But then time has a way of making a fools of soothsayers, Cassandra's and weather men alike….
Not forgetting itinerant song writers:
I once wrote a song called 'The United States of Europe, 79' - yes that was Nineteen Seventy Nine I was on about…. Then again on the Earth Rise album there is a line in one of my songs about 'the weather war of eighty nine'…
But history just rolled over me and all the other pundits and part-time prophets and nobody even felt the bump. The years and their portends passed by and we barely turned in our beds. The Cold War, George Orwell's 1984, the Millennium Bug. We survived all of our future fears to live instead in our very own present ones. New and fresh fears.

2001 started well. Mandy and I were in our third year at Church on the Hill, busy redesigning and landscaping the former jungle at the back of the church that was to become the garden. Busy also playing our evangelistic set at numerous locations around England.
In March, I released a new CD album of secular songs - 16 songs of love and fun, including some old originals that I had found lurking on tapes gathering dust at Grimm Doo. Like my preceding Christian albums, 'Reel Two' was a cottage production and on it I included a couple of songs written by my old pal Jim Cleary. In June we flew to Romania, visiting Miti for a 10 day holiday.

Zoom
Just before then, in the spring of 2001 we had 'Zoom!'
Maybe you didn't get it, but I did. Jeff sent me a copy of his new album - released under the 'ELO' banner, the first for over a decade - and my old mate Richard went off on a secret mission to America… When he surfaced again it was on stage with ELO:
They were playing before an invited audience at a TV studio in Manhattan, a light and happy affair.
I watch Jeff joking on the video recording:´We are ELO… This is the first show we've done for 17 years, but we have been practising...´
They certainly had. They played a 90 minute set with Jeff taking the microphone between each song and talking relaxed and free like I had never heard him before. Jeff's new ELO included his girl-friend Rosie Vela, five American back-line musicians and of course, Richard on keyboards. (A 'Dave Morgan' is credited on the video as part of the crew, but it isn't me! In the credits also you can see the name 'Sheila Tandy' - Richard's wife pitched in operating a teleprompter to help Jeff remember his lyrics… - Wow a teleprompter - I want one!)
The show, like the album 'Zoom', was first class, and the televised gigs - in New York in April and Los Angeles in May - were intended to be the flagships for a nation wide tour set to begin in the autumn. But by August, lackluster ticket sales had scotched the idea and then came September the eleventh….

Mandy and I were at home watching live pictures of a skyscraper on fire…. subtitles and studio inserts told the story - a terrible accident had just happened, an airliner had crashed into one of the two Trade Center towers of Manhattan. Camera shots of people waving from windows a thousand foot above the ground, and even some people jumping… Then accompanied by incredulous shouts from the newscasters, a second aircraft slammed into the other building alongside. And our heart's began to quake as we realised it was no mishap, but a fiendish act of mass murder orchestrated with military timing for just such a shock effect. Frantic news reports told of another airliner loaded with passengers slamming into the Pentagon building near Washington, and there were rumours of yet more aircraft heading for God knows where… We watched in a transfixed dread as one by one the towers crumpled and dropped vertically down in explosions of dust and smoke. You could not help but feel that cold rush pass through you. Thousands of people trapped in concrete, hundreds more that had ridden on an airliners made into guided missiles - And yes, the chimes of world history as one age ended and the other began. The tallest buildings in New York felled, one that Pam and I had stood on top of during a break in ELO's TIME tour in 1981. I turned to Mandy and said: 'Revelation Eighteen' and we ran to get a bible and read it. There it was, for some reason I had highlighted it the three times it is mentioned: in 'one hour' .. city of power.. your doom has come… such great wealth brought to ruin…. in one hour brought to ruin! It had taken a little over one hour from beginning to end.


At the close of 2001, Mandy and I travelled to Northern Ireland for a concert date. Our second trip to the province was as good as the first, in January 1999, had been bad. For a start we flew there instead of the interminable drive up the M6 and then the ferry across the Irish Sea… This time we landed at Belfast airport after only 45 minutes travel time instead of nine hours. Our host, Clive Elliot (promoter of 'The Cleft' in Portadown, where we played) met us and chaperoned us royally during our four day stay.
Right after we arrived in Northern Ireland on 30 November, we heard the news that George Harrison had died in Los Angeles. Then hard on the heels of that news came reports of Palestinian suicide bombers striking at Israel.
When I got back to Birmingham, I spoke with Richard about George's passing. I remember how, along with the sad news about George, he seemed especially weighed down by what was going on in the world, the news from Israel and the new war brewing in Afghanistan. Normally confident that the goodness and sanity of men would prevail, his optimism was crushed before the tide of evil cresting ever higher. He said to me: 'I used to wonder when I read about the thirties, how everyone could see that the world was drifting into war and yet nobody could do anything about it. It used to puzzle me: If they knew that, how come they were powerless to stop it? Now I think I understand how they felt!'
Richard put words to the helplessness of us all before the apocalyptic events that were unfolding before us. The gulf between us grew strangely wider in the shadow of tragedy. Where in the natural, bad news might forge a common interest, there was no philosophical ground of agreement we could tread. For I could not live with a scenario that didn't include God and Richard could not live with any scenario that did.

No, 2001 was not to be the year of space odysseys or star gates but instead the year of September the Eleventh. Hollywood had entertained us for so long with James Bond scenarios of the fiendish mastermind at work - Smersh, Doctor No and other cookie megalomaniacs - characters who blackmailed the world from volcano craters or underground hideaways tunnelled into rock … Suddenly our vista was shaken by just such a figure, a wealthy drop out living in a cave and scheming the downfall of us all… The head of an organisation that succeeded in toppling the prime icons of the world system, the Twin Towers of Manhattan. Bin Laden was a caricature right out of an Ian Fleming plot and yet he was real. It was hard to see where the inventions of Hollywood ended and the iron fist of messianic Islam began. It seemed almost like we had created our own reality out of a disaster movie script. And there we all were, trapped in Gotham City with the Joker on the rampage - and this joker, a religious assassin without mercy.

2001 was the year that Miti became a born-again Christian - a month after we left him in July. And by September he was married again - to Paula, a lady from the church in Tulcea that we had visited with him. It was also the year that ELO got to tread the footlights one more time. Maybe it was a finale, who knows? But there they are, on video and DVD, stood beneath a new space ship singing Jeff's musical masterpieces old and new… Set in a time, at the very end of the last epoch, just before the world changed in September….