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Drinking Fernet Branca with Flanagan in a Palma bar altered my relationship with space and time. We fast-forwarded to late afternoon, grinning at complicities that would have made sense to no one, except the playwright Alfred Jarry. Thus summoned, a diminutive, birdlike man entered the bar. He was wearing bicycling gear – a sweater, short […]
Prince Harry escapes to the South Pacific for some serious me time. But the best-laid plans… CHILLING ON TANNA WAS EPIC, ruminated Harry as he gazed out at the South Pacific sky streaked by startling bands of yellow and red as the sun rapidly set. He heard giggling, and glancing over his bronzed back, saw […]
THURSDAY, 8 APRIL 1965: The Graham Bond ORGANisation’s fractious gig at Klooks Kleek, West Hampstead, and a subsequent encounter with two acid-spiked Beatles in Soho. EVERYBODY’S HAIR WAS GETTING LONGER. Ginger Baker’s was a red fuzz framing his sucked in cheeks, pinned eyes and nicotine-veneered teeth. It was a face that threatened to eat you […]
(Attribution: MarkMarek: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en – no changes have been made) A Cautionary Tale: Christmas Eve 1978, the Moonlight Club, West Hampstead, London. FOUR GANGLING YOUTHS WITH SPIKY HAIR, stringy leather ties, skin-tight jeans and plimsolls are belting out a deafening hybrid of punk and reggae: the audience pogo and spit. Wannabes, hangers-on and groupies cluster at the […]
Writers engage the past and anticipate the future when weaving fact into fiction. Let me begin with a confession. I’ve never liked the word “faction”. There’s something curt and clunky about it. But it does do the job when describing the introduction of historical characters into fiction, or when novels and stories mysteriously anticipate the […]
An appreciation of Barry Flanagan In 1983, Barry Flanagan and Seamus Heaney collaborated on an illustrated version of The Names of the Hare, the Irish poet’s rendition of the medieval poem. Beneath three characteristically graceful leaping hares, there is a roll call of the impish creature’s names, this being the only way the hunter could get the […]
The influence of Aleister Crowley on musicians such as Bowie, Page, Ab Soul, Joe Meek and Graham Bond
Is there a connection between Rudolf Hess’s crash in 1941, the Duke of Kent’s (’42) & General Sikorski’s (’43)?
When I first hung out with Colin Casbolt on Ibiza forty or more years ago, I was struck by the contrast between his flamboyant hippie style and the knowledgeable way he spoke about Criminology, a subject he studied at university and later lectured on while living in Denmark. Here is a man who has looked […]