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Catching Fire

22 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Catch a Fire

When the Wailers finished recording their new album, Bob Marley flew to London with the master tapes to present them to Blackwell. Hearing them, Blackwell knew that his gamble had paid off – big time. This was an album to make the world take notice.

His instincts vindicated, Blackwell and the Wailers signed a formal contract: from now on, Island Records would be promoting their career. But while Blackwell, an aficionado of Jamaican music, loved the recording he also knew what would appeal to the ears of the fans of underground rock he aimed to promote the band to. So, at the Island Records studios on Basing Street, Marley and Blackwell set about, as Blackwell called it, ‘sweetening’ the music for Western ears.

Keyboards player John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick added the clavinet and synthesiser sounds to the record, their first use in reggae. But to really sweeten the record for Western ears, Blackwell needed some guitar: Wayne Perkins, from Alabama in the United States, was the man he brought in despite Perkins knowing next to nothing about reggae. But it would prove an inspired choice. Perkins got the solo on his third take. Marley was so delighted he ran into the recording studio and gave the guitarist a thanksgiving spliff.

Those present during these sessions affirm that Marley was very much part of the process involved in preparing the record for the market Blackwell had identified: this was no music-business Svengali remaking a band according to his own designs but a creative partnership, with Marley as ambitious to make it big as Blackwell.

Catch a Fire was released in Britain in December 1972 to a press fanfare and solid although not spectacular sales. To follow up the release, the Wailers went on tour in Britain, starting in April 1973. When they came off stage after their first show, the Wailers were puzzled by all the shouting from the audience: had they hated the show? They did not realise they were shouting for more. Their tour manager had to shove them back on stage for their encore. The tour ended with four nights at London’s Speakeasy club, then the hippest club in the country. The rock aristocracy turned out for the shows: Bryan Ferry, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, various members of The Who and Deep Purple, Brian Eno. They soon realised they were watching something new and revelatory.

The Gemini Missions

20 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Astronaut Ed White during a spacewalk from Gemini 4
The rendezvous of Gemini 6A and 7 in orbit.

The Mercury missions first put Americans into space. The Apollo missions took men to the moon. But in between were the Gemini missions, eight launches which were fundamental in establishing the principles of space flight. It was these Gemini flights that made the Apollo moon landings possible.

Unlike the solo Mercury flights and the three-man Apollo missions, Gemini were two-man rockets, using a repurposed ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) to put the crew into orbit. During the Gemini missions, Nasa learned how to keep men alive in space for the length of time necessary to get to the moon and back, developed Extravehicular Activities (‘space walks’) and, crucially, developed the protocols necessary for two spaceship to rendezvous and dock in space.

It’s actually very difficult for two spaceships in different orbits to rendezvous. On earth, you would get on the same track as the other ship and then increase speed to catch up, slowing down as you neared the target vehicle. But in orbit in space, speeding up means the spaceship goes into a higher orbit where, being in a higher orbit, it will actually be travelling slower than the target spacecraft.

The Gemini astronauts found that the way to do it was to put the spaceship into a lower orbit, which means you will be catching up with the target spacecraft as lower orbits are faster, and then, when you have nearly caught up, slow down, thus pushing the spaceship up into the same orbit as the target vehicle.

This, and much other work, was done by the unheralded but vital Gemini missions.

Book review: The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell

Whoops! Chalk this one up as a top contender for brilliant marketing idea gone disastrously wrong. Suppose you’re a writer, you’ve set your first novel of paranormal detective fiction in a version of London really quite similar to the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. The book has done well but obviously you want the next in the series to do better. Then an amazing possibility presents itself: you meet Neil himself and tell him about your book. You get friendly with him. You think about asking him to read your book and write a cover comment and he’s happy to do that but he’s done that for a fair few other writers and you want your book to stand out.

Then you get that brilliant idea. Your vision of London owes so much to Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Would he…? Might he…? After all, the idea plays into Gaiman’s own use of metafiction. So you ask him and he says, “Yes.”

“Yes!” You are beyond delighted. This will really make your book stand out.

Neil Gaiman has agreed to appear in your novel as one of its characters, a writer navigating on the borders between this world and Neverwhere, dipping his writerly toes into the supernatural world of your own creation.

A more perfect, more arch, tribute to Gaiman’s vision of London that has inspired your own book is hard to imagine.

What’s more, Gaiman doesn’t even ask to be the book’s hero, or even heroic: he’s happy to be a morally dubious figure, skating the boundaries of self-interest and altruism, right in line with your overall vision.

Yes, this is brilliant, this is really going to work…

Then, ten years later, Gaiman goes and gets accused of all sorts of horrible behaviour by various women. He denies it, obviously, but then sues one of the women for breaching a non-disclosure agreement. What was your book’s biggest selling point suddenly becomes an albatross of Me-Too proportions.

The most brilliant selling idea of modern metafiction gets undone by the fiction ceasing to be meta.

Book review: London Falling by Paul Cornell

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
London Falling by Paul Cornell

If, like me, you started off really enjoying Ben Aaronovich’s Peter Grant supernatural police detective fiction but then found the series tailing off, then this new series, featuring police detectives investigating supernatural murders, might seem like an obvious new avenue.

And it is. But perhaps a better reference point would be the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere but with more murders and the police involved. The story takes a while to get going, and a bit longer to successfully differentiate the main characters, but after about 50 pages Cornell hits his writing stride, the characters start breathing and moving, and the pace picks up.

Definitely one worth thinking about in the growing genre of London based paranormal fiction.

Raiders and Riders

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Thirty-five heavily armed men riding fast through a thinly populated land could cause devastation. They could move more quickly than the news of their advent could reach the king, raiding villages and halls and moving on, striking hard, fast and deep before returning to their own country. In most cases, a dozen trained warriors would present overwhelming numbers against any defence. While the warband attached to a king could reach substantial numbers, there would only be a handful of warriors defending an outlying hall or manse. Faced with 20 or 30 raiders, the wiser option was to withdraw rather than seek battle. Or bar the doors and hold out until the raiders move on.  

The battles remembered in the historical record are greatly skewed: for every Battle of Hatfield Chase or Winwaed, when kings and warbands died, there would have been hundreds, if not thousands of skirmishes, retreats, raids, ambushes and escapes. The great battles were remembered precisely because they were unusual, both in the nature and the number of the casualties.

The annual round of war was more mundane. In the usual cycle of raiding, cattle stealing and slave taking, warriors far more often declined to offer battle than staked everything upon a single encounter. The whole culture of small-scale, fast-moving warfare was predicated upon the attackers being able to produce overwhelming numbers in a particular area and moving out before anything could be done to stop them.

When A Fight Becomes a Battle

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Raiding was the great training school of warriors, where they learned the skills, hardiness and courage necessary to their calling. Skirmishes were part of this training, but full-on pitched battles were rare enough to be recalled in record and song.

Battles only become battles retrospectively. During the fighting, the situation is pretty well always so confused that it’s impossible for the men taking part to know the full scope of what they are engaged in. However, when the combatants disengage and the survivors pick over the memories, then the story of the battle emerges.

Its precise meaning will develop according to the events that occurred but also the meaning that is placed upon them. The Battle of Stamford Bridge, when King Harold of England defeated the most feared king of his time, Harald Hardrada, would have been a key turning-point conflict, remembered in general culture if it had not been followed by another battle 19 days later.

Death Comes for the King

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

Although the king list of the rulers of Northumbria is subject to some considerable question, what no historian doubts is the mortality rate. Not one of the early kings of Northumbria, nor its constituent kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, died as old men.

The kings were caught in a cycle of raid and revenge, revenge and raid. Raids to acquire the booty to give as gift to their warband. Revenge to strike back at those raiding them.

Offensive warfare has two main avenues: columns of men moving through the countryside seeking to find and destroy the enemy’s forces or smaller groups of men moving fast and setting out to cause as much damage and chaos while reaping as much plunder as possible.

The main drawback for raiders was that cattle, a frequent target for such raids, can only be moved at cow speed, which is slower than horse speed. Trying to usher enemy cattle back out of enemy territory before the enemy could concentrate enough men to cause serious trouble must have been a major headache. Decoy or simultaneous raids could have helped to scatter the response.

Book review: Oathbreakers by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
Oathbreakers by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry

Historians, when writing for the general public, don’t normally draw back the curtains on what they do. They tell the story of what happened, when it happened and who did what, but they don’t spend ages going through the painstaking work that allowed them to tell this story.

In Oathbreakers, Gabriele and Perry do something different: they pull back the historical curtains. While the book sets out to tell the history of the bitter civil conflict between the children and grandchildren of Charlemagne that tore apart the Carolingian Empire, it’s a book that also reveals how historians interrogate their sources to try to get at the real story of what happened.

While the history of the falling out between the heirs of Charlemagne is dramatic in itself, just as much of the tension in the book comes from the authors’ treatment of their sources. As Gabriele and Perry examine the sources of their history, the writers’ description of their methods also allows the reader to evaluate what they are doing. For, of course, just as the original annalists were telling a story with a view to its effect, historians work with their own set of assumptions and presuppositions. It’s just rare for these to be presented to the reader, explicitly and implicitly.

As such, Oathbreakers is both an excellent history of the division and conflict that, eventually, produced France and Germany but also a chance for readers to understand how historians come to these conclusions and agree, or disagree, with their conclusions.

Bob Marley Meets Chris Blackwell

16 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

In 1972, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingstone paid a call on Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records, at his office on Basing Street, Notting Hill.

They pointed out to Blackwell that the Wailers had never received any royalties for their recordings that Island Records had distributed in Britain. Blackwell told them that he had paid thousands to their record label in Jamaica. The Wailers had been systematically cheated.

At the news, Marley, Tosh and Livingstone went up to the roof of the building and did what the Wailers normally did when considering important matters: they smoked a spliff. Meanwhile, Blackwell was downstairs, considering what to do with this group of intense men. He had been told that the Wailers were difficult but already Blackwell was coming to respect them. So, when he joined them on the roof, Blackwell proposed a most unusual deal. He would give the Wailers £4,000 to cover the cost of recording a new record and another £4,000 on the record’s completion. What was more, at this stage there would be no contract. It was a handshake deal.

Blackwell was working on instinct. If he was wrong, there would be nothing to stop Marley and Co. walking off with the £4,000 and never coming back. There were plenty of people who told Blackwell that he was throwing his money away, that the Wailers would disappear back to Jamaica with his money and that would be it, but Blackwell trusted his instincts. He was certain that the Wailers were something special.

The World’s Oldest Ghost Story

14 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History

The world’s oldest ghost story was found written on four sherds of ostraca, pottery inscribed with writing. The story is around 4,000 years old.

In the tale Khonsemhab, a high priest of the god Amun, is visited by a restless ghost, named Nebusemekh, who laments that his tomb has fallen to into ruin, that no one brings him food any longer and that, if this continues, then he will be lost, for his soul no longer has a dwelling place. Khonsemhab asks the ghost who he was and Nebusemekh tells him that he had been in charge of the treasury of Pharaoh Mentuhotep and lieutenant in his army. Nebusemekh had died in the 14th year of Mentuhotep’s reign but the pharaoh had provided his faithful servant with all the necessities for the afterlife. But now the care due to him has withered away and he is withering too.

The high priest, Khonsemhab, assures the ghost that he will see to the care of his tomb but Nebusemekh is dubious: he thinks the priest simply doesn’t have the money to build him a new tomb or to supply enough victuals to sustain him.

But Khonsemhab does not forget his promise, and sends men out to search for the tomb of Nebusemekh. They return with news of its whereabouts, at which Khonsemhab rejoices, calling an official to tell him what he has found.

Unfortunately, the end of the story is lost – although there is hope that another piece of ostraca may be unearthed with its ending – but experts believe that in the story Khonsemhab goes to the ruined tomb to tell the ghost of Nebusemekh that he will soon have a new home.