The lad without music

More than a hundred years ago Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz dismissed millions of people, people like me in this part of the world that we call among other more favourable sounding clichés England, as “das Land ohne Musik” translated from German “the land without music”.

Not that long ago I picked up a book with the same title and struggled through it, it wasn't that interesting. The gist of the book seemed to be that in order to be classed as “a land with music” that land must essentially be either full of dead classical composers or full of percussion, which as we all know isn't really music. Roots are important.

I became interested in playing a drum when I was about ten years old. I wondered about drumming as I was concentrating listening to the music that I was being taught to dance to. I became ever more interested in trying to become a decent drummer. I became adroit at sensing where the first beat in a sequence seems to be. I was way younger than ten when I started dancing lessons. I even passed a few Modern and Latin Ballroom dance tests and won some certificates and medals in dancing competitions before I was ten. I can't remember many of the steps but I have never stopped counting the pulse in music since then when I was seven years old. I was seven years old when our mam had to give the hospital permission to switch our dad’s life support machine off. I have often wondered many years before now, now that its ok to share information about things like that whether my slavery to the beat has any connection. A very brilliant psychiatrist who helped me up from the depths a few years ago also helped me to not mind thinking about anything in the world that I need to.

In the first place Latin rhythms drove my interest in the drum, by about age eight I preferred big bands such as Joe Loss and his orchestra for dancing. In the second place my overriding fear became to be being seen, as cissy. I turned to the beat of the drum just after I turned ten. A local musician helped me when I was about thirteen at a Catholic all boy’s in the Beheaded King’s Sea Shanty singing town upon Old Man River Hull fifty years ago. The same teacher came round again already in this life to both of our surprise. When my old drum teacher turned up playing on a set of toy bells without a sleigh or a single reindeer one rainy day on a Blackpool Lancashire market street. Like any other sexagenarian one could go on talking forever about lots and twists and turns in a life essentially full of drums.

Northern Drummers in Great without music Britain have inherited fulsome and unique difference. Rhythmic Musical Heritage in the geographic centre of the Industrial Revolution is all it is. It is rich, poor, full, empty, with love and war and slaves and labour and poverty and greed, collapsing factories as well as collapsed industry also is quite beautiful in its returns of stories and inspiration it always was and still is still based on the one essential ingredient for true national greatness. Real peoples music, that is to say, music that real people have access to or access to make is and was always in bondage seeking escape. Successful National must control what gets seen and heard full stop (period). Successful Nationalistic must oppress expression and control arts.

National Culture in Land Without Music as described by Salty Schmitz was essentially Victorian England during the turn of Pope Gregory’s 19th to 20th century. This part of our Northern Wasteland where I am sat sitting in me shed writing right now in N.W. England aka Lancashire actually harboured The King Cotton’s mechanical heart 1.2 centuries ago.

Yup sisters and brothers, the worlds very own Number One Red Brick City, the actual birthplace of what the great Welshman Nye Bevan called the struggle, proud working-class poverty that begat the very first recognised industrial illness in the entire world, Cancer of the Scrotum which presented to small slaves shoved up posh flues armed only with baleen bristle brush, cap n’ mucky hanky for defence.

Manchester is obviously too big and famous to fit in a county now, let alone Lancashire of all places. Yet till this day, this part of the Northern Wastes still contains a peculiar idea of Dublin! The name?Dublin?comes from the Gaelic dubh linn or “black pool” Blackpool is English for Dublin. Blackpool is where people lucky enough to be born and bred in the right zone get to be called San’grownuns and get to live with the lowest male life expectation in the entire Greatness of Britain.

In Schmitz’ “das Land ohne Musik” Blackpool was The World’s only living first class Working Class Holiday Resort and it was abundantly thriving some thirty years before Schmitz’ smite because Local Mill Workers fought for and won the right to take a break from industrial illness. Oh yay oh yay the true newes rolling off the thundering printing press’ Labouring for “King Cotton” was a shit for all industry’ the exact best kind of industry to fuel National Ambition and National Ambition is always going to be shit for mr ordinary right from small ‘p’ politics to cap ‘P’ Political Empire-ness including the Commonwealth or whatever the oppressors decided their wealth would be known as? Common it certainly was/is not!

Weaving and spinning industries are at the core of where and how the folk’s in the NW are living today in the land without music. The multi-cultural land without music exists only because of the machines of the Industrial Revolution and all the rest that went with them. Where do you want to stop? The North Eastern Wasteland that lays claim to have supported Kingstown Upon Hull Parliamentarian William Wilberforce abolish slavery in 1807 is the same land without music which was building cities from the profits gained from selling the slaves from any countries that were happy to swap British made pots and pans and guns for human cargo to swap for sugar in America ad infinitum.

Not only has the amazing seaside town Blackpool hosted every kind of music in the world at some point in its tremendous Northern Seaside Herstory, a great deal of that influence has taken genetic root which is waaay deeper than culture. Our Northern English Milltown’s presented the world with Brass Bands and Northern Flag-Cracking* Clogs. Blackpool the resort built by the weavers work created a different cloth on the NW West-Coast.

Blackpool invented the exotic that the clog culture demanded for its annual wakes-weeks escapades away from Mammon’s Mills. Itinerant workers from all over the world ventured to the mighty King Cottons holiday resort of Blackpool to work here in the shows and in the circus and in the hospitality and pleasuring Industries. Blackpool invented the Seaside Holiday for most people in the alleged UK. Not until Blackpool San’grownans’ built everyman’s seaside %100 free fresh air and fun included, only the wealthiest could afford to take to the waters.

When oppression moves its political boots ordinary folk loose control of their own culture first. Look at history anywhere in the world the slaves and labourers will have their music mocked, downgraded or banned entirely. Cultural centres become run down. In extreme cases in history libraries get shut down* even books that the oppressors don’t agree with get burned. Existing culture becomes criticised and challenged as not good enough or not sophisticated or dumb. The next move includes cleansing/cleaning up the evidence open your eyes or unblock the tube that takes the light from them to your heart.