Authors Electric

Visions of Johanna - The Portrait of an Artist I began writing this blog the day after the Eurovision Song Contest had been shown on the BBC to great acclaim. It was a contest that had been held in my favourite city, Liverpool, and you can see above a picture of Bob Dylan singing Visions of Johanna in the same city in1966. This was a key work from his album Blonde on Blonde and with any luck you will be able to get the song too, although you don’t have to listen to it all. A couple of verses will give you the flavour. Anyway, it is a longstanding favourite of mine, and on the day of the Eurovision Song Contest I somehow came across this live recording of it from the 1966 Dylan concert at the Odeon Theatre in the city. (On the same day Everton happened to be playing Sheffield Wednesday in the FA cup, which they won.) I still have the programme that I bought on the day of the Dylan concert because, as we time travellers have a habit of saying, "I was there."   The Programme: ...

60 Years Ago Today   Memory is notoriously selective. In 1963 in the UK it was the coldest winter anyone could remember and my father had died the previous year. Talking this over with my brother recently, he remembers fondly how we made a fabulous slide from frozen snow in the side passage of our house - and of course1963 was also the year that The Beatles released  Please, Please Me  and began to take over the musical world. As Annie Ernaux says in her memoir, The Years (2017) – ‘Just listening to them you wanted to be happy’.   The Beatles: I have this idea about the circular nature of time and how we are able to revisit ourselves as we get older. This happened again when I caught sight of an article in my Sunday paper, ‘Why lost Beatles school gig tape could be saved for the nation’. It was an article about how The Beatles had played a gig at Stowe School in April 1963 and it featured the story of how 15 year old John Bloomfield had made a tape recording of the s...

What Was Remains I make no apologies for telling you about the people in this photograph, although the story may seem a little sentimental. Anyway, they are a group of ex sixth-formers who had met up in Liverpool towards the end of the 1960s and were at the time either working or beginning university studies. I received the photo recently as a Christmas present from a member of the group shown. It is one of two taken in 1971 outside The Palm House in Sefton Park by another of those in the picture.   At one of a number of re-union meetings a couple of years ago, I asked them all whether it was ok to write about the group in one of my monthly Authors Electric blogs, and they all agreed.* For various reasons, which I hope will become clear, not all were there at this re-union, but I will tell you about each one in the photo as far as I know their story in relation to myself. Friends are becoming increasingly important to me I get older.    There is Vince, perhaps the easiest...

 A Meeting with Macca * Hope Street: Paul McCartney '...supplied a real guitar case to be cast by the sculptor. McCartney attended the Liverpool Institute when it was a boys' school. So did George Harrison...'   A long time ago, maybe before some of you were born, I had two American pen-friends obtained through a popular music station named Radio Caroline: the first, Jo, was a leggy fifteen-year-old from New York who liked Bob Dylan and Ayn Rand, although not necessarily in that order; the second, Sandra, was a girl-next-door type from West Virginia who early in our correspondence sent me an intricately arranged wreath of chewing gum wrappers.  As my tale is more concerned with Sandra, we will leave any questions about Jo's liking for  The Fountainhead  to one side for the moment.   Anyway, the story is not really about my pen-friends but about Paul McCartney and how when I was fifteen I met him. I had just completed my paper round and, having grunted...

We're going away on January 8th for our annual pilgrimage to New Zealand for two months, so I thought I'd better get my my next two blogs ready and scheduled.           January's blog seemed to be going well: a reasoned discussion of something which I think is of some moment even if nobody else does. Then, as the old year died, something happened to stop me. I left Blogger for a moment and switched over to the football results. And there I saw something which shocked me and made me postpone January's blog to February.          League 2.  Portsmouth 0, Northampton Town 0           No, they must have got it wrong. Portsmouth have been rubbish all season but they've got a new manager now and he's put the fear of God in all the under-achieving players and they beat Dagenham and Redbridge last week and now everything would go BRILLIANTLY and they'd win and win and win...