The vagaries of youth are a catalyst for some remarkable things; some transient, soon forgotten and some which last a lifetime. Although I have not led a pampered and bountiful life, least of all in my somewhat impoverished childhood and adolescence, still I have managed to acquire some, at least, of the things that give me lasting pleasure. Baroque architecture and the works of the painters of the renaissance; the wit and the wisdom of a host of European writers (and an Argentinian); the sublime joy of crafting a falcon or a songbird out of nothing but pigment, water and brushstrokes on paper, although I have still to master, and may never master, the ethereal beauty of egg yolk as a 'binder'; the awesome ear, and brain, numbing power of Wagner, Black Sabbath, Mahler, Led Zeppelin; the quintessence of the human experience, love, whether it be lost or not.
It was in such a mood, a 'remembrance of things past' (and extant) that led me towards a strange conflation of disparate elements; a play by Moliere, some disposable Euro-pop and the miners of the Somme. As staunchly English as I may be, and only my good sense stops me from being a supporter of the dreaded BNP, I occasionally hanker after the 'European'; a legacy of the years spent learning to speak and to read the languages of cultures that were not English and the necessary immersion in to those very cultures that were, in some ways, inimical to the English mode of being.
It started with a strong desire to hear, once again, the appallingly awful 'Plastic Bertrand' and 'Ca plane pour moi': a piece of music so disposable and inconsequential that it must rank with 'Chirpy, Chirpy Cheep Cheep' and 'Mouldy Old Dough' as the the most execrable example of the 'pop musicians' 'art' to be found in all the annals of the genre. You can hear just how awful it is here. As an example of how badly the Europeans could do 'punk' it cannot be 'bettered'. 'Plastic' was Belgian and the featured artist was not the individual who actually sang on the record - Lou Deprijck, the producer sang but Roger Jouret 'mimed', presumably an ageing 'hippie' producer was not in keeping with the times - but nonetheless, like '99 Red Balloons' (by Nena, a German) it swept all before it.
It is difficult now to determine exactly what lay behind this behemoth of a song; the backing track, a three chord wonder of F, Eb and Bb, was also recorded earlier with different lyrics (decidedly weird about a 'punk' and an older man) as 'Jet Boy, Jet Girl' by 'Elton Motello', a little known English 'punk band' also founded around a record producer. (This is not to be confused with the New York Dolls', 'Jet Boy', which is entirely a different kettle of phlegm.) The Elton Motello version can be found here complete with 'hip', surreal German interludes. The lyrics to 'Ca plane pour moi', with suitable 'intepretation' and 'translation' is here.
The 'Sex Pistols' or the 'Damned', 'Plastic' decidedly was not!
Almost immediately, I was drawn into a tale of the sappers of the Somme; those British miners who tunnelled thirty feet under the Somme battlefield in 1916 to lay mines under the German trenches prior to the planned attack. Despite the documentary's assurances, this was not the untold story of the Somme; Sebastian Faulks dealt with the horrors of such tunnelling in 'Birdsong'. However, the tunnels, such as they are, still lie beneath the battlefield around Ovillers and La Boisselle in Picardy; if the plight of Allied prisoners of war, tunnelling to freedom, can be counted as frightening and claustrophobic, then these tunnels are far, far worse.
Silence was of the essence, lest the Germans tunnelling from the opposite direction should hear you. Inch by inch, spadeful, by spadeful of wet, cloying clay, they made their way to the Germans' trenches. With each passing minute, a mere clod, a rock, would be passed, silently rearwards as the miners, especially recruited from amongst the coal miners of Wales and England, burrowed their harrowing way under no-man's land. It is difficult to comprehend what was the worst; to confront your enemy in the candlelit gloom of a tunnel, a la Wilfred Owen, or to be mown down, as wheat is scythed, on the surface. We do not, cannot, know what those men, at least those that survived, went through. It is hard, I think, to keep from pissing yourself at the prospect now of 'going over the top' to the barking of the incessant machine guns; aimed deliberately at knee height; not to kill but to maim; to cut the legs of the advancing soldiers from under them. It is hard, I think, to conceive anyone surviving the horror of that war.
Therefore, in the wake of this, I sought solace in the non-descript, the inconsequential, the farce that is 'Les Fourberies de Scapin' by Molière. With a copy of the text in French in front of me, and a DVD of the play, in French, performed by Belgians, I laughed out loud, banishing the gloom before me. "Que diable allait-il faire, dans cette galère', I mouthed. 'What the f**k is he doing in that galley!' Molière wrote no better play than this; not 'Le Misanthrope', not 'L'Avare', not 'Tartuffe'. Scapin, ultimately alone, despite his 'largesse' and compassion, doomed forever to be 'l'etranger', is surely the most tragic of creatures. A farce masquerading as tragedy? Or a tragedy masquerading as farce? Surely the latter!
The British, as a nation, eschew the European, although we are a part of it, We do so at an immeasurable cost.
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