Al Stewart — Cadogan Hall, October 9

The songwriting career of Al Stewart goes back over half a century, so even though he has produced little or no new material over the past decade, there was still a lot of ground to cover. I’ve been a fan for most of that time, first hearing Al probably on Capital Radio around or just before the release of Year Of The Cat, ie 1976. The first time I saw him was at the Hammersmith Odeon when he performed solo. The only date that fits is December 10, 1980, which sounds about right. I was living in Leeds at the time, so it was a long journey the day of the concert, and an even longer one back on the milk train. On the off-chance there is a recording, when he asks the audience “What do you wanna hear?”, the bloke who shouted “Nostradamus” was me.

Nostradamus is one of his epic songs, so I wasn’t really expecting him to perform it Wednesday night, but Tanglewoods is based on it. The show began with his backing band The Empty Pockets performing their own set with multi-instrumentalist Marc Macisso coming in on harmonica for the third track. Although they look extremely youthful, they have actually been around more than a decade. As guitarists go, Josh Solomon is a fair substitute for Tim Renwick or Adam Yurman, or even Peter White on acoustic guitar. They ended with Tanglewoods.

Al Stewart in concert.

At the interval I managed to buttonhole keyboard player/vocalist Erika Brett, who is also Josh Solomon’s wife. I asked her if she realised Al had once lived just down the road from Cadogan Hall at Elvaston Place. She knew the song; she also knew about Al’s illustrious visitor there, so clearly these are dedicated acolytes.

After the interval, Al opened with Sirens Of Titan, a slightly off-beat choice; On The Border is a popular opening number, but when I saw him at Croydon in 2013 he was not performing with an electric band. The last time he did so was with Shot In The Dark save for the special Year Of The Cat events at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

After Sirens Of Titan we were treated to an electric version of Post World War Two Blues followed by Time Passages with Marc on sax, then Flying Sorcery followed by a new song, loosely based on Primo Carnera, then On The Border. After his anecdote about Robert Fripp, Midas Shadow seemed oddly out of place; this was followed by Broadway Hotel, which in the original album recording has a violin solo, but here Marc substituted on flute. With the enigmatic One Stage Before and the inevitable show closer, Al performed no fewer than six tracks from his biggest album. As we were literally a stone’s throw from King’s Road, Chelsea, it occurred to me he might have included Gina In The King’s Road, but it doesn’t appear to have occurred to him. Carol, the opening track from Modern Times would also have been thematic, but like I said, there is so much material to choose from.

As well as another new song, about the mythical Prester John, Al performed the autobiographical Almost Lucy sharing the lead vocal with Erika.

According to the programme, Al’s first four albums are his least favourite. While some criticism may be made of the production of Bedsitter Images, all four include some masterful pieces. Whatever his lyrical prowess, Al has consistently produced some exceptionally beautiful melodies like Song Out Of Clay from Orange and House Of Clocks from the much later Down In The Cellar.

The inevitable encore was anything but inevitable, a souped up version of another of Al’s epic songs, Roads To Moscow, another track from Past, Present & Future. The tour finishes at Basingstoke at the end of the month. And his next album? Al turned 74 last month, but we shall see.

[The above concert review was originally published on Medium, October 10, 2019].

Paul Raymond (1945–2019)

A time-serving member of legendary rock band UFO died yesterday.

If you are not a dedicated heavy metal fan, you may associate the name Paul Raymond with an entrepreneur who died in 2008. Paul Raymond the musician was born at Saint Albans on November 16, 1945 and began his career in 1964. At that time he was jazz-oriented, but 12 years later joined UFO as a replacement for Danny Peyronel, who was briefly the band’s first keyboard player.

Paul Raymond (1945–2019)

UFO was founded way back in 1968 with Mick Bolton on lead guitar. Not to be confused with singer-songwriter Michael Bolton, he quit the band in 1972 and vanished off the face of the Earth after two unique albums which included some incredible soloing. The hard core of the band though was always lead vocalist Phil Mogg, bass player Pete Way, and drummer Andrew Maynard Parker. Way and Mogg are both Londoners; Andy Parker was born at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire.

Paul Raymond joined in what has been called the Schenker era, serving no less than four terms: 1976–80, 1984–6, 1993–9 and 2003 up until his death. The photograph above was taken at the O2 in London on April 5 this year during his last ever performance. As well as keyboards, Paul played rhythm guitar and chipped in with backing vocals. He also wrote and co-wrote a fair amount of material.

It would take more space than allotted here to list all his musical achievements, but for UFO fans and neophytes alike, the Strangers In The Night album must surely be among the most outstanding. Considered by many good judges to be one of the finest if not the finest double heavy metal album ever made, it was recorded in Chicago and Louisville in the autumn of 1978.

Though incredibly he said he was not satisfied with it, Schenker’s improvised solo on Rock Bottom is likely one of the greatest ever recorded, Raymond enhancing it with a race on keyboards. Another very fine album is the much later A Conspiracy Of Stars on which he played keyboards, co-writing The Real Deal with Phil Mogg. Outside of UFO he also played with the Michael Schenker Group and Waysted, the latter with Pete Way.

Off-stage, rock musicians can be temperamental or worse, but trawling through interviews with Paul Raymond, he always comes across as a genuinely nice guy. He was still working outside of UFO at the time of his death, and his official website will doubtless be continued.

The band were said to be in shock and have not commented much at the time. A private person, Paul appears never to have married but is survived by his partner Sandra.

Like another musician who shares his given name, Paul Raymond was left-handed; Paul McCartney is now 76. Recently, the 75 year old Mick Jagger underwent heart surgery for a serious complaint, and today is Ritchie Blackmore’s seventy-fourth birthday. Without wishing to sound the alarm, over the next decade and more, the cream of the finest generation of rock musicians will be with us no longer, but don’t go writing any obituaries yet: Paul appears to have been the first member of UFO to die, Chuck Berry died at 90, and Les Paul at 94.

[The above obituary of Paul Raymond was first published on Medium, April 14, 2019, the day after his death].

Race, Class, And Gender In The United States: An Integrated Study

This book is complete rubbish. It would be tiresome to review every chapter or even most of it, but the chapter on The Wage Gap: Myths And Facts is as good as any to analyse. The term “people of color” is used throughout the book, as here, and on page 144 the reader is told "The U.S. labor force is segregated by sex and race”.

Yes and no. The word segregation used in this sense implies compulsion. In 1992, the year concerned, there was little in the United States that was segregated by race, and women were excluded from certain fields simply because…Even today, there are few women working in engineering and related fields, not because they are excluded by law but because this is not women’s work, however much idiots like the authors of this book whine about gender being a social construct.

Page 146: “The Wage Gap is One of the Major Causes of Economic Inequality in the United States Today”. No it was not and is not.

Page 147: “The Cause of the Wage Gap is Discrimination”.

No it is not. In practice, the only way such a wage gap can be enforced is by legislation, and legislation “against differential pay rates" for men and women was enacted in the United States back in the 1960s.

By the time this book was published, the gender pay gap myth had been thoroughly deconstructed by among others Thomas Sowell, yet even in 2017 the same type of idiots who wrote Race, Class And Gender…are pushing the same lies and nonsense and the same “solution”, ie legislation. Editor Rothenberg has gone on to write reams of rubbish about the chimera of white privilege, something for which, ironically, she is highly paid.

[The above book review was published originally on Medium, November 16, 2018].

What Killed Eric Garner?

Eric Garner died July 17, 2014 as a result of a tussle with police officers in New York City. He was back in the news last month when Daniel Pantaleo, one of the officers involved, was finally fired, which is probably as near to justice as the victim will get.

As we have long come to expect in such cases, opinion is sharply divided into two camps. On the one side are the race hustlers with their incessant and at times ludicrous chants of racism, racism, racism, while on the other side there are those who say basically the victim deserved it, the police were only doing their always extremely difficult job. Heck, these guys are really angels.

Regardless of who killed Eric Garner, the question has yet to be asked, what killed him? Let us forget for this purpose the fact that he was black. What sort of man was he?

According to the three authors of New York Police Officer Won’t Face Criminal Charges In Eric Garner Death, published in The Wall Street Journal later the same year, he was a father of six, a grandfather, and had been arrested more than thirty times since 1980. He was born September 15, 1970, so clearly started young, and was quite likely a juvenile delinquent.

Eric Garner about to die.

His arrest record included assault — which can be something as trivial as a shove; resisting arrest — which means anything the police want it to mean; grand larceny — which is definitely serious, ie theft of considerable value; and most tellingly, selling unlicensed cigarettes. It was this latter that led to his death. It should also be pointed out that Eric Garner was seriously overweight, and had a history of asthma. No one should be surprised when a man who fits that description is struck down at the age of 43, even without being held in a choke hold while resisting arrest.

Although no information is available, it is fair to say he was not a college graduate and perhaps not even a high school graduate. On the other hand, he was definitely not a career criminal, and was most definitely not a menace to society. Eric Garner was a member of the underclass, a group that is often erroneously identified by race by those who wilfully ignore the growing number of whites caught in the same downward spiral. So how did this come to be?

A hundred years ago, a man of Eric Garner’s limited talents could have eked out an existence pushing a broom. Many not only did but raised a family on one income. True, in real terms the standard of living for all working people was far lower than it is today; most homes did not have a telephone, there were no mobile phones, of course, nor television, and homes with no running hot water or no water at all were far from uncommon. The modern welfare state did not exist, and those who fell on hard times could have it very rough indeed. Best not talk about the difference in medical treatment. Would Eric Garner have lived to even 43 had he been born in 1870 rather than 1970?

All that being said, one thing that did not exist in those bad old days was the poverty trap. The colossal increase in the output of especially consumer goods, including food, has resulted in plunging prices, which is good news, but only for those who have money to spend. This output and the corresponding fall in prices is due to two things: advances in technology, and the accumulation of capital. The technological advances are nowhere greater than in the realm of computers. To give just one example, on February 10, 1927, a famous trans-Atlantic telephone call was made between the London office of music publisher Lawrence Wright and the New York office of lyricist Edgar Leslie. It lasted around half an hour and cost nearly £150. That was around a year’s salary in the UK at the time. Today, most of us think nothing about “hanging out” with people on the other side of the world for hours at a time.

While increases in other sectors have not been so spectacular, we are still faced with the “problem” of distributing this massively increased output. Generally we use the financial system to do this: workers are paid money which they spend on everything from rent and mortgages to food, clothes and holidays. But what happens when goods and services are produced in abundance by an increasingly smaller workforce, especially when many in that workforce have highly specialised skills? Augmenting the financial system is the tax system; the government takes money from the wealthy, from businesses, from highly paid workers, and redistributes it to those unable to find paid employment. That in addition to paying for emergency services, local administrations, public libraries and so on.

Adherents of socialism go much further, they seek to increase taxation on both the wealthy and corporations. Some, extreme socialists and communists, advocate confiscating corporations and businesses over a certain size if not everything, claiming this will not only increase output but deliver goods and services to everyone — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. And how precisely is this to be achieved? As Leon Trotsky pointed out infamously, under socialism, he who does not work does not eat is replaced by he who does not obey does not eat. Would even Eric Garner have preferred to live under the tyranny of a monster like Trotsky than take his chances selling illegal cigarettes?

There is though a better way, basic income, the freedom dividend currently being advocated by Andrew Yang. Basic income paid unconditionally to every citizen out of newly created debt-free money would not only put more money in everyone’s pocket, it would, coupled with the abolition of minimum wage laws, destroy the poverty trap. This would mean most of those who are currently unemployable at market rates would be able to find low paid jobs to supplement their incomes.

Many objections are raised to this, usually pseudo-moral objections by academics, members of think tanks who are paid ludicrous salaries to churn out reams and reams of useless documents that no one ever reads. But the biggest apparently valid objection raised is you can’t simply print money, this will cause inflation. This completely ignores the fact that the banks do print money, electronically. The central banks including the Federal Reserve print it by quantitative easing. The commercial banks do it by lending money: every bank loan creates a deposit; every repayment destroys a deposit. Clearly, printing money per se is not the solution, otherwise every government on Earth could simply print money and give it to its citizens, which would result in their having enough to paper their walls but not enough to buy a loaf of bread. But we should not allow the common tactic of raising the spectre of hyper-inflation to frighten us into rejecting basic income. Without it we will see more pressure on the underclass to find paid work, work for which they are unsuitable, and more attempts to control them.

It should be noted that however much austerity any government requires its people to undergo, the one thing for which it can always find money is war. Ludicrous though it may sound, the conventional wisdom is that the Great Depression was “cured” by rearmament for the Second World War. During the war itself, men who had previously been languishing “on the dole”were put into uniform and sent abroad to kill and die, just like in the First World War. Some of these men were every bit as “unemployable” as Eric Garner. Although there was a shortage of consumer goods, no production of planes, ships, or ordnance was ever halted because the government ran out of money. No nation ever lost a war because it ran out of money. If the United States can afford war after foreign war, it can afford to pay all its citizens a basic income. And so can many other sovereign nations.

[The above article was first published on Medium, September 18, 2019].

The Police Are Not Your Friends, Colin

In 2013, Colin Flaherty published White Girl Bleed A Lot. Subtitled The Return Of Racial Violence To America And How The Media Ignore It, its subject matter is self-evident.

Two years later he followed it up with Don’t Make The Black Kids Angry, which has a similar, thematic subtitle: The Hoax Of Black Victimization And Those Who Enable It.

Colin also used to upload videos regularly to YouTube, but with the sudden war on “right wing” content prompted by the election of Donald Trump, he was kicked off that medium. Although his compilations old and new are still uploaded to the video hub of the world by fans, Colin can now be found at his own website, and also on podcast.

People like Colin are too easily branded bigots. In case you hadn’t guessed it, his thesis is that there is indeed a race war raging in the United States, but not the fantasy war waged by “white supremacists” and “Nazis” so beloved of Elizabeth Warren (the whitest woman in America) and fake Mexican “Beto” O’Rouke, rather it is a war waged by black Americans against whites and everybody else.

Colin Flaherty

Superficially, this thesis is very plausible. The crime statistics for black Americans are absolutely horrendous, and there is at times real animosity, some of it apparently racial. But not everything that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck really is a duck. The reality of this “black” crime wave is a lot more nuanced.

Firstly, violent crime the world over is committed primarily by males between the ages of about fifteen and forty-five. One must be careful using the word violent because slapping somebody’s face is a violent act, so is exploding a bomb in a crowded shopping mall. Let us though assume that violent crime with a capital V is indeed far more prevalent among American blacks than the rest of the population, is this really a racial phenomenon?

One person who disagrees is Thomas Sowell, who is clearly a Colin Flaherty fan. Sowell gives cogent reasons for this, in particular, there has been a literal explosion of crime among American blacks since the 1960s. When he was growing up in Harlem in the 1930s, street crime was all but unknown. Poverty among blacks at that time was a lot more prevalent than it is today when thugs playing the knockout game assault strangers in the street then upload videos of their handiwork for the world to marvel at. In short, there are social causes for this massively increased crime rate rather than racial ones.

One of these social causes is what Colin rightly identifies as the denial, deceit and delusion of the elites, including and especially the media. In order to fix a problem, we must first recognise what that problem is. Where Colin goes astray is his claim that black victimisation is a hoax, and especially with his oft’ repeated mantra that there is a “war on cops” in America, mostly by blacks. In short, the police are blameless, always, they are hated, despised, attacked, even murdered, for no good reason. This kind of selective amnesia and myopia is not unique to Colin, and he is old enough to know better, old enough to recall first hand the Rodney King incident, even if his only recollection is of the riots that followed the total acquittal of King’s assailants, the thugs who stood over him as he crawled on his hands and knees, who beat him 56 times in 81 seconds, laughing as they did so.

On the other side from Colin are the Black Lives Matter crowd who see only a war on blacks by the police. The reality is that in the United States, the police routinely kill unarmed civilians of all races; women as well as men, at times even the young are not spared.

In addition to shooting first and asking questions as an afterthought, the police have a disgraceful track record of gratuitous assaults on citizens, abuses of power, harassment, and lying about their misdeeds. The evidence for this is far more plentiful than the video clips Colin’s supporters send him of black mobs rioting in the streets.

Added to this is the fact that while we expect thugs to behave like thugs, whatever their race, the public has a right to expect professionals to behave like professionals when engaging with them.

A few examples will suffice:

In January 2016, an unarmed white man named Daniel Shaver was shot dead by the trigger happy Philip Brailsford at an hotel in Mesa, Arizona. The murder, for that is what it was, was filmed, but a jury refused to convict.

An even more outrageous violation was the 2014 murder of another white man, Dillon Taylor, in Utah. Taylor was wearing earphones and walking away from Officer Bron Knox, so it was hardly surprising he “ignored” the order to stop. Knox shot Taylor in the back, then immediately handcuffed him as he lay dying. The district attorney refused to indict, and to add insult to injury, a judge dismissed a suit by the victim’s family.

The bottom line is that in the United States, an unarmed citizen can be shot dead at any time by the police with total impunity. These and similar incidents tend to suggest it is not blacks who over-react to police brutality but whites who are far too tolerant of it.

In September 2016, the unarmed Terence Crutcher, a black man, was shot dead by Betty Shelby at Tulsa. As with the murders of Daniel Shaver and Dillon Taylor, the execution was captured on video. The shooting attracted the attention of then Presidential candidate Donald Trump, who said the victim did everything he was supposed to do. He went on to suggest that “people like that” should not be policing the streets.

Shelby was tried for manslaughter rather than murder, and acquitted. And, would you believe, she was given the task of training police officers to react to similar situations? Donald Trump appears to have had nothing more to say about the case.

Apologists for American police claim it is an extremely dangerous profession. Often we hear words to the effect that every time a police officer steps outside his front door he puts himself at risk. This is a gross exaggeration; most police work is routine and not dangerous in the slightest. Having said that, there are certain situations which can be potentially dangerous in a country that is more obsessed with guns than any other nation on Earth. Traffic stops at night are of particular concern, but citizens are always at far greater risk from the police than vice versa.

Returning to the subject of professionalism, the death of Sandra Bland highlights just how unprofessional the police can be, and how arrogant, because her encounter with State Trooper Brian Encinia was captured on video. And he didn’t care.

Miss Bland was clearly a young woman with an attitude about being black, and very likely about being a woman, but watch the video and decide for yourself who was in the wrong here, who was the professional, who was supposed to be the professional? The breaking point is where Encinia orders her to put out her cigarette. On what authority? She refuses, and he goes ballistic.

Obviously, whatever political or other issues Sandra Bland had, she was clearly a young woman with psychiatric problems, but Encinia must be held at least partly responsible for her later suicide. In effect, this woman died for nothing.

Examples of actual police brutality, including against women, are easy to find with a simple Google search, but here are a couple.

Last year, no fewer than six police officers manhandled a 65 year old female motorist in Georgia, as with Sandra Bland, over a triviality. This incident was likewise caught on video, and led to the resignation of Officer James Legg, who insisted he did nothing wrong. Do they ever?

The homeless Marlene Pinnock was walking barefoot alongside a main road when she was challenged by a police officer. Clearly there would have been a concern that she was either under the influence of alcohol or drugs, if not mentally impaired in some way. The video of her gratuitous beating by a thug in uniform can be found all over YouTube. The outcome of her civil suit against Los Angeles police was reported by a local CBS station.

Many more examples could be added to this list. Like most American adults, Colin Flaherty drives a car. If he has ever been stopped or challenged in other circumstances, he clearly hasn’t experienced this kind of treatment. If he had, he wouldn’t write such rubbish about America’s police.

We will not mention here the countless other examples of how the police bend and at times break the law to inflict misery on a broad demographic of innocent citizens, such as contrived stopping and searching of motor vehicles and grotesque seizures under Draconian civil asset forfeiture laws, but we will mention the recent murder trial of former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger.

The incident that led up to this case was simply remarkable. Guyger had finished a long shift, and was obviously on automatic pilot if not in a trance when she walked to her apartment in a multi-storey block, put her key in the door, then realised there was someone inside. Taking out her weapon, she walked into the living room and opened fire on the dude who was sitting on her sofa eating ice cream. It was only after mortally wounding Botham Jean she realised she was not in her own apartment, but in the corresponding apartment on the floor above.

Difficult though this is to believe, it is undoubtedly the truth, but so was what she said on the witness stand, namely that she intended to kill whoever was inside. Which might have been…a 10 year old juvenile delinquent burglarising the place; an authorised agent from the landlord making an emergency utility investigation; a police officer investigating a break-in…Castle doctrine or not, is it reasonable to kill an intruder on your property under any circumstances, especially when — as per her police training — she should have retreated and called for back up, by which time she would probably have realised her initial mistake?

The reader is invited to contrast the calm professionalism in the way the British police took down two dangerous terrorists with the way the American police routinely kill the innocent. That contrast is stark.

Returning to the Amber Guyger trial where on conviction she received the extremely lenient sentence of ten years, we witnessed the bizarre spectacle of the victim’s brother “hugging” the killer, and of the black trial judge actually giving Guyger her own Bible. Instead of commenting on these extreme acts of forgiveness and compassion by “the fellas and their lovely ladies”, Colin Flaherty chose to gloat over the recent murder of one of the prosecution witnesses in the case. Colin is no spring chicken, but if like not a few older men he should ever end up on the business end of American policing for the first time, he will realise both how wrong he is, and what an enormous apology he owes most American blacks.

[The above article was first published on Medium, October 18, 2019].