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Enjoy the Haydn joke at the start - a slow movement that starts fast and loud enough to wake up the ladies at the back. Afon Marw means literally Dead River but Valley of the Shadow of Death would do as well. Adolescence as an eternal human condition but also its specific setting here amid the poignant end of the Heavy Industrial Male. Where the allegro expressed the fury and iniquity of it all, this movement expresses the sadness and 'hiraeth'. And then finally sees the funny side ( the Bowie pastiche.)

lyrics

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?)

credits

from 'Hiraeth' - Symphony Number 1 in Coal Minor, released January 1, 2020
LC - music and guitar
BardontheWire - words, voice, Ghost valley soundscape, vocal.

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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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