Terrorism is not the greatest current threat to the British way of life

November 22, 2015 / Tom King / Leave a comment

It’s now almost eight months since the face of British politics was decisively altered. Yet the full impact of the UK’s 2015 general election has still to be understood by politicians, let alone the voting public.

You might think this is hyperbole. A lot of people said the same thing after the 2010 election, for instance, due to the apparent breakthrough of the Lib Dems as the third party – and the prospect of perpetual coalition government.

But my view is no exaggeration. The reality of the election is this: we have been left with a Conservative Party vulnerable only to its own hubris. The opposition is either disinterested, splintered, or simply invisible.

We are now in a situation where world events threaten to further diminish our ability to discern the dangers of our domestic political environment. The emphasis on responding to recent attacks is understandable, but not at the cost of allowing a majority government to do whatever it wants.

In the immediate aftermath of the election I retained some hope that with such a small majority, a combination of internal squabbling and a united opposition might force the Conservatives to veer away from Austerity Mk II. And for a brief moment in October, this looked like it could yet ensue.

View of Westminster from Embankment Bridge

The tax credits issue threatened to throw some light on the punishing and unnecessary way in which George Osborne is planning to slash and burn the welfare state. Had Labour peers sided with their Lib Dem counterparts in the House of Lords, the government could have suffered a decisive defeat. But instead, Labour trimmed their sails just as the wind turned in their favour, adopting a halfway house position that gave Osborne breathing space to come up with a “solution” by the time of his Autumn Statement.

I confidently predict that that solution will be spun as a major climb down on his part, but will give almost no real relief to the people against whom the cuts were targeted.

Of course, since the Lords sent Osborne back to the drawing board, events have moved on rapidly. UK politics, like those of every other Western democracy, are currently dominated by questions of foreign policy, terrorism and conflict.

The irony of this should not be lost on anyone who witnessed as recently as April the major parties of a still-influential nation conniving to pretend that we are serenely unaffected by world events.

While of course we should take every sensible step to respond to terrorist attacks effectively – if, indeed, there is an effective response – the significance of recent events domestically is already plain. A ComRes poll released last night shows a remarkable 70% of voters agreeing with the statement: “We have to accept infringements of privacy on the internet for the sake of fighting terrorism”.

Theresa May has so far declined to force through her new surveillance measures despite this overwhelming public support and the best efforts of arch-authoritarian Andy Burnham to speed her up. But it is a matter of time.

Meanwhile, the same poll showed that public perceptions of Jeremy Corbyn are rapidly worsening in the wake of his post-Paris prevarication. A mere two months after he became leader, he now looks in serious danger of being toppled before next spring’s elections, with MPs and even Shadow Cabinet ministers lining up to criticise and undermine him.

People won’t necessarily thank me for talking about domestic politics in the context of the current debate around our response to Daesh. But it is unavoidably relevant. This Wednesday, George Osborne will be in the House of Commons to deliver his Autumn Statement and the results of his spending review.

His statement will have far more profound effects on our way of life than terrorist attacks ever could, even ones of the same shocking scale as Paris. As I write that sentence, I blanch at a comparison that seems extremely insensitive, but that is the reality we face.

Will Hutton – hardly a raving Marxist, but rather a mainstream, Keynesian social democratic economist who was strongly associated with New Labour – has an extremely powerful article in today’s Observer which urges us to weep for the country we live in. It details the hard facts of Osborne’s plans, and what they could mean. This is the “security” the Conservatives promised the nation in April and May:

the de facto wind-up of the Department for Business as a pro-active department, further shrinkage of the criminal justice system (mitigated by prison sell-offs), local government reduced to a husk and the knell of further education. Meanwhile, the cuts in welfare will hit the wellbeing of millions, including their children. Expect on top a firesale of government assets – from housing associations to Channel 4.

Terrorism is a serious and awful threat to our lives and our way of life. But my point here is that it is emphatically not the greatest threat. We should not – must not – allow attacks like those in Paris and Mali to distract us from what is being done by our own government in the name of “security” – whether economic or military.

In five years’ time, our government may well have helped to wipe Daesh off the face of the earth. I will be the first to celebrate that outcome. But unless there is a serious change in the way our government is scrutinised and held to account by our opposition parties, our media and, most of all, voters themselves, we can expect our country to have been irrevocably damaged in the meantime.

This process can and should start on Wednesday. George Osborne’s statement will be carefully stage managed. As in the summer Budget and as both he and David Cameron did at their party’s conference, he will take great pains to appear ever so reasonable, moderate, even centrist. He has been given space to do so, of course, by articles like Hutton’s (and like this), with their dire warnings of imminent doom.

The presentation will be serious, but with just the right amount of apparent backtracking, alongside some trademark difficult decisions and some patriotic purchases.

The question is whether we have yet learnt not to take him at his word.

“‘Tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings”: Henry V at the Barbican

November 19, 2015November 19, 2015 / Tom King / Leave a comment

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Henry V, running at the Barbican till late January, is extremely timely, arriving on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.

Despite appearing slap bang in the middle of his career – written in 1599, Henry V was the 21st of Shakespeare’s (roughly) 42 plays, according to many modern chronologies – it is his most fully realised history play.

Appearing as the fourth in his second history tetralogy, encompassing Richard II and Henry IV (whom he covered in two parts), it is a sophisticated discussion of kingship, power and war that rewards close reading.

Not pro- or anti-war

In order to stage a successful production of Henry V, the most important factor is to acknowledge that it is not the jingoistic tub-thumper of myth.

The 1944 film, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier, and commissioned by the British government to boost morale, may well have been the first silver-screen adaptation of the Bard to achieve commercial success, but it was also really dreadful.

It’s dreadful not just because of the aforementioned tub-thumping jingoism, but also because it failed seriously to deal with the ambivalence and the nuance of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Henry himself.

Thankfully, Gregory Doran’s production at the Barbican avoids these major errors. Under Doran’s careful guidance, the RSC’s production is a play neither pro- or anti-war, but about going to war.

The play’s the thing

Some of the best moments are in the reappraisal of the famous speeches. In particular, the delivery of “once more unto the breach” – often portrayed, such as in Ken Branagh’s 1989 film, as a rallying cry – is made into a real argument.

Here, Henry is a small man on an empty stage, pleading with his “troops” – actually the audience – for one more push. Alex Hassell is excellent here, managing to infuse the high-flown rhetoric with real uncertainty.

Hassell also excels during the subsequent speech to the governor of Harfleur. Again, this is lent extra weight through the direction; the governor is on stage, but not visible, for most of the speech, in which the English king lists a range of gruesome threats should surrender not ensue.

These threats are some of the most problematic in Shakespeare’s depiction – infanticide and rape feature heavily. Even allowing for historical context Henry’s determination is fearsome, bordering on criminal. But delivering the speech to an empty stage is a masterstroke – giving the scene an air of uncertainty, allowing the king to say things that he might draw back from addressing to someone’s face.

Alex Hassell as Henry V

Hassell is less impressive in the genuinely tub-thumping speeches. His rather reedy voice is well-suited to quieter passages – his tour through the camp on the eve of battle is a real highlight – but lacks the power for the “band of brothers” call to arms as Agincourt dawns.

The actual staging is rather bare, but it is enlivened by excellent lighting, including a very clever method that can create the appearance of different structures, as well as weather conditions – the “rain” during the battle was particularly impressive. Two elevated walkways at stage right and left enable some interesting positioning, and give the play its crowning moment of pathos, when a kind of celestial choir (including some of those killed in battle) join to sing the Te Deum as Henry realises he has won the day.

Other highlights included Oliver Ford Davies as a witty and occasionally grumpy Chorus. The understanding of how Shakespeare played with his audience – sometimes teasing, sometimes demanding – was clear and these moments, which can often drag, zipped by. I would say that the humorous scenes were done very well overall, too; if Branagh’s film had a failing it was that those bits were sometimes ponderous. Here, Doran has huge fun with the Welsh/Irish/Scottish dialogue, getting big laughs from Fluellen’s leek obsession among other things.

Warring like it’s 1599

What could be more fitting than a play addressing complex issues of leadership and conflict in November 2015?

The reason I keep coming back to Henry V as one of my favourite Shakespeare plays is because it is unafraid to address those enormous questions that echo down through history.

Serious study of the play would benefit all aspiring and current leaders, whether of a small number of people or of entire nations. Prime Ministers and Presidents across the world are currently wrestling with a rapidly worsening security situation that for the first time in my remembered life threatens to end up in a return to global conflict between large nations.

The self-awareness that Henry shows, his grasp of history and his understanding of his enemy, are all attributes that some of our esteemed leaders would do well to emulate.

And for us, the audience, understanding the weight of the decisions such leaders have to make is vital. We will be better citizens and better critics of foreign policy if we take seriously the real difficulty of such responsibility. As Shakespeare himself put it, “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”. Our modern leaders do not always wear the crown, but this week of all weeks they are just as susceptible to the stress and loss of sleep that accompanies events of great moment.

If David Cameron really wants an “assault on poverty”, he could always try giving the poor more money

October 8, 2015October 8, 2015 / Tom King / Leave a comment

One of the striking things about David Cameron’s much admired speech yesterday was the emphasis on the concept of “equality”. This was very much at the heart of the rhetoric: he promised to “finish the fight for real equality” and even went so far as to say that “you cannot have true opportunity without equality”.

Equality is undoubtedly a powerful concept. But it’s become a political cipher. And I mean that word in every sense: when a politician uses the word “equality”, it is simultaneously devoid of any meaning at all; a code that the politician’s supporters instinctively feel they can crack; and a method of concealment. The same can be said of words like “values”, “progressive” or – most problematically for my party – “liberal”.

Cameron himself acknowledged that he believes in equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome. This is what enables the key elision in the most “centre left” section of his speech: that an “assault on poverty” is the same thing as tackling “the root causes of poverty”. If you read this part of the speech carefully, you can actually see the ghost of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty hovering smugly in the background:

Central to [tackling big social problems] is an all-out assault on poverty.

Conservatives understand that if we’re serious about solving the problem, we need to tackle the root causes of poverty.

Homes where no-one works; children growing up in chaos; addiction, mental health problems, abuse, family breakdown.

This is a revealing passage. To put it in the language of sophisticated political commentary, Cameron has things completely arse about face. Look at what he is saying: that the reason people are poor is because they have dysfunctional lives, health problems, or are actually guilty of criminal behaviour.

I’ll repeat that: to David Cameron, the root causes of poverty are the terrible decisions that people choose to make about their own lives.

Poor children in olden times. They probably should have worked harder tbh.

Or to boil it down still further: if you’re poor, it’s probably because you live a life that led inexorably to that outcome.

If you really believe this – as David Cameron claims to – then equality of opportunity is a meaningless concept; there’s no use trying to magically turn such bad, stupid, dangerous people into good, intelligent, virtuous ones.

Of course, he’s wrong. The root cause of poverty is – surprise! – people not having enough money.

This might be a shocking revelation to some people. But it seems pretty obvious to me. People who have enough money aren’t poor. People who don’t have enough money do tend to be. QED.

Now, you might say that’s far too simple, and I’m making the same mistake that Cameron has, but from the other side. But if I’m right, then there would be lots of evidence suggesting that if you give poor people more money, their lives get better, yes?

And it just so happens that there is. In lots of countries across the world, governments have found – ASTONISHINGLY – that if you directly transfer cash into the hands of poor people, they… spend it on things that will make their lives better. And no, I don’t mean cheap booze and cigarettes – or even beer and bingo.

There are articles and studies which explore this phenomenon further.

But obviously, David Cameron isn’t just intending not to give the poor people in the UK more money. He’s already announced, via his sidekick George Osborne, that poor people will actually have money taken away from them. I’ve used this graph before, but it is kind of essential to understand the impact of the Budget on the UK population:

The Institute of Fiscal Studies, which produced the above graph, has also undertaken further analysis since then. This reaffirmed the fact that people on low incomes will be far worse off, even when you include all the random policies Cameron claims will alleviate the impact.

If David Cameron really wants an assault on poverty, and to ensure that there is equality – even just equality of opportunity – he could start by reversing or at least drastically reducing his tax credit cuts. But more importantly, his entire government needs to start seeing poverty the right way round, rather than from a position some way through and to the right of the looking glass.

Today we left reality behind and entered David Cameron’s fantasy world

October 7, 2015October 7, 2015 / Tom King / 4 Comments

To read the breathless commentary of moderate pundits as David Cameron delivered his speech to Conservative Party Conference today, you would be forgiven for thinking that Cameron had announced a reversal of tax credit cuts, a real living wage, the abandonment of his ridiculous net migration target, and the implementation of a land value tax, all while wrapped in a red flag and doing that thing Tony Blair used to do with his hands.

(You know the one: when he used to make a fist and then stick his thumb out, creating an effect both dominant and approachable at once. Clinton used to do it, too.)

What we actually saw, of course, was nothing more than a good PR man playing to type. Cameron and Osborne have both quickly realised the opportunity offered to the Conservative Party by the election of Jeremy Corbyn: namely, power almost in perpetuity, provided the Tories don’t tip too far to the right in the eyes of typical voters.

Anchoring the party to the perceived “centre ground” has been both men’s transparent aim at this party conference, even if Theresa May seems to think now is the time to veer off into the xenophobic weeds in an attempt to bolster her leadership credentials. It is a simple continuation of the strategy already employed by the Chancellor at the Budget. As I wrote then, a bit angrily:

Aided and abetted by a supine media and an opposition that isn’t there, he is using the Conservatives’ new political capital to carry forward at a far greater speed his vision for Britain.

If anything, since then the nation’s media has become even more supine; in fact, today they were simply prostrate. Damningly, this is particularly true of centre-left commentators who, far from praising Cameron for his rhetoric, should be pointing out at every opportunity the lies he is spinning. Instead, they were busy saying things like:

David Cameron is now the leader of the British left.
— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) October 7, 2015

All sorts of holes, the biggest being tax credits cuts, but hugely effective One Nation speech consigning Labour to irrelevance.
— John Rentoul (@JohnRentoul) October 7, 2015

The worst example of this was Ian Dunt’s unusually ill-judged article on Politics.co.uk, in which he argued that Cameron’s speech was proof of the positive impact of Jeremy Corbyn on British politics. He went so far as to compare Corbyn’s success in dragging Cameron to the left to Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, New Labour.

Every time this happens, it simply gives the Conservatives more breathing space to implement even more right wing policies. The natural consequence of this fawning media reaction will manifest itself in policies that are not just distant from the greater Britain Cameron claimed to dream of today, but that actively undermine the possibility of a more moderate, compassionate society ever coming into being.

Come November 25th, the Spending Review and the Autumn Statement will reveal just how far from reality Cameron’s fantastical rhetoric took everyone today. It won’t be breathless or exciting; it won’t be surprising or brilliant. Instead, it will be presented as an inevitability: “tough decisions none of us came into politics to make”. But that will be a lie.

Cameron’s Greater Britain won’t be moderate. It won’t be compassionate. It won’t increase equality or reduce poverty. As I wrote after the Budget:

It is a country gripped by greed, selfishness and suspicion. It is a country where the poorest are expected to fend for themselves and where the wealthiest are enabled and encouraged to hoard their riches.

If people as smart and influential as those I’ve mentioned in this article are genuinely being taken in, there is little hope for the rest of us.

A Song for Saturday: Rae Morris – Skin

October 3, 2015October 3, 2015 / Tom King / Leave a comment

“Skin”, by Rae Morris, is a gorgeous, weary coo; a song that murmurs and flows like a river carving its way through soft sedimentary rock.

It’s the first track on the 23 year old’s debut album, Unguarded, released earlier this year; it’s also comfortably the best song on the record, which is something of a disappointment.

Although Morris’ voice is not much akin to Kate Bush’s, the confidence with which she gently unfolds the sounds on this cut is definitely reminiscent, as is the high-class, elegant, if somewhat self-consciously arty video, shot in monochrome and recalling “Running Up That Hill” in particular.

The tick tock of the music box at the beginning of this song may gradually be overtaken by increasingly authoritative piano and a drum track that ensures a constant sense of momentum, but it’s still there, buried deep in the mix. It creates the same feeling as I get from some of Bush’s work – the feeling that you have heard this somewhere before and that it was only necessary to jog your memory.

British politics is now just a question of maths and time

September 19, 2015September 19, 2015 / Tom King / 5 Comments

I consider Matthew Parris to be the finest columnist in the UK, and today’s article on Labour is one of his best.

He suggests that Jeremy Corbyn’s victory is an opportunity – rather than a defeat – for the centre left: a “gift”. He paints a painfully accurate picture of what is likely to happen to the Labour Party now that Corbyn is in place:

The party may (as I suggest) go out with a bang. Equally likely, some residual instinct for self-preservation will kick in, they’ll defenestrate Corbyn, and replace him with a less astringent nonentity, capable of papering over the cracks.

In which case the party will go out with a whimper, on a long, gentle amble into that good night: drifting on towards the next election – and the next, and the next – never winning, forever compromising, softly losing support in a sort of quarter-century slow puncture…

Arguing that Labour is the same old beast it’s always been, and that three election victories under Tony Blair couldn’t reshape its identity, he pleads with Labour’s moderates to abandon the brand. There is a fairly strong hint at the end of the piece that he is suggesting they should either start a new party in the mould of the SDP or join another party.

Parris is a liberal Tory who, it is fairly clear, harbours some fairly warm feelings towards my own party and to whom the coalition government was probably close to the ideal blend of ideas and policies. So I think it’s quite clear which home he is envisaging for these liberal Labourites. In any case, the same argument is being made on a regular basis by senior Lib Dems too.

Unfortunately, it’s completely unrealistic.

Labour MPs bow to no one in their tribalism. Even now most Labour people – even the moderates – are still pretty pleased about what happened to the Liberal Democrats in the general election: this is despite the fact that if the Conservatives had not won seven seats as a result of Lib Dem voters switching to Labour, they would not have a majority in the Commons.

More importantly, it’s a simple question of mathematics. If to be in politics is to exercise power, then Labour moderates have two ways of doing so. One is to stay where they are, grit their teeth and hope for the best: that somehow, in two or three years, the tide of left-wing support will ebb as quickly as it flooded in, and their party will allow someone “sensible” to take over in time to avoid total destruction in 2020. The other is simply to join the Conservatives, on the basis that they are closer to people like George Osborne than to Jeremy Corbyn.

Neither scenario is at all plausible.

If there were a third party with, say, 50-60 MPs, around 20% of the vote and a relationship with the electorate that hadn’t entirely curdled into a poisonous mess, things might be different. But there isn’t.

For the UK opposition (which doesn’t include the SNP, a party so obsessed with its own nationalism that it may as well be given the opportunity to hang itself at this point), politics is now simply a waiting game. We must wait for the Conservatives to make some kind of mistake; to get so complacent that they try to do something so utterly insane that even voters who believe in their competence wake up to their fallibility.

It might take a very long time, and our country will almost certainly be a very different place – a poorer, harsher, more insular place – at the end of it.

Appointing a convicted arsonist should be applauded, not admonished

September 18, 2015 / Tom King / Leave a comment

The political media is breathlessly reporting, in its usual shocked and horrified tones, that Jeremy Corbyn has appointed someone to his frontbench who was once sent down for “wilful fire-raising”.

Mike Watson, who has been appointed a shadow education minister in the House of Lords, went to jail for 8 months in 2005/06.

We are still supposedly a country committed to the concept of rehabilitation through the criminal justice system. The strength of that commitment is sadly frequently called into question, given the two major political parties’ mutual predilection for totemic “tough on crime” one-upmanship.

The idea that by banging more people up for longer you make society safer – “prison works” – only has superficial merit until you realise that its logical conclusion is to bang up everyone for ever.

But Justice Secretaries still like to bleat on meaningfully about rehabilitation and restorative justice from time to time, because they know they will reduce “recidivism” – i.e. re-offending.

So Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to appoint a convict should not be denigrated, but praised. Especially as Watson’s crime was committed long ago, he served his time, and he has rejoined civil society and worked in the private sector successfully for almost a decade with no apparent recurrent desire to set fire to the curtains.

Why the state of Jeremy Corbyn’s top button actually does matter. Honest.

September 15, 2015 / Tom King / Leave a comment

When my family gets together we sometimes play a game called Scissors. It’s pretty cruel because it’s based solely on the ignorance of whoever hasn’t played it before; in other words, it’s more of a practical joke than a parlour game. In short, it involves sitting in a circle handing round a pair of scissors, with each person saying if the scissors are “crossed” or “uncrossed”. Obviously it has nothing to do with the state of the scissors: let the reader understand, but gradually the truth dawns on everyone and there is much chortling.

I was reminded of it today when England’s journalists, in their wisdom, decided that the state of Jeremy Corbyn’s top shirt button – “done” or “undone” – was a suitable subject for political reportage and punditry.

Urgh. The state of him. (Photo: Jonathan Brady/PA)

This in turn led to the usual Twitter feedback loop, with Corbynistas (Corbynites?) deriding the vacuity of the press. The same could be said for Corbyn’s refusal to sing the national anthem, which according to Conservative MPs apparently marked him out – along with his scruffy appearance – as the sort of dangerous madman who would probably sell us out immediately to the Bolsheviks if he had the chance.

But it does matter. And I’ll tell you for why.

Corbyn could have decided not to attend today’s Battle of Britain memorial service at St Paul’s. There’s another one in Westminster Abbey on Sunday, after all. But he did.

He could have decided not to wear a suit, or, as his general wont, he could have gone open-necked. But he didn’t.

Implication: he grasps the importance of ceremony in British society and, especially, British politics. He was attempting, in some way, to reflect this in his mode of attire and in being present in general.

I have no doubt that he was also being sincere in his attendance and in paying his respects.

The problem is that UK politics is currently dominated by a narrative of competence. I’ve talked about this before in extremely negative terms. The Tories are past masters at defining what competence is (even if it turns out not to be competence as anyone else would understand it), and then putting themselves on the right side of that line.

If Corbyn is going to try to play that game, he needs to get much better at it. His undone top button may not seem like much, but every time he does something like that, it undermines him. He is going to get a lot of harsh treatment in the media as it is – he already does – so he needs to do everything possible to avoid self-inflicted injuries.

Either you spin properly or not at all. Either you play by the rules set out by your opponents or you completely flout them. Acknowledging the rules, and then failing to stick to them, is the worst of all worlds.

Based on his performance so far, maybe the better course is for Corbyn to recognise that, as in WarGames – which I like to imagine is one of his favourite films – the only winning move is not to play.

Glory and ghosts: Sufjan Stevens at the Royal Festival Hall

September 6, 2015September 6, 2015 / Tom King / Leave a comment

When the lights go down and the band slowly walks onto the stage in the darkness, I’m struggling to work out which one of them is Sufjan. I know what he looks like, but there is no indication that he is special or different. It is only when the first piano chords are struck that I am sure his fingers are the ones pressing the keys.

Sufjan Stevens (Photo: Andrew King)

Sufjan does not have the voice or the stature of a man who sings as he does. He is tall and strong. When he speaks for the first time – perhaps an hour and a half into the show – his voice is deep and assured. It is an almost comic contrast.

Because when he sings, the sound is that of a man retreating. It is more than a whisper, far less than a shout. It is more than an echo, far less than a statement. It is the sound of a person caught between the past and the future.

In a word, it is ghostly.

Vesuvius (Photo: Andrew King)

There are many ghosts and spirits in Sufjan’s writing. Even before his best album, Carrie & Lowell, was released this year, he had explored this theme many times before. He plays “Vesuvius” as if it is part of the album, although it was released two years before the death of Carrie, his mother. The arrangement is at first jarringly different – all glitchy electronica – but as the lyrics tumble out it’s clear why he chose this song tonight.

Vesuvius, are you a ghost

Or the symbols of light or a fantasy host?

… Sufjan, the panic inside

The murdering ghost that you cannot ignore

… Vesuvius, fire of fire

Follow me now as I favor the ghost

Vesuvius, fire of fire

Follow me now as I favor the host

… Why does it have to be so hard?

He is either using the volcano as a God-metaphor or he is contrasting the destructive fire of Vesuvius with the purifying fire of the Refiner. And then what of the phrase “murdering ghost”? Why would you “favor the ghost” if it is killing you? Elsewhere in the song, Sufjan sings of following the path that “leads to an article of eminent death”.

That eminent death is also what dominates his most popular song, “To Be Alone With You”. It’s a song beloved by music pickers on American comedy-drama TV shows and romantic films, yet a song that is as explicit about Sufjan’s Christianity as any he has written. In it, he describes the sacrifices made by Jesus:

You gave your body to the lonely, they took your clothes

You gave up a wife and a family, you gave your ghost

To be alone with me, to be alone with me

To be alone with me you went up on that tree

There’s that “ghost” word again. Again the meaning is doubled; he takes a euphemism for death and spins it around the concept of Holy Spirit as ghost. Christ’s death and resurrection are both a culmination and a harbinger in the New Testament, of promises fulfilled and promises yet to be kept. The “ghost”, the holy fire that burns within the Christian’s heart, is what enables a relationship with Jesus to exist, yet for it to arrive that same Jesus had to give up his own ghost.

Outro of Vesuvius – feat. recorder (Photo: Andrew King)

No wonder he describes it as a “murdering ghost” in “Vesuvius”. Life through death is what this ghost brings, and so when he gazes into the fire he can sing “I’d rather be burned than be living in debt.”

The Royal Festival Hall is a large space. It is more associated with classical music than with modern forms. It is the kind of room you can hear breathing. It is a place that adds warmth to sound, but leaves each instrument, each chord and each note distinct.

The band Sufjan has chosen is as carefully composed as his music: these musicians’ precision, commitment and talent seems equal to his own. In this place we can hear what each is doing, what each is giving, to this musical monument. This is not mere competence; each person on the stage cares. It is almost as if they have experienced the same weight of grief and confusion as the man at the centre of things.

Carrie & Lowell is both broken and complete. It is the sound of a man raking through all the fragments of his life to find an answer. But this act stirs up as many questions as it answers. The points of exquisite pain on this masterpiece are at their sharpest when these questions are made explicit. And they appear periodically, because grief is not linear or neat or to be reasoned away. And they pour from Sufjan’s lips in a wave that is intense and tender and so raw.

What is that song you sing for the dead?

How did this happen?

What did I do to deserve this?

What’s the point of singing songs if they’ll never even hear you?

What could I have said to raise you from the dead?

Do I care if I survive this?

I wonder did you love me at all?

Friend, why don’t you love me?

How do I live with your ghost?

Everything about Sufjan Stevens’ performance of this music is meticulous. Nothing is left to chance. I have never seen such seamless precision in live performance. Each song starts and ends neatly, even when accompanied by a wash of ambient sound or a clash of cymbals and percussion. Instruments are carried in and removed by quiet, self-effacing, careful stage assistants. To call them roadies seems entirely demeaning. Everyone moves around the stage in that way: quietly, cautiously, avoiding ceremony.

Reverence (Photo: Andrew King)

That’s ironic, given that the atmosphere all of this creates is exactly that – a ceremony. Each song feels like a letter etched into a graveside monument. But it also feels like a celebration. A recognition that life continues and that while the ambivalence Sufjan feels about his mother is real, it cannot control him.

It’s more than that, too. To this Christian unbeliever, it feels like a celebration that death cannot hold us. The ability to confront death and all of its pain comes from knowing that there is both something greater than death and something greater than each of our lives. Sufjan believes in a created connectedness that sings out from that stage. It is what enables him to recognise, at the end of “Fourth of July”, that “we’re all gonna die”. This coda becomes a refrain taken up by the whole band, repeated over and over again; it no longer feels despairing but triumphant.

In “Death With Dignity”, the first song on Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan describes his mother’s apparition passing through him. It is painfully clear from the lyrics of almost every song on the album that his connection with her is so slight. The connection is real, literally umbilical. But his confusion is also real, as is the lack of definition; he never really knew her, and he knows it, and he’s almost manufacturing memories. “Fourth of July” is the most excruciating example of this creative process, as he imagines a conversation between them that may never have taken place.

The first song I heard from the album was “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross”. I have completely changed my opinion of the lyrics since I first heard it. At first, I read it almost as a recantation: Sufjan finding no help from the Jesus he had once loved and who he thought loved him. The last verse runs:

There’s blood on that blade

Fuck me, I’m falling apart

My assassin

Like Casper the ghost

There’s no shade in the shadow of the cross

The song is full of the addictions and damaging behaviours Sufjan has tried to get over the grief of his mother’s death. There are many allusions: “I’m chasing the dragon too far”, “I search for the capsule I lost”, “get drunk to get laid/I take one more hit when you depart”. Each is replete with double or triple meanings.

So when it comes to the final stanza, I’ve changed my mind. I might change it again yet. But it’s about that word “shade”. Earlier in the song he’s described how “I slept on my back in the shade of the meadowlark”. A meadowlark is a bird, the state bird of Oregon (and five other US states), in which much of the album is set. Even fully grown, it is only around 22cm long; it would cast only a small shadow.

So what does that word “shade” signify? It is another, older definition Sufjan is using. The word implies a disembodied spirit – a ghost. The “shade of the meadowlark” is just another way of describing the disembodied memories and fragments he is carrying with him through a dark place.

That last verse, read in this light, is turned upon its head. After a moment of weakness and honesty (the blood on the blade seems to refer back to “The Only Thing”, where he contemplates self-harm; ‘fuck me, I’m falling apart’ is as self-explanatory as anything on the entire album), he finds some kind of answer: his mother’s self-destructive behaviour will be the death of him too.

She is the smiling assassin, his Casper the ghost. But there is “no shade in the shadow of the cross”.

The concept of light runs through Carrie & Lowell and the rest of Sufjan’s work like a golden thread. It’s not surprising, then, that the photography and lighting at these shows were entirely exquisite. From the grainy home camera footage backing “Death and Dignity”, to the breaking waves behind “I Should Have Known Better”, there is no shortage of imagery to feast one’s eyes on.

John My Beloved (Photo: Andrew King)

But the best moments come when there is simplicity. Sufjan, alone at the piano during “John My Beloved”, bathed in spotlights of each colour of the rainbow. Sufjan, gently finger-picking his way through “Eugene”, with a single solitary white beam playing over him. The beginning of “I’m Drawn to the Blood”, where his upward strumming is accompanied by jagged red backlights.

Nico Muhly (Photo: Andrew King)

The culmination of this delicate display is “Blue Bucket of Gold”. As the song shifts out of its short verse-chorus-verse-chorus pattern and into a prolonged, gorgeous ambient passage shifting between just two chords, Sufjan slowly leaves the piano behind, while Nico Muhly ascends to the heights to play the Royal Festival Hall pipe organ. As this transition deepens, the whole auditorium is illuminated solely by white uplights shining directly at two mirror balls. The rest of the stage is black. The overall impression is mournful, even funereal, but also starry. It is the visual embodiment of what is described in the song:

Once the myth has been told

The lens deforms it as lightning

… Search for things to extol

Friend, the fables delight me

My blue bucket of gold

Lord, touch me with lightning

The closing song on the album, it offers little closure. It’s a mixture of recognition that the lack of memories Sufjan has of his mother cannot be filled; that he cannot find in the fragments ‘things to extol’. Instead, he seeks out other ‘fables’; the blue bucket of gold refers to the Blue Bucket Mine in Oregon, a fabled site for a lost treasure.

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As the noise squalls around us, and deep bass notes rattle our bones, Sufjan stands quietly still in the centre of things. The billowing storm of sound is deafening and some people clearly don’t know what to do with themselves. But the band plays on. They are building a monument to a memory that is out of reach. After all the precision, all the neatness, all the clarity of expression, this feels like something else.

It is glorious. It is transcendent. It is a requiem.

The band takes a bow or three (Photo: Andrew King)

NB: All photos in this blog post are credited to Andrew King Photography. If you like what you see, please look at his website.

Never Cruel Nor Cowardly

An occasional blog about life and politics