MILE OAK MUTTERINGS

5TH SEPTEMBER 2010

As you can imagine my last week or so in the UK has been hectic. There has been so much to fit in before I drag myself back to the sunshine. Still I expect I will cope when I have to go back on Wednesday.

I have talked before about my deep love for the Isle of Wight, in fact as their own advertising so aptly says “I Love Wight”. So my mum and I decided to have a day out. She hadn’t gone to the island by public transport since the 1970s and in all her visits in my lifetime she has had to drive round, and hence not been able to just enjoy the views. So off we trolled to catch the train and the catamaran. Unsurprisingly it was grey and drizzly when we left, but if we were going to wait for a sunny day we might never have gone. However, the Isle of Wight has never let me down yet and true to form the sun came out as the tide came in. We had lunch in Cowes and no matter where I travel around the world it is still one of my favourite places. The whole vista of the mainland stretches out in front of you with yachts, ships and lively sea filling the middle ground until you reach the beautiful stone walls of the esplanade that frame the entire picture. There is also a particular smell to the Solent. No other sea in the world smells the same. I don’t know if it is a certain type of seaweed, but it is unmistakeable and I love it. Although the sun had come out I did still have my pashmina underneath my snotty yachty waterproof which was done up to my nose because the wind was so cold – it does have to be said that my mother thought that I was being a wimp, but then she had found Cyprus too warm in April, when I still had my cardigan firmly on. 

On Monday I met up with my ex-husband for a drink. We hadn’t seen each other for about 4 years so it was lovely to catch up with him. The last time we saw each other we were trying to sort out who was going to divorce whom and I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, so it hadn’t been the most salubrious of meetings. I had heard he was living back in West Sussex and, while trying to clear some things out of my mum’s attic, I had found some of his stuff that I didn’t know was still around. I thought, therefore, that this might be a nice opportunity to erase any tension that may have remained between us. We decided to meet in a pub in Portslade Old Village called The Stag as this was between our two bus routes. He was there when I arrived and he indicated that he was going to drink up so that we could leave the place immediately. Sadly Brighton had been host to an EDL (English Defence League) march on Monday (although to be fair only fifty people had shown up to take part in that, while 200 people turned up to protest against them, so well done Brighton) and some of the stragglers had arrived in The Stag who, when ordering a drink, had requested ‘anyfing as long as it ain’t black’. We thought it probably wouldn’t be a good way to begin the evening if one of us started a fight with someone at the bar for being an ignorant pig. While we are on the subject – how can they be the English Defence League when they can’t speak the English properly that they purport to be defending, or is that just me being picky? As I have said many times: ‘I may be common, but I am not a peasant!’ Anyway, we tried the pub a couple of doors up - The George. I hadn’t been in there since I was a teenager but I swear they used to at least have carpets! So after a drink in there we decided to try the Battle of Trafalgar which was about ten minutes walk away. I had noticed by this point that the theme of the evening did seem to be jingoistic pub names. We finally settled in here as we couldn’t be bothered to wander any further, but when I went to the toilet I did see that the doors were still the ones where you had to put pennies in the slot. Portslade as Brighton and Hove’s dodgy relative - surely not. The long and the short of the evening was that Simon and I were able to part on good terms and it doesn’t matter if we see each other next week, or not again for 50 years, we can do so now with no bad blood between us. I may be unusual in this but I cannot see the point of antagonism between people after they have split up. Yes, there is the initial anger, after all if there wasn’t a problem you would still be together. But when that has passed then you have to remember that this person shared your life for no matter how long or short a space of time and therefore you must have cared about them at some point. You don’t have to see them regularly but it is nice to know how they are doing. I feel like that about all the people who have come and gone in my life, whatever the relationship. You may both move on and thus not need the relationship any more, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want them to have a pleasant life. The evening was also an agreeable reminder as to why we got together in the first place, as when you have split up with someone it is very easy to wonder what on earth you saw in them. Don’t get me wrong I do not want to get back with Simon and I know that would be the last thing he would want either, but we had a good laugh together and that is not something to be sniffed at. 

I was chatting to Simon about the blog and I said to him you do know that as I am going to see Robert Plant this week, you will have a much smaller paragraph than him (no change there then I could see him thinking), but I do seem to have wittered on for a while. Not like me I know!

So – Robert Plant. I could so easily have called this week’s blog Ponderings on the Plantmeister or some such thing and used up every single word just talking about his voice and stage presence, but when it comes down to it, there is so little to say that can even convey a small part of the effect that he has on an audience just by walking on stage. You have to experience it to know. He can raise an eyebrow and the whole crowd just sway with him. I have to say that I am a huge Led Zeppelin fan but I am with him wholeheartedly in his refusal to regroup. I would give a limb to have been able to see Zep at their height, at which time I was about 2 years old, but it was over 30 years ago. These people (apart from Mr. Bonham obviously who is no more) are all still fabulous musicians but you cannot, whatever walk of life you are in, do the same things in your 60s as you can in your 20s and 30s. You may be able to do better things, or different things, but not the same things. Robert Plant’s voice has mellowed and matured and listening to ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ in the car the next day it is obvious that he would not sound right doing the visceral wailing that he did then. His timbre is deeper for a start. It must also be galling to be remembered for only 12 years of your professional career when you have since had 30 years of a successful solo career. During the concert there were the obvious calls of ‘just one more concert with Jimmy, go on’ and he just laughed and said ‘Ah...England!’ He is respected all over the world for his music, but as per our very British psyche we like to live in the past. I may not have liked everything he has done as a solo artist but that is just from sheer individual musical taste and not an indication of the quality, which has always been brilliant. However, I totally understand his need to constantly be trying something new and not getting stuck in a rut. 

The ‘Band of Joy’ group and album, for which this was the preview concert, has a sound that I can only describe as heavy bluegrass, although this doesn’t really begin to cover it. It is very blues and gospel based, but it still rocked. I struggled with some of the more country aspects of the concert, but again we are back to taste. He took a back seat for some of the show too as the Band of Joy consists of six musicians and Buddy Miller in particular was fabulous with Planty on harmonica. Patty Griffin also has a great voice and their duet on ‘Monkey’ was amazing. He did perform some Zeppelin tracks, but he chose ones that suited his voice and which had been rearranged to give them a new feel. ‘Houses of the Holy’ was stupendous, but as always it was ‘Gallows Pole’ that brought the house down. Most importantly though, you could see that he was enjoying himself and quite frankly the audience reaction was secondary, which I think is as it should be. Going out there every night and doing the same songs for 45 years in a tired fashion does not actually give the audience what they want despite the fact that they think it is. What we want to see is Robert Plant the singer, not an automaton - which is what could have happened had he not chosen to constantly explore new avenues. Also, of course, it has to be said, that even at 62 he is still gorgeous, with his flowing mane of hair and beard speckled with grey which just serves to accentuate the crags. Attractiveness, for me anyway, has never come from pretty boy handsomeness, it is all to do with the life in the eyes; the charisma; the voice and the intelligence that a person exudes which all come together to form a whole. I have no interest whatsoever in Robert Plant as a person. I don’t care about his politics (although I am pretty certain he is not a member of the BNP!), where he does his shopping, who he is currently married to, or any other of the minutiae that seem to make up celebrity magazines. One of the things that I have to say always disconcerts me when I see him live is the amount of middle-aged, middle-class men that seem to be unable to control themselves from shouting out: ‘I love you Robert’. Bless them. As he has famously said: ‘you know, people can’t fall in love with me just because I am good at what I do.’ Yet as a culture don’t we try and do just that. All I know is that over the last 25 years the sound of his voice has cheered me when I have been in the darkness, which is more often than I care to remember right now; and perhaps more importantly when I have been in the light he has provided the soundtrack to my life and made the light shine brighter. However, I think what said it all about the concert was a remark I overheard as we were walking back to Kentish Town Tube station. Someone said with great relief: ‘well, that was better than Bon Jovi!’ Talk about damning with faint praise! 

So, I have run out of space again and I haven’t discussed the day spent watching Aidan and Luke play cricket on Southwick Green while Stuart, Becky, Carl and Natalie made me rock with laughter. Or the family tea we organised on Wednesday where Aidan and I (as the two youngest, although at 34 I really should start associating with the grownups rather than the 10 year old, but I think he speaks more sense) hid in the kitchen. Each time we took a drink out, or some food, we were taking the mickey out of how often war was discussed. He would come running into the kitchen and whisper '27 seconds that time’. Obviously I remained out of the conversation as I didn’t want to start an argument; until I could bear it no longer and had to state that it took just as much courage, if not more, to be a conscientious objector, as you are being vilified by your own side as well as the enemy. At which point the garden became very quiet and I went back indoors to giggle with Aidan. 

So just to end my Plant-themed prevarications, here is a quote from ‘The Battle of Evermore’ that fits in here quite nicely: ‘The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath.’ and I think that has never been more apparent than the age in which we now live, where we are trying to pick up the pieces in a world ravaged by constant war and suffering.