All Together Now

In No-Man's Land

Only a short wait now until ‘Track 3’s release (at 10am on Sunday).

‘Track 2’ had an excellent ‘open rate’, so I hope you’re enjoying reading it. More to come on the next chapter at the end of this post, but in the meantime …

… I thought I would try out something a bit ‘weightier’ for this week’s playlist.

I read an article the other day that posed an interesting question, “have ‘the arts’ become guilty of romanticising the First World War?” which I’ve ended up thinking about (or, in true Stuart style, over-thinking about!) since, in particular considering whether popular music could be guilty as charged? So, I decided on a trial by playlist.

Restricting myself to songs that specifically reference WW1 (the war that patently didn’t end all wars) I could only come up with a handful of songs myself, but a quick bit of online research revealed this was actually a richer vein than I’d thought. I’d soon compiled what I think is an interesting (and thought provoking) playlist.

1 - ‘Green Fields of France’ by The Men They Couldn’t Hang - surely the best ever Pogues song, just not by The Pogues!

2 - ‘Some Mother’s Son’ by The Kinks - an interesting Ray Davies song that I’d never heard before.

3 - ‘Poppy Song’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees - a short but vicious re-reading of a poem by the Canadian war poet John McCrae.

4 - ‘All Together Now’ by The Farm - shamefacedly I must admit to never realising this was about WW1 (what on earth did I think they were on about in the chorus?)

5 - ‘Snoopy vs The Red Baron’ by The Royal Guardsman - one for the ‘Junior Choice’ generation (apologies to younger/overseas readers who won’t know what I’m on about)

6 - ‘On Battleship Hill’ by PJ Harvey, one of several WW1 referencing songs from her (second) Mercury Prize winning album ‘Let England Shake’.

7 - Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 2014) by The Zombies - a song which really couldn’t be much more different from ‘She’s Not There’

8 - ‘Passchendaele’ by GoodBooks - I knew I had a WW1 song that I loved on a ‘forgotten’ CD somewhere in my collection, and I eventually tracked it down, and

9 - ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ by Eric Bogle - the original (and better) version of the Pogues cover, by a Scottish/Australian singer/songwriter I only discovered in researching this playlist (he also wrote ‘Green Fields of France’).

I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoyed compiling it. Anybody got any suggestions for tracks I’ve missed (surely there must be one from Dylan)?

With the definite exception of ‘Snoopy vs The Red Baron, which is after all a novelty record, and with my initial reservations around The Farm allayed (listen to their verses - I clearly hadn’t!), then I’d suggest this playlist proves ‘pop’ can be found innocent of any charge of romanticising WW1. All these songwriters seem, to me, to have handled a tricky subject with due sensitivity, but I’ll leave the closing argument for the defence to some lines from Eric Bogle in his ‘Green Fields …’ (handkerhiefs at the ready),

But here in this graveyard that's still No Man’s Land,
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand,
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

Anyway, back more lightheartedly to the book (at least for those of you who have managed to get this far!).

‘Track 3’ will, as is now traditional, be published in two parts. The start of the chapter (up to the point the ‘Challenge’ is issued) will reach your inboxes at 10am on Sunday 25th, with the continuation/solution following 24 hours later.

For those readers who like to try to solve the competition element themselves (and I’m really looking to find somebody who can beat Brendan!) just a word of warning. The structure of ‘Track 3’s ‘Challenge’ means that access to a desktop, and preferably a printer, may be a big advantage over trying to solve it on your ‘phone (which I suspect is nigh on impossible!)

With that cryptic clue left hanging I’ll leave you all in peace until Sunday.