Since I've come back to the term in my last post, I should probably put this quote here as it's what got me thinking about the concept in the first place.
"Most definitely I say 'English' instead of 'British'. The British include the Scottish and Welsh, who have their own brand of surrealism. At least the Scottish do; the Welsh make do with simply being surreal. There's nothing remotely English about a Scottish surrealist writer such as Alasdair Gray, whose prose crackles, dances, does other tricks, in a member vehemently non-English. English surrealism is a distinctive brand. Rex Warner, J.B. Morton, W.E. Bowman, Vivian Stanshall, Kyril Bonfiglioli, a few others, adopt a mocking stance from the beginning. They just can't seem to take surrealism seriously: by which I mean that they tend to exploit the surreal for its comic inventiveness rather than for the light it sheds on the secret workings of the grim subconscious mind.
"...The English surrealists were consequently far more theatrical than their continental counterparts - they had a liking for large casts and elaborate props, the complex and ineffable interconnections of clubs, galas, events, expeditions. Its all about the Show; and the Show must go on, far beyond the ridiculousness that once was the sublime. Rex Warner's bicycle race in pursuit of the proverbial and real Wild Goose; J.B. Morton's boomerang-shaped aeroplanes that save on the fuel for a return flight; W.E. Bowman's cruise in search of talking fish: these form a different order of surrealism from the one Breton originally envisaged, and conceivably he wouldn't even recognise the representative works of these authors as being 'surreal'."
Rhys Hughes, Englebrecht Again!
'[A] few others' for Rhys would at the very least include Maurice Richardson (whose work Englebrecht Again! tributes), Michael Moorcock (Dancers at the End of Time), and the 'semi-surrealist' William Sansom. There must be others?
I confess, Moorcock, Richardson and Stanshall aside, to date I've read none of these gentlemen. This needs investigating further I feel.
Goodness, has it really been ten years? Longer in fact, if I consider that Sweet England, the album on which this arrangement originally appeared actually came out the previous year. I remember the praise and the excitement it received. This was the 'future of folk', or some such similar nonsense. And consequently hated by those who feel affronted by a difference to their fixed ideas of how folk music should be performed. It was certainly innovative, in his melding of traditional songs and tunes with ambient electronic soundscapes. Only it falls apart at the end for me with the one rather plaintive original, backed only with the piano.
I actually prefer the live performance here to the original that's on the record. It preserves most of the icy chill of the arrangement (that opening solo violin) with an added forcefulness when the drums come in, provided here by two static drummers, both rooted to the spot behind the main performer. What really lived in my memory though, was the eccentric backdrop playing behind the musicians.
Here, memory has clearly betrayed me somewhat, as the camera focuses on it for relatively little of the performance. Instead, we get rather more of Jim Moray's rockstar posturing than I remembered. Which is understandable: the performer is what we want to see after all. Still, we see enough to get a clear sense of what was shown, and it's not as though it's anything particularly complex.
The backdrop is, as I said, the element that's really stayed in my mind from when I first saw it:
An autumnal forest, much like that which appeared on the album cover and inside sleeve. In fact, I imagine it's the same image. On the cover, Jim Moray appears asleep, lying next to an electric guitar and several books. One of them looks like an old fashioned kind of exercise book, while the other is a cloth bound hardback, missing a dust jacket. In the background, gazing at him, there's a black dog. The dog reappears on the inside sleeve, as part of a digitally manipulated series of images of the musician. Behind his pensive looking self he appears holding a crow on his left hand; two versions of him are investigating his - sleeping? - self; he gazes at an open book whilst the back of his head bursts into flame; he holds a rose, while his head spins so fast that it's become a blur; he stands proudly next to himself, bound to a tree, whilst another self takes a photograph of the two of them; finally, a tear falls slowly down his cheek.
We don't need to read anything specific into the symbolism here - I imagine that nothing specific is meant - but images of crows, roses, black dogs, of repetitive doubling of the self, have their own resonant meanings, if only ones taken from popular culture. It conjures up a vague sense of the occult: occultness if you like. The combination of a very modern looking guitar and camera means that the images enact a melding of the past and the present which the music also works to self-consciously create: very old songs treated in a most up to date manner.
The performance backdrop achieves something else. Whilst the musicians play, the initially empty forest scene is slowly populated by their doubles, only in the backdrop they are wearing costumed animal heads. This is achieved by what looks like a very cheap effect, akin to the blue screen of an earlier era, as though their human figures have been pasted onto the image. The final figure to appear, and here I'm grateful that my memory hasn't completely betrayed me, is of a drummer wearing a badger's head. Or so it looks to me.
How to define, how to place this image? The album cover and sleeve are trading very obviously in a form of romanticism, laying it on a bit thick almost. The intense seriousness carries over into the musical performances on the album. Live, that seriousness is preserved. It's only in the backdrop, in the simulated or actual cheapness of the backdrop, that any humour creeps in. It's very oddness lends it that somewhat comic air. The reason that it's the badger which has lodged in my mind all these years is probably an unconscious echo of The Wind in the Willows. Taken as a whole, matched with the seriousness of the performance, what I think I saw all those years ago was an image of what I would now wish to define as English surrealism. No wonder it lodged itself in my mind in the way that it did.
