Michael Horovitz's Nocturnal Commune at the Albert Hall

For much of my life I’ve watched people unused to my father’s approach to poetry and music look on in fury, delight or bewilderment when he gets up on stage. Sometimes these three reactions are fused in the same person. It can be rather like watching the weather changing off the coast of Orkney; a rapid succession of fronts co-existing in the same sky. Even the people who are used to him or who love him dearly sometimes undergo these same divergent emotional states when he gets up on stage.

So when he walked out on stage at the Royal Albert Hall wearing a tank top featuring sheep in a field last Saturday night, having been announced by Noel Gallagher, of all people, as a ‘wonderful poet from the 1960s’ and surrounded by Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and Paul Weller, to perform, with their accompaniment, his song-poem Ballade of the Nocturnal Commune, I was watching the audience with as much interest as I was watching the stage.

I was rewarded, too. For all the distant storms of discontented chatter that emanated from some of the more conservatively-minded Oasis fans in the audience, those who chose to ignore Gallagher’s instruction to ‘shut the fuck up, open your minds and listen’ (I warmed to him enormously at that point), there were numerous rays of sunshine; people who were clearly delighted, amused and transported by the pastoral dottiness of the poem and the subtle lyricism of the jazzy semi-improvised music.

The Ballade is a strange and beautiful thing, a surreal evocation of the night-sounds of the countryside. Robert Graves once accused my father of being “incorrigibly urban”, and he often is, but much of the first nine years of my life were spent with him in a cottage in the country, where I am living again now, listening to the exact sounds he describes. In this poem, as in his (in my opinion) finest poem Midsummer Morning Jog Log, he captures the rural landscape with just as fine an ear for the owl, fox and bat-strewn night as he does the urban landscapes of his childhood. For all the griping in the press about noodling, the music written and played by Albarn, Coxon and Weller to back and extend my father’s melody invokes the spirit of the poem beautifully and subtly.

What seems to have caused the most mischief with the audience at the Royal Albert Hall is the interpolations my father throws in – owl noises and sheep bleats punctuate the poem at regular intervals. But mischief is the key word here, as Caroline Sullivan rightly pointed out in her Guardian review of the event – expectations in my father’s poetic world are there to be played with, to be poked, prodded, deflated, inflated and run around the streets and gardens with in joyously naked anarchy. Words become music and music spills out into words. That’s never going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

It was therefore immensely gratifying to see quite a number of people bounce up to my father as he and I walked through the Albert Hall afterwards, on the way to catch Gallagher’s headline set, and pat him on the back, ask for photographs and say things like “nice one” and particularly “that was mad, mate – mad but great”.

I now can’t wait to see what reaction there will be to the Record Store Day 2013 album Bankbusted Nuclear Detergent Blues album (a state-of-the-nation poem initially commissioned by Paul Weller and written for the inner sleeve to his last album, Sonik Kicks) and its accompanying 7” single Ballade of the Nocturnal Commune/Extra Time Meltdown.

The single moves from a more tightly controlled and subtle version of the pastoral Ballade played at the Albert Hall to the polemical Extra Time Meltdown, but for me it is the nearly 50 minute long LP, in six sections, that is the finest achievement. Bankbusted Nuclear Detergent Blues sees my father on high polemical, savage, satirical form whilst Albarn, Coxon and Weller create a potent jazz-infused city soundscape of the failing New Labour/ConDemnatory societal tailspin that is Britain today, which draws in influences as various as Brecht and Weill, electronica, ambient, Ornette Coleman and so much more that it’s giddying to listen to.

All four are clearly inspiring each other to greater heights of invention, miraculous strangeness and dissonant lyricism, and they are performing out of their skins. Whilst Bankbusted Nuclear Detergent Blues is not perhaps the stuff of Top of the Pops and hit parade culture, which Blur and Weller have always been so good at but which, as the reaction of some of the audience at the Albert Hall suggests, can risk leading to the stultifying conservatism of “we want you to keep releasing art like the art you released before” (something that all three musicians have regularly bridled at throughout their careers), it is a potent challenge (to my somewhat biased ear) that offers a whisper of the sort of alternatives that pop culture needs to remain relevant.

I only hope that it will inspire other poets and musicians to stretch beyond their perceived limits into something new, collaborative and fresh, in the manner that my father has been trying to encourage for over five decades, and that more and more people listen with eyes and hearts wide open. If some, or all, of them then choose to run around the streets and gardens in joyously naked anarchy having done so, so much the better.

Both records, released by Gearbox and available in all good independent record stores on April 20th 2013, along with a box set of Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead, the debut release of an ebullient live performance of the early jazz poem by my father and Cream lyricist Pete Brown in collaboration with some of Britain’s greatest modern jazz musicians, including Stan Tracey, Bobby Wellins, Jeff Clyne and more.