These late collaborative plays pose a problem to the romantic, shapely arc often assigned to Shakespeare’s writing career. This suggests that, having written the theatre’s greatest histories, comedies and tragedies, Shakespeare’s art rarefied to romance, a second childhood of shipwrecks, fathers and daughters reunited, evil queens and gods descending from the heavens to untangle confusion. This theory crests with The Tempest, where Prospero – virtually Shakespeare himself striding onstage to put everyone straight about a thing or two – rounds off two miraculous decades in art by ‘drowning’ his book and renouncing magic (for which read writing plays). Prospero/Shakespeare then retreats to Stratford to a dignified retirement of grain hoarding and minor litigation.

Except he doesn’t. Instead, he writes one, possibly two, possibly three plays with John Fletcher.

I’ve written about Henry VIII before on this blog. The Two Noble Kinsmen is also extremely strange. The passages usually assigned to Shakespeare are far from The Tempest’s elegiac elegance. Clearly, we can take Prospero/Shakespeare’s final grumble that ‘every third thought will be my grave,’ as sincere. In a speech on the seductive powers of the goddess Venus, he focuses on the vitalising power of sex by imagining an 80-year-old old man to whom

                                       The aged cramp
Had screwed his square foot round;
The gout had knit his fingers into knots,
Torturing convulsions from his globy eyes
Had almost drawn their spheres that what was life
In him seemed torture. (V.i)

Nice stuff, particularly when we’re told this man fathered a child with his fourteen-year-old bride.

The Two Noble Kinsmen has a tragic-comic sub-plot centring on a girl driven mad by love, a possible burlesque of Ophelia’s behaviour in Hamlet. The play breaks for a pastoral episode featuring comic characters. This is a quality it shares with The Winter’s Tale and, I am happy to fantasise, the original Cardenio.

The after-history of Cardenio depends upon a possible rewritten version by Lewis Theobald, Double Falsehood. Theobald’s play includes no comic sub-plot. However, in Don Quixote, the source of the Cardenio story, the tale’s protagonists encounter and interact with the one character notably absent from Double Falsehood: Don Quixote.

Cardenio has been cheated of the woman he loves and this has driven him mad. He retreats to the wilderness, raves and grieves and eventually encounters Quixote and Sancho Panza. Quixote has decided to imitate the heroes of chivalry by living mad and naked in the wilderness, beating his head against rocks to show his love for Dulcinea of Tobosa. Sancho, concerned for his master’s wellbeing, suggests that Quixote should instead bash his head against some wool, or some water, to prevent hurting himself. The madness is, he says, feigned after all. They argue the point of feigned madness, Quixote stressing his sincerity.

I am convinced that this episode would have kindled instant recognition in Shakespeare. It contains some of his favourite themes  – as well as a deranged old man stripping naked in the wilderness as in King Lear. The scene is intensely theatrical;  it debates the performance, or playing, of emotion; Quixote’s madness-within-madness satirises the more serious love-madness of Cardenio in what would be the play’s main plot. The comic possibilities of the simple-yet-pedantic Sancho trying to persuade a half-naked Quixote to bash his head against some wool surely must also have appealed.

I have written a play, Forgiving Shakespeare. It is a comedy freely imagining the composition of Cardenio. Having examined the chapters Fletcher and Shakespeare must have read for their play, I am completely seduced by the possibility that – in this lost play – Shakespeare would have recognised then seized the opportunity to animate two of the few characters in world literature to match his own creations in scale, soul and universality.

Cardenio had a comic sub-plot. And in that sub-plot Shakespeare brought Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to life on the Globe stage. It’s a wonderful thought.

The approved narrative, of course, brings things to a head in 1969, with Altamont and the Manson killings, the end of the 60s etc. What I’m interested in is the way that the emergence of explicit darkness into popular music seems to correspond with the significant influence of several powerful women artists on their more famous male partners during that time. Arguably, the exploration of dark, chthonic sounds, themes and textures by many leading artists of the time seems to correspond with their relationships with several significant, cultured, powerful and self-determined women for whom the rock spotlight either held no place or no interest.

There were few women in rock in the late 60s, at least no successful or self-determined lead artists fully able to exploit the growing opportunities for musicians to present themselves, however erroneously, as mystics, revolutionaries, even magicians. Most female artists had to settle for being producer-controlled solo acts and vehicles for the work of other songwriters. So the feminine influence on the subterranean turn taken by music at this time had to be indirect, filtered and thus rarely acknowledged or recognised. The liberation of the mid-60s, in which musicians seized more control of their art and direction than ever before, were still focussed almost entirely on the liberation and elevation of the male artist, around whom adoring wives and groupies alike were expected to worship and attend, servicing the young gods as muses, courtesans and housewives.

One such was Marianne Faithfull. A successful singer in her own right, Faithfull had been pursued by Mick Jagger and, upon beginning their relationship, was surprised to discover herself at home on Cheyne Walk much of the time, where Jagger – ever a product of the conservative suburbs – assumed she would cook, clean and maintain the household. But it was through the literate and semi-aristocratic Faithfull that Jagger became exposed to theatre, good wine and Mikahil Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, the source material for arguably his most accomplished lyric, Sympathy for the Devil. But there was more to the song: a huge part of its newness (at least to the Stones and their audience) was the driving, polyrhythmic funk and the chant of ‘woo-woo’ almost mocking Jagger’s supposedly civilised Lucifer like a primate army at his back. The chant was vamped in the studio by Anita Pallenberg, swinging her arms in the background. She was partner to Keith Richards, for whom she had left Brian Jones in 1967. Like Faithfull, whose mother was of the Sacher-Masoch family, Pallenberg came from a continental background that must have seemed romantic and bohemian to the still-suburban Stones (although they never would have let this enchantment show). She left the violent Jones for Richards; it has been suggested that Jones never recovered from losing her – he would, up until his death, find girlfriends who resembled her – and it has been noted that her allegedly unsimuated sex scenes with Jagger for Performance contributed to Richards’ crippling heroin addiction; almost, then, a case of killing two Stones with one bird. The Stones, ever a lads’ gang, wouldn’t flirt with the occult, the untamable unconscious, for long. Faithfull co-wrote Sister Morphine, perhaps the Stones’ most honest portrayal of powerlessness. It would be 1994, following a lawsuit, before Faithfull received a songwriting credit.

Also an artist in her own right, although not in rock, Yoko Ono transformed John Lennon and therefore the Beatles. Through Ono’s encouragement towards experimentation and self-examination, Lennon was able to bring both a new savagery and child-like vulnerability into his music. The radical Revolution 9 was recorded with Ono, Lennon screaming as if in childbirth; and, as Ian Macdonald notes, the overheard voices and drifting snatches of music and dissonance more resemble the hypnogogic memories of childhood that the piece’s professed subject, revolution. The journey into a new, dreamlike world culminates in the near-weightless Julia, wherein Lennon calls to his dead mother, naming her ‘ocean child’ (Yoko, in Japanese). Lennon entered the pre-natal realm offered by Ono – the ‘mother superior’ of Happiness is a Warm Gun – more completely and gratefully than any contemporary. For him, this pre-natal realm was neither devouring or nightmarish but a blissful, if psychologically spurious, return to infancy – itself one logical destination for the ideals of Flower Power.

One-time pimp and inveterate beater of women, Miles Davis’s idea of giving something back was putting his women on the covers of his albums. So how was it that his younger wife, Betty Mabry, was able to turn him onto the new, vital black sounds coming out of America’s inner cities, thereby transforming jazz and the artistic trajectory of a genius? Davis’s mid-60s albums are brilliant but remote, cerebral, and the politically-sensitive Davis sensed he was losing his black audience. Mabry, herself a musician, encouraged him to explore the driving funk of James Brown, Sly Stone’s multi-racial celebrations and the molten explorations of Jimi Hendrix. The result, soon enough, was Bitches Brew ( a telling, begruding title if ever there was one), one of the most radical career overhauls in history and, as Julian Cope might say, a righteous howl from deep within the womb of the great mother. Davis would push this sound harder and harder for the next five years until retiring from music, depressed, toxic and having alienated most of his audience in pursuit of a source that only Lester Bangs and Cope ever seemed interested guessing at. Betty and Miles were married for one year. Betty went on to record some profoundly funky music.

Someone did manage to express this descent into the murky unconscious during the late 60s as an artist on her own terms, in her own words and with her own music. Nico had released one album of covers, Chelsea Girl, and though her appearances on the Velvet Underground’s debut LP, straddled the mainstream and the underground. She had modelled and acted, appearing in La Dolce Vita. Like Pallenberg and Faithfull, Nico’s European roots contrasted the USA-facing pop-culture grounding of most rock artists of the time (VU’s John Cale being a notable exception). But nothing can really explain The Marble Index, Nico’s first album of original songs, written and performed on harmonium with arrangements by Cale – the male artist for once taking the supporting role to the female. Released almost unnoticed in 1968 it is unique, disturbing, unfathomable, an authentic glimpse into the primordial abyss. Individuality is erased by snow and time, Nico’s lyrics are opiated and nightmarish but never fearful. Her delivery has extraordinary clarity. It is the most authentic recorded example of the atavistic derangement, the angling in the lake of darkness that erupted in popular music at this time. Nico doesn’t just angle from the shore, of course, she dives in and keeps swimming downwards.

I’m not sure what I mean to say by all of this, expect that I feel it worthy of note that so many cultured and creatively potent women gained influence – however obliquely – over some of the most alpha-male lords of the day and that, almost without exception, this brief integration between male and female, old Europe and USA, avant garde and poptastic, pushed the music of the late 60s somewhere dark and strange, where the more usual rock preoccupations of casual sex, callow posturing and generalised idealism were swamped by something familiar to pop’s ancient forbears, literature and visual art: Chaos and Old Night.

Certainly, it offers us grand characters on a grand stage: Henry himself, Anne Boleyn, Cardinal Wolsey and a scene-stealing, visionary Katherine of Aragon. There are falls from grace, deceptions, seductions and intrigue and yet the play is not a parade of crowd-pleasing grotesques such as Shakespeare’s earliest history plays, nor a redemptive portrait of flawed power, as so many of Shakespeare’s later works are. It is something in between, barely touching on the characters’ inner workings, and the Globe’s current production offers little illumination.

The Globe, along with the RSC, has a near-duty to perform plays such as Henry VIII, those too uncommercial for less prestigious companies, so that we get to see the lesser-know byways of our greatest poet’s works. Sometimes these are a triumph – the RSC’s history cycle at the Roundhouse in 2008 revealed Henry VI as a monumental theatrical achievement. Sometimes, however, we can experience first hand the limitations of a text in performance. Such with Henry VIII.

Henry VIII is an equivocal, subtle text and it is entirely lost in this production, both in terms of volume and interpretation. There are pleasing aristocratic processions in rich period costume, there is a masque, but even characters such as Wolsey and Katherine are lost in weak or bizarre performances. Ian McNeice’s Wolsey is a mountainous, scarlet presence, boding splendid malevolence, but his delivery is halting and uncertain, barely reaching the audience. His fall from grace, ending with a justly celebrated meditation of the follies of ambition, falls flat. Kate Duchêne delivers a heartbroken Queen Katherine, the play’s moral centre. But Katherine’s decline in health, slipping finally into an angelic vision, is marked by a corresponding increase in shrieking and twitching until the queen’s grief and implied saintliness are barely detectable.

Amanda Lawrence stands out as the Fool and Old Woman. In these brief roles she brings laughter and interest where there was none, humanity where there was pomp and pathos where there was sentiment.

The play ends with Thomas Hurley’s sympathetic Cranmer prophesying the glorious reign of Elizabeth I – no doubt a patriotic moment for the original Jacobean audience but frankly meaningless now in its decorous enthusiasm.

Is the play a neglected masterpiece? Perhaps in a more intimate venue the subtleties and ironies, the plots and hypocrisies might glow a little, draw the audience in, and allow us to find out. But here the Globe gives us a great deal – three hours – of not a lot.

In writing a couple of thoughts about William Blake I am engaging in a very minor piece of family heritage. My great-great-great grandfather, Alexander Gilchrist, wrote a biography of Blake, published in 1863. In fact, Alexander died of scarlet fever aged 33, before the book was completed. His wife, Anne, finished the work.

Prompted by an interest in Anne, I was recently drawn to Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Blake. I discovered that his life was sadder, and far funnier, than I had known. The archetype of the struggling artist is a cliché in our time; wander through Soho, Whitechapel or any arts college and you’ll see several dozen who might, in their cups, confess themselves a hidden genius. But the popular vision of the overlooked genius seems to prefer the saintly gazer into eternity, careless of worldly recognition. Not the angry, embittered rationaliser of their own defeat, enervated by disappointment which so many who strive can become. Blake, as Ackroyd observes, was both. He saw his work as of and for eternity yet railed against those who overlooked him, the fashions of the time that prevented any chance of his wider success and recognition. One of the saddest moments in Ackroyd’s book comes when detailing a private journal entry of Blake’s. Having outlined the worldly successes of his peers, Blake concludes ‘I was hid’. At a later time, or as an afterthought, he crosses through was and writes am: I am hid. For a man who was clear enough in his genius to emphatically and publicly compare himself to Michelangelo and Raphael and to declare his verse the greatest since the Iliad, the humiliation of being overlooked, passed over, must have been of hellish intensity.

Yet throughout the years of neglect Blake sustained a strong regimen of work and a belief in the imagination as his beacon, the core of all his various and complex visions, the proof of man’s divinity. And whilst every would-be artist should take inspiration from his tenacity, it is the second point that I find most inspirational. Like many mystics he perceived the physical world, which he called ‘vegetable’, as a brittle shell, a miserable husk of the spirit. The spirit, in contrast, was eternal and of God. But, or so I see it, even God was – at times – an emanation of the imagination.

It was encouraging to read this, as I’ve reached my own conclusions. When challenged by an esoterically-inclined friend as to what I believe, I told him that the only force that seems to unite or make sense of the endless human outpouring of myth, art, fiction, faith, scientific invention, song and untruth, is imagination. What others might call God, I call imagination. It is uniquely human and stands as my conception of the sacred without the creaking support of supernatural agency. I don’t need – though I may sometimes want – the attendant belief in the disembodied soul, gods, ancestral spirits or magical forces that always accompany a belief in divinity. Because the imagination – whilst taking its place in my private pantheon – is an entity of the vegetable world; an evolutionary by-product existing within, and because of, the human body. That we can build cathedrals, fight wars and conceive masterpieces all for the glory of an invisible force is the most terrible, farcical and wonderful proof of humanity. And that it was sparked at all, by hungry, vegetable humans – as a stick against a stone, charcoal scraped against a cave wall – is miracle enough for me. But I envy Blake his visions.

I’ve not read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but last year I was introduced to his work. I read Outer Dark, which I’ve written about before, and Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian is an extraordinary, unrelenting descent into the kind of temporal hell that the fortunate amongst us will only ever fear, never experience. Its biblical language, sense of creation being somehow corrupt at root – a kind of inverted gnosticism – is operatic and visceral; its depictions of savagery are unflinching.

I am easily frightened by post-apocalyptic movies. The first hour of 28 Days Later, Day of the Triffids, the parts of Threads I managed to sit through, even scenes in I Am Legend leave me nervous, claustrophobic and aware of the vast, overpopulated urban space surrounding me. I remember, years ago, alone and drunk, watching Things To Come late one night and feverishly wondering where I could get my hands on a firearm.

So, when a friend asked me if I wanted to see the film of The Road, I said yes – with reservations. Post-apocalyptic McCarthy? Did I want to start the weekend preoccupied with planning escape routes from Clapham or wondering how best to transport water on foot? As another friend told me this week: “Since I read The Road I keep a store of food and supplies in my house. And so do three other people I know.”

Strange, then, that I spent the film in a growing state of relief that nothing truly frightening was going to happen and – at the same time – increasingly disappointed that the film seemed to have demurred from taking me where I was so afraid to go. What were the problems?

Certainly not Viggo Mortensen, who gives the kind of egoless, intense and self-eviscerating performance that seems his default level of commitment to any project. I noted several close-ups of his dirty, stubbed fingernails – almost identical to several shots of his hands in Lord of the Rings; as if the filmmakers are saying: ‘Look, this guy’s not Hollywood. He gets his fingernails dirty. His fingernails!’ Top marks to Viggo.

And a mature, sad performance from Kodi Smit-McPhee as Viggo’s son, a character who presents the first problems. The child has been, we’re told, born into the apocalypse. He knows nothing but scavenging, grief and hunger. Yet he approaches each new threat with the whimpering surprise of a boy in Chelsea who just got addressed by a poor man through the open window of his mother’s parked SUV. This isn’t Smit-McPhee’s fault, but the screenplay seems not to account for the adaptability, the survival instinct in children. The boy never runs from danger but has to be dragged or carried by Viggo. If I was a nine-year-old apocalypse boy, I think I’d know how and when to run. When one reads of children living in horror – from Cockney mudlarks to child soldiers, shock and timidity are not their defining characteristics.

Another factor that seemed to soften the horror is the soundtrack. The kind of melancholy plinky-plonk piano one associates with films about people with perfect teeth coming to terms with things. It soothes, insists that our core experience of the film should not be despair, but a kind of mellow reflectiveness. When the credits rolled and I saw the soundtrack was by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, I was stunned. Cave should have left his Boatman’s piano at home and invited the Grinderman over for a bathtub gin and axe party.

The landscapes, the vistas of annihilation, are stunning, beautiful in a way that robs them of misery: one admires the desolation. But the filmmakers have chosen to wash the visuals with the kind of grey-sepia filters that have been popular for too long now. At times I felt I was watching the world’s longest, most depressing Guinness commercial: ‘he pushes a shopping trolley, it’s what he does…tick follows tick follows tock’. That the early flashback scenes to Viggo and wife Charlize Theron are coloured like an advert for some meadow-smelling detergent suggests that the apocalypse was nothing more than a re-branding exercise on the part of some capricious celestial account manager.

And one thing an audience member can guarantee is this: a film that gets funding in Hollywood will not feature the dismemberment and consumption of a brave little boy whose dad happens to be Aragorn, Son of Arathorn. Some Mad Max-styled Judge Holden would not appear, dandle him on his knee then cut his throat (the boy, not Viggo). If they died, it would be nobly. And so it turns out. Viggo dies his old viking’s death at the sea’s edge (a beautiful ruin of an ocean, sludge grey with no hope of seeing sky. Just like Norfolk, which makes me happy). The boy mourns and then…there’s a man coming! It’s probably a cannibal. No, it’s Guy Pierce. With his wife and two children. And a friggin’ dog. One with sad eyes and floppy ears: The only sacred form of life in Hollywood. Do they kill the boy and eat him, fuel for the hopeless road? Do they sadly explain that food is already scarce enough without another mouth to feed and leave him there alone? I’m not going to spoil it.

2.30AM.

I’m lying in bed, awake. I’ve worked out that, if we headed south, then north east around London, rather than trying to head through the city, it would be the safest route. Sachets of porridge are lightest to carry but we would have to find water as we moved. A friend of mine used to be in the army. He lives close. We should head for his house first then to Norfolk, where I know the land…

Ah, yes, but this friend has a secret identity.  He is Organ Monkeys. And he sounds like this:

ORGAN MONKEYS

I love Beefheart. I once spent several weeks only listening to Trout Mask Replica. I wanted it to become so familiar that it would become my default setting for ‘normal’ music and thereby transform every subsequent auditory experience into some avant-garde trip. I love Funkadelic, the squelchy bass and keys, the exuberance and, like Beefheart, the courageous wisdom that humour can deliver a serious message. Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense changed my life when I was 13, replacing any latent idea of becoming an author with dreams of jerking around in a big suit with Bernie Worrell getting up on his bad thing behind me. I also love Ivor Cutler, the gnomic (and gnomish) surrealism, the darkly child-like wordplay and the concision of his vision. Organ Monkeys, I think, shows all these qualities and (Joe, correct me on this if I’m wrong), he plays it all himself.

Further, he builds banjos. I urge you to visit his site and learn of his quest. Here’s an appetiser:

I looked for an old guitar. I needed one which was really really bad. Eventually I saw a white acoustic hanging on a guitar shop wall. “METALLICA” was stencilled in tiny writing on the body…

The guitar shop guy didn’t want to sell it to me as it was so bad…I said “it’s OK” in Japanese and did my best to mime sawing motions with sound effects. He looked a little bit shocked.

Read more here

For much of the material in this essay I am indebted to online musicologist ‘Sean’, who also brought Jibbs McCallister to my attention.

In October 1972, 37 years to the day last week, a temporary worker brought in to the Yazoo offices to catalogue a job-lot of donated shellac sides failed to extinguish a cigarette correctly and, in what has now become known as the Great ’72 Barn Fire (although it was no barn but a lock-up in the West Village), an entire department of Yazoo’s archive was destroyed. It could have been worse, or so many have observed. Once the smoke cleared, almost all the destroyed records came from the section named ‘Problematic’. These were the scratched records, the poor performances by forgotten jug and hoss-tube artists, the discs without labels and, famously, a near-complete set of White Star shellacs by Jibbs McCallister. Rumours persist that this was no accident.

Jibbs who?

Exactly. McCallister is as forgotten today as he was notorious in his time. In the categorisation frenzy of the 60s folk revival Jibbs was most commonly referred to as a Zydeco fiddle player but even this apparently simple piece of information crumbles when examined. The reference originates from a taped interview with folklorist Stuart Palmer. Palmer asks Jibbs what style he plays and Jibbs, slurring, apparently replies ‘Zydeco fiddle’ but recent digital analysis has suggested he may have said ‘psycho fiddle’ or even ‘zygote feel’ although the latter theory has few adherents within professional studies (Greil Marcus excepted).

Jibbs claimed variously to have been born in Peu Menteur, Croix Saint Nulle-part and Beletteville in Louisiana. His race was never successfully established and Jibbs appears to have adjusted his mannerisms according to his audience or in relation to the various legal and criminal representatives that dogged his travels. His only recorded reference to race is a claim that he was ‘one of them injuns’. In what is believed to be the earliest representation of Jibbs, in an etching submitted as evidence in a court case by illustrator Esau Mallory titled ‘The Last Time I Saw My Good Hound, Nutmeg, Alive, Jibbs seems unambiguously Caucasian although this may be due to the conventions of the time. The etching is reproduced above.

What is agreed upon is that Jibbs developed an extraordinary style and idiosyncratic fingering, visible on a post-war amateur film from Jukin’ Sam’s. Or so goes the received wisdom. True, Jibbs developed some ingenious techniques and posterity has been kind and attributed this to the desire for musical innovation but the fact is that Jibbs wanted to unsettle his rivals. The fingering was altered to confuse and he would detune by a quarter-tone so that anyone trying to play along would sound incompetent

For this reason, Jibbs’s influence has not been wide. Those of his contemporaries who were not put off by these strategies were often physically threatened. In a non-released cut from his only Library of Congress session, Jibbs breaks off from the middle section to Sweet Lindy Be My Undertaker, shouting ‘don’t be peepin’ at my goddamn fingers,’ to John Lomax. The sound of scuffling follows.

This unfortunate incident introduces perhaps the biggest reason for McCallister’s historical occlusion. He was renowned for what Lomax would later describe as ‘a belligerent, drunken lasciviousness and avariciousness that almost deterred one from the charm of his fiddling’. There were ugly fights over billing at Newport ’64 where, as Dave Van Ronck observed, ‘It’s a brave man who pisses in Dock Boggs’s banjo’.

In an extended version of the Jukin’ Sam’s film currently in private hands, Jibbs – despite the darkness of the venue and his obvious state of inebriation – appears to be manipulating his instrument in a manner that perhaps renders it spiritually unsuitable for the following number, Lord, Let the Jesus Guide Me. The visual evidence is backed by Stonehand Pikes who confirmed that Jibbs had indeed developed a variant on the ‘play it with your teeth’ trick in another case of obnoxious one-upmanship; Eck Dunford and he had been drinking but fell out over a woman. Eck was chatting to the lady after the dance when Jibbs barged over and allegedly shouted ‘forget the lily-boy. I can play Wake Up Jacob with my pecker’.  As Sean observes:

“Jibbs was so bawdy he made Big Joe Turner’s metaphors of balls and lemons look like Sunday morning programming. Evidenced by his versions of “Pinochle Bar-B-Que” and “Chitlins and Gravy”. Of course between the Yazoo fire and the ‘59 Baton Rouge First Baptist lewd record and book burning, these recordings are now as rare as a Quarrymen acetate.”

Despite his extraordinary talent, Jibbs was perhaps the only old-time musician to have bad blood with John Lomax. Jibbs misunderstood the purpose of the Library of Congress recordings and, having railroaded several hundred miles, arrived on Lomax’s doorstep clutching a .34 and demanding money. There was an altercation during which, allegedly, Gibbs grabbed a young Alan Lomax by the hair. Had Lead Belly not intervened, events could have become truly violent. Subsequently, during the early 60s folk revival, Alan actively opposed the search for Jibbs, apparently doctoring Carl Bleikwitz’s maps and muttering that Jibbs was ‘one motherfucker who should never be rediscovered’.

But there also rumours of a Robert Johnson-style unholy pact. Stonehand Pikes again, from a 1940 Lomax interview:

‘Well, ev’yone knowed Jibbs can’t hardly play and he can’t get no brown, black nor high yellow neither so he goes down to the crossroads like they says to do but the crossroads, way he telt it, was full of banjy players, so he walks along a little way and there sure nuff is an old gentleman sitting by the track with a fiddle. So Jibbs offers the feller a share of the heat in his pocket but clobbers his head instead an’ runs off with the fiddle. Fine one. And from that day he played fine, too.’

Lomax: ‘Do you think…did Jibbs think…was that man he saw the devil?’

Pikes: ‘Was he what? No, man. Just some poor sunvabitch. Jibbs was a asshole.’

Still, when asked why he excluded Jibbs’s definitive recording, a racially-divisive version of Train on the Island, from his Anthology of American Folk Music, the esoterically-minded Harry Smith claimed that Jibbs was ‘numerologically corrupting’.

Even Jibbs’s death is mysterious. The last documentation of his life is an arrest record from 1968 for ‘attempting harm upon a fellow street musician with a modified musical instrument, possibly a violin’. One rumour suggests that he ended his own life accidentally, a victim of E-string related autoasphyxiation. I heard another version at a Greil Marcus symposium. Marcus can be very obtuse but I think it had something to do with bathtub gin and a Confederate ghost.

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Just over two hours ago I was sitting on the terrace that overlooks the hundred-metre gorge of Ronda, eating supper with my beloved and her mother. We had been watching a family of wild dogs that seems to live amongst the cacti on a narrow ledge high on the cliff. A mother and perhaps eight pups, they troop in a line along ledges that are barely more than kerbs. We watched a wide-winged bird of prey circling above, spooking the swallows, or smugly gliding lower, frightening a giant flock of rock pigeons from their cliff face roost. We’ve noted the cycle of life, here, something one rarely notes in London. Now it’s October, clusters of starlings have begun to swerve back and forth across the gorge, between old and new Ronda. There are red-beaked crows that slide past in cool formation, dipping with the synchronicity of an aerial display.

The tourists, too, have their cycles. They flock in the morning across the bridge, as the first buses arrive, but lessen as the evening comes in. As we ate there were fewer, but still a steady stream, some stunned mid-wander by the vast, grey-scale mountains and the dizzying distance between the bridge and rocks and stream below. They crowd, lean over, take photos. One woman seemed, although it couldn’t be right, to be crouched atop the grille that curves outwards so that tourists can see straight down, arms out behind her like a diver. Then she jumped.

A short, high squeak, like someone leaping into a swimming pool that’s too cold, and then she was out of sight.

I’ve given a statement from the police station, over the phone to a woman who spoke English. Whilst waiting for my turn in the interview room I searched my tiny Spanish guide for the words to describe what I’d seen. I drew diagrams, with lines of sight and possible distances. They didn’t need them so I’ve brought them home, folded, to open by accident one day. My statement is useless, I saw nothing but a distant, nameless figure disappear. Now, it’s official.

Walking back, I met our landlord’s wife, who lives on the floor below. She had her three-month old baby with her, tiny, in a high-wheeled carriage. I helped her carry the child to her door then said good night.

It’s amazing how many clichés run through your head when you see something like that. I don’t know if I should write about this but, with her public death, this woman has sent little ripples through the lives of everyone who saw her jump. She wanted to be seen.

If I had been born in the Netherlands during its Golden Age, if I had studied painting and produced work for the exploding population of middle-class merchants seeking work of less religious and more domestic themes, and if I had I been a genius, I could have painted something like Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing. I could never have painted Vermeer’s Wine Glass.

If I had been developing television series for the BBC in the 1980s – and had been hugely talented – I might have come up with something like the Singing Detective; I would not have been able to conceive Smiley’s People…

I glimpse in these first works, dim and incomplete, qualities that are deeply and personally felt, superior reproductions of my own semi-conscious preoccupations and sense-tones: I see aspects of myself expressed better than I could ever say them.

And this is not the same thing as admiration or enjoyment, or even quality. I stand stunned before the works of Proust, Fra Fillippo Lippi, Miles Davis, as acts of skill, as vast intellectual and emotional accomplishments, yet I do not encounter myself in their works, I am located outside the perimeter, gaping in. Passages of HP Lovecraft, on the other hand, echo to me the histrionics of my own prose, and sometimes even my gloomier suspicions about the world. It unnerves to identify more with the tormented Rhode Island racist than with, say, a genius such as Joyce.

We don’t choose the works in which we recognise ourselves (I say we, assuming that others may have the same eerie experience). A work resonates with private truth or it does not. In Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum – the film when I was a child, the book as an adult – I found what seemed the perfect ensign for how I imagined the best my fiction could aspire to, not because it was the best I’d ever read but because I sensed, radiating through it as a kind of palimpsest, qualities that felt intimately familiar. For the good and bad.

There are some geniuses that can produce both kinds of work: King Lear, for me, reads like my darkest, most pagan inner voice speaking direct, human truth. Julius Caesar, whilst magnificent, seems beamed from another thought-world entirely. Titian and Dylan also achieve this, I think.

These thoughts are instinctual and inconclusive; could we each amass a tribe of these avatars, on a separate shelf, and say ‘over there is the great work, but here is the work – good and bad – that explains me to myself’? And if you could do that, would you show anyone, or would you box them in the cellar?

There is a window to the right of where I sit. Just below there, I can see a small sun terrace belonging to the neighbours on the floor below. But beyond that things fall away for another hundred metres into a gorge; two plateaus are linked by the Puente Nuevo, which leashes Ronda’s old town to the new. The old town – which perches opposite me across the gorge, is one of Spain’s oldest settlements. There are signs of habitation going back to 2,500BC. The architecture is a palimpsest of Moorish, Counter Reformation and modern tourism. Beyond the town the mountains, currently paled in a morning haze quite unlike the unfiltered all-day sunshine I had expected.

I’m not sure why I’ve included this information, except maybe to illustrate that I’m far from home, which may explain one of my current preoccupations.

We travelled here from Weeze airport near Düsseldorf, just across the border from the Netherlands. It was a quick flight but, coming after several weeks of sofa-surfing with friends and family, we caught the bus from Seville airport to the centre of town with a sense of newly-relaxed exhalation. I remember the moment precisely; we had passed through the rotating door of the budget hotel we were to occupy for the night before moving on to Ronda and, smiling at the dried flowers and twigs – giant pot pourri – sealed into the glass between the compartments of the door, I felt a tingle of excitement that all had gone well and soon I would be somewhere in the town, drinking a beer with my beloved and marvelling at the tiny, inconsequential differences between nations that still, to my untravelled eyes, seem so telling, alien and thrilling.

It’s not an unusual occurrence that, when required to produce a document of some kind – especially when in a hurry or a queue – I must go through a burlesque of pocket patting, bag emptying and deep-breath-taking. But by the time I had refilled my luggage from where the contents had been strewn out in front of the check-in desk, carried it up to the seventh-floor room, unpacked again, practiced my new exercise for not automatically leaping to the worst conclusion, and double checked everywhere, it was clear that I’d lost my wallet.

Not a lot in there; cash card, some receipts, birth certificate, beloved’s business card, a beer-bottle label with my face on it from a film festival in Amsterdam.

We racked up €17 in calls from the hotel room phone, a small price to pay for such an acute insight into the workings of Spanish customer services. Four times I was put on hold and cut off by the airport English-language call desk; then I was given a number to call Ryan Air which resulted in a speed-talking Spanish recorded message that took my money then cut the line. There was no answer at the lost luggage desk so we stomped out and caught a bus back to the airport. No one was there except a friendly but unhelpful woman at the information desk. Amongst the overtures for assistance that I made, I remember saying this: ‘The only thing I really, really want to get back is the birth certificate’. This surprised me, later. I hadn’t known that. But there was a rising sense of dismay, of something just out of reach yet impossible to recapture; something lost that really need not have been.

I cancelled my card and held over further investigations until the morning. But the sensation of stepping light into a new adventure had evaporated. I went to sleep ashamed to have caused such pandemonium and awoke with the heaviness of knowing I would need to spend more money talking to more people that didn’t want to help me to recover something that, by now, could be anywhere. The airport told me it was Ryan Air’s responsibility. Ryan Air told me that they were not responsible. It seemed a simple thing, even if the loss was my fault, for them to just look for the damn wallet. I became inordinately aggrieved at the world’s indifference. My self-recrimination was worthy of Torquemada. But why? The card was cancelled, we had money, and the wallet was no treasured possession, why did I still care?

It was the so-little-thought-of piece of paper, folded in four with faded red lines and decorous lettering – the formal effect ruined by the wonky type-work and bald information of the entries – that tugged at my thoughts. I can’t repeat the information it held because I don’t have it to hand and I can’t remember precisely what it says. Except that my name is Corin Kim Gilchrist, there is a registered address in Southampton that neither of my parents would ever remember if asked and, under my father’s name, ‘None’ or ‘Unknown’ or ‘Not known’. That part wasn’t true.

I was reckless to carry it with me; I could see my beloved struggling against a tide of ‘I told you so’. It must have been all she wanted to say, but she only said it once (perhaps twice). I hadn’t realised it meant so much; this small proof of nothing, a square of paper almost thirty-five years old that bore no relation to and gave no extra proof or sovereignty to my existence yet now, in this Seville hotel room, was becoming the most important object in my life. I agonised that I could never know the street I’d first been carried home to, however brief our stay. I was oafish and clumsy; this document had made it through years of squatting, social housing, passed from box to drawer-bottom to wallet to passport across half-a-dozen chaotic shared south-London homes and yet it, magically, had stayed with me.

Until I’d first needed the thing – I forget what for – in my early twenties, I had thought my name was Kim Gilchrist. Corin – my father’s choice – had gone out of the door the same time he did, when I was too young to notice or recall. It revealed the true entity I was, not the name I used myself, not the name on my bank account, my National Insurance, the voters’ register, the name I gave employers, landlords. I had an occluded, secret identity and this was the only proof. Now it was gone.

Corin comes from Corin Redgrave, my father told me a few years ago. He’s not a theatre goer and could give no other indication as to his choice other than he liked the name. Ignorant that I was named after an actor I had acted since a child, in school plays, am-dram, then studying in university and working sometimes as a director. I can speculate that Redgrave’s parents took the name from As You Like It. The name may also have its roots in Corineus, a legendary king of Britain who I researched for some time for a novel some years ago, not having noticed the connection to my own secret first name.

Kim, my mother’s choice, comes from the Rudyard Kipling novel. She told me that, in the book, Kim is called ‘little friend of all the world’. Many would laugh, rightfully, cynically and from sore experience, that this hardly applies to me. I read Kim, finally, seven years ago. There is a character called Mukherjee, which startled me at the time, as that was the name of the band I played in. I am now – in aspiration and daily habits at least – a novelist.

I was told a story – apocryphal, as it came from my father – that he and my mother bickered over my name even as I was carried to the font, where my grandfather waited. True or not it illustrates, perhaps, a condition of instability regarding identity, a condition I now focussed on this document of a name legitimised by baptism and state. This was why, 35 years later and stuck in Seville, I could not let it go or accept that paper as lost. I tried to transform the loss into a symbolic event: it represented a break with the past, with the tyranny of unremembered influence, an opportunity to remake myself as the man I am, not a reverberation of the child I’d been. Bollocks and sophistry, of course. I really wanted it back.

God bless German efficiency.

A lady from Weeze airport called my beloved’s mobile – they must have found the number from her business card, which I carried also in my wallet. It was safe and I found myself babbling that the birth certificate was the most important thing, the only item of real value and I was so glad to know it was safe. I thanked her again and again as if she’d saved some valued limb from amputation. It’s there now, waiting to be brought to me. But I’ve learned something weird. The things we define ourselves by are not only our actions, how we love and are loved in return, our work, haircuts, spiritual and intellectual lives, dietary peculiarities and morbid imagined secrets but also scraps of unthought-of bureaucratic ephemera. I’m more lucid about the whole affair now but, eight days ago, if you’d held out to me my birth certificate in one hand or a new-recovered manuscript of Shakespeare’s lost Cardenio*, I can’t in all confidence tell you which I would have chosen.

*The discovery and loss of Cardenio is a fascinating story. The tale is taken from one of Don Quixote’s novels-within-a-novel. Don Quixote is one of my favourite books. When in Berlin I bought a t-shirt of Picasso’s sketch of the Old Man of La Mancha. I was well pleased with it; hip yet classic and representing double-genius. Now, wearing it in Spain, I feel like some sucker-tourist.