Life and Times: R-E-A-L L-O-V-E (2023)

The Life and Times column from the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

My local Community Centre recently advertised a Saturday evening event, a gospel choir with performers from London. Entrance was free to all. I view religion as baseless superstition, but I do enjoy gospel music. Regardless of many of the sentiments it expresses, I enjoy its energy, its rhythm and the powerful singing voices of those who perform it. And I respect the sincerity of its performers and their followers.

With this in mind I decided to go to the event. Arriving a few minutes before the start time, I was surprised to see only a sparse audience in the Community Centre hall. That, it seemed to me, would not be good for the atmosphere. But the organiser was reassuring. He announced that more people would arrive soon and in the meantime advised those present to pray. He proceeded to do so himself out loud in improvised fashion. And then more people did arrive and the show started.

Gospel rap

But I was in for a disappointment. Rather than a massed choir or Mahalia Jackson-type singers belting out Oh Happy Day, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Old-Time Religion or Amazing Grace, it was individual performers with pre-recorded backing doing what I was later told is ‘gospel rap’. Rap isn’t my favourite type of music and, since the acoustics in the hall weren’t brilliant, it was difficult to catch the words most of the time. The exception to this was a number called Real Love, since the spelt-out refrain (R-E-A-L L-O-V-E) was much repeated and gave the listeners something to hang on to. The ‘real love’ was of course love of or for God or Jesus. Fair enough given the context, but what I wasn’t expecting was the religious ‘testifying’ that punctuated the evening. Each performer, after their spot, would stay on stage, tell their story and exhort the audience to listen to and embrace the word of God or the teaching of Jesus, to put their hands in the air and even come to the front if they were moved to do so. A small number did, though these may have been members of the group who were organising the event. But their exhortations were impressively powerful and gave some kind of inkling of how the mass events of evangelising preachers are capable of gaining converts on the spot. I was reminded of the mass rallies addressed by the American Baptist preacher, Billy Graham, over many decades.

I obviously wasn’t up for conversion, but, as the event drew to a close, one of the organisers, who, when I came in, introduced himself as Dion, came and sat next to me and asked me if I was a Christian and, if so, did I want to take that further? I very politely made it clear I didn’t have Christian beliefs and wasn’t a candidate for conversion. But I also told him I’d found the concert interesting and wished him luck in any future events.

The solace of religion

What to make of that? Well, first of all, before going to a gospel concert again, I’d make sure what kind of music it was going to be. And I’d also be prepared for any evangelising, not be surprised by it and just consider it part of the show. One of those who had ‘testified’ told the gathering that he was a refugee who had the group – and Jesus – to thank for embracing him after much suffering. I could understand the force behind that. But I found it more difficult to fathom why seemingly ordinary people with the families and children they had brought with them should be involved in activities and beliefs that were so contrary to evidence and to everyday experience of life. But maybe they too, for their own reasons, needed the solace, the comfort of religious belief and its ritual and the attachment to a community it brings with it. Maybe they needed, as we all do in our own way, to feel part of a larger group, to feel, in a world that oppresses us all in so many ways, that we at least have something to hang on to.

Illusions

The trouble of course is that, on top of the illusions that most people have about the way the society we live in – capitalism – works, which are a serious impediment to understanding its true nature and the urgent need for a different kind of society, religion constitutes an additional illusion in its irrational belief that there exists a supernatural entity, a supreme force that intervenes in nature and human affairs and even somehow allows us to live on after death. This is one of the reasons why socialists are opposed to religion, whether organised or otherwise, and see the socialist society of free access and democratic organisation we advocate and work for as one that will be free of religion, and indeed will have no need for the illusions religion harbours and seeks to spread.

When Dion came and sat next to me at the end of the concert, I would have liked to say those things to him, but of course it would have been unfair, as it was his ‘gig’. I would have liked to tell him that religious fantasies answer no questions about the world we live in, that humans are born into a material world, that their ideas are fashioned by that world and that they in their turn modify it. But not knowing the circumstances of his life, I may have come over as plain offensive. Maybe I could at least have pointed out that the music I’d heard that night was not ‘gospel’ as normally understood and that, when they next put on an event, I’d be glad to attend if real gospel music was on offer.

Howard  Moss

Old Time Music Hall (1963)

From the March 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

A gulf of time separates the original working class entertainer who amused his fellows with rough song and dance, from the plushy, awed restraint of the present- day Command Performance. The Music Hall of yesteryear is gone, never to return. Its roots were in the unsettled, lucre-mad savagery of the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century. All that then remained of the abundant regional folk song and music of the English countryside went into the melting pots of the industrial towns to emerge in a uniform pattern of urban culture.

The rural culture, smothered in the slums of the towns, managed to find an outlet for fragmented skills and techniques in the drink-sodden atmosphere of the “pub.” In those days, the public house was new and quite distinct from the ancient inn. It had cut glass, fine woodwork and gas lighting, and offered more comfort and social contact than the home. It was to the early Victorian worker what the coffee bar is now to the Earls Court bed-sitter.

As industrialisation increased, the skilled worker obtained some change in living standards. Some of his wages remained after his basic needs had been met and the brewing trade had a fairly free field in mopping up this surplus. In time, the larger public houses had halls where beer, food and tobacco were helped down by the mixed talents of the entertainers, with the very necessary chairman in control.

It should be remembered that prior to the Theatre Emancipation Act of 1843, straight dramas were allowed only in Crown-chartered theatres of which there were but two in London. This law was evaded by wedging musical comic and acrobatic turns between drama and sketches—“Variety,” in other words. By the time the theatre was freed of restriction, the prolonged effects of State control had already funnelled variety into some form of theatre or hall, and here its ultimate flowering took place. The halls, along with the theatres, were the principal suppliers of performers in growing numbers. In the very poor areas a much lower standard existed in the form of the gin shops, where the “penny gaff” provided crude doggerel, larded with a hefty helping of bad language.

In the early days, the main halls charged admission, which was repaid in food and drink (wet money). This was an encouragement to spend more as the evening wore on. The entertainers were often employed on the premises in some other capacity and received a supplement for their extra efforts. Hence the development of such people as singing waiters. Many publicans were themselves capable performers, such as Collins of Collins Music Hall fame.

But it was Charles Morton who took a big step in the establishment of the music hall. In the 1850’s he enlarged his hall at The Canterbury by demolishing an American skittle alley and created what was for those days a super-modern theatre. Women were eventually allowed in—a good box office draw—and “wet money” was abolished in favour of set admission prices. This meant that artists could now be paid salaries and become specialised—an important change.

Morton himself was very conscious of the need to improve working class taste. Capitalism, after all, needed something more than just a mass of degenerate proletarians. So The Canterbury even sported a picture gallery and selections of opera and ballet were included in the programme; in fact, the first performance in Britain of Gounod’s Faust was performed at The Canterbury. Nor should we forget that in the I860's such halls as Turnham’s White Lion and the famous ’’Met” in Edgware Road, London, had their full-time ballets. Workers who frequented these places did not regard such art form as being above them or effeminate, and although one must allow that standards then were much lower than those of modern choreography, working class acceptance of ballet in its introductory form doubtless played a fair part in its subsequent development.

In the next few years, the halls separated from their public house origin and only the names continued to bear trace of the site of their birth. Laws were passed in 1870 ordering the closing of places of entertainment by midnight and prohibiting the sale of food and drink in the auditorium. This put paid to the Chairman, and correct theatre procedure took his place. But by then capital was flowing into this expanding business and a whole army of song writers, costumiers and small timers were earning their living at it. The audiences still sung, cried and thrilled with the performer, and the personal contact was still a factor, even though it was getting more remote.

By the I930’s, the music halls were in decline. A devastating world war and generally changing conditions saw to that, and it was not to be long before memories were all that remained.

It is interesting now to look back over the years of their heyday and compare them with the present. The most outstanding change is in the type of popular songs) Almost exclusively modern lyrics lean on a theme of sexual love and centre on the young, whereas the old music halls produced songs about almost every human emotion and experience. Love, bravery, misfortune, poverty, snobbishness, death and patriotism they were all there. Workers were still closely knit, even in the large towns, and the isolation behind the lace curtains of suburbia had yet to come. Personal misfortune was eased by the direct mutual aid of one’s neighbours. Today, the state has moved into this field.

As industry develops, every aspect of our lives becomes affected by it, and no field of human activity is left unscrutinised in the search for profit. So the trend in modern songs is not surprising. Who is much bothered if the fervour of young love is aroused by pop singers who, even by general standards, are poor, so long as the money keeps rolling in? Anyway, the ruling class are probably thankful that their young workers spend so much of their spare time shuffling and mooning about broken hearts and frustrated passions. Their minds will not then so readily turn to more awkward aspects of the system.

But modern capitalism has produced something else the quite untenable assumption on the part of many teenagers that we have moved into an era of slickness and high-toned quality in song production. A comparison of the pop songs of today with those of the old music halls will show the falsity of this. There is a difference between the two, yes, but a subtle, one; both are reflections of poverty not only in wealth itself but in the understanding of the capitalist world.

Private property society has divorced its workers from the means of wealthy production and has reduced many of our tasks to simple manipulation. It has also brought about a uniformity of taste, ideas and general behaviour which social reformers may wail about but which none of them can alter. We hope we have said enough by now to show that only a classless, property-less society will make any radical change in this state of affairs. It will be then that we can express ourselves fully and encourage variety in the truest sense of the word. But it is only the working class who can ring up the curtain on this new world.

Jack Law

Mental illness in a sick society (1996)

John Ogdon

Theatre Review from the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Virtuoso by William Humble (Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich and 
touring)

Socialists are not Utopians. Whilst we seek to change society so that it operates in the interests of all the people of the world and not just a small minority of capitalists, we recognise that a socialist society will still face daunting problems and challenges, some of which at present might seem insoluble.

One such challenge is mental health and, at the extreme, madness. We rightly talk of “the sick society” and there can be little doubt that the vast majority of the psychoses and neuroses which are the common experience of so many people today are associated, directly or indirectly, with the stresses and strains, the poverty and insecurity, of capitalism. People are sick, both physically and mentally, because the good health of the population must never be allowed to get in the way of the exploitation of the working class and the endless pursuit of yet more profit. In deference to profit children go hungry, old people go cold, and the unemployed eke out a chilling existence denied the essentials of life. Even the lucky ones (sic), the employed, must work harder, for longer hours and sometimes less pay in real terms, with the ever-present threat of re-structuring, voluntary redundancy, or some other euphemism for unemployment hanging over them. No wonder capitalism drives some people mad.

But beyond the victims of callous capitalism there remain those few whose illnesses seem, at least at first sight, unrelated to the world in which they live. The concert pianist, John Ogdon, was one such person. In Virtuoso, a new play by William Humble the onset, nature and treatment of his mental illness—and its impact on those around him—is sensitively and enthrallingly explored.

By any standard Ogdon was an exceptional pianist: a performer of such power and vision as arguable to warrant the label genius. Perhaps significantly his father, a teacher of English, also suffered a period of mental illness and wrote about his experiences in a book intriguingly entitled How I Became Sane. Ogdon recognising the onset of his own illness—and both threatened and encouraged by his father’s example—asks his wife after one temporary derangement "Would you be so kind as to get me a psychiatrist, please?” It is a poignant moment.

Ogdon the astonishing is counterbalanced with Ogdon the man. The latter childlike in his dependency: unsophisticated in his choice of a wimpy and milkshake in preference to lunch in an exclusive restaurant; warm and tolerant in his appreciation of music—comparing a song by Herman’s Hermits with an aria by Mozart, and toe-tapping an accompaniment to the Modern Jazz Quartet

And psychiatrists. How do they seek to understand the causes of mental illness and set about its amelioration? The limits of an overly empirical approach—one which sees human beings in reductionist terms, and imagines us little more than a complex set of stimuli and responses—are obvious. Whilst capitalist methods of production often see people as mere automatons, human beings are far too complex for their natures to be trivialised in such a monstrous way. It is only when the particularities of Ogdon’s experiences, both past and present, are shrewdly and painstakingly examined, that the possible causes of his trauma become mistily apparent, and likely treatments begin to take shape. In recognising Ogdon’s uniqueness and respecting his worth as a human being—never mind a concert pianist—the play strikes a blow for the warm, dignified way in which all people will be valued in a socialist society.

And at the heart of it all are Ogdon's singular gifts. Is it the case that genius is akin to madness? Perhaps not, but faced with the choice of returning Ogdon to sanity at the cost of losing his pianistic gifts, what should be done? The psychiatrists vote for person rather than performer— an indefensible position in a capitalist society—whilst hoping that their treatment will invalidate having to choose; and in spite of the sounds of Ogdon the performer magnificently assailing our ears with the music Rachmaninoff, Beethoven and Liszt.

Virtuoso is a warm, intelligent play, adeptly played and presented by gifted performers, designers and production staff. In the central role Oliver Ford Davies plays Ogdon with such revealing and touching honesty and integrity as almost to make you believe that he is John Ogdon. It would be difficult not to be moved by Ogdon’s plight and cheered by his recovery. Perhaps we may now have a play about the tens of thousands of ordinary people, no less worthy, whose mental illness is more simply explained—as victims of callous capitalism.

Michael Gill