Lord of the Flies - A film by Peter Brook

1963, 35mm, black and white, 92 mins. Director & Screenplay: Peter Brook. Producer: Lewis M.Allen. Cinematography: Tom Hollyman, Gerald Feil. Music: Raymond Leppard. Cast: James Aubrey, Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards, Roger Elwin, Tom Gaman. Distributed by British Lion (UK) & Continental Distributing (US).

"You're a beast, and a swine, and a bloody, bloody thief!" ... "We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English! And the English are best at everything!"

All I wanted was a small sum of money, no script; just kids, a camera, and a beach.

A young American, Lewis Allen, felt that private backers could be found who would be interested in each putting up a couple of thousand dollars for a film.

With this sum they would have no excessive anxiety about losing the lot. He and his partner Dana Hodgdon had just financed the film of The Connection this way, and they offered to do the same for Lord of the Flies. We were going into the unknown and we knew that luck and faith were completion’s only security. In France, feature films have been made for $150. The $150 gets you through the first day’s shooting. By then, enough wheels are turning to get you through the second day and soon you have enough to show to justify credit for going on a bit longer. Our only question was how to get to the point of no return.

An assistant I had in New York named Mike Macdonald stood on the docks and accosted likely-looking families as they set foot on American soil. He loitered outside the circus, he wrote to the Embassy families in Washington, he found in the New York telephone directory an Old Estonians Club, an Old Harrovians Club and even one of the Old Boys of Mill Hill.

I suppose we saw about 3000 children, all anxious to be in the film, with parents ardently keen on the novel and glad to have a quiet summer with the children taken off their hands. Ralph, the leading boy, we found in a swimming pool in an army camp in Jamaica just four days before filming began. And as for Piggy, he arrived by magic through the post—a sticky Just William on lined paper, “Dear Sir, I am fat and wear spectacles,” and a crumpled photograph that made us cry with delight. It was Piggy, come to life in Camberley—the unique boy himself, conceived ten years before at the very moment that Golding was wrestling with the birth of the novel.

We found an island off the coast of Puerto Rico. A jungle paradise; miles of palm-fringed beaches owned by Woolworth’s. They lent us the island in exchange for a screen credit.

Being for once in a position to decide, I ruled that no one could ever question the use of film. This was our salvation, because despite bad weather, illness, no rushes, no lights, no facilities, we kept on shooting, several cameras turning at once, leaving them to run as we talked to the children, starting again and again. We ended up with 60 hours of unbroken screening—and a year’s editing. This was not the ideal technique, but it was the only technique open to us, and in a sense it was our completion guarantee. I believed that the reason for translating Golding’s very complete masterpiece into another form in the first place was that although the cinema lessens the magic, it introduces evidence.

The book is a beautiful fable—so beautiful that it can be refuted as a trick of compelling poetic style. In the film no one can attribute the looks and gestures to tricks of direction. The violent gestures, the look of greed, and the faces of experience are all real.

People always ask whether the children understood, and what effect it had on them. Many of their offscreen relationships completely paralleled the story. Even the wise and calm Piggy came to me one day close to tears. “They’re going to drop a stone on you,” the other boys had been telling him. “That scene on the schedule, Piggy’s death. It’s for real. They don’t need you anymore.” My experience showed me that the only falsification in Golding’s fable is the length of time the descent to savagery takes. His action takes about three months. I believe that if the cork of continued adult presence were removed from the bottle, complete catastrophe could occur within one long weekend.

- Peter Brook, excerpted from The Shifting Point © 1987.

Further information here, here and here.

Video content here and here.

Evil is inherent in the human mind, whatever innocence may cloak it.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values"

Nietzsche was born in Röcken, the Prussian province of Saxony, on October 15th, 1844. His father died when Nietzsche was five years old, hence, his childhood was spent with his mother, sister and two maiden aunts.

At fourteen the young Nietzsche was awarded a scholarship to enter the preparatory school, Schulpforta, with the intent of training for the clergy. He excelled in religious studies, German literature, and classical studies. He also began to suffer from migraine headaches, an ailment that would trouble him for most of his adult life.

He graduated in 1864, and continued studies in theology and classical philology and the University of Bonn. However, he soon gave up theology and transferred to Leipzig, where he was introduced to the works of Kant, the composer Richard Wagner and Schopenhauer and his recent text, The World as Will and Idea.

Although Nietzsche served in the army in 1868 his appointment was cut short by illness. However, he was thought to be a brilliant student, and rather than return to the army, the University of Basel called him to the chair of classical philology at the age of 24, even though arrangements to award him a doctorate had to be made shortly thereafter. Then during the Franco-Prussian war, he served as a medical orderly for a brief period, returning this time to Basel in ill-health, and though he managed to teach there from 1869-79, he was again forced by his health to retire.

It was in Basel that Nietzsche became a close friend of Richard Wagner, the second part of The Birth of Tragedy is devoted to Wagner's music. With the publication of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music in 1872 Nietzsche returned to Basel to lecture. Upon Nietzsche's rise to celebrity, he sought to bring his friend along, and together, they managed to convince the government to fund the construction of the Bayreuth theatre, built to feature Wagner's work. The theatre was completed in 1876, and Wagner's self-proclaimed masterpiece, The Ring of the Nibelung, was performed for the Emperor. Much to his despair, Nietzsche found that he hated the work, and began to question not only Wagner's work, but Prussian culture in general. His friendship with Wagner ended in 1878, at the time Nietzsche discovered the French Enlightenment. Tensions between the two rose as Wagner disapproved of the French and Nietzsche refused the cult of Wagnerian ideals in Bayreuth, particularly the anti-Semitism it propagated.

Nietzsche encountered more adversities in his life, the rejection of Lou Andreas-Salomé to his proposal of marriage, along with his ongoing resistance to Prussian citizenship (which he had given up in 1869), provoked a withdrawal of Nietzsche. He remained stateless for the rest of his life, preferring the life of a tourist-scholar and spending his time writing in boarding houses -the summers in Switzerland and the winters in Italy. During this time he published nine books, between 1872 and 1888, while preparing four others for publication.

In his first published book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy), he diagnosed that human beings are subject to Dionysian instincts — unconscious desires, impulses, or overwhelmingly self-destructive tendencies. Nietzsche pointed out that the Greeks had opposed Apollonian principles of sobriety and rationale to such destructive drives. These became to major principles in his future work, the Dionysian and Apollonian, one of chaos, dream and intoxication, the other one of order and the lending of form. These Nietzsche associated with an aesthetic disposition in which life be viewed as a work of art. He demonstrated that the Greeks had theorized the relation of the two principles in which art is a willed illusion and is composed of both form-giving and intoxication, and thus, art offers one a vantage point of life. Therefore, life itself becomes recognizable as unknowable in terms of an ultimate truth, as proposed by an idealist metaphysics.

Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) was formally published first in three parts in 1883-1884 and 1892. Central in his thinking is the notion of the will to power, the eternal return and radical nihilism, which together negotiate pain, suffering and contradiction as expressions of existence and its actual tensions instead of objectionable phenomena. Nietzche opposed ideas of the progress of the human species as theorized by Darwin, preferring instead the idea of an eternal recurrence with an accompanying positive power of heroic suffering. The ideal of 'man' for Nietzche is to be overcome along with all idealism, as such concepts bear no correspondence to reality. Zarathustra is the figure of the 'higher' man, and his thought is poetic. This superman rejects faith and morality upon the assumption that either "God is dead," or that his role in human development ended shortly after Creation. Nietzche believed that an ideal society should form its own morality outside of religious morality, suggesting even that the use of Judeo-Christian morality was often the cause of the avoidance of decisive actions or the acceptance of our fundamental existence in the material world. The failure to live, take risks and decisive actions is a failure to realize actual human potential — for nothing exists beyond life.

His most influential work, The Will to Power, published posthumously in 1901, was based on a series of notes in his journals and contains his strongest oppositions to idealism. This anti-idealist stance not only had an influence on thinkers such as Bataille, but continued to shape the thought of existentialists, post-modernists and post-structuralists well into the 20th century. The work is a continuation of key principles of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The will to power is foundational to his anti-idealist stance; it is an affirmation of life, a vision of the world itself as a will to power. The implications are profound — all simplistic oppositions between subject and object, between will and apathy, being and nothingness are divisions within the world as will to power itself. There is nothing else besides, and identity itself is to be constructed in the plurality of forces for which there is no unity of reality behind appearance.

Following Kant's thought on the necessary affirmation of values, Nietzsche saw the revaluation of values as the equivalent of making values within the play of forces of the will to power.

Near the end of his life, Nietzsche's productivity ended in January 1889, when he suffered a mental breakdown upon seeing a coachman cruelly whipping his horse -this drama had him sobbing with his arms around the beast's neck. He was housed in an asylum at first, then placed in the care of his family. During his illness he was mostly pleasant, engaging in conversation when he was more lucid. However, his health deteriorated, and in the final decade of his life he was generally dysfunctional, dying in 1900 in Weimar.

His sister Elisabeth secured the rights to his literary works as yet unpublished, and edited them for publication, although sometimes in rather disjointed form. To further complicate matters, Elisabeth was married to a prominent member of the German anti-Semite movement, which Nietzsche loathed; the supposed nature of his influence of Nazism served to make the interpretation of his texts difficult. He rejected biological racism and German nationalism, writing "every great crime against culture for the last four hundred years lies on their conscience." His ideas were first championed by the Danish critic, Georg Brandes, who lectured on Nietzsche in Copenhagen in 1888. Nietzsche's work has influenced among others Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, Albert Camus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Paul Sartre.

Further information here, here and here.

Video content here and here.

Children's TV: Raven

"No good living in the past, got to look after the future, right?"

Raven, a 15-year-old Borstal boy, is released on probation to live with Professor Young, an archaeologist immersed in research into Arthurian legend, and his wife, an amateur ornithologist.

The professor is working in deep underground caves whose carved symbols suggest that King Arthur may have used them as a hiding place, and Raven is intrigued by his belief that Arthur was not one man, but a succession of chiefs. But the professor’s research in is peril: the government plans to build a nuclear waste reprocessing plant on the ancient site.

As Raven is drawn into the battle to save the cave system, he begins to understand its mysteries - and the brightly coloured bird that has accompanied him on his journey holds the key to the discovery of his own unique destiny.

Future Quadrophenia star Phil Daniels is Raven, alongside Michael Aldridge and Patsy Rowlands, in this six-part fantasy series, in which occult and supernatural themes are interwoven with environmental concerns. Raven was written by Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, creators of the groundbreaking Children of the Stones, and received a BAFTA nomination for Best Graphics.

ATV 1977, 25 minutes, ITV. Series Directed by Michael Hart, Series Writing credits: Jeremy Burnham & Trevor Ray, Series Produced by Colin Shindler, Series Production Design by John Hickson. Cast: Phil Daniels: Raven, Michael Aldridge: Prof. James Young, Patsy Rowlands: Mrs. Young, Shirley Cheriton: Naomi Grant & James Kerry: Bill Telford.

Further information here, here and here.

Video content here and here.

La Musique des Sons #1

Welcome to the first in a series of musical snap-shots, entitled: La Musique des Sons. Unable or unwilling to expand on the whys and what-fors of a particular artist/project, etc, two for one seemed like the way to go. Less is in no way more, but maybe less is enough.

To start us off, lets take a look at two acts beginning with S: S.Maharba & Supreme Vagabond Craftsman. There is little or no information available, regarding both of these artists, so much so that neither have a complete discography, at the usually reliable Discogs. If S.Maharba & SVC have anything in common, it's that they're both on the outside, looking out. Which is not a bad place to be, all things considered.

First up is S.Maharba, followed by Supreme Vagabond Craftsman. Enjoy...

Arms & Legs (Download) - I Am Blood (Download) 2006/2007

S.Maharba (Cass): Sassbologna Records - 2008 - (LP): Ocular Science - 2010

She (CD/Download) - World Around Records - 2008

Up In Blood (Cass) - BTS Radio, French Maid (12") - BTS Records - 2011/2012

S​.​Maharba: Remixed (Download) - BTS Radio - 2013

Ross Abrahams started his musical life in hardcore metal bands, so I'm told, playing bass, drums, maybe even contributing vocals.

Time passes and Ross reinvents himself as an illustrator/Graphic Designer, working predominately within Hip-Hop.

More time passes, and having acquainted himself with a new musical landscape, Ross once again reinvents himself as S.Maharba.

Creating atmospheric, crackle infested, downtempo jams, that simultaneously cause the head to nod and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

Fractured beats, fragmented melodies and disembodied vocals, that often seem at odds with the evocative imagery on display, of scantily clad, sunbleached nymphets. However, a closer look reveals a disconnected 1000-yard stare, that somehow connects with the spooked-out music, only too well.

She - She (CD/Download) - 2008



Pianomouth - She (CD/Download) - 2008

A Cloud Punched Me (10") - Twisted Nerve - 2001

Twice As Nude (CD/Download) - Invisible Spies - 2002

Just You, Me and the Baby (CD) - Analogue Catalogue - 2006

Check Out My Rifle Range (7") - Analogue Catalogue - 2006

Fuck Everyone, I Am King (Download) - Invisible Spies - 2007


As with S.Maharba, little or no information is available regarding Will Goddard and his Supreme Vagabond Craftsman alter-ego. I was introduced to SVC, by our good friends The Young Knives, towards the end of 2011. Information regarding Will's musical backstory is out there, but inconclusive. In recent times, Will has been involved with Kid Acne and the Toah Dynamic collective, via Invisible Spies Records.

A few years back, I revisited Manchester, whilst researching for my post on Alan Garner's Alderley Edge. So taken with SVC's 'Just You, Me and the Baby' LP, I decided to pay a visit to the studio where it was recorded: Analogue Catalogue, in Mossley. The studio resides in a large house, halfway up a hill, in the dark shadow of Saddleworth Moor, and is run, with a wonderfully relaxed family atmosphere, by Julie McLarnon & Robert Cotter. Analogue Catalogue is an all analogue set-up, which is something Julie is very passionate about. For it was Julie who recorded, mixed and produced 'Just You, Me and the Baby' and Robert, who oversaw it's release, via their own label.

During my visit and guided tour, we spoke at length about the analogue recording process, Will Goddard and the making of 'Just You, Me and the Baby'. Julie recounts a tale of making arrangements with Goddard to start each days recording session at 9:30. Assuming Will to be a typical musician, she expected him around 10:30, at the earliest. However, each and everyday, the Supreme Vagabond Craftsman arrived at 9:30, on the dot.

Rather than offer up any descriptions of my own, I shall instead hand you over to three short reviews of his 'Just You, Me and the Baby' LP, taken from the Analogue Catalogue website. Supreme Vagabond Craftsman has an 'interesting sound' and these reviews reflect that...

“Musically eccentric in a distinctly English way, one man band SVC has carved his own niche with this curious collection. Containing heavy elements of prog complexity, post-punk, and on songs such as ‘Western Day Off’ and ‘My Welsh Family’ meandering folk melodies and spoken word parts. Its music that doesn’t stand still and is near-impossible to pin down. In these days of increasingly genre-obvious music that in itself is an achievement on this truly formidable album from this enigmatic figure.” 4/5 Kerrang, June 2007

“With lyrics about libraries and the civil service, scientologist assassins and heavy drinking sessions all wistfully sung with a madrigal-y Dukes of Stratosphere bent, this is at first a pop album of highly accessible songs and secondly a bizarre collection of folksy time signatures, odd sentiments and jester-in-the-court style quirkiness. So, is this XTC meets a pastoral Jethro Tull jamming with an acoustic Wire in a lunatic's dream and therefore, by rights, the vanguard of late noughties off-kilter pop?” 8/10 Drowned In Sound, July 2007

“As the Supreme Vagabond Craftsman, Will Goddard’s ability to throw everything he can lay his hands on into the mix and maintain coherence deserves applause. Here, on such tracks as ‘Check Out My Rifle Range’, Goddard blends TV theme-tune kitsch, medieval folk and industrial grind with bemusingly effective results. Of course, Goddard would argue that its better to feel the width of his tunes than engage in a forensic examination of the material. As such Just You, Me and The Baby sounds like a merry meeting of the out there pop fan club.” 4/5 The Irish Times, July 2007

Forest Punk - Just You, Me and the Baby - 2006



Murder Documentary - Just You, Me and the Baby - 2006




R/J/L-H would like to thank Ross Abrahams & Analogue Catalogue for their assistance in putting this post together... Thank you.