Magic and music (2): Arthur Brown

Further to my previous post, let me tell you more about Arthur Brown.

Arthur was playing the Manchester Academy last week, one stop in the intensive national tour he’s currently doing with Hawkwind. My friend Janice and I had had tickets for a while and were excited about attending the gig anyway but, after my conversation with Marc Oberon, I decided to see if I could get an interview with Arthur, to find out what he thinks about music and magic, amongst other things.

Although my e-mail hadn’t reached him and he wasn’t expecting us, when Janice and I enquired at the stage door whether we could have a brief chat with Arthur, we were welcomed in the most relaxed and friendly way. Despite having just delivered a fantastic performance and been cheered by hundreds of fans, the god of hell fire was completely calm, quiet and grounded. He offered us a drink and answered our questions thoughtfully.

All this is to say, Arthur Brown is an extremely nice man, straightforward, unassuming and not at all the stereotypical rock star. While it’s true that, in their fifties and sixties, the wild men of rock tend to tone themselves down – off stage, at least – (Alice Cooper has become a dab hand at golf), in Arthur’s case, I get the impression he’s always been like this. Eccentric, yes; frightening, no.

Arthur has an amazing voice with a huge range. His act is theatrical and stimulating, visually as well as acoustically. Paint on the face, ultra-violet light and several costume changes - though, sadly, no fire (health and safety, I suppose).

Arthur Brown on stage

Before he became established as a musician, Arthur held a variety of down-to-earth jobs, including postman, road digger and sewage farmer. He put in a year studying law at London University but failed the exams because he changed the questions to ones he felt more like addressing, such as a critique of Marilyn Monroe’s wardrobe.

After that, he moved to Reading University and studied philosophy. He later gained a Masters degree in Counselling and Guidance and is trained in an astonishing array of therapeutic techniques and meditative disciplines.

I asked whether he’d arrived at the hell fire thing from a Christian perspective but Arthur said no, it’s a Pagan thing taken from the Vikings. He’d recognised this as a powerful image and decided to adopt it, with no view to making a point or preaching in any way.

When I ask what his lyrics mean, he tells us that an A-Level class was once studying a poem by CP Snow and came up with six different interpretations of it. They wrote to the poet to ascertain which was correct and he wrote back, ‘How should I know?’. Whatever worked for each individual was right in its own way.

Asked what legacy he would like to leave to subsequent generations, Arthur says he has no interest in bequeathing anything: “Whatever you pass on will fade away and disappear. It’s more important to find a way to be in this moment”. Considering the influence Arthur has had on Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Peter Gabriel and a whole host of other huge names, I can’t help feeling he’s mistaken about the first part, but I take the point that he doesn’t see himself as a missionary.

Arthur backstage

Growing up after World War Two, Arthur Brown and his contemporaries were living on bread and dripping and questioning their belief in life. They were, as he puts it, “looking for something joyful” and, for him, this was music. Describing how he felt as a teenager attending his first live concert, he says, “It was more than excitement. I left my body; all the normal limitations of the mind were gone”.

For me, a really good magic show can induce this feeling and I ask him whether he sees any common ground between music and magic. It seems he doesn’t particularly – not with conjuring. But he reminds us of the distinction between the art of illusion and the real magic (as I have referred to it elsewhere in this blog) of the shaman, which involves such practices as controlling the weather, communing with spirits and healing the ill.

“Music does have a kinship with the magic of the shaman,” says Arthur, “in that both of them can produce resonances in the deepest levels of reality.”

Personally, I believe really well done conjuring can produce similar resonances, by making us question the nature of reality, but I agree with his assessment – and I think Arthur would make a pretty good shaman himself.

The power of the mind (2)

Did you hear the Rt Rev Tom Butler, Bishop of Southwark, on the Today programme this morning? His Thought for the Day brought together several of the strands I've talked about in this blog: the power of belief to make someone become very ill or even die, the African curses that exploit this and how those with authority need to be careful what they say.

I've downloaded the podcast and you can listen to it by clicking on this link:
thought_20090616-0954a.mp3

The power of the mind

As mentioned in my first post on this blog, in some cultures the power of suggestion can be strong enough to kill someone. Even in Western society, where we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated, developed human beings, a figure of authority can wield a great deal of power.

I'm talking about this because the reason I've been a bit slow off the mark commenting on the Blackpool convention (see next post) is that I spent most of yesterday at the hospital. As it turns out, what I'm suffering from is relatively trivial, if uncomfortable and disfiguring. But the first nurse who looked at me expressed alarm and gave me the impression I could be in mortal danger. A pall of gloom instantly descended on me and I began to think of how I might cope with having the sort of unexpectedly dire illness that carries people off in 24 hours. OK, I may have over-reacted but you see it in the news and you know it happens. And the point is, it hadn't occurred to me I might have anything serious until the nurse put the wind up me. When, after a few hours, I saw a doctor who told me I was going to be fine, I instantly felt much better, long before I started taking the medicine.

As magicians, we need to remember that people may respect our opinions and/or be afraid of our powers (not mine, obviously, but those who have significant magical skill). Don't underestimate the effect you can have on other people's lives. Use your powers for good.

Magic and superstition

Well, here we are on Friday 13th and I, for one, have had a really good day. Thirteen is actually one of my lucky numbers, though I don't know why.

There are close ties between magic and superstition, as alluded to in my last post: one person's religion is another person's superstition and another person's magic show. If I sound like an atheist, I'm not, but I do find this area interesting, the intersection of magic, superstition and religion.

Although Richard Leigh's magic shows are the purest conjuring fun, it was notable that the shows he presented on Hallowe'en sold out very quickly. Is there something about prestidigitation that appeals to the primeval part of us?

Magic and religion

I was recently reminded of that excellent film, based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King. Sean Connery and Michael Caine knocking about the Hindu Kush suddenly find themselves hailed as gods by the local people and manoeuvre themselves into living the life of Riley. They aren't magicians - the misapprehension occurs by accident - but there is a lot of scope for unscrupulous conjurors to give the impression of having supernatural powers.

This was exploited by the French colonials in Algeria, who persuaded the legendary Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin to pass off his phenomenal conjuring as real magic. Conversely, during the Second World War, Jasper Maskelyne was responsible for exposing an Egyptian spiritual leader with so-called special powers as a plain old conjuror, not quite as good as he was himself (or so I read in a book called The War Magician).

In our culture these days, it's generally only mentalists who get the opportunity to pretend to be genuinely magic - and fortunately these charlatans seem to be getting rarer.

Welcome!

Hello everybody and welcome to my blog. I've been thinking of setting one up for some time, as a space to write my thoughts about magic, the magic books I've read, the magic conventions I've been to, the magicians I've seen/met... and also about how conjuring fits into the great big scheme of things. I'm interested in what magic is, to what extent real magic exists, to what extent conjuring should be presented as if it were real magic and issues of this sort. I've talked to several magicians about these questions but it occurred to me that, if I write some thoughts in a blog, people might comment and that we could sometimes get some discussions going.

Anyway, what prompted me actually to get this blog off the to-do list and into cyberspace was the arrival this week of my niece Jemima. I've never been an aunt before and it's absolutely wonderful! Magicians tend to use the word 'miracle' quite loosely but childbirth: now, there's a real miracle. Because it's been happening every day since the beginning of time, it's easy to take it for granted but those of you who've been close to it will know what I mean.

Jemima

John van der Put said something similar in my interview with him (click on the link to read it). It's interesting what people consider to be magic and what they take for granted. Automatic doors, mobile phones and palm-top computers are (at least, in our culture) accepted as standard. Occasionally, we may say, "It's clever what they can do these days, isn't it?" but it doesn't feel like magic. And yet, as John says, when he takes a signed four of diamonds out of his wallet, everyone goes wild because it's 'impossible'.

One man's instrument of magic is another man's everyday gadget - but what makes it amazing is not just not knowing how it's done (how does a mobile phone work?) but unfamiliarity with the whole concept. My cousin's wife, Cassie, wrote a fascinating book about the Congo, where they lived and worked for a few years, before moving to Bangladesh. (My cousin, Mark Dummett, is a BBC journalist and I've put a link to his website in the Links section.) Cassie's book is called Brazzaville Charms: Magic and Rebellion in the Republic of Congo and it describes several instances where things happen - and people die - for reasons that make no sense to a Western mind.

So there we are. A few thoughts for the first day. What do you think?