The Outside Of Everything

Chapter 27
The Lives of the Saints

The fates having conspired against me, for one reason and another I’ve had time on my hands of late. So to help pass the time I have sort of drifted back into old habits, hanging out in the local library among other things. Very different place it is now the library. Computers everywhere. I’d not been in there much in recent years. And at first I wondered what was going on. But when it dawned on me that the computers were free for all, well I realised it was a good thing. After all not everyone can afford a bright shiny new laptop, so access to the web and all that, for free, has to be applauded.

But there is still a part of me that says libraries should be about books. I love books. And before I knew it I was back browsing in the reference section, half expecting to see old friends like Taj. As I was looking around, getting my bearings, my eye was caught by the ten or so editions making up the full set of Butler’s Lives of the Saints. Fantastic. A saint for every day of the year. And more. Makes you think of the old Russian novels we used to love. The protagonist would be off to see his estranged father to celebrate his saint’s day. I started looking through the set. I couldn’t help remembering that one of the things we used to joke about, and indeed this was another of those projects we never quite saw through to fruition, was putting together our own Lives of the Saints. An entry for each day. But our own definition of what saints were, or who should be the saints.

I can remember some of our choices as the book took a semblance of shape. There were some people, the saints, who at that time had seemingly disappeared. This specifically was people that had been in groups, characters that seemed to have been kicked out of groups, where once they were gone well something had been irretrievably lost. Like? Like Rob Simmons and Subway Sect, Mick Finkler and The Teardrop Explodes, James Kirk of Orange Juice. Absolute saints in our book. But people who had at that time gone missing. Same with Palmolive of the Raincoats or Slits. We didn’t know what had happened to her. Our saints. Partly as a joke, we referred to the book as Lives of the Aints. And indeed an important part of it for us was if you like canonising and celebrating people who really were not known. Like a lot of the saints in Butler’s books. There are plenty of saints in there we don’t really know.

Inevitably for us our choices were close to home, and rarely removed from the world of popular culture, if you stretch that term about as far as it could go. Popular as in unpopular, you could say. The great unknowns, if you like. People like, well, let’s call him Ron Todd, because that’s what we did call him. Much to his annoyance. Because our Ron thought the Absolute Beginners character was a cheap if charming stereotype of the folkie figure. We didn’t mean him any ill will though. It was a massive compliment really because we loved MacInnes’ London novels, and we loved this guy, our very own Ron Todd. We came across him first when we put in a wide-eyed and innocent appearance at the local folk club which our Ron ran each and every first Thursday of the month in the function room of one of the local hostelries. Had done for years, and would do for many more years.

We went along filled with revolutionary folk fuelled fervour, as a result of discovering the first few Phil Ochs records, and falling in love with the myths and legends of the rebel and fool. I’m not sure what we were expecting to find in the local folk club, but it seemed a sort of symbol of solidarity for a man who had stirred our souls. If Phil could place a flower on the grave of Jim Dean of Indiana, the least we could do was to try to conjure up the spirit of the man Sean Penn called his all-time favourite fighter. I don’t know, it seems daft now, but perhaps we thought we might just maybe possibly come across a beautiful sad-eyed stranger singing a toast to those that have gone. Of course it wasn’t at all like that. But we stuck it out, out of respect.

That first time. In that pub function room. We sat through the evening. It was pleasant enough. Then, after it was over, the guy who was clearly in charge came across to say hello, how are you, thanks for coming, what brings you here? Well, we shuffled our feet, and mumbled and bumbled something about Phil Ochs and Richard Farina. The guy laughed, in a warm and wonderful way, and said ah the romance never dies does it? I’ve got a bottle of wine open lads. Will you join me in a glass, and we can raise a toast to romance and rebels? Then you can tell me about yourselves.

That was the strange thing about our Ron. He was delighted we were there. Genuinely delighted. And he really did want to know all about us. He was fantastic at asking questions, drawing things out of you. And none of us were great talkers. And we hardly ever drank. But as we got to know our Ron better, as time went by, we became accustomed to sharing a bottle of red wine with him. We hated red wine, but you could not say no to our Ron. Not once he got started. He’d lean in towards you. Tell me about how you spend your time? What about the new groups? What’s there to be learned? What stories are being told? Where does independence start and end? What about hip hop? Are The Fall folk? What about this group Test Department who recorded with the choir of striking miners?

With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to further stereotype our Ron Todd. The unashamedly Marxist college lecturer. The Harris tweed jacket and NHS specs. The beard and the fisherman’s jumpers. It’s as though he was perpetually on a CND march to Aldermaston. But he was so important in our development. Telling us about things to listen to and, in particular, things to read. Raymond Williams’ The Volunteers and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. You’ve got to read those. Eric Hobsbawm and Eric Ambler. You can learn from them. It’s funny. I can to this day remember him nodding over his pipe when we spoke, oh so gauchely, about the holy trinity of Tims. Hardin. Buckley. Rose. And our Ron nodding more when we spoke about our unease about Nick Drake, and how it was a bit wet like the Incredible String Band wasn’t it? And he said, well, perhaps you should try Mark-Almond instead, and how he collapsed laughing when we stared at him dumbfounded, thinking of the Days of Pearly Spencer. It should be pointed out our Ron Todd had dallied and dillied with the more progressive elements in the early ‘70s, of which we were then wary, before returning to his folk roots.

Most of all we loved getting our Ron talking about the folk scene as it was in the ‘60s when Ewan MacColl ruled the roost and the rules were complex and the politics more so. Ah yes, he’d say, the Singers’ Club, the Critics Group, the Pindar of Wakefield, the Union Tavern. Special times. Trying times. He cherished still memories of some performances, names that were then not known to us. Not then. Anne Briggs, Sweeney’s Men, Lal Waterson, Martin Carthy. Wonderful music. But the politics, oh the politics, he’d say, and raise his glass to the light.

So the folk clubs in London dwindled, and our Ron Todd escaped to suburbia. Like Ewan MacColl did. And there our Ron lived his double life. College lecturer by day. Specialist in fossils. Keen cricket fan. Passionate reader of PG Wodehouse and Peter Tinniswood. Devotee of Galton and Simpson. Knew every one of the Ealing Comedies and the other lesser known British comedy movies where Dennis Price or Bernard Cribbins had a walk-on role. Collector of GK Chesterton tomes. Very old school. And then, once a month, there was the other Ron. The folk club founder. The red rebel ready to provide a platform for anyone with an acoustic guitar or a mandolin and a voice to sing out with. He would nurture and encourage and cajole, and the years would pass and the audiences come and go, but Ron would be there, ready to wonder where the time goes. Who could begrudge him that?

One of the great things about our Ron was the way he would challenge you. Quite often he left us feeling uncomfortable. You’re always moaning, he’d say, why don’t you do something of your own? It’s one thing to opt out, he’d say, but to another man that might mean being scared. He’d laugh then, raise his glass to the light, and say he was being hard and anyway we were good lads, and by the way what about Patrick Sky? Have you listened to him? He’s a good man. We’d listen closely. We were learning all the time. Learning’s for sharing, he’d say. That was one of Ron’s favourite sayings. Anyway, one of the things our Ron was always challenging us with was about who writes the history books? You know the answer to that, we’d say. Yes, but it’s not right, he’d counter. You should. You can. You must. The hagiology is in your hands, he’d say, raising his glass to the light. Of course we did do things of our own. Like the Northern Soul For The Masses mobile discotheque thing we got going. He wasn’t 100% sold on that, but he supported us nevertheless.

Our Ron was tragically killed in a car crash, returning from a county cricket match in Canterbury. Ironically it was a time when we had a cricket loving Prime Minister. That always made our Ron uncomfortable. What with one thing and another we’d not been seeing so much of him in the few years before his death. I felt very guilty as I had a lovely old edition of our neighbour William Morris’ Dream of John Ball to give him but never quite did get round to doing so. But we all went to the local church to pay our respects when a special memorial service was held. They read some Viv Stanshall and played Roy Harper singing about when an old cricketer leaves the crease. Our Ron would have hated it. Sentimental mush, he’d have said, raising his glass to the light. What he would have enjoyed is the continued discomfort I feel very strongly, the guilt at never completing our own hagiography. A Lives of the Saints that our Ron should have featured in. Still, now that I’ve got time on my hands ...