Trouble for your ears?:An evening with Ectoplasm Girls and Leyden Jars.

I really ought to go to Cafe Oto more often. It's a great venue, a wonderful institution, a meeting place for like minded souls, and somewhere you could pretty much rock up any night of the week and hear interesting music. You can browse back issues of the Wire magazine, flick through old crates of vinyl, get a beer, a coffee (Persian food now too), and even the toilets are clean. It's to my shame I had, before Saturday, only attended twice. In 2014 to see Brazilian jazz/punk/samba/fusion outfit Meta Meta and then, two years after that, for the Egyptian wedding electronica of Islam Chipsy and E.E.K.

So I was pleased to catch up with Neill and Leonor in Tate Modern, after, at long last, seeing Christian Marclay's epic 'Clock' installation, and head up to Dalston for an evening in the company of Ectoplasm Girls and Leyden Jars.

Firstly though, we needed food and, on a friend's recommendation, we visited Andu Cafe, an Ethiopian vegan joint with friendly, prompt, unfussy service, Ethio-jazz playing in the background, and a BYOB policy (I, remarkably, went for a Coke). There's no menu as such, you just share a platter and then choose between Ethiopian bread (inerja) and rice. We had both and the platter contained a selection of foodstuffs all of which I had previously been ignorant of (yemisir wot, tikil gomen, ater kik, fesolia, and shiro wot) but, all (or at least most) of which were delicious. Following a tasty vegan pizza in Camden back in December, I really must eat at more vegan places. It makes sense on so many levels, no matter what tiresome Twitter trolls like Piers Morgan pretend to think.

Arriving at Oto we met with Neil, Mark, and Eugenie, I grabbed myself a schooner of Cwtch (a Welsh red ale I'd enjoyed previously) and Leyden Jars soon, unceremoniously (in the experimental music world it's really not cool to act the big star), took the stage.

Their sound is a slow building one, heavier on atmospherics than tunes, but not without beats, not lacking in rhythm. There are elements of dub, glitch, and minimalism and, in places, spectral visions of more upbeat electronic genres like techno and jungle. It's as if we're viewing these styles through a veil, squinting at them, or as if they've been revivified by some mad scientist and now have a life of their own.

You can get lost in the music or you can try and analyse it. I'd recommend the former but when I deigned to don my reviewer's cap during sections of their roughly half-hour performance I found myself mentally scribbling down words like 'ambient' and 'global'. Words that may well be serviceable in describing the sound that Leyden Jars make but have become moribund by overuse and misuse.

What Leyden Jars do, I think, is more interesting than that - and the fact they do it all out of a couple of 'suitcases' full of cables, wires, and contraptions unspecified (and not forgetting what looked like a Heinz tin can into which a microphone was attached and voices looped) makes it all the more curious. I enjoyed their chiaroscuro and, although I don't fully understand everything they're trying to do, I was, in the words of Ian Dury, partial to their abracadabra.

I'd actually, primarily, gone along to see Leyden Jars and had no knowledge of Ectoplasm Girls whatsoever. Oto's website informed me that sisters Nadine and Tanya Byrne are "an audiovisual ongoing project" that  take "influence from punk, industrial and minimal wave" to create "distant and muted sounds for the unsettled sleeper" and that's as good a description as what they do as any so I won't add too much more. This blogging lark can be a right doss, I tell you.

Before they played, Nadine performed a solo set from the side of the stage. To my uninitiated eyes and ears it seemed pretty much in keeping with the main set, if a little bit lighter and the visual projection given more over to dance and the liminal space we experience upon first waking up. Ectoplasm Girls went for the more gothy skeleton/lithium fractal motif which seemed more in keeping with their music.

The Swedish siblings performed sat on the stage behind a reasonably small stack of electronic gizmos from which they coaxed caliginous chopped and crackling beats overlaid with ghostly disembodied voices, bursts of static, and, what to me (though I could be wrong), sounded like snatches of 'found' sound.

As with Leyden Jars their sound seems to have evolved out of what we once called dance music but, also as with Leyden Jars, you can't really imagine David Guetta or Steve Aoki dropping it into one of their sets. Perish the thought! It's all the better for that. Dance music lost its way when it started to become entertainment for the rich and beautiful and so it's no wonder that some of those who cut their teeth on it have taken off in other routes. That's how it's supposed to work. Keep moving things forward.

I, for one, am glad there are people unafraid to make dark and confused music for dark and confused times. Even if the people making that music, it turns out, are anything but dark and confused. In fact they're all lovely. As was my company for the evening. Thanks to Neill, Leonor, Neil, Mark, Eugenie, Mark, and Natalie. It was good to see that we could roll that deep at a relatively low key experimental electronica evening in January. We should do it again some time.

A Continent of Carnage:Killing Eve.

"I am going to find the thing you care about the most, and I am going to kill it"

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's eight part thriller Killing Eve was gripping, intriguing, violent, pretty brutal in places, highly stylised, and often very confusing (many plot lines were left unresolved, leaving plenty of scope for a second series), and I enjoyed it very much indeed.

It wasn't a realistic show (it was far more in hock to Breaking Bad's flights of fancy than The Wire's precise autopsy of dangerous lives dangerously lived) but it didn't need to be. This could lead to criticisms of Killing Eve being style over content and such criticisms would not be completely inaccurate, but, oh, what style it had.

The exquisitely choreographed murders, the ornate bathtubs, the retro radios, the Abstract Expressionist prints hanging from the walls of Parisian apartments as oh-so-trendy ye-ye music blasts out, the clever camera angles, and some of the wonderful outfits Jodie Comer gets to wear.

The locations too. This is as much a travelogue as a thriller, though the amount of grisly murders going down may put you off booking your next Ryanair flight to any of the places involved. Paris, as mentioned, is all tasteful art and artifice. Vienna is, of course, a city of chic cafes and strawberry ice creams. Tuscany:- cypress trees, sunshine, and yellow paint peeling off the walls of villas that are the very much the last word in faded glamour. London actually looks a bit like the London I inhabit (or at least the bits I visit) and Moscow is portrayed, perhaps somewhat negatively, as a city of imposing Soviet tower blocks, grey skies, constant drizzle, dark prison cells, amorality and ultraviolence.

The music, also, is always ubercool (some times I suspect they're trying a bit too hard, a little bit too tasteful - you're not gonna find any of Hixxy and Sharkey's happy hardcore here). Alongside the aforementioned ye-ye of Francoise Hardy and Brigitte Bardot, sad bangers by acts like Cigarettes After Sex, Cat's Eyes, and The Kills are very much the order of the day. The only real outlier is Evil Woman by The Troggs. Killing Eve is not a show that indulges in diegetic sounds.

It all begins with Eve Polastri (a constantly flustered and tired looking Sandra Oh) waking from a bad dream. Then she's in MI5 with a hangover, chatting to her fresh and enthusiastic colleague Elena (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) about Russian sex traffickers over croissants.

We jump to the life of Villanelle (Jodie Comer), a callous (though hot, well dressed, and clearly a criminal mastermind) contract killer who zips round the continent (Bulgaria, Germany) shooting people, stabbing people, poisoning people, and, in the case of poor Colonel Zhang Wu in Berlin, clamping his testicles tightly and chopping his knob off. The revelation of which is followed, cheekily, by a scene of someone cooking sausages.

Soon Eve, Elena, Bill (David Haig), Kenny (Sean Delaney), and the sour faced Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) are on the trail of Villanelle who by now we've learned receives her assignments from the avuncular, but suspicious, silver fox figure of Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) who appears to represent a somewhat shady organisation who operate under the gnomic and economic title of 'the twelve'.

But if you're looking for resolution, you've come to the wrong place. Each unravelling of the plot only serves to further obfuscate matters and some of the leading characters switch sides as easily as they cross borders. Nobody's motivation is ever entirely clear but as Eve's hunt for Villanelle becomes an obsession we're plunged into a succession of nailbiting chases, Mexican stand-offs, and double crossing, all underpinned with a sometimes latent, sometimes blatant, sexual tension that leaves nobody in any doubt why Killing Eve became such a firm favourite with lesbians.

There were some excellent cliffhanger endings and I was never quite sure what was going to happen next. Which makes Killing Eve the perfect drama, in many ways, for the uncertain times we find ourselves living in. The idea of nobody trusting anybody else does seem to fuel a lot of real life now so it's only right that it is reflected in our drama. The pattern of, and the reason for, the kills seems to suggest the intention of destabilising from the ground up with the aim of creating maximum chaos. Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin could almost have been script consultants!

Certainly Bannon and Dugin's methodology should send a chill up any right thinking person's back just as effectively as Waller-Bridge regularly does with Killing Eve. To me the dialogue, initially, seemed to be trying overly hard to be loaded with pertinent cultural references, humour, AND exposition (which made it a bit tough going, though, for me, most things are) but by the second episode I'd settled in for a rollercoaster ride and had learned to accept that I was looking at a hyperreal, rather than real, world where all dialogue is expedient and everybody in it is simultaneously exactly who they say they are while at the same time being someone else completely.

Moments of lightness come in Villanelle's slightly robotic sex scene with the innocent romantic Sebastian (Charlie Hamblett), some of the more cockamamie dialogue, and trying to work out if Frank (Darren Boyd) looks more like Jurgen Klopp or Matt Berninger from The National but it's for the drama, the thrills, and the chills that you come to Killing Eve and they're the reasons you stay hooked too.

Maximum credit to Phoebe Waller-Bridge for adapting Luke Jenning's novel Codename Villenelle into such a suspenseful piece and hat tips too to all the cast but especially Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Kim Bodnia, Darren Boyd, and Fiona Shaw (Owen McDonnell as Niko is sadly underused, much like his character) for helping make Killing Eve an ensemble piece when it could, quite easily, have become a two woman show.

But it is, of course, Comer and Oh who dominate every scene they're in. They're both superb. As Eve, Oh undertakes a journey not just around Europe and not just in pursuit of a killer, but also to the heart of her own sexuality, soul, and motivations and the often pained expressions on her face portray this ferociously.

Comer gets the most fun gig of all. She gets to do most of the violent stuff. She gets to constantly fuck men over, play around with a host of accents, wigs, and outfits, and even when she appears to be letting light in we're still never sure if this is just a trick and if her heart is truly dark and cold. Killing Eve was dark, alright, but it was never cold.

"So, what do you want to do now?"

"I want to kill her. With my bare hands".

School's out forever? - The Rise and Fall of Steiner Schools.

"I want to go home. I don't want to stay. Give up education as a bad mistake" - The Headmaster Ritual, The Smiths.

The Q&A session at January's Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub talk (What every parent needs to know about Steiner schools, with Andy Lewis) proved to be what Mrs Merton, in her pomp, would have called a 'heated debate'. But, instead of the depressing level of discourse seen online and in real life these days (shouting, name calling, lying) it remained intelligent, courteous, and enlightening. In that it was a fitting way to follow Lewis's meticulously researched and articulately presented talk about the history of Steiner schools, the problem with them, and why they may soon cease to exist.

It began by outlining the story of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy itself and Andy's route into it over the last six or seven years since he moved to the Glastonbury area and found himself living near a Steiner school (there's one in Greenwich too, apparently).

Rudolf Steiner's beliefs came out of the late 19c fascination with spiritualism and the occult. He'd been a theosophist, and thus was hugely influenced by that old Evans is a place on Earth favourite Madame Blavatsky, but he split with them, there was a schism, because they believed Jiddu Krishnamurti was the new Christ - and Steiner didn't think a mere 'Indian' could possibly be the new Christ, for reasons I shall outline soon.

Anthroposophy was Steiner's breakaway movement, a spiritual 'science' based on mathematics which claimed we could advance via karma and reincarnation, but to do so we would have to gain esoteric knowledge of higher worlds through clairvoyance and meditation. Those who reach the 'final revelation' are known as blue card holders. This sounds like mumbo jumbo of the highest order and, indeed, Andy Lewis called Rudolf Steiner a mystic barmpot (something David V Barrett of the London Fortean Society had out with him later (in the Q&A, not the car park).

More worrying still than this belief in, very popular at the time, pseudoscience was anthroposophy's idea that reincarnation had a racial, and indeed racist, element (Steiner was a German in the 1920s). Immature souls were black, advanced souls Aryan. Black people used their rear brain, yellow people their middle brain, and white people their front brain.

Steiner claimed he loved all races and that he wasn't a white supremacist because he felt everyone could be white, if only they try hard enough! Unsurprisingly these beliefs don't appear on websites for Steiner schools and nor are they taught at them but they may, and sometimes do, underpin the belief of some of the staff at these schools.

Oh, and children in art classes aren't allowed to use black crayons (cue a riff on the old Henry Ford quip, "you can have any colour you like as long as it's not black).

The Steiner art is quite interesting though and the architecture is cool and curvy. Dance (eurythmy) is another big thing in the Steiner schools. On the surface all fine and dandy, and Steiner schools do make claims to be more creative than normal schools. Although critics, such as Andy Lewis, counter that the art is somewhat prescribed. You can be as creative as you like as long you don't colour over the lines - or use a black crayon.

Where the Steiner organisation is undoubtedly creative is in business. The Triodos Bank exists not just to make money but to further anthroposophic aims, the staff chant hymns. Weleda, who make beauty products and naturopathic medicines (sold in shops as mainstream as Boots), have their roots in anthroposophy too. But by far the biggest industry they're involved in is agriculture. Biodynamic farming to be specific. Waitrose sell biodynamic wines and Prince Charles uses their products at his Highgrove estate. It's all underpinned by an emphasis on 'spiritual enrichment' and astrology charts, observance of full moons, and other rituals are followed.

So the Steiner organisation makes a lot of money by promotion of banking, wine, cosmetics, and woo. This can be fed into schools that use the somewhat bizarre, and surely impractical, idea of breaking childhood up into seven year periods. Something that suggests a lack of understanding that some kids grow up quicker than others.

It is expected that by age seven children will have their adult teeth and, therefore, the strength to learn. Fourteen marks the age by which a child should have reached puberty and therefore able to inspire and be inspired. Twenty-one is the age of the ego and divine selfhood. The child is now an adult. I may have physically been an adult by 21 years old but, mentally, I still  had a lot of learning to do.

But I could read long before I was seven - which, according to Steiner, may be why I'm in some way morally deficient. The seven year cycle instructs that children below seven should not be taught to read as it is 'spiritually harmful' - so teachers, and some parents, actively prevent kids of that age from reading. Screen time too is very much frowned upon.

Parents who buy into it are never informed that this is a spiritual 'belief' with no basis, whatsoever, in science or fact. The belief goes so far as to state that a fourteen year old who can't read is better than a seven year old who can. It's almost as if they don't want children reading, learning, and thinking for themselves. Almost as if there was some element of indoctrination involved. Religions, eh?

If the age splits aren't iffy enough, Steiner also liked to break people up into four different 'temperaments' which can even be recognised by certain physical characteristics. The melancholic among us will be tall and slender, the phlegmatic have protruding shoulders, and the sanguine person will look 'normal'. I sadly can't remember how you identify a choleric person but they tend to make good leaders, apparently.

The bonkers beliefs don't stop there. Steiner's theory was that human beings originally came from Atlantis (the great undersea continent), that islands float on the sea and are held in place by stars, and that homeopathy is true and works. He didn't believe, however, that the heart pumped blood around the body, preferring the idea that it is the rather abstract sounding 'seat of the soul', and he didn't believe in germ theory. Therefore he had no truck with immunisation.

Which, unsurprisingly, meant, and still means, that children at Steiner schools are more susceptible to disease and that these diseases can spread very quickly. If children are ill they can have homeopathic 'medicine' but not anything that works. Alternatively, they could just dance the illness away or, even worse, some adherents believe that diseases are good for children. Karmic!

AIDS has been blamed on the use of conventional medicine and in Scotland, remarkably, doctors can still prescribe extract of mistletoe for cancer on the NHS. Another thing that's seen as karmic and, therefore, good for kids is bullying. So bullying is both rife and unchecked in Steiner schools. It helps children.

With all this, it's a great surprise that these schools should have become so popular and supported by such a variety of respected (and some much less respected) sources as I'll come on to. A lot of that, I would suggest, is down to the fact that Rudolf Steiner proposed that the anthroposophical aims behind his schools should be hidden. That's why some of them are known as Waldorf schools.

He recommended lying about their aims, basically. But it's uncertain if they're still lying now or if they've reformed and there are good reasons for this. Much as every teacher you ever speak to complains about how stressful a visit from OFSTED is (usually whilst letting you know how highly they scored at the same time), perhaps the alternative is not so great either.

Steiner schools don't have OFSTED, but their own anthroposphical inspections and guess what? They tend to get glowing reviews all round. One particular anomaly was that some individual teachers had ticked every single box for ethnicity. Only white ones though as they are the only ones who have, at some point, been every race and were now at the top of this very rotten tree with no roots.

It was Tony Blair's government who set up Britain's first publicly funded school in Hereford and both the right wing press (The Telegraph, The Spectator) and the left leaning press (The Guardian) raved about it. There are still only four public Steiner schools, and many more private ones, but Michael Gove, when he was Secretary of State for Education during the early years of the Cameron led coalition government, advocated for more.

Along with Jacob Rees-Mogg's sisters, Gove has recently been lobbying for the introduction of even more (when he's not campaigning for division and economic disaster across the UK, that is). On the question of racism within the Steiner schools, it has been proven that Gove had meetings where this was explicitly discussed and documentation publicly available proves that he agreed any incidents of racism within these schools would be covered up using PR. Or 'spin'.

The tide is beginning to turn though. The Guardian have found that the Woods Report, the one that inspired Blair to green light funding for the first public Steiner school, was written by a person with a background in 'woo' and The Telegraph have exposed the practice of Steiner schools sending gagging letters to parents who have become worried about some of the aforementioned elements of their children's education.

It's also been suggested that investigations have found that some of the adults working in Steiner schools should not be anywhere near children. When these people are exposed they are simply moved to a different school. Again, the potential of being molested is just part of karma - and karma is good for children.

Some Steiner schools have been closed down following these investigations and in the last few weeks the Department of Education have ordered emergency inspections of all Steiner schools. It's, rather obviously, a case of better late than never (and there were several dissenting voices in the Q&A, as mentioned earlier, including an ex-Steiner pupil who seemed perfectly well adjusted and spoke rationally in favour of the schools) but it does seem that in the mad rush towards free schools and, as ever, the fear of criticising religious beliefs, we've let this slide for far too long and if even a quarter of the more trenchant criticisms outlined by Andy Lewis are true then urgent action is required.

Thanks to Andy for an interesting, sometimes enraging, and long (at Greenwich Skeptics you get to yak on a lot longer than at London Skeptics) speech. Thanks, also, to Professor Chris French for hosting another wonderful event, to the audience for making the Q&A so passionate yet so amicable, and to Vicki for joining me for the evening and a not inconsiderable debrief afterwards. Looking forward to the next one. 

 

Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family:Why Dr Stacy Hackner is no longer Loving the Alien.

In 2004 I visited the amazing pre-Columbian archaeological site of Monte Alban, near the city of Oaxaca in Mexico. It was one of the most fascinating places I've ever seen on any of my travels but last night, at London Skeptics in the Pub, I was reminded of a question asked during that trip to our very helpful tour guide by one of my fellow visitors.

The American man wished to know a little about how families worked in the Zapotec civilisation. On being told that it was common for the whole of the town to bring up children, the curious visitor was flummoxed. He simply could not begin to comprehend any other kind of family except the nuclear, 2.4 children, family he, and most people he'd ever known, had grown up in.

So conditioned was he to his own way of living, it'd become impossible to imagine that anybody, anywhere, could live, or ever could have lived, differently. Dr Stacy Hackner's enjoyable talk in Camden, Paleo-fantasy and Alien Contact:How we misunderstand the ancient world, aimed to overturn a few canards about the past and how we used to live while at the same time explaining why we so often imagine people who lived millions of years ago to, somehow, live lives much like our own. It's funny when it's done in The Flintstones but when serious historians repeat the same mistakes it can, Dr Hackner asserted, be more than a little problematic.

2019 had got off to a predictably shitty start (Anna Soubry had been surrounded and harassed on her way to work by a group of angry Brexiteers screaming 'scum' and 'Nazi' in her face, Chris Grayling had pissed away nearly £14,000,000 giving a potential no deal Brexit shipping contract to a company that doesn't have any boats, Katie Hopkins had resurfaced to spread vile racist lies on the Internet, and, most sadly of all for me, members of my own family were regurgitating those lies and using sexist, racist, and xenophobic language while doing so). Not only was it a pleasure to be among like minded souls at London Skeptics in the Pub, it felt like an much needed safe house away from the seemingly inexorable slide into demagoguery, victim blaming, and, in some cases, outright fascism that we're witnessing at the moment.

It's not always that interesting if someone begins an evening by, essentially, reading out their CV, even if it's to assert their credentials rather than boast, but Dr Hackner's curious career proved an exception. I think I can safely say I have never before been in the company of a "bioarchaeologist focusing on ancient activity patterns in Sudan and diseases in 19th century Cyprus" who has "excavated human remains in four countries and lectures at UCL and Glyndwr University"

Thankfully, Dr Hackner wore her learning and experience lightly, remembered there were lay folk such as myself in the audience, and peppered the whole talk with some humorous asides. Which went down as well as my veggie dog and the pint of Red Stripe I accompanied it with.

CV done and dusted, Dr Hackner led off by outlining a few of the common archaeological biases those in her profession regularly have to contend with. The conservative bias is when people tend to ignore new evidence, even when it's overwhelming, because they've become so ingrained with long held ideas. Confirmation bias differs slightly in that this is due to people only believing things that already reinforce their view.

Underpinning both these, and other less prevalent, biases is, Dr Hackner contended - with little dispute, the fact that, historically, most archaeological studies have been carried out by white, middle class men and white, middle class men (like our American friend in Monte Alban) tend to see things through the prismatic worldview of, you guessed it, white, middle class men.

When people talk of the Paleolithic age they tend to mean the Paleolithic age in Europe. The Paleolithic era happened in different times in different parts of the world. It began in Africa, in the Great Rift Valley, about 3,300,000 years ago and only reached Europe more than two million years later. Africans were using stone tools (one of which was passed around the audience, I had a fondle) for 2,000,000 years before Europeans.

Fire was first harnessed in the area that is now Kenya roughly one and half million years ago and it not only meant people could keep warm, a luxury that eluded those on the European continent until about 50,000 years ago, but they could cook their food. A theory exists, an interesting but as yet not proven one, that being able to cook such foodstuffs as carrots provided us with not just fibre but also vitamins. and it was these vitamins that caused our brains to expand and made us, ultimately, the humans we are now. The most dominant species on the planet.

Don't think that means either Dr Hackner or myself are promoting the paleo diet though. Paleo is an old Greek word meaning 'ancient' and anything that calls itself paleo will almost definitely be (a) wrong and (b) a marketing device. Charts taken from the Internet showed most foodstuffs that have been lumped under 'paleo' actually originated in the much later Neolithic age or even after that.

So if you're on a paleo diet you shouldn't be eating strawberries, lemons, bananas, peppers, aubergines, onions, or cauliflowers. None of that is paleo food. A lot of the time what is being promoted as paleo food is something very different. That of the hunter-gatherers or, as Dr Hackner prefers - not liking the insinuation of the gender balanced division of labour between hunters (assumed to be male) and gatherers (assumed to be female), foragers.

Even these hunter-gatherer/forager diets vary due to geography and food availability. In some places meat made up the bulk of the diet. Elsewhere seeds and nuts were prevalent. If the paleos and the hunter-gatherers had been misrepresented in the past that's nothing to the bum rap the poor old Neanderthals get.

Neanderthals, contrary to popular belief, were not as boorish and were less primitive than we tend to think. They had culture, they had art (it's fairly rudimentary - but still), they had jewellery (necklaces made of bones, shell, and teeth have been discovered), and, it's just possible, they even had music as a photography of a very crude looking flute suggests. Studies of Neanderthal caves have discovered they were fond of heating and eating turtles. As the turtles came in their own bowl, once cooked they could be seen as a primitive form of Pot Noodle.

We shouldn't be ragging on the Neanderthals anyway. On average each of us has 8% Neanderthal DNA so they are, in a very real way, our ancestors. White people, white homo sapiens, didn't appear on the planet until as recently as 11,000 years ago but there is evidence that Neanderthals were 'white' (their bones have been mostly found in  present day France and Spain) while Cro-Magnon were certainly not.

Despite this. 'cavemen' of all stripes have, often, historically, been depicted as white whether they were or not. Which Dr Hackner went on to talk about in a section she'd cleverly titled The Unbearable Whiteness of (Hominim) Beings, got to enjoy a nod to Kundera. Beginning with the famous 'march to progress' picture which shows apes evolving into dark skinned cavemen and, finally, strong white men.

I'm generally quite irked by recent spoofs of it that try to suggest that evolving into wearing comfortable clothes, and inventing chairs and technology is somehow a retrograde step but that's as nothing compared to how offensive the idea is that somehow white people are more evolved than black people.

Museum dioramas showing scenes of the ancients propagate stereotypical and sexist gender roles too. Ones that may reflect the way things are now more than they ever were back then. There's a tendency to present the women as feeders and carers and men as animal killers and painters of extraordinary cave art. Woman feed. Man make art.

Even when ludicrous ideas such as aliens creating the pyramids, the Nazca lines, or Teotihuacan began to take hold, these soon became imbued with the spirit of hegemony, patriarchy, and colonialism. Although the idea was first posited as far back as the second century (in a parodic text, it's worth noting) by the Syrian satirist and rhetorician Lucian of Samosata, it started to really take hold when the American astronomer Garrett P.Serviss started to expound it from 1898 onwards.

Thomas Edison's worthy attempts to pooh-pooh such nonsense didn't entirely stop the belief from taking hold and when the Swiss author Erich von Daniken released his best selling book Chariots of the Gods? in 1968 no archaeologist could have been expected to know that they'd still have to regularly debunk its proposals half a century later.

But, of course, it was (for the most part) only the monuments of ancient civilisations in Africa and Latin America that were built by aliens or astronaut gods. On the whole, people weren't saying the Colosseum or the Great Wall of China were built by spacemen. No, white (and Chinese) humans would have been perfectly capable of overseeing such grand building schemes but dark skinned people, nah!

Julien Benoit from the Evolutionary Studies Institute in Johannesburg claimed this tendency came from "a feeling of white superiority that emanates from the rotting corpse of colonialism" and if that's a fairly dramatic way to put it, Dr Hackner's thoughtful, myth busting, and, in places, very funny talk underlined that it was not an incorrect reading of the situation.

I had caveats, sure, I usually do but, for the most part, I once again thank London Skeptics in the Pub (and, of course, Dr Stacy Hackner) for another wonderful talk and one that marked their twentieth anniversary. They're the oldest SitP group in the world and it was testament to the great work they do that the event was so packed (in the first week of January, on a Monday night) that I had to perch upon the stage.

Most of all though I thank everyone involved in these groups, everyone who attends these events, and everyone who continues to apply critical thinking and skepticism when so many around rely on hearsay, rumour, and hate speech. These illuminating events have always lit up my life but in the dark days we're being forced to live in at the moment the light needs to, and thankfully does, shine brighter than ever before.

Fleapit revisited:Disobedience.

"However far away I will always love you

However long I stay I will always love you
Whatever words I say I will always love you
I will always love you" - Lovesong, The Cure.

Distance can be a tricky thing to quantify. You can be physically close to somebody but emotionally distant. You can be physically distant but emotionally close. You can be on the other side of the world and never stop thinking of someone. Or you could be just down the road and barely spare them a thought.

There is distance between everyone. Distance between friends, distance between families, and distance between lovers. Sometimes we create it ourselves and other times it is forced upon us by others, by society, by responsibility, by 'honour', and, in the case of Sebastian Lelio's quietly confident new film Disobedience, by all those things and more.

It's a film that touches on grief, loss, love, heartbreak, one's sense of belonging, and one's sense of duty. At its crux it pivots on the eternal dilemma of whether to be true to one's heart or whether to try to please those you love, and those who care for and about you. Even if that is to your own detriment. It's a dilemma that anybody capable of reflection will have wrestled with many times in their life.

Disobedience tells the tale of Ronit (Rachel Weisz), a successful photographer living in New York and estranged from her Orthodox Jewish family in London. She's called away from an assignment photographing a heavily tattooed gentleman to be informed her father, the highly respected Rav (Anton Lesser), has died while delivering a sermon on free will in his synagogue and, after a brief section in which we see her drinking, shagging a stranger in the toilets of a bar, and ice skating alone (standard grief stuff, basically), she catches a plane back to London to be confronted with a past she's clearly been running away from all her adult life.

There she's greeted by her childhood friends Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) and Esti (Rachel McAdams) who, to Ronit's surprise, are now married. Dovid was Roni's father's favourite disciple and almost more of a son to the Rav than Ronit was a daughter. There's clear tension in their history and there's even more in their current relationship. But it's as nothing compared to the sangfroid between Ronit and Esti.

Something has clearly happened in the past and that something, even more clearly, is still unresolved. How, and if, it will be resolved soon becomes the emotional hub of the drama with the death of the Rav revealed to be merely a plot device so that Ronit, Dovid, and Esti can all come together under the same roof and allow the secrets and lies of their past to either bring them closer together or, slowly, destroy everything they hold dear.

I say 'secrets and lies' because there is something reminiscent of Mike Leigh's imperial phase in the way these intimate personal dramas are played out. How Lelio skillfully creates a picture which shows us how the structures we build to protect ourselves from hurt can be cages in which we become prisoners of our own suppressed emotions and desires.

It can be extraordinarily difficult to escape inherited circumstance and though our families and friends may be kind and loving they may also be incurious, they may lack empathy, and they most certainly will have their own emotions and desires that, often, will not be compatible with our own. If you then add into the mix adherence to an outdated, and no longer fit for purpose, Abrahamic 'faith' then you are creating something of an emotional impasse in which being able to live both a good, and a fulfilled, life starts to look almost impossible.

The comfort blankets of life can really start to itch after a while, but it is to Lelio's great credit that we see events from the perspective of each of the three leading protagonists and we understand each of their motivations and concerns. Dovid wishes only to advance in the synagogue, have children, and live an honourable life. Esti wants to be a good wife and has channeled much of her energy into the profession of teaching yet remains, obviously, unfulfilled both physically and emotionally, and Ronit is torn between putting a metaphorical bomb under the petit-bourgeois concerns of her extended family and hotfooting it back to the US and her other life. Permanently, this time, it's implied.

Weisz, McAdams, and Nivola all put in wonderful, realistic, performances, Lelio's direction is calm and assured and he trusts the characters to tell the story (adapted from a 2006 book by Naomi Alderman) without the need for any clunky exposition, Matthew Herbert's score is unobtrusive, making solid use of diegetic sounds as well as The Cure song quoted at the head of this piece, familiar London locations underlined that this is a story that could happen to anybody I know, and the supposedly 'strong' sex scene both rang true and managed to encapsulate all the thrill and danger of an illicit erotic encounter.

But it was with the small gestures that Disobedience spoke to me the loudest. It was a film in which nobody set out to do anybody else any harm but people still got hurt. To see kind and fair people being put through an emotional wringer is, necessarily, upsetting and in that Disobedience felt like a film with a warm, and human, beating heart.

In a poignant, moving, profound, and articulate piece of correspondence on his Red Hand Files website back in October, Nick Cave responded to a letter from Cynthia in Vermont in relation to the recent bereavements both had suffered with these incredibly moving lines:-

"It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable."

Disobedience looked at grief and it looked at love and it came to a very similar conclusion. To feel joy is to feel pain. To feel pain is to understand joy. To love is to grieve and to grieve is love and, that doesn't change and never will, no matter the distance between people.

If you can't say it, sing it:The Sound of Movie Musicals with Neil Brand.

"I'm singin' in the rain, just singin' in the rain. What a glorious feeling. I'm happy again. I'm laughin' at clouds so dark up above. The sun's in my heart and I'm ready for love" - Singin' in the Rain (Arthur Freed/Nacio Herb Brown).

I really enjoyed BBC4's recent three part series The Sound of Movie Musicals with Neil Brand. I like music and I like movies so why would I not like movie musicals? I also like Neil Brand. He's knowledgeable, enthusiastic, he's as eager to listen to his interviewees as he is to impart his own take on the history of the musical, and when he sits down in front of his piano to break down motifs and genres, often hidden within very well known songs, he does it both in layman's terms and without condescension. By the end I didn't even begrudge him his somewhat cushy gig of getting to play the piano on a Chicago boardwalk overlooking Lake Michigan.

His story starts on Broadway, New York City, in the roaring twenties. 1926 saw the invention of the Vitaphone allowing sound and vision to be synched up for the first time ever and ushering in the era of the talkies. Within three years Broadway Melody became the first 'all singing, all dancing' musical film and made use of original songs specifically written (by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed) to fit the story.

It won the second ever Academy Award for Best Picture, and that was it, the musical was born. The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (starring Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, Joan Crawford, and Jack Benny) followed swiftly. It was a big production and it was promoted with no little fanfare. A billboard was made of live scantily clad women to draw attention to a film that was created using the new technicolor process and featured an early version of Singin' in the Rain.

1930's King Jazz looked even more spectacular. Utilising George Gershwin's beautiful and sophisticated Rhapsody in Blue, the film itself included a huge green piano with a lid that opened up to reveal an entire orchestra as well as leggy dancers gyrating around a mocked up model of New York City itself. It cost so much to make that it was always going to end up losing money - and that's exactly what it did.

It wasn't just the cost that affected its reputation though. NYC audiences were pretty up on their jazz at the time and a film that didn't feature a single black musician (Paul Whiteman was musical director and very much lived up to his name) wasn't going to wash with people who were schooled with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. The only black face in the film was as tokenistic as it could be. A small, smiling, little girl sat upon the lap of a happy fat white sailor.

King Vidor was white but he'd been born in Galveston, Texas and at least has the nous to realise that the under representation of black people in the movies, and the musicals, wasn't right. So he proposed a film set in the deep South and featuring an all black cast. Hallelujah, a tale of a sharecropper's fall from grace and eventual redemption. Shot in Tennessee and Alabama, it used some of the traditional spirituals that Vidor had heard growing up.

But it mixed them up with songs, in the spiritual style, written by Irving Berlin. A man obviously neither black nor from the South. Critics found Berlin's music to be both sanitised and inauthentic. Despite this the film was a success but when the depression hit in the thirties some, and not for the last time, thought it was over for the musical.

Also not for the last time, the naysayers were proved wrong. In fact, showbiz was seen as one way out of poverty, a potential escape from the Dust Bowl. 42nd Street captured the mood of the time and, inspired by FDR, was advertised as a 'New Deal in entertainment'. It was 42nd Street that gave choreographer turned director Busby Berkeley his big breakthrough. You'll surely be familiar with his dance routines but perhaps less so with the fact that he filmed them all with one camera, a camera, Brand tells us, that Berkeley made to dance as well as his cast.

Berkeley followed 42nd Street with Gold Diggers of 1933. It's perhaps most famous now for Ginger Rogers and her friends dressed in coins singing We're in the Money but it also closed with the bluesy Remember my Forgotten Man, a wonderful, evocative song by Harry Warren and Al Dubin. The film was such a hit it saved Warner Brothers from bankruptcy.

Back in the USSR agit-trains would travel around the country showing films promoting Soviet values. Stalin commanded there should be cinema for the millions and banned Hollywood films. But, secretly, he loved them himself and had cinemas installed in several of his private homes so he could watch his favourite stars, the likes of John Wayne and Charlie Chaplin. The Great Dictator, one presumes, going straight over his head.

Soviet musicals like The Jolly Fellows (1934) were directed by Grigori Aleksandrov who went on to make the film Circus in 1936. Circus promoted an inclusive society (Soviets were seen to take in a mixed race baby from a mother who'd been hounded out of the US for having said baby, and there was even a man singing in Yiddish) and that, you would think, could only be a good thing.

Unfortunately for Aleksandrov, it was released the same year Stalin embarked on his Great Purge targeting Trotskyists, ethnic minorities, kulaks, and his political opponents and resulting in somewhere close to a million deaths, most of those summary executions.

So the fact the film criticised America while stealing its style from Hollywood was the least of its hypocrisies. In fact it was from France, rather than the Soviet Union, that the next step forward in the history of the musical would come. Rene Clair, an avant-garde film maker, eschewed the 'show' style of musical and added some grit and a touch of his trademark surrealism to the genre in 1931's Le Million, a tale of an impoverished artist who wins the lottery but mislays his ticket.

Rene Clair had invented the 'integrated musical' in which, in lieu of huge set piece song-and-dance routines, characters would simply burst into song where they stood or sat. During one scene, song is even used for a character's internal monologue. It's not certain if this inspired the making of Peep Show but it certainly influenced the work of both Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers as well as the Armenian-American director Rouben Mamoulian who, with 1932's Love Me Tonight, took the integrated musical to Hollywood.

Mamoulian also used a rhythmic street symphony (sounds of machines working, doors banging etc;) that seems remarkably forward thinking for the time. Not all in America were so happy with the pace of change though. Some wanted to turn the clock back and soon the Motion Picture Production Code (popularly known as the Hays Code after Republican politician Will H.Hayes) was introduced cracking down on skimpy outfits, double entendres, and racy songs.

Combine that with the segregation in America and you had no climate any longer for making cutting edge cinema. In 1925 at the age of just nineteen, St Louis born Josephine Baker had sailed to Paris and soon became a much bigger star in France than she would have been allowed to have become in the nation of her birth. First as a dancer but in 1934 she moved into film, playing the title character in Marc Allegret's Zouzou.

Under the Hays Code, Hollywood could not hope to compete with Baker in a fluffy bra swinging in a birdcage so they countered with Fred Astaire and his dancing. Tame in comparison, perhaps, but Astaire's dancing still looks phenomenal, even today, and his routines were more subversive than a cursory glance would suggest.

Astaire, who became the biggest musical star to that day (possibly ever?), had been in a vaudeville double act with his sister, Adele, since they were children but when Adele got married she hung up her dancing shoes and left Fred, briefly, high and dry. Until that is, he was paired with Ginger Rogers.

Because of the 'code', the thrill of the chase had to imply seduction without directly showing it, and this they did with a wonderfully imaginative dance routine to Irving Berlin's Cheek to Cheek in Top Hat (1935). We see Fred and Ginger dance slowly away from the other party goers. They continue dancing together in private and when they're finished dancing they lie back on the balustrade looking for all the world as if they're post-coital. All that's missing is them lighting up each other's cigarettes.

It was about as 'adult' as cinema in America was allowed to get during the thirties. With grown up themes a labyrinthine nightmare to navigate it's perhaps no surprise that the children's film should become so prominent. In 1937 Walt Disney made his first full length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It took three years to make and employed over 750 artists. It still looks amazing now.

Talking heads attest that children everywhere could be heard singing Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work but Brand seems more interested in the fact that these songs seemed to owe more to 19c German light opera than to the likes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, or Cole Porter. Two years after Snow White, MGM made The Wizard of Oz and changed Judy Garland's life forever. One year after that war broke out in Europe and, once again, the future of the musical appeared to be in jeopardy.

With death and destruction decimating Europe why would anybody want to watch people singing and dancing? But in 1942 Die Grosse Liebe (The Great Love) opened in, of all places, Berlin. On the surface Die Grosse Liebe was a simple love story but beneath that veneer it was very clear to all that it was blatant Nazi propaganda. The lead role was taken by the Swedish singer Zarah Leander, one of Hitler's favourites who'd been personally signed up to the 'cause' by Goebbels.

The age of the musical may not have been over but the age of innocence certainly was. Fortunately, in 1945, the war, too, was over and, the following year, cinema attendances hit an all time high as people, those who hadn't been killed at least, set about resuming their normal lives. Arthur Freed hit his peak as a producer with Meet Me in St Louis. Judy Garland took star billing and the film featured new songs like Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and standards like Down at the Old Bull and Bush.

Gene Kelly was emerging as a star, and reinventing dance, in films like Cover Girl (1944) and 1949's On The Town where Kelly and Frank Sinatra play sailors on shore leave in New York. Shot on location, Sinatra's megastar status attracted huge crowds to watch filming. It didn't hurt Kelly's fame either and in 1952 he made the film he will forever be associated with:- Singin' in the Rain.

Singin' in the Rain starred Kelly alongside Debbie Reynolds and Cyd Charisse but most people remember it now for one oft-repeated but really rather lovely scene. That of Kelly dancing to Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown's now title song euphorically after falling in love. The feeling of sheer joy in knowing the person you love loves you right back. I remember that wonderful feeling. Just.

As the musical hit a peak in Hollywood, it did also in newly independent India, in Bollywood. Guru Dutt's 1957 film Pyaasa took on prostitution and destitution and shed a light on the terrible way women were treated in Indian society while retaining a sense of the poetic and a concurrent theme of interior angst. It sounds, and looks, exactly like the sort of film I need to see.

Mother India (dir:Mehboob Khan), also from 1957, looks equally ace. "If life is a poison we must drink it" is the line that seems to most encapsulate this story of suffering, poverty, and acceptance. It was the first Hindi movie to be nominated for an Oscar but it was not the film's star Nargis (Dutt) who was singing  the songs but the legendary, and still around - at 89, playback singer Lata Mangeshkar.

In China, they were turning out a film about once a week. With no unions permitted actors and crew could work for hours on end and though for the most part the Shaw Brothers (Runje, Runme, and Runde - based in Hong Kong) churned out kung fu flicks they also turned their hands to the musical. 1959's The Kingdom & The Beauty and 1963's The Love Eterne both look as amazing as any of the Bollywood films of the time and an old Chinese proverb, 'singing is better than saying', could stand as a motto for any musical film made in any country at any given time.

In 1965 Chairman Mao embarked on his Cultural Revolution (eventual death toll:anything between one and ten million people) to purge China of all Western culture and all Western thought. Of course Hong Kong was separate and there they pushed things forward with groovy go-go films like Hong Kong Nocturne (1967) featuring women bathing in champagne and frustrating horny men with their unavailability. Beijing and Hong Kong at that time must have felt light years apart.

Back in Hollywood, teenagers were being coaxed back out to the picturehouses by Bill Haley and his Comets in Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Gene Vincent in 1958's Hot Rod Gang. Most of these films were cheap cash-ins on the new rock'n'roll sound, low budget affairs that attracted little critical acclaim, but The Girl Can't Help It (1956) was a cut above. With Jayne Mansfield in a starring role, the film also featured musical performances by Fats Domino and Little Richard. Jean-Luc Godard loved it and, for the music alone, he was right to. It really is fucking great music.

Of course, of all the rock'n'roll stars Elvis was the biggest. Not only on stage but also on screen. His star quality could carry some phenomenally flimsy flicks but 1957's Jailhouse Rock is considered one of the best and does showcase 'the pelvis' doing some pretty awesome dance moves.

In the UK we got the decidedly more sedate, and chaste, Cliff Richard. Clips of The Young Ones (1961) and Summer Holiday (1963) are about as wholesome as you could get this side of Butlin's (and even feature The Shadows dressed up as traditional Greek musicians) but, nevertheless, Cliff could sing a bit in those days and they were enjoyable enough romps for their time.

If nothing compared to what was going on in France where Jacques Demy made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in 1964. A musical coming out of the nouvelle vague scene of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, and Rohmer seemed an unusual idea but Demy didn't stop there. This would be a musical with no dancing in it - and no speaking. Every single line was sung. Radical enough in itself but just to make it that bit more challenging it was set during the Algerian War of Independence. It looks a bit different to The Battle of Algiers.

Hollywood was, again, playing it safer with films like My Fair Lady (1964) and, a year later, The Sound of Music. Or were they? Brand makes a case for the then highest grossing film of all time and the winner of five Oscars, and now a cinema singalong favourite to crowds of fans dressed as nuns, being, oddly, a game changer. The subject matter, the tracking, the songs themselves. They seemed to have taken the musical to the next level. Had the genre peaked?

As America moved into the time of hippies, the era of civil rights struggles, and the Vietnam War that seemed to be the case. The musicals coming out in the wake of The Sound of Music weren't exactly pushing the envelope either. 1967's Camelot, Rex Harrison talking to the animals in the same year's Doctor Dolittle, and Clint Eastwood, of all people, taking it a step further by talking to the trees in Paint Your Wagon two years later.

It was all very out of step with what was going on in the real world. It was, the programme instructs us, Bob Fosse who solved the dilemma of how to move forward with the genre while staying in touch with contemporary mores. The dichotomy was resolved with 1969's Sweet Charity in which Fosse introduced his trademark small gesture, a shoulder drop perhaps, or maybe something as simple as a finger click.

Three years later Fosse's biggest hit, Cabaret, arrived. Decadence, Nazis, and Liza Minnelli (daughter of Judy Garland) belting out the title track in black stockings and suspenders and a hat tipped at a jaunty angle. It was the first x-rated musical but that didn't stop it scooping eight Oscars. Seven years later Fosse directed All That Jazz. A film that, by the looks of the clips shown, was both very homoerotic and very very of its time.

Of the cinema of its time that is. Not the reality of life at the time of its release. 1970s New York City was gritty, bleak, and violent. The films reflecting the lawless streets were Taxi Driver and The Godfather, most definitely not musicals, yet it was the director of Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, who made New York, New York in 1977 (with Liza Minnelli singing the title song two years before Sinatra picked it up and made it his own) and the director of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola, who made One From The Heart in 1982. A tale of a tumultuous romance with songs by Tom Waits.

Both were musicals and both were flops. The new breed of directors may have wanted to pay homage to Hollywood's past but their audiences, clearly, did not. More irreverent stuff like Mel Brooks' The Producers (1967) and Blazing Saddles (1974) had become catnip to the cinema crowd. In 1973 a fledgling director called George Lucas made American Graffiti and it not only proved to be an escape from the grim reality of the Nixon era but to be a new way of doing the musical.

In American Graffiti the cast don't burst into song, the music mostly blasts from cars and jukeboxes and because it includes such great artists as Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Del Shannon, and The Big Bopper (combined with exquisite period detail) it became as much of a hit as One From The Heart was a flop.

Five years later Grease followed and became pretty much the biggest film of my youth. I still remember people lining up for hours outside the ABC cinema in Basingstoke to see it when I was a kid. Only Star Wars, and perhaps Jaws, ever attracted such large queues.

The songs were great, anyone growing up in that era probably remembers every word now, and the story was a simple, but affecting, tale of young love but, also, to UK audiences at least, it showed us a different world. In Britain we'd had David Essex, Ringo Starr, and Billy Fury in That'll Be The Day in 1973 and the difference was the same as between Coronation Street and Dallas.

All these fifties throwbacks were fun but Ken Russell, apparently, moved things forward with his motion picture version of The Who's Tommy in 1975 featuring Elton John singing Pinball Wizard playing a giant pinball keyboard and wearing massive boots. It looked odd but probably not compared to Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone which followed a year later.

We take it for granted now, and the Paul Williams songs have seeped into the popular imagination, but the idea of kids playing gangsters with custard pies instead of guns is utterly bizarre. It was either going to fail abysmally or be a massive success and, of course we know, it proved to be the latter. The fourteen year old Jodie Foster appeared in both Bugsy Malone and Taxi Driver in 1976. That's quite an achievement no matter how you slice it.

The same year saw the first blaxploitation musical. Michael Schultz's Car Wash came in the wake of Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972) and Norman Whitfield's soundtrack, and specifically the Rose Royce version of the title song, helped make the film a success. The Wiz, rather a forgotten film, followed two years later. A black version of The Wizard of Oz that starred Michael Jackson and Diana Ross and featured music by Quincy Jones and Luther Vandross.

That's quite a roll call but the film was not a success and was soon knocked into a cocked hat by Alan Parker's Fame (1980), a much earthier, considerably tougher and more streetwise affair than the TV series that came in its wake. I learnt that when they filmed the iconic dance sequence to the song Fame had not yet been written so they all danced to Donna Summer's Hot Stuff instead. Good choice.

A year after Fame, MTV launched in the US and the rule book was ripped up and replaced with a new one. Pop videos became musicals in miniature but the movies, too, learnt from pop music and started incorporating techniques and styles first developed in the short form format. Specifically in films like Flashdance (1983) and Footloose (1984).

Of course, as with anything new there were hipster types who preferred things how they used to be and The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle director Julien Temple catered for them with 1986's Absolute Beginners. It had David Bowie in it during possibly his artistic nadir, Patsy Kensit looked good but seemed to rub people up the wrong way, the film went hugely over budget, suffered from massive hype that it could never live up to, and massively flopped. Neil Brand was kind in suggesting it was because it was ahead of its time.

The musicals that were doing well in the late eighties/early nineties were the ones from the Disney renaissance. Films like The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Aladdin (1992) saw the house of mouse enjoying their biggest success for years. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken wrote the songs for all three films mentioned but even when they were replaced by Hans Zimmer, Tim Rice, and Elton John for 1994's The Lion King the hits kept coming. In fact I'd wager The Lion King is the most fondly remembered of all. I bet you could sing Hakuna Matata right now.

A year later Pixar took the Disney ball and ran with it. Randy Newman may not have seemed the most obvious choice for 1995's Toy Story but it worked. So much so that he returned to Pixar for Monsters, Inc in 2001, Cars in 2006, and two Toy Story sequels. He's on board for Toy Story 4 to be released in June of this year. Randy Newman, it seems, is a company man.

The musical had been revived and Neil Brand took us on a whirlwind tour of the world:- Moulin Rouge (Australia, 2001), The Happiness of the Katakuris (Japan, 2001), Hipsters (Russia, 2008), and Dil Se (India, 1998) - before returning to Hollywood for a quick look at La La Land (2016) and surprise sleeper hit The Greatest Showman (2017), both films with songs written by the new kids on the block Pasek and Paul.

I've not seen either, they don't look like my cup of tea - too milky, but it's good to know the grand old musical is in safe hands. Music documentaries too when Neil Brand is involved. With interviewees of the standard of Mel Brooks, Alan Menken, David Essex, Jeremy Deller, Bruce Welch from The Shadows, Julien Temple, and Paul Williams as well as historians and critics, and vintage footage of interviews with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly it was important that Brand was at the top of his game and luckily he was. I'm looking forward to seeing what he turns his dexterous fingers to next. Everybody cut, everybody cut footloose.