Dickie Peterson, RIP

There have been a lot of fairly hefty celebrity deaths in 2009: Farrah Fawcett, Ludovic Kennedy, David Carradine… when the lead singer from the Jackson 5 went off to that great theme park in the sky, the world at large took note. Another mortal coil was shuffled off this year, one which the tabloids didn’t pay much attention to but which meant a lot more to me, that which belonged to Dickie Peterson, who died on October 12.

Peterson was the vocalist and bassist of Blue Cheer, a band held sacred these days by the type of rock enthusiasts inclined to dip into the Woodstock generation‘s stash for thrills. The Cheer (who probably aren’t ever referred to as such but, m’eh) are one of those bands along with Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Budgie and doubtless others who ‘invented heavy metal’in the late 1960’s. While that fact’s debatable and the subject for far more scholarly work than my own, what’s not up for debate is the quality of the music they made.

Blue Cheer, like countless other bands made up of kids who love rock ‘n’ roll but can’t play, initially specialised in chunky renditions of blues standards in their salad days in the bars of ‘Frisco. Their one and only big hit was a cover of Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues and their first album, Vincebus Eruptum, is a six-track, 30-minute blast of raw, heavy blues. Three covers and three Peterson-penned originals, the album is a perfect snapshot of the musical period’s transition from Yardbirds-style cutesy blues appreciation to the sort of shit-yer-pants experimentation that Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi were beginning to unleash on the world.


However, the Cheer’s only drawback was that they really couldn’t play very well. I’m not being a snob and, frankly, I think Peterson’s bass lines, his singing and the drumming on the record are punky-to-good, but the band’s guitarist was no Clapton. It’s intriguing to note the ways in which the band tried to get round the fact that their guitar parts sounded more leaden that lead, such as recording two solos and using both at once in the same portion of a song, but while Page would lay down solos which dropped the jaws of anoraks and novices alike, the Cheer did more to try and convey a feeling or energy. In their approach they were like a punk band who’ve smoked that bit too much pot and discovered the joys of side two of My War, and they made music that, for anyone who’s ever felt the sheer exhilaration which comes from getting a twelve-bar blues progression right on guitar or bass for the first time, was just…well, right on.


Live, they must’ve sounded phenomenal. They were managed by a Hell’s Angel fantastically named Gut and apparently were the loudest band in Frisco. Considering Canned Heat were playing around this time with a rig so loud that their guitarist could stand in front of his amp, lean back and remain supported upright on the sound-waves alone, they must’ve been ear-splitting.

And beyond their passion and volume lay the band’s counterculture credentials in the form of uninhibited drug experimentation and promotion. The fact that they were named after a type of high-grade blotter acid and played a song of Peterson’s called ‘Doctor, Please’ left no doubt in the minds of listeners and fans that this was a band who were turning on and tuning in as well as dropping-D. Peterson regretted the band’s youthful enthusiasm for late-night pharmaceuticals later in life, but this was a band in touch with the sort of Tim Leary, Discordian idealism which permeated the mainstream and which these days seems incredible. In their personal lives, Blue Cheer were a sort of musical version of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, an artefact of a more hedonistic, carefree age.

It’s the band’s first album that it’s fashionable to cite as a favourite in stoner rock circles these days but the band’s post-Vincebus career was replete with glory too. Their follow-up, Outsideinside is a gem of a record, which sounds these days like a precursor of grunge, not least for Magnolia Caboose Babyfinger, which Mudhoney paraphrased on their first LP. Subsequent albums saw a huge number of line-up changes and Peterson relinquishing sole vocal duties, but they still churned out some cracking tunes. Good Times Are So Hard To Find is a song which perfectly encapsulates the souring of the hippie dream in the early ‘70s and Pilot is as good an example of a beautifully realised red-eyed pop song it’s possible to find. The band’s activity became more sporadic as the ‘80s hoved into view but rock’s nice habit of paying heed to its founding fathers meant that again, like Budgie, the band’s memory was kept alive.


In later years Peterson moved to Germany and Blue Cheer capitalised on the vogue for Woodstock-generation bands, playing their greatest hits around the world. In fact it’s funny to note how they took note of the nods given them by heavy metal bands over the decades on their Live in Japan album. If you’re on Spotify give the solo on this version of Out of Focus a listen. See what I mean?

Dickie Peterson means a lot to me because, when I was a struggling young dreadlocked student, fumbling away on my bass, I listened to his music and thought - ‘great, that’s the sort of thing I’m trying to do!’. I remember the evening when I first cracked the bass line to Out of Focus and the glee I felt at playing along with a righteous tune from an era that fascinates me by musicians who were as unpretentiously keen as myself. Blue Cheer inspired a lot of people, made a lot of brilliant music that we’ve got forever and are rightfully acknowledged along with their Woodstock contemporaries as being one of the more important bands of the mid-twentieth century. Dickie might’ve only been 63 when he headed off into the sunset but, wow, what a life he led…

Too Fat to Live, Too Rare to Die

A short and entirely un-scholarly look at the future of human evolution

On Monday 01 June 2009 ITV1 will broadcast a documentary entitled Supersize Teens: Can't Stop Eating, a documentary on tennage obesity. A Radio Times billing for the programme summarises the show's content thusly:

"We follow two morbidly obese teenagers as they risk everything - including their lives - in a bid to lose weight. Laura is a 24 stone 13-year-old, and is one of the youngest patients ever to have the high-risk gastric bypass operation, while Victoria is 14 and is paying 25,000 dollars for a reversible gastric band."

These are shocking cases of morbid obesity in two very young children, but more remarkable still is the fact that, in this day and age, such stories are commonplace. 2009 alone has seen the likes of Georgia's Story: 33 Stone at 15, Gok Wan: Too Fat, Too Young and Extraordinary People: The World's Heaviest Man grace mainstream, prime-time UK television. The digital channels, particularly those aimed at women or themed around 'health' abound with endless weight-loss comptitions of freak-show documentaries about whale-like Americans. Indeed, to mention our cousins across the Atlantic isn't to score cheap laughs, it's to highlight the extent of the problem. The Radio Time continues about "the situation in America, where more than 200,000 children a year undergo weight loss surgery."

This is staggering! Why has this occurred? We, the human race, have mastered this planet. We've tamed the beasts of the wild, we've explored and documented each and every nook and cranny of the lands of this planet (and a good deal of the waters too), we can predict the weather, communicate golbally, we have knowledge of physics, biology, mathematics... In short, we understand this working of this planet and have carved it to suit our needs. Why, then, have our very bodies failed us? Why have they, to paraphrase an episode of Transformers, become weakened and totally useless?

Think of any technological development you like and ask yourself what purpose it serves. All technology is designed to overcome the shortcomings of our physical or mental abilities. The chair, something we all take for granted, overcomes the cumbersome nature of our physical form, overcomes fatigue and serves as the best possible means to rest a body 'in neutral', as it were. The roof over your head prevents hypothermia. The car you drive propells you to your destination far faster than your legs or horse ever could. I could ramble on; the point to bear in mind is that everything we have developed from the knife and fork to the microprocessor is in some way intrinsically connected with our biological needs.

However, nature has been developing technology for far longer than we have. Think of your body, comprised as it is of limbs, a torso, a skeleton, a myriad of senseory receptors, an internal communication and electrical system in the form of the nervous system and so on. Each part of your body serves specific funtions. Think of the arm and the hand. These are your body's primary tools. Consider the versatility, sensitivity and ingenuity of the human hand and contemplate the many functions the hands perform. These are tools carved by evolutionary need.

But sadly evolution, being a crude process of trial-and-error, has not made us perfect. We can marvel at the human eye and ponder the wonders of its workings but we know, categorically, that our visual spectrum is very limited. One only has to blow a dog whistle and watch the reations of any nearby canines to know that we perceieve but a fraction of the audio signals around us. Our sense of smell is nothing compared to that of a dog. And these shortcomings are nothing compared to those that instinct forces upon us: hunger, thirst, sexual desire and more abstractly chemical moods like anger, misery, despair and so on. Schopenhauer was correct in proclaiming that we are all slaves to insatiable desire and will always remain so.

Since we have taken our evolution into our own hands, as previously stated, we have developed an alarming array of technological solutions to our various biological shortcomings, and herein lies the problem. We have been too ingenious too quickly. Our minds, natures, technologies and so on are of 2009 but our bodies might as well exist in the Stone Age. And it is for this reason that we are stagnating and in danger of degenerating.

Our young are fat because food is no longer a challenge. They do not have to pick it or hunt for it, they no longer slog it home or exist in states of perpetual feast-and-famine. It's not their fault; it is perfectly sensible to streamline the production and availability of something as biologically essential as food, but the abundance of food, and often refined and alien produce at that, has unwittingly caused a problem. Our prisons are perpetually full to bursting with rapists and drug abusers, all of whom are merely retreading crimes perpetuated since the dawn of man, but crimes borne of their own chemistry rather than conscious malice. We no longer have to move now that we have the car, and so on, and so on...

Humankind is at a crossroads: we can either face up to the fact that our very natures (i.e. taking the path of least resistence in all situations) are incompatible with our physical forms in the world in which we now live and seek to use our technological developments in order to evolve, or slide into a state of increasing physical weakness and frailty.

Radical biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is currently seeking a means of prolonging human life through prevention of "the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us", and compares his view of 'repairing' human beings to the notion of a mechnaic replacing parts on a car. This is all very well in its way, but we have already proven that, by using technology, we have become capable of superhuman feats. With the telescope we can stare deeply into the heavens at any time we desire; with the motor car we can travel at huge speeds, we have learned how to fly, we have developed machines capable of great physical strength and versatility, as well as things such as calculators, communication technologies and the means to artifically maintain the health of bodily organs.

In my view, the next stage in humanity's development will be the widespread physical replacement of biological limbs and organs with technological equivalents. Indeed, think of the pacemaker, the prosthetic limb, the hearing aid and so on - such technologies are already in common use. Such a situation poses no end of philosophical problems: is identity something local to merely the brain, is it an illusion, what does it mean to be 'human', and so on but, in my view, if we are to finally overcome our biological and chemical dilemmas, we must now put into practice on ourselves the same technological mastery that we have wrought on the world.

Mutiny on the Buses

Like Viz comic, ITV1 seems to exist largely for the purpose of scrutinising working-class British life. Unlike Tyneside's best-loved bi-monthly magazine though, ITV1 doesn't apparently mean to be satirical so much as affectionate.

Take this Sunday morning, May 17 2009. I don't make a habit of watching soap operas, or indeed lying in bed knowingly wallowing in low culture (well, actually...), but on this particular Sunday morning I saw no particular reason to rise and lingered on for far longer than usual, the TV on for company. An omnibus of Coronation Street was screening when I fired up my set and the series's attention to detail of the banality and trvialities of everyday life was, frankly, both comforting and cursiosly enlightening.

The dull decor of the characters' homes, the shabbiness of the Rovers Return Inn, the George at Asda clothes sported by the cast, all of these serve as well-observed reminders that life isn't all Lily Allen and Hoxton Square. I say this not to sneer but to demonstate a genuine affection which rocked me as I tuned in and out of the show. Indeed, Jack Duckworth's worries about being seen with another woman after his wife's death were heartening in this epoch, in which 'fidelity' is seemingly something of concern only to hi-fi reparirmen, and the pain of regret felt by Norris (who I gather runs the corner shop - I'd never seen the show before) as someone special to him left the Street for a life of caravanning around the south coast was oddly moving.

Yes, the lives and concerns of the 'little people' of this sceptered Isle as depicted in Corrie tip a hat to the everyday, unglamorous side of life, so rarely seen on TV. But if Corrie depicts an unremarkable, vaguely grimy working-class life in 2009, nothing could have prepared me for the film which followed it, 1972's Mutiny on the Buses.

I've recently been getting into Carry On films, so the opening credits of this Hammer Comedy Classic (I couldn't help wondering if Peter Cushing was going to pop up any moment) compelled me to pull the duvet up closer and concentrate on what was on-screen. If you thought Carry On films were end-of-the-pier entertainment, you ain't seen nothing yet.

A quick Wikipedia search after the film's end informed me that Mutiny... is a spin-off of popular ITV1 sitcom On the Buses, which I'd heard of but never seen, and a sequel to a big-screen outing with the same title. But, like a Dickens novel, it's so much more than a bog-standard bawdy British comedy: it's a snapshot of an era of British life that is, materially-speaking, so far removed from today as to be almost mind-blowing, yet spiritually the cousin of Corrie.

The main thrust of the film sees Stan Butler (played by a 50+ Reg Varney), a bus driver, attempting to put his affairs in order so that he can marry his conductress, move out of his mother's home and escape his oddball family, all the while getting through life shirking and having a laugh with his best friend Jack Harper (Bob Grant).

All the heartening British hallmarks of the late 1960s are present and correct: big double-decker buses, red telephone kiosks, sideburns on every male character, smokers peopling every scene and smutty laughs by the barrel-full. The remarkable things about this film, though, are the small details which wouldn't have seemed shocking at all at the beginning of the '70s but which are entirely at odds with modern sensibilities.

I'm not sure how much this film and the Carry Ons' insistence on marriage before sex as a norm was for comedic and farcical effect, but each girl Stan ends up with puts pressure on him to propose almost as soon as their liason begins, and so the sexual morality which runs through the piece is a curious mix of knowing nod-and-wink allusions to 'forbidden' sauciness, coupled with this hangover insistence on marriage as proper and expected. Perhaps it's this kind of eagerness and coyness in the national character which has given rise to our current culture of prurience and locker-room boasting, to borrow a phrase from the Americans...

The film's lackadasical approach to working life is both recognisable and refreshingly nihilistic: these men know that they'll rise no higher in life and content themselves with trying to wring as much fun and mischief out of their humdrum lives as they're able.

But it's the domestic setups which are really remarkable. Stan Butler is a man in his mid-thirties who lives with his mother, sister, brother-in-law and infant nephew in a small and vaguely tatty-looking house, which his mother shockingly suggests he move his future bride into. The house itself is blandly grotesque: a symphony of browns, beiges and debris, with the baby shitting at the dinner table while the other characters are eating. Such a set-up, I would imagine, seems astonishing to many watching the film today but was evidently unremarkable back in the 1970s.

Many of the film's locations and set-pieces are uniquely British too. At the bus depot a game of darts between staff and management gives the characters an opportunity to let their hair down, indulge in a few vodka and tonics and make spectacles of themselves, and the busmens' 'exotic' trip to a safari park toward the film's end both act as reminders of the simple pleasures we Britons delight in. Even the adverts which adorn the many buses in the film scream out 'Go Pontinental!' in reference to Pontins holiday camp.

Mutiny on the Buses isn't spectacularly funny. The physical comedy pieces are so contrived as to be utterly predicable and their execution is enthusiastic if not particularly well-done. The dialogue-driven humour's not much better: a decent example, from Stan's sister about her husband, is "Don't go to bed with him! The only thing he's got that'll keep you awake at night is his snoring!". No, the film's real appeal to a contemporary audience coming to it cold is the image of working-class Britain some forty years ago. The bonhomie and affection the characters show for one another, the proliferation of 'cor, blimey!'s and ''ave you gone ravin' mad?!'s, the grottiness of the film's locations and the obvious class schisms which are the source of much of the film's humour; all of these things mark the film out as ostensibly working-class British and proud and the product of a less self-obsessed age. Even the Carry On-style seaside postcard fascination with women in their undies is present and correct when Stan and Jack burst in on the ladies changing room at the bus depot.

As a cultural experience Mutiny on the Buses is up there with Carry On at Your Convenience as a snapshot of a golden-age of British low-culture now long-since past, but even to this day it is a film which cannot fail to produce a warm feeling of affection in a viewer. As a curiosity piece, it's fascinating to see how British life has evolved materially, and as light-hearted fun it's perfectly servicable.

ITV is a pretty beleaguered media company these days, and while a great deal of their output sickens me (Mr. Cowell's mob, Ant and Dec and The Bill to cite just three examples), it was fascinating to be given the opportunity to compare and contrast working-class British life in 2009 with that of 1972 from the light channel this morning. And while Corrie's peopled with gay characters, ethnic minorities and without a single cigarette or pie-and-mash shop on display, it's refreshing to see that, beneath the surface, the hopes, dreams, aspirations and general morality of the fictionalised working-classes have remained fairly consistent. Fans of bawdy comedy will find much to keep them amused in Mutiny on the Buses; future historians will see the film as an invaluable insight into the cultural history of the English people.

Stop overlooking John Nettleton!

When you think of The New Statesman the first image to mind is probably of a wavy-haired Rik Mayall bedecked in Saville Row pinstripes, standing in front of Big Ben. And while Rik’s undoubtedly brilliant in the series, to my mind he’s totally and utterly upstaged by the inimitable John Nettleton.

His is not a name commonly bandied about. While Nigel Hawthorne and Rik Mayall are household names, John Nettleton is a name which would probably draw a blank with most people. This must stop. John Nettleton is brilliant because, frankly, there’s no-one else like him out there. I can’t think of any other actor who’s played mainly secondary roles, who so consistently outshines his fellow cast members. He is Englishness incarnate and his performances are so enjoyable that they might well be fattening.

John Nettleton’s been part of my life since childhood. As a lad I loved watching Sylvester McCoy-era Doctor Who, and my favourite story from Sly’s tenure in the TARDIS was Ghost Light. This particular serial is set in a Victorian manor owned by an eminent scientist of the age (well, he’s actually a shape-shifting alien, but that’s not important right now), who is visited during the course of the story’s first three parts by a mutton chop-sporting man of the cloth called Reverend Ernest Matthews. And it was as this hairy clergyman that I first encountered John Nettleton.

I’m sure it’s not just me and my brother being odd in marvelling at Nettleton in the role - anyone who’s seen Ghost Light must surely be able to conjure up his Etonian accent, his versatile expressions of indignation and the hilarious pomposity brought to the screen by Mr. Nettleton. He plays the role sublimely, being at once believable and utterly comic. Seriously, if you’ve not seen it, have a look around Google Video and see if it’s online. John’s theatrical entrance and his delightful belittling of the house’s staff are well worth the effort alone! Or get a taster - John appears 14 seconds into this trailer.



Flash forward about 15 years and I’m a 22-year-old having a drink round at a friend’s flat one night and being introduced to Yes Minister, when who should I see on-screen, this time sans-chops and called Sir Arnold Robinson, but John Nettleton! The sound of his voice was like Proust’s Madeline* to me and catapulted me right back to childhood.

But the thing is, Nettleton’s perfect in his role as the Cabinet Secretary too. The man is every bit the archetype of the English gent - his voice, his accent, his mannerisms. He’s simply a joy to watch and listen to. I can’t put it any more plainly than that. Seeing John Nettleton in Yes Minister is a real treat and I urge comedy fans to watch the opening few minutes of this Yes Minister episode and witness John in action for yourself.



But it was recently, when getting into political comedy more broadly that I encountered John in the role he was born to play. In the first two series’ of New Statesman, Rik Mayll’s Alan B’Stard and his whipping boy, Piers Fletcher-Dervish, are both under the tutelage of a wizened politician named Sir Stephen Baxter.

Lo and behold! Beneath a very convincing makeup job, a wig which looks like one of JG Bennett’s cast-offs and a hideous moustache, John Nettleton emerges again to outshine everyone else on-screen. Unlike his portrayal of Sir Arnold, which saw him playing a character in late-middle age (as the actor was at the time), John plays Sir Stephen like an ancient, crusty, slightly less senile Major from Fawlty Towers. And again, it’s difficult to find language to express the sheer pleasure I get from watching John Nettleton in this role. Again, I’ll let John’s acting express itself. In the following clip, which begins with John delivering a cracking speech, Sir Stephen is explaining to Alan why the Minister for Wales isn’t to be trusted. I won’t spoil it for you, but watch this in a place where you can laugh out loud with impunity!



I love this man’s acting and his is a voice I could listen to for hours on end. If there was a radio station which broadcast nothing but John Nettleton reading the phone book, I’d tune in. I hope, if you’ve read this and watched some of the videos, that you understand why John Nettleton’s so brilliant and so utterly deserving of recognition. And, hey, hope you had some laughs too.

Thanks for the great performances, John!

*Thanks to Colin Wilson for this, by the way. If it wasn’t for him repeating the reference in every one of his books, my attempts at pseud-hood would all be in vain.

Why I Hate The Big Questions

Like many people, my Sunday mornings are routinely spent trying to shake off the effects of Saturday night’s revelry in a vain attempt to regain some sort of grip on reality. Thing is, in that state you’re not going to make much headway on your own and so, if you’re like me, you turn to TV for a crutch. But I’m too old for the Hollyoaks omnibus and too fat and wheezy to watch the football on ITV, so I usually end up inevitably making the first of many mistakes of the day by switching over to BBC1...

The Big Questions is an absolute joke. It’s like a televised version of one of Plato’s dialogues with Nicky Campbell in place of Socrates. The format’s always the same. The earnest Scotsman poses a panel of clerics, non-fiction authors, highly-strung hack columnists and TV-friendly politicians a few ethical head-scratchers in front a crowd of baying Express readers and sets the philosophical sparks flying.

So far, so good, right? Sounds almost edifying doesn’t it? Don‘t be taken in.

The titular Big Questions are always predictably divisive and posed in such a manner that they head straight for the emotional centres of the brains of all involved, thus nipping the possibility of rational argument squarely in the bud. For crying out loud, here are two recent examples of the kind of topics being discussed: ‘Does love mean never telling your partner a lie?’ and ‘Is torture ever justified?’. I mean, yuck.

Alright, cracking stuff for a sixth-form debate perhaps, but on TV and argued about by a mob of half-educated cranks, these sorts of issues and questions are, frankly, just asking for the inevitable kind of huffing and bellowing usually confined to the letters pages of the Daily Mail. I’m not knocking the practice of thinking about such questions yourself, working out your own position based on a careful, sober weighing of the issues, but these sorts of questions, by their very nature, can never possibly be answered on what is essentially a Jeremy Kyle for people who still have a village hall near their house.

And it’s all so ruddy cheap. Honestly, the Beeb have saved a fortune by axing Heaven and Earth, with its expensive sets and slick production values, and replacing it with this tatty parade. Campbell’s surely the only person involved with the programme who commands a fee and the production crew is very probably comprised of the sort of poor sods who ended up at Thames Valley University on a media course through clearing. It takes place in a different town or city each week and tours the country, I suppose to fulfil some of Auntie’s commitments to regional broadcasting. This is true no-frills telly, TV that makes Cash in the Attic look like a Spielberg epic.

My main beef with The Big Questions is that it’s such a colossal waste of time, not only for the viewer but for everyone involved. Ethical debate is all well and good but seeing as morality’s largely an individual thing, hoping to arrive at a consensus on a moral issue by inviting an imam to quarrel with Anne Widdecombe is startlingly pointless. At least Heaven and Earth gave us Alice Beer to soothe our hangovers. This is cheap-as-chips schedule filler, telly that truly achieves nothing. It’s like Question Time being hosted by Richard Littlejohn discussing gay rights with Garry Bushell and Jim Davidson.

Now Countryfile, the show which follows, is lovely. Stunning. Lots of majestic countryside and very prim and proper people enjoying rambles and discussing nature. Surely, surely the schedule controller could see fit to tethering Nicky Campbell to the Watchdog kennel and moving Countryfile forward a little? Please? With Countryfile filling The Daft Questions’ slot we’d need nothing stronger than will-power to feel better; as it is the nation needs a collective sick-bag every time Campbell and his mob hove into view.