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'Hiraeth' - Symphony Number 1 in Coal Minor

by Bardonthewire

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1.
Allegro 05:50
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Scream. Angel years Golden nights Young Running Shadow... Just watch me now. When Lennon was singing of flowers and love And the planets of Holst was in aquarius I was with Pikes in the school corridors. A child of the 60s was something to be. When Floyd were with Emily and Ummagumm- ah And I was Pike in his aquarium Miss Bitcham taught grammar; Miss Whiplash taught sums. A child of the 60s was something to be. * Born To Run In Abersychan speeding cars with Mary Jane A chance of that would be a fine thing, I was walking in the rain To the dance at Croesyceiliog to take my chance with Hotlips Jones. I dance like Jagger, hips akimbo, that's Ok if you're with the Stones. Killing time's a teenage pastime Bored to tears for years and years The you find your lifetime's killer Mortgaged to a straight career. * Uniforms are worn and torn and corn and porn and every morn with heads all shorn we swarm upon the school. The old school tie will never die for she and I at throat and thigh are tied for life by Dai the Stupid Rule. His uniforms's an overall, his mind's a blinking traffic light. If he's the model of our age I hope I die with Megan on Friday night. Uniforms are worn and torn and corn and porn and every morn with heads all shorn we swarm upon the school. The old school tie will never die for she and I at throat and thigh are tied for life by Dai the Stupid Rule. His uniforms's an overall, his mind's a blinking traffic light. If he's the model of our age I hope I die with Megan on Friday night. (Yeee!) Old School Tie. Let go Dai. Die the death die. Always say die Dai. Die Dai! * With a working class hero who didn't feel fine. In a coal-shadowed valley where nothing was mine. I was studying hard to es caper the job line. A Lennonist Student was something to be. A Lennonist Student was something to be.
2.
Adagio 06:00
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Boy girl share sleep new hearts strong love Boy girl share sleep new hearts strong love Fleeting hours new tears, * Nothing. She looked out of the window and took in a view of the Western Mountain and the pricking lights of the valley below. She was tired of it. The banks of the streams plunging riverwards across the igneous pavement tops of Craig Ddu were a sickly after-the-goldrush orange, ghost-buildings and broken up winding gear beginning to sink into the dusk; a wilderness of ferns interspersed with slag; a disused railroad; a dead sheep rotting acridly on the wind, and bones everywhere. The stump walls and wind-bitten lintel of a solid but roofless old limestone farm, so old it may have pre-dated the industrial revolution and been ruined by it, were still just visible among the dead bracken and leaves of a century of autumns. Trees fell away below and mounted above, the lines of evergreens nearest the lane and the old railway conveying an atmosphere of resentment and hostility. Two former brick works spewed their memory of industry and energy, one of the many bi-products of a thriving coalfield and ironstone valley, pouring it imperceptibly away into this tributary of the Afon Marw year by year, a treacherous slide of decay down the steep valley sides. Slag heaps and waste tips had begun to take root and bear gorse, whimberry and heather, and next to the one remaining pit-head there was an old miners’ cooler. A big rusty sign still proclaimed DA GER: DO N T SWIM – but it had seen its last unauthorised swimming boys in the miners’ water a couple of years before. It had not seen miners bathing for even longer. Shale and iron caught the last daylight. The whole place seemed to be rusting. * The factory because it destroyed the mentor-apprentice system without destroying the need boys have to adopt men as heroes and role models. Who were your male models? My male role models were all capitalist posters and they were all crap at football. Ground Control to Uncle Tom Ground Control to Uncle Tom Take your toilet rolls and put your bobble hat on. Ground Control to Uncle Tom Start the milk float engines on. Bristol City and your god's love be with you. This is Ground Control to Uncle Tom. I'm stepping froo the door. And I'm floating in a most peculiar way. And I'm flaring down from Clifton Onto the Hardcliff Way. Here am I psychedelic spray can Behind a builder's van. (Peterson's of Bristol) Rovers shirts are blue and there's nothing I can do. (For all your hardcore needs.) (I'M SITTING NEXT TO A HAIRY BEAR. WHAT'S WAITING FOR JESUS, CHRISTMAS?)
3.
Dance movement 03:10
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Hey butt, take a walk on the Forge Side… Rocking over the melody Rolling under the beat The girl is losing her fashioned head The boyo’s finding his feet. They’re moving into a smoky world Winding free of the street Rocking over the melody Rolling under the beat. He’s miming don’t you love me? The Rams are slurping their Wind & Piss Ogling pieces of meat Stamping time to the furnace thud Needing someone to beat. The swaying hips of the dancing boy Mark him out for their feet. Knocking over the melody Rolling under the beat. He’s miming don’t you love me? Rocking over the melody Rolling under the beat The girl is losing her fashioned head The boyo’s finding his feet. They’re moving into a smoky world Winding free of the street, Rocking over the melody Rolling under the beat. He’s miming don’t you love me? The Rams are slurping their Wind and Piss Ogling pieces of meat, Stamping time to the furnace thud Needing someone to beat. The swaying hips of the dancing boy Mark him out for their feet. Knocking over the melody Rolling under the beat. He’s miming don’t you love me? Shoot me. In his, her body’s a violin Moaning sharply and sweet His a cello below the heat Of hammered sinew and skin. They soar and plunge along the bow Of what their cannon pulses know. Rocking over the melody Rolling under the beat. He’s miming don’t you love me? They decoy brushes against his cheek. The boy’s reflexes are neat. Hooks the decoy across the floor, Mines a fist through his teeth. The Rams are halted but not for long Twelve to one you can’t beat Knocking over the melody Rolling into the street. (And maybe we could go for a walk together. Up The Mountain.)
4.
Finaleo 10:36
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Angel years Golden nights Young Running Shadow... Just watch me now. With a working class hero who didn't feel fine. In a coal-shadowed valley where nothing was maine. I was studying hard to es caper the job line. A Lennonist Student was something to be. A Lennonist Student was something to be. In life's uncertain lodging, youth is crucified by elders from the start. Scream. Uniforms are worn and torn and corn and porn and every morn with heads all shorn we swarm upon the school. The old school tie will never die for she and I at throat and thigh are tied for life by Dai the Stupid Rule. His uniforms's an overall, his mind's a blinking traffic light. If he's the model of our age I hope I die with Megan on Friday night. (Yeee!) Old School Tie. Let go Dai. Die the death die. Always say die Dai. Die Dai! Holidays keep getting shorter. Start of term is always nigh. Time is getting nowhere faster, Life's bitch and then you die. Hanging on between each new inspection is the teacher's way. They stole the great important lesson. We make believe in what we say. (And maybe we can go for a walk together? Up the Mountain.) The river’s prophet tongue I now understand: I am heir to my druid realm at last. Girl’s curves hover, almost in my grasp, The boys step back a bit; I have command. Down Jerusalem Lane, mine’s the upper hand, A Carpenter of Fate in the Christmas Sun - then the mocking mud, led on by a judas To his Hotpoint, house, wife, ‘friends’, looks that brand. No escape, through a room that madly pulsates To Pen y Maen bridge, tracing beneath it Green microdot fields, hills’ pie in the sky, Victorian railings, Dad’s Thought Police eye. I need a real home, away from this place: A girl, a room, a bed, tavern, music… * Coda Star The Dark (Isla's Song) We're comprehensively full of ability And it breaks my heart Why they bite off and grade the fingers that could Star the dark. Star the dark. Star the dark. Star the dark. Save the whale. Save the whale. Save the whale. Kill the shark.
5.
Isla's Song 02:15
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We're comprehensively Full of ability And it breaks my heart Why they must bite off And grade the fingers That would star the dark. Save the whale. Kill the shark. Look at the sky, child. That's Sirius, the Dog. Orion, the Hunter. There's the Plough. That's how, According to our lights, We know. Now reach.

about

Hiraeth (Welsh) n. - " a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was, the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of the past."

Symphony No 1 in Coal Minor is about a teenage ghost that spent 50 years trying to get laid. It achieves a lifelong ambition to arrange once and for all my mostly Welsh bildungsroman into the four movements of a (metaphorically speaking) classic symphony. I could never have done this without the help of rock musician LC, original composer/producer of most of the music, whose track record includes chart success, in case that matters to anyone listening. LC's willingness and ability to grasp, support and facilitate my project makes him a constantly reassuring presence and the perfect fun collaborator.

We wrote both words and music on the hoof in the studio after deciding that the larger project we were then working on ("Marked For Life, 2000") needed some songs. As a consequence, neither of us having much time to think about it, they are simple, honest and raw. Rock songs in other words.

The first movement sets out all the major themes of the bildingsroman; the adagio has another two looks at them in a lighter funnier mood then a poignant ("How Green Was My Valley") elegiac one; the dance movement shakes everything up in a heavy industrial metal disco soufflé' and the final movement digests the whole thing with a broken bottle of something heavy. I like the way that a classical symphony creates 3 parallel universes in this way rather than a continuous forward narrative (as a novel might, however experimental) and then resolves them all into a final statement in a fourth movement. That's the pattern I followed here.

The heavy industrial, heavy metal, old school manhood template of that time and place was, like British manufacturing itself, under terminal threat. The Jagger dances, Bowie transitions, hippy clothes and alternative flower powering were quite as revolutionary as the old Coalfield Dads feared but this wasn't how it felt at the time. We were just trying not to fall over even if in fact we were storming the barricades.

The translation of "hiraeth" above is better than most but for me there is a missing hint of the Celtic otherworld, where we really are at home, in an always-present beyond past and future. A present home falsely experienced by our limited consciousness as a dim memory.

credits

released January 1, 2020

LC - guitar, music, original production.
Bardonthewire - words, vocals, voice, percussion, additional music and additional re-production.

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Bardonthewire England, UK

Performance poetry with a library card (voice & drum, folk ballads, ghazals, sonnets, beat poems, sound poems, raps) much of it happening 'on the street' or jostling to be heard in the tavern. Researched stories of folk heroes and real folk. History for you. Bardic poetry striving (as all arts do) for the condition of music (from punk though rap to to prog). Visionary lit. for your average Blake. ... more

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