the way they were planned.

The film is noted for the music scene near the beginning, in which one of the visitors, Drew, plays Dueling Banjos on guitar with a gifted banjo-picking country boy, played by fifteen-year old local Billy Redden (whose large head and almond-shaped eyes ticked the boxes for Boorman looking for a character suggesting an “in-bred from the back woods”, with all due respect to Redden). Redden didn’t actually play the banjo and wore a special shirt that allowed a real banjo player to hide behind him!

Duelling Banjos

Deliverance is also notorious for the scene later on in the movie when the adventurers are now deep in woods country, and in which Bobby and Ed encounter two shotgun-wielding mountain men. These men turn out to be the last people you would want to meet in such a remote setting, and they tie Ed to a tree by his neck whilst one of them puts Bobby through a gruelling and humiliating ordeal: he is compelled to strip down and then to “squeal like a pig” as his attacker torments him, before finally being raped. It’s grim viewing, and only relieved when Reynolds’ capable character Lewis happens upon the scene and comes to the rescue (if a little late for Bobby) by killing the rapist with his bow and arrow and inducing the second hillbilly to scarper into the woods. The rest of the film involves the panicked reactions of all concerned and the drama of their attempts to escape back to civilisation (where you can safely imagine Bobby would be remaining ever after).

There is a scene in which the guys fall from their canoes whilst riding a particularly dangerous stretch of rapids. Dummies were used in the filming but having viewed the scene, Burt Reynolds requested to have the scene re-shot with himself in the canoe rather than a dummy, in the interests of authenticity. Boorman agreed and Reynolds proceeded to ride the rapids, but fell out, smashed his shoulder and head on rocks and floated unconscious downstream, before waking up with Boorman at his bedside. Reynolds asked “How’d it look?” and Boorman said, “It looked like a dummy falling over a waterfall”!

Get a flavour of the movie by watching this montage below.

Music

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 Adagietto (1902)

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Although Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) is right up there in the pantheon of composers, his music gained its true currency only well after his death. Sure, he was famous in his lifetime as a conductor but his compositions were largely neglected and indeed banned in Europe during the Nazi era (Mahler was an Ashkenazi Jew), and it was only after 1945 that a new generation of listeners rediscovered his music and turned him into one of the most frequently performed and recorded composers which has sustained to the present day.

Mahler composed his Symphony No. 5 between 1901 and 1902, mostly during the summer months at his holiday cottage at Maiernigg in Austria (his “composing hut” is now a little museum). At nearly seventy minutes long, it’s a musical canvas with some serious scope, but today we’ll look at the fourth movement or Adagietto, a tender piece of music that was said to have represented his love for Alma Schindler whom he married in March 1902.

The Adagietto is undoubtedly the single most well-known piece of Mahler’s music. Leonard Bernstein conducted it during the funeral Mass for Robert Kennedy at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1968, but it was its use in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice that skyrocketed it to fame.

Death In Venice was German author Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella about a famous and ennobled writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, who is sojourning in Venice for health reasons and becomes increasingly obsessed with a young handsome Polish boy, Tadzio, who is staying in the same hotel on the Venetian island of Lido.

In the movie, Visconti turns von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) from writer to composer, which allows the musical score (which also includes music by Beethoven and Mussorgsky) to represent Aschenbach’s work. The ending scene in which the dying composer watches Tadzio strolling and wading through the seawater to the enraptured tones of Mahler’s Adagietto (before von Aschenbach promptly keels over dead) is striking. You can go watch the movie (despite the spoiler!) but for now, listen to the music itself:

Gustav Mahler
Poetry

Louis MacNeice’s Prayer Before Birth (1944)

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In good poetry there is so often a great last line, something that effectively closes the poem leaving the reader/listener with the white space/silence in which to reflect on their experience. Sometimes the last line has a sense of fade: take Ozymandias, for example (see here), in which the once-mighty statue of that ancient king now lies broken and decayed and the final line “The lone and level sands stretch far away” draws our attention to the barren desert in which the ruins reside and allows the irony to sink in.

Other poems end with an encapsulating line, summing up the theme of the entire poem in one line: Wilfrid Owen’s last line in Dulce Et Decorum Est (see here), after a series of shocking imagery about the grim realities of the front line, sums up the emptiness of the platitudes around “honour and glory” that the generals had hoped to instil into the common soldier: “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”).

Other poems end with a surprise, a jolt – often called the “trap door” or the “rug pull” – and today’s poem from Louis MacNeice fits the bill perfectly. See what you think…

Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) was an Irish poet and playwright, born in Belfast, and a member of the Auden Group, that loose affiliation of literary figures active in the 1930s and including W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis, names that have come down to modern times with perhaps more celebrity than MacNeice’s (and two of whom have appeared in the pages of this blog before, here and here). MacNeice’s body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, however, due to his appealing style and the fact that, like many modern English poets, he found an audience for his work through British radio.

Prayer Before Birth is a poem written at the height of the Second World War, and takes the form of an agonised plea from the mouth of an unborn infant in its mother’s womb. Dramatic in intensity, the poem bemoans the deplorable state of the world, but articulates that, whilst living in it is a painful experience, being born into it must be truly terrifying. It mirrors perhaps the growing modern trend of young people choosing not to have children due to their fears of what the world is becoming.

As pessimism goes, it’s hard to beat, but it’s incantatory rhythms, alliterations and repetitions gives it a hypnotic, ritualistic quality and, as I said, it serves up its final line with a powerful punch.

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Louis MacNeice
Art

Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (1971)

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As a boy, the Beano was my comic of choice, with occasional forays into the Beezer, the Topper, and the Dandy. Later, Warlord would come along, a now largely forgotten boys’ comic featuring stories centred around Lord Peter Flint (codename “Warlord”), Union Jack Jackson and Bomber Braddock (I would write to the comic for its free pack to become a “Warlord agent” with a badge and everything). By the eighties, all grown up, I had pretty much done with comics, but one notable exception came along in the guise of the series of underground comics written and drawn by Gilbert Shelton and featuring the “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers”.

The Freak Brothers were a trio of hippie stoners whose lives revolved around the procurement of recreational drugs and whose chaotic lives led them on various adventures. First appearing in 1968 in the underground counterculture newspaper The Rag, published in Austin, Texas, the characters were emblematic of the blooming hippie culture of the late sixties and soon would graduate to a dedicated comic book of their own: Shelton co-founded Rip Off Press in 1969 and published 13 issues of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic between 1971 and 1997 (so no, it was no weekly comic, it was issued as and when Shelton finished his latest piece). How they came onto my radar, I’m not entirely certain, though I was possibly drawn by the vibrant and promising covers:

The “brothers” (who were not actually siblings) consisted of Fat Freddy (overweight, yellow curly hair, moustache), Freewheelin’ Franklin (tall, skinny, bulbous nose, Mexican moustache, cowboy hat, ponytail) and Phineas Phreak (bushy black hair, joint-shaped nose). They live in San Francisco (where else?) and their adventures often serve to foil Norbert the Nark, the inept DEA agent who is continually trying, and failing, to arrest them. Meanwhile, a bonus comic strip at the foot of the page featured feline anti-hero, Fat Freddy’s Cat (which spawned its own spin-off comic series).

With drug use being the dominant theme, the stories are very much in line with the shenanigans of contemporaneous on-screen homologues Cheech and Chong. Far be it from me to confess some kind of fraternity with law-breaking drug-takers conspicuously failing to be model citizens but what can I say, I’m a cultural observer! Shelton’s comics are richly humorous and brilliantly drawn, even if very much of their time. They must have clicked with a whole generation of boomers for whom, as Freewheelin’ Franklin said, “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope”.

Gilbert Shelton
Music

Miles Davis’s Soundtrack to Elevator To The Gallows (1958)

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Rolling Stone described him as “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century” and it’s hard to argue with that appraisal of Miles Davis (1926–1991) the American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Not to everyone’s taste for sure (and certainly not to the other adult sharer of my household, who pretty much loathes the entire genre of jazz) and challenging at times to even the most willing of new listeners, but he is one of the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz.

Born in Alton, Illinois to a well-to-do family (he was born Miles Dewey Davis III), Miles went to study at the celebrated Juilliard School in New York, but dropped out and sought out, befriended and soon joined saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker’s bebop quintet, collaborating with him from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the ground-breaking Birth of the Cool sessions which would become the defining recording of the “cool jazz” genre, and in the early 1950s he recorded some of the earliest “hard bop”, the funky offshoot of bebop music. Ever innovative, he was always pushing the envelope and inventing genres along the way.

Davis signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records, and recorded the album ‘Round About Midnight in 1955. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he would lead into the early 1960s and with whom he would rule the jazz world. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959), the latter recording selling over five million copies in the US.

The piece I have singled out for our delectation today is a piece of cinematic cool, combining Miles Davis’s musical soundscape with some typically moody French art-house aesthetic provided by legendary screen goddess Jeanne Moreau. This scene is from the 1958 crime thriller movie Ascenseur Pour L’échafaud (Elevator To The Gallows), directed by Louis Malle. The soundtrack was recorded in one night, and improvised by Davis and four other musicians while they watched the relevant scenes from the film. Jazz critic Phil Johnson described it as “the loneliest trumpet sound you will ever hear, and the model for sad-core music ever since”.

Miles Davis

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