I can agree with you to a degree Nic - on accents - he had one of the worst Liverpool accents I can ever remember - it didn't happen often, but when it did I wasn't very happy.
His Scots accent was different - he grew up in a Scots household where that was the accent he heard the most so he absorbed it rather than acquired it.
In the period I stayed with them, when he and his mother sat and talked together, I might have been in a Cairo bazaar
He adopted the actors trick of neutralising the Scots accent for an English audience - may not have worked for a Scots audience, but it certainly did for me.
"He was also a Stalinist which may be deeply disturbing to many people"
A complicated one - he was from a generation of Stalinists - my father was one.
I was a wartime baby, and when the bombing of Liverpool became dangerous for my mother, sister and I, he had us moved out to Springfield in Essex - he was a navvy there at the time.
We have a family photograph of a Liverpool Street party to mark the end of the war and across the street is stretched a rope holding up an effigy bearing the inscription, "Good old Uncle Joe", marking the local people's gratitude to Stalin and the Soviet Union's massive sacrifice in W.W.2.
My favourite American writer is John Steinbeck and one of my favourite books is his lesser known, 'In Dubious Battle', written about 'The Party' - an organisation which worked on behalf of the American fruit-pickers - almost certainly the Stalinist Communist Party.
Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Howard Fast and many, many more - all admirers and supporters of Stalin.
With the comfort of our hindsight, do we not listen to their songs or read their books because of this - do we use their contemporary beliefs to dismiss them as artists?
I don't
At the time I knew Ewan, he would not discuss his party allegiances other than to say he wasn't a member of anything - he was not a party politician, but a humanist who wanted to change the world - I can live with that.
Peter Bellamy came from a Fascist background and his attitude to that as I understood it from the few times I met himt, was ambivalent.
Waddya do?
"Is there anyone with anything new,"
Masses and masses - we haven't scratched the surface - I reckon we have around 250/300 tapes worth here on our shelves alone..
What do you know about his ideas on singing - anything?
Would be interested to know what you claim to though I doubt if you are going to part with it
This seems to be how these threads go - we start to discuss the work and ideas and along trolls a necrophobic troll and (usually deliberately) nauses it up with inanities.
I've yet to meet anyone who actually knew him; few saw him perform in the flesh and he wrote little - so it can't be because you don't like him based on your own experience - so is it his ideas?
Prod a bit and you find that few people have the faintest clue what those ideas are - so you come to the conclusion that it must be ideas in general they don't like.
Now I find that oddly disturbing.
If you are not interested anonymous Guest, why not leave those who are to get on with it, or would that not be fun?
Nick
MacColl sat back-to-front on his chair as part of a relaxation technique - extremely useful but unusable for its links to MacColl - more's the pity
One contributor told the 'hilarious' story of the time MacColl sang at his club, and before the evening started he (the contributor) pinned a stip of paper onto the back of his chair reading "I AM A C****"
Can't remember with the comedian was (I lie - yes I do - he's already posted on this thread)
I really don't know how to deal with that level of mentality - though I do know if MacColl had done it to another fellow performer there'd be weekly folk-masses to damn his eternal soul!!
Now - finished with the ARTHUR 'TWO-SHEDS' JACKSON interlude - does anbody want to discuss MacColl as a creative artist?
Jim Carroll