Now and Then: A potted history of the Beatles’ final songs

As Beatlemania once again reaches fever pitch with the release of Now and Then, the Beatles’ final song together, Chris James looks at the numerous contenders for the Fab Four’s last hurrah.

The End, as we know now, wasn’t the end.

In fact, it wasn’t even the last track on the last record from the Beatles in the 60s: Abbey Road. That honour went to Paul’s throwaway ditty ‘Her Majesty’, which in fact he did throw away before it was rescued from the cutting room floor by a tape operator called John Kurlander, understandably jittery about binning anything by the Fab Four.  

Yet Her Majesty wasn’t the final word. Far from it.

Let it Be, with its funereal black cover, was released after Abbey Road in 1970, (although recorded before) meaning there was a whole LP of final songs beyond The End.

The final song on the Let it Be album was Get Back, an unadorned, fresh-sounding rocker (complete with terrific guitar solo from John) bringing the Beatles back full circle to their rock and roll roots.  A fitting finale, you might think. Except it wasn’t to be. The actual last song they worked on together (or at least George, Ringo and Paul) was I Me Mine, which needed tidying up before adding to the LP.

The 1970s  

Then along came the Hey Jude compilation album later in 1970, a ragtag collection of odds, sods and pearls, pulling together A-sides, B-sides and besides, that had somehow slipped through the clutches of record executives, too busy to notice while fileting perfectly good albums to make less good ones. In their excitement they’d forgotten to swipe these. Making up for lost time, they put this enjoyable but slightly nonsensical compilation together. 

The Hey Jude LP ended not with the iconic refrain of its title track, but with the sprightly Ballad of John and Yoko. A breezily busked diary song, it was recorded between Let it Be and Abbey Road and distinguished in that it featured only John and Paul. It gallops along to Paul’s spirited and really rather fine drumming (don’t tell Ringo!) while John noodles with obvious glee, let loose once again on lead guitar.  

Again, what a beautiful way to end things: John and Paul, the original partnership, rocking it up for one last hurrah. Then it really was over. Paul fell out with everyone. Lawyers were instructed. Insults (and bricks) were hurled.

John and George formed the next incarnation of ‘The Two-tles’ in 1971 for Lennon’s Imagine album. Like schoolboys smoking behind the bike shed, they collaborated on John’s rather mean-spirited dig at Paul: ‘How Do You Sleep?’ It’s a great sounding track with some career-best playing from George, and an emphatic bass part from Beatles’ alumni Klaus Voormann, but it makes for uneasy listening. John later tried to reinterpret what he meant in the song, but he didn’t sound convincing. 

All four Beatles then reunited, after a fashion, to rally behind Ringo on his eponymous 1973 LP. Above-par songs like I’m the Greatest from John, Six O’Clock from Paul and the superb Photograph co-written with George meant that fans could enjoy all the talents once again on one piece of plastic if not on the same song. These too, were all final songs of sorts.

Another contender is the Long and Winding Road. Most would agree this sounds exactly what a Beatles final song should be: a rueful, elegiac look back at their shared history. It finally got its chance to be the final song as the final track on the Beatles’ ‘Blue’ compilation album, also issued in 1973.   

Then, for a few years, things went quiet. Then got incredibly loud.

Live at Hollywood Bowl, recorded in 1964-5, but not released until 1977 is essentially an album’s worth of screaming with some songs indistinctly heard in the background. The unresolved seventh chord and Paul’s last shriek on Long Tall Sally then, was the final curtain. It was how they’d often finish their live sets, and so again, with nothing more to give, it was a suitably exuberant, and fitting way to bow out. You can see them now, taking their polite bow while the fans tore the seats from beneath themselves.

Cut to Eric Clapton’s garden on May 19^th, 1979. Celebrating the guitarist’s marriage to Pattie Boyd (yes, George’s ex-wife and the same muse who inspired both Something and Layla) George, Paul and Ringo found themselves part of an impromptu, allegedly drunken, Beatles reunion, missing only John. They stumbled through Get Back and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, before finishing with a pub band bash at Lawdy Miss Crawdy. It was an ignominious note, and poor final song, to end things on.  

The 1980s

The senselessness of John’s murder in December 1980 prompted the unthinkable: all three remaining Beatles finally reunited (and sober) on record for George’s tribute to John: All Those Years Ago. It was pleasant enough, but perhaps not the final word people were looking for. For this reason, perhaps that’s why George recorded the superior When We Was Fab (with Ringo on drums) for his masterful 1987 Cloud 9 album.  

But with John gone, so too went the prospect of a genuine reunion and new songs. (Paul had already been admonished by John for turning up unannounced at his New York apartment with a guitar, perhaps hoping to rekindle the magic).  

So long then, Beatles. Except there were still more final songs to come. Lots more.

The 1990s

The 90s ushered in the Anthology series: three double albums’ worth of giggly outtakes of classic songs, alongside some genuine gold, like McCartney’s demo of Come and Get It, as well as take-it-or-leave-it numbers like the lacklustre If You’ve Got Troubles or the dipsy What’s the New Mary Jane. More last Beatles songs.

Sensing the need to step in and stop this final song madness, re-enter George Martin, their peerless original producer. He declared, once and for all, that there was nothing left in the barrel to scrape.  

But hold on! Alongside this alternative history of The Beatles, we were treated to some sparkly ‘new’ recordings: Free as a Bird and Real Love. Lovingly rebuilt around some wobbly song-writing demo tapes John recorded in the 1970s, gifted by Yoko to McCartney), these were transmogrified into bright, tuneful records with cavernous drums, sunshine harmonies and searing slide guitars from George. They didn’t sound like the records the Beatles made in the 60s. For one thing, George didn’t really play slide guitar in the 60s. (The lovely Hawaiian flavoured slide on For You Blue was played by John).

Instead, they sounded like records the Beatles might have made if they’d followed the long and winding road into the 90s and chosen ELO supremo Jeff Lynne as their producer. As the mastermind behind Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and George Harrison’s late eighties career revivals (and great pal of George) Jeff was the right man in the right place with the right sunglasses. And he played a blinder.  

The 2000s

But no sooner than the ghosts had been laid to rest, when the news came in 2003 that the Let it Be LP was being ‘de-Spectorised’ and reissued as Let It Be Naked; this time, without the orchestral treacle and uninvited choir of angels added in 1970 without Paul’s consent.

The new version certainly had a raw quality missing from the original, returning it to the spirit of the ‘live only/no overdubs’ promise they’d made at the start of the project. They also reinstated a criminal omission from Let it Be: John’s Don’t Let Me Down, while quietly shoving also-rans Dig It and Maggie Mae off the end of the bench.  But what about the final song?

This time, they went for the hymn-like ‘Let it Be’ as the final dignified statement. A comforting reconciliation with friendly ghosts, a coming to terms with the past, it was a healing song of hope and remembrance and the perfect note to end things on.  

But as we well know by now, no final song by the Beatles stays final for long. The Let it Be album was transformed again, this time, by Peter Jackson’s magisterial Get Back docuseries. It charmed and astonished us at every turn, and showed that the Beatles didn’t fight all the time in 1969, just some of the time.

The series ended of course, with the inspired rooftop performance, ending on their third run at Get Back. (They practiced that one a lot as anyone who’s watched all 468 minutes will testify). Considering that their hands were freezing on that cold January day in West London, the performances are miraculously tight and soulful.

John’s pronounced: ‘I’d like to thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we’ve passed the audition.’ It was the perfect, ironical, good-humoured way to bow out.  Or might have been.

The 2020s

Fast forward to June 2023. While chatting amiably to Martha Kearney on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Paul casually drops in that he’s been working on a demo from John, and had been using some new technology to clean it up. It had the unmistakable whiff of another final song.

Rewind to 1994-5

The origins were a second tape handed by Yoko to Paul that year, and actually inscribed by John: ‘For Paul’. It contained the song Grow Old With Me (another beautiful tune, but already issued posthumously on John’s 1984 Milk and Honey LP. Putting this final song to one side, and after completing fellow final songs Free as a Bird and Real Love, the Threetles turned their attentions to the new final song: Now and Then.  

Slated to open the third of the Anthology compilations, it was shelved after only an afternoon’s work in 1995. Unimpressed by the quality of the demo, hampered by an obstinate ‘mains hum’ that couldn’t be separated from Lennon’s vocals, George Harrison threw in the towel, declaring the demo ‘F*&cking rubbish’. Not even Jeff Lynne had a magic wand powerful enough to take a bad demo and make it better. 

Instead, for the new final song on the last Anthology compilation, they added: ‘A Beginning,’ (see what they did there?) a pleasant but ultimately surplus-to-requirements orchestral excursion from George Martin, which originally pre-ambled Ringo’s Don’t Pass Me By from the White Album.

And so that was that. Except, of course, it wasn’t.

Back to the 2000s

Cue the ecstatic chime of the chord of the century that opens: ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (The Beatles were very good at opening and closing songs). Love was a show and album from 2006: a dizzying, playful reimagining of The Beatles legacy assembled by Giles Martin, who had inherited all of his father’s taste, talent and charm. Accompanying the Cirque du Soleil spectacular of the same name, this was as good as a Beatles album should be. But what about the final song?

This time they went for ‘All You Need is Love as the final unifying anthem: a manifesto statement: Love is all you need. There it was then. The real final song had been there all the time, quietly waiting its turn. As if to underline the point, there was a mischievous little send-off from John spliced in at the end: ‘This is Johnny Rhythm just saying good night to yous all and God bless yous!’

But the Beatles being the Beatles, would insist on a last coda.

Join us back in 2023

Paul made no secret over the years of his intention to complete Now and Then; to: ‘finish it off one of these days.’ And that’s what he and Ringo did, albeit with the full blessing of Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison, helped by the magic ears and knob twiddling of Giles Martin, who’s done so much to restore the Beatles’ recordings to their full glory, updating some of the earlier, more eccentric mixes.

But why has Paul felt the need to open Pandora’s box once again? Surely not for the money or to give the reissued and expanded Red and Blue compilations a sales boost. But perhaps because it was so intensely personal. After all, John’s final words to him in person were: ‘Think about me every now and then, old friend.’  This was Paul fulfilling a promise to a dear friend.

Thanks to sound source separation technology (the magic wand Jeff didn’t have in 1995) they’ve finally been able to clean up the tape John left behind for Paul.

Giles has brought his own considerable powers to the party, along with the magic cauldron of the Beatles’ own recordings. With harmonies borrowed from Because, Eleanor Rigby and Here There and Everywhere for the new recording, there’s a tantalizing prospect in store.

Add to John’s still potent writing powers from 1979, Paul’s unmatched musical invention, Ringo’s inimitable drumming and there’s only one man missing: George. Crucially they’ve made full use of that afternoon’s work he put in during the nineties.

The Beatles have had more final songs than number ones. And they’ve had plenty of those: 20 in all. And they’re deserving of another. But maybe this really is the final word.

Christopher James is an author, collage artist, and poet. He won the 2008 National Poetry Competition. His latest poetry pamphlet is The Storm in the Piano (Maytree Press, 2022)

Uncaged birds trying their wings

Review of Love Leans over the Table, by Rosie Jackson (Two Rivers Press)

Where to begin with this luminous collection from Rosie Jackson? Perhaps with The Boisterous Sobbings of Margery Kempe, which I had the privilege to hear the poet read at the National Poetry Competition prize giving this year. Of all the winning poems, this was perhaps the most arresting; an intense, tour de force that depicts a woman (and mother of fourteen) who has given everything – to faith, to her children and to the world:

If she doesn’t sleep, it’s because God circles

Her quarried pelvis like a buzzard.

She’s burdened with ‘the weight of love’ as if she is carrying all of the world’s belief and devotion. The flood of images and metaphors is almost overwhelming; there are no stanzas; no let up, and it has a breathless depth and density. It’s almost a book in itself. In fact, Rosie revealed at her reading, the poem began as a novel, and the subsequent compression gives the poem a diamond like quality: a forest, crushed into a single gem.

The Woman Who Lives At the Back of the Quaker Meeting House, another vivid pen-portrait, is the spare antithesis to this. The language and form here is sparse, mirroring the woman herself. She ‘crops her hair like spikes on a scrubbing brush.’ The poet admires, perhaps envies her contented, ascetic life, as she:  

sits in her doorway to sew a quilt as white

and green as a fields of daisies, does not eat

much; does not fear the company of the dead,

Spends her days uprooting weeds in the graveyard.

She has something money can’t buy – peace. She doesn’t seem to suffer Margaret’s weight of expectation and feeling. The couplets allow space and light through the poem.   

Faith, and the poet’s relationship with it (bound up with early revolt her parents’ religious zealousness) is one of the most compelling themes of the book.

Letter to Nietzsche, is a coming-to-terms with her early rejection of God. Where once she made her own god of the man who declared: ‘God is dead,’ she now sees him for the person he was; mortal, uncertain and afraid like the rest of us:

I learned for the first time how very ill

you were: migraines, despair, dementia.

While he made arguments for the darkness of atheism over the light of faith, the very act of denial seems to have crushed him mentally and physically.

The poet speaks movingly of her own journey of self-discovery and realisation. Like so much of this book, there’s beauty, regret and acute self-awareness here:  

What a long time it can take to wake up.

I missed fifty years of cherry blossom.

Mocking their faith broke my parents’ hearts.

The ability to see things from all sides (hard learned from time and experience) make these poems empathetic epiphanies. There’s a sort of peace in these meditations that translates to the reader; it gives the collection an astonishingly honest, intimate, and at times, cathartic quality. These are narratives overheard from the confession box; secular prayers of self-realisation.

It’s impossible to give a full sense of the variety and colour of this book in a short review except in glimpses. But be assured, there are few weeds among these wildflowers. Wayside is a vivid memory of childhood:

‘Walking for hours along disused railway

Tracks with my book, my bag of apples,

Striding over black sleepers…’

We can instantly relate to the solitary reverie; the bookish, observant child, already alive to nature, language and the mystery of other people’s lives. There are intimations of the tribulations of life to come: the child marvels at the ‘willow herbs that sprouted/down the edge of cinder tracks’ and reveals: ‘I loved how they took their chance,/how coal dust couldn’t stop them.’ There’s a parallel with the life spirit of the child herself – already resilient and wary of the thousand things that sully our days.

There are laments and sorrows in this book, too, but tempered with love and the consolation of beauty and the prospect of salvation.

John Donne Dreams His Still-Born Son Lives is one of my favourite poems in Rosie’s marvelous book. It’s simultaneously a lament and a resurrection, and spoken in Donne’s voice. He conjures his lost son back into life with exacting detail:

Like all children, you break things – teeth, bones,

Your mother’s heart.  

But he goes far beyond this. The fantasy traces another version of reality, where the boy lives. All the senses are at play which makes this dream all the more vivid: the boy likes ‘swimming in icy water’ and when he speaks, Donne can ‘hear my own warm vowels.’ But the vision is temporal, fleeting – as fragile as life itself: ‘Many times in dreams I lose sight of you.’

The poem speaks beyond the poem – to anyone who has loved and lost – or perhaps never had the chance. The heartbreak is made all the more intense by the fact Donne never knew the child at all; he is entirely a creation of Donne’s imagination, necessarily coloured by impressions of himself (you have my long-fingered hands.’) There’s also an amusing, unconscious revealing of Donne’s ego: ‘I fancy your footsteps sound on bare boards/where you tread back and forth, reciting poems.’  

But the pay-off is brutal: ‘You’d make a good thief. As you did when you stole/your mother from me.’ But love forgives everything – revealing that his devotion to God pales against the love he has for his lost wife and son.      

The poem has all the tenderness and heartbreak of Ben Johnson’s On My First Son (Farewell my child of my right hand and joy/My sin was too much hope of these, lov’d boy.’) But the poem is utterly original and as much a testament to Rosie’s powers of imagination as Donne’s; a magical act of poetic ventriloquism.        

This is a truly an exceptional collection; Rosie Jackson is in full control of her language, tone and form. A lifetime’s experience is found within these pages, and it’s matched by a lifetime’s honing of her craft. The poems are so skilfully woven from memory and imagination that the stitches are invisible.

As with all poets, there is perhaps a nervousness giving these poems to the world. But these poems now live lives of their own. To borrow one of Rosie’s own astonishing lines, they are ‘uncaged birds trying their wings.’             

Should we be chasing the perfect poem?

I sometimes think of writing as a kind of chase.

Even the written line – especially if it’s handwritten – looks like a dash across the page, as if in a hurry to catch something or be somewhere.

We’re chasing a thought, an idea, or perhaps the mot juste. It could be a phrase, or just sense of something that’s tantalisingly out of reach.

It’s as if you’ve spotted someone ahead you faintly recognise. You try and catch up, yet fail to close the distance. Perhaps this person has something for you; the thing you’ve been searching for. 

I often find myself chasing the perfect poem. And at the same time, puzzling over what that might be, or whether I should be chasing it all. Is it a foolish – even infantile notion? Or somehow vital to becoming a better poet? 

Invariably, I’ll recognise within a line or two, that it’s not the perfect poem – but press on, in the hope it’s still worth persisting with. We accept a sort of compromise; a certain lowering of expectations, that it’s not our Bridport winning entry but not hack work either.

Often we’ll enter some sort of delusional pact with ourselves. We’ll mute our reader-self, and allow the writer to press ahead, even if if we know it’s pedestrian work. We’ll have the good grace to let them have a go at least.

We know in ourselves we can make it better through revision. By unpacking our tools and chipping away, we work until it passes that invisible threshold of ‘muster’ that makes it a keeper; until it resembles something that cuts our own personal mustard.

Sometimes we won’t go for perfection. Imagine an architect biting on her Ryvita, making sketches for a multi-storey car park. She knows in advance it’s not going to be the Taj Mahal. But at the top of her game, she still might still stumble on a sort of perfect car park. But she’s already adjusted her ambitions before setting off. But at home, that night, she might pour herself a drink, pick up clean sheet of paper and a 2H pencil and start sketching the graceful arcs of a concert hall. In that moment, she’s reaching for something greater. She’s chasing a sort of perfection.   

Of course, the idea of perfection in art has been almost universally rubbished (you’ll remember the scene in Dead Poet’s Society when Robin Williams ridicules Mr J. Evans Pritchard PHD’s graph of greatness, as if a perfect poem can be reduced to a mathematical equation: ‘A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal…’

‘Excrement. That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. We’re not laying pipe. We’re talking about poetry. ‘Oh, I like Byron. I give him a 42, but I can’t dance to it…’

The implication is that magic; verve; spirit – whatever you want to call it – a certain visionary quality is what makes the difference, not syllable counting or benchmarking against stated objectives.

Having gained popularity in the 18^th century, the concept of perfection in art lost ground in the 19^th before finally being scrunched up and tossed out of the window by French poet Alfred de Musset who declared: ‘Perfection is no more attainable for us than is infinity.’ But was this a case of sour grapes? Perhaps he realised perfection simply wasn’t within his grasp. Rimbaud dismissed de Musset, saying he ‘closed his eyes before the vision.’ Rimbaud’s implication is that we need to make ourselves receptive to a higher state – like Coleridge downloading Khubla Khan from the muse, channeling his visions of Xanadu.

Today, more pedestrian concepts of technical skill, emotional resonance, and originality persist as barometers of excellence. Yet the idea of a poem’s perfection persists on a subconscious level at least for anyone with a good idea and a word processor.

I once had a dream of holding three or four pages of poems that I’d written. All the poems were quite short – none much longer than a sonnet. I remember my sense of sheer delight with them; they had a luminosity to them. Each had a sort of perfection. 

I remember the feeling that they had a sort of lightness, detail and delicacy that set them apart from anything else I’d written. A sort of precious quality. I remember a sense of completeness, as if the chase was over – as if I’d caught up with that person and found – or even retrieved – what I’d been looking for. It was a feeling of relief.

Except I hadn’t written them. None of them existed and I couldn’t remember a word when I woke up. Only the shape and the sense of them. The chase wasn’t over. In fact it had only made the longing more acute. Having glimpsed this perfection, but with complete amnesia as to the words themselves, I was no closer to finding it. One might attribute this psychological ‘chase’ to a creative impulse – the desire to make; the Victorian urge to pile red brick on red brick. An evolutionary trick to keep you working. Keep you trying.  

We all have our own ideas of perfection. I think Keith Douglas is close with How to Kill; surely Byron was near to getting Robin Williams to dance with Ozymandias. Both of these poems are touched by a curious magic; each line fits in the memory as perfectly as a sea-smoothed stone sits in the palm of your hand. Sifting through my own work I can see where I’ve achieved what I’ve set out to do – and then somehow gone beyond. And it’s only in these moments of creative liberation, where I’ve taken my hands off the handlebars (and somehow managed not to veer off the path) that I’ve somehow reached somewhere beyond, and transcended my own powers.

Sometimes we’ll have the start of what looks like it could be the perfect poem. Often this is a brilliantly strong idea or first line so good it’s as if its got its own energy source. It’s demanding to be developed, extended and explored. It would be a crime not to do something with it.

You can imagine, Wordsworth when he hit upon: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud…’ I wonder whether at once he felt his pulse quicken; whether he called Dorothy in from the next room to check he hadn’t pinched it (perhaps she was too loyal to point out it sounded remarkably like a line from her own journal). This might be described as his ‘Yesterday moment’ – when Paul McCartney opened his eyes with that indelible melody in his head.

Wordsworth might have felt a responsibility towards that line – a duty to develop it. The same with Keats’ Ode to Autumn. The bar is set high from the outset. The opening line is a gift to set the poem’s heart beating, but how to sustain that sort of quality?  Immediately the poet moves from inspiration to perspiration. The pressure’s on to make the poem as brilliant as the opening line. There’s a risk of trying too hard – or even trying to compete with yourself; ‘the ‘other poet’ – ‘the better poet in you’ – who came up with that line.   

I think that’s why I think we should seek out the great poets’ second best poems. Don’t go for Howl; try Ginsberg’s A Supermarket in California instead.

‘Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?’

The pressure’s off here. It’s 1956. He’s on incredible form, but he’s writing what he wants. He’s not having to follow up an opening line of genius like: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ Instead he’s in the flow state; he’s ‘opened his eyes to the vision’ in Rimbaud’s phrase.

I wonder whether Ginsberg had a moment of self-doubt afterwards, staring at the words on the page; was it little more than an inspired diary entry? It’s imperfections; its sprawl; the stacks of adjectives piled like tins on the shelf, are what make it perfect.   

Is it useful to frame writing poetry in this way? To think of it as a Chaplin-esque chase through a crowded city street? Or The Wile. E. Coyote’s futile pursuit of the Road Runner through the canyons with armfuls of TNT?

Whether it is or not, the chase adds a sort of urgency to our writing life; a persistent, questing quality. Even if we never find that perfect poem (read it or write it) the chase spurs us on. Writing is often characterised as a struggle, perhaps even a noble one. And lest we forget, poets are ultimately lost causes. Whatever it is we’re looking for, we can’t help but keep chasing it.

For those too impatient to find out what happens at the end of the chase, let’s seek answers from Kaveh Akbar’s, The Perfect Poem

The perfect poem knows
where it went.

The perfect poem is no bigger
than a bear…

…The perfect poem is light as dust
on a bat’s wing, lonely as a single flea.

Christopher James’ new pamphlet: The Storm in the Piano (Maytree Press), including four first prize winning poems, and three second prize winning poems, is published on 17 June 2022. Signed copies available from the author.

Angels and guitars: State of the Union, 3 March, Haverhill Arts Centre

State of the Union, the unholy musical alliance of Brooks Williams and Boo Hewerdine, came storming back to Haverhill Arts Centre this evening. After an enforced two year absence, they opened with a surging Sweet Honey in the Rocks and didn’t relent for the best part of an hour and a half. With some intriguing new material, they succeeded in charming the audience with their easy mix of banter, blues and bonhomie. With old-time harmonies as sweet as these, they could set the phone book to music and make it sound like a forgotten classic from the 1930s.

For this duo, anything is game when it comes to subject matter, although they’re drawn irresistibly to the margins – alchemising the bizarre into musical gold. Man with a Hammer is a tune about marathons of all things. (In Germany instead of ‘hitting the wall’ at the 20 mile mark, they liken it to being hit by ‘a man with a hammer’). Snake Oil, from their second album of the same name, is a cautionary tale about the charlatans of old medicine shows, and conjures vivid images of the old west. Then there’s 23 Skidoo, which reminds you why you fell in love with State of the Union in the first place: absurdist lyrics that suddenly hit you for six, a hypnotic descending riff (complete with extra bends and trills tonight) and the catchiest tune you ever heard.    

Some songs are possibly over familiar: King of California never leaves Brooks’ set, but it’s not hard to see why. It’s a stunning story-song with a devilish twist. What makes it worth hearing again is what Brooks does with his guitar. His fiendish mix of lead lines, fingerpicking and strumming is never the same twice. He lends the same talents to new and old material alike, never once putting a foot wrong. There’s a real sense of risk-taking too as he dashes up some new musical avenue, possibly not quite sure himself where it will lead. Watching and listening to him find his way back again by some ingeniously inventive means (and in time for the start of the next verse) is a genuine treat.

They didn’t waste time in lockdown, Boo relates, having recorded ‘a song,’ which leapt to number three on the New Zealand iTunes chart. Brooks remarks that he’s noticed a few pence arrive in his bank account. Boo wonders whether they might have been better off if they’d been paid in kiwis. Unjustly overlooked on release, Why Does the Nightingale Sing? is genuinely one of the most intoxicating ballads of the last two years (if not twenty). Despite sounding like it was written before the Second World War, its plaintive lyric and haunting melody goes straight to the heart. If anything, their combined voices evoke the spirit of the Everly Brothers. The standard really is that high. Equally good is Butterfly Wings, which achieves lift off with its equisitely harmonised chorus. Wings are clearly a recurring motif of Boo’s. His song I Wish I Had Wings from his last solo album is a real gem.

Two boda-fide classics from Boo’s oceanic back catalogue are delivered solo (while Brooks goes backstage to rifle through Boo’s dressing room, we’re told). Patience of Angels is as fresh as the day it was written, an empathetic study of a woman’s fortitude every bit as good as McCartney’s Daytime Nightime Suffering. Meanwhile, Dragonflies continues to dazzle with its lilting sing-song melody mimicking the dance of the dragonfly. 

Not to be outdone, Brooks’ Down at the Mission is a deceptively straightforward sounding piece of folk radicalism, that would fit nicely alongside his acoustic gospel-blues number, On The Rolling Sea. Its searing melody seems sure to earn it a regular place in his setlist.

Unforgettable, their take on the Nat King Cole classic is a thing of fragile beauty (although they forget bits of it at an earlier performance, they confess). One of the highlights comes near the end. That’s All Folks is a brand-new end of relationship song in the same vein as Paul Simon’s 50 Ways To Leave your Lover, with some of their wittiest lyrics to date. Delivered in Boo’s trademark deadpan style, it’s an instant winner. Another unexpected treat comes in the form of Hesitation Waltz. Boo found the title from a piece of sheet music from the 1890s – but with no evidence of the words or music, they composed their own, with predictably brilliant results.

All too soon, the set draws to a close with more closely harmonised balladeering. It’s a deliciously enjoyable night. With the prospect of plenty of new material on the (next) horizon there are still tricks up the sleeves of these most prodigiously talented of troubadours.        

Blue is the colour. On a lesser known sonnet by John Keats.

We all know the blockbusters – Bright Star and On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. These are Keats’ Yesterday and Let It Be. But what of his other sonnets? Outside academia they are little known. Yet some are exquisite – and worth committing to memory to pull out on a rainy day. That’s the joy of sonnets. They fit easily into the pocket of the mind. This one is a case in point; on the face of it, an ode to a sunny day, that becomes something more.

Blue! ‘Tis the life of heaven,–the domain
Of Cynthia,–the wide palace of the sun,–
The tent of Hesperus and all his train,–
The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey and dun.
Blue! ‘Tis the life of waters–ocean
And all its vassal streams: pools numberless
May rage, and foam, and fret, but never can
Subside if not to dark-blue nativeness.
Blue! gentle cousin of the forest green,
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers,
Forget-me-not,–the blue-bell,–and, that queen
Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers
Hast thou, as a mere shadow! But how great,
When in an Eye thou art alive with fate!

It’s a magnificent riff on the theme of blue. Yet unlike Picasso’s melancholy series, this is an ecstatic dance; a burst of joy; a glorious daubing of the colour. You can easily imagine Keats strolling out on the heath, peering up from beneath the brim of his top hat, beneath a basin of pure blue sky. Remarkably, we know the date he wrote it: Sunday, 8 February 1818 – and it was a good omen – because it preceded what was to be London’s longest and warmest summer in years.

The poem’s conceit is simple. It’s a defence of blue – a riposte to lines written by fellow poet J.H. Reynolds, who argued:

    dark eyes are dearer far
Than orbs that mock the hyacinthine-bell.

Reynold’s poem is sadly not worth repeating in full. It’s a lightweight thing, too clever by half, and caught up in its own contrariness, making the case for brunette over the blonde (the ‘tresses dusk’ rather than ‘the golden clusters’) and dark eyes over blue.

Keats’ poem transcends its casual origins and becomes a luminous, freshly minted thing in its own right. Perhaps it owes its spontaneity to the speed and circumstances in which it was conjured. In the joy of the game, the spirited sparring between the poets, it has a zest it might not otherwise have had, had he laboured over it in the dark. Perhaps a first draft was dashed off in a moment of good humoured indignation.

The poem is exceptionally vivid, and intensely visual: the brightness of the star is offset by the duller colours of the clouds, which are ‘gold, grey and dun.’ The sonnet has a painterly quality to it, yet unlike a painter, restrained by a single canvas, a poet can transport us from one scene to another. With its jump cuts from sky to sea to forest, it’s more like a short film.          

‘The wide palace of the sun’

It’s a poem in three parts: first the sky, or, as seen through his extravagant metaphor: ‘the wide palace of the sun.’ The long and open vowel sounds of ‘domain’ ‘and all his train’ give a sense of its epic scale. It’s not so much a sky as a sweeping theatre. The fact that he metaphor-hops from ‘palace’ to a ‘tent’ to a voluptuous woman (‘The bosomer of clouds’) gives you a feel for Keats’ mood – drunken on its endless bounty, struggling to contain it in a single idea.  There are a couple of classical allusions – Cynthia is a name for the Greek goddess of the moon, nature and hunters. She was born on the eponymous Mount Cynthus on the sacred island of Delos under those dazzlingly blue skies. Hesperus is the bright evening star.

But then he abandons the idea of the sky altogether. It’s not enough. Next comes the water; oceans and ‘pools numberless.’ Like these, the sonnet overflows, the line endings spilling over. The alliteration of ‘rage and foam and fret’ creates an unstoppable tumult. ‘Ocean and all its vassal streams’ is masterful; the lines themselves coarsing like clear streams through the poem.  

Then we’re back on dry land; in the woods, where blue is ‘the gentle cousin of the forest green.’ Its ‘strange power’ here is how it accents the other colours; and where as a shadow of green, has transformative properties. It’s a clever trick. Keats is not trying to out punch his own bombastic phrasemaking with the sea and sky, but instead focuses on the colour’s quieter alchemy. The coy ‘forget me not and ‘the queen of secrecy, the violet’ are small miracles in themselves, which in their miniature perfection are every bit as breath-taking as the sea or sky.

Is the sonnet overblown? Possibly. But Keats is too much an artist to allow his tsumani of metaphors and images to dominate the poem. The focus-pull from the wide shots to the delicacy of those forest flowers shows he’s totally in control of his material.  

And then comes the coup de grace. Forget how blue floods nature, and electrifies the world. ‘When in an eye’ it truly comes into its own, bringing humanity to life. It’s a stunning closer; no matter what miracles we find in the natural world, nothing comes close to the miracle of our own existence – brought to life here by the blue of an eye ‘alive with fate.’ There’s a note of vulnerability and transcience here too, that gives it an added poignancy.  Our mortality makes the perfect imperfect.

There’s an interesting postscript. Eric Ormsby, in his review of Andrew Motion’s fine biography remarked on Keats’ own eyes:

‘whose exact color none of his friends could later remember but whose flashing vivacity none of them ever forgot.’

Commit this sonnet to memory and bring it out at the beach, or at a picnic that’s been rained off, as a gift from the pocket of your mind. This might be a Keats B-side, but like The Beatles, even his B-sides made mincemeat of the competition.

John, Paul, George, Ringo…and Elvis

‘Without Elvis,’ John Lennon once declared, ‘there would be no Beatles.’ Yet songs by the King are conspicuous by their absence on The Beatles’ original albums.

What could the hip-shaking Memphis rockabilly of Elvis, and the Mop Tops’ mind-bending psychedelia, possibly have in common? It’s a long way from Liverpool to Tupelo, Mississippi. But the King’s influence runs deep throughout The Beatles’ work, both together and in their solo years. 

Even the most casual McCartney fan knows that Paul is now the owner of the Elvis Presley bass: the famous upright once played by Bill Black. You’ll find plenty of clips of Paul looking adoringly at it before essaying his a startlingly good version of Heartbreak Hotel.

‘They weren’t playing much of Elvis’ stuff on the radio in those days,’ Paul remembered. ‘To hear Heartbreak Hotel I had to go into a record shop in Liverpool and listen to it through headphones in one of those booths. It was a magical moment, the beginning of an era.’

John was equally moved: ‘When I first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’… me whole life changed from then on, I was just completely shaken by it.’

While perhaps more famous for his Little Richard screech, the dopy charm of Paul’s Elvis impersonation is just as convincing: full of love and respect for the man. You’ll hear it again on There’s Good Rockin’ Tonight and Blue Moon of Kentucky from his 1991 MTV Unplugged live album, as well as on scattered recordings from across several decades.

When The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein was touting his boys to the record labels he described them, with astonishing prescience (or barely credible hyperbole) as ‘potentially bigger than Elvis.’ Once they’d got their deal, however, they largely steered clear of Elvis’ repertoire. Perhaps conscious they needed to make their own mark, The Beatles put some distance between themselves and the 20^th century’s other runaway pop phenomenon. Despite being huge fans, they only recorded four songs made famous by him, including Paul’s take on That’s Alright Mama. Even these only appear on the BBC recording sessions rather than any of the original 1962-70 LPs.

Countless other Elvis songs peppered their early live sets, when their gargantuan sessions at the Star Club and Reeperbahn in Hamburg necessitated an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock and roll. John took the lead on tough sounding material like Mean Woman Blues (later also covered by Paul on Unplugged, but unreleased). John’s drinking buddy, Brian Griffiths remembers being with John while Paul was heard practicing It’s Now or Never one morning in Hamburg. ‘Oh, why the frig’s he playing that sort of crap for?’ asked John. But Paul knew that an Elvis ballad was just the sort of thing the German crowds lapped up – even delivering Wooden Heart, complete with its German verse.   

Yet strangely none of these graduated onto the early albums, which were otherwise crammed with affectionate tributes to their other musical heroes. You can’t help but feel that when selecting the songs from their live act to fill their first LP, Please, Please Me, it was a deliberate move not to be seen paying such public homage to their transatlantic idol – and now rival.   

They were, by contrast, far less coy about recording Buddy Holly’s tunes, (no fewer than six on record, and 13 on stage) including That’ll Be The Day, their first ever recording as The Quarrymen in 1958. Admiring of Holly as a composer as well as performer, they even styled themselves after his band, the Crickets, with some slightly twee insectoid punning. If Buddy Holly had lived, and continued to flourish, perhaps they would have distanced themselves from him too.

While they might not have recorded many of his songs, Elvis’ influence can be found everywhere in The Beatles’ output. The flip side of their very first record, Paul and George’s In Spite of All the Danger, has the unmistakably ring of early Elvis – a distant cousin of the sort of mournful teenage cri de coeur Elvis so favoured when he wasn’t ripping it up. It even features the same, slightly hokey backing vocals you’ll find on Elvis’ 50s records. When Paul included it in his 2018 live set, it became an unexpected sing along favourite with fans. 

Then there’s Paul’s magnificently moody mumble on Back in the USSR. While it may be a Beach Boys pastiche in conception, the vocal is pure Elvis. The same is true for Lady Madonna – its boogie woogie styling has its roots in Fats Domino and Bad Penny Blues, but the voice is an echo of King; perhaps while it appealed to Elvis. He heard himself in it.

There’s a spirited but all too brief take on (You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care that surfaced on the deluxe reissue of The Beatles (White Album) in 2018. It was recorded directly before Helter Skelter, their proto-metal work out. It seemed that they hit upon the idea that channelling Elvis might put them in the zone for the heavy excursion that would follow. Meanwhile, when The Beatles’ 1969 Get Back sessions descended into a series of sloppy rock and roll jams, Elvis was one of their frequent go to points.   

While they may have cool towards the King in their recorded output, they couldn’t resist an opportunity to meet him in the flesh, a summit (brokered by their managers as a PR coup) which finally took place in Bel Air at the end of August, 1965. While it’s sold as one of the iconic moments of the 20^th century, the reality was somewhat anticlimactic. Priscilla Presley remembers The Beatles ‘being so excited, but so nervous. You could hear a pin drop when they came into the room… they were speechless. John was shy, timid. I think he couldn’t believe he was there with Elvis Presley.’

To break the ice, Elvis picked up an electric bass and played along to Mohair Sam, the Charlie Rich number, and an element of slightly forced larking reportedly ensued. John later claimed The Beatles ‘plugged in’ and jammed along, although the surviving Threetles in 1995 had no memory of this. (Ringo played football with him,’ George quipped. While no great friendship blossomed from this rather stilted meeting, Paul still remembers it as one of the great moments of his life.

Thirty years on, Paul, George and Ringo had conflicting recollections, but the sense of being star-struck was common to them all. ‘I mean, it was Elvis,’ recalled Paul, ‘he just looked like Elvis. Wow! That’s Elvis.’ Ringo lamented that he later discovered Elvis had tried to have the Beatles banned from America – either on the grounds that they were a corrupting influence or, more likely, that he didn’t want the competition.

They also learned something else: that fame wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. They took an instant dislike to Elvis’ court of hangers on and sycophants. They also saw that wealth, comfort and fame had somehow taken the edge off their idol. He wasn’t the same hungry hound dog they’d heard hollering through the static on Radio Luxenbourg. It was no coincidence that when John temporarily lost his mojo while procrastinating in the suburbs in 1965, he called it his ‘Fat Elvis period.’    

Clearly having parked his misgivings, Elvis turned to The Beatles’ songs during his Vegas years, covering Hey Jude and Yesterday (although, as Paul pointed out ‘he gets the last verse wrong’ slightly changing the lyrics to the less apologetic ‘I must have done something wrong, how I long…’ ‘He added a little disclaimer,’ says Paul). Elvis seemed to favour Paul’s tunes, although his version of George’s Something is perhaps the most famous of the five. His charmingly ramshackle version of Lady Madonna features some tasteful harmonica, although it’s clearly an impromptu recording as Elvis has only the shakiest grasp of the lyrics. He loses interest towards the end, clearly thinking of his lunch: ‘I’ll tell you what, are you guys hungry?’ There’s also a film showing Elvis take a stab at Get Back, as part of a loose medley. It’s fascinating to see him reclaim the pastiche of a quintessentially American sound and making it sound authentic.     

Once The Beatles were themselves history, they clearly grew much more relaxed about sharing their Elvis fixation. ‘I love Elvis so much,’ Paul told Uncut Magazine, ‘that for me to choose a favourite would be like singling out one of Picasso’s paintings.’ That said, the song Paul returned to most frequently was That’s All Right, Mama – including a version recorded with the late Scotty Moore, Elvis’ original guitarist, surely a dream come true for Paul.

John went further still: ‘I’m an Elvis fan,’ he admitted in 1975, ‘because it was Elvis who really got me out of Liverpool.’ In his promo film for Whatever Gets You Through the Night, John’s wearing an Elvis badge; while presenting the Grammy’s the same year, he sports a garish brooch spelling out the world ELVIS. By this point, he literally wore his influence on his sleeve. And further evidence, if any was needed, of his love for the man can be found in the unmistakable Memphis echo of (Just Like) Starting Over, the song that helped him kick-start his short lived comeback in 1980.     

As early as 1973, when putting together his slightly indulgent TV special, James Paul McCartney, Macca recorded four Elvis songs later dropped from the official release, including a delightfully playful, We’re Gonna Move and a less successful, schmaltzy version of It’s Now Or Never. Perhaps John had a point, back in Hamburg.  

Paul’s rock and roll covers projects, Run Devil Run and Choba B CCCP (‘Back in the USSR’) both lean heavily on Elvis’ output. The former (and superior of the two) features blistering versions of I Got Stung, All Shook Up and Party, which rank among Paul’s greatest covers (perhaps only bettered by Long Tally Sally), and he’s in superb voice throughout. Meanwhile, the Russian rock and rock album featured lively, although less inspired versions of Lawdy Miss Crawdy, and Just Because, also covered by John Lennon on his 1975 Rock and Roll album. For both Beatles, Elvis had a talismanic quality – almost beyond rational explanation, connecting them to some ghostly other world of magic and danger that lay beyond their reach.

It seemed Elvis defined for them the purest the spirit of rock – the original spark that lit the fire. Of course, The Beatles eventually transcended their rock and roll roots, later exploding into astonishing technicolour, their writing and recording becoming ever more experimental. Yet their sense of wonder at the person and image of Elvis never left them.   

Marvelling again at the mystery of Elvis’ appeal, Paul circles back to Heartbreak Hotel: ‘Elvis is a truly great vocalist, and you can hear why on this song. His phrasing, his use of echo, it’s all so beautiful. It’s the way he sings it, too. As if he’s singing it from the depths of Hell. It’s a perfect example of a singer being in command of the song.’

When Paul finally visited Graceland in 2013, he left a plectrum bearing his own name on Elvis’ grave ‘so Elvis could play in Heaven,’ where perhaps John finally got his chance to jam with him after all.   

Something so wild and new in this feeling – a review of Sarah Doyle’s new collection

The title poem of Sarah Doyle’s audacious and brilliantly conceived new collection says it all. Reading these collage poems, drawn from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, there’s something absolutely remarkable about seeing her luminous words for the first time presented as poetry.

Using cut-up techniques, elements of found poetry, and applying her own sensibilities as an unusually accomplished poet herself, Sarah has given us these words afresh. She has freed them from history, and the straitjacket of prose, stitching together disparate lines and observations from different days, months and even years into finely honed and coherent poems. Working thematically – for example bringing together Dorothy’s reflections on the moon, birds, the sky – Sarah has crafted individual pieces that catch the light in new and unexpected ways.   

Dove Cottage, Grasmere, where Dorothy Wordsworth lived with her brother, William (collage by Christopher James)

Sarah’s source materials are the journals Dorothy kept between 1798 and 1803, of her life with William Wordsworth. Dorothy records their intimate, symbiotic relationship, where she casts herself almost as a midwife for his poems, copying down his stanzas and sharing her own nature writings for him to use and rework – including one of her finest pieces of writing on encountering a blazing belt of daffodils that ‘tossed and reeled and danced/and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind’. She records her and her brother’s comings and goings in often amusing and revealing detail, documenting their visitors, walks and moods, spanning their crucial time in Dove Cottage, Grasmere. 

Anyone familiar with these journals, will know that the weather (particularly the incessant rain) and William’s predisposition to ‘compose’ (or fail to compose) on any given day, form the chief preoccupations. She has a powerful sense of empathy, both with her companions and surroundings, and indeed her moods closely reflect the weather and those around her, soaring to moments of epiphany and bliss, but spiralling just as easily into melancholia.

‘A heart unequally divided’ is a sonnet built around Dorothy’s struggle with a depression, and captures these oppositions particularly well. It begins with the assertion: ‘My heart was so full that I could hardly speak.’ She takes herself on a solitary walk to the lake: ‘I sate a long time upon/a stone at the margin of the lake, and after a flood/ of tears my heart was easier.’ The catharsis she experiences in nature goes some way to mend her heart, even if she cannot banish her demons for good. As a sonnet, it works perfectly – a focused, compressed and continuous narrative that allows us a glimpse of her soul through a rich sensory experience (she hears ‘the weltering on the shores’ almost like the sound of her own sobbing). Part of the pain it seems, is a sense of her own unfulfilled potential, alongside unspecified, unrequited feelings, perhaps unknown even to herself.   

Almost all of Dorothy’s writing is rooted in nature, and this manifests itself in her phrasemaking in the most astonishing ways; she is constantly open to the colour and variety of the wild that meets them almost at their door. With a magpie’s eye, Sarah collects some of her most vivid and surprising phrases, and with careful use of line break, form and rhyme delivers them memorably.

‘Among the mossy stones’ is almost a parallel piece or version of Wordsworth’s Daffodils: ‘…and at last, under the boughs/of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore.’ And later: ‘Some rested/their heads upon these stones, as on/ a pillow for weariness.’  There is a tenderness to it, and sense of Dorothy’s own weariness too in the face of all this beauty; as if she would never be capable of capturing or mirroring nature’s bounty. Yet paradoxically, this is almost the closest she got to a sort of poetic perfection – only for it to eclipsed by the dazzle of her brother’s showboating reflections on the same scene. Her wonderful phrase: ‘ever glancing, ever changing’ could describe the light, the rain and these poems too.   

Sarah’s use of concrete (or visual) poetry is especially strong. ‘Snow in the night and still snowing’ is full of gaping white space between the words, which drift down like flakes, the lines collecting more densely at the foot of the page; form perfectly reflecting the meaning. Scouring the journals for different observations on snow, Sarah piles phrase on phrase, each compounding the next – from ‘the occasional dropping of the snow from the holly boughs’ to ‘the brooms waved gently with the weight of snow.’ The cumulative effect is incredibly powerful: repetition with variation, almost like Monet’s water lilies or van Gogh’s sunflowers. The individual phrases continue to work in their own way as vivid, dynamic images – all the more redolent for their filmic sense of movement – like a photograph taken on an iPhone where you see a second’s movement before the still image itself.  

‘When the rain’ is another tour de force in the same manner – the phrases flooding down the page in a twisting spiral; the word rain itself running like a spine through the poem (as I heard one reader astutely describe it). Indeed, the almost comical quantity of rain that falls on William and Dorothy seems to make the very pages of the journal damp; yet it’s this very liquidity, slipperiness and the luminous reflections of the rain that most accurately describe Dorothy (and Sarah’s) style – with images and colours running and flowing together to create something fresh and new.    

Sarah’s trick in this collection is to make herself invisible; yet her poetic intelligence is constantly at work, feeling the weight of each line – like snow on a branch. She is alert to rhymes and half rhymes, repetition and rhythm. The space she gives these poems to breath is almost her greatest gift to Dorothy, clearing space for us to see the lines more clearly and quiet for them to sing out.  

There is a sense here too of a wrong being righted. Dorothy has been cast as a spinster, a hanger-on, an also-ran of the Lakeland poets, and latterly, even a gooseberry in William Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary. While many have praised her as a diarist, few have truly made a claim for her as a poet in her own right. These pieces make a compelling case to the contrary.

Whether Dorothy herself limited her poetic ambitions to serve her brother, his muse and reputation, or whether she felt the constrained by society and convention, we will never know. However we do at least get a sense here of what she might have achieved. To compare William and Dorothy’s work is perhaps unfair – but there is arguably a lightness and freshness about her writing that’s missing from her brother’s; an instinctive, intuitive grasp of nature’s hold on us. She is unshackled from the stuffy strictures of form William adhered to, and untroubled by his public expectations.       

Indeed, this book is a double achievement: first for Sarah for seeing the poems within the prose and working them into such fluent and complete pieces; and second to Dorothy herself for what is in effect, her long-delayed debut collection. What a wonderful thing it would be to see both their names together on the Forward Prize shortlist for best debut? You can imagine Dorothy bashfully ascending the steps to the stage in her black gown, cheeks flushed as she collects her cheque. And, yet, you feel, she would still spend most of her acceptance speech praising her brother. Bravo to Sarah on such an original and daring venture.   

Why Does the Nightingale Sing? Review of the new single from State of the Union

The new State of the Union song has dropped. Once more, it feels like a tune that’s been beamed down from a planet where it’s always the end of summer and always 1954. The moon shines and hearts reliably break. Business as usual then, for this most treasured of transatlantic collaborations.

Blessed with a timeless melody, and filled with the great unanswerable questions, Why Does the Nightingale Sing? is an unashamedly romantic offering. After the polished set of covers that made up their last album, this is State of the Union back to doing what they do best – demonstrating their peerless mastery of old school songwriting.  

The instrumentation is simpler than some State of the Union records, which occasionally border on showboating (and when you can play like Brooks Williams, why wouldn’t you?) They’ve clearly taken a decision to let the song stand on its own two feet and sing for its supper.

Unlike the bulk of their material, where one singer takes the lead (generally the song’s lead author) with the other harmonising like a ghost in the next room, this is almost a duet in the traditional sense. Exchanging lines like two seasoned crooners, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra could have made a decent fist of this. Still, it feels marginally closer to Boo Hewerdine’s oeuvre than Brooks’. As ever, it’s a masterclass in songcraft. Like Blake’s Jerusalem, it’s built around a series of questions – but at the core of this song is heartache – ‘Was it a love that went away? Is that why the nightingale sings?’

It sounds a plaintive note of sweet regret that haunts so many of their songs: ‘The sound of a joy that has gone/the sound of being apart.’

Now onto their fourth album, this is a collaboration that only gets more interesting. On the strength of this beguiling balled, the portents are good, and it all augurs well for a splendid album to come.

The Adventure of the Imaginary Detective

Sherlock Holmes: The man who never lived and will never die. The poster boy of Victorian fiction, doyen of the great detectives. But who was he? Who is he, besides a Hollywood star and fixture of Christmas Day TV schedules? Why does he command such a loyal following even now, a hundred and thirty years on since he first appeared in A Study in Scarlett?

I present here, a fresh new case: The Adventure of the Imaginary Detective. Together, will be looking for clues and carefully sifting through the facts. By the end I hope we will have reached a satisfactory conclusion. But for now, I would ask that you all remain within this room until the case is resolved.

Film poster for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Now it is impossible to imagine the outcry that followed the death of Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem. The Victorians wore black arm bands in the street. The national newspapers ran obituaries. 20,000 people cancelled their subscription to the Strand magazine. Except perhaps for the break up of The Beatles, there is no modern equivalent. To his fans, he was fully alive, leaping off the page, and glowing as brightly as the tobacco in his famous pipe bowl.  This insatiable public appetite for Holmes perhaps was ultimately the reason why he eventually returned, never to leave us again.

But there is so much more to Holmes that the two-dimensional sleuth of popular culture. The Holmes of the original canon, the fifty six stories and four novellas, which we will confine ourselves to here, is a surprising, complicated and flawed character, foibles that only serve to make him more attractive.   

‘I’ve found it. I’ve found it!’ These were the first words we hear Holmes utter in that memorable first adventure from 1887, and they echo down the years. They also serve as a manifesto. Holmes finds the solution time and again.

I stumbled into writing Sherlock Holmes fiction almost entirely by accident. My brother rang me up one day asking for a suggestion or a name for his online jewellery shop. I asked him what sort of pieces he had and he told me a about a strange ruby elephant he had acquired from an American collector. I thought for a moment and suggested the name ‘The House of the Ruby Elephant.’ Immediately this sounded to me like the name of Holmes adventure.

A quick internet search however, revealed that Anthony Horowitz had just published his Sherlock Holmes adventure: The House of Silk. I changed mine to The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants, and without so much as a plot, I began my first novel in earnest.

It begins with the escape of an elephant from London Zoo and leads Watson and Holmes on an unlikely search for lost Indian diamonds that leads them to Queen Victoria and the last Maharaja of India via rural Suffolk and Lord’s Cricket Ground.  

Along the way, they encounter four sinister characters called the archangels – assassins in top hats and sharpened canes hell-bent on the destruction of Holmes and the acquisition of the diamonds. I’ve since written two more: The Jeweller of Florence, and published just last month The Adventure of the Beer Barons.

The Adventure of the Beer Barons

In this blog, we will learn only about the man. We will find out where he came from. We will meet his friends and his enemies. We will study his methods and try and think like him. But before we begin our investigations, a word of warning, from Holmes himself:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.“

So let us not speculate, but acquire our data first, and by the only means Holmes would approve: by scrupulous observation.

The precursor to Holmes

Let us first consider his origins. Sherlock Holmes did not of course simply pop out of thin air, fully formed.

Now there are many who believe, or choose to believe, that Holmes was in fact quite real. And who am I to say they’re wrong? Was he just a figment of Dr Watson’s imagination? However most agree that Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was his creator.  

Born in 1859, Conan Doyle (No hyphen) was 38 when the first Holmes story was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. As well as a writer of prose fiction, he was a poet, a playwright, a spiritualist and trained doctor, suggestive of course, of Dr Watson’s occupation. He was well travelled having been ship’s doctor on a whaling ship, but in the early 1880s settled down, like Watson to start a general medical practice, first with his friend, and later on his own.

However, and fortunately for us, Conan Doyle’s practice was not a success. With few patients, he filled in time by writing his stories. It is tempting to think that many of the characters that populate the adventures drew their inspiration from his list of patients. We also know he had a rival working around the corner called Dr James Watson.  

Now while Conan Doyle proved a writer of great invention, and perhaps genius, he cannot however take credit for inventing the detective fiction genre.

Holmes may be the best remembered, but there were several who came before him and who are now considered the precursors to Sherlock Holmes. There was Inspector Bucket from Dicken’ Bleak House, but the most relevant to our enquiries perhaps was a character called Auguste Dupin, conceived by that master of the gothic, Edgar Allen Poe.

Dupin is now almost completely forgotten, eclipsed by the blinding light of Sherlock Holmes’ fame.  Yet he reflects many of the qualities we later come to associate with Holmes. He is reclusive, eccentric and follows a rigorously scientific method. He has a superior manner, divorces himself from his emotions and regularly reveals the incompetence of the police. Does that sound familiar yet? If that’s not all, he also has a side kick who becomes the narrator of his stories.

Dupin’s first appearance came in 1841 in the Murders in La Rue Morgue, a full 46 years before A Study in Scarlett in 1887. I’d like to read you a little bit to give you a taste of Dupin and his methods:

Residing in Paris during the spring and part of the summer of 1840, I there became acquainted with a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. This young gentleman was of an excellent—indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it.

Our first meeting was at an obscure library in La Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion. We saw each other again and again. I was deeply interested in the little family history which he detailed to me with all that candor which a Frenchman indulges whenever mere self is his theme. I was astonished, too, at the vast extent of his reading; and, above all, I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor, and the vivid freshness of his imagination.

Seeking in Paris the objects I then sought, I felt that the society of such a man would be to me a treasure beyond price; and this feeling I frankly confided to him. It was at length arranged that we should live together during my stay in the city; and as my worldly circumstances were somewhat less embarrassed than his own, I was permitted to be at the expense of renting, and furnishing in a style which suited the rather fantastic gloom of our common temper, a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain.

Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen—although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within ourselves alone.

We were strolling one night down a long dirty street in the vicinity of the Palais Royal. Being both, apparently, occupied with thought, neither of us had spoken a syllable for fifteen minutes at least. All at once Dupin broke forth with these words:

“He is a very little fellow, that’s true, and would do better for the Théâtre des Variétés.”

“There can be no doubt of that,” I replied unwittingly, and not at first observing the extraordinary manner in which the speaker had chimed in with my meditations. In an instant afterward I recollected myself, and my astonishment was profound.

“Dupin,” said I, gravely, “this is beyond my comprehension. I do not hesitate to say that I am amazed, and can scarcely credit my senses. How was it possible you should know what I was thinking of?’

“Tell me, for Heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed, “the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter.’ 

 “I will explain,” he said, “and that you may comprehend all clearly, we will first retrace the course of your meditations, from the moment in which I spoke to you until that of the rencontre with the fruiterer in question. The larger links of the chain run thus—Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichols, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer.”

You will note that Dupin has a very similar manner to Holmes, the same apparent gift for reading minds and divining the seemingly impossible. He has the same supercilious way in which he explains his method, based on the twin sciences of observation and deduction.

There is the also same dynamic between the two men as Watson and Holmes; the same balance of power – Dupin superior in intellect, the other dumbfounded by his conclusions.

The story also has a Holmesian ring of strangeness to it. The bodies of two woman are found in a locked upper room – a mother and daughter, one of whom is found in the chimney. There are deep scratches and bruises on their bodies. Shall I tell you how it ends? If not, please skip on. An orang otang belonging to a sailor living close by escapes, climbs up the lightening rod, enters the women’s room and commits the murders.

The story was later made into a film starring Bela Legosi – although as you can see from the poster, they clearly didn’t mind giving the ending away.

Film poster for Murders in The Rue Morgue

The key difference of course between Holmes and Dupin, is that he is a Frenchman and his stomping ground is Paris rather than Baker Street. Transplanting this character to London was a canny move on Conan Doyle’s part, but I think you will agree that he owes something of a debt of gratitude to Edgar Allen Poe.

Joseph Bell

There was a real-life inspiration too. Joseph Bell was a Scottish surgeon whom Conan Doyle worked for while at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

He was a pioneer in several ways, both in his habits and interests. He was one of the first experts in forensic medicine, helping the police in a number of matters including the notorious Ripper murders. But it was the fact that he based his medical work on close observation, often diagnosing patients based on tiny, almost invisible symptoms that suggests he was a model for Holmes. He would also use his powers of observation and deduction to play games where he would deduce a man’s occupation and character merely by his appearance. You can well imagine Conan Doyle as an impressionable young clerk in thrall to Bell, totally impressed and mystified by the older man’s exceptional skills and masterful manner.

Robert Louis Stevenson, who also worked for Bell wrote to Conan Doyle write to the authors after reading the first Holmes adventure. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘Holmes is based on old Joe Bell!’ 

So let’s get to know Holmes a little better. I have spent the last five years in the company of Sherlock Holmes. Not in the form of a box-set or with the benefit of the iPlayer but sitting inside 221b Baker Street in my guise of Dr Watson. I have had the opportunity to observe him a close-quarters in his lesser known stories: The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants, The Jeweller of Florence and the Adventure of the Beer Barons. He is infuriating, unpredictable and ferociously intelligent. Indeed the biggest problem writing a Sherlock Holmes adventure is writing about a character who is more intelligent than you are. There have been many instances where I have ceased typing and stopped in astonishment at some utterance or revelation. It is as if I am discovering the solution at the same time as my fictional alter ego. 

There are a few unspoken rules when writing Sherlock Holmes’ fiction. First and foremost, you must never kill off Watson, and certainly not Holmes, for the simple reason that it would spoil the fun for everyone else.  It’s worth noting that this is not a rule Conan Doyle chose to follow himself.

There are other rules too. You mustn’t tinker with the chronology. You can’t send him off to India in 1890 when we know he was in Devon. If you do set a novel further afield, you need to set it during the great Hiatus, between his supposed death and his return in the adventure of the empty house.

There’s another important rule. In the novels, he is never Sherlock. Always Holmes, except in the company of his brother, where only Mycroft is permitted to address him by his first name. This presents problems for writers who must keep finding new ways to refer to him, without writing the word Holmes on every line. You end up writing many lines such as these: ‘I regarded my friend with a weary affection.’

Now let’s us consider the man and his habits

Holmes the hedonist

Holmes was inordinately fond of his pleasures. For a man famous for his brain work, by the same measure, he did not deny himself the pleasures of the flesh. Let’s look the beginning of The Adventure of the Illustrious Client:

Both Holmes and I had a weakness for the Turkish bath. It was over a smoke in the pleasant lassitude of the drying-room that I have found him less reticent and more human than anywhere else. 

This is quite typical of Holmes’ self-indulgence, and there is something of the decadent nineties that pervades all the stories. After all, this is the decade bestrode by Oscar Wilde, who memorably declared: ‘Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.’  

In the Adventure of the Twisted Lip, Watson finds Holmes in an opium den:

‘I suppose Watson,’ said he, ‘that you imagine I have added opium smoking to cocaine injections and all the other little weaknesses on which you have favoured me with your medical views’ On this occasion, he was in fact on business rather than pleasure.  

Then there is Holmes the smoker. Pipes, cigars, cigarettes, loose tobacco. You name it, Holmes smokes it. In fact without the references to smoking, the 670,000 Conan Doyle wrote across the adventures of Sherlock Holmes would be probably be halved. Never was there a worse case of passive smoking than the one suffered by poor Dr Watson. But you see smoking is considered essential to Holmes’ brain work.

“It is quite a three pipe problem,’ he tells Watson. ‘and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.”

Don’t you love the precision of that? He doesn’t know the solution to the problem yet, but he knows exactly how long it will take him to get there.

This is one of my favourite descriptions of Holmes’ habits and its inextricable link with his thought processes:

A large and comfortable double-bedded room had been placed at our disposal, and I was quickly between the sheets, for I was weary after my night of adventure. Sherlock Holmes was a man, however, who when he had an unsolved problem upon his mind would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over.

He put on a large, blue dressing gown and then wandered around the room collecting pillows from the bed and cushions from the sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Easter divan, upon which he perched himself crosses legged with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp, I saw him sitting there, an old brier pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him. 

The references are exhaustive, the most famous perhaps being the fact that he kept his tobacco in his Persian slipper and his cigars in the coal scuttle. These are two of the key references for any aspiring writer of Holmes fiction. Leave them out and you will leave the fans disappointed.

Smoking is not confined to quiet moments at Baker Street. Cigar and cigarette ash are often the key to solving cases too and we learn Holmes has written monograms about identifying different types of ash.

Now of course Sherlock Holmes is all about finding solutions. But when there is no case to absorb him, he turns to a solution of quite a different kind. I’m referring of course, to Holmes’ most notorious transgression: the 7 percent solution. Conan Doyle makes no attempt to conceal Holmes’ cocaine use, appearing as it does in in the very first line of The Sign of Four.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat Moroccon case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff.

It is hard to imagine even an Irvine Welsh novel beginning in such a brazen way. But he turns to narcotics only when there is no brainwork to be had. It helps him ‘escape from the commonplaces of existence.’

He requires constant stimulation of the mind – and when there is none, he either withdraws to his room, in a funk for days at a time, or reverts to his cocaine use. Indeed it seems quite probable evidence that Holmes was a sufferer from bipolar disorder – susceptible to unpredictable mood swings. One minute he is waking Watson in the dead of night to pursue a suspect through the rain, the next he refuses to leave his room for three days.

For the most part, brainwork dominates the stories. Holmes is not the man depicted in the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Junior version, swinging from chandeliers like Zorro. Notwithstanding several memorable episodes involving bartitsu, an obscure branch of the martial arts, which involves the use of a cane, and a spot of boxing, he is more commonly found in his mouse-coloured dressing gown, slumped in his chair until the small hours losing himself in a problem

Holmes is not merely a brain on a stick. Nor is he some sort of 19^th century superhero. He is an unusual combination of both mental and physical prowess.

To anyone thinking of writing a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. There is one simple piece of advice. Read all of Conan Doyle’s stories first. Yet it transpires that this is not something Conan Doyle chose to do himself. Despite his obvious mastery of plot and character, the books are full of continuity errors.

The mystery of the three dressing gowns.

Holmes dressing gown is described first as blue, then as purple, then mouse coloured. Conan Doyle clearly had better things to do that go rummaging through his old stories to keep things consistent.

Then there’s Dr Watson. Considering he is one of the two main characters, one would have thought that the author would keep a few notes as an aide memoir. But again, Conan Doyle is hilariously inconsistent. In one story the bullet wound he receives in Afghanistan is in the shoulder. In another it is in the leg. This gives the modern writer a dilemma as to which version he is going to use.

In the Man with the Twisted Lip, Conan Doyle even get his name wrong, with Mary referring to him as James, rather than John. (By the way, did you know that Holmes’ sidekick was originally called Ormond Sacker, before settling on John Watson?) And to keep up with Watson’s marriages is beyond the abilities of most.

There is even a Conan Doyle adventure that is set in the years after Holmes death in his tussle with Moriarty but before his resurrection in the Adventure of the Empty House. But if anything, these errors only add to the charm. And as I have found out myself, there is nothing a true Sherlockian enjoys more than pointing out an error. Indeed some have speculated that this was Conan Doyle’s intention – laying mysteries within mysteries. More likely he was churning out the stories at such a rate he didn’t have time to check them properly.

But what is that really appeals about the stories? Undoubtable, there is something in Holmes’ magnetic charisma and he dynamic between Holmes and Watson. Then there is the remarkably stylish prose, the quick as a whip plotting and Conan Doyle’s unique ability to create a vivid sketch of a character in just a couple of lines. Listen to this description of Inspector Bardle of the Sussex Constabulary — he was ‘a steady, solid, bovine man with thoughtful eyes, which looked at me now with a very troubled expression.’ Just a sentence but you get a very complete sense of his character and appearance. This is a remarkable skill, but an essential one for a writer of short stories.

But it is the alchemy of it all working together that makes it such a success. Yes, the adventures are formulaic, but there is wit and invention in abundance. Above all, there is an unusual facility of the language that elevates these stories above the commonplace. Shakespeare used approximately 28,000 unique words. Conan Doyle uses 35,000. He may have been writing popular fiction, but he saw no reason to compromise the quality of the writing.

So what have we learned about Holmes?

He’s a hedonist and man of action, but whose greatest pleasure is brain work. He’s an eccentric who owns three different coloured dressing gowns. He values friendship but has very few. He is detached from his emotions but is capable of feeling great pride and envy. He is blessed with an unusually brave and loyal friend in Dr Watson.

The stories have endured because of the quality of their writing and ingenious plotting. They are full of glamour and decadence – the Victorians and Edwardians enjoyed them in the same way we enjoy watching a James Bond film. But I think it is for the unique dynamic between Watson and Holmes and the quality of darkness and strangeness that the stories continue to appeal.    

So, after 130 years, the Holmes phenomenon show no signs of abating. To spend time in the man’s company is to be constantly delighted and confounded.

But have we proved that Sherlock Holmes was imaginary? I’m not so sure.  How often has Holmes told us that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Christopher James is the author of three Holmes novels, most recently Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Beer Barons.

He ‘swam for love, as I swam for glory’ – On poetry and wild swimming

I burst up out of the sea and steal a breath from the sky. My head is ringing with the cold as I paddle, seal-like, parallel to the shore. It’s a chilly Sunday in May, and I’m at Covehithe, a remote beach on the Suffolk coast. Behind me are woods, wildflowers and wheat fields pin-pricked with poppies. Before me is a yellowish sea, beneath stacks of grey cloud. But the sky is bright and I feel awake, properly, awake for the first time in months.

Tankers balance on the horizon, and four miles distant, the pier and lighthouse at Southwold print themselves against the clouds. Covehithe, has the unenviable claim of possessing the fastest eroding shoreline in Britain, almost visibly crumbling into the sea. The road leading down to the sand ends in mid-air like something from a Road Runner cartoon.

It has another, delightfully absurd claim to fame. It’s where the Monty Python sketch: ‘The first man to jump the English Channel’ was filmed. Needless to say, it’s an absurd joy. But thankfully it hasn’t brought hordes to these shores. There’s barely a soul abroad, and people are outnumbered by the upended tree stumps that litter the beach like discarded wooden crowns, worn smooth by the wind.

I’ve only heard about this place from a friend of a friend. My only companions are dog walkers, a couple out rambling and a lone photographer waiting for the light. The only amenity is a plastic bin at the start of a footpath that leads along the edge of a field and down to the decaying shore. In short, it’s hidden gem, and the perfect place to lose yourself in the exquisite pleasures of poetry and wild swimming.

For twenty years I’ve pursued the twin passions of poetry and outdoor swimming. My first poem to appear in a respectable journal was (unimaginatively titled) ‘The Swimmer’ back in 2000. I’ve kept that first thin volume ever since as proof of my ‘year zero.’ But it’s book ended by one of my most recent poems: ‘The Archbishops at the Lido’ which won first prize in the Crabbe/Suffolk Poetry Competition 2019. In between, I must have written and read hundreds of poems whose chief preoccupations are tides, water, swimming and memory.

By the time Matthew Arnold stumbled down to ‘Dover Beach’ to see that ‘the tide is full, the moon lies fair’ an immense poetic body of work had swelled on water, the sea and swimming. The rhythms of water and poetry are so interwoven, and so closely connected to the body’s own rhythms. The sense of complete immersion you feel when reading or writing a poem is so similar to that feeling of swimming in cold water. The exhilaration; that sense of intense connection and absolute focus is uncannily alike.

I know of at least one workshop that deliberately links the two endeavours – inviting poets to plunge into the iron-grey waves of the North Sea, before handing them a pencil and paper. There’s something about the body’s reaction to cold water – a simultaneous closing and opening of neural pathways that inspires a breathless immediacy. It can so often produce something fresh and original on the page, utterly charged with energy. The body and mind are in shock and behave in radically different ways.

Of course I’m not the first to make the connection between poetry and swimming. There’s a sensational episode in one of our earliest poems, Beowulf, where we find our hero locked in an absurd swimming contest with his childhood friend, Breca, the Bronding. They were to swim for seven days and seven nights clad in full armour, (‘battle-sark braided, brilliantly gilded’) and nothing can separate them: ‘While swimming the sea-floods, sword-blade unscabbarded/Boldly we brandished, our bodies expected/To shield from the sharks.’

It’s a classic piece of mead-hall boasting: ‘Then we two companions stayed in the ocean/Five nights together, till the currents did part us/The weltering waters, weathers the bleakest.’

And yet there’s more; he must fight off the creatures of the deep: ‘To the bottom then dragged me/A hateful fiend-scather, seized me and held me/Grim in his grapple’ until it can be disposed of by ‘My obedient blade’ and ‘by means of my hand-blow.’

Inspired by the same primal urge, albeit without the armour and sea monsters, Walt Whitman plunges in with his ‘Poem of Joys’, an ecstatic panegyric on the visceral physicality of the natural world. He marvels at ‘the swiftness and balance of fishes’. Stumbling over cuttlefish shells of exclamation marks to get to the water’s edge, he sings: ‘O to bathe in a good place along shore!/To splash the water! to walk ankle-deep—to race naked along the shore.’

So many writers and poets use swimming as a means of regeneration; a way of replenishing the well.

While living in Deia, Majorca, Robert Graves rarely went a day without his sea swim to reinvigorate body and mind. It helped him channel his energies and refresh his spirits.

Even the games-dodging, chain-smoking John Betjeman, was drawn into the water. It’s well worth seeking out the delightfully silly piece of footage on YouTube, of the Poet Laureate learning to surf in Cornwall. ‘I don’t know anything so exciting as getting a perfect surf,’ he claims, ‘timing’s one’s shoot off from the waves, riding along on the crest and coming far in shore.’ His sense of freedom and delight is self-evident. He returns to the sea repeatedly in his poetry. In ‘A Bay in Anglesey’, he watches it: ‘filling in, brimming in, sparkling and free/ The sweet susurration of incoming sea.’

Anne Ridler’s poem Bathing in the Windrush is an evocative and elemental piece – a halcyon meditation on children swimming. They inhabit two worlds – one of the earth, the other of the water: ‘Smiling above the water’s brim/The daylight creatures/Trail their moonshine limbs below.’ Once in the water, they become subsumed – a part of nature again – at once more graceful, more animal and they ‘move like swanbeams through the yielding/pool.’ It’s as if nature has claimed them for its own, and in return grants them the gifts of lightness and felicity. She concludes: ‘These are like symbols, where half seen/The meaning swims, and drawn to the surface dies.’ It is as if a spell is cast in the water itself; once we return to the mundane world, the spell is broken and we lose that miraculous sense of buoyancy.

There is a darker sensibility in Eliot’s Death by Water sequence in ‘The Waste Land:’ lamenting: ‘As he rose and fell/He passed the stages of his age and youth/Entering the whirlpool.’ The water changes us, but it’s a reminder than we ourselves are little more than water and dust. Entering the water brings risk. It is sometimes a baptism, sometimes a rebirth, sometimes a death.

Into this canon, it feels churlish not to admit Michael Stipe’s oblique lyricism in REM’s beautiful and beguiling, Nightswimming. It’s a song of memory, regret and the luminous moment. He perfectly captures the illicit thrill of night swimming: The fear of getting caught/Of recklessness and water/They cannot see me naked. Water and memory stir together. The moon, ‘low tonight’ creates forces and ebbtides of its own, acting on us in ways we cannot resist. Yet the luminous moment dims with the fading memory: ‘These things they go away/replaced by everyday.’

Carl Phillips’ sensuous poem ‘Swimming’ explores similar territory: ‘I love the nights here,’ he asserts. ‘I love the jetty’s black ghost-finger, how it calms the harbour.’ The water represents childish fears too:  ‘An old map from when this place was first settled shows monsters everywhere. But it’s worth the risk: ‘I dive in, and they rise like faithfulness/itself, watery pallbearers heading seaward, and/I the raft they steady. It seems there’s no turning back.’

It’s a heady mixture of fear, tempered with adventure and reward. Sea swimming is at once a return. It comes at a cost and a shock. It’s a reminder that we are part of the world and its rhythms – not above it or outside it.  When we are held in the water we give ourselves back to nature; we surrender the autonomy afforded by evolution;  it’s at once a regression and a reminder of our fragility. It impels us to live life more intensely, to value ourselves more, each other and the world.

Roger Deakin, the great swimmer and nature writer has practically inspired a tradition all of his own. Judy O’Kane’s meditative tribute ‘Waterlog,’ after Deakin’s book of the same name, is a rich and densely layered study on the man’s life and work, marveling at how close he got to the essence of things. She pictures him mid-swim at frog’s-eye level in the waters that circled his Elizabethan home in Suffolk: ‘He’s circling the moat, his forearm/gliding through the weight of the water/fluid, fluent, and I float in his wake.’ Crucially, she makes the explicit link between the rhythms of water and writing: ‘Everywhere liquids move in rhythms/he says, his pen never lifting/ from the page.

Deakin’s own writing frequently reaches the pitch of poetry itself. His prose is rich with metaphor and simile and freshly-minted phrase-making. As he lolls in the waters off the Suffolk coast, he sees ‘the giant puffball of Sizewell B’ while the shore itself disappears in the rising swell. He swims beneath ‘an orange sickle of a new moon’ which hangs ‘in a deep mauve sky.’

Meanwhile Louise Gluck’s poem, Pond begins in darkness, but glints into focus:  ‘Night covers the pond with its wing/Under the ringed moon I can make out/your face swimming among minnows/ and the small echoing stars.’ The night creates an alchemy of its own: ‘In the night air/the surface of the pond is metal.’ Water and the powers of darkness have a transformative effect.

Perhaps the last word should go to Byron, and his poem, Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydo. He compares himself (at least at the outset) unfavourably with Leander, that fabled swimmer and lover of Greek legend who nightly swan across Hellespont (The Darndelles) to woo Hero, even in ‘dark December.’ He begins: ‘For me, degenerate modern wretch/Though in the genial month of May/My dripping limbs I faintly stretch/And think I’ve done a feat today.’ But he confesses his exploits cannot be compared with brave – or foolish – Leander’s: ‘But since he cross’d the rapid tide/According to the doubtful story/To woo, — and — Lord knows what beside/And swam for Love, as I for Glory/Twere hard to say who fared the best:/Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!/He lost his labour, I my jest;/For he was drown’d, and I’ve the ague.’

It’s a delightful piece of self-deprecating humour – but how classic of Byron to make himself the victor in the end, feeling every bit the adventurer, but escaping with little more than a cold. It betrays that giddy sense of the heroic (mixed with the slightly hare-brained) that every wild swimmer feels as they stand shivering on the shore, post-swim, wondering where they might find nearest mug of hot tea.

Christopher James has won the National Poetry Competition, as well as the Bridport, Ledbury, Oxford Brooks and other poetry prizes. His new novel Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Beer Barons is available for pre-order and latest collection, The Penguin Diaries is out now.