I voted for scouse princess Rebecca Ferguson in the X factor final. She's a self-effacing girl who doesn't realise just what a beautiful soul voice she possesses. It's clear Rebecca grew up listening to Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul. Without Aretha there would be no Rebecca. It has just been confirmed that Aretha is suffering from pancreatic cancer and has had surgery. I cannot express in words the joy her voice has given me over the years. She once said: "Soul to me is a feeling, a lot of depth and being able to bring to the surface that which is happening inside, to make the picture clear. The song doesn't matter....it's just the emotion, the way it affects other people"
So as we sit down to watch the X Factor final, let's remember that for all its popularity, it's a derivative show that rides on the shoulders of ground breaking artists. Aretha and her contemporaries defied poverty and racism to create a new kind of sound that continues to uplift us. What joy she must have felt to sing at the inauguration of Barack Obama as her country's first African American President. Let's say a little prayer for her tonight. Or, if like me you are not religious, you can write to her c/o the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detriot, which was where her late father preached and where she began singing as a child.
Archbishop Conti definitely more a unionist than Cardinal O'Brien. Conti reminds the crowd that Christianity arrived "before Scotland and England came into being". O'Brien drapes the Pontiff in a tartan scarf. Every kid in Edinburgh had a saltire.
The biggest cheer of the night came as the Pope left and stopped to bless a little boy with cancer interviewed by Jackie Bird the night before on Reporting Scotland.
Bumped into Professor Tom Devine, Scotland's leading historian, as we both gatecrashed the photographers' platform for a better view. He endorses my Scotsman column asserting that Scotland owes its statehood to the Catholic Church. Most relieved.
Glad I got a plug in for Mary's Meals on Five Live. They feed 400,000 kids in the developing world at school. Often this is the only way they get an education.
The Vat Pack (ok, international journalists) were sustained by complimentary Tunnocks Caramel wafers. The food of life?
The gold Papal Vestments were pure show biz, though I did think of Fellini for a second.
The crowd is not just smaller than 1982, but more varied. Spoke to Poles and Filipinos, lots of African families. Took leaflets from Sri Lankans protesting at the persecution of Catholic Tamils in their homeland.
Mass in the park not so easy for a crowd of 50,000 with about 2000 deckchairs between them. What do you do when ritual demands you kneel or sit? The most devout got muddy knees. I think they were Polish.
James MacMillan's sung Mass was incredibly moving as was all the music. Glad they sang Soul of My Saviour and included so much Gaelic and Latin.
Loved the Father who, descending from the altar after the Pontiff left, pulled out his mobile to photograph the crowd. The priests who distributed Communion were all accompanied by funky teenagers holding gold umbrellas.Quite a sight
We said goodbye to my lovely cousin and friend Cal (Campbell) Williams yesterday. It seems unfair that only famous people get obituaries. Cal deserved that treatment. He was witty, kind, charismatic, clever, talented and totally unique. Our coming-of-age friends shape the way we turn out in life and Cal had a huge influence on the adult I became. We were very close through our childhood, teens and twenties. We shared a desire to break away from the rather limiting life path that might have been our fate. Neither of us became artists, as we had planned, but we have both lead lives more creative than we thought possible. As is often the way, we hadn't seen much of each other these last few years - kept apart by geography and the distractions of work and family. Complacency too, because you just assume you can pick up where you left off. But Cal was taken by a cancer so virulent he had no chance to fight it and died less than three months after the diagnosis. If you care about someone take this advice - keep them close. I did get to see Cal while he was ill, and I did tell him I loved him. But how I regret not spending more time with one of the most important people in my life. After the funeral service at his home in Essex, I was chatting to a woman who used to commute with him every day when they both worked on the same Channel Four show. "He often talked of you," she said. "He was so proud of you." I was proud of him too and wish I could have told him in different circumstances. One last joke she recounted about him. Cal was an audio engineer known for his quick wit on the studio floor. Once the star presenter of a show was looking for a mike and shouted "Sound! Sound!" Cal shouted back "Presenter! Presenter!" To the credit of that star presenter she and her husband wrote Cal's partner the most lovely message of sympathy. I will never hear an unkind word about Richard Madley and Judy Finnegan again...Here is the tribune to Cal I read at his funeral
My last memory of Cal was sitting with him in this garden. It was a scorching day in
late June and he had just returned from another horrible spell in hospital.
But that afternoon he felt bit better and he asked us to take him down that lovely
avenue of trees to see the roses and a shrub he had planted.
Then we sat in the sun and reminisced. He worried about me getting burned.
It was wonderful to see him relaxed and relatively pain free for a short time.
Cal adored all three acres of this place and spent a great deal of time here.
He produced a beautifully bound book using his Apple Mac featuring photographs of
the garden through the seasons. One of John’s happiest memories of him
is sitting on the tractor-mower, full of smiles, cutting a swathe through the
meadow grasses
He was gradually remodelling the spaces you see here, to enhance the experience
visitors had walking through the different rooms of the garden. That was typical
of Cal. He loved to create beautiful experiences for the enjoyment of people
around him. All his life, Cal loved to give pleasure to his family and friends.
It might be a carefully chosen gift, a CD or tape of music he mixed, a piece of art
or just the memory of a perfect day. Cal had a talent for making perfect days.
Not everyone here will know all about his early life. He was born
in 1960, the son of Bridie and Bill Williams, a Scottish mother and
English father who met at a skating rink in wartime Aberdeen. He grew up
in Gourock, a seaside town on the River Clyde, along with his brothersWalter and
Barry. Gourock is a close and caring community, full of great people.
But like any small town, it can be a wee bit stifling for an imaginative teenager,
and Cal was always keen to stretch his wings, explore new places and possibilities.
His dad remembers him having a sense of adventure and wanderlust early on.
The mountains of the Scottish highlands lie across the Clyde estuary from
Gourock. Cal would often go there with a friend to build fires and explore the
woods. He’d get so wrapped up in his Boys Own adventure he would miss the
last boat home, much to his father's frustration. Later in life he loved to travel to
new places with John and their friends. He took his parents Bridie and Bill to
America on several occasions, arranging everything so that it was just right for
them. He reunited Bridie with her best friend friend, who had moved to
New Jersey. Bridie is no longer here, but Bill remembers those times with great
fondness and gratitude to Cal for his generosity. Everybody has a story to tell
about how Cal touched them in ways they often did not realise. His niece Frances
and nephew Derek spent their early years in a cot he had decorated. Now Frances's
babies sleep in the same cot when visting their grandparents and, like her, spend
hours staring at the Sgt Pepper style interpretation of the nursey rhyme, Three
Men in a Boat...
Cal’s artistic talent was inherited from his dad. When he was 14,
he was invited to Saturday drawing and painting classes at the
Glasgow School of Art. Some of the friends he made then went on
to gain international reputations as painters. Cal was equal to them.
He could see beauty in all sorts of places. There was a disused quarry behind his
housein Gourock that fascinated him. He spent hours there as a child,
photographing it, painting it, making observations. He was the first person I
knew who raked through skips and found treasure. NOBODY did objets trouve in
the 1970s. We used to spend hours in the Briggait, a Glasgow flea market where
you could find 1940s clothes. He adored Film Noir then. He could spot an art
deco piece from a mile away. He loved chrome, Bakelite, old gramophones and
quirky miniatures. The homes in which he lived with John, and his previous
partner John Wood,were defined by Cal’s amazing eye and the way he put all
these objects together. He was an artist in the true sense of the word because his
imagination shone through every aspect of his life.
It came out in his music. There are many people who fell in love to the sound
of Cal’s music back in the 1980s. Cal would compile tapes for our many parties
when we were students. His arrival was the high point of the evening. He
had incredibly broad taste and incorporated everything from Prince
to Kraftwerk to Ella Fitzgerald. He was ahead of the curve here too. Hip hop
had only just emerged in America, but in Cal we already had our
own mix master. If he had be born a couple of decades later he
would have been a superstar DJ like Calvin Harris or Fatboy Slim. But it seems
his fame has spread around the world anyway. John says Cal continued mixing and
regularly got requests for his recordings. They are sitting in CD racks from
Cambridge to Boise Idaho. And I am sure people are still falling in love to them.
Cal was a professional sound engineer. This was a childhood
passion too. I do not know how he got hold of them, but
he would play vinyl samples of BBC sound effects in his
Some friends who went along to hear the beautiful and talented Alicia Keys this week got R 'n B with extras when she told the audience: "Never stop fighting for your freedom Scotland". Alicia's mum is half-Scots I believe, and forced her daughter to sit down at the piano every night, with excellent results. Wonder if she could be persuaded to write a campaign song for next year...or get Jay-Z to provide some muscle...or even a few tips from the Obama campaign which he was closely involved in.
Forget Nick Clegg, Billy Bragg is surely the greatest living Englishman. He writes today:
A poll published this week suggested that the English were the least patriotic people in Europe. Only one in 10 of those asked would happily fly the cross of St George. The remaining nine blamed fear of being called racist, and "political correctness", for their reluctance to show any national pride. Surely, however, these are just excuses. It's not "political correctness" or fear that inhibits our patriotism – it is the dark heart of English nationalism that makes us feel uneasy about flying the flag of St George, the same nationalism espoused by the British National Party.
Billy is currently campaigning against the BNP in Barking. He represents a stream of English radicalism that includes The Levellers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and Thomas Paine. He remains, of course, a marvellous singer song writer. Here is the extraordinary moment in the 1980s when he performed Between the Wars live on Top of the Pops
Stumbled upon this extraordinary version of my favourite Irish song, Star of the County Down, from the Orthodox Celts. They are a hugely successful Belgrade band obsessed with all things Irish, a kind of singing theme pub, but with Eastern European accents. The musicianship is impressive - Serbians have their own version of the pipes. And they added the tin whistle to their line up of accordions, fiddles and bodhrans.
It's not all merry ploughboy stuff either. Look at this version of Drinking Song. Surely that's the Gallowgate on a Saturday afternoon? Who needs The Pogues...
Cannot ascertain where they stand politically. They have been around since before the Balkan wars began in the early 1990s. Are they also big in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo? Even google isn't that informative on this admittedly rather specialised strand of popular culture. Something called turbo-folk, was apparently a vibrant part of the Serbian music scene in the 1990s. Some bands protested against the aggressive Milosovec government, but others supported extreme Serbian nationalism. Celtic Rock, seems to be different from Turbo-folk. These guys look and sound like they are just out for a laugh. Let's hope so. They have an album track called Lock Lommond (sic). Maybe we could get them to play in Scotland for St Andrew's Day, then go for a jam session in Baird's Bar.
Go Lassie Go is changing her tune to the Uist Tramping Song. I'm heading to the island to live in an undergound house and listen to the wind whistle over the peat bog. The laptop is being left behind. I originally planned to blog, but even an energetic Lassie like me needs a rest occasionally. As well as the fleeces, wellies and Thinsulate headgear, I shall be pack:
Mad Men season 1 and 2
My Neighbour Totoro, an anime masterpiece from Hayao Miyazaki
Love, A Novel, by Toni Morrison (well it is Valentines)
Audio book The Fall of Troy by Peter Ackroyd for the drive to Oban
Sugar, A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott (birthday present from my darling daughter who remembered me once enthusing about a history of Cod. Honestly)
Toffee...not the tooth rotting stuff but my adorable King Charles Cavalier Spaniel
Sarah Vaughan the Great American Songbook
Queen Amang the Heather, a biography of the singer Belle Stewart
Belle was traveller born in a a bow tent on the banks of the Tay into a family of wonderful singers who kept the Gaelic oral traditional alive. I first heard her Queen Amang the Heather on the car radio while we were driving to Edinburgh to attend the count of the devolution referendum in 1999. So I have particularly fond memories of it. Belle never got as famous as Kenneth McKellar - nothing on YouTube - but her interpretation of Scots song had a bit more soul. No disrespect to the great man though, his semi operatic renderings have their place. Let's face it, he was all we were allowed to hear in those days. And isn't it strange ladies, with the passage of time, I realise that Kenneth was a rather handsome dude in his day....However, if you prefer your Hebridean tunes a bit less camp, here is Capercaillie with a song I also love. Lassie returns in a week.
Gerry Hassan has taken a break from imaging the future of political policy development and posted on his top 60 albums of the noughties. And as befits a leading public intellectual, his choices are placed firmly within a socio-cultural context. Here is how he introduces his Top Ten:
Then there is the state of music which engages with and shapes the political mood. Given what has happened in the last decade: Bush, Blair and the march of the neo-liberals, where are the subtle albums and songs about the state of democracy in Britain, America, and the never-ending wars? Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ hardly counts as a learned tome; instead where are the equivalents of the Specials ‘Ghost Town’ and even Pink Floyd’s ‘The Final Cut’, an album subtitled ‘A requiem for the post-war dream’?
Gerry is knowledgable about contemporary music, and such a huge fan of Gil Scott Heron must be a man of taste. Still, I confess most of his Top 60 choices are alien to me, because I let the noughties drift by in much the same way as the 90s...listening to Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and an infinite variety of Motown compilations.
I do find time for contemporary artists linked by a thread to such soul greats. But Gerry would probably consider the lyrical content of their work neo-liberal. I have daughters. We share common cultural ground in our enthusiasm for all things urban. When they were young I played them Aretha, they played me Alicia. So my musical decade is very different from Gerry's. It is defined by MTV Base of an evening, Trevor Nelson on Saturday afternoon and Beyonce for breakfast. From Missy Elliot Getting her Freak On at the start of the noughties, to Will.i.am giving it Boom Boom Pow at The End, R n' B is so driven, life-enhancing and exciting, you can almost forget the passing of time. It's been called brash, sexist and materialistic. Translate that as joyful, sexy and escapist. You can enjoy it and still see through all the misogynist nonsense - we regularly scream mock outrage at the groupie fantasies of the male stars. We love the divas, the dances, camp jokes about bouncing out of the after party on 24s...Beep Beep! Yes, even sleazy old R Kelly and his outsized wheels are venerated. I am sure Demos once wrote a paper on the dangers of that...
So here, in no particular order, is my own top ten. No albums, that's so 1995. And no obscure tracks either, this isn't the NME you know.
Outkast: Hey Ya! Yes this picture is exploitative, but in a post-modern way...
Mary J Blige: Family Affair. Produced by God, sorry, Dr Dre
Pharrell Williams: Frontin' Boy genuis in a rare bashful moment
Missy Elliot: Work It I'd also feel like doing this if I had just lost six stone
Beyonce: Crazy in Love Noughties Anthem, has to be
Tweet: Oops (Oh My) For lovely ladies without a lumber
Usher: Yeah Not one for the feminist consciousness raising group, but perfect for every other occasion
Kanye West: Gold digger/Diamonds are from Sierra Leone It not always about range rovers you know
R Kelly: Ignition Dare you not to dance
Eve ft Gwen Stephani: Let Me Blow Ya Mind Real girl power..samples one of the first reggae crossover hits
Rapper's Delight samples the song Good Times by Chic whose Nile Rodgers I recently interviewed for The Sunday Times. As well as being a brilliant and influential musician (he produced Sister Sledge, David Bowie, Diana Ross aand Duran Duran) he is a thoughtful and politically astute person. Or as another writer tweeted after reading my piece: "Boy Scout, Black Panther and God-like Genuis".
Rodgers has used his wealth to set up the We Are Family Foundation . It brings young people from different cultural backgrounds together in the wake of 9/11, builds schools in the developing world and runs an inspirational teen leadership programme.