His latest book is Waiting for The Etonians – Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (Fourth Estate, February 2009).

Illustrated HASTalk by Alison Oldham, Visual Correspondent for the Ham and High Not Only the Sister: Rediscovering the work of painter Jeanne du Maurier and poet Noël Welch Daphne du Maurier’s younger sister Jeanne met Noël Welch in Basutoland in 1947. This talk reveals what happened from that point onwards, using readings and unique slides to illustrate their individual work and shared life in St Ives and Devon. The three du Maurier sisters – the daughters of actor-manager Gerald and granddaughters of author/illustrator George – grew up in Cannon Hall in Hampstead and all later move to the West Country. Jeanne, who died in 1997, was an intimiste painter influenced by the Impressionists and Noël is a poet and memoirist of rare sensibility, most recently published in journals in PN Review. Alison came to know Noël and her work – and hence Jeanne by one remove – when she was the Tate St Ives/ Falmouth College of Arts Research Fellow from 1999 to 2001. Time: 7:00 for 7:30 p.m – 9 p.m. Date: Thursday, 2nd April 2009 Place: NW3. Details upon registration.

Alison Oldham was born in Wiltshire in 1947, moved to Cornwall in 1961 and to London in 1965. She studied philosophy at University College London and worked as a lecturer, journalist and editor before embarking on research into writing in and about Cornwall in the mid 20th century.

For the past five years she has been the visual arts correspondent of the Ham & High while continuing with literary research. Her book Everyone was Working: Writers and Artists in Postwar St Ives was published by Tate Publishing in 2002.

Alison edited Noël’s collected poems A Shadow to its Tree, which was published in 2006 by Samphire Press in a limited edition of 250, and signed copies will be available for £15 at the talk.

HASTalk and Music-making  by Daniel Cainer, Composer and Performer Creative Choices in Chronicling the Chronicles Songwriter Daniel Cainer will deconstruct some of his work and try to explain how and why he makes creative choices. He will be as fascinated as anyone at how this information will be revealed. Expect live excerpts from songs, some examples of how demos turned into finished productions and a few good laughs. Time: 7:00 for 7:30 p.m – 9 p.m. Date: Sunday, 26th April 2009 Place: N10. Details upon registration.

Daniel Cainer has composed much theme and incidental music for TV. He has written and performed topical songs on LBC and BBC Radio. He's a music producer and consultant, and the author of the musical EX! His latest one man show, Jewish Chronicles, has played across the country and comes to The Shaw Theatre on May 10th, 2009.

 

Good for the Jews?
Backstory to the show ‘The Jewish Chronicles’ by Daniel Cainer

My songwriting has always been topical. Confessional even. Of course, it’s a conventional medium for that kind of thing. But I wouldn’t like to think of myself as a relationship obsessed, self-pitying, self-indulgent moaner. Well, maybe I have been known to stray into that territory once or twice and that is largely because sometimes that’s just, you know, how I feel. And being a ‘topical’ songwriter, I’m like a journalist reporting on my current state of internal affairs. Anyway, we all like a good moan once in a while. So I try to file a good story. I try to tell my story.

I used to write a news-driven song and perform it, weekly on breakfast radio. This would involve staying up most of the preceding night, stressing, praying, agonizing, panicking and spinning like an agitated compass needle between self-congratulation at the top and self-flagellation at the bottom. I sit at the piano keyboard. I sing into a microphone. I send the mixed, high-fidelity sound to my headphones which I crank up loud. I fill my head and all that it’s connected to, with my amplified voice and piano. And I come up with something. I have to. I’m on air in a few short hours.

Where does it come from? God only knows. Which brings me round quite nicely, to the subject of my latest collection of songs, ‘Jewish Chronicles’.

This is not a topic I would have willfully chosen before the onset of my current midlife kosher-crisis condition. And it has taken a certain amount of bravery to stand on a stage and expose my Jewishness not only to the Gentile world but just as scarily to the Jewish community that I have had next to nothing to do with since I was 13.

‘I got as far,
As my Barmitzvah.’

I say in the song ‘Jewish Man’. The title speaks for itself and it has taken me irreversibly out of the kosher closet and via a detour or two, to the stage of The Shaw Theatre on May 10th, where I plan to make a right old song and dance about it.

And the timing... whilst the rockets fly between Israel and Gaza and the world plunges into a deep recession during which times historically the Jews have more than often been made scapegoats, I’ve become ‘the comic bard of Anglo-Jewry’. So said an article in the newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, on whose name the title of my show/collection/obsession shamelessly puns. I, who can count on my hands the number of times I’ve visited a synagogue in the last 30 years, find myself stretched between the secular and the Jewish World with my arms in the erm... Jesus pose, unable to extricate myself currently from either fixing.

‘Though I was born British, (soften the ‘t’ in ‘British’ )
I was also born Yiddish’

...and there, in a ground-nutshell, is my position.

On the day of my birthday four years ago I wrote a mildly exaggerated faux-epic 15 minute autobiographical comedy song. Like you do. It relates, in some detail, the story of my parents’ rather complex and messy marriage breakdown and the effect it had on me as a child. I was also only recently emerging from the wreckage of my own marital melodrama - and in case you’re wondering, I’d already written and staged a whole musical about that. So, now I am an expert on the subject – and I have learned the discipline of composing a tune in a hurry.  I am, as usual, desperate to impress. A captive audience is due to arrive at my house that evening, so I embark on making myself the fraught centre of attention by inflicting upon myself the oh-so-stressful and demanding conditions that I’ve described above. I am determined to write my own birthday song.  What better present could I give myself.

You could infer from this that I am a tad driven. And you would be right. Driven by any number of psycho-babbling inner forces of course. But driven also externally, I am beginning to recognise, by a more majestic Muse - whatever and whoever that is, we all have a view. So what is the mighty message that manifests through me?

‘Meanwhile in our family kitchen,
My mother according to our religion,
Was making every kosher dish:
Rolling out gefilte fish,
Knedalach, krepelach,
Anganach, Shake ‘n Vac,
Lighting candles, saying prayers,
All completely unawares’

[of my father’s affair:

‘She cases the joint,
She catches his eye,
But she’s about as a kosher
As a Wall’s Pork Pie’

with whom he would romantically liaise every Sunday morning at the launderette whilst doing the weekly family laundry – giving a new meaning to the term ‘service wash’]

From my birthday song ‘The Surbiton Washerama’, just to give you a little taste of it.  I am clearly a mere vessel.

 (A quick technical note: the addition of a brand name i.e. ‘Walls Pork Pie’ as opposed to plain old ‘pork pie’, I tend to find, adds greatly to the comic effect. It’s a useful device that gives a visual stamp, and it triggers off all those associations and memories, adding layers,  and piling on the pounds of weight faster than you can say ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’).

The truth is I am visited nearly all the time, with an overwhelming need to write. But I don’t/can’t till the last minute. Fear, adrenalin, a chemical cocktail of just the right combination to release the catches on the muse receptors and allow the Goddess in. Music, words, words, music? Tempo, rhythm, style? I run myself out of time so I have to run with what I’ve got. On this day I have no idea that I’m about to write a piece that is to erm... change my life, if not the whole course of Jewish Musical History.
 
Take the phrase ‘conduit’ and break it down to its syllabic parts. ‘Con’, ‘Jew’, ‘Wit’. The middle syllable: inescapable, the last: debatable, the former: the crux of my inner critic’s battle with itself. So I twist and turn and embellish the story both musically and lyrically.

I over-egg it. I throw in the ingredients that I might usually throw away. I take some musical risks.

I don’t mean that I experiment with diminished, augmented, flattened ninths – because my knowledge of the rudiments of music is frankly, rudimentary. But I do accidently-on-purpose flatten a note that turns my blossoming masterpiece into genuinely recognizable matzah-melancholy, worthy of a milkman in a schtetl.

At the same time, I flatten my carefully constructed fence of assimilated contemporary western singer-songwriter conventions with as much subtlety as an Israeli bulldozer on the West Bank. The story of my childhood as part of a suburban, observant, Jewish Addams Family, is given a Yidishe musical setting. And it comes so naturally, the rhythm, the lilt, the tune, the lament, the turn-on-a-sixpence from comedy to tragedy... I find my niche. Mazeltov, I hear you say.

The ‘Surbiton Washerama’ becomes the centrepiece of a suite of songs about a simultaneous ‘Jewish Journey’ of self-discovery. My new-found fascination with my ethnic history, and the discovery of how it informs so much of how I operate, I document, in song, as I go along. With the help of a (non-Jewish) therapist who seems to specialise in reforming lapsed Jews, I begin to reconnect with my roots.

A friend tells me she’s seen a notice in the London Jewish News, a free-sheet that she would not normally have seen – had it not been for a long list of Dickensian/New Age style ‘coincidences’ which she proceeds to tell me... in real time. Eventually, I hear that The Jewish Musical Institute (there is one) is looking for Jewish music and drama to take to Edinburgh Fringe. It’s more than a sign; it’s a burning bush.

The Edinburgh Preview takes place in the function room of The Spiro Ark, a Jewish outreach and education institute dedicated to keeping the flame alive. A full audience of paid-up, card-holding real-live Jews, with their critical faculties sharpened, are ready to pounce.

I have been trying to put my pieces in order, to give the sequence the right dramatic shape. But I don’t know how to start, how to set out the stall. The night before the Spiro Ark engagement, with headphones cranked up high, I come up with a way to start. Abraham’s first conversation with God set to a jaunty little music-hall style oom-pah on a slightly out of tune piano. Well, as much chutzpah, as oom-pah.  

I play my tunes, we laugh, we cry, I finish, they clap, they queue to offer their opinions. 

Ninety nine percent broadly complimentary. Apart from of course, the second line of the third verse of the fourth song when it would have been better if I’d said this rather than that. Oh, and some understandable, minor offense caused when I described God artificially inseminating Abraham’s barren wife using a turkey baster. A line I have since cut, by the way.

But let me focus on the negative. One woman objected to this:

I feel anger, I feel shame,
When I see what’s going on,
And carried out in my name,
In the West Bank and Lebanon,
That’s not the kind of Jew I am

“What are you ashamed of?” (she’s virtually grabbing my lapels and about to knee me in the groin). Inarticulate mumblings form me. I’m not good at this. I’m expressing a feeling... it’s not agitprop. “You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know about”. That’s not quite what she means but I think but you get the gist. Later she storms out in the middle of comedian Ivor Dembina’s routine about visiting a Jewish prostitute and haggling over the prices of the various services. There’s just no pleasing some people.

But this is my first introduction to the very thorny political issues of Israel and the Jews. My material is largely focused on what it means to be Jewish. Can you be it and not do it. Easier than doing it without being it. A bit of history. Some slightly sentimental tales of the old country, of tailors, of showbiz-agents, of triumph over tragedy. That kind of thing. When it comes to Israel, it’s hard to put a foot right. Criticism of Israel is quickly construed as anti-semitic. Even, and perhaps especially, by some Jews. This is something that I hope to address in new writing between now and May under the general heading “Is that good for the Jews?”.  It’s Raining - is that good for the Jews, or bad for the Jews. It’s Sunny - is that good for the Jews, or bad for the Jews.  So the sayings go.

Today, I have a piece about inadvertently driving through the West Bank, thanks to an errant satellite navigation device (don’t ask)  and “The Road to Jerusalem” written for the 60th Anniversary of the State. I’ve played the show in Glasgow and Manchester and Leeds, and filled the New End Theatre a number of times. I haven’t been stoned or shot by Gentiles or Jews. Indeed I’ve found the old adage of the ‘more personal you are, the more universal you are’ to be largely true. At least for me. I’m learning to hold my ground and write and sing from my heart as I find that the ‘con’ in ‘con/jew/wit’ might well be short for ‘connected’, albeit temporarily. This was certainly not my idea of a career strategy, but the news from the niche is quite good, at least for this Jew.

Last week I ran into my number one fan. At another function at the Spiro Ark, since you ask. She clocked me immediately, consulted her internal database of evil traitors to confirm that I was indeed the same self-hating, anti-semitic, Israel-bashing, Guardian-reading enemy of the people that she had previously identified, swiftly spun around and stormed out, again. Is that good for the Jews?
© Daniel Cainer and HASNotes

Daniel Cainer’s acclaimed one man show Jewish Chronicles plays at The Shaw Theatre on May 10th 2009  www.danielcainer.com