The Protein Man

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UPDATE: A pdf of Eight Passion Proteins With Care can now be downloaded from the blog by clicking on the link below:

Eight Passion Proteins With Care

In 1987 I went on a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) rally in London. We started off in Hyde Park listening to speeches by politicians like Tony Benn, and then wandered over to Oxford Street where the protesters were trying to block the traffic. It ended up with a giant rugby scrum between the police on one side and a mass of Anarchists, Socialist Worker Party members and Quakers on the other.

I was watching one guy with a spiked Mohican straight out of Mad Max 2 being carried off upside down between two policeman when I was poked in the back. I turned and half a dozen little old ladies pushed past with cries of ‘Come on Tabitha and Florence, let’s smash the state!’ They were Quakers, and they ran out into the middle of the road and lay down in front of a big red London bus.

The Quaker grannies scared the bejeezus out of the police. Paint-throwing anarchists they could handle with a bit of discreet thuggery, but when confronted with an army of tiny 70 and 80 year olds in flowery hats they were helpless. I saw one huge Police Constable red faced with embarrassment while one lady three times his age and half his height wagged her finger in his face and berated him for being the agent of an oppressive war-mongering regime.

Among the sea of placards  and raised truncheons surging back and forth one board stood out. For a start it seemed detached from the lurching crowd. It just blithely coasted along like black-sailed ship cutting through rough waves. Secondly it said ‘LESS LUST BY LESS PROTEIN‘, which was a bit incongruous, given the circumstances.

The placard belonged to Stanley Green, who spent 25 years walking up and down Oxford Street in London, declaiming in sepulchral tones “Beware the Passion Proteins!”. For 11p you could buy his self-printed booklet, outlining his philosophy. He argued that eating protein inflamed desire, and led to marital and social breakdown. Sitting has the same effect, though it’s never fully explained why, (presumably because it causes the passion proteins to puddle round your groin and start stirring things up). I regret never buying a copy because the contents are a wonder to behold. He mixed fonts, sometimes mid-sentence, had his own concept of grammar and would cheerfully insert random statements (again, in different fonts) as a new notion struck him. The style is somewhere between St Augustine and a James Joycean stream of consciousness:

Alas! When such denied children have come to youth, they are often primed with a sort of foolish self-reliance, to make for themselves a world of fantasy and pleasure. They are without shame or discretion, and unaware that moments of abandon bring misery.             —When this protein-MANIA has passed, there will be more — happy homes; fewer criminals, delinquent youths, and psychopaths; fewer suicides; and not so many patients in hospitals.    -Taking tranquilizers is unwise when a LOWER LEVEL of PROTEINS would calm you.

According to Wikipedia he sold 87,000 copies of this before his death in 1993. He belongs to that pantheon of mad eccentric English people who cheerfully sail along pursuing their own obsessions, untouched by the small-minded grind of the real world. Sadly they seem a dying breed. Born out of the confident excesses of Victorian and Edwardian crackpot radicalism, they struggle in a society increasingly using surveillance and technology to herd us down very narrow paths. Oxford Street is a duller place without him.

Stanley Green, 1915 - 1993

Simon Crubellier has uploaded scans of the entire booklet here. Stanley Green’s possessions ended up in the Museum of London and Gunnersbury Park Museum. I will stitch together the scans into a pdf and post here. I worry that, as websites come and go, we may one day lose the electronic version of that masterpiece Eight Passion Proteins With Care forever.

The Prisons of Piranesi

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Anyone watching TV would think that the late 18th and early 19th centuries were full of demure young ladies taking tea and unfavourably comparing the balls of Bath with the balls of Highbury. Both the BBC and Jane Austen have a lot to answer for, forever embedding the notion that England was locked in fifty years of Regency propriety where the most traumatic thing ever to happen was when old Mr Woodhouse felt a draft down the back of his neck. In reality, the bulk of literature and art produced during what we now call the Romantic period was resolutely dark, horrific, passionate, often drug-addled and frequently downright bonkers. After all, this is the era that saw the beginning of both the Horror genre (with the Gothic novel) and Science Fiction (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). In the year that Jane Austen started writing, one of the most popular novels was The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis, in which an evil friar rapes a young woman on a heap of corpses. It’s important to remember that books like this were mainly read by precisely the young middle class women that populate Austen’s books, a fact she gleefully makes fun of in Northanger Abbey.

So while Jane Austen penned her novels of sensibility on pieces of paper small enough to hide under a book when someone came into the room, most other writers and artists were tanking up on opium and committing their magnificently deranged visions to text and canvas. Coleridge took opium ‘for toothache’, and came up with Kubla Khan (1797). His friend Thomas DeQuincey, faced with the prospect of writing about a trip with the postman (The English Mail Coach (1849)), downed some Laudanum to kill the boredom. His essay is probably the first recorded acid trip in artistic history (if we discount the mad visions of the 12th century Abbess Hildegard von Bingen). Not only does the coachman turn into a cyclops but the coach ends up hurtling through a titanic cathedral based on the equally barmy visions of the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Which is a long-winded introduction to Piranesi himself, one of the most influential fantasy artists of the eighteenth century. The Romantic era was partly a reaction against the Enlightenment idea that calm, measured Reason was the foundation of society. Fed up with classical order, writers and artists like Piranesi went hell for leather in the opposite direction. Instead of Reason they embraced Dreams and Madness. Instead of order they turned to nature, and instead of a world where man and his civilization stood supreme, they created landscapes where tiny figures struggled amid the immense ruins of the ancient past.

Slightly exaggerated, to the annoyance of Piranesi fans who actually visited Rome

Size mattered. Piranesi produced etchings of Roman ruins and deliberately made them three times bigger, the implication being that a) ancient civilisation was huge and powerful and b) the bigger the ruin the greater the hubris of pitiful man in the face of a remorseless cosmos. From 1745 onwards Piranesi produced his most disturbing prints, the Carceri d’invenzione or ‘Imaginary Prisons’. Sixteen pictures show the interior of vast prisons, littered with arches, stairways, pulleys, ropes and various relics of classical antiquity. Tiny figures struggle in these huge illogical interiors, including, according to Thomas deQuincey, Piranesi himself:

Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him. (Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1820).

The Prisons of Piranesi are fascinating, not least because the angle of the viewer is always such as to imply that these vast interiors go on forever. Like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, they speak of an endless world of stone and ritual in which tiny mortals live out lives that are utterly insignificant. They had a huge influence on the Gothic novel, especially the first one – The Castle of Otranto (1764) – with its giant armoured ghost glimpsed on a huge staircase. Even in Chris Foss’s mighty spaceships and cities I think we can see echoes of Piranesi. In Thumb the stone fortress known as the Carceral Archipelago is essentially a Piranesi construction.

So the next time a BBC camera takes us on a twee journey through the house of Miss Bennett or Miss Woodhouse, that book she’s reading is probably horror porn, there’s an etching by a mad Italian in the drawing room and the bathroom cabinet is most likely stocked with Tincture of Opium.

The Saga of Noggin the Nog

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In the lands of the North, where the Black Rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long the Men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale…

The TV adaptation of Game of Thrones is impressive in its complexity, sweep and intelligence, but there is one fantasy series that will never be bettered – The Saga of Noggin the Nog.

Noggin the Nog was a children’s TV series of 5 minute episodes, usually broadcast on BBC 1  just before the news at 5:45pm. They were the creation of Oliver Postgate and the artist Peter Firmin, who together formed the animation studio Smallfilms in 1959. Their charming, quintessentially English cartoons are now recognised as classics of the Golden Age of kids’ TV in the UK.

Oliver Postgate’s voice always sounded sinister to me, even when he was narrating the most innocuous of children’s tales. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d finished one of his wonderful TV short movies with ‘Have the lambs stopped screaming, Baby Clanger?’.

When he died in 2008 a lot of attention focused on The Clangers and Bagpuss. This is understandable as they were at the hi-tech end of Smallfilms’ output. They were in colour, glorious 3D and are still available on DVD or through iTunes. In terms of sheer spaced-out barminess, The Clangers, with its musical boats, iron chickens, soup dragon and wooly rats swearing at each other via swanee whistles made the average Ken Russell film seem like a rather dull Merchant Ivory movie. Noggin the Nog was one of the earliest Smallfilms series and is a much simpler combination of very basic animation and charming watercolour stills.

Winter is coming ...

Noggin the Nog reached its heyday round about the time I was beginning to make sense of children’s TV. I must have been about four when the seemingly random images from the box in the corner started to assemble themselves into recognisable stories, and they scared the living daylights out of me. There is an underlying, faintly sinister darkness to Noggin the Nog. It begins with an image of waves battering dramatically against the entrance to a fjord, followed by a group of Vikings huddled by a fire listening to stories. The characters were based on the Lewis Chessmen. My parents had four of these, a King, the Queen, a Knight and a Warrior. Seeing them come to life, garner personalities and move jerkily across the screen was as exciting as it was scary.

The story that entranced me the most was The Firecake. The inventor Olaf the Lofty invents gunpowder and tests it on a ring of stones in the mountains. These turn out to be the heads of stone giants imprisoned in the ground by a magic sword. One of the giants wakens and befriends Noggin’s little boy Knut. At night the giant carries Knut through the town and up to the ring of stones, giving him magic powers so he can see through stone. Meanwhile Nogbad, Noggin’s wicked uncle, steals the firecake with the intention of retrieving the magic sword for his own nefarious ends…

It’s a testament to the storytelling power of Oliver Postgate that he could make a simple little black and white stop-motion animation so utterly entrancing. At the age of four I imagined myself as Knut, cradled in the arms of a sad, and scary, stone giant that carried me away from home while singing a mournful lament that only I could hear. I probably didn’t sleep for a week.

Fortunately all of the Noggin the Nog stories are available on region-free DVD from The Dragon’s Friendly Society. Please support them and help keep the legend of Noggin the Nog alive by buying the DVD, you won’t regret it. Charlie Brooker sums up the genius of Olive Postgate in a tribute here. Here’s a link to the official Smallfilms site and here is Neil Jones’s tribute to Noggin the Nog. Finally here’s the beginning of the very first episode.

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Eagle Book of Spacecraft Models

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By the time I was old enough to read the famous British comic Eagle it had folded, so I missed Dan Dare, Police Constable 49 and the inner workings of various planes, trains and automobiles. Eagle was founded in 1950 by a vicar who wanted to get the morals of Anglican muscular Christianity over to a generation of boys corrupted by American horror comics (girls were too busy watching John run/dive/chase Spot at this period in history to read comics). It was hugely successful and light years ahead of any rivals in terms of its production quality and content.

The Eagle Book of Spacecraft Models was published in 1960, the year before I was born, and the year before Yuri Gagarin became the first official man in space. It’s got 9 full scale plans inside and instructions on how to build flying miniatures of Moon Rockets, Martian Flying Saucers and Space Patrol Craft. One model is for looking at only – the Interplanetary Spaceliner, which “is for display in your room or den.”

All the spaceships are designed to be made with balsa wood, tin foil, asbestos sheets (!) and Jetex motors, which were jet engines in miniature used in model aircraft. The book warns readers not to use home-made rockets or jet engines as they might blow up, taking the inventor and his den with them. Airfix plastic kits were yet to dominate English boyhood so models at this time were all built from scratch. In 1960 you could get the construction materials at your local Boots the Chemists. Nowadays they are banned in 75 countries and usually handled by guys in giant white overalls, helmets and waldos.

The book belongs to another age, when falling out of trees, setting your hand on fire to see what it felt like and careening down hills towards a busy junction in a home-made go-kart with no brakes were part and parcel of growing up (for those of us who made it). It combines the kind of hands-on slide-rule engineering that pipe-smoking back-room men in cardigans used to defeat Hitler, with a wildly naive and optimistic vision of the future. The lad below is holding a model of a Car of Tomorrow. I had a school cap like his until Stinky Foster poured hydrochloric acid on it in Chemistry class and the peak fell off.

Whatever shape the cars and coaches of the Space Age take, one thing is certain – they will be very unlike the vehicles on the roads of today. A combination of aircraft and surface vehicle seems likely, probably jet-propelled and capable of very high speeds.

By the Space Age they meant round about 1970 onwards. I am still waiting for my flying car so I can stand outside my flying-saucer shaped house with one hand in my cardigan pocket and point at it proudly with the stem of my pipe.

Here’s a picture of the back cover, showing all the models and their costs. To build a Moon Rocket will set you back by 4 shillings and 3 pence, that’s 21.5p in New Money, which is about the same price as a third of a modern Mars Bar.

Angel’s Egg

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The first batch of Japanese anime to appear in video shops in the UK were resolutely aimed at the disturbed 13 year old boy market. The choice was limited to giant robots belting each other or deeply unpleasant pornography involving school girls being raped by multi-tentacled demons. Not surprisingly those of us uninterested in badly drawn porn were not impressed and anime got the reputation of being solely for the trainee pervert. Living in Japan was an eye-opener. When I moved there in 1988 I discovered a whole range of beautiful, intelligent and sophisticated cartoons coming out of Tokyo’s studios that never made it outside the country. That year saw the release of Otomo’s Akira and Miyazaki Hayao’s Tonari no Totoro (My neighbour Totoro). These eventually went on to become international classics when people began to realise there was more to this genre than giant demonic willies.

The girl in the empty city

The film that sticks in my mind most of all is Tenshi no Tamago (Angel’s Egg), by Yoshitaka Amano. It’s rarely seen outside Japan, probably because it is so completely bonkers most western audiences would have difficulty coping. I’ve already mentioned Yoshitaka Amano as one of the very few artists who’s managed to do justice to the decadent worlds of Michael Moorcock’s fantasies. He also collaborated with Neil Gaiman on Sandman: the Dream Hunters, which won the Bram Stoker award in 2000.

Tenshi no Tamago is beautifully drawn, dark and creepy. It’s set at night in what looks like an abandoned late 19th century city. A little girl drifts around filling up bottles with water and looking into them. She carries an enormous egg tucked under her dress.  A stranger who looks a bit like Elric of Melnibone turns up and they wander about some more. Out of nowhere hundreds of statues of fishermen with whaling harpoons appear, followed by giant fish shadows. The whalers come to life and chase the shadows, throwing harpoons at them. Then it rains a lot and the whole city is submerged. I won’t tell you what happens in the second half, but it is as arbitrary as the first.

Giant fish shadows, pure Magritte.

The whole film is effectively an extended dream sequence. For most of the cartoon the girl looks about ten, in the final shots she’s suddenly a fully grown woman. There is very little dialogue and none of it helps the story. Long scenes consist of little more than tracking shots over empty windows and through the dark interiors of the abandoned city. The girl seems largely unfazed by the deeply sinister world she lives in, though the fisherman terrify her. No reason is given for the giant egg she carries, and the sparse dialogue between her and the stranger reveals very little. The end is startling, and I still can’t make sense of the final image despite having watched the movie countless times.

The stranger and the angel's egg

Apart from Studio Ghibli’s movies and a handful of others I’m not an anime fan. Most are derivative and suffer from the Japanese film’s industry’s tendency to play safe by reworking the same ideas time and time again. However, Tenshi no Tamago is one of the most haunting bits of film I’ve seen and I highly recommend it to anyone who fancies a sleepless night or two.

Update: Someone has uploaded the whole film (just over 1 hour) to Youtube. A bit naughty and I don’t know how long it will be up there,  but people outside Japan can now have a chance to watch it. It’s in Japanese but there’s hardly any dialogue so it doesn’t get in the way. Just enjoy the imagery!

Worlds of If – part two

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My last post about the magazine Worlds of If generated quite a bit of interest so I thought I’d post a few more covers so you can see how it developed during its thirty year lifespan

Below are the first and last covers, from March 1952 and December 1974 respectively. The first cover bears no relation to anything. Take the spaceship out and you have a man threatening Lea the Leopard-woman and her pet straight out of a 1950s B movie poster. The last cover is pretty trippy, with Stonehenge and a customised pod from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It has the distinct feeling of this is the last issue so bugger it, let’s throw everything in.

After a directionless start cover art briefly became sensible, scientific and prophetic. Here is a picture of the first moon landing as foreseen in the October 1955 issue. At this point lunar landers were still sleek and groovy instead of looking like a flying bedstead with an enormous metal testicle on top.

However,  just in case we were in danger of getting too po-faced, here’s a wonderful Kelly Freas cover from a couple of months later showing a strangely-bosomed woman gladiator being fitted out with combat jewellery.

By the 1960s Worlds of If had pretty much established itself as a publication for quirky and imaginative stories. The artwork tended more towards cinematic action shots executed in a loose, fluid style using acrylics, rather than oils. On the cover of September 1966 issue an alarmed man in a red gimp suit is about to get his eyes poked out by two miniature spaceships.

In the 1970s the covers became a lot bolder, often combining realistic images with semi-abstract designs or striking palettes. They were definitely superior to the covers of Galaxy, which still suffered from the editors’ insistence on embedding every image in a frame. The cover below is one of my favourites, by the Hugo-winning SF artist Jack Gaughan.

Future Past – Worlds of If

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I first came across the magazine Worlds of If in 1974, in a little news kiosk on the Via Veneto in Rome. It was amongst a bunch of comics with covers showing naked women having their legs ripped off by zombies, which apparently is a peculiarly Italian genre. I was just getting into Science Fiction via the British magazine Science Fiction Monthly and had heard of the rich legacy of American magazine SF. For me at that time reading science fiction meant I was growing up, away from comics into an adult world of ideas about the future, human emotions, sex and violence. Being on holiday with my dad was a good thing, as I went away with Worlds of If April 1974 and not Zombies strappare la gamba di una monaca (I’m guessing the title with the help of Google Translate). Above is the cover of that very same If, complete with the vendor’s stamp. It was 900 Lire.

Worlds of If ran from 1952 to 1974, from the same publishing house as Galaxy. It never reached the same standard as its sister magazine, but it printed some famous stories nonetheless, including James Blish’s A Case of Conscience and Harlan Ellison’s short story “I have no mouth and I must scream“. Personally I always preferred Worlds of If, the cover designs and artwork were bolder and unhampered by the big borders of the Galaxy magazines. The stories seemed more quirky and less self-important.

Like many science fiction magazines Worlds of If would often have a guess at the World of Tomorrow. This particular cover is called ‘Comparison of the sexes, 2060 AD’, suggesting that either men will have shrunk and have mighty heads or women will have grown to the point where they crack the concrete they’re standing on. For those of you thinking we still have 48 years to go check out the couple at 2010 AD, where the height differential is such that the woman could comfortably rest her pointy 1950s boobs on the man’s shoulders.

A slightly more prophetic picture is this one, which shows an Atomic Power Plant of the 1970s. The caption firmly asserts that such an installation

must be perfectly built – never any repairs! – because deadly rays prevent anyone from entering after it is put into operation. Breakdown would force complete abandonment of the plant.

Right – well I’m glad they pointed that one out in 1954.

When I bought that copy in 1974 the writing was already on the wall. Worlds of If‘s declining sales, the competition from the paperback market and the rise in paper costs mean that the December 1974 issue was the last. After that it merged with Galaxy, which sailed gamely on until 1980 when it too folded. There was a brief attempt to resurrect the latter in the mid 1990s but it only lasted 8 issues.

I’m the proud owner of a complete set of Worlds of If, from 1952 to 1974, thanks to Books from the Crypt, a fantastic online store for old pulps and magazines. They only take up a couple of shelves but they stretch from the Korean War, through the 60s and into the era of Vietnam. Like most SF they tell us more about the period they were published in than the future, though in a roundabout way they managed to hit Atomic Power Plants on the head.

Alexander Thynn – The King is Dead

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Two reviews stand out on the back of Alexander Thynn’s self-published 1976 epic The King is Dead. Princess Zouina Benhalla (yes she really does exist and you can see her perform her poetry on YouTube) states that ‘La profondeur analytique de sa philosophie font du “Carry Cot” une oeuvre inoubliable.” The other one, by Anonymous of The Times Literary Supplement (this review is sandwiched between comments from The Methodist Recorder and The Wessex UFO Record) runs thus: “To drop in corny old magic, and then to avoid conclusions by a device inadmissible except in the weakest SF, will not do.” You have to admire Alexander Thynn’s bravura for including such a dismissive assessment of his earlier book, probably on the assumption that a sneer from the establishment raises his Bohemian credibility no end. Either that or he was anticipating Lemony Snicket’s clever ploy of putting dire warnings on the back of his A Series of Unfortunate Events telling children they would not enjoy the story inside.

In days of old self-publishing was largely the province of the deluded (like Mr Crabcalf in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone who lives surrounded by piles of his remaindered book) or the utterly barmy. Alexander Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath, (self styled Viscount Weymouth) falls into the latter category. He is one of England’s last great eccentrics, along with King Arthur Uther Pendragon (formerly John Timothy Rothwell). In Japan he would have been given a scroll by the emperor and referred to as a ‘National Living Treasure’. In today’s small-minded Britain only his wealth and status keeps him from being moved on by the police or some other petty Commissar.

Alexander Thynn can’t write. He can’t really paint either, which didn’t stop him from covering the interior of Longleat House with huge murals showing scenes from the Kama Sutra, splattering the walls of an exquisite example of late Elizabethan Architecture with what can only be described as Chagall does Dallas. He studied art in Paris in the 1950s, a milieu in which he is resolutely stuck. Bohemian to a fault he lives on his estate with his wife Anna and a harem consisting of a variety of ‘Wifelets’. The total number of Wifelets stands at 73, though not all at the same time. It’s a mystery to me what the Wifelets get out of this open relationship, or how the Marquess persuades them to hang around. Nevertheless in June 2011 two of them, Trudi Juggernauth Sharma and the rather prosaically named Amanda Doyle came to blows over who had shagging rights for that evening and the police were called.

The King is Dead is a science fiction book by someone who hasn’t a clue about science fiction. Or books. Cheerfully devoid of characterisation, plot, suspense, structure or coherence it is a rambling opus commenting on ‘contemporary anxiety’. It is wonderful. Here’s a brief example of the treasures within, King Askadaz lounges, bored, on his throne in the middle of a palace coup:

It was the mace which had secured his attention this time: quite a massive object, and yet it managed to achieve an interesting, vertical pendulum motion, when pivoted between the knees. He was in the process of regretting in fact, that he had never investigated the possibility of having his own erection inflated to this size. It ought to be scientifically possible, he thought. But then he wondered if his bedmates would like it.

There’s probably a mural in Longleat House depicting just this scene. The King is Dead is a classic, though very hard to find. The cover is one of the Marquess’s own creations, done in what looks like the gold biro you use to sign Christmas cards. Inside is a wonderful Pre-Raphaelite photo of the bearded and ringleted author, moustache ends waxed and possessing a gaze of messianic profundity.

The abiding image I have of Alexander Thynn is from a TV documentary in the early 1980s. It showed him taking a break from painting and Wifelet collecting to chase butterflies on his estate wearing nothing but a pair of flowery underpants and a giant butterfly net. The world will be a smaller, greyer place when he departs. In our materialistic, conformist CCTV society there is little room for these marvellously eccentric relics of the 60s and 70s. Rumours have it that the son will evict the Wifelets and paint over the pornographic murals. Other equally grandiose characters die off, or are moved on by the authorities. England once had a tradition of the non-conformist free thinkers. No matter how wooly the thoughts, their absence will diminish us.

Update: The King is Dead is available on Amazon

Rodney Matthews

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Hawkmoon defends Castle Brass

Rodney Matthews appeared out of nowhere in the mid 1970s. At that time the one-stop shop in the UK for posters to adorn bedroom walls was Athena, which made its fortunes from a tennis player baring her bum and Che Guevara. One day, leafing through the stacks for a big picture of Kate Bush, I came across a set of posters of scenes from Michael Moorcock novels. This was pretty astonishing in itself given that Science Fiction was still very much a niche genre despised by non-fans. They were fantastic. Very few artists had attempted to illustrate Moorcock. The covers of the Mayflower paperbacks were the bizarre rantings of someone who had fallen into a barrel of Acid clutching a copy of the Upanishads and offered very little insight into the books. Other artists tried to cast his heroes and heroines in the standard fantasy mould of Frank Franzetta‘s Conan, all muscles and huge bosoms.

The Twilight Tower

Rodney Matthews somehow managed to capture the exotic imagination of Moorcock’s novels. He used bright colours and strong lines, imparting an almost comic-book feel to his paintings. Yet his strong grasp of composition and meticulous draughtsmanship somehow managed to pull the images out of the realm of the cartoony to invest them with the peculiar sense of the uncanny that pervades the originals. His Elric is spot on, as is his Hawkmoon and Corum. My bedroom wall disappeared under Tanelorn, the Ice Spirit and the People of the Pines. I must have used up half a kilo of Blu-Tac.

I was in heaven, Matthews had taken memorable scenes from a bunch of books only I and a handful of other nutters had read, and turned them into massive pictures on sale in a poster shop. Very few artists who came after him managed to achieve the same atmosphere. The covers of the Grafton Elric series fell back into beefy barbarian paintings by some Asda version of Chris Achilleos. Only the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano came close to capturing the ethereal, dreamlike qualities of the stories.

Matthews is still active and has worked on a huge variety of projects, including Lavender Castle, an animated series produced in 1996 – 1998 with Gerry Anderson. His official website is here - www.rodneymatthews.com. Paper Tiger published collections of his works in the 1990s, but they are sadly out of print.

The People of the Pines

 

Brontë country

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I’ve just spent a week in Yorkshire visiting my parents, who live in the shadow of Ilkley Moor. It’s not far from Haworth where the Brontë sisters lived. We drove up in warm sunshine. Then, in the space of 24 hours, snow fell and the high roads were blocked. I went up onto the moors and the freezing winds and snow were coming in horizontally at gale force. I played here as a child. Later I used to go for long runs across the heathlands. There is nothing like them on earth. While there are places that are jaw-droppingly spectacular, there is something in these bleak empty spaces, lowering clouds and long lines of dry stone walls that gets deep inside. I understand why the Brontës wrote the books they did. The word ‘Wuthering’ comes from Old Norse and is the sound of a strong roaring wind. Standing among these rocks always makes me feel like re-creating Blake’s painting Glad Day, or the Dance of Albion, snow or no snow, but I’d probably get arrested. Anyway, here are the photos I took.

Snow on the moors

The Cow and Calf Rocks

The Cow and Calf Rocks

Sunset towards Howarth

Sunset towards Howarth

 

"...how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

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