The My Mate George St George’s Day song is now available on iTunes and Amazon for only 79p! A bargain St George’s Day present. Links below. Feel free to post a review on the Amazon page too!

Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mate-George-Georges-Day-Song/dp/B004TW1ZEU/ref=sr_shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301596671&sr=301-1

iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/my-mate-george-st-georges/id428829883?i=428829889&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Cheers!

George.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=151474368250200&notif_t=event_wall#wall_posts

featuring Rosie the snow-dog

Hello! The My Mate George St George’s Day song is finally available for download here:

http://www.reverbnation.com/store/view_item_album/artist_1389173?item_id=556674

along with four other tracks to make up the ‘Welcome Aboard’ EP. Only $0.99 (60p ish?) per track!

Cover photo of the crazily happy Rosie supplied by the wonderful Chris Barber — check out his photos on Flickr here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbarber/with/4646856867/

Cheers!

My Mate George.

A song about John Frum, messiah of one of the religions (often referred to as ‘Cargo cults’) that sprang up in Pacific Melanesia and New Guinea during and after WWII. John Frum is the messiah of much of the population on the island of Vanuatu (formerly ‘Tanna’) in the New Hebrides.

Having seen their native cultures eroded by white people and their missionaries, some of the holy men of these islands predicted a messiah would come to save them. And lo and behold, the US Navy came to the islands in WWII, bringing all kinds of wondrous ‘cargo’ with them.

The islanders noticed that the white people never actually made any of these magical things. If something broke, they just sent away for another one, and miraculously, it arrived. Surely, this must be the work of supernatural forces.

John Frum (possibly a contraction of ‘John from America’) has become the messiah to many Vanuatu islanders, and they predict he will return one day, save them from the apocalypse, drive out the white man and bring them wonderful cargo. They predict he will return on February 15th, but they do not know what year.

Sir David Attenborough made a film about the ‘Cargo cults’ in the 1950s, and fascinated by this phenomenon and the people’s continuing faith despite John Frum not returning for 19 years, said to one believer:

” ‘But Sam, it is 19 years since John say that the cargo will come. He promise and he promise, but still the cargo does not come. Isn’t 19 years a long time to wait?’
Sam lifted his eyes from the ground and looked at me. ‘If you can wait 2000 years for Jesus Christ to come, an’ ‘e no come, then I can wait more than 19 years for John’.” (quoted in Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’, p238.)

Perhaps an odd topic for MyMateGeorge to write a song about. After all, not the English way to bang on about religion, what? But I see this as more about rooting for the underdog. These people believe, and though they are currently outnumbered by the believers in a similar messiah from overseas, they stand their ground. They stubbornly stick to their own ways, and will not be dominated by the outsiders.

A song about books, or more accurately my possibly unhealthy little obsession with them.

For those who are interested, the books that Peter the Duck and his special friend are sitting on in the background behind me are a few of my favourites:

Watching the English, by Kate Fox
The Little Book of Mornington Crescent, by Garden, Naismith and Pattinson
The Talisman, by Stephen King and Peter Straub
Forgotten Voices of the Great War, by Max Arthur
Freedom from Fear, by Aung San Suu Kyi
My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor
The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge
Quirkology, by Richard Wiseman
King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild
As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela, by Mark Thomas
Teach Your Own, by John Holt
The Song of the Dodo, by David Quammen
Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Goblins, by Spike Milligan and Heath Robinson
Myths to Live By, by Joseph Campbell
Matilda, by Roald Dahl
The Great Transformation, by Karen Armstrong
The Railway Man, by Eric Lomax
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by Bobby Henderson
Understanding Power, by Noam Chomsky
and by no means least the Calvin and Hobbes collection Something Under the Bed is Drooling, by Bill Watterson.

Reflecting on the pointlessness of much of my job, I finally quit to go part-time. And then I was re-reading Tom Hodgkinson’s marvellous ‘How To Be Idle’ and came across this description of the phenomenon of ‘St Monday’:

“But there was a time when skiving was practised openly and with pride, as the little-known phenomenon of Saint Monday demonstrates. Saint Monday, as we learn from historians such as EP Thompson and Douglas Reid, was a tradition of institutionalised skiving. It is first mentioned in the 17th century, persisted through the 18th and gradually withered and died in the 19th, destroyed by industry. It essentially consisted of an extension of the sabbath into Monday. Instead of working, shoemakers, silk-stocking makers and weavers preferred to spend Monday knocking back ales at the tavern or watching bare-knuckle fights and cockfights…

“The key feature of Saint Monday was that, unlike modern institutions such as ‘duvet days’, where supposedly enlightened companies munificently bestow free time on their employees, Saint Monday was a bottom-up initiative; it was taken by the workers, it was self-constituted, often against the will of the employers.

“Saint Monday could exist in part because those who followed the custom had not been infected by the modern-day desire to accumulate possessions. Therefore they did not see the need to earn cash beyond what subsistence required.”

Billy Bragg has a song called “St Monday” on his album ‘England, Half English’ on the same topic, but I wanted Saint Monday to actually come to life as a character, so I wrote this. Hope you enjoy it!

I called this ‘Daydreaming’ instead of ‘Away With The Fairies’ mostly in order to avoid inevitable gay references in the comments. And because the song is about the joys, and benefits, of daydreaming.

Again, inspiration came from a chapter in Tom Hodgkinson’s excellent “How to be Idle”.

In the Training, Life Coaching and Support Services fields, people don’t half talk a lot of guff sometimes. One particular idea that has always made me wince is that everyone should be Fulfilling their Potential, or at least trying to.

At very least the suggestion that clients be ‘enabled’ to do so, implies they are already failures of some kind, and even more inaccurately, that the ‘enabling’ trainers or support service staff somehow ARE fulfilling their own potential, whatever that means. Witness obese chain-smoking support staff getting frustrated with clients who will not comply with their support plan to stop smoking or lose weight.

I’ve often thought: what exactly IS fulfilling your potential? Is it ever possible? Or desirable? Surely if you fulfil your potential to do one thing, you sacrifice the time and effort that you could have given to fulfilling it in another thing. In encouraging people to judge their worth by their performance, and implying a never-ending strive toward perfection, I think the concept probably does a lot more harm than good (unless a good trainer heavily qualifies it). I have concluded that it is therefore, technically speaking, pants.

Lyrics:

The Potential Song

I hear you say you’re passionate to be the very best
But I’m not so sure about your definition of success
You suggest that to be worthy there’s one thing that is essential
That we should all be working very hard toward fulfilling our Potential

I understand you have a need to build your reputation
With power-suits and power-talk and powerpoint presentations
And I’m all for learning new ideas til I’m one hundred and three
But your constant striving way of life, it’s just not my cup of tea

[Chorus]
Well I can only speak for me
And I don’t mean to be rude:
I’m not fulfilling my potential
And I hope I never do…
(I won’t be human if I do)

Would I like to maximise my outcomes going forward?
Just like every single other desperate corporate whore would?
Do I want an increased bandwidth social network interface
To enable me to get ahead of all the others in the race?

Potential is, of course, an almost infinite abstraction
And binding people’s worth to it will produce a bad reaction
Perhaps we’re all much better off with what is simple and what’s real
And not with being so obsessed by what we have and how we feel
(Chorus)

A song arrangement of Britain’s favourite poem.

I wanted to create a less sombre, more light-hearted version, that I could busk and that would get a few toes tapping, but still give the lyrics plenty of room to be heard.

Thanks again for musical inspiration to Rory McLeod, Billy Bragg, Paul Armfield, Greg Brown.

If…

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!