Piece of Cake

...Ho bloody ho.

I got an email from Matt Craig, West Midlands comic dynamo, before Christmas asking if I'd be up for entering the Eagle Intiative comic competition, which closed yesterday. He was drafting a story when he was taken ill rather dramatically (hope you're still recovering well, Matt) and told to rest up.

The idea of entering had rather struck me, though, so I wondered if I couldn't set about writing a story of my own which I could then draw up. The short version is that I could and I did, the long version is that from the first scratchings of an idea to inserting the final speech bubble on GIMP took over a month of long hours. I dithered over whether I could get an action sequence into one page or would have to stretch it out over two, and I'm glad I managed to keep it to one because I was working up until Saturday night and wouldn't have fancied having to complete a whole extra page with the Monday deadline looming.

Anyway. Is it the Very Best that I can do? I tend not to think anything I do is quite as good as it should be, but I think it's about as good as I could get after giving myself a rather squeaky deadline. From what I can gather, something like half the population of the planet has entered, so I'm not holding my breath waiting for the Winner's cheque to plop through the letterbox, but stuff it - I wrote it, I drew it, I lettered it, I learned some things, and I finished it to the dealine.

So that's why it's been nothing but an extended musical interlude for weeks on end.

Anyway, it's called 'A Piece of Cake.' A few random panels to meet Rosie:

(I should say, before it goes all Richard Keys, the disparaging 'just a girl' remark in the first panel is not editorial, and indeed its disproving is part of the story.)

Music on Monday: No Geese Farts

...just some devillish fingerstyle guitar from Leo Kottke.

In the 1980s, Kottke developed serious wrist problems, something like carpal tunnel syndrome, which jeopardised his whole career and forced him to radically reinvent his picking style. Just watching this rampage through John Fahey's Last Steam Engine Train gives me cramp.

He gives good anecdote, too, even if the pleasure is the journey not the destination. Bob Dylan's book Chronicles details a meeting between the two musicians in the 1970s, which was news to Leo. This clip also contains a rare clue as to why Kottke never made it as a trombonist.

Music on Monday: That's Some Bad-Ass Farmer.

Bo Diddley was, in his time, a Lover, a Gunslinger and a Lumberjack, but also, and less snappily, a Pioneer in the Integration of Race and Gender in a Musical Environment.

Bass player Debby Hastings led his band for twenty-five years, and when Bo was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, it was with Hastings alongside him. Before that there was Cornelia 'Cookie' Redmond, a backing singer small in stature but big in personality who became an integral part of his on-stage show, including a snazzy line in repartee.

"Bo," Cookie would say, "you look like a million dollars."

"I do?"

"Yeah, you look like something I've never seen before."

Peggy Jones, 'Lady Bo', was a fantastic guitarist and singer who was an integral part of Bo Diddley's band and sound between 1956 and 1962. She taught herself Diddley's unusual tunings and style, and to list her work is to list some of his biggest hits - Say Man, The Story of Bo Diddley, Mona, Hey Bo Diddley, Crackin' Up, Aztec, Roadrunner. None of them would have sounded quite as they did without Lady Bo.

When Jones left the band, audiences missed "the girl" and so Norma-Jean Wofford stepped into her dizzying high heels. Also known as 'the Duchess', she was mentioned in the Animals' The Story of Bo Diddley as "his gorgeous sister." (I was going to say she was 'immortalised' by the song, but it's not like she was sitting quietly counting on a bunch of herberts from Tyneside to get her noticed.) The 'sister' thing was just a line Diddley put around; "we did everything together. She was like family, which was why I told everyone she was my sister." Another reason Diddley gave for this was that "it put me in a better position to protect her out on the road." The favour ran both ways; it was the Duchess who Diddley trusted to look after his money. (He could have done with her in the early 1970s, when he signed away all his copyrights with Chess, a decision that literally cost him dearly the rest of his career.)

And here she is, wearing a characteristically understated outfit and standing shoulder to shoulder with the great Bo Diddley in guitar-slinging bad-assery.

Music on Monday: And What's That Tune He's Always Whistling?

"When I was a kid, I had a neighbour that we all wondered about.

"But everybody has a neighbour that they wonder about.

"And then you grow up and you're the neighbour."

When you can be old like Tom Waits the whole concept of youth seems overhyped.

(Speaking of only knowing a couple of things about your neighbours, at my last house we had a neighbour called Eddie who had a beautiful retriever called Troy [Derby winner, 1979.]. The last summer, I borrowed a book from him and when he called round for it I was out. He signed the note he left on the back door 'Alan.' I'd been calling him Eddie, often to his face, for four years.)

Swing Out, Sister

These days you just don't see middle aged religious ladies in extravagantly floral dresses slashing a solo out of a white Gibson SG quite often enough.

Happy Rosetta Tharpe Day.

Music on Monday: Stuck Inside of Mobile.

If the Penguin Cafe Orchestra defies categorisation - and there really isn't another group quite like the Penguins - then that's not an accident. The PCO was founded by cellist Helen Liebmann and Simon Jeffes, after Jeffes' experiences with classical and rock music left him dissatisfied with the rigidity and limitations of both forms. There may never have been a Penguin Cafe at all, though, had Jeffes not crossed paths with a tainted shrimp.

"In 1972 I was in the south of France. I had eaten some bad fish and was in consequence rather ill. As I lay in bed I had a strange recurring vision, there, before me, was a concrete building like a hotel or council block. I could see into the rooms, each of which was continually scanned by an electronic eye. In the rooms were people, everyone of them preoccupied.

In one room a person was looking into a mirror and in another a couple were making love but lovelessly, in a third a composer was listening to music through earphones. Around him there were banks of electronic equipment. But all was silence. Like everyone in his place he had been neutralized, made grey and anonymous. The scene was for me one of ordered desolation. It was as if I were looking into a place which had no heart.

Next day when I felt better, I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out 'I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe, I will tell you things at random' and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a nice orderly life, you kill off what's most important."

This principle held up in the music. Telephone and Rubber Band arose out of a faulty telephone exchange through which Jeffes was attempting to make a call. Hearing the ring tone and a busy signal at the same time, he recorded it on his answering machine. Music For a Found Harmonium was composed on a discarded harmonium he came across in a back street in Tokyo.

If in some alternative universe no-one (Lloyd Loar, Adolf Rickenbacker, Merle Travis, take your pick) had invented the electric guitar and classical music was left to evolve pop music of its own accord, then this is what it would sound like. Melodic, charming, moving, always fearsomely accomplished and irresistible.

Mariah Carey* would have to learn the violin or shut the f*** up. And that would of course be no bad thing.

*A probably dated cultural reference to be sure, but that much annoyance from the Queen of Pointless Vocals has a half-life of centuries.

Brian #4: An Inspector Calls

Ofsted. Welcomed into schools like a snot and vomit virus.

It was always fun trying to match up to whatever was the Unswerving Orthodoxy in teaching practice at that particular time. In general, new Unswerving Orthodoxies came around on a three year cycle. The pupil's white board, for instance, to be used in interactive starter activities at the beginning of lessons. Firstly starter activities were mandatory, then they were strongly recommended, then they were abandoned, and there were store cupboards full of piles of whiteboards.

The whiteboard was interesting but fabulously impractical. And, being double-sided, meant that you could show the teacher the correct spelling of "receive" and the pupil behind you "cock", complete with a bus stop penis. I would have, anyway.

In ten years I was only visited once, which I was not overly upset about because I hated being observed. It was a Key Skills lesson and out of the two disaffected sixth formers in my class one was skiving. So when the inspector walked in I was sitting at the computer with an autistic kid slowly devising a customer service questionnaire for him to use in his Business Studies. We did it for forty minutes and the inspector sat and watched. I hope he was impressed, but I never found out.