Given our general disinterest in Xmas. I really don’t understand the manic attitude about receiving a t-shirt or anything else before the 25th. Occasionally this reaches hysterical proportions and you can tell people have forgotten that there is a time after Xmas and none of this really, truly matters. Not our regulars of course, who tend to be more calm and keep things in perspective. Being sick this time last year after having a stroke and being in hospital for over 3 months gives you a perspective on the festive season. Thankfully I’m home this year, and though quite disabled - I can’t walk properly and only have one functioning arm - I feel grateful for that.
It also means that my Jethro Tull EP Ring Out Solstice Bells will be getting its annual play. I first got it in 1976 aged 15 and it provoked my early Pagan instincts. I loved that it celebrates something natural and earthly like the solstice and not the usual man-made inventions. And it was typical for me that rock music led me away from the usual conventions. As an inquisitive teenager, searching for meaning in everything, trying to understand this thing called life, plugging into the earth’s innate cycles seemed a greater truth than the Xmas I was sold.
Now that I think about it, this was part of a bigger philosophic view. This occurred to me this week while I was playing Steve Hillage live at Madison Square Gardens on orange vinyl which was recently released. I love Hillage, I think his music brings a greater cosmic consciousness. I don’t know why but it just feels attuned to a higher level of existence. They were on tour in 1977, supporting ELO and they finished their set with All Too Much, the George Harrison, Beatles song, as they often did, at the conclusion of which they burst into a snatch of The Glorious Om Riff, first heard as Master Builder on Gong Live, well, joyous doesn’t do it justice. I’ve not heard anything so uplifting in a long while, with its mantra-like riff. It caught me by surprise and that made it even more special. Green, which that track calls home, is a favourite album of mine.
That kind of far out, cosmic sort of music has, since an early age, appealed to me, for all my love of Americana and west coast psychedelia. Music by the likes of Gong, Hawkwind (it was 1995 before they failed to chart an album in UK) and Tim Blake, Robert Calvert as well as the likes of Ash Ra Tempel, Nektar and probably Ozric Tentacles. Music my mother called ‘weirdy’. If, like Hillage’s Lunar Musick Suite, it can only be recorded on a full moon, I need to hear it.
Does anybody reach for a cosmic, higher spirituality with their music these days? Recording far out vibes in an abandoned windmill on the summer solstice is my kinda thing. Somehow, it seems very 1970s and alien to today's culture.
Xmas hysteria provoking Pagan instincts...
