7 Mar
Theatre of the Absurd
Yosef Ardi reports on the news that Manchester United is about to be sponsored by a major internet gambling concern, Mansion, which is owned by the Sampoerna family from Indonesia which last year sold its interest in their cigarette company to Philip Morris. (NB. It turned out to be Tottenham Hotspor who sported the logo. Edited 10.11.11)
Mansion’s logo, M, is very similar to a major kretek cigarette here, A Mild, so although cigarette advertising is illegal in the UK, Indonesian viewers will be treated to some subliminal adverts. Wayne Rooney smokes kreteks? Yeah, probably.
And today comes the sad news, for Jakartass and many others, of the death 4 days ago of Ivor Cutler, aged 83.
“Ivor Cutler (was) a Glaswegian whose humour is surreal, to say the least. He (was) a master of anecdotes, monologues, comic songs and poems, commentaries on the more neglected aspects of everyday life, and just sheer nonsense. But very often, if one looks beyond the nonsense facade, there seems to be a glint of a message in it all – whether or not he intended it to be, we will never know.” – D.A. Eger.
I first saw him in concert in either 1969 or 1970 at, probably, the Royal Festival Hall in London. The concert by Soft Machine had two halves, a fairly unusual event for a rock (or was it jazz?) group but then those were unusual times. In the interval Ivor entertained us with wry songs accompanied only by a harmonium, a child’s toy. It was so small that Ivor had to sit on the floor to play it. His lyrics were somewhat baffling, even if you managed to get past his thick Glaswegian accent. They made sense, sort of.
if your breasts are too big
you’ll fall over
unless you wear a rucksack*.
I encountered Ivor in 1970 at the Gospel Oak Primary School in North London where he taught …. artistic subversion. It was that sort of school; amongst the parents were George Melly and Ken Loach.
In my second bachelorhood days, I used to have Saturday dinner parties in my Herne Hill flat. If the night went on beyond my bedtime, I would play an Ivor Cutler album I’d come across in a street market, probably Who Tore Your Trousers?
No-one would stay long enough to listen to both sides. Not even me.
Remember, you can’t erase a love letter with a nipple, however rubbery it is.
*rucksack, also known as a backback
Ivor as quoted on the much missed John Peel show “The Earth meets the sky over the hill. I was told by a sparrow with a lump on its head.”
Shame. We saw him on the 134 bus travelling between Camden and Tufnell Park a couple of months ago, and he talked art and poetry with us (Anna has the hands of an artist apparently). We thought he was just a nice eccentric old man till we saw his picture in the paper a week later.