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Postscript Meditations To me the wonderful irony about this is that, at the time, me (and it seemed everybody else in my world) was hanging upon every word John Lennon said because we thought HE had the secret! But there he was, clutching at straws of his own in the shade of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi! It was really due to the fact the
Beatles had thrown their lot in with the Maharishi and his
'transcendental meditation' that I had a go at it also. After all, if
they said it was okay, they must know what they're talking about (cuz
they obviously had the secret and I obviously needed it). I received my
mantra at a short ceremony in Birmingham, not from the Maharishi but one
of his faithful cohorts, an English actor whose name escapes me now.
With my mantra enabled, I would drift off into the big blue nowhere - it
was quite nice for awhile….. You meditate on your mantra until it,
you, and everything else becomes a meaningless flubber and you enter
into that big blank of perfect nothingness. I thought it must be a sort
of modern method of praying but I was wrong. Prayer is dialogue with, or
else a focus upon, another person, and nothing like meditation.
Certainly nothing like the void that Transcendental Meditation pointed
us to as the ultimate goal, the ointment to sooth the ills of our modern
world. 2001 But history just rolled over all the pundits and part-time prophets and nobody even felt the bump. The years and their ides 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 innocently enough. 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 love and fun songs - 16 tracks 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. Late in the year, we travelled to
Northern Ireland for a concert date. Our second journey 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. No, 2001 was not to be the year of space odysseys or star gates but instead the year of September the Eleventh and all that was birthed in its wake. 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 almost seemed 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 - but this joker, a religious assassin without mercy. 2001 was 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…. |
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| Brum Beat Mike Sheridan, like the faithful soldier he is, is still active on the local scene. Once a month he compères a gathering in a cricket pavilion lounge called 'The Old Silhilians' in South Birmingham. Mike was a local star when I was still turning the pages of my Bert Weedon book. I remember watching him and his group 'The Nightriders' (with Roy Wood on lead guitar), performing at a Birmingham dance hall early in the sixties and being amazed at how professional they were. I remember too the tones of Pythonesque daftness that he dropped in to his announcements of 'the next song.' It was quite unusual back then - playing music in a group meant looking cool and acting aloof and not being jokey or whacky. Under Mike's fatherly care the Old Sils has turned into a sort of nostalgia club, a place where those who remember fondly the Birmingham group scene of yesteryear, can congregate to listen to music from Mike plus a stream of impromptu guests, of which I have been one. Now I see a strange thing has happened. It seems the past has returned victorious from its lowly stable and all who were part of it, whether as spectators or actors, have become latter day heroes for no better reason than that they have survived. But then, what better reason is there? Like an old black and white film that has been re-engineered in computer enhanced Technicolor, yesterday has been re-released afresh with an honour it was never able to command at the time. Even the term 'Brum Beat' has become fashionable and the haphazard history of the Birmingham group scene has somehow coalesced into a recognisable, visible legend. Forty years have distilled all the toxin out of the seedy and downright rotten things that happened, the disappointments and broken allegiances, and redeemed and re-cast both heroes and villains into characters forged together in a noble struggle: Robin Hoods, Maid Marians and quite a few Sheriffs of Nottingham too, all caught up from their time and station to chase each other around the forest of rock n roll, and unwittingly to play a part in putting Birmingham onto the table of the world's musical attentions. And another strange thing has happened - I discover that I am part of this history for I share the same stage with those acquaintances who, from so long ago, I have admired or worked with or both. People like Steve Gibbons, Dave Pritchard (Idle Race), Danny King, Gerry Levene and many, many more. We all pop in to the Mike's nostalgia emporium, get up and play a couple of songs and then disappear back to our nursing homes or wherever. Yes, the Old Sils is like a reunion for an era. Every time I go there long-forgotten faces come up and remind me of episodes and situations that time has reduced to a blur, or maybe just that I still owe them a fiver! Mike chaperones the proceedings with his long practised flair for such occasions; Always the masterful host of ceremonies, now in the relaxed environment of the Old Sils, his penchant for wit has grown into interludes of outrageous comedy that wafts like a warm hand of gladness over the gathered worshippers. Tony Kelsey is Mike's right hand man in running this monthly trip down Memory Lane. He was not one of the sixties crowd because at the time, he was too young. Tony is a guitarist who comes from the next generation, the one that learned their craft at the university of technical excellence rather than that of teenage angst, cheek and bravado - the one that taught most of us all we knew in the sixties. He has also been an indispensable ally to me in my home recordings these past years. I first met Tony when I was playing bass for another old rocker from Birmingham - Gerry Levene - on a sixties gig at the Town Hall in 1995. Since then he has helped me to put many tracks together at Grimm Doo - his accomplished guitar playing is on most tracks of the 'Reel Two' CD released in 2001. | |
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Grounded But on a positive note, I have written a book. It's called 'Patterns in the Chaos'… You should read it! | |
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LIFE Life is the pattern in the Chaos. Life is the spark that glows in a vacuum without any oxygen, against all the odds. Life is an impossible origami figurine rising up from a torrent of molten lava; it is the Mona Lisa painted by a thunderstorm, the jet plane designed by fruit-fly larvae. It is the next octave on the molecular scale, the only sanity to be found inside a universe of whimsical lunacy. Right there, where it should never be, in the middle of a system predisposed to decay and disorder - the thing that breaks all the rules, that cannot be, that does not belong - a structure that has order, purpose, complex design; that is self-replicating, self-repairing and self aware…. Right there, dangling precariously. Life, the most precious thing in the firmament I came from eternity, and I go back to eternity. I did not ask to be sent here and I definitely do not ask to leave. It is simply not my call. All around me is an event horizon that I cannot see beyond - behind is birth and ahead is death - I cannot see, smell, touch, feel or know anything behind the curtain of eternity. Yet I know it is out there as sure as Solomon did when he wrote that God 'has set eternity in the hearts of men.' He went on to say that men still can't figure it out, just what God has done, just what he is up to! Yes I have flown into this room - the 'world' - through a window of time and I must fly out again through another window. I did not project myself into this place and on my own, am unable to change my fleeting passage through it by more than a millimetre. For I was fixed on a trajectory that was imparted to me, that is not of my making. I came in from eternity and I will go out to eternity. But then for the briefest of moments, the Spirit of God came and flew alongside me like a beautiful homing dove and said: 'Come now let us reason together,' and when our reasoning was done, or to be more precise, when His reasoning was done, I cried 'Yes' and wallop - my direction was instantly changed like I had just hit the ramp of a ski-jump. And you know what happens when you change direction - you get a different view of things: The landscape doesn't look the same. The sun shines from a different part of your sky and brings into clarity the very thing that before was so dark and foreboding, while at the same time it draws a shade across things that once seemed so bright… When you change heading, the view is totally different. And so you find yourself saying: 'it's like this'… and everyone else says you are crackers - 'Oh no it is not,' they sing in unison, 'it's like that!' The only thing you can agree upon is something in the periphery of your vision - 'Yes the weather is lovely isn't it - and I agree, the price of carrots is just criminal.' And slowly you begin to realise that the reason why you are now so inept at describing your reality, is simply because your view is so radically changed from the others around. And there comes a point where you notice sadly that the gap between you and those, who for so long you loved to fly with, is growing inexorably. Like trains on two lines that once ran parallel, you discover you are now diverging further apart until, where once the merest whisper could get their attention, now all the shout in your lungs cannot be heard. Oh you hope there is a station up ahead where you can meet up again. And maybe there is. Because the God who breathed life into our frame, did it like he does everything. For a good purpose. And He alone is able to join up the broken lines of our journey through this room called life. | |
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Epilogue It is morning and Mandy is reading Genesis to me, and I start to get angry. 'That doesn't make sense - where did Cain get his wife from?' (I think). And I realise I am feeling like my friend used to when I expounded the bible to him, and he started to boil up with indignation. The acceptance of a record with gaps in it caused him to bristle, as if I was heaping slime upon him. And then I understand: You have to start from the 'In the beginning God...' – If God hasn't made for you that beginning, if God hasn't created the starting point for your universe, you are not going to receive the rest. The brain cells repel it. So I get back to the 'In the beginning God...'I have to fill in a form in order to hire a car. What a trauma, I hate it. The question looms 'what is your job?' And straight away I am in a panic: What is my job? Shall I put 'drifter and opportunist?' Maybe I should put 'writer' or 'pilot' for I do write songs and I do fly planes. But somehow that seems fraught with problems - for sure the next question will be 'What hit song did you write, maybe I know it?' or 'Which airline do you fly for - I went to Ibiza on Monarch, maybe you were driving?' Maybe I should put 'musician', well that's certainly true (but will they still let me have their car?) Maybe 'pastor' - although that implies an income, which is not the case. After all, the word ‘job’ is descriptive of something that renders money. So I am forever wondering who I am. ‘Can we leave that blank please?’ 'Oh, so you are unemployed huh?' – ‘No, I am employed up to my eyeballs in tasks day and night actually. But....’So you must edit my thoughts in the light of the fact my box marked 'who are you?' is completely blank. Who am I and what do I do? I look out for signals coming in, patterns in the chaos…. And if I should say boldly that I believe God is doing this or that now, it is only because I am quite clear that God has already done this or that then, before, previously. The 'In the beginning God' set something going, and unlike me, He does not abandon his plans in midstream, or get distracted....Science calls it ‘synchronicity’ - meaningful related events, but that antiseptic word is but a smear of toothpaste to freshen the mouth of those who have never tasted the substance of synchronicity in their gut, and never known it's directed elegance in their life, for if they had, they would tack on the word 'divine' somewhere. It has to be divine synchronicity, for without that, the 'meaningful related event' is in fact a meaningless related event! So many things have happened to me that fall into the category of a meaningful related event, that I grow tired of the word ‘coincidence’. Still, I know how dear that word is in the chaotic world of chance that science has bequeathed us, so I use it in order to communicate with the outside world, to explain. And anyway it’s a lot shorter than divine synchronicity. In the end, the patterns in the chaos – the evidence of divine synchronicity - can only be discerned, if at all, from the perspective of time, like a fog from afar becomes a cloud. Time is the one thing the eternal God has plenty of, the one thing of which we have very little. But if He grants you enough of it, and you look carefully, I’m sure you will find some of those patterns for yourself. | |
