Month: March 2014

It sits at the top of Bold Street, Liverpool's most singular shopping street, on the edge of Chinatown and in view of the massive redbrick Anglican Cathedral. Everyone in the city knows it and gives and takes directions from it. It's got no roof but it hasn't stopped the people making good use of it, and its gardens, since it was hit by a Luftwaffe incendiary bomb on 5 May 1941.

Some time back I was part of an interfaith working group compiling a bid to the City Council to transform St Lukes' into Liverpool Peace Centre, creating a new building inside the bombed-out shell for exhibition and education spaces on the theme of the people's experiences of war and peace, past and present.

That never came to anything, but since then it's been great to see how the city's creative community have made great use of the space for exhibitions, open-air films, all kinds of performances. And never forgetting the events which made the building what it is now – the blitz and its effect on Liverpool's people. I hope the campaign to keep it as 'living, working monument' succeed.

I love the cover of this week's Church Times, a zazzed-up Sydney Carter from 1963 when it was the height of cool (ref John Lennon's iconic Hamburg doorway shot) to pose with a ciggy against a brick wall. It looks like a classic cover from Melody Maker in its prime. A great visual introduction to my feature about this most singular and special of hymnodists: Fishing with question marks (pdf).

I felt privileged to have a nice long chat on the phone to Martin Carthy the other day, in preparing a piece for the Church Times to celebrate the music of Sydney Carter, a decade after his death (on 13 March 2004).  The article is set to appear in next week's issue. Various contributors (including the Iona Community's John Bell and the poet-broadcaster Stewart Henderson as well as folks from publisher Stainer & Bell and others of Sydney's friends and collaborators) say a lot of good stuff about this most singular of songwriters. For Sydney Carter (as Martin Carthy underlined to me), God and the devil, folk and politics, protest and devotion were 'all of a piece'. Lord of the Dance and One More Step Along the World I Go are still among the most-requested wedding hymns, still often sung in schools, but his back catalogue bears revisiting because it's stock full of works which are in Carthy's words, 'astonishing'.

I'm chuffed that the Church Times supported my idea of trying to reawaken people's awareness of these songs and his unique approach to hymnody. Note the subtitle of the album, here: 'carols and ballads', not 'hymns' or 'praise songs' – although they are deeply devotional they are distinctive in voicing the faith and doubts of ordinary people in everyday, but greatly poetic, phrases. Carter does not shrink from grappling the most difficult questions about God, life and faith, and that's perhaps why so many of his songs sadly remain unsung in churches. There's a great playfulness in Carter's songs, not simply satire (though he was accomplished at that as a writer for revues). Take 'One More Step' for instance: "Keep me travelling along with you". It's sung so often on the way out of weddings and the ‘you’ in the title could be your partner, it could be God. Martin Carthy is in no doubt, though: "Substantially it’s God. That’s the nice thing about Sydney’s songs. It could be interpreted different ways. He wouldn’t mind if you did that. But he’s talking about God."