Another season, but not just another season. Everything has been reset, everything is new, there is a darkness to the world and our heroes have been separated and dispersed to the far corners of the world, that is, if you accept New York as the world.
And yet, as all new seasons are required to do, the opening story resets the principle of the procedural. There must always be a Number, there is always a Number, but there is dissension among the team about what to do.
Season 4 starts without an opening monologue from Finch. It starts with surveillance footage from a bar in Budapest, a journalist who’s just been fired, a journalist who’s been pursuing a story about the changed underlying structure of the world. He knows he’s on the right track because his contacts are all dying. He’s telling this paranoid fantasy to a beautiful blonde he met in the bar, but she met him, for a reason. He’s a threat. She’s called Martine Rousseau, though we don’t learn this today (played by Cara Buono). She’s there to execute him. The surveillance footage looks off, but that’s because it comes from Samaritan, with different processes and the use of circles to pick out individuals.
Back in New York, we tour our friends. Sameen Shaw, promoting perfume and makeovers in a Department Store, in a little black dress. Detective John Riley of Narcotics, busting drugs dealers. Professor Harold Whistler, teaching an esoteric class at college to a limited number of students, one of whom, a pretty girl in a short skirt, gets up and walks out when the Professor says that all grades are final and cannot be bargained up (a very economical piece of storytelling, that).
Everyone’s separate, unable to communicate or even to mingle, for fear of drawing Samaritan’s eye down upon them. Shaw’s openly rebellious against her lot, spraying perfume in women’s eyes instead of on their wrists. Reese is at least doing something. Harold wants nothing more to do with their old profession, for fear of exposure to Samaritan – if one is detected, all will be – and because in his mind he has made a break with the Machine – whereabouts still unknown – since it instructed them to kill that Senator. Harold wants nothing to do with it. Besides, they don’t have the Library, they don’t have the resources.
But John Reese has not forgotten his Purpose. And Root, getting a makeover from Shaw, with whom she’s starting to flirt quite openly, is making the point that these roles chosen for Team Machine aren’t just for survival but part of a longer-term plan, the outlines of which are not even visible yet.
But there’s a Number, sent to Reese and Shaw. He’s Ali Hassan (Navid Negahban), owner of an electronics shop, reluctantly working for a new street gang called the Brotherhood, whose representative Link Cordell (Jamie Hector, so effective as Marlo in The Wire and just as good here with his laidback menace) wants a private network for the gang, that can’t be tapped by the Police.
Ali attempts to retaliate by blowing Link up but Detective Riley is on the scene and saves the day. Link responds by kidnapping Ali’s son, Ben: network by midnight or…
Finch is reluctant. Not only are the people they could save a mere drop in the ocean, of no practical difference to the world situation but overall their efforts have caused more deaths than lives saved (yeah, but never mind the width, feel the quality). Root is angry with him: this is a War. Reese visits Carl Elias, discovers that midnight is the biggest heroin shipment in America, a quarterly event, run by the Brotherhood and its unseen leader, Dominic. He wants to hire Elias…
And it all comes together. Finch helps Ali complete a foolproof Network, using an old, unremoved technology. Scarface makes it look like a gang war is brewing over the drugs, giving Detective Riley probable cause to investigate and free Ben. Shaw runs interference for him with a sniper’s rifle, still wearing her little black dress. The Number is saved: the Hassans will move onwards. It’s a subtle marker that the times have changed, alongside all the blatant ones: Finch cannot organise a new identity and funding for them, they will have to do that for themselves.
So, Team Machine can still operate effectively, under their changed circumstances, though the fact they have operated at all puts them at risk: Martine Rousseau is already on the scene…
But there has been a major advance already. Finch has acquired a Network that can enable them to talk freely. Riley’s got a promotion to the Homicide Task Force at the Eighth. He’s going to be partnering Detective Fusco. There’s a delicate moment as he pauses before taking his assigned desk, the one that used to be used by Detective Carter. Shaw gets linked up with a small team of crooks, for whom she becomes their wheelman, keeping her from going stir crazy. And Root points out a message from the Machine to Harold that he didn’t even know had been sent. It leads him to a book about old, underground tunnels, one of which he and Bear locate. What he sees is… reserved for next week.
So, we’re back in business. The world has changed, and so have our heroes’ response to it. Five people against the world. Crazy, melodramatic, comic book pulp stuff. But this season is going to show that Archimedes was right: give them a sufficiently long lever and a reliable place to stand and five people can move the world.
The only other time thus far that I have featured a Pete Atkin track was from his relaunched career, that began, in effect, in 1998. Since the Monyash Folk Festival that established the existence of a still loyal audience, eager to hear more music from Pete, and more words from Clive James, there have been four new collections, of music written but never released in the Seventies, and music newly written in that so welcome revival.
Before that, we had to rely upon six albums recorded between 1970 and 1975, which really ought to be numbered as five, since the last of these was the classic Contractual Obligation Album, a collection of all those comic songs that relieved the intensity at gigs but didn’t necessarily hang together as a group to be experienced all at once.
There are many tracks spread over those first five albums, not all of them of the standard of the most impressive tracks, but every one is one fan’s favourite or another, and the least you can say is that there is nothing that is not at minimum interesting.
There’s at least a half dozen tracks I could have chosen as a first subject, but ‘The Faded Mansion on the Hill’, from Atkin’s third album, A King at Nightfall, has always been a particularly evocative track, despite the limitations of the recording process: not the equipment or the session musicians, who were always drawn from the finest of the period, but the minimalist budget afforded to Atkin’s albums.
It’s unfair to call this a sprawling song, but both musically and lyrically it goes through changes. And the words have a dark aspect to them, ameliorated by the musical setting chosen by Atkin, a deliberate tempo, electric piano-based melody to begin with, contrasting to the determined oblique angle of the words. When you see what can’t be helped, Atkin opens, go by with bloody murder in its eye. The couplet evokes an unspecified horror, which is amplified by a matching pair of lines, a man on a rack, a voice about to crack.
From here, James broadens the scene, surveying… well, it has to be seen as people in general, a mass leading ordinary, unfulfilled (litter of) lives, with stupid children and bitter wives, bereft of self-esteem, and and the urge of every observer to climb away from these dispiriting scenes of decay.
The temptation is to think this just a trick played by fate, these sick, hate days that might, if we think it so, just be a phase, but the mind is ground down by a thick weight.
And then we see the culmination of this miasma of lines, the faded mansion of the song’s title, out of whose gateways comes an aged car, carrying a single passenger, an old man, old because time has not yet found the time to kill.
The music shifts, a percussion track matches it stride for stride, Atkin shifts into a different, smoother melody, singing of the yachts in Sydney Harbour, the yachts of James’ childhood and youth, fleeing for the open sea, the freedom of the Pacific, their sails white and blinding, like driven snow, through the metaphor is unexpected. Outward they go, escaping from what we’ve already seen, with the ease of dolphins and seabirds, on the edges of their separate domains. They are alive, and living their days, as if the cemetery of home can be wished away, be left for dead.
Another turn. The hope is vain. Atkin sings with anger and desperation, an anger that desperation is all there is or can be. Where they are is still the graveyard of tall ships, just as surely as the grass that yearly breaks up more of the driveway in the mansion left so far away. Nor do they have more than this illusion, James once again producing a matching couplet, the beach the poor men never reach, the shore the rich men never leave, a contrast that is plain and inescapable and forever.
In an echo of their departure, returning to what holds even them in place, the homing yachts return between the headlands, lowering their sails, calling to one another, intent no doubt upon the bar where beers and wines and spirits will be drunk and spirits maintained unrealistically high. But all the while behind them, the avenue leads back up the hill, into the hill, back to the crumpled old man.
And in a line that turns back upon itself and evokes the weariness of inevitability, writer and singer come together upon the understanding that time, tonight, might find the time to kill.
Lyrically, melodically, this is an epic of regret. At each turn, Atkin finds the music, the melody, the tempo to match each phase of this story. None of this can be helped, it is how things are for the majority of men (and women), and even the yachts can only escape for a time. Time will, in time, find the time, and we are none of us immune. All that is left are a few chords of piano, falling into silence.
And the remembrance of where we have been.
Once again I’m watching a French sub-titled film that isn’t the kind of French movie you’d expect me to be watching: I mean, it doesn’t have Isabelle Huppert in it.
The DVD was a recent impulse buy via eBay, nice and cheap for something to watch on spec. It’s actually my second time round for the enjoyable Adele, for she is the eponymous heroine of a bande dessinee series written and drawn by Jacques Tardi, and after discovering this via an enthusiastic Kim Thompson review in The Comics Journal, I did try the first volume, Adele and the Beast (about a pterodactyl terrorising 1910 Paris), but never retained it.
After watching this film – intended as the first of a trilogy of which neither of the other two films were made, hiss, boo, curse – I’m minded to give the series another try.
The Extraordinary Adventures… was written and directed by Luc Besson and synthesised from a number of books in the series, including Adele and the Beast. It stars Louise Burgeoin as Adele and my gosh she’s perfect in the role, intelligent, direct, inventive, determined and wonderfully drily sarcastic at practically every moment.
All by herself, Bourgeoin proves my oft-made point that the only way to pull off a film so steeped in the impossible and ridiculous is to play it with a completely straight face, never for one moment letting on that what is going on around you, however comic, is anything other than completely expected. The whole film, in both dialogue and narration, adopts a semi-ornate dryness that embodies this approach and which had me in constant fits of giggles throughout.
The plot, convoluted as it is, may be outlined simply. In the Paris of 1910, the elderly and wizened Professor Esperandieu (Jacky Nercessian, looking like he’s stepped out of the page) uses his mental abiities to hatch out a 165 million year old egg containing a pterodactyl, for which he is sentened to death by the guillotine.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, journalist, traveller and adventurer Adele Blanc-Sec is seeking a Pharoah’s tomb, where she intends to remove the mummy of his personal physician (marvellous these Egyptians, especially where it comes to restoring people to life) but finds herself up against her archaeological rival, Dr Dieulevelt (Mathieu Amalric) who is prepared to have her shot as a tomb robber, except that Adele escapes with the relevant sarcophagus, via an underground river (you’re getting the picture, aren’t you?)
Back in Paris, she discovers what is happening to Esperandieu and sets out to break him from prison against the background of the hunt for the pterodactyl, whose services she enlists to spring the elderly Professor from beneath Madame herself. She needs him to reanimate Potmosis, the Pharoah’s doctor, and she needs Potmosis to restore her twin sister Agathe, in a coma these past five years, victim of a freak accident involving a tennis match and a hatpin.
The Professor is now psychically linked to the Pterodactyl so when the same is shot by Big Game Hunter Justin de Saint-Hubert (Jean-Paul Rouve), his time is limited. He reanimated Potmosis, by only just, but there’s a terrible mistake: Potmosis was not Pharoah’s doctor but his physician – his nuclear physician.
All seems lost but Esperandieu’s final effort was so powerful it would have animated the dead within two kilometres, which just happens to include the exhibition of Egyptian mummies at the Louvre… And the Pharoah’s doctor restores Agathe before the mummies, the Pharoah included, wander off into the Parisian night to have a look round…
The fact that the film was always intended to have a sequel is made plain by its ending, as the evil Dieulevelt sends men to follow Adele on her holiday… aboard the RMS Titanic…
Damn, I’d have paid for another dollop of this comedic delight if they could have maintained the standard and I’m sure they could with Tardi’s underlying material to provide a structure.
The film scores in all its elements: the absurd but seriously acted story, the well-defined but above all unexaggerated performances by all the cast but especially the no-nonsense Adele – have I said Louise Bourgeoin was absolutely brilliant yet? The kind of woman you’d be fascinated to meet but who you know would never give you the time of day unless she temporarily needed something from you that you’d love to deliver – the design that conjures up 1910 Paris as if it were really here still on Earth a century later, and the brilliant, bulky dress the cast wear, especially the tightly-buttoned-up, heavy-coated males with their luxuriant moustaches of all kinds, so gloriously thick and bushy and evidently artificial, a visual that provides the final touch to the milieu, and of course the effects.
One doesn’t have a pterodactyl flying around Paris, nor Egyptian mummies trotting around the Queen of Cities without some well-placed CGI but it’s to the film’s credit that this is minimised, and confined solely to the fantstic. Instead of taking over the look of the film, it blends in with it, making the fantastic look part of the scene rather than the scene look like the CGI.
I’ve missed out an awful lot, including many of the strong supporting roles, not to mention one contemporary gag involving the Louvre (been there, seen the joke, wish it were a joke) but that’s because this is a very dense film and should be enjoyed as such. It’s been a brilliant herald for spring in this year of the pandemic, a transportation much needed, and a film I’d hope to watch again soon.
In 1986, when things were otherwise then they are now, and I was active in UK Comics Fandom, I wrote an article about The Spectre that was published in Arkensword, a high quality fanzine published by Paul Duncan of Coventry that was one of only two then-fanzines to enjoy a circulation of over 1,000 copies.
The piece was written in the immediate wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, as a prelude to a new version of the Spectre, written by Steve Gerber, that promised to modernise the character, and to introduce an alter ego relationship relevant to the 1980s.
No such version ever appeared, nor any hints as to Gerber’s plan. According to Wikipedia, Gerber missed the deadline for issue 1, to be drawn by Gene Colan, in order to watch the last day of filming on the Howard the Duck film, and DC cancelled the project: not worth that last day, eh? The prospect of Gerber’s series led me to publish an article on The Spectre to date, on the various, contrasting incarnations of the character that had been thrown together without the least regard for continuity between the various versions. It was fun, and I made fun of the twists and turns that were, frankly, irreconcilable.
Ironically, a few years later, I came up with one small idea that made the whole pre-Crisis history come together. Though I’d been out of fandom for some time by then, I wrote my idea up as a sequel. Arkensword was dead, as were most of the fanzines I’d read or written for. I can’t remember if it was ever published and, if so, in what magazine. I don’t even have a copy myself.
Recently, I thought of these paired articles and decided I would reprint one and rewrite the other here, to give them a decent home. That was until I re-read ‘The Riddle of The Spectre; or, Continuity? What Continuity?’. If you really want to know what I wrote in 1986, you can go hunt out a copy of Arkensword 16 for yourself, because I’m not willingly going to let anything that awful be published on my blog. I need to rewrite both. Besides, I’ve thirty years of new information I didn’t have back then to include.
The Riddle of The Spectre
The Spectre is dead: Long live The Spectre.
In the tradition of Julius Schwartz, at the beginning of the Silver Age, Steve Gerber has been commissioned to create a Spectre for the Eighties. Back then, things like that happened without any thought for previous versions, which is why so much time and effort went into Crisis on Infinite Earths. No longer will that happen, Marv Wolfman assures us: Gerber’s Spectre will be the only Spectre there has ever been.
Thus passes Jim Corrigan, died 1940, deceased 1985. He leaves behind a history so convoluted, so inconsistent, so thoughtlessly plotted as to defy the very notion of continuity itself. It has been rumoured that Roy Thomas planned to straighten all this out in a Graphic Novel, but if The Spectre of old is now dead – which was the point all along – is there any point?
But it’s a shame to leave it like that. There are happy memories for some of us invested in one part or another of The Spectre’s career, and a lot of fun to be had picking over the bones of Jim Corrigan’s afterlife.
The Spectre debuted in More Fun Comics 52, February 1940, published by Detective Comics. He was created by Jerry Siegel, with artist Bernard Bailey, Siegel’s most substantial creation outside of Superman. The Kryptonian was about the vast enhancement of the body’s attributes: strength, speed, invulnerability etc. The Spectre was possibly the only idea that could extend beyond that: incomparable, illimitable power, bounded only by the imagination. Though at that time, the imagination was pretty bounded by writer’s crude notions.
Jim Corrigan seemed to have it all made: a successful Police Detective, engaged to marry heiress Clarice Winston, bringing in half of Gats Benson’s mob. In retaliation, Benson kidnapped Corrigan and Clarice, sending Jim off to swim in a barrel of concrete. Jim died. His spirit ascended but, at the borders of Heaven, was sent back by a Voice (presumably that of God), to combat evil.
Corrigan returned as a ghost, to resurrect Clarice, who had been shot, round up the rest of the mob and frighten Benson to death with a glance. He then jilted Clarice without explanation. How could he tell her he was no longer alive, did not breathe, could not… hold her.
As The Spectre, Corrigan appeared to be dressed in white and dark green, but don’t be fooled: hood, cape, trunks, gloves and moccasin sandals were costume, the white areas were The Spectre’s body.
As a character, The Spectre’s series was full of potential rarely realised. There was a freewheeling aspect to it typical of a time when anything went because no-one knew what might work. There were even flashes of genuine imagination, every now and then, but there were too many lame monster and magic stories, the thudding dullness of Corrigan’s Captain being convinced the Spectre was behind every crime and berating Corrigan for not bringing him in, and too much stiff and stilted art from Bailey. At first, the avenging ghost used to leave almost as many bodies in his wake as did the villains, but this didn’t last as long as a later writer suggested, as Detective Comics realised they had a money-making industry on their hands and started smoothing off rough edges.
The Spectre – Golden Aga
When Charley Gaines, at All-American Publications, Detective’s sister company, ordered up All-Star Comics to promote both company’s characters, The Spectre was chosen to represent More Fun, alongside Doctor Fate. Perhaps, as a Detective Comics character in an All-American comic, there was a subconscious bias against Corrigan, but despite his popularity, he never got considered for the JSA chairmanship, the route to a solo title.
Nor did he shine overmuch, despite being potentially more powerful than all the rest of the team put together. Gardner Fox wrote him competently, but lacked the intensity that Siegel could bring to the solo series, and even had him gassed into unconsciousness in issue 13 (drawing a retcon from Roy Thomas courtesy of The Monitor in 1985). And unlike other members, changes in The Spectre’s series were not taken up in All-Star.
To my surprise, instead of being parcelled off in Corrigan’s origin story (which required two issues to complete), Clarice Winston hung around a very long time, still in love with Jim (and he still in love with her) in a very touching manner that provided an oft-needed touch of stability.
But in More Fun 74, the series was changed permanently in a bad way by the introduction of Percival Popp, the Super-Cop, a short, klutzy and over-eager Private ‘Tec who wanted to team up with Jim Corrigan. At a stroke, The Spectre became second fiddle to his comic relief, a fate that other heroes didn’t suffer until much later in the decade.
An issue later, Popp’s investigations threatened to expose the barrel of cement in which Corrigan’s earthly remains lay in the river, so The Spectre got permission from the Voice to restore Corrigan to life. Which wiped out his excuse for not marrying Clarice, except that Popp took up so much of his and Spec’s time, she was pushed out.
And in issue 90, Corrigan went off to War, leaving The Spectre behind and suddenly invisible for the rest of the run until issue 101, after which More Fun was abruptly repurposed as a comic comic. And at more or less the same time, The Spectre was forced out of All-Star by the split between All-American and Detective Comics. Thus ended the Golden Age of Jim Corrigan.
Twenty years passed. Superheroes went out of and came back into fashion. In 1966, Julius Schwartz had stopped introducing new versions of old characters and was testing the revival of JSA characters in Showcase and Brave and Bold: Dr Fate and Hourman, Starman and Black Canary, all written by Fox and drawn by Murphy Anderson. For Showcase 60, Schwartz planned to pair Dr Mid-Nite and The Spectre, but in the end went for the Ghostly Guardian alone.
I bought ‘The War that shook the Universe’ one Saturday afternoon, walking from my Gran’s in Droylsden to the newsagents at Fiveways, poring over the spinner rack, and selecting this after a good half hour’s consideration. It was a good choice. Fox wrote what was the first retcon at DC, explaining why The Spectre – an all-powerful, immortal being – should have ‘retired’ for twenty years. Ingeniously, Fox conjured up Asmodus, an evil, demonic equivalent whose arrival on Earth had cancelled out both his and The Spectre’s energies, trapping them in their respective hosts.
The Spectre was released by the death of Asmodus’s host and had to fight the demon’s plot to trap him permanently within Corrigan. But Asmodus was only the herald of the greater menace, Shaithan, who arrived the next issue and who very clearly stood for the Devil himself. To defeat both adversaries, The Spectre required illimitless power, power of and from good (which, in 1966, included American soldiers fighting in Vietnam). He was, in short an incarnate form of Good.
Response was mixed: I loved both issues but many readers didn’t, rejecting the very idea of supernatural characters and menaces in the Silver Age of scientifically minded heroes. Schwartz, who was expecting to start a solo series, was surprised at the unfavourable commercial response. Fox’s approach wasn’t entirely successful, adopting a dry, mytho-religious tone that tried to reduce The Spectre’s supernatural abilities to semi-scientific energies.
Still, Schwartz didn’t give up. A third Showcase appearance in issue 64, half a year later, winding back on all-powerful entities to a ‘mere’ ghost was added to The Spectre’s appearance in the 1966 Justice League/Justice Society team-up. This was undertaken without any supernatural elements whatsoever, The Spectre being treated as ‘merely’ a character with immense power and a pycho-matter body.
The story called for Earths-1 and -2 being pulled into hyperspace on a collision course, and The Spectre physically holding the two planets apart until, in order to save everything, he agrees to the Earth-1 Atom shrinking him to one inch and then expanding him again, a process that causes any subject so treated (except Ray Palmer) to blow up.
It all sounds a bit callous (not to mention risky for the two planets) but worry not. Being all-powerful, The Spectre merely willed the atoms of his body to regroup themselves from all over the Universe.
These two stories lifted The Spectre over the hurdle and he gained his own comic in 1967, starting with one last, and unsatisfactory, Fox/Anderson story, then falling to lesser hands, amongst whom Neal Adams had to be classed. Weird and wonderful were The Spectre’s adventures, but most of all they were not very good. It was a different failure of imagination: in making The Spectre seriously all-powerful and Good with a capital G, it begged the question of who or what could pose him a threat.
In an attempt to combat the sales drop-off, DC tried to side-slip towards the still-successful Mystery market. Steve Skeates was brought in to do this, in keeping with the prevalent trend towards Relevance. As a punishment for casually killing crooks when he had much too much power to need to do so, The Spectre was sentenced to read from the Book of Judgement, short, pallid, sub-EC stories. Once again a supporting character in his own series, The Spectre only lasted one more issue before suffering his second cancellation.
Thus far, for all its changes of emphasis and direction, The Spectre’s story has been reasonably straightforward. But that was before Denny O’Neill. This is where it starts to get tricky.
In the late Sixties, O’Neill was DC’s hottest writer and Julius Schwartz’s go-to guy for updating series that had run out of steam. On the evidence of Justice League of America 82 – 83, it’s hard to see why. This was the out-and-out worst JLA/JSA team-up ever written, a nonsense farrago whose climax set Earths-1 and -2 onto a collision course again, requiring The Spectre to once more interpose his body between them, except that this time the resultant gravities tear him apart and he dies.
Come again? He’d already done that once and survived. Furthermore, O’Neill gave the impression of never having read a Spectre story before when, in order for him to enter the fray, Dr Fate has to summon him from imprisonment in a crypt (what crypt?), although the effectiveness of this crypt has to be questioned when set against Dick Dillin having drawn Spec as attending the Justice Society meeting in the first part. That one we’ll have to put down to pure sloppiness (did Julius Schwartz really edit this?)
The Spectre – Silver Age
So The Spectre was once again dead, for four years that is. Former EC artist Joe Orlando had joined DC as an editor, but was struggling with Adventure Comics, ever since it’s long-term feature, Supergirl, had been pinched for her own title. Six issues of floundering, including the debut of the mysterious Black Orchid, then a mistress of disguise with neither identity nor origin, led to a revival of The Spectre.
This was the infamous run written by Michael Fleisher, then a fixture at DC’s offices, researching his six-part ‘History of Superheroes’ (of which only two parts ever appeared). Orlando, who had recently been mugged in the street in front of his wife, was bubbling under with rage and susceptible to Fleisher’s proposal to go back to the character’s origin as an avenging ghost. With spectacular art from the then-little known Jim Aparo, a new series was launched in issue 431.
This version of The Spectre was controversial from the start for its gruesomeness. It went back to the idea of Jim Corrigan being a ghost that transformed into The Spectre and The Spectre not as an embodiment of Good fighting spiritual adversaries but as the pursuer, and executioner, of evil men, who would be despatched in various colourful, bloodless but graphic means: a hairdresser cut in two by scissors grown to massive size, a fake fortune teller turned into crystal, tipped over and shattered, and a man turned to wood and sliced up in a band-saw, etc.
I confess that I loved it in 1974, mainly for Aparo’s art, but even then I was aware that the stories were repetitious. Evil, heartless bastard villains prey upon and/or kill innocent citizens, The Spectre kills them brutally. The only real imagination lay in the latest graphic disposal.
The series rejected all versions before it. In the letters page, Orlando dismissed the crypt as Denny O’Neill’s problem, claiming his was the Earth-1 Spectre (whilst permitting an exchange with the reporter introduced to query The Spectre’s actions in which he’s sarcastically referred to as Clark Kent, leading a rookie cop to ask if he’s really Superman). Fleisher defended himself with the faux-naif claim that all these devices came from the original series. No, they didn’t, it was a lie. Jerry Siegel never wrote a scene in which his hero animated a hand-axe to cut his girlfriend into seven separate body parts in one panel (the scene got past the Comics Code Authority since it wasn’t actually Gwen Stirling being chopped up but rather a mannequin of her: then again, The Spectre didn’t know that until after he’d eviscerated her…) and that was before you thought of comparing the art of Bernard Bailey to that of Jim Aparo.
There was even a revoltingly predictable story in which Corrigan pleaded for relief from his task and was rewarded by the Voice by being restored to a human being. Except that the Voice didn’t tell him this had happened, so Corrigan only found out when he was shot. In this series, even God was a sick bastard. Jim took to the opportunity to visit the despairing Gwen (and impliedly shag her senseless, but then it was the first time he’d gotten any in thirty-four years). Then he got murdered by a mobster and returned to being a ghost. Sigh.
That story appeared in Adventure 440 and became the perfect, if unintended, finale of the run. DC had been taking heat from fans from the start, and, as soon as sales showed a slight downturn, publisher Carmine Infantino ordered the series cancelled, leaving three stories written and paid for but not drawn (these would be drawn by Aparo in 1988 for the mini-series Wrath of The Spectre, reprinting Fleisher’s run in issues 1-3 and presenting these ‘new’ stories in the fourth).
Immediately after this charming run, The Spectre re-surfaced on Earth-2 for the 1975 JLA/JSA team-up. There was no trace of the raving ghost: instead Spec stayed invisible and intangible throughout, merely intervening with the Voice to have six JSAers restored to life after they’d been killed by the JLA (don’t ask).
Were there now two Spectres after all? Jim Corrigan turned up in a single panel of the revived All-Star 70, without a sign of his ghostly companion, but the next two, almost simultaneous appearances to The Spectre himself were both clearly on Earth-1. The avenging ghost of Fleisher turned up in a three-part Dr Thirteen story in Ghosts, to enable the great sceptic to refuse to believe in him, whilst a version evidently much closer to Fox’s messianic agent appeared in DC Presents… to prevent Superman from entering Heaven, and to teach him a lesson about hubris.
In 1984, whilst writing Swamp Thing, Alan Moore introduced yet another, and utterly magnificent conception for The Spectre, as the Guardian of the Road to Hell, only for Roy Thomas to negate this idea by having The Spectre turn up back on Earth-2, in America vs the Justice Society, a courtroom drama featuring the framing of the JSA for treason as an excuse to summarise their every adventure.
Thomas posited that there was and only ever had been one Spectre, and that he’d moved to Earth-1 for unspecified reasons. Yeah, right. This Spectre was a mess of previous versions. He was no longer invisible, intangible and benevolent on Earth-2, and instead he threatened to destroy the planet for the crime of trying the JSA (they turned down his offer to move them to Earth-1, so he quit Earth-2, forever, sobeit.)
Marv Wolfman used The Spectre in Crisis, to directly challenge the Anti-Monitor at the Dawn of Time, causing the shattering of existence, and putting Spec in a handy coma for the rest of the series. Roy Thomas used him at the start of The Last Days of the Justice Society, having him destroyed and wiped out of existence, all the way back to his start. But it was Alan Moore who gave The Spectre the closest thing to a fitting finale, even in defeat: his arrogance at his powers and his desire to use them to the glory of God leads to him allowing the bird carrying the pearl of distilled horror to pass, to summon the Ultimate Darkness, the Shadow cast out by Light. The Spectre believes he will defeat the Darkness, but he is beaten, unhooded, broken, even his powers inadequate. The Last Days of the Justice Society came out a week later, with a passing reference to the struggle against the Darkness as ‘a mighty affair’, excusable if Thomas didn’t know Moore’s story in advance but nevertheless demeaning. Given Thomas’s attitudes to anyone else writing the JSA, the slight may well have been deliberate.
Such was the story of The Spectre, a confusion of different portrayals and states, impossible to reconcile into any cohesive history. It doesn’t matter now, because The Spectre is Dead. Long Live The Spectre.
The Riddle of The Spectre Revisited
(After some thought, I decided it was impossible to reconstruct the thoughts and associations of thirty years ago, so this part of the post will effectively be a new article, attempting to rediscover the tenor of my thoughts. Since I’m trying to reflect the ideas I had circa 1990, I’m going to ignore all later versions of The Spectre and his story.)
It started with a single moment of inspiration, from which I realised that all the contradictions and wildly fluctuating treatments of the Spectre’s pre-Crisis history could be resolved into a harmonious whole. The crucial point came in 1970, when Denny O’Neill decided to end the eighth JLA/JSA team-up by killing off The Spectre. I can see his reasoning behind that: O’Neill was much more comfortable with street-level heroes and the Sixties approach to The Spectre as cosmic incarnation of Good made it even harder to fit him into a story that he could resolve in an eye-blink than Superman.
So O’Neill imprisons Spec in a crypt from which only a séance can free him, just in time for him to intervene between Earths-1 and 2 on collision course, bouncing the two planets back where they belong but unable to prevent the gravitational forces from tearing him apart, thus killing – or rather destroying – The Spectre. But…
What if? What if, in that final moment, feeling himself torn apart, unable to recreate himself as he had in 1966, because he’d had notice of The Atom’s plans to blow him apart and time to imbue his molecules with a kind of spectral magnetism whereas now he only just has time to intervene at all, what if in that last moment as he thinks he’s falling into endless rest, Spectre’s survival instinct kicks in and he makes one final attempt to cohere, grabbing at an Earth to form upon? But he gets Earth-1…
How does that affect everything? Firstly, let’s work backwards.
Jim Corrigan became The Spectre in 1940, under order by the Voice to eradicate crime. At first, his methods are often brutal and he kills criminals with grim purpose. This was not the Voice’s intention so if we shift history slightly, The Spectre is instructed to raise Corrigan’s body from the dead and bond to it. Corrigan’s humanity tempers The Spectre’s darkness, and ameliorates his ruthlessness.
But now that Corrigan is alive again, he’s anxious to play his part in the War his country is fighting. He joins the Army, but the separation has an unintended effect: without Corrigan as a host, The Spectre cannot materialise. He can effect criminals but is invisible: he joins forces with private Detective Popp because he has no alternative: the police still don’t trust him.
This lasts until 1945 when The Spectre disappears completely for twenty years, forced into imprisonment inside Jim Corrigan by the arrival on Earth-2 of Asmodus, a demon of similar status to Spec, intent on spreading evil. The two beings cancel each other out until 1965, when the death of Asmodus’ host alters the balance. He can escape Earth, The Spectre is freed. The twenty years he has spent imprisoned, unable to use his magical energies, has built them up to an incredible level: it has also kept Jim Corrigan younger and fitter than he should be.
But this energy is not infinite. Gradually, and more so, as he faces menaces of incredible force, such as Shaithan, and the first threat of the two Earths colliding, these diminish, enough that, after a prolonged period of being absent from Corrigan, he reverts to his earliest form, that of the killing ghost.
The Spectre – Bronze Age
Corrigan’s outrage causes a permanent separation between the pair, and in order to discipline the Spectre, and ensure he doesn’t revert fully to his earlier savagery, the Voice confines him to a crypt (a-hah!) where he must read from the Book of Judgement until he understands humanity better. Only to be released by séance performed by a magical practitioner of great ability, such as Doctor Fate.
Whilst in the crypt, Spectre’s energies have again increased through lack of expenditure, giving him the power to separate the Earths from collision. But at a terrible cost…
Let’s move forward. The stress of surviving, and the enforced separation from Corrigan, leaves The Spectre weaker than ever before. He cannot return to Earth-2. It’s all he can do to ‘be’ Jim Corrigan, NYPD Detective. Slowly, his energies start to build up again, but without an anchor in the form of a human host, he reverts to his original form as the killing ghost. This time, out of step with Earth-1, he is even more inhumane the deaths he deals out more bizarre and horrific.
Back on Earth-2, Jim Corrigan is seen again only once, in a single panel of the revived All-Star Comics. Without his spirit to sustain him, the energies bequeathed him by The Spectre’s presence dissipate: I believe he doesn’t live much longer.
Finally, having borne his duty for too long, The Spectre appeals to the Voice for rest, and restoration of his human status. Besides, Gwen Stacey’s hurling of herself at him is getting too persistent to ignore. The Voice which is common to both Earths and to others, responds by granting his wish, knowing that without supernatural protection, Jim Corrigan will soon be killed again. But this is necessary to bind The Spectre fully to the Earth-1 universe. Now he is whole again.
Having died and been reborn again, The Spectre has the energies to try to return to Earth-2. He succeeds, partially, but he cannot materialise. He cannot approach the ageing Corrigan on this Earth, he is invisible but more than that, he is intangible. Understanding his estrangement from his former home, all The Spectre can do is plead with the Voice to restore the lives of six former JSA team-mates, inadvertently killed by the JLA.
The Spectre returns to Earth-1. Frustrated that he can no longer contact his old friends, The Spectre’s anger overwhelms him briefly, in opposition to the ultimate sceptic, Dr Thirteen, the Ghost-Breaker but after that he accepts his role and begins to grow in wisdom and authority. It is The Spectre who is sent to halt Superman when he threatens to break the bounds of heaven, and it is his decision to stop the Man of Steel without violence that earns him a vast increase of power.
But he hasn’t, yet, totally abandoned his life on Earth-2. With his increased energies, he fights through the barrier, only to discover his old comrades threatened with charges of Treason. Using all his energies to make himself visible, and placing himself under massive stress, enough to warp his judgement, he threatens to destroy Earth-2, and rescue the JSA. He could never have done it: not even at the height of his powers, back in the Sixties, could he have achieved that, but the bluff might serve to rescue the situation.
The JSA’s response is negative, however. They will not join with him. Spurned, The Spectre accepts the final breach and returns to Earth-1 permanently. As punishment for his recklessness, he is set to guard the access to Hell and prevent illicit incursion there.
From there, as the Multiverse is under attack by the Anti-Monitor, The Spectre travels back in time, with the heroes, to the Dawn of Time, where he is the only one with the power to stand up to the this adversary. Even he cannot defeat him, but the battle destroys everything from the Dawn of Time on, putting The Spectre in a state of shock until the Universe has reformed itself and the Anti-Monitor finally defeated.
Determined to redeem himself, The Spectre makes the mistake of assuming no greater foe can exist. He permits the passage of the Pearl of Ultimate Blackness beyond the Universe of light, sure he can overcome the Darkness, to the glory of the Voice, but to his horror, he finds himself but a child in its hands, beaten utterly, and broken. His energies have travelled back in time to the Spear of Destiny, opening the door for Hitler to undo the new history, but in his attempt to intervene he is wounded, fatally, by the Spear, and only has time to alert his old JSA comrades before he dissipates entirely…
The Spectre is Dead, Long Live The Spectre
Epilogue
Whatever Steve Gerber intended for The Spectre is lost to history: no hints, notes or rumours ever emerged from the cancellation of the project due to his deadline issues. The Spectres of Doug Moench and John Ostrander, not to mention Hal Jordan and Crispus Allen are irrelevant to this piece.
The second part of this retrospective was a self-indulgence in 1990 and is even more of one in 2020. Given that the history I’d reviewed so bemusedly for Arkensword had been swept into non-existence so far as the DC Universe was concerned, the entire piece was nothing more than an exercise in cleverness: see, look at me, I solved the riddle. That it was nothing but an exercise in advanced Roy Thomasness – but far less convoluted and congested I hoped was self-evident then as now.
I’m presenting the two pieces together in this package just for the hell of it, to see my thoughts in print. It’s not the only piece I have planned on The Spectre now I have access to the whole of his pre-Crisis history. Keep an eye open for an in-depth survey of Michael Fleisher’s little run…
I mentioned only last week that the aproach of the end of a Lou Grant season has me feeling some form of burn-out, especially if I’m watching a didactic episode: shall we take a break befre continuing. And equally regularly, as if it senses my doubts forty years ahead, the series bounces back with a good, strong, personal episode that refreshes the palate and leaves me set on continuing this rewatch uninterrupted.
‘Influence’ was another of those split stories, the two halves essentially unconnected but both a commentary upon the title in differing degrees, and given enough equal measure as to not be an A-and-B story set-up.
The episode featured the series’ most regular guest in a Guest Star role for the first and only time. Allen Williams has been playing the role of Adam Wilson, straight-laced Finance Editor for ages, and appearing in the opeing credits since the start of season 2, but one half of the story is about him.
Adam, clean-cut, Mr suit-and-tie, is an alcoholic. It’s a surprise, at odds with his persona, but isn’t that so often the case? It’s getting to the point where his marriage is breaking down over it, he’s goofing off, he’s letting down his colleagues, messing up his job, and he’s getting other people to cover for him. The story starts when he starts to bring Lou into his personal circle of deceit, helping him avoid consequences that would tip over his carefully constructed system of ling to himself.
Lou plays along for a while. Rossi, who has been through all this with his own Dad, insists on Lou coming round for dinner with his old man, to learn that covering for Adam is the worst he can do. He has to go into tough love, to force Adam to recognise the worst in himself and manouevre him towards rehab.
It’s a neat little story, made all the more effective by happening to a character we know and, generally, like, instead of some invented on the spot guest with whom we have no familiarity, and the effect is doubled by the small degree to which Adam is affected by his condition: he’s a high-functioning drunk, smooth and capable, but still self-deluding.
The only drawback is that this is 1980. How much, if any, of this will feature in future episodes?
The other half of the story was a much higher-level and, in its own way, story of influence, and also corruption. Mrs Pynchon is tremendously flattered to be invited to join ‘The Circle’, a self-appointed group of influential and very rich businessmen engaged on sweeping projects that not only make money but which improve LA’s infrastructure and the wellbeing of its people. Their current project is a second LA airport, to relieve pressure on LAX and create jobs etc.
The Trib’s already covering that project, in the form of new environmental writer Nick Bowyer (James Whitmore Jr). Bowyer, a forerunner of the UK’s George Monbiot, is against the project for its envirmental impact on unspoiled country. He’s pinting out obvious flaws: the 60 mile distance from LA, the lack of roads, the imposibility of creating satisfactory transport, the surrounding high mountains…
The Circle doesn’t like the Trib’s coverage. They want Mrs Pynchon in the tent with them, peeing out, and she, who isalready unhappy with Bowyer’s relentless negativism, is only too happy to support her paper rethinking its approach. It’s the same old story of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions: she’s a perfect fit for the Circle, being Patrician as all get out. So much good can be done once she’s inside the tent. She wants Bowyer fired, she wants an ‘objective’ look at all the good this scheme can and will do.
So Billie gets landed with the task of being objectively for this. But Billie is objective: she uncovers the scandal waiting to explode. Yes, the Circle has donated, free, thousands of acres of land to this project, but it’s retained hundreds of thousands of acres that will be invaluable if the airport goes ahead, whilst the free thousands are worthless withut an airport being built in the first place…
And Margaret Pynchon, however Patrician she may be, is to honest and too much the newspaperwoman, wedded to the facts, to go on.
A tale of two influences, one ultimately used to the painful benefit of another, and one withdrawn, for the equivocal benefit of many. After all, LA still needs another airport, and who’s to say that this might not have been what was needed?
So that leaves two more chances before season 3 ends to influence my thinking on a break. Where will we be, three weeks from today? Still in LA, or…
The First Chronicles of Amber had taken Roger Zelazny eight years to write. They represented five books in a total of eleven published by him in that period, one a ‘fix-up’ novel consisting of three novellas about the same character. The Courts of Chaos was his seventeenth novel overall. Each of the others were science fiction, although the trappings of fantasy were overlaid on two novels in particular, each utilising a pantheon of Gods (Indian in Lord of Light, Egyptian in Creatures of Light and Darkness) as templates for once-humans to populate.
Amber had proved to be massively popular and Zelazny’s career was already tied to this sequence. It’s influence, and especially the concept of travel throughout Shadow and alternate worlds, had a marked effect on his writing. Roadmarks translated the notion into a road through time, and his next four books (discounting collections and collaborations) were all in the fantasy mould: Changeling and its sequel Madwand utilising the same mixed formula as Amber, the second pair, The Changing Land and Dilvish, the Damned (the latter a ‘fixer-up’ chronologically preceding the former) were more straight fantasy, albeit with Zelazny’s signature cynical, hard-bitten, pragmatic protagonist.
They were, universally, unsatisfying. Compared to the level of work Zelazny had produced at the start of his career, even in minor but nevertheless taut and economic novels as The Dream-Master and This Immortal, they were loose and flabby.
I remember a contemporaneous interview with Harlan Ellison in which he praised not just Zelazny but the fact that he had been recognised early, had been allowed to progress freely and expansively, without having to claw out recognition step by step, like most writers of SF had had to do. And I remember, not all that long after, when surveying this sequence of novels, wondering if that really had been a blessing. It’s a pain in the arse, having to struggle to meet editor’s expectations, but don’t you learn a lot more from adversity that you do acclaim?
The proof of my theory came in the form of 1982’s Eye of Cat. Once again, Zelazny was writing SF, overlaid by a structure imposed by a pantheon, this time the Navajo gods. An interplanetary hunter is tasked with trailing a menace. To succeed, he needs the tracking abilities of an alien creature he previously captured. The creature’s price for co-operation is not merely release but the chance to hunt. Once the menace is taken, the creature – Cat – hunts the hunter, to the death.
It was brilliant. Fine, taut, severe, without wasted words or anything even approaching a hellride. It was Zelazny back on his original form, a recovery of all his old skills. It was, or it could be, a turning point in his career. I looked forward anxiously to his next book. I had been a fan of Zelazny for a decade, I had everyone of his books, including the crappy, barely readable collaboration with Philip K. Dick that I only managed to get through twice at most. I wanted my favourite writer back and here was his chance.
His next announced book was a sequel to Amber. He never wrote anything major again. Indeed, apart from two minor stories, one of them what would be called a Young Adult novel now, he never wrote anything that was not a collaboration again.
Was the Second Chronicles that bad? Let’s see.
Two deaths in a day brings back uncomfortable reminders of 2016, when the gifted seemed to be dying in batches. As well as Albert Uderzo, I now learn that we have lost the gentle and lovely Julie Felix, at the age if 81.
Julie’s chart career cnsisted of two singles, only one of which, a cover of a Paul Simon song from Bridge over Troubled Water got as high as no. 19. But I never associated her with pop, nor did she. The lady sang folk, with long dark hair, a flashing smile and an acoustic guitar. I saw more of her, perhaps, in those last days before I finally started listening to the radio, on TV shows like David Frost and her own BBC series.
And Ed Stewart would regularly play ‘Goin’ to the Zoo’, her most well-known song, on Junior Choice at weekends.
To be truthful, I know and remember very little of her music, but I remember her so well from those last days of musical ignorance. She was pretty and bright and you enjoyed her songs because she was full of a joyful energy of which there’s been a dearth for oh so very long, and now it’s a world with no Julie Felix in it and that brngs me nothing but sorrow.
It isn’t ever going to be the same again, but how many times have I said that already this season? Joss Carter’s death wasn’t all that long ago, and its aftermath extended, but do we even remember her now, as things have shifted, both violently and inexorably, over the last third of the season. Where would she fit into our rapidly dying little world? What role might she play?
Deus Ex Machina. The God in the Machine. What, might we suppose, will the Machine do as Vigilance and Peter Collier play Trial-and-Execution with her creator?
Be very careful. This is a story of defeat, of almost total defeat, and the destruction of everything Person of Interest has been to date. It is the story of quite complex plotting, stretching back over years, to create the very circumstances that start this episode, when Peter Collier – a fanatic whose fanaticism is brought out brilliantly by Leslie Odom Jr, whose whole body glows with the self-righteousness of those who know – puts the enemies of the world on trial. Presidential aide Manuel Rivera, Senator Ross Garrison, Control, John Greer… and Harld Finch.
Their trial, the debates, the anger in Collier’s inability to see any other point of view and his insistence that his brother’s case is the entirety of the system instead of a potential outlier, these are the stuff of the episode. And the ‘defendants’ responses: Rivera’s furious and shouting challenge to Vigilance’s ‘power’ to do this that gets him summarily executed, proving Mao Zedong’s maxim that power grows from the barrel of a gun, Garrison’s political weaseling and throwing Control under a bus, her calm non-answers in the knowledge she will be killed.
All of this is more asorbing that the outer elements of the plot, the almost mundane strands. Reese and Hersh form an unlikely but oddly effective partnership, going to Finch’s rescue, whilst Shaw takes off to cover Root’s back as she plugs her seven servers into Samaritan.
And Harold, unable to see anyone being killed if there is a way he can save them. Finch gives away the most important secret of them all, that he designed and built the Machine, as a quid pro quo for Vigilance letting the other three live. Of course he’s wasted his breath, of course Collier will still kill everyone. he doesn’t even listen to Finch explain everything. He has erected the straw figure in his mind and no amount of testimony, or honesty or evidence to the contrary will serve to deflect him from that one true image in his mind, that vital truth that only he sees, knows and understands.
hersh and Reese are on the way, but it’s planned out. It has been from before Peter Collier’s brother was picked up for something we cannot be certain he didn’t do. Many things can be made to look what they are not, especially for those who are looking for what they want to see.
Decima find Vigilance’s ‘court’ first because they’s always known where it is. Hersh finds a mega bomb in the basement and tries, bravely, instinctively and unavailingly, to defuse it. The bomb, and the loss of collateral life, is Vigilance’s swansong. It, and everything, has been Greer’s plan: establishing Vigilance as a useful devil, grooming Collier, setting them up as fall guys, all to tip the balance. The bomb goes off, Garrison authorises Samaritan, which will go live within the hour. Collier is shot and killed, Finch would be but for the intervention of Reese.
But the defeat is overwhelming. Everythng is gone. Root’s servers weren’t meant to shut Samaritan down, they couldn’t. Instead, they create seven blind spots – herself, Shaw, Reese, Finch and the three computer nerds. When Samaritan comes looking for them, and that’s the first thing Greer will have it do, it will have seven blind spots.
So Team Machine will live but that’s all they can do.Seven new identities, prepared by Root, seven separated lives. The Library lost, smashed by Decima. Everything lost. Going different ways. No more numbers, no more missions, just living under the most wide-ranging radar there has ever been.
It’s just been announced that Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix and Obelix with the late Rene Goscinny, has died at the age of 92. He’d long since passed the reins on Asterix to other hands, for good or ill. No matter that the strip was never as fiunny or sharp again after Goscinny, Uderzo had the absolute right to continue their creation, and his art never lost the confidence and seemingly effortless grace he brought to the Gauls. Quite simply, he was a genius and once again the world is colder and darker place without him.
I’m trying to think of a way to work a “These Romans are crazy” line in, but i can’t. It is us who are crazy, but no amount of tapping a finger against your head will make it funny.
Among the many things I gained from a decades-long enthusiasm for the works of Clive James was an introduction to the works of Lake Street Drive, a jazz-rock band who’ve been around since the beginning of the 2010s. I am not normally a fan of any kind of jazz, and especially not anything that falls into the bracket of trad, but based on his panegyric to the voice of singer Rachael Price, I went on YouTube. And now I have all their CDs to date and the ambition to see them live.
Lake Street Dive are a compact four piece consisting of Mike ‘McDuck’ Olsen on guitars and trumpet, Mike Calabrese on drums and Bridget Kearney on stand-up bass, plus the aforementioned Ms Price on vocals, with all three of the other members on backing vocals. Their music is tight and complex, utilising a mainly rock-oriented sound but jazz inflections and constructions. And in Rachael Price they have a woman with a stunningly rich voice.
Her voice is warm, throaty, flexible and she’s in complete control of her range, owing nothing to studio trickery whatsoever. That she’s also stone cold gorgeous is a bonus.
That first song I was exposed to on YouTube was ‘What I’m Doing Here’. To my chagrin, it is not available on CD, but only as the lead side of a 7″ single, and me with no record player any more. It’s a slow ballad, built upon a primarily piano track, with Price ranging throughout her entire vocal repertoire over its length, trying to decide for herself whether or not the boyfriend she has is worth keeping.
Nobody knows what I’m doing here, she sings, and admits that she herself hasn’t got a clue. What she is doing is messing around with these other fools, when she’s not with him. But what seems obvious to everyone else, that he is the one she should be with, is far less obvious to Rachael. She knows she’s wasting her time with these other losers, but questions whether the boyfriend she’s avoiding is so good a bet for her. Their relationship is turbulent: yes, they’re in love, or he’s in love and she has feelings for him, but there are times when things are turbulent and that love is not enough.
And while they wonder, they who are unnamed but are her friends, and are here represented by the backing vocals of the band, what she’s doing with these fools and losers, Rachael herself wonders, knowing that they are not enough for her, they are beneath her, and why she is here and not elsewhere is as much a mystery to her as it is to her friends.
But not necessarily the same mystery. If they are that much below the boyfriend she, on one level loves, why does she spend her time with them and not him? What is she seeing that she can’t see that she’s seeing? Her voice dips and soars, asking herself a question she cannot answer, hoping to find in the music the explanation, and the key to what she should do in order to move forward.
That she can’t find it yet is no fault of the honesty with which she interrogates herself. If the answer is in her voice, it will come. In the meantime, being caught between choices like Hamlet has never sounded so musically compelling.
And she sings it in one single take in the video attached below. Incredible.
Martin Crookall - Author For Sale 