This week it is the turn of Manu Chao who is Spanish but was born in Paris. His music is a mix of Spanish, French, African, South American with lots of other influences besides.
And a song for Diego Armando Maradona, they always like to include a clip of his 'hand of God' goal against England!
"Manu Chao helped begin the Latin alternative movement way back in the '80s -- although it had no name then -- and in his later work he cut a cross-cultural swath across styles and geographic boundaries. Chao was born on June 21, 1961, in Paris to Spanish parents -- his father, Ramon Chao, a respected writer, comes from Galicia, his mother Bilbao. Growing up bilingual, he was also influenced by the punk scene across the English Channel that happened while he was still in his teens."
In 1911, when California held a referendum on the question of women’s suffrage, the writer Jack London surprised his wife Charmian by saying he had voted in favour, because:
"When the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition. It is the wives, and sisters, and mothers, and they only, who will drive the nails into the coffin of John Barleycorn.”
In his 1913 book ‘John Barleycorn’ he claimed that few men were born addicts to alcohol; the real driver was its availability:
It is the accessibility of alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol. I did not care for it. I used to laugh at it. Yet here I am, at the last, possessed with the drinker's desire. It took twenty years to implant that desire.
Sure enough, the Constitutional amendments introducing Prohibition and granting women’s suffrage were passed within six months of each other, in 1920. Women did not vote directly for Prohibition - there was no referendum, though by 1918 fifteen States had already legalised the female franchise - but the two movements ran in parallel. Women have been ‘blamed’ for Prohibition, though perhaps ‘credited’ is a better term, seeing the practical benefits of the experiment.
London’s accessibility argument is borne out by British history. When the Government deregulated sales of gin in order to turn people away from importing brandy from the enemy, France, the result was an epidemic of drunkenness that forced the passing of the 1751 Gin Act to reduce the damage.
A fortnight after the passage of that Act, Sydney Smith, renowned for his idealism, who, previously, had been a strong advocate of it, wrote: “Everybody is drunk. Those who are not sinking are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state.”
Since then there have been various episodes of regulatory tightening and re-loosening of licensed hours and premises, from e.g. Sunday pub closures in Wales (1881) to the nationwide availability of 24-hour licenses (2005.)
Outlets have proliferated: today, I would be hard put to count all the places within a mile of our (suburban) house where I can buy alcohol; not just pubs and off-licenses but supermarkets, post offices, garages and convenience stores.
In our post-industrial country, the home is an increasingly important venue for consumption:
The main change in the structure of capital during this century has been the relative stagnation of industrial capital and the growth of the service sector of the economy. This trend, which has been most marked in the south of England, has had consequences for inner city working class areas: de-industrialisation, mobility of labour, and post-war rehousing policies have combined to dislocate the pattern of community based upon local work and extended families and associated cultural traditions...
Population has been decanted to the New Towns, and more generally, to the suburbs, where social life has focussed upon the nuclear family, and the home is increasingly regarded as a place of leisure, recreation and consumption. It is in this context that off-licence sales have become more important. The 1961 Licensing Act relaxed restrictions on the opening of off-licences, and the 1964 Licensing Act facilitated supermarket sales. By the late 1970s, most beer was still sold in public houses, but one third of all wine and half of spirits were consumed at home.
From ‘Alcohol, Youth, and the State’ by Nicholas Dorn (RKP, 1983)
The State is conflicted on the subject: on the one hand there are the health and other costs of alcohol; but on the other there is the fact that the sales taxes represent something like 2% of total Government revenue (not counting the taxes and National Insurance Contributions provided by all those employed in the drinks industry.)
Males drink more than females, though the latter are catching up. On average, men in 2018 were drinking the equivalent of 17.8 litres of pure alcohol per year - in spirits terms, more than five 70-centilitre bottles a month. Bear in mind that around 20% of the adult population doesn’t drink at all (among the young, there may be a switch to drugs instead, especially when beer is retailing at close to £5 a pint in pubs) and according to this survey:
… the very heaviest drinkers – who make just 4% of the population - consume around 30% of all the alcohol sold in the UK.
Those who call for further controls over alcohol, tobacco, gambling and drugs will often be accused of ‘nannying’, though the State Nanny is one that has been making it easy for her charges to get the things that harm them, and who gets backhanders from the suppliers; a Satananny, if you will.
Libertarians dislike having anyone say no to them; the line starts behind me on that one, but let’s have no illusions about our supposed complete rationality and freedom of the will: there’s not that many Buddhas in the world. Jack London ended his 1913 book with a personal commitment to a more measured approach to alcohol:
No, I decided; I shall take my drink on occasion. With all the books on my shelves, with all the thoughts of the thinkers shaded by my particular temperament, I decided coolly and deliberately that I should continue to do what I had been trained to want to do. I would drink—but oh, more skilfully, more discreetly, than ever before.
He didn’t live past 40.
We may not get booze and fags back into Pandora’s box, but maybe we can do more about the plague of gambling - so heavily advertised on TV at the moment - and think twice about liberalising drug laws.
I republish below a post from my Substack account (June 15.) Tragically the boy, Archie Battersbee, died yesterday after his life support was switched off, against his mother's will. Her request to move him to a hospice was also denied and permission to take the legal case further refused by the Court:
Three judges, sitting at the court of appeal in central London, ruled on Monday that the decision of a high court judge to reject the plea by the parents of Archie Battersbee for him to be allowed to die a “natural” death had been based on the child’s best interests.
What we suspect it's really about: resources, especially money.
Tiger mothers
... or should they just be sensible and listen to experts?
A British boy currently lies comatose in hospital; doctors say there is ‘no brain activity’ and a High Court judge has ruled that he can be taken off life support. Yet his mother says he has gripped her hand; she believes he is ‘still there’ and she will fight on.
Intensive care is very expensive and so there can be a financial element in medical professionals’ judgment that there is no point in continuing. They may or may not be right in this case; yet ‘miracles’ happen.
Lady Anne Glenconner’s autobiography ‘Lady In Waiting’ (chapters 14 & 15) gives reason to hope against hope. In 1987 she learned that her 19-year-old son Christopher had had a motorcycle accident (helmetless) in Belize; after emergency surgery he was flown to Miami in a deep coma. Fortunately she had bought travel insurance for him and he was taken on to London in a private plane, still unconscious and on life support.
After Christopher had been unresponsive for weeks in the Wellington Hospital a doctor with long experience in this field told Lady Anne:
‘Christopher will be a vegetable all his life. There is no hope of recovery for him. If I were you I would forget about him improving and get on with your life.’
There are two kinds of explanation. One is to enable you to understand a phenomenon; the other is to explain it away, preferring it not to be real. I’m no preacher - I doubt everything; but this is what Lady Anne says and I believe she is being truthful:
Already religious, she had begun engaging with God and praying hard. At the point of giving up she heard of a Christian healer in Scotland, a Mrs Black, and got help from her by telephone. Then Mrs Black came down several times to work on Christopher in person. Lady Anne thought she could see tiny improvements, but she told Mrs Black she herself was exhausted. Back in Scotland, Mrs Black told her to prepare for a session next morning:
‘Suddenly, to my amazement, I felt as if champagne was flowing through my veins. I felt invigorated. It’s the only time in my life when anything like that has happened to me.’
With renewed energy and commitment she sought out a doctor whose own son had been in a coma; he stressed the importance of doing things with the patient and engaging all five senses. Christopher would need to be stimulated ‘fifteen minutes in every hour every day for weeks.’
Lady Anne set up a rota with the help of friends, to use the doctor’s ‘coma kit’ - smells, music, singing, talking, reading aloud, brushing Christopher’s skin with different textures and temperatures.
‘We even persuaded the nurses to let us take Christopher out of bed [still wired up to many machines] and nurse him on the floor so I could cradle him: I was sure that if he could feel my heartbeat it would have a positive effect on him.’
The breakthrough came when after Christopher had come off the ventilator a friend arrived with a baby’s bottle. A skeptical nurse let them try and eyes still closed, Christopher started to suck. Eventually, after four months in a coma, he woke up, and began rehabilitation.
If Lady Anne hadn’t accepted Mrs Black’s help, she would very likely have followed the hospital doctor’s advice and given up, sensibly.
As with so much with us of the older generations we get berated for opinions that are dated, do not take in the advances made since our youth and being stuck in a supposed ‘golden age’ that never really existed, except in many cases as with all else it did.
Anyone who was in their late teens or early twenties and lived through the Sixties would probably agree it was the best decade in modern times, we had it all.
The music that exploded across the world was nearly all our making and changed the landscape of popular music. It was without a precedent, nothing before or since has matched it.
British fashion was a bad joke until the Sixties. Suddenly an explosion of talent changed all that and we led the world in fashion design: the mini skirt became an icon of the age, Mary Quant hairdos, and barbers became hairdressers much else in design such as promoted by Terence Conran, and innovators appeared and were hugely successful in that same decade.
And through it all up till the present day Twiggy represented the age with style:
And alongside Twiggy a bevy of photographers changed the way the camera recorded the age: David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy and the photojournalist Don McCullin, and Tony Ray-Jones the social photographer changed the way in their respective fields how Britain was seen, here and worldwide.
Bailey could almost be accused of making the Krays ‘popular’,
such was the success of his portraits of them.
Our way of life changed, not necessarily all for the better as ‘free love’ via the contraceptive pill, came with certain problems but the earlier prudish approach to relationships was swept away in that decade. Women advanced their case more in the Sixties than all the decades before, equal pay after the Dagenham Ford strike was demanded and started to be accepted as the norm, even though the resistance to it stayed for years after.
We started to venture abroad for our holidays and those weeks at Butlins started to became a faint memory for many.
There was full employment, good wages and working conditions were being transformed. At the beginning of that decade hardly anyone owned a motor car at the end of it nearly everyone did, and we got the E-Type Jaguar and the Mini.
And pre-EU we were successful as a nation. The old nationalised industries were slowly being privatised and became more competitive, we led the world in nuclear fusion, had a more than competitive aircraft industry and still had armed forces that could be a force anywhere should the need arise.
Concord first flew in ‘69 and to this day is a marvel of aviation. Anyone who saw it could not help but be amazed something like that was actually flying. Yes, I am aware it never made money but at the time who cared.
Entertainment through the medium of television created the first stars of the screen, pubs and working men's clubs provided entertainers who went on television and became household names, who without that medium would have remained undiscovered.That Was TheWeek That Was broke new ground in the presenting of news and satire with brilliant writers and presenters.
Sporting achievements were capped when we won the football World Cup, we had our first world road race cycling champion in ‘65, we had a whole raft of innovative race car and engine designers who changed the whole way that race cars were built and we won world championships on two wheels and four. John Surtees won the world drivers championship in ‘64 and became still the only man to have won world titles on two and four wheels' Hill Clark and others cemented our position at the top of Grand Prix racing. Lynn Davies and David Hemery made gold in the ‘64 Olympics
No decade is perfect. We went from Harold Macmillan 'You've never had it so good' to Harold Wilson 'From now on, the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. That doesn't mean, of course, that the Pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued' - quite………….
You could see your GP at any time and he would visit if necessary in the middle of the night. The hospital system was more rudimentary but it worked and there were no real waiting lists.
Prices in ‘65 adjusted to today's allowing for inflation:
A pint of beer £1.70, newspaper 25p, average house price £50,000 and you got space inside and out, Ford Cortina 9,500. Not all was cheaper: new technology was much more expensive than now inline with the first mobile phones, and some food items are much the same, but transport was cheap.
Posting a letter cost 19p adjusted in ‘68 compared with 67p today.
Petrol per gallon - see here for how it has gone upwards ever since the motor car became a tax gift.
Eating out, something that simply did not exist in the Fifties started to happen in the Sixties. Rudimentary it may have been, nonetheless although Chinese and Indian restaurants had been around for decades they were never really a pull for the general population. That all changed and with the change came food with taste, and along with the spicy food came lager. So much before had been so bland as to be instantly forgettable. As usual not all was good, Wimpy bars arrived!, and Bernie Inns, but it nonetheless got people out to eat in a way not seen before.
We really did not eat out, even the pubs only had a plastic cheese roll under a glass dome that had been perspiring for days and a choice of crisps: salted and unsalted.
Wine started to appear on menus. Till then wine had been something that Colonels drank in the shires; Mateus Rose and Blue Nun changed all that - basic, but a start.
Among other technological advancements in the sixties, carbon fibre was invented at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in ‘63.
The touchscreen was another British invention in ‘65, who would have believed then what an influence it would become in later years.
Barclays Bank saw the first ATM in action in ‘67 - a British, in its final form, invention; and James Goodfellow a Scottish engineer pioneered the PIN system which incorporated in with the credit card made cash withdrawals from ATMs a part of normal life in ‘66.
Technological advancement meant people had more leisure time. The microwave appeared along with transistor radios and colour TVs; Radio Caroline opened up a whole new a whole new world with DJs who promoted popular music.
Film mirrored the age and actors like Michael Caine, David Hemmings and a list that seemed endless advanced on the world stage, plus the films that were made when we sill had a functioning film industry, many remain classics and icons of that time.
People spoke to one another in the street down the pub. Today all you see is people glued to mobile phones. The art of dating has been lost as all go online to meet someone of the opposite sex, and same sex! - can’t think of a worse way to set out in the world with a new partner, it’s like colouring by numbers, you get a result but they are all the same.
Nobody gets married any more and single parents prevail, a backward step on all counts for the child especially, and a further burden on the taxpayer.
Being unemployed during the Sixties carried a stigma with it, no one wanted to go on the dole; today you can’t get a large percentage of the population weaned off it, it has become a lifestyle choice and is aided by the State.
And our ruling class of all colours gets ever more ridiculous and incompetent, yet people still vote for them.
As is the case younger people with no knowledge of earlier times are inclined to sneer at what was a golden age sans smart phones, it’s all they know, which is sad as they missed something they could never envisage. Who knows they might even have enjoyed it, the music was certainly better.
Politics has changed as well, no longer any orators or even speakers with any authority, who today could emulate this from Harold MacMillan:
"I am Kamala Harris. My pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit." Second in command of the most powerful nation on the planet. God help us.
The Sixties was Britain pre-EU, a world that we left behind to join a trading bloc? Something else the later generations would not have a clue about. It was on reflection a decade we largely took for granted at the time such was the speed of change, but there has not been a decade like it since.
“If you remember the ‘60s, you weren’t really there.”
That line though with some basis of truth for a small section of society was not of the time, it was first uttered by American comedian Charlie Fleischer in ‘82 and he would be just ten when the Sixties started so probably knew little about the decade. It assumes everyone at the time was on something, that was also not true but it makes a good punchline.
Tottenham Royal with the Dave Clark Five on stage, a regular haunt of mine during the Sixties. Many top bands played there as they did up the road at the Astoria Finsbury Park (later the Rainbow.)
Cab Calloway (1907 - 1994) was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, bandleader, conductor and actor. He was associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, where he was a regular performer and became a popular vocalist of the swing era. His career more or less spanned the 20th century, he led one of the most popular dance bands in the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1940s.
Calloway had several hit records in the 1930s and 1940s, becoming known as the "Hi-de-ho" man of jazz for his most famous song, "Minnie the Moocher", originally recorded in 1931. He reached the Billboard charts in five consecutive decades (1930s–1970s).
In 1980 he appeared in the film The Blues Brothers (performing Minnie the Moocher, of course) Not many people can look back on 65 years in the showbiz limelight!
Last Tuesday's C4 documentary 'Alcohol, Dad and Me' may have helped reopen the debate on addiction and whether it is really enough for the State to stand back and let so many individuals be trapped and flounder.
Businesses and government have a two-part strategy to exploit your weaknesses:
make profits and raise taxes from your self-indulgence
say it is your choice so they can’t be blamed and sued
Companies will do whatever is profitable and are tempted to reduce ethical issues to relative-cost calculations. For example in 1970s USA Ford produced a model, the Pinto, known to be fire-hazardous, but worked out that the estimated $50 million compensation for 180 anticipated deaths was less than half the expense of modifying the vehicles to make them safer.
The State is expected to take a wider, less commercial view; besides, at first sight the figures seem to argue for stringent control of alcohol and tobacco:
UK alcohol taxes in 2021/22: £13.1 billion, vs ‘health, social and economic consequences, estimated at between £21 and £52 billion a year.’
That said, the revenues quoted above don’t include the income and corporation taxes and National Insurance contributions generated by the industries concerned. Taking them into account, perhaps ‘Pinto maths’ might win the argument after all.
[In the case of gambling, coldly considered, it already looks like net profit for the country - c. £3.1 billion in tax receipts, vs ‘annual economic burden of harmful gambling … about £1.27 billion.’ Does that make it right?]
Moral issues can’t be simply resolved by analysing cashflow; that’s the sort of thinking that could even be used to justify killing unproductive people, which is exactly what the writer and socialist George Bernard Shaw advocated in 1931 - and again in 1948.
Keeping the debate on the ethical level, liberty is a strong counter-argument to puritanical bans, though one has to weigh freedom in one’s personal habits against the harm and expense they cause to others.
A test case for that assessment was America’s experiment with Prohibition (1920-1933). Note that the Eighteenth Amendment did not forbid drinking alcohol; it proscribed the ‘manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.’ The term ‘manufacture’ implies large-scale production, so technically ‘home brew’ might be considered unexceptionable. The real target was the commercial exploitation of these products.
It’s often been supposed that Prohibition was a failure, but that may not be so. Not only were there definite health benefits but the popular idea that crime and violence increased may also be mistaken, as this 2019 article on Vox suggests. What brought it all to an end was the Depression: in 1933 the revival of the alcohol industry increased employment, made profits for associated businesses and raised much-needed revenue fot the Government.
On the other hand, if the 1933 Banking Act that curbed investment banking had been introduced when Prohibition started, maybe America would have been both more temperate and much wealthier, and there would have been no Depression.
Obviously there are challenges in trying to uproot well-established enterprises that batten on the vulnerability of individuals, but Prohibition was introduced on the back of much popular support and clearly did reduce alcohol consumption. The clampdown might have worked even better if Canadians had not helped to undermine it; it was this that hardened the previously porous border between the countries.
In the UK, the three vices discussed so far are money-makers and the costs to the NHS are only a fraction of the overall disbenefits, which are diffused throughout the economy, so the Government may not be so motivated to take action as if all costs impacted directly on the Treasury.
Tax hikes on alcohol and tobacco may sometimes be justified in terms of dissuading overconsumption, but one has yet to hear of many people giving up drinks and smokes because of the expense. My father started his tobacco habit when the local shopkeeper sold children a cigarette and a match for a penny; once addicted, his generation might have cheerfully called fags ‘coffin nails’ but it didn’t stop them buying packets of ten and twenty at a time as adults.
What would happen if drinkers and smokers all ‘went on strike’? It could be argued that the State is hooked on the income; and our political representatives are liable to be lobbied by powerful interests, too.
So the official strategy is to legalise, regulate and tax; and to try to keep the damage down to some acceptable level (measured how?), without going all-out for abolition.
Another element in that policy is to throw the responsibility back on to the addict. ‘Please drink responsibly’; ‘smoking kills’; ‘when the fun stops, stop’ - there. we told you! It was your free choice; we wouldn’t dream of interfering with your liberty; and there are organisations to help you - Drinkaware, ASH and NHS Stop Smoking, GambleAware - more fool you if you don’t seek help.
This plays on our perception of ourselves as free and rational, but the long-term recovery rates for the seriously addicted make for discouraging reading.
Even if we give up hope of turning the tide on the first three vices, should we also give in to the clamour for legalising currently illicit drugs? There is tremendous pressure to normalise cannabis use, even though the modern, genetically modified strains are so much stronger than what was around 50 or 60 years ago; and now one sees articles linked from social media suggesting the health or mental benefits of LSD.
The discussion of disbenefits needs to widen. It’s not enough to talk about serious illnesses and fatalities, or increases in criminal behaviour. A major objection to letting the young be ‘stoned’ - even if that doesn’t happen in their school years - is the tiredness and apathy that hold them back in those crucial years of early adulthood.
I saw that last when working in a scheme to help 15-year-olds who had been out of the education system for some time. One was falling asleep at nine in the morning, during the group session designed to raise morale and aspirations. He didn’t last there.
Another, a very nice lad who habitually referred to cannabis as ‘bud’ or ‘bud-dha’ and was desperate to stop even though his friends and family were a constant temptation, turned to religion, praying five times a day as Islam expects, and listening to beautifully-sung hymns to help his meditation. It’s not his fault that the amateur makers of the CD waited a few minutes into the light hypnosis to begin their perorations on the wickedness of Jews; I hope he made it through one temptation without falling into the other.
It’s not just poor fallible individuals who should be expected to behave responsibly; the State cannot disclaim its own share of responsibility.
Two intelligence sources tell Fox News Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahiri was killed in the CIA drone strike. "Over the weekend, the United States conducted a counterterrorism operation against a significant Al Qaeda target in Afghanistan," the senior administration official told Fox News. "The operation was successful and there were no civilian casualties."
