The Revolt of the Pendulum (41 page)

The cost of shooting the shows could have been fatal again, but the British cable channel Sky Arts stepped in to pay the bills, and soon, I hope, a further alliance with Times Online will make
another season of programmes possible. The bottom line – I love this business talk – is that I not only choose the guests and run the show, I get to run the finished product on the site
forever. The same goes for the radio material: all my ‘Point of View’ pieces that I record for BBC Radio 4 are mine to keep. The Gallery section acquires a new artist every month, and
the library of guest writers grows, and . . . well, I’m not exactly planning to install a swimming pool, but there’s already the beginnings of a virtual bookshop, although browsers will
have to make their own coffee at home. Wandering the gangways of this transparent space vehicle that we have been building as it flies, I try to see it through the eyes of the viewers. There is
already plenty for them to choose from. But who are they?

In that question lies the only thing for the aspiring webster to be really scared of. You can throw a party, and nobody might come. As of now, there are at least seven million websites in the
world, and about ninety million blogs, and it’s already obvious that when everyone on earth is building a personal display case they won’t have time to look at anybody else’s. As
many lone bloggers have already found, their regular audience is only going to be a handful of people like them. Some of the handful are in Iceland or Venezuela, which can be a thrill, but on the
whole, no matter how well the bloggers write, if they haven’t got a selling point beyond their own opinions they are digging their own graves under the impression that they are putting up a
building.

But when I wake up sweating in the night, wondering if I am going broke to no purpose whatever, I can check the viewing figures and remind myself that at any given moment, as the sun comes up
around the world, there are people on line to find out what we’ve got to offer. Not a lot of people, perhaps, but they come from more than fifty different countries. Since most of them, if
they decide to browse around, will read as well as look and listen, it’s a safe assumption that they are good at English, which they got from books. The fear that the Web necessarily erodes
the ability to read is groundless. The Web is fundamentally literate, even if only at a low level.

At an even lower level, alas, it is also frightening, because a huge percentage of it consists of pornography, eked out by master classes in bomb-making, conspiracy theory and religious terror.
The word ‘jungle’ is almost too genteel to apply. But if the whole thing really is a lethally dangerous primeval forest, then a crucial battle will be lost if clearings are not provided
in which people can find nothing but civilisation. I suppose the most glittering prize the Web offers is that it gives you a chance to put your life on the line in a constructive way. Even the
brightest young people, wherever they come from, are more likely to find an older voice worth listening to if it is talking about something beyond wealth and power. It can talk about value, saying
not just ‘This is what I have done’ but ‘This is what others have done, and I find it valuable beyond price.’

I wouldn’t want to sound too worthy, because I have never had so much fun since my first trip to the movies. I wish, though, that the Web had been around a couple of decades earlier,
because a site on this scale is so obviously the ideal form of self-expression, where you get your name on the gateway to infinity. What would a pyramid be beside that? Just a pointed building
sticking out of the sand.

The Times
, May 16, 2008

Postscript

My website www.clivejames.com can be defined in two ways: as the first personal fully fractal multi-media archival-critical instrument on the Web, and as an unbeatable
method for going broke slowly. The video department is its most money-hungry feature, and to offset the production and transmission costs I have formed various alliances, always with the aim of
giving the ally something he needs for the moment while I get something to keep for my Casaubon concordance, my scheme for joining the stars. Forming an alliance with Times Online, I ran the risk
of looking as if I had gone to work for its proprietor. But the executives were very kind about allowing me to proclaim my continued independence, and I am grateful to them for giving me the space
to do so. Meanwhile, the other departments of the site continue to grow, unhindered by any considerations except those attached to my diminishing supply of time. I wish that last thing were not so
pressing, but I would never have started building the site in the first place if I hadn’t thought that the day had arrived for getting things together. How to keep running it after I conk out
is the big question now. But my Web editor, second-in-command and sole crew member Ce´cile Menon is already testing an early model of a cyborg boss, which has a close physical resemblance to
Gerard Depardieu. It makes strange noises, but so do I.

Back on the Road

This note was included in the programme for a Song Show tour of Australia in 2004.

The show Pete Atkin and I perform on tour spares every expense. All we need is two chairs, a small table and a piano. If the theatre has no piano, Pete has a portable one in
the back of the car. At the start of the show, the curtains are already open. We just walk on. The houselights remain undimmed. There are no theatrical effects. For two hours with an interval, he
sings our songs and I do most of the talking in between. Nothing else happens, yet the show is far and away the most fruitful artistic venture I have ever been mixed up in. It wouldn’t do for
me to go on about how interesting I find it. The audience must judge. But I can say something about how much fun it is to do.

People who see the punishing tour schedule often commiserate with me. I wish they wouldn’t, just as I wish young men wouldn’t offer me their seat on crowded trains. I actually like
being on the road. I was born to be a rock star. I just had to wait a few decades before it all happened: the endless travelling, the anonymous hotel rooms, the soulless existence. I can’t
get enough of all that stuff. I can’t get enough of what it hasn’t got. For one thing, it hasn’t got complication. On tour, we know exactly what we’re doing tomorrow.
We’re moving on to the next date, and we’ll be eating Crunchy Bars in the car while listening to Credence Clearwater Revival’s greatest hits. Or anyway, we’ll be eating
Crunchy Bars while touring Britain. Touring Australia, we might be eating Cherry Ripe chocolate bars. Almost forty years ago, when Pete and I first met in Cambridge, I told him that the greatest
taste thrill in every young Australian’s life was the Cherry Ripe, eaten chilled from the fridge on a hot day. Over the last two years, as we toured Britain, I have told him many times that
although Crunchy Bars are no doubt very nutritious, when we got to Australia he would at last find out what a Cherry Ripe can offer.

I
think
they’re called Crunchy Bars. Pete buys them in bulk, and for all I know they’re really called Neutrogrit or Yorkiechaff. I have never been able to look at the labels,
which carry lists of all the desirable ingredients – sugar, calories, flavour, etc. – that the contents haven’t got. This was the second year Pete and I took a song show on a
thirty-date tour of Britain. This year’s show was entirely different from last year’s but the living conditions were the same. Most of the daytime between performances we spent on the
motorway, with him driving the car while I changed the CDs and the floor filled up with Crunchy Bar wrappers. (Neutrochaff. That was it.) In Australia, on those occasions when the dates are close
enough together to drive between instead of fly, we will both be in the back of a tastefully luxurious chauffer-driven Lexus provided by the sponsor. Cherry Ripe wrappers will be folded up neatly
and retained in the pocket. In Britain, most of the nights after performances were spent in one room each of a motorway Travelodge. My room always looked so much like the room of the previous night
that I would search it for a missing sock I left a hundred miles away. In Australia we have been promised proper hotel accommodation by our generous impresario, Jon Nicholls, but I have already
told him, on Pete’s behalf, that we quite like the simple lifestyle of the troubadour and won’t mind at all if the taps in the bathrooms of our interconnecting suites are merely
gold-plated instead of solid platinum. After all, I’m not Saddam Hussein, nor is Pete Ivana Trump, although there have been lonely nights when I wished he were. In the first few days of last
year’s tour of Britain I quickly realised why this superficially austere way of life felt so sumptuous. It was because I had been thirsting for simplicity. After too many years in television
I was worn out from being looked after. Television isn’t the movies, but for anyone with his name in the title of the show the pampering is decadent enough. You never buy an airline ticket
yourself. Someone puts the ticket in your hand. You soon get used to the huge basket of fruit waiting for you in the dressing room. You never eat any of it, but if the huge basket of fruit
isn’t huge enough then your agent will instruct you to eat the furniture, thus to express anger at being slighted. In America it’s a huge basket of huge fruit, and the artist’s
attorney weighs the apples.

Out on tour with our song show, I buy my own apples, and sometimes, even in Britain, I actually eat one, if we have run out of apple-flavoured Fergiecrunch. In Australia I will introduce Pete to
the concept of limitless fruit, along with all the fast yet fabulously healthy food that can be bought by the roadside in a nation where not even the shopping malls have yet succeeded in becoming
impersonal. It beats being waited on. (For one thing, you can’t be waited on without being made to wait: have you noticed?) It’s a simpler, saner way of life. I like to think it is
matched by what we do on stage. Last year, getting ready for the first tour of our revival phase, we had to choose from more than a hundred songs we wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the
period in which Pete released six albums commercially and the record companies could never decide how to promote the stuff, because they didn’t know what it was.

Thirty years later, with the blessed Internet having made the music industry less omnipotent at last, we were able to jump to the right conclusion: trust the audience. It doesn’t matter
what category our songs fall into, as long as people listen. The trick is to make sure nothing gets between the songs and the listeners. So the answer was, in both senses of the phrase, simplicity
itself. The word got out, the tour organisers got their money back, and there was an unexpected result. For both of us, being on the road was like being back in our first days in the Cambridge
Footlights, when we sat up late in the ratty old clubroom and wrote song after song because there was nothing to stop us except the usual essay crisis. Last year, as if all that elapsed time had
never been, we started writing songs again. This new show, the one we are taking all the way to Australia, is largely composed of the new work we have done in the past year, and I am sure that
while we are on tour with this show there will be yet more new work getting started, and so on until I am old and grey. But I can just hear Pete saying: ‘You already are.’ He’s a
bit like that. A realist. It would be bad manners for me to praise his other qualities, except to say that if my lyrics helped him to discover the melodies of
Winter Spring
, then I have
justified my long career of misspent youth. Whether or not my homeland thinks the same I will now find out. I am bringing home my best stuff. Much of it is the sort of thing I am lucky enough to be
known for: tall tales about childhood in Australia, unreliable accounts of strange journeys to the magic land of Pracatan. But right at the heart of it is the work I am least known for, but would
still like to be, if only as the writing partner of a unique musician. It is the work I have done with Pete Atkin, so I am very glad he has agreed to come with me, to see for the first time the
amazing nation that he has heard me talk about so often.

Postscript

An important form of the handbill is the programme note. The audience is already in the theatre, but the programme note helps to orientate them before the lights go down,
and after the show they will take the programme home if they think it has enough interesting material in it. A programme taken home works like a handbill, so you win twice. The Australian tour did
good business. In the big cities we filled the concert halls, and up country we filled the theatres, the town halls and the function rooms of the hotels. (Only Australia could come up with a title
like ‘function room’: it sounds like a plus-point in a sales pitch for underpants.) Whatever the venue, we were cost-effective, because apart from the two of us we had only our roadie
on the payroll. In Australia it was Mark Wilkinson, who has a background in rock music and knows all about sound. Our regular roadie in Britain, Steve Mitchell, has similar qualifications. The
sound-check is the most important part of the day, and it’s vital to have a man on your side who knows what he’s doing. You could leave it to the on-site staff and save money, but only
if you felt suicidal. As for the album,
Winter Spring
, it did well enough to make us confident that self-publishing was a viable prospect, and paved the way for a later album,
Midnight
Voices
, which is the album I would recommend as a first purchase for anyone who feels the urge to get acquainted with our work. It’s still there on Amazon. End of plug.

LURE OF THE LYRICS

When I was still in short pants manufactured in Sydney, Tennessee Ernie Ford’s
basso profundo
voice crossed the Pacific like a Boeing Stratocruiser and landed
massively in the Australian hit parade. It sang ‘I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine.’ My unwashed ears flapped. ‘I picked up my shovel and I walked to
the mine.’ My unwashed ears came to a point. I just loved the way those words were energised by the music, and I walked around for weeks doing my imitation of Tennessee Ernie Ford. I was a
long way from Tennessee and eventually my mother was a long way from sanity, but the pint-sized uproar was a birth pang: a new lyricist was being born.