London Dreamtime is the title of a fine album I made in 2010. It is also the name of the artistic partnership I have with Vanessa Woolf. Here is a short video we have had made of the kind of things we do together…

In the corner house on the Strand lived William Lilly. Astrologer to the Roundhead Parliamentarians during the English Civil War. His Almanacks were bestsellers, he was friends with Pepys, Ashmole, Culpepper and many more.
Predictor of the Fire Of London, Author of the Christian Astrologer. Preserver of the works of Doctor Dee.
An exemplar of what it is to become a Londoner, arriving from afar and becoming part of it’s tapestry.

Gemini City Wheels of Fortune
Streets are guided by the paths of history
We walk in the footsteps of wonder and mystery
Everything changes and change itself will change some day.
We are living in tomorrows yesterday
And we can follow the rivers between us till they join together under city streets buckled by plane trees
Oriental and American Plane
Fall in Love in a Vauxhall garden
And their children still remain in the parks and the avenues of the city who gave them their name

Walking up and down the Walworth Road, ghost resident Austin Osman Spare cast his magic eye at the ugly beauty of the twentieth century slum metropolis. London born and bred he weaved magic and art from cradle to grave. While we don’t know where that grave is exactly we can celebrate him nonetheless by toasting him in the upstairs room of a pub he most likely had a pint in himself one fine day.

Gemini City Wheels of Fortune
Streets are guided by the paths of history
We walk in the footsteps of wonder and mystery
Everything changes and change itself will change some day.
We are living in tomorrows yesterday
and we can follow the rivers between us till they join together under
city streets buckled by Neckinger and Walbrook and Fleet and Peck,  and Westbourne and Tyburn and Effra
still flowing after all these years

Whose footsteps do we walk in when we step out in this fair capital?
What temples do we grace unaware of the traces they have left?
Mithras? Cernunnos? Necka? Weyland? Bran? Apollo? Diana?

I love Mayday. I took a long walk in the morning around South East regions and then arrived in Deptford regions for noon to be part of the Jack of the Green celebration.

The Jack is a large frame dressed with leaves and flowers that some strong fellow gets into and carries at the head of a procession of musicians, morris sides and folk travelling to fine places of wassail!

The Deptford Fowlers troop is a particularly good crew.

One of the great wonders of the industrial age
Was built with the blood
Of the workers who made her
From millions of pieces of people forgotten
The Great Eastern promise
Was born to be broken
And trapped in the bulkhead is a lonely man
Undeserved in his sentence
And he can’t stand it
So he knocks his revenge through the hard steel walls
A forgotten albatross taking his toll
He brings down Isembard and the engine crew
A storm in the ballroom cuts the cable in two
A fire in the nightclub
And a launch day massacre
He’s a son of a bitch let’s not spare the vernacular
But enough exposition: let’s hear his song
You can judge for yourself if he’s right or wrong
An angel of death or a devil of mercy
After what he’s been through
I couldn’t say categorically with authority

And the green man is watching all of this. The old ways may be hiding from the march of progress but they dance in the corners of the city. The maypole still comes out on the Strand, the Jack of the Green makes his appearance at mayday. The turn of the seasons from winter to spring to summer is marked by the green man come to bless our garden.

John Crow came up with this song which is a favourite of mine, hence the cover.

In Green Park there is a tree known as the Tree Of Death. It is the invariable choice for lost souls looking for a branch to hold a rope. Birds avoid settling on it. Laughter has been heard emanating from it. A shadowy indistinct figure has been seen by the tree which melts away upon approach.

Hyde Park had Black Sally’s Tree. Black Sally was a Romany who lived in the park. At the time there was a hollowed out Elm which no-one would go near. She was scornful of the fear of her peers and resolved to spend the night in the tree. This may have been a bad idea as she died on that very night. Her figure was seen
by the tree on many occasions.

There is also rumour of a man hating tree in the royal parks known as the Pig Tree. This tree will kill any man who goes under it.

Outside of London, in Rooshall, Sussex, there is a hanging tree. It is said that if you walk around the cursed Oak six times you can summon the Devil himself.

In Welling there was, apparently, a cursed privet hedge. 2 folk who cut it died shortly after and another had a stroke.

Don’t mess with plants.

It’s Holy Week, so a song about Jesus seems to be appropriate. I’m not a Christian myself, but was brought up one and enjoy a good hymn, spiritual, gospel. In that spirit I thought a meditation on the idea that there is a capacity to be Christ-like in all of us would be alright. I recently got into the Louvin Brothers:

The Byrds version is a treat:

Indie band, Gay Dad, gave old time religion a good shot with this number:

I remember tracking this at a studio called Raezor in Wandsworth. We had popped down to a pub called The Cats Back for some refreshment and cut the backing track in a most relaxed state. If memory serves me correctly, that would have been in the autumn of 1997.

The Velvet Underground made this little beauty.

No discourse on the history of Jesus in contemporary song is complete without the Country-American-Football-Waltz, “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through The Goalposts Of Life”. Where does this fit into the grand scheme of things?

And then we get to Nick Cave.

I was commissioned to write music to accompany an event at the Grant Museum. I chose to write musical interpretations of physiological and embryological processes.

The first piece is based upon the journey of the egg from ovum to fallopian tube where it meets the sperm cell to form the embryo, which travels down the fallopian tube to implant in the wall of the uterus. By use of different melodic, spatial and timbral motifs the piece represents the dynamic process of ovulation, fertilisation and implantation.

The second piece is a reflection on the early development of the nervous system of the embryo with representations of the differentiation and migration of cells to from the neural tube. This piece in particular brought back to me the fascinating complexity of the development of the embryo: changes in number of cells, migration of cells, differentiation of cells and changes in morphology of the embryo as a whole.

Here is an excerpt from the presentation.

The high priestess of Amun Ra has the dubious honour of being one of the only artefacts in the British Museum to have been subject to an exorcism. She left a trail of death in her wake from discovery, in the late 19th century, to exhibition in the museum. The intrepid colonial graverobber antiquarians who found her died en route to England with their haul. Of course they may have fallen to Coptic Flu, an aspergillosis, a fungal lung disease contracted from spores in ancient mummy wrappings… (pigeon fancier’s lung is a more prosaic equivalent.) The original collector, an elderly lady from Streatham, felt compelled to pass the mummy on after all her pets died. In the process of installation, the mummy fell on one of the museum staff causing a fatal injury.
A fair number of visitors complained that the mummy’s head would turn to follow them around the room. The museum quietly arranged for a priest to come and exorcise the mummy. Of course they could have just put it back in the ground, in an Egyptian Tomb, where it belongs…

The witch of Wapping, Or An exact and perfect relation, of the life and devilish practises of Joan Peterson, that dwelt in Spruce Island, near Wapping; who was condemned for practising witch-craft, and sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn, on Munday the 11th. of April, 1652. Shewing, how she bewitch’d a child, and rock’d the cradle in the likenesse of a cat; how she frighted a baker; and how the devil often came to suck her, sometimes in the likeness of a dog, and other times like a squirrel.

Many are of the opinion that there are no witches; but let them read Leviticus and they will find them in the time of Moses. And isn’t that close enough? Close enough to take her away, and hang her high at Tyburn come Monday?

Poor Joan Peterson, popular enough when the residents of Wapping wanted a cure for ague, or something to help the cow milk better; less popular when she wanted to get paid for her trouble. When a man refused to pay and she got ticked off he swore she had put the evil eye on him, had overlooked him, and he had a fit on the spot. Plenty enough evidence to be hung at Tyburn. Witchery was a capital offence, whilst astrology (so long as it wasn’t used to discover the whereabouts of stolen or lost items) not. The primarily male preserve of astrology was science, witchcraft was the work of the Devil. While Matthew Hopkins stalked Essex and Suffolk filling the gaols and gibbets with women, magistrates in London were quite happy to do the same.