76: March 2024
Welcome to Border Crossing issue #76.
I hope you’re well. Dare we whisper the season’s change? Probably not. Clear blue skies here today, though, and they didn’t have that deep, crisp midwinter sunshine feel either.
After two months of dicking about, suddenly loads of work is getting done, I’m travelling, and I have no time to breathe. I finally finished clearing the attic, ready to create some kind of art studio space. That job was a decade in the making, so it’s been a big weight off.
If you’re free, in Brighton, tomorrow night (Monday 4th) I’ll be at the Folklore Rooms to see the London-based alt/folk singer Roxanne de Bastion. This week we wrote a song together, so if nothing goes awry, I’ll join her to perform it. It’s the first new song I’ve completed in eight years, of which, some reflection below.
Also this week, I’m going to Bridge House Theatre in Penge, London SE20, to check out Tim Connery’s new play The Importance Of Being Frank, about a Sinatra tribute act and his accompanist.
gems
1
Thanks to a tweet by the poet and queer theologian Jay Hulme, I got briefly obsessed with this 5,000 year old ancient Egyptian bowl, with little human feet, in the Met Museum. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a commercial replica anywhere. Someone’s missing a trick.
2
Earlier today, over on Double Chorus I banged on about the vid for Charli XCX’s ‘Von Dutch’. Oh man, she’s a blast. Do check it out on YouTube.
3
A simply extraordinary piece of writing: the great Indian author and essayist Pankaj Mishra’s long piece ‘The Shoah After Gaza’ for London Review Of Books. Mishra is measured and humane, clear-eyed and deeply challenging, on the shaping of Israel. It’s a long one, full of learning. This is not a rant for justice, nor a listing of recent horrors (though there is horror in it), rather a crystal clear tour-de-force accounting of an ideological hardening, as viewed from outside the white, western European-centric lens. Mishra makes a fascinating personal aside to draw connections between Zionism and high-caste Hindu nationalism. Do read it, if you can.
4
I’m enjoying Brian Merchant’s book Blood In The Machine, a very solid telling of the mechanism smashing Luddite uprisings of the early 19th century, and how working class people reacted against the industrial revolution, as it began to decimate their livelihoods. Merchant is deft, comparing factory bosses of 1812 with today’s tech billionaires. Partly the book is interesting as an American (mainstream, progressive) take on a very English bit of history, and a northern English one to boot. Really though, Merchant tells the story to emphasise how badly we’ve failed to react to modern equivalents.
My favourite surprising fact: even as the Napoleonic Wars reached their climax, more British troops had been sent north to occupy swathes of Nottinghamshire and West Riding, to try to stop the Luddites, than were overseas fighting Boney.
I loved the stuff on Lord Byron. There are a couple of potential movies contained within this book — but genuinely a fantastic film could be constructed around Byron’s decision to make his ‘maiden speech’ in the House of Lords a fierce defence of the Luddites, even as they relentlessly trashed knitting frames and other factory equipment across the Midlands and the north. It placed Byron at violent odds with almost every other Lord, at his moment of greatest fame / infamy. He was sincere, however it was also (deliberately) a bravura piece of self-branding.
“I consider the manufacturers a much injured body of men, sacrificed to the views of certain individuals, who’ve enriched themselves by those practices which have deprived the frame-workers of employment.
By the adoption of a certain kind of frame, one man performs the work of seven. Six are thrown out of business. But the work is far inferior in quality, hardly marketable at home, and hurried over with a view to exportation.
Surely, however we may rejoice in any improvement in the arts which may be beneficial to mankind, we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanism.
The maintenance and well-doing of the industrious poor is an object of greater consequence to the community than the enrichment of a few monopolists, by any improvement in the implements of trade, which deprives the workman of his bread, and renders the labourer unworthy of his hire.
I have see the state of these miserable men and it is a disgrace to a civilised country.”
— Lord Byron
5
Just turned thirty, the comic Taylor Tomlinson’s third stand-up special recently went up on Netflix. She’s terrific. If you watch it, then check out The New York Times using interactive video-clip storytelling to document how Tomlinson developed the ‘closer’ for her special. It’s a somewhat clunky bit of comedy analysis (especially compared to the brilliant job Joel Morris did the other week on two minutes of The Simpsons) but well worth a go if you’re into the po-faced art of analysing standup. Plus, Tomlinson does seem on her way to being one of the major comedians of the century.
6
Paul Meighan writes for Bella Caledonia on how languages do not die naturally, without persecution. He writes from a Scottish Gael perspective and the article has an audio version on the page, which is great.
potato gems
The new shortlist for sculptures on the Fourth Plinth includes a giant potato, albeit a sweet one.
Also this week, Tesco sent out a reminder that got picked up by a lot of newspapers, about potato storage. They clickbaited it as an ‘unusual hack’ but it was the basic tips I grew up with. Just in case you’re a potato newbie: potatoes will last a lot longer if you store them loose in paper packaging (not in tight plastic), in a cool, dark spot.
I know, teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
Finally, awful news: a chip factory in New Brunswick, Canada, has burnt down. To a crisp, even.
•
As I mentioned at the top, since 2016 I hadn’t written a song, not a complete one, until this week.
Over the years I’ve worked up a few songs to what I call the ‘first stage’ of completion, that is: I still do the organic ‘notebook’ bit of songwriting, because it just occurs naturally and doesn’t cost any real intent or effort. So, I’ve come up with ideas, lines of lyrics, a melody, or a run of chords, and jotted those down — even sometimes developed them a little bit in the notebook. But that’s where I leave them. It was always the easy bit: capturing an idea as it floats around, to save for later.
At that point, the backbone of a song exists. Obviously, in reality, it’s nowhere near being done. The labour I haven’t done at all — not once — since finishing 9 Green Songs eight years ago, was the formal ‘songwriting session’ bit. That’s when you allocate time, go through notes, try to cajole your works-in-progress into completed songs, ready to be performed and demoed. This was something I used to do all the time, sat at the piano, or laptop, or with a guitar on the sofa. It was a core element of my working life as a music dweeb. In some ways it’s also the aspect of music I most firmly gave up, when I stepped away from Chris T-T.
There are enough songs!
Okay so ignoring that mantra for once, even as it rings around my head, this week I had a go at co-writing with the excellent singer-songwriter Roxanne de Bastion, who is kind, thoughtful, and clever in her composition, with probably more of a tidy, deliberate folk-pop sensibility than mine. I took a train up to north London (right into the heart of my twenty-something stomping ground of the late nineties) and we finished our song, with a croissant and coffee reward. Not even decaf.
Never mind being badly out of practice, co-writing was always a very rare thing for me: even when I was deepest into music, I never was smoothly collaborative. Perhaps I should’ve been more open to it. I can count the attempts on one hand.
Occasionally I contribute tiny bits to other people’s songs, but it’s no more than advice. The album I recently finished producing for Ben has my hooks, riffs and non-vocal counter-melodies all over it, some arrangement too. But none of that felt remotely like co-writing: it fell neatly and comfortably into the ‘producer’ bucket. Those songs remain truly Ben’s, nothing is co-written.
I got a great deal out of collaborating with Roxanne. I have no clue what may happen to the song, after we’ve sung it the once. I have no clue if we’ll do more (I hope we will). Which is all fine.
And thinking about it now, it’s funny how it doesn’t matter what happens next, when back in the day I was so, so precious and fragile about what might happen with material, to the point of damaging myself with anxiety about it.
It has opened me right back up to that crucible of process in generating song-based work, without denting any of my sense of liberation from the industry built upon what happens to songs afterwards.
We’ll see.
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey @doublechorus
Bluesky: @christt
Twitter/X: @christt | @doublechorus | @lofiarts
always there
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My Chris T-T complete annotated lyrics book Buried in the English Earth is still (just about) available via the Border Crossing shop. One last half-a-box to sell.
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Look after yourself and your people.
All my love, as ever.
Christopher
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