The Clash “London Calling”
Released in 1979 this seemed, at the time, as a call to action and a portent of what was to come. There was a darkness to punk that the Clash reflected. I think their music and politics was summed up by critic Sean Egan when he wrote that the Clash were exceptional because:
“They were a group whose music was, and is, special to their audience because that music insisted on addressing the conditions of poverty, petty injustice, and mundane life experienced by the people who bought their records…”
I liked the Clash and in particular the album “London’s Calling” I have spent a great part of my life visiting London either because of work or to meet up with friends and family. It is a sprawling place were even the smallest journey seems to take a life time but it has an energy and vitality that is difficult to beat. Much as I love my home town of Newcastle it can’t rival London for sheer variety and originality.
Over forty years ago I remember travelling from Hackney to Stepney on a bus late at night when I fell in to conversation with the conductor (this was in the days when you had a person separate from the driver who would collect the fares). He was reading a dictionary and we talked about words and language. English was not his first language and he was fascinated by the sheer number of words in the dictionary. The words had a magic quality to him and I loved the delight he took in discovering new words. Something I still find today,
My problem was always not the words but the spelling of them but now thanks to software it no longer troubles me since I discovered computers, spellcheckers and word processing software.
This is an old poem of mine from my first collection called “Doors” but it’s a long time since it saw the light of day and finding it was like meeting up with an old friend.
Dictionary
My father gave me a dictionary
Full of words I did not understand
And could not pronounce
Every vowel was a brawl
Every consonant a skirmish
I learned to love the words
That I could not spell
To explore their meanings
Taste their sound on my tongue
Prising them apart
Stitching them back together
In my head I wrote poetry
Furtive words about secrets
Never daring to put pen to paper
In case my words would be mocked
And ridiculed
Geordie boys don’t write poetry
Thirty years ago
On a Routemaster bus in London
Going from Hackney to Stepney
I shared a dictionary with a conductor
We drooled over the pages
Like schoolboys ogling porn
I realised, I was not alone
This was not a fetish
Just a fascination for phonetics
Now, I let the software
Worry about the spelling
While I enjoy creating the lines
© Jeff Price August 1998
