For they marched up to Bastille Day
La guillotine – claimed her bloody prize
Hear the echoes of the centuries
Power isn’t all that money buys
Neil Peart, Bastille Day, (From the Rush album Caress of Steel, 1975)
i
Following in the footsteps of my father, I attended Wrekin College, a respectable, middle league, private boarding school in Wellington, Shropshire. By the defined standards of the system, I was educationally average. I enjoyed cricket and gymnastics, hated rugby and passed a reasonable set of GCE O-Level exam grades. In the sixth form I attained a high level of indifference. The dry science subjects I had been narrowly streamed into - Biology, Chemistry and Physics - all seemed to blur into a cloud of bewildering mathematical formulae. I found myself inculcated into boredom. I have spent the rest of my life resisting the pull to be streamed into any single river of interest. I believe in autodidactic autonomy, contextualised within collaborative enquiry. For me the primary functions of education are: to stimulate curiosity, to facilitate resourcefulness, to identify unique intelligence, and to acknowledge that there is more to intelligence than the rational mind. I would consider a non-binary approach to learning - a trans-intelligence that expands beyond limiting categories of science/humanities, head skills/body skills.
ii
Intertextuality as a methodology of expanding perspectives, where text is not only the written word but includes the body, the environment, the historical context, the geography of a place, social structures, musical resonances, moods and emotional constellations.
iii
Agenda fluidity.
iv
"Teach me some chords", I said to Mike Sweeney, my fellow rebel in boredom, in our sixth form lounge.
"Yeah. Put your fingers here, here and here. That's an 'A'. And this is a 'D'."
Mike left his guitar lying around so I could pick it up regularly. By the next term I had my own acoustic, a gift from my mum, from a music shop in Shrewsbury. I had a book of easy to play songs for beginners. What was the real education I needed here? The answer was blowin' in the wind. Three chords is enough to get by.
And how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?
v
Maybe I have to forgive my teachers a little. They might not have known it but, in the long run, they gave me a lot, just not in the way they might have expected. My unmarked alternative A-Level was in rock music. Some of us formed a school rock band and were given permission to rehearse in the school gym. Settling on the name Bastille, inspired from a song, Bastille Day, by the Canadian rock trio Rush, our band is excited when we are given the go ahead to do a school concert.
They looked good from the moment the lights came up on them; from their opening number to their finale they hardly flagged at all. To my untrained musical ear, this concert seemed a very professional job, backstage and up front. The Director of Music popped in for a time and passed the verdict of 'not bad', which is praise from a classically trained musician.
So, English teacher, Gary Hopkins writes for the school magazine The Wrekinian, in 1979. For one night, at least, we storm it. On one side of the stage, in the newly built school Centenary Hall, is a scaffolding: a structure of potential support or execution. We have rehearsed for most of the term and it is more important to me than my A level’s, which I have an uncomfortable, and accurate, premonition are going yield disastrous results. 20p per ticket.
The hall fills up quickly. In a stance to build up tension, we start the concert lights low, with our backs to the audience: a packed floor of eager schoolboys. A pre-recorded intro tape of space sounds takes too long to start up. Dave Shenton, the drummer and leader of the group, glares angrily. ‘Just fucking start,’ his expression seems to say. We launch into Ejection, a Dave Calvert song from his Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters album.
There's only one course of action, left for me to take
I've tried every switch selection, that might control this state...
Mike Ormerod, our 'special effects' and stage manger has rigged up a complex system whereby a pulley should release some 'Coffee Compliment' dry milk-powder from the top of the scaffolding down onto a meths burner flame at the bottom. He discovered that this can create a dramatic burst of flame rising rapidly up through the air. But the pulley is stuck. Mike climbs the scaffolding to release the powder by hand. It works really well. Too well. His hair is nicely singed by an dramatic ball of heat. Exuberant cheering from the audience.
Smoke on the water, a fire in the sky....
The hall is hot and sweaty. It's going to be ok.
Chris Ward as principal vocalist possessed a very distinctive style of his own. His voice has always struck me as sounding rather like gravel being ground underfoot. He has a nice, understated stage presence (yes, I admit that he did pick up the microphone-stand on one occasion and swing it over his head, but, nevertheless...).
Songs performed, not in order:
Ejection, Dave Calvert
Mongoloid, Devo
Honky Tonk Woman, Rolling Stones
Jumpin' Jack Flash, Rolling Stones
Paranoid, Black Sabbath
Freebird, Lynyrd Skynyrd
Silver Machine, Hawkwind
Smoke on the Water, Deep Purple
Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Bad Company
All Right Now, Free
House of the Rising Sun, The Animals
Pretty Vacant, Sex Pistols
I Want you to Want Me, Cheap Trick
Dave Shenton is an accomplished drummer with an undeviating sense of rhythm. His drum solo was one of the highlights of the evening. Guitarists Roger Bygott (lead/rhythm), Paul Clarke (rhythm/lead), and Clive Garnham (Bass) are all, to a man, great showmen, although they did not allow stage antics to interfere with the precision of their playing. In the jargon of my own formative teeny-bopper years, they could, in the present musical climate, one day be 'out of sight man.'
One boy fainted. Sadly, no one took any photographs. We did get a rehearsal photo in the Shropshire Star newspaper. Gary Hopkin's review was surprisingly positive. Highlight of my school career.
Dave Shenton carried on playing drums and was in various bands including UK rock group Vixen who were on MTV in the early days of the show. They nearly got a deal with Warner Bros but pulled out due to the onerous contract.
vi
Six days after Bastille played Wrekin College Centenary Hall, to a couple of hundred schoolboys, Jean-Michel Jarre gave a concert to a record breaking 1,000,000 people in the Place De La Concorde in Paris. The event was to mark the 1979, 14th July, Fête nationale française or Bastille Day Celebrations. The storming of the Bastille on 14th July 1789 marked the end of feudal monarchy in France. On 26 August, 1789, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was proclaimed.
vii
The first rock concert I attended was the Welsh power trio, Budgie, on 24th February 1978, at Liverpool Empire.
The second rock concert I attended was the Rush, Farewell to Kings tour, on 25th February 1978, at Liverpool Empire. They opened with Bastille Day. It's not my favourite song, but I'm still fond of Rush. Mid set, they also played Anthem a track from their second album Fly By Night.
viii
The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law.
Article XI, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
ix
Equality 7-2521, the street sweeper met Liberty 5-3000, a 17-year-old Peasant girl who is a field worker, at the edge of the City. An illegally aspiring scholar, Equality 7-2521, struggles in a dystopian future where individuality has been abolished and technological development or research is curtailed by an authoritarian regime. Equality 7-2521 discovers an ancient underground tunnel from The Unmentionable Times. In the tunnel he comes across a glass box with wires that gives off light when he passes electricity through it. He thinks this technological rediscovery will be welcomed by his society. However his revelation is rejected and he’s lined up for punishment, having disrupting the plans of the World Council and the Department of Candles. He curses the Council, seizes the light-box and escapes to the Uncharted Forest. He feels outcast but savours his freedom and the strange sense of individuality that comes with it. The next day Liberty 5-3000 also escapes the city and joins him. They find a house from the Unmentionable Times which has a library. In the books they discover the word “I” for the first time.
*
Neil Peart joined Rush on July 29th 1974. One of the first songs they worked on was Anthem. Appearing on the second Rush album Fly By Night, that particular song, lyrics by Neil Peart, wasn’t directly about the above story, my précis of Anthem, a sci-fi novella written by Russian-American writer Ayn Rand in 1937. But Peart’s song was influenced by Rand’s philosophy of individualism.
Live for yourself, there’s no one else
More worth living for
Begging hands and bleeding hearts
Will only cry for more.
Neil Peart, Anthem, from Fly By Night
The Rush concept album 2112 started out as an original idea by Neil Peart, but as it developed he realised the story was strongly influenced by Rand’s Anthem novella. Hence the controversial philosopher of objectivism gets a praiseworthy credit on the album cover.
Miles, the journalist, Beat biographer and historian of the British Underground, tore them to pieces in a New Musical Express interview conducted around the same time I saw them. The interview, near enough an argument, isn’t pretty reading.
Neil Peart: “….you can find answers to pretty well everything on an individual basis. Putting the individual as the first priority, everything can be made to work in a way that it can never be made to work under any other system.”
I began to object to this statement, but Neil interrupted excitedly:
“You’re living in the best example! Look at Britain and what socialism has done to Britain! It’s crippling! And what it’s done to the youth. What do you think the Sex Pistols and all the rest of ‘em are really frustrated about? They’re frustrated because they’re growing up in a socialist society in which there’s no place for them as individuals. They either join the morass or they fight it with the only means left. They have literally no future, and I lived and worked here, and I know what it feels like, and it’s not very nice.”
Do you really think they’re a product of socialism?
“Yeah! What else? What else are they fighting against if they’re not fighting that?”
Fighting against socialism? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Peart was later to admit that he had come to a more compassionate philosophical stance as to the implications of personal freedom.
x
And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.
Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987
xi
I saw the impressive stage version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, directed by Ivo van Hove for Manchester International Festival, in July 2019. Howard Roark, a brilliant architect, has novel, radical ideas for a new city of tomorrow. Peter Keating, his colleague, constantly compromises his design concepts to align with market demands. At what point does the unique genius of the artist tip into egotism? At what point does flexibility in service of the many undermine individual growth and visionary brilliance.
xii
Ultimately I’m unhappy with extremes either way. Maybe that’s a privileged statement in itself. Nevertheless I do believe in at least trying to overcome the endless opposing dualisms and polarisations that seem to lead only to war, suffering, environmental disaster, inequality of opportunity and misery. It’s so much a world of ‘this’ vs. ‘that’. Despite being ‘post-Buddhist’, I gratefully call on the Buddha’s core teaching of the ‘middle way’ as a guide.
xiii
Eternalism: the notion that anything is fixed or permanent, that our ego is solid and reliable. The illusion of self. Fight to get what you can, do anything to conserve the familiar, reinforce the reassurance of your own individual existence. Help the nihilists to remove themselves from the planet as quickly as possible.
Nihilism: the notion that there is ultimately nothing, we are insignificant, meaningless and empty. Shoot yourself now. Or do it slowly using multifarious options that the eternalists will be happy to sell to you.
Middle Way: the whole thing is one glorious flow and flux, with temporary constellations of form arising as objects, animals, people, social systems, art, ideas and subjective dreams. Shit happens; roses grow. Individualism is dependent on others, on life giving conditions beyond ourselves, on ecosystems. Collectivism is dependent on unique individuals interacting in alignment with the survival and good of the whole.