Salvation through Love

My boyfriend has tickets for a new production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, which premiers at the London Coliseum, the home of the English National Opera, towards the end of the month. He has contacts with the company, so were kindly allowed to attend a recent rehearsal. I can tell you that it’s all looking good!

I confess that I’m not massively keen of the German master’s ponderously Teutonic total art works. I saw Parsifal last year in the same theatre. I’d heard some extracts before but that was my first full performance. What can I say, other than it’s deeply depressive, almost as depressive as Tristan and Isolde! There is such a negative, life-denying quality to Wagner’s philosophy. I can only agree with Nietzsche, who in Der Fall Wagner – The Wagner Case – contrasted his work with that of George Bizet, contrasted gloomy northern bogs with southern light and sun!

The Flying Dutchman is different, though, because it is one of Wagner’s early operas, written at a time when he hadn’t been completely seduced by his own mythos. Compared with Tristan and Parsifal, those knights of gloomy countenance, it has a much lighter touch with some really super arias. I love the choruses too. I think the Spinning Chorus quite wonderful as is Steuermann, laß die wacht, during which the Norwegian sailors call for the Dutch crew in the silent and ghostly ship to come and join them. They end by rather wishing that they had kept silent themselves!

Thinking beyond the opera, the legend itself has long intrigued me, the story of a cursed ship and crew, condemned to sail the oceans forever. The origin is uncertain, but it seems to have appeared for the first time in the seventeenth century, though possibly of much older provenance in the bowels of nautical folklore. It’s first mentioned in print in A Voyage to Botany Bay, published in 1795, in which the author says;

I had often heard of the superstition of sailors respecting apparitions, but had never given much credit to the report; it seems that some years since a Dutch man of war was lost off the Cape of Good Hope, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape. Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitude. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the apparition of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman. From the Dutch the English seamen got the infatuation, and there are very few Indiamen, but what has some one on board, who pretends to have seen the apparition.

The tale of a ghost ship was then laced with a curse, though the reason for its particular doom is uncertain. All sorts of macabre layers were added by successive authors, to the point where we have a story of a captain, struggling to round the Cape of Good Hope in a storm. Refusing to go into harbour for the night he said “May I be eternally damned if I do, though I should beat about here till the Day of Judgment.” Thereby he spoke his own doom!

For the Dutchman there is no hope at Good Hope. It was Heinrich Heine who threw in the possibility of redemption in The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski, a satirical novel published in 1833. In this he allows the captain to come ashore every seven years to seek true love, thereby finding salvation in the devotion of a woman. This was the spin that inspired Wagner’s own romantic adaptation in the story of the Dutchman and Senta, the one woman who finally proves to be true, even unto death. It’s rather ironic considering that Heine was a Jew and Wagner a notorious anti-Semite!

Yes, OK, there is, like Tristan and Isolde, another ‘love death’ here. But the sacrifice of Senta seems much more human, altogether far, far less tortuous. The whole thing appeals to my romantic sensibilities. Seduced and deluded I may be, but I like to console myself with notions of love greater than death.

So, all in all, I’m quite looking forward to seeing and hearing it in it's full glory, with James Creswell as the Dutchman, and Orla Boyan as Senta, his one true love. I feel certain that it will be a memorable evening. Afterwards we shall have an intimate supper for two, a return to less ethereal forms of romance. You see, unlike Senta, I’m not thinking of throwing myself off a headland…not just yet awhile. :-)

Please, no more Jingle Bells!

There is a store on the west end of Edinburgh’s Princes Street near the Caledonian Hotel which sells Scottish-themed products, the sort of tartan tat that’s most likely made in China. I’ve never been in – I can’t stand this sort of thing – but I could not help but notice it on the two occasions when I walked past – it blares out pipe and drum music, horrible stuff really loud. It was bad enough for me, passing in moments; it must be intolerable for the staff, who have to listen to this ghastly racket all day long.

I have music in mind, or rather muzak, the sort of background noise that Wikipedia defines as elevator music, sounds on a cycle, an endless loop. In discussion recently I mentioned that one of the horrors of Christmas is that supermarkets (I have my local Tesco in mind) insist on pumping out seasonal noise, jolly tunes on the loop, tunes coming round time and time and time again.

I don’t know what they are attempting to do in this, put people in the mood, perhaps, for spending and happy times in Tesco. Well, it’s not working, at least so far as I’m concerned; I work on a different psychology. It makes me shop as quickly as I can, get what I need and get out before my ears are hammered by Frosty the Snowman yet one more time! It’s the people who work there I feel most sorry for, people who have no choice but to be beguiled by Frosty or Rudolf for as long as they are on shift. To my mind this constitutes the very acme of cruel and unusual punishment!

I had an experience of this once myself. I was in Havana over the Christmas and New Year period a few years ago, staying in the Hotel Parque Central, right in the heart of the city. The usual Christmas horrors were played from the bar by the roof-top swimming pool. I’m not much for sun-bathing (frying like a fry bores me!), which is just as well, as I would have gone quietly mad with that as a constant background. Swimming or lunching to this accompaniment was bad enough!

I finally cracked on 2 January. “Look”, I said to the barman in my broken Spanish, “Christmas is over. Can we please, please have some Cuban music, some salsa, anything but Jingle Bells?” And that was that, a sigh of universal relief.

I’m not Scrooge; I do enjoy some Christmas-themed music, just not the mass market stuff. What’s my favourite Christmas song, you may wonder? Why, it’s a fairy tale, a strangely poignant one. I do hope you all have the kind of holiday you most wish for yourself. :-)

Sound and Fury

I spent the Christmas of 2005 with some friends in Moscow, an experience I’ve written about previously (Ana in Moscow). I’m returning to the subject because I’ve found the programme for Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the opera by Dmitry Shostakovich based on the story by Nikolai Leskov. We saw it on Christmas Eve, performed by the Bolshoi Company, though sadly not in the big theatre, which was under repair at the time, although the little theatre is splendid enough. My theatre was not Bolshoi but Menshoi!

I’m so glad to have found these notes which I thought I had lost. There they were, tucked away among various papers and old magazines, the notes of the twenty-seventh performance since it first opened in Moscow in 1935. It was a tremendous production of a brilliantly innovative piece of work, throbbing, vital and impassioned; expressionism at its purest.

Ever since 1934, when it premiered in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, it had been thrilling audiences in Russia and beyond. It marked Shostakovich, who was only twenty-six when he completed the score, as one of the authentic artistic geniuses of the whole Soviet period. Unfortunately for him genius, in the sense of free expression of natural talent, was about to die.

There was one person that the opera did not thrill – Stalin. On the night of 26 January 1936 he came to the Bolshoi with his entourage, comfortably placed in the government box. The composer, who had intended to travel to Archangel on the White Sea for a performance of his First Piano Concerto, received a call from Yakov Leontyev, the director of the Bolshoi, with the news. According to an account later set down by Mikhail Bulgakov, the novelist, Shostakovich rushed to the theatre “white with fear.” He had reason to be fearful; for the dictator, lackeys in tow, ostentatiously walked out before the final act.

Two days later an unsigned editorial appeared in Pravda under the title Muddle Instead of Music. Crude, vulgar and spluttering in its incoherence, the authorship has been in question ever since, though the polemical style suggests that it was penned by Stalin himself, or ghosted under his close direction. Whatever the source, it came in the form of a ‘directive’, that is to say that it was the opinion of the Communist Party itself, something beyond question. Sorry, it could be questioned, assuming one had a penchant for suicide.

“The music”, the author shrieked, “grunts, pants, moans, the better to depict the love scenes as naturally as possible. And ‘love’ is smeared throughout the opera in the most vulgar form.” The composer's use of “petty-bourgeois formalistic contractions” was held to constitute a ‘political transgression.’ The assassination in words goes on in this tone, till it reaches a chilling crescendo –“This is playing at things beyond reason that can only end very badly.”

This was a dangerous time. All of Russia was listening to the overture of a new production: the Great Terror was in its opening stages. Later that year the first of the Moscow Show Trials was to open. Soon millions would be swept away, guilty, most often, of no greater crime that being alive at a particularly malevolent period in history.

To be an artist, young and alive was not very heaven; it was often a death sentence. So many went into oblivion, poets like Osip Mandelstam and writers like Isaac Babel. For months after the Pravda article Shostakovich lived in his own personal hell, fearful of the night-time knock on his door; for that’s when they came, in the night, most often in the early hours of the morning. His opera had already been ‘disappeared’. It was to be decades before the original version appeared again on the Russian stage.

In the end the composer survived, though by what caprice is impossible to say. He survived, yes, but only by performing the most abject acts of personal obeisance, including subtitling his Fifth Symphony, full of all of the ‘right’ political and cultural noises, as A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism. This was the age of denunciation, of all sorts of betrayals, of oneself and of others.

I was there in Moscow, happy to be alive, happy to see Lady Macbeth alive and flourishing in a new Russia, happy that Stalin and the whole Soviet system had been consigned to oblivion. I was happy to take delight in that wonderful mad sensual muddle, that thumping music, full of electric sexual charge.

But there is a lasting casualty of that Pravda attack. Shostakovich was never to write another opera; Lady Macbeth was never to have a successor. Stalin, the petty pace of all mediocrities, creeps in to the last syllable of recorded time. Still, his was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Pagan born- loving Inkubus Sukkubus

I mentioned in the comments on my previous blog that Inkubus Sukkubus is my favourite band, something I’ve written about in the past. I’ve been following them since I was in my mid-teens, after attending one of their London concerts with a group of friends.

It all fell into place more or less at the same time. Since I was little I’ve been enchanted by tales of witches and witchcraft, of spells and of magic. My interest was further cemented after I saw The Craft when I was about twelve. Then came Inkubus Sukkubus and Candia Ridley, the most beautiful witch I had ever seen. I was thrilled, I was captivated, I was hooked.

If you don’t know their work, Inkubus Sukkubus is an English pagan and Goth band formed in the late 1980s by Candia Ridley, the lead vocalist, Tony McKormack and Adam Henderson. Their songs inspire me, the music and the lyrics, to which I have often danced through the night, danced the magic circle round!

Their best album is the classic Beltaine, which includes some of my favourites like Beltaine itself, Wytches – this has such an effect on me-, Supernature and I am the One. From Belladonna and Aconite I particularly like the lead track and Samhain. From Wytches there is Pagan Born and Vampires.

I could go on and on; there is so much. But my all-time favourite, my theme tune, the tale of the succubus herself is All Along the Crooked Way from Vampire Erotica. Enjoy…and beware. :-)

Underneath the darkened sky
All along the crooked way
The same story once again
Of sorrow and of pain
One fool in a dream
One black-hearted queen
A tale of unrequited love
That's written in tears, written in blood
She smiles, he cries
He begs, but she denies
As tonight becomes tomorrow
All joy will turn to sorrow

This is a tale of a succubus
A tale of love, pain and lust
Cheated Heart and a broken trust
And death, and death!

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
Where there's love, there is lust
Where there's a boy to give his heart
There's a woman to tear it apart
Where there's giving, there's taking
There's faking, and there's breaking
Where there's trust deceit's right there
The dream becomes the nightmare!

To despair she'll take him
A shadow she'll make him
Before hi, the open grave
On his wrist, the razor blade
Young man, hang your head and cry
It's time to suffer, time to die
Abandon you the dreams of youth
Abandon love, hope and truth!

She will crush you, she'll excite you
She'll destroy you, she'll ignite you
She'll take you to a world of darkness
And death, and death!

On a night of dread and wonder
Hear her heartbeat turn to thunder
Now's the time for soul surrender
And death, and death!

The Food of Love

To say that my musical taste is catholic is a bit of an understatement; eclectic and eccentric come far closer! It ranges from Gregorian chant to Lady Gaga, with several stops at points in between. My favourite band is the Goth witchy Inkubus Sukkubus, though I also like XIII Stoleti, a Czech Goth band. I like madrigals, French cafe music, the songs of Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht, the dance music of the Tudor and Stuart period as well as Cuban salsa rhythms!

I like some classical music, though veering more to the early period, Bach rather than Hayden or Beethoven. Generally opera leaves me cold, though I’ve quite enjoyed performances of Alban Berg’s Lulu, at one end of the range, to Mozart’s Magic Flute at the other. From the latter, contrary to the composer’s intention, I acquired a dislike of Masons and Masonic gibberish. My sympathies are all with the Queen of the Night, not with that great bore Sarastro! Of the Romantics it’s the Russian circle of nineteenth century composers known simply as The Five, particularly Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose music moves me the most. To this I would add the songs and orchestral work of Gustav Mahler.

Anything with a medieval theme I find deeply appealing. My collection includes Music from the time of Richard III, Music of the Crusades, The Songs of the Troubadours, Christmas Music from Medieval Europe, Music from the Spanish Kingdoms and lots more besides.

My interest here goes back some way, goes back so far as the womb, at least according to mother. When she was trying to relax she would listen to a recording of the songs of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen. She noticed that if I was particularly active at the time I would calm right down. At first she thought it was coincidence but if happened more than once, so it must be true! I have my own copy of that collection, one entitled A Feather on the Breath of God, which helps me to relax now as it did then, transporting, sublime, deeply beautiful.

There are lots of others who share my interest in the music of the Middle Ages, a tradition kept alive, I’m delighted to say, by the Medieval Baebes, an English female ensemble which sings traditional songs and poems in modern arrangements, not just that but singing in the original tongues, anything from Latin to Middle English. Their performances are all backed by medieval as well as modern instruments. Here they are, the Sirens of delight; listen, dream and die. :-)

Come my swete, come my flour
Come my culver, myn owne bour
Come my moder, now with me
For hevyn quene
I make thee

My swete sone withal my love
I come with thee to thin above
Where thou art now let me be
For all my love is
layde on thee

Beautiful and sad

I was sent a video by my friend Rehan today on You Tube, a wonderful song called Where do you go to my lovely? It’s both beautiful and sad, particularly the last few lines. I’ve been listening to it on and off for most of the day.

You talk like Marlene Dietrich
And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire
Your clothes are all made by Balmain
And there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair, yes there are.

You live in a fancy apartment
Off the Boulevard of St. Michel
Where you keep your Rolling Stones records
And a friend of Sacha Distel, yes you do.

You go to the embassy parties
Where you talk in Russian and Greek
And the young men who move in your circles
They hang on every word you speak, yes they do.

But where do you go to my lovely
When you're alone in your bed
Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes i do.

I've seen all your qualifications
You got from the Sorbonne
And the painting you stole from Picasso
Your loveliness goes on and on, yes it does.

When you go on your summer vacation
You go to Juan-les-Pines
With your carefully designed topless swimsuit
You get an even suntan, on your back and on your legs.

And when the snow falls you're found in St. Moritz
With the others of the jet-set
And you sip your Napoleon Brandy
But you never get your lips wet, no you don't.

But where do you go to my lovely
When you're alone in your bed
would you Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes I do.

You're in between 20 and 30
A very desirable age
Your body is firm and inviting
But you live on a glittering stage, yes you do, yes you do.

Your name is heard in high places
You know the Aga Khan
He sent you a racehorse for Christmas
And you keep it just for fun, for a laugh ha-ha-ha

They say that when you get married
It'll be to a millionaire
But they don't realize where you came from
And I wonder if they really care, or give a damn

But where do you go to my lovely
When you're alone in your bed
Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes i do.

I remember the back streets of Naples
Two children begging in rags
Both touched with a burning ambition
To shake off their lowly brown tags, they try

So look into my face Marie-Claire
And remember just who you are
Then go and forget me forever
But I know you still bear
the scar, deep inside, yes you do

I know where you go to my lovely
When you're alone in your bed
I know the thoughts that surround you
`Cause I can look inside your head.

Life and Love

Three years ago I went to see La vie en Rose, a French biopic about the life of the wonderful Edith Piaf. I’ve now seen Gainsbourg, vie héroïque a portrait of Serge Gainsbourg, another French cultural icon. By coincidence – completely unaware that this movie was on the point of release – I wrote a blog a few weeks ago about Je t'aime... moi non plus (The Sexiest Love Song Ever Written), his famously infamous duet with Jane Birkin. Is the movie as sexy? No, but it has some deliciously orgasmic moments!

Gainsbourg was directed by Joann Sfar, probably better known as an artist and creator of comic books than a movie maker. Among his influences is the painting of Marc Chagall, which shows strongly in some of the movie’s more surreal moments. There are some fine performances, particularly from Eric Elmosnino as Gainsbourg, a part he was born to play on the basis of his looks alone, Laetitia Casta as Bridget Bardot and Lucy Gordon as Jane Birkin, the great love of Gainsbourg’s life insofar as any woman can be said to have commanded that demanding part.

Gainsbourg as a composer and song writer is one of these people it’s almost impossible to classify, his work crossing so many boundaries. The movie tries to cover as much of his style as possible, and therein lies the problem, or part of a problem: it’s simply too ambitious, ambitious to the point of being breathless.

The other problem is that the director has eschewed a straightforward chronological format, which rather makes the life a little difficult to follow, proceeding by unexplained leaps. Sfar’s makes full use of his talent for cartoon imagery and caricature, highly effective at points, though rather at the price of proper dramatic and narrative focus.

The story really begins in war-time France where Lucien, as Gainsbourg was then known, grew up as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, a double outsider, a foreigner and a Jew. Although the mature artist was quintessentially French, his ‘otherness’, and his perceived ugliness, was to haunt him all his life.

As a boy he is pursued –literally –by a grotesque anti-Semitic caricature, one that jumps out of a poster on a Parisian wall. This later transforms into a puppet alter-ego, one that exaggerates his own pronounced Semitic features, one that continually exposes his self doubt as well as inspiring his subversive genius. In the cast honours I really should also mention Kacey Klein who plays the young Gainsbourg, cocky and assured, in some of the movie’s best scenes.

Thereafter the life and the art crams in, so much so that Sfar seems overwhelmed by the material, moving from song to song, episode to episode, love to love in a breathless, somewhat impressionistic matter. Casta’s entrance as Bardot is sublime but Gordon as Birkin rather ‘drops down’, so to speak, without preamble or introduction. Then comes that song, that wonderful sexy masterpiece, sung in the original, as the couple bathe together in a golden light, for me the highlight of the movie.

Controversial as Je t’aime was it seems not to have been nearly as controversial as another song, at least in his native France. After he recorded a reggae version of La Marseilles he was confronted once again by his ‘otherness’, washed over by waves of aggressive anti-Semitism. One notice said that he had brought this on himself by his ‘provocations’, the kind of vicious casuistry that would not have been out of place in Vichy. We see him confronting a group of beret-wearing veterans, angered by this alleged insult to the national anthem, reminding them that it is a song for rebels and that he is a rebel. As he proceeds to sing the berets are quickly removed!

There is more good work to come but Gainsbourg’s capacity for self-destruction steadily takes hold: he drinks too much, he smokes too much, he lives too much, he loves too much.

Looking back over what I’ve written I begin to feel that I may appear more negative than necessary. I do stress that I enjoyed this movie; I enjoyed some of Sfar’s treatment of the subject. I could see what he was aiming at. It’s just that this was a large life of a larger than life figure, described after his death by President Mitterrand himself as “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire”. Sfar has reduced it to a series of cameos, some good, others less so, not just out of artistic preference but as a way, I suspect, of coping with the complexity.

Finally, I should say that I came away feeling really sad, sad that the beautiful and talented Lucy Gordon took her own life last year in Paris. She was a wonderful Birkin, utterly convincing as ‘Little Miss England’. Gainsbourg will serve as a lasting tribute.

Remembrance of things past

I was discussing music this morning with Adam Garrie, a fellow blogger almost as tireless as I am. There was no particular depth to this exchange, mostly some light banter. But I happened to mention that I liked Russian composers like Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Thinking about the latter the very first piece of romantic music I fell in love with was Scheherazade, his symphonic suite based on the Tales of the Arabian Nights. Mother and I used to listen to it when I was little as she told me the most wonderful stories night after night, just like Scheherazade herself. I still can't listen to some of the themes without feeling tears welling up. I delight in the sheer beauty combined with a remembrance of things past.

The Sexiest Love Song Ever written

There is a feature on Serge Gainsbourg today in Seven, the Sunday Telegraph's art's magazine. A musician, painter, photographer, writer and all round bad boy, he is still an iconic figure in France, his homeland, almost twenty years after his death. A former French president even described him as a descendent of the poets Apollinaire and Baudelaire. After all these years tributes in packets of Gitanes cigarettes and and bottles of Pastis, his favourite vices...sorry, high among his favourite vices, are still left on his grave.

In England he is known, if he is known at all, for one thing and one thing only, a song called Je t'aime, moi non plus (I love you...me neither). The unusual title comes from a quip by Salvador Dali about Picasso: "Picasso is Spanish, so am I. Picasso is a genius, so am I. Picasso is communist, neither am I".

A duet, it was originally written for Bridget Bardot, his then girlfriend, but she asked him not to release their version because she was married, and not to him! He agreed but that same year, 1969, he met and fell in love with Jane Birkin, a young English actress some twenty years his junior. Their duet went on to become a sensation when it was released as a single.

The song is structured as a dialogue between two lovers during sex. Even in these more sexually liberated times it still has a slightly sensational quality. Then it was predictably condemned by the Vatican and banned by the BBC, old Auntie, still the arbiter of British sexual morals. The relationship between Gainsbourg, not just middle aged but fairly ugly, and the young and beautiful Birkin was also an occasion for comment, with The Times saying "To see them together is to believe again in every fairy story ever written".

The two went on to have a daughter together, Charlotte. This week Birkin will open a Parisian park in memory of her former lover, with a Boulevard Gainsbourg following later this year. An exhibition of photographs featuring Gainsbourg is presently on show in Antwerp and there are plans to bring it to London next year.

I think the story of Gainsbourg and Birkin is like that of Abelard and Heloise, one of the great tributes to love, dryly Platonic in the first case, magnificently sensual in the second. I have not the least doubt that Je t'aime, moi non plus is one of the sexiest, most moving tributes to physical love ever written. It makes me tingle, it truly does.

Je t’aime je t’aime
Oh oui je t’aime
- Moi non plus
- Oh mon amour
- Comme la vague irrésolue
Je vais, je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Et je me retiens

- Je t’aime je t’aime
Oh oui je t’aime
- Moi non plus
- Oh mon amour
Tu es la vague, moi l’île nue
Tu vas, tu vas et tu viens
Entre mes reins
Tu vas et tu viens
Entre mes reins
Et je te rejoins

- Je t’aime je t’aime
Oh oui je t’aime
- Moi non plus
- Oh mon amour
- L’amour physique est sans issue
Je vais je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Je vais et je viens
Je me retiens
- Non ! maintenant viens...

Surabaya Johnny

I’m not particularly keen on Bertolt Brecht as a playwright, as a thinker, or as a man. I loath his politics and I distrust his didactic view of the theatre. I find plays like The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui banal, obvious and tiresomely unimpressive.

However, the work I do admire is that which emerged from his collaboration with Kurt Weil, the composer; musical dramas like The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany and above all The Threepenny Opera. And the impressive thing for me about these productions is not so much Brecht’s lyrics, as always pushing a clumsy political message, but Weil’s music. Still, the combination of words and music works well in wonderful songs like Mackie Messer and Seeräuberjenny.

But the Weil Brecht song that I like the most has to be Surabaya Johnny from Happy End.

Ga Ga about Gaga

I think Lady Gaga is the best think to happen in music, to performance in general, for ages. She excites me; the image, the outrageous dress sense, everything about her is just so extravagantly beautiful, even if she is not beautiful. For me she is a little piece of theatrical magic - gutsy, sexy, outrageous, and wonderful. I can just see her in Berlin in the 1920s in the heyday of cabaret. What a sensation she would have been; what an impact she would have made. :-))

Nico is my Mirror

I’m really just discovering The Velvet Underground, a band active in the late 1960s and early 1970s; a band associated with Andy Warhol and his Factory as well as his Exploding Plastic Inevitable Events. Their 1967 debut album The Velvet Underground and Nico, given to me last Christmas, just leaves me breathless; songs like Heroin, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Sunday Morning and I’ll be your Mirror leave me breathless.

Lou Reed is an excellent song writer but it is Nico, the German singer, who collaborated with the band on that first album, who intrigues and fascinates me the most; the beautiful, magical and tragic Nico. Now long dead that haunting voice reaches out to me, seems to beckon me in the fashion of a Siren. I listen to her again, and again and again. She is becoming my mirror. She was a Chelsea Girl; I am a Chelsea girl-she is my avatar

A Dancing Witch-Loving Inkubus Sukkubus

I've mentioned before that I adore the goth, witchy band Inkubus Sukkubus. Here are two of my favourite songs. Abandon you the dreams of youth-this is a tale of a succubus. :-))





Underneath the darkened sky
All along the crooked way
The same story once again
Of sorrow and of pain
One fool in a dream
One black-hearted queen
A tale of unrequited love
That's written in tears, written in blood
She smiles, he cries
He begs, but she denies
As tonight becomes tomorrow
All joy will turn to sorrow

This is a tale of a succubus
A tale of love, pain and lust
And death, and death!

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
Where there's love, there is lust
Where there's a boy to give his heart
There's a woman to tear it apart
Where there's giving, there's taking
There's faking, and there's breaking
Where there's trust deceit's right there
The dream becomes the nightmare!

To despair she'll take him
A shadow she'll make him
Before him, the open grave
On his wrist, the razor blade
Young man, hang your head and cry
It's time to suffer, time to dieAbandon you the dreams of youth
Abandon love, hope and truth!

She will crush you, she'll excite you
She'll destroy you, she'll ignite you
She'll take you to a world of darkness
And death, and death!

On a night of dread and wonder
Hear her heartbeat turn to thunder
Now's the time for soul surrender
And death, and death!

This is a Tale of a Succubus!

It’s difficult for me to say just how much I love the Goth, witchy band, Inkubus Sukkubus. I’ve been listening to them since I was in my teens. I’ve followed them around, attending every concert I can. Oh, the things I have done, the dances I have performed, the spells that have been cast, the energy expended. Oh, yes, this is a tale of a succubus!

Underneath the darkened sky
All along the crooked way
The same story once again
Of sorrow and of pain
One fool in a dream
One black-hearted queen
A tale of unrequited love
That's written in tears, written in blood
She smiles, he cries
He begs, but she denies
As tonight becomes tomorrow
All joy will turn to sorrow

This is a tale of a succubus
A tale of love, pain and lust
A cheated heart and the broken trust
And death, and death!

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
Where there's love, there is lust
Where there's a boy to give his heart
There's a woman to tear it apart
Where there's giving, there's taking
There's faking, and there's breaking
Where there's trust deceit's right there
The dream becomes the nightmare!

This is a tale of a succubus
A tale of love, pain and lust
A cheated heart and the broken trust
And death, and death!

To despair she'll take him
A shadow she'll make him
Before him, the open grave
On his wrist, the razor blade
Young man, hang your head and cry
It's time to suffer, it’s time to die
Abandon you the dreams of youth
Abandon love, hope and truth!

This is a tale of a succubus
A tale of love, pain and lust
A cheated heart and the broken trust
And death, and death!

She will crush you, she'll excite you
She'll destroy you, she'll ignite you
She'll take you to a world of darkness
And death, and death!

On a night of dread and wonder
Hear her heartbeat turn to thunder
Now's the time for soul surrender
And death, and death!