It’s always been seen as a fair game to boo, lampoon, insult, attack, complain about and scoff at Bob Dylan.

This attitude has made me furious over the years … of course he can sing, he is probably one of the most inventive singers since the beginning of popular music and has influenced the whole inflection and style of rock music.

Bob is a writer of stunning prose too of course, but he is first and foremost a musical poet, a bard, a troubadour, an unfinished work of art.

We’ve been sharing rave reviews here at The Society since the beginning of his new tour. when Dylan finally got the chance to take his strolling bones back on the road again after Covid, the tragic hint of a sex scandal and the release of the stunning beautiful Rough and Rowdy Ways.

And the reviews, mainly, have been written by the man-and-woman on the street who’ve got other things to do with their lives but took the trouble to jot down notes and thoughts and their enthusiasms for Bob and his band landed in places like Milwaukee, Bloomington, Hershey and Moon Township.

And then he arrived in New York and he got ignored and insulted.

No New York Times review (if I’ve missed this please send me a link, I’d love to be wrong) and a handful of bad reviews from the Mr Jones’s on the street. We share them here:

Dave & Molly from Montreal, Quebec

EXPECTED SO MUCH, RECEIVED SO LITTLE

Dylan has always been one of my favorites. This was the 3rd time seeing him in Montreal, I was ready for another treat. Had fabulous $$$ seats 100 feet from Bob. The lights came up and there was Bob dressed in white, standing in front of the black, grand piano banging out his first tune in a surprisingly low pitch, gravely voice. His guitar lay across a chair a few feet away with his white brimmed hat atop, We would never hear that guitar or see him with hat on. Instead he alternated playing old and new songs either sitting or standing at the piano then grabbing a mic stand at the back wall of the stage as far from his audience as possible as he crooned old American standards. I came to see Dylan play guitar and sing like he meant it. Not a single word was uttered to his fans, not a smile, not a nod. Between songs he shuffled to a table to get a drink, hanging on to equipment as he walked. He looked old and disinterested. What an utter disappointment for me and my girlfriend.

P. A. C. from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

SELFISH, DISENGAGED & UNDECIPHERABLE DYLAN AT THE MET PHILA.

When the best part of your concert event is the newly renovated Met and the outstanding food at Osteria, you know it’s going to be a bad night. A 60th birthday present from my daughter who is a singer and astute listener of all music. She knows how much I love Dylan’s music and wanted to take me to see him for the first time. It was an utter embarrassment. Dylan voice itself was as good and raw it’s always been but we couldn’t understand a word as he mumbled and garbled every word. His arrangement changes on some songs such as Like a Rolling Stone, were shockingly discordant to the essence of the song. And for 1 hour and 30 minutes, as we sat hoping things would get better, he didn’t muster one single word of welcome, thanks, or appreciation to his audience of 3,500. As we walked out on Bob 30 minutes early, he had me feeling badly for my daughter who certainly lost some respect for one of the musical heroes I spent years extolling. Bob my friend, it’s time to retire.

Sarah from Columbus, Ohio

GROSSLY INACCURATE VISIONS OF BOB DYLAN

If you attended Bob Dylan’s concert last night at the Palace Theatre expecting to see a lounge act and almost unrecognizable versions of Desolation Row and Tangled Up in Blue then you got what you paid for. If, like me, you were hoping to see Bob with his harmonica and guitar playing Just Like a Woman, Don’t think Twice it’s Alright, Like a Rolling Stone, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door…ANY of his songs – in their original arrangements – that define him as one of the best poets/storytellers/lyricists to ever live, then you were left absolutely heartbroken like me. Before going to the show, I had heard that for years Dylan hasn’t been great live, that he doesn’t acknowledge or interact with the audience, that he doesn’t play many of his classics, so I guess I’m the fool for not listening to those comments and thinking my experience would be different. As I sit here today listening to live Dylan albums from ’67, I can’t help but cry for the artist I never got to see live.

And yet Allison Rapp, a professional writer, had this to say: Dylan, perhaps more so than any singer-songwriter of his generation, has continuously asked his listeners to, in essence, think again. Newly arranged versions of old songs were peppered throughout the evening, including completely reimagined versions of Tempest’s “Early Roman Kings,” Slow Train Coming‘s “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “To Be Alone With You” a track from 1969’s Nashville Skyline which Dylan has not performed live since 2005 and the also recently reintroduced “Every Grain of Sand” from Shot of Love. A Frank Sinatra cover, “Melancholy Mood,” which Dylan performed on his 2016 album, Fallen Angels, also appeared.

Dylan did not come back for an encore, perhaps choosing to save his energy for the next two nights of shows at the Beacon, plus the string of East Coast dates he has planned for the rest of this month and the beginning of next. But at 80, the legendary musician seems energized by simply being back on a stage, surrounded by a supportive band, performing new compositions that most Dylan fans have spent months listening to in the confines of quarantine and now get to hear in their full live glory.

As his Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour moves on, ticket holders can expect a wonderfully rested and still remarkably enigmatic Dylan to greet them, even if it is with only a few words in between songs. As he sang in 1961, “You can step on my name, you can try and get me beat, when I leave New York, I’ll be standing on my feet.”

 What are your thoughts on Bob’s fascinating career..?

#bobdylan #roughand rowdy

PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR)

                   (A BILLY THE KID PERSPECTIVE)

Another grand opus by the quite brilliant Eric Lastick

Pat Garrett Texas cowpoke, high call it home.Home wherever the cowboy in him. Tilt barrels of frozen memories—–all through the grimes of days. Dust-belts and passing bull rings. Army-up against the beast. The new west…southern draw remains. Home and yonder clear the still waters of yesterday’s dreams. Lost in the saddles like ancient times. Row boats and measures…the Lewis and Clark northern path, unlike mine. The cowboy mend… steady short climb. Discovery short-band sweet—and of the lone home and horse sent  to me, as a gift from a friend, now foe, Billy the Kid!

                   (A SALOON STYLE PIANO PLAYS)

 The city dwell and making a man out of a stone fixture. Better times lay out the range. Angus and black tobacco stain oak bent corners of round horseshoe in one. Those southern draw’s need make way–past this city. New Mexico’s fresh out of gun-belt, cowpoke, high call, be it of home. A Marshall’s extend stay.

Billy Bony…a gunslinger life. A timetable unlike the rest of us. The gated opens to the range of gunfire. Halts of every door. Stable hands draws of eyes…hears of the day—blue barrel rumbles. Nighttime crossbow sleeps with one eye open. The basis for heaven’s callings, as Dylan established so eloquently—too the knock knock knocking…The prose of his own guitar. No fiddler on this day, this hour. Gunman cannot hide. The time table shows. Pat Garrett out of rides. Billy the Kid in one last draw of this hour of the gun. Dylan counts thee assures…the measures of the doors. Heaven in song.

 BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

 Those blood reined tracks…must is the reign and saddle. Most are the plans you’ll spread. Riders badged and heaven star pasted push-back winds. How many revolves of the doors. Must stay focus. Centered and path. Four by four are the steadies in song. Vocals stay-ed smooth…come and go to next-ed verse. Seamless and bodied to mandolin seated whole sequenced and rye. The company one keep…obeys only in honest ways through the open air that guides… Leaves behind the empties of gust and cruel…keep the beauty of stain glass and presumes of iron-on dreams. Pipes and homestead more than child-like takes and images. The answers seem to flow in partnership, as if they’ve always been there. The unity heart feed-stock…the horse you’ll run. No needs more than ten. Commanded tights in moral standbys—all the way to the sings of the bridge. Fall the draws and the empties and canned in faces, not what this is about. Rows and rows of followers—wishing wells lost their pennies, oft track…cash their final coin. Margins bargain left next door. The band, up and played on. The right fit is “the whole” What gets it done…pasted those bloody tracks.

 JOHN WESLEY HARDING

  (THE NEXT FORCE DRIVEN TRAIL)

 John Wesley Harding looked out the shack and it’s holds of those old days. Decisions with less ‘sun up’ waking hours until realized of the sleep. Wind drawn to nap-sack …flow the ways. The pen or pencil, a kind of artist pad of words and wisest, as a tree or brush run of the clear sighted day. Mom- esk Robin Red above the branch lines… as cinnamon lunches to fledgling, close distances…the clear sighted Mary, Me–Mom…as June Wesley, tall stick in hand–clear the smokes of old campfire…smoky ridges need no home. The avenue is a trail to the best won stories of one’s soul searches. Brandy is a virtue to the flights of birds that stalk and prey. NEW DAY

Harding on his way further North, fights the good fight…sees what is much clearer now. Spring visit a little while…Harding too. The buds and wished of springs…water levers fill in the calm cool drink of day…clearer now, though older. Solar be of a sun…feeling never so young.

 SERIES OF DREAMS

  (TENDING ACES. THESE SERIES OF DREAMS)

  The poet delves in sequenced paired halves…images as if tossed and slowed—right back at the steady eyes…brings and basket-ed as three. The turn of the hands and in halves of the clock…it’s hour and seconds united. Clauses and energy dusts o’ mighty in partnered dreams. The poet knows, as if life is but a dream. Gently cadences—sees of all our frailties in rows. Paddle down stream…the fine feathers of all the animals knowing so well. Feed their young…honor and prides of Lions. C.S. Elliott brought his son. Sun rises all of the same. Sets of Jobs and riches. Count our blessings…give thanks of the little things that which bring us real joy. Family, friends…few if be of the wiser. Family on the pick-ed blend of good and bad…may all be brought back to happy sides…cures; even of no longer in good graces. This series of dreams has a bed and kind of food for thought bellyful for breakfast. And when we wake up, we are fit and rightly meant to see our actual home of homes…Just a precise and little bit before the last myriad of fly-full years. Screen Jam should have bought a camera…though may indeed just ride the clouded puffs of carpet. Magic and pearls. Tending aces, these series of dreams. Dylan song signatures…interprets in strides of three.

 THE TEMPEST

 (IN-SIGHTED LONG-ED DAYS) 

 The spade to earth, every cornered edge, every new beginning. Then the muddle, less the will. The ware-withal …a certain kind of sense—go tempered the bloodstream. Iron’s still knock-knee hots for a little more certain endeavored reason. Cause. Living callus days into years. The weathered bright star you are. The frightened pace of ”back and forth”…days grow short in the ending of one’s ‘dears and dared, as in life’ Busy me in the branched frost glisten of a mature mind. Find humor and mellow along the slow walk path finding home once more. The canals whom you once came charging in; now are a backdrop memory old as one is young. The forfeit is optional in withering aged. Tall cropped hair out of  monkey business of only youth fit dreams, though so old. So busy with just that. A few cent penny stockings buy me an old green stamp, i only used to know. But it’s alright, I’m only seeming. The dig is worth the born driven plot in grounds. Beautiful sky of orange leaf angling in corner eye. Lay spun a beautiful place. Rest me a lot, I’ll need it—for those dreams of gardens…riches. Now i have um all. Raise like a sunlamp…phased once more.  

When Andrea and I moved to Shropshire in 1989 we were the proud owners of a black Jaguar, a black cat, and an Albino golden Retriever. The car might have been a bit of an overdraft-hungry wreck but when we reclined its big leather seats it became a large double-bed, room for the dog and the cat in the footwell.

In those days petrol was less than 40p a litre and it was our greatest weekend pleasure to head off into the wilds of Shropshire and slide with oil-slick precision down the nameless byways and country lanes of this fabled county.

 We’d take beer and sandwiches and camp overnight, in our Jaguar, outside hamlets and ancient settlements with curious names like Loppington, English Frankton and Clive …

One summer’s evening we arrived at a crossroads with a derelict three-storey Victorian mansion on the top of a hill to left. The crossroads, however, were nameless and marked only by the roots of an upturned tree, the four litre engine purred like a panther at rest as we tried to decide which road to follow. The dog was as happy as the day had been long, panting out of the rear window. The cat was asleep on the back shelf.

Andrea smiled and said: “You choose.”

Behind us was the way home, to the left was the road back to Ellesmere and rural civilization, if we took a right we’d head off into Wales, so, I chose to take the overgrown narrow lane ahead. It looked like night had already fallen down there.

Andrea looked at me: “It looks a bit scary!”

I smiled back: “That’s why we’re going.”

She laughed as I slipped the car into ‘drive’. The dog lay down as we moved slowly into the darkness.

***

We’d gone less than half a mile when our dog noticed something. He didn’t make a big thing of it, just cocked his ear and began to pant a little more heavily. The cat had moved from the window shelf onto Andrea’s lap.

Andrea and I were musing about the eeriness of this early evening darkness, yet the other roads I could have picked were still basking in the sunset.

Then something rushed by in the bushes. It seemed as big as a horse.

There is a geist that follows travelers in the darkness you know and once she is on your shoulder you lose the power to predict the future and to forget your own past. The female geist can make the wheels fall off everything from a travelling man’s wagon to a salesman’s Mondeo if she is so minded. 

Hoof beats fell away into the distance. The dog was still tense.

Well, it’s said too in the world of the traveler, that everything is revealed to he who travels slowly. And sure enough as we sailed slowly around the next bend, she was there as tall as a ship on top of a black gelding. Her black hair was cascading around like an eruption, and she appeared to scream as she yanked the horse’s head to the left. The animal reared twenty feet in the air and pawed the darkness as if it was boxing shadows.

           It all happened in abject silence until the moment this startling figure laughed triumphantly like a warning bell and looked directly at me. Birds fled the treetops as she crashed the horse into the undergrowth. Once she was no longer there, there wasn’t even a snapped branch to show where she had gone.

****

Chastened, we continued on down the lane with our ghost-hunterly antenna as tuned and as sensitive as the skin inside an old fashioned telephone.

           Eventually we came upon an oxbow lake, a tranche of water cut off from the meandering of a nearby river. Good idea or bad we decided to stay here, the animals could have their freedom and the crescent shaped lake looked romantic shimmering as it did in the newly arrived moonlight.

****

According to the moon now it was about 3am. Andrea was sleeping on the thick leather seats of the Jag the dog by her side, the cat was off incising dragon flies and moths. 

The power of the night stirred up a kind of awe inside me. I listened for noises in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the heavens danced with silent shooting stars but the air around me fluttered with tiny wings. Bats were tumbling in this teeming silence.   Nights like this were for dreaming and planning and worrying about nothing.  

… then I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a blade slicing through the forest.  Our cat abandoned its ballet of death and vanished, the dog began a long low growl.  Whatever it was was coming towards us, the dog slunk to my side, I let my hand rest on his head as he cocked his ears and narrowed his eyes.  This wasn’t a car or a station wagon.  

The night seemed to go out as this thing crashed through the forest, everything fell silent, the   sky emptied of stars and became so dark it was as if we’d fallen inside death itself. Irrationally I began to fear that this thing manifesting before my eyes was actually the geist.  Perhaps she  had mistaken us for true travelers, not just eccentric tourists.

Even the forest   was swallowed by the blackness and the air bristled with a sense of   revenge … it’s said that the geist is like a broken memory skipping through an obsessional list of needs and desires and here she was – now – speeding towards us like a ghost train. Thank God Andrea was still sleeping.  

The transformation that took place before my eyes was terrifying. The blackness slowly metamorphosised as this monolith of dark sucked in all the night and all the sap from the trees in a grand re-manifestation of single-minded revenge.

She was as tall as a ship on the back of that black gelding, her boots were long, to her knees, her blouse was sticking to her just about everywhere as she rasped for breath, I could make out it was  coagulated blood from the wide open gash down the side of her face.

She rode that gelding like it was kicking down waves as it reared high above me and my dog and boxed the air. She held the horse in that position for so long it became impossible. And she never once took her eyes off mine, not once. She was burrowing inside me, reading me until my head felt like it was exploding. The geist was sifting through my mind, overturning my very existence to see if I was the one she was hunting down.

I think in those few moments one wrong thought inside my head might have brought about my death … or worse. 

 The gelding flailed hooves as giant as clubs as the women leaned forward in the saddle moving her face closer to mine, I could see the snapped veins inside the gaping wound which had almost split her face in two. Her jaw was loose, swinging held on only by dry sinew. She drew closer to me.

Then she was gone and the stars came back into the sky.

****

The next morning we could hear a steam train off in the distance, see the steam too cutting through the plains. It was so early the birds were still rising, field mice were chattering.

Ah, this really is England but after I told Andrea what happened in the early hours, she thought it prudent to collect our animals and be on our way. 

We packed up quickly and set off back up the lane to Ellesmere and what we felt was safety. It was strange because the overgrown lane was still dark although the day was glowing all around us. As we reached the crossroads with the roots of the upturned tree I saw the derelict mansion again. I stopped and looked trying to read its atmosphere from a distance, I knew right away it was a monument to tragedy, abandoned because memories inside it were to strong for anyone to live with.  It was a ghost towering on the hill, dead eyes in the upper ruins of rooms filled by the whistling of the wind by day and by agonised memory in the night. Time stood still inside its broken wings.  

I said nothing to Andrea and we drove on.  

I’ve never been back to that part of Shropshire although we’ve travelled extensively in the county, it really is a beautiful place to explore. But part of me wants to discover the story behind the tall horse rider and the abandoned house on the hill.

Perhaps one day soon we will return.

#GHOSTS #HUNTERS #SHROPSHIRE #SUPERNATURAL #JAGUAR #COUNTRYSIDE

I washed up in Central and Eastern Europe as an itinerant travel journalist in the blistering summer of 2015 … I remember Mr Vlad ‘Action Man’ Putin was still, daily, baring his chest and his teeth after annexing Crimea.

Mr Putin was obviously emboldened by his new war of attrition.

After all, he’d got noticed by raising his manly shaven head above the world trenches – and nobody had blown it off.

He was like a farmer in the city, land-grabbing wherever he wanted and boasting he was only taking back what was historically Russia’s.

Not many had died in the Crimea anyway. So, apart from three protesters and three soldiers, not much damage done. In Putin’s mind.

Me? I was out there to report on the big damage the little man had done to Crimea’s once-booming travel industry.

Crimean Peninsula was regularly described as ‘the diamond suspended from the south coast of Ukraine’. It was one of the world’s top destinations,  accounting for about a quarter of Crimea’s economy.

But now tourism was dead on its Lilo in a pond of lilies.

****

A few months later I was invited by a group of business people to look at tourism in neighbouring ‘Little Big Country’ Slovakia, another victim of greed behind Russia’s twitchy iron curtain.

On August 20, 1968, 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks had hit  Czechoslovakia to destroy what was being described as the Prague Spring — a liberalising of a communist country. But they were no match for the Soviet tanks.

Within weeks of arriving in Slovakia, I felt at home in this once tin-pot little country of shell suits, leaky Trabants and hard liquor. And I stayed there for fifteen years … in fact ‘til my liver inflated like a back street Russian balloon shop, and I remembered the NHS.

I flew back to the covid greyness of the UK and took the cure.

Slovakia had grown around me and when I flew home – July 6, 2021  – the Trabants and polyester suits were being rapidly replaced by BMWs, Armani and posh eating houses.

A few months later Russia’s dogs of war gathered and howled as missiles and bullets rained down on Kiev, a city I’d got to know well.

I hope to return later this year to the Slavic ‘states’. But I know I will be going back to regions filled with fear and loathing.

I wanted to share two stories that in some ways express the true human cost of Russia sending its dogs of war to mark their horrific territories for its resurgence.

https://open.substack.com/pub/leighgbanks/p/death-at-the-bus-stop-the-intimacy?r=drr6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

https://open.substack.com/pub/leighgbanks/p/jozef-bonk-19-was-shot-and-then-demonised?r=drr6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

It would be so easy to go with my tabloid mates and write a short eulogy to Sinead O’Connor headlined Nothing Compared to Her …

And it would be true.

I met her once, on a dark rainy night in a dingy back-street pub in Birmingham.

And nothing did compare to her, way back when, towards the turn of the last century. Sinead was beautiful in every way, diminutive, elfin, dark, stylish, gypsy and smiley.

But it was her eyes.

All I can say is that, as she sipped her small beer – and, I think, smoked one cigarette after the other – it was her eyes, deep as black pools. She watched everything like survival.

It was impossible though to avoid seeing fear in there too.

And yet heroism burned in the background, always her mind was ready to fight for what she saw as true and right.

Sinead O’Connor was beautiful in every way. I was a bit jealous of the man with her, a fellow journalist I knew vaguely who was holding her tattooed hand protectively under the table.

But she wasn’t just a dark child from Dublin, not just a serial wife, not just a mother or a singer, or an activist, or a victim of life’s fickle horrors. Sinead was an artist, a woman who sang her life away for us.

Sinead never hid her pain, and the late 90s was a rough period within her life. She was derided, became a figure of ridicule and responded by exposing herself even more – anger, challenges, attacks – running through the darkness in America.

Then her beautiful son Shane, aged 17, died. And so did she.

It took her a year to go though.

 Sinead was shaved bald, waif-like, vulnerable and yet she was ferocious too and beautiful and honest. And a fighter.

Update on the story I may never be able to tell you

PART III

THE PLEDGE

Storm clouds are gathering … the town looks like it’s on fire, Genghis’s ghost army is billowing.

Yep, those good ol’ good fellas are getting ready for war… they’re pumping up their ancient smoke and mirror machines.

 Stirrup pumps and burning cabinets.

They are the arsonists of truth and security. These good fellas take away your safety, put you in jeopardy and pocket your hard-earned cash and demand that you do not insult them, attack them, expose them or tell the world they are lying cheating vicious, black-hearted conmen and women.

I’ll be ready for them this time though…

 I’ll be right here, waiting behind my cabin door. If those bastards want to fight on my doorstep, they’ve got it!   

I might only last a few seconds as the punches fly – but I’ll black some eyes, break some noses and ruin some reputations on my way down. I just have to accept that when my head finally hits the concrete and I bleed from my ears, they will turn around and ride their stolen horses away…

You can just hear them can’t you: “That taught the c*nt … that’ll teach ‘em all round here, if you take us on, you are dead!”

They’ll ride their crock horses to malady cross, slug whisky and suck on gay cigars – that’s what these bad boys do in their Bada Bing go-go bar.

Bada bing, bada boom, eh?

Or so they think.

Yeh, I’m watching Genghis’s army gathering… but its head is in the clouds and they forget I am a farmer in the city…

PART II

THE FEAR

Yep, it has happened again … they are gathering at my back door. The lights of the road don’t reach there.

I am going to have to fight them again, aren’t I.

I beat them off last time, but I had to go into hiding afterwards.

Below is everything I can tell you about what is going on… it is something I need to share with you without being muzzled by fear … this a terrifying story about money, power, abuse, loss, cynicism, corruption, secrets and lies.

But I can’t tell you anything about it.

All I can tell you is that soon there will be blood. And it won’t only be mine.

PART I

THE PARANOIA

And they WILL NOT destroy me and my family.

It’s a story of crime and flabby gangsters, conmen and shysters, all the worse for the smiles on their bloated shavers-rash faces and their tea-breath fibs.

That’s them over there, though I dare not share their names.

But beware, they are all around you. They hide in everybody’s plain view.

Look out your window now!

THERE THEY ARE, LOOKING IN!

Others are keeping on going in dump trucks, in 4x4s and on horseback.

Yep, on horseback. Working class hooray Henry and Henriettas clopping down the lanes on their proud posing mares…

Wait!

Sshhh…

That could give even a casual reader a clue. Sounds like it might be a rural tale, about not-so everyday country folk!

Sshh!

I can’t risk it…

So, for transparency and fairness (and security and safety), this kind of gangsterism goes on in cities and towns too, and in any corporate thrashing ground. So, I could be keeping this secret about anywhere…

After all, I’ve lived all around the world, boys.

No, I can’t pin it down for you to anything more than ‘somewhere around the world boys’ … yeh, crime that happens whether you are watching the glister in  Vienna at night, or ruminating in a beautiful morning of elephant’s eyes.

But my silence isn’t fair to you is it.

And it’s not fair on me, the whistleblower who’s had his whistle blown and now is afraid to tell his story. I only set out to right a wrong, which could even have been a mistake.

At first.

But then the bullies started lying about me to everybody and dropping simulated pearls in a few diamond encrusted shell-likes.

Truth is, between the bullies and the shell-likes, they shook me and my family up – then shut us down.

And they left me in fear of just how far they might go to get their own way.

Seriously, I can’t tell you what part of the world this is happening in, little tin-pot thieves aspiring to be pillars of society.

They are the real good fellas.

So, back to the window while nobody is looking in and I can’t see any listening van outside either.

Let’s look at the facts – It would be psychologically, emotionally and financially dangerous for me to share this story with you now…

But I can’t tell you what happened, when, where and who these people are who believe they are entitled to crush the lives of the little man under the wheels of pan-global progress.

Who are they? I know, I have their names … but I can’t expose them, they are simply too powerful, dishonest, self-serving and stick their silver tongues down just too many shell-likes. I’ve got all the answers you know, documents, emails, recordings, letters from government officials and Ministers, and billidos containing personal insults lies and threats …

And it is this very dossier that brought about this very real danger.

Well, that and the fact I took it to the police.

Yep, that scared those blingy gangsters out of their pretend Bada Bing club.

It scared ‘em, for sure.

But only for a bit.

Then a few more pearls appear to have been dropped into other shell-likes, many under pointy hats topping off blue suits.

The police station door clanged in my face.

I’d reached my metaphorical cell-by date.

But, the way out of it all was simple for me. The didn’t tie me to a chair or anything – or hang me upside down from a meat hook – just kept offering me an escape route …

Masonic marauders in cummerbunds and lacy Hush Puppies, kept telling me all I had to do was keep my mouth shut.

Stay schtum; Avoid telling the truth.

Not stand up for the rights of myself and others.

Losing my home and my family was the ultimate price they would expect me to pay if I ever wanted to be counted again.

By then though it’d gone to far – I was outed by the powerful ones as an obsessive and a weirdo, a dope-smoking, hard drinking ex-Fleet Street journalist, a seeker of truth not to be trusted.

I’d gone to a member of parliament (they have them all over the world you know).

And then the battle got elevated to Parliament itself.

The word was out and the Bill I was championing was filibustered into a blank  stone.

A nameless headstone for a nameless man who went down fighting but would soon be forgotten.

As far as the good fellas were concerned though, they just saw me as a bit of a nameless cult!

Although I can never explain to you why every one of them – from detractors, horse-faced neigh-sayers, buzzing negative gnats, brain-dead bone doctors, to poisonous scoffers – were so determined to bask in the bonfires of my losses.

And yes, because this fraternity of old-fashioned, boozy, gobby, rolled-gold-dripping, deal-making, fat cat tw*ts, operates in every community across the world, people loose so much to them every day.

Often the sanctity of their homes and hopes for the future.

Because of this ‘mafiosa’ – and I use that term with a certain amount of nebulosity – I could be about £100,000 out of pocket.

But I don’t suppose I should have told you even that, should I?

I am genuinely afraid that these so-called people might turn up one day and kick down my gates and set fire to my boundaries to shut me up forever.

Corruption is dishonesty undertaken by somebody with power to acquire illicit benefits for themselves.

Like I say, I have a lot of evidence to show this is what happened.

Yes, I am afraid. Very afraid.

The things I dare not tell you about are like the final nails in the coffin lid of democracy and honesty.

I have been a full-blown working journalist all my adult life and I have exposed cant, pomposity, cruelty and abuse on a daily basis. I worked on exposing Jimmy Savile and his cronies.

Back then though, I had all the backing of legal eagles who were feathering their nests by protecting people like me – journalists – from the criminals and perverts we were on the tail of.

Nowadays, though I’m just that ancient trouble-causer down the road who the bullies wish would simply go away.

Or die.

I’ve got to say I haven’t done either yet – and there will be blood

Many years ago I was commissioned by a leading magazine to investigate the burgeoning interest in ancient hauntings in the early 2000s … I got quite well paid for the articles over three years and retained the copyright.

Anyway, I ‘sold’ myself as the Skeptical Occultist with a mission to prove or disprove existence of ghosts which would bring us a lot closer to proving or disproving the existence of God!

A grandiose claim, I know and blush a modicum internally as I have to admit we proved absolutely nothing!

Still, it was interesting (for a while) and took us to some strange places…

In this case, Welcome to Electric Lady land.

And sitting there, over by the roaring log fire, is Mavis Price, the Electric Lady herself. She prides herself on being able to cause electrical goods to explode simply by touching them; kettles, irons, toasters all have fallen victim to her kinetic powers.

Once she had to abandon a computer training course after blowing up an Apple Mac.

With her is Terry, a tortured little slip of a man who is staking his future on a liver transplant.  He’s an ebullient character though and says he shares his rented flat with a man who died from liver failure decades ago. They communicate through a second-hand television set.

Mavis is middle-aged and full of raucous laughter. Periodically she wafts her walking cane at a ghost cat muling around her ankles. Terry might look ill but he is regaling Mavis with his camp and witty tales. His hands tremble as he warms them against the flames of the fire.

I wonder if he knows that those flames may be roaring up from the conflagration in Satan’s hearth? Mythology in this small rugged enclave of rural Shropshire has it that the fireplace Mavis and Terry are sharing is one of  the county’s Gateway to Hell.

Nothing is what it seems here at the Alerston Inn, on the outskirts of Telford. Even the Gateway to Hell is, in reality, an ancient well capped after the tragic death of a young girl one hundred and fifty years ago.

And the inn? Well, that isn’t what it purports to be either. It looks like a bucolic 19^th century coaching house, and boasts an ingle nook, crannies and corridors, a wealth of oak beams, uneven walls and a steep and narrow stairwell. The central heating rattles incessantly but makes the building hum with an almost oppressive heat. The floorboards creak and doors groan.

But the Alerston Inn is a modern folly, a house-that-John-built in 1985 on the site of an ancient piggery.

Local builder John Clarke wanted to construct a property that looked as if it had been there for centuries. And he succeeded.  It’s an eccentric, charming and incomprehensible pile.

The motley crew of paranormal investigators, have taken up their posts around the pub and guest rooms, and they are quiet with anticipation. This could be a good investigation, some very strange things happened two weeks ago when IMP did their baseline tests.

Two happened to me. I really do not have a desire to be numbered amongst the haunted, but like Mavis has an effect on electrical goods, I seem to have an effect on things beyond the grave. That’s why I’m here with IMP, for a greater understanding of the fundaments of life after death.

The first incident happened at about 4pm as I photographed the outside of the £60-a-night inn. The shutter captured two curious balls of light flitting across the roof. They are particularly curious because they have tails like comets, short and stubby, but tails all the same. And they are moving in different directions. Initial tests on the photograph show that these ’comets’ do not seem to be made up of the natural constituents of light, the red and blue  of the rainbow appear to be missing.

Later that evening I was talking to Les Beer, co-ordinator of IMP and other team members on the corridor outside Room 7, the room landlady Merle Cotterill says is her most haunted. Suddenly the ceiling light above my head began to spin impossibly. Les and I watched in astonishment as the lamp made a dozen circumnavigations of my head. Then it stopped dead. Not even a sway.

There were no draughts along the corridor, no open windows and the lamp was too high for me to have knocked.

And the movement it made could only be recreated by holding the flex and spinning the lamp vigorously.

This all added grist to the mill for the investigators.  Merle had already told us of a chanting she heard on this same corridor: “It was almost like a red Indian chant, very disturbing. It just went on and on. I get very nervous up here and don’t like being by myself. And it’s not just me … the girl who cleans the rooms for us has told about things being moved from room to room. She describes it as a playful poltergeist.

“Then a guest in Room 7 became very uncomfortable after he saw a shadow walking around the bed.”

Mavis too has seen things: “I was sitting in the bar when a cat started brushing up against my leg, I kept shoo-ing it with my cane – but there was nothing there. Nothing, yet I could feel it brushing up against me. Another time, I had my credit card in my hand when something snatched it off me and flung it across the room.”

Terry claims to have seen two old men sitting in the bar area. The pub was closed. He described them as Victorian workmen, coats pulled tight against the cold, thick cavalry twirl pants, boots worn, soles still thick.   Their hands were cracked and dry and looked like clay in the moonlight. Fingers tapped on the arms of the chair.

The investigation began late. It was almost 1am when the tills were cashed and staff  had gone home. Les, Merion, Paul and myself settled in the dark in Room 7 armed with recording equipment and monitors. Other investigators based themselves in the corridor at the top of the stairs with infra-red cameras and Tom set up camp in the bar near the entrance.

And so we waited in the dark in sweltering heat on a moonless night. The Alerston Inn yawed and groaned around us like an ancient sailing ship.

 It was as hot as hell in Room 7, despite the fact the heating had gone off a couple of hours earlier. It was so hot that Merion lay down on the floor to find cooler air. Room 7 is very small, barely enough space for the double bed, hand wash basin and the wall mounted TV. It was airless and uncomfortable for four men.

Then something happened. Les inexplicably began to complain of feeling cold down his right-hand side. He sounded spooked and shined a lamp onto his arm to show the goose-bumps spreading like a rash.

Paul pointed a directional thermometer at him and we watched as Les’s temperature dropped by four degrees in as many seconds.

It was obviously bothering him despite his protests that he was fine. He kept muttering: “This is weird … this is weird  … this is really weird.”

I felt the air around him, but there was no discernable change in the temperature. Paul started to get concerned and asked Les if he wanted to take a break.

Les’s reply was terse: “No – this is what we’re here for – note it down.”

Interestingly, the night’s log showed that Tom had experienced the thing at the same time downstairs in the bar.

The rest of the night passed uneventfully amidst the creaking of the inn, the hushed whispers of the investigators and the submarine-like bleeps of their equipment.

At 4.30am Les called off the hunt and the team began packing up. But Les had one last trick up his sleeve and the Alerston Inn was about to respond gamely.

He used a technique I’ve witnessed him use once before and it had an equally dramatic result then. Les calls it Electronic Voice Phenomena, or, in laymen’s terms, Calling Out.

The simplest thing to do is give you a transcript of the three minutes ten second recording he made at dawn as embers died in the fireplace. There are long silences:

Les: The beginning of EVP experiment … can you give us your name? (silence) Can you tell us if you live here? (silence) Can you tell us if you died in here? (silence) Can you tell us if you are a man? (silence) Can you tell us if you are a woman? (silence) Can you tell us if you are looking for somebody? (silence) If you are looking for somebody, is that somebody a girl? (silence) (Inaudible) … any messages you’d like to leave (inaudible) on this table?  Leave any message you want. (Silence) I have one final question for you … are you a little girl who fell down the well? (Silence) Are you looking for somebody who fell down the well which is situated under the fireplace?

Tape: (Muffled sound) ‘No’.

Les: Did you say ‘No’? (silence) Was that you talking? Did you just say  ‘No’ to my question? (silence) Did you say ‘No’ to your (sic) little girl? Or did you say ’No’ to the well?

The tape ends.

So, there we have it, one fascinating night in the land of the Electric Lady. Of course there is nothing conclusive, at best it’s a hotchpotch of unusual tales and mythologies, unexplained happenings and an indistinct voice on a bad recording.

None of it adds up and for a very good reason. Whereas the equation of life is calculable, written as it is across the face of the world, the equation of death is written in the recesses of the mind. Parts are hidden in dark places of fear, prejudice and ridicule and parts of it are undoubtedly written in places we have not yet discovered.

But the equation of death is the sum total of life itself, so we must keep on looking.

Nice guy who crooned his life away for us all

I was sad to hear of the death of crooner and all-round good guy Tony Bennett at the age of 96. In some ways he was the urbane smiling, freshly showered, elegant face of smartness and comfy shoes, no matter how patent.

This is a personal view – I think Tony was on top of his own world but never became the vocal influence he should have been – but who was he up against? Frank, Elvis and Bob, that’s who!

Thanks for reading Leigh’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

They each had an eccentricity that I never saw in him … Frank was edgy and dangerous even when he was covered by syrup, Elvis could break your heart with his baritone andits tenor-tendencies … and Bob? Well, listen to every rock singer in the past half a century and you will hear Bob’s influence.

Yep, Tony was stylish but there were others with more impact…

But I am genuinely pleased that Once Upon a Time I shared the world with him…

Here’s Bob singing for Tony…

Sadly, we have to defend a frog-eyed monster to protect our own freedoms

Coutts, perceived as an international private bank for the super-rich,  has cancelled one of the most dangerous men in the UK.

But this censorship had nothing to do with Farage’s political pontifications or the fact that the ex-banker-turned-big-w*!nk*r has been erroneously described as not being too well-off, or even Brexit.

No, a leaked memo shows bank executives just hated his views.

And quite rightly too!

“He is considered by many to be a ­disingenuous grifter,” they said.

But when our Prime Minister says: “This is wrong. No one should be barred from basic services for their political views. Free speech is the cornerstone of our democracy”, then surely we, as a nation, need to defend Nigel Farage.

To many, he is a politically dangerous – but in this case he is a victim too, victim of a new form of control… corporate social control – it is already around us everywhere …

We aren’t fighting for him, we are fighting for US!

A very personal view of the man who smiles in the face of hate …

“Nigel Farage looks like a tobacco stained, beer burping, pop-eyed frog …

And I say this with heart-felt sincerity.

I also picture him as an international sickipedia of vileness, hiding his dystopian distemper in a half-light of untruths and vomitus invective.

As I’m sure you have gathered by now – and after only 39 words of overstated lampoonery and downright insult – I despise the bones of Nigel Farage and his beer-swilling bonhomie is one of the lowest common denominators in Britain today.

And I have a lot of reasons for saying this!

One of them just happens to be his own dark art of insulting over-statement.

The difference between mine and his over statement though is simple… I insult an ugly hearted bloke.

He wears his ugly heart on his corduroy sleeve and is more than happy to flick the switch on anything that might shine a dishonest light on the plight of our world’s refugees.

The truth is, vulnerable people, many fleeing for their lives, are groomed by people traffickers and are put in peril in the sea.

I say they deserve better than a Captain Hogwash floating in a little boat off the coast of Dover claiming to be a journalist, which is rather fishy anyway as he has only written the odd column and done a bit of broadcasting!

Nigel Farage, the former Brexit party leader, didn’t try to help those refugees in leaky boats and freezing conditions, some with young children to protect.

No!

He filmed this stateless flotsam of   …

Surely people have a right to flee these regimes.

And surely that is not over-stating any case about anything other than an ugly heart pumping bad blood round an ex-banker who has a fashion fetish for corduroy and wants to leave the weak drifting too far from any shore.

#farage #farago #migrants #channel #refugees #deaths #sea #dinghies

Society’s good fellas use their dull knives of lies to play ‘split the kipper’ with my life

Yep, it has happened again … they are gathering at my back door. The lights of the road don’t reach there.

I am going to have to fight them again, aren’t I.

I beat them off last time, but I had to go into hiding afterwards.

Below is everything I can tell you about what is going on… it is something I need to share with you without being muzzled by fear … this a terrifying story about money, power, abuse, loss, cynicism, corruption, secrets and lies.

But I can’t tell you anything about it.

All I can tell you is that soon there will be blood. And it won’t only be mine.

Thanks for reading Leigh’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

And they WILL NOT destroy me and my family.

It’s a story of crime and flabby gangsters, conmen and shysters, all the worse for the smiles on their bloated shavers-rash faces and their tea-breath fibs.

That’s them over there, though I dare not share their names.

But beware, they are all around you. They hide in everybody’s plain view.

Look out your window now!

THERE THEY ARE, LOOKING IN!

Others are keeping on going in dump trucks, in 4x4s and on horseback.

Yep, on horseback. Working class hooray Henry and Henriettas clopping down the lanes on their proud posing mares…

Wait!

Sshhh…

That could give even a casual reader a clue. Sounds like it might be a rural tale, about not-so everyday country folk!

Sshh!

I can’t risk it…

So, for transparency and fairness (and security and safety), this kind of gangsterism goes on in cities and towns too, and in any corporate thrashing ground. So, I could be keeping this secret about anywhere…

After all, I’ve lived all around the world, boys.

No, I can’t pin it down for you to anything more than ‘somewhere around the world boys’ … yeh, crime that happens whether you are watching the glister in  Vienna at night, or ruminating in a beautiful morning of elephant’s eyes.

But my silence isn’t fair to you is it.

And it’s not fair on me, the whistleblower who’s had his whistle blown and now is afraid to tell his story. I only set out to right a wrong, which could even have been a mistake.

At first.

But then the bullies started lying about me to everybody and dropping simulated pearls in a few diamond encrusted shell-likes.

Truth is, between the bullies and the shell-likes, they shook me and my family up – then shut us down.

And they left me in fear of just how far they might go to get their own way.

Seriously, I can’t tell you what part of the world this is happening in, little tin-pot thieves aspiring to be pillars of society.

They are the real good fellas.

So, back to the window while nobody is looking in and I can’t see any listening van outside either.

Let’s look at the facts – It would be psychologically, emotionally and financially dangerous for me to share this story with you now…

But I can’t tell you what happened, when, where and who these people are who believe they are entitled to crush the lives of the little man under the wheels of pan-global progress.

Who are they? I know, I have their names … but I can’t expose them, they are simply too powerful, dishonest, self-serving and stick their silver tongues down just too many shell-likes. I’ve got all the answers you know, documents, emails, recordings, letters from government officials and Ministers, and billidos containing personal insults lies and threats …

And it is this very dossier that brought about this very real danger.

Well, that and the fact I took it to the police.

Yep, that scared those blingy gangsters out of their pretend Bada Bing club.

It scared ‘em, for sure.

But only for a bit.

Then a few more pearls appear to have been dropped into other shell-likes, many under pointy hats topping off blue suits.

The police station door clanged in my face.

I’d reached my metaphorical cell-by date.

But, the way out of it all was simple for me. The didn’t tie me to a chair or anything – or hang me upside down from a meat hook – just kept offering me an escape route …

Masonic marauders in cummerbunds and lacy Hush Puppies, kept telling me all I had to do was keep my mouth shut.

Stay schtum; Avoid telling the truth.

Not stand up for the rights of myself and others.

Losing my home and my family was the ultimate price they would expect me to pay if I ever wanted to be counted again.

By then though it’d gone to far – I was outed by the powerful ones as an obsessive and a weirdo, a dope-smoking, hard drinking ex-Fleet Street journalist, a seeker of truth not to be trusted.

I’d gone to a member of parliament (they have them all over the world you know).

And then the battle got elevated to Parliament itself.

The word was out and the Bill I was championing was filibustered into a blank  stone.

A nameless headstone for a nameless man who went down fighting but would soon be forgotten.

As far as the good fellas were concerned though, they just saw me as a bit of a nameless cult!

Although I can never explain to you why every one of them – from detractors, horse-faced neigh-sayers, buzzing negative gnats, brain-dead bone doctors, to poisonous scoffers – were so determined to bask in the bonfires of my losses.

And yes, because this fraternity of old-fashioned, boozy, gobby, rolled-gold-dripping, deal-making, fat cat tw*ts, operates in every community across the world, people loose so much to them every day.

Often the sanctity of their homes and hopes for the future.

Because of this ‘mafiosa’ – and I use that term with a certain amount of nebulosity – I could be about £100,000 out of pocket.

But I don’t suppose I should have told you even that, should I?

I am genuinely afraid that these so-called people might turn up one day and kick down my gates and set fire to my boundaries to shut me up forever.

Corruption is dishonesty undertaken by somebody with power to acquire illicit benefits for themselves.

Like I say, I have a lot of evidence to show this is what happened.

Yes, I am afraid. Very afraid.

The things I dare not tell you about are like the final nails in the coffin lid of democracy and honesty.

I have been a full-blown working journalist all my adult life and I have exposed cant, pomposity, cruelty and abuse on a daily basis. I worked on exposing Jimmy Savile and his cronies.

Back then though, I had all the backing of legal eagles who were feathering their nests by protecting people like me – journalists – from the criminals and perverts we were on the tail of.

Nowadays, though I’m just that ancient trouble-causer down the road who the bullies wish would simply go away.

Or die.

I’ve got to say I haven’t done either yet – and there will be blood.

#artificialintelligence #media #blood #journalist #robots