UKH

Hi,

I'm currently reading the excellent 'Punk in Gym' by Andy Pollitt.  In it John Redhead crops up with some regularity and his book "...and One for the Crow" gets mentioned as a really good book.  Has anyone read it?  It's very expensive second hand so I'm not likely to buy it but I was wondering what it was like.  John Redhead is quite a character and seems to have operated a little outside of that North Wales mainstream and so I was interested to hear his story and get his perspective.

David

get it from the library?

Marvellous book beautifully illustrated with photos and artwork. I find it suits dipping in and out rather than "reading". And I've even ticked one of the routes.

It’s fantastic.

I’ve got a copy, but wouldn’t sell it for love nor money.

He certainly was/ is an interesting bloke.

Ha!  Obvious but it'd never occurred to me.  I'll see what they can do.

If your local authority is like Lancashire they'll order any book/map in the country for you (with a small fee if it's not on the county stock list).

I too have a signed copy from John in mint condition, but it's not for sale. I've seen it at £600 on Amazon for average condition. Makes you think!

The photography all in B&W is really beautiful. Many pictures are posed during repeat ascents for the camera. Published privately as publishers wouldn't touch it with a very long pole. Also sketches as prep for paintings, which are in colour. And then there is the writing and language!!!

All in all a beautiful original book.

You'll either love it or hate it but just owning it, is in my opinion, quite a thing. I'm in the former camp though.

My copy (with a lovely message in the dust jacket) was bought through John's website about four years ago. That avenue is probably a forlorn hope but the batch I bought from was, apparently, some long lost but then found box of them that resurfaced. 

Harold Drasdo wrote an enlightened review for the 1998 CC Journal which was reproduced on the 'one for the crow' website, which is well worth perusing, that is if you have a spare hour or so!

I read that earlier, it seemed he was more bothered by the obviously shocking bits than he was by Redhead's treatment of women.  I've not read it, but I remember at least one review from when it came out saying it was misogynistic and at times disturbingly so. Considering that must be going on 20 years ago, I suspect the reactions now would be quite a lot stronger. Drasdo's review for example, while not uncritical, does feel rather like it was written by a man, about a man, for other men to read. It's interesting to reflect on how much things have changed just in the last decade or so.

It’s a bit more nuanced than that.

Some of the terminology, and his at times very graphic descriptions, would undoubtedly be considered highly sexist in today’s world, but if you dig a bit deeper it’s a man’s (a highly egotistical man at that) perspective on sex and his perspective on female lust. Something rarely written about in this sort of form. It is what it is.

Anyway, art can be ugly and art can be challenging. And the book is definitely a work of art.

Best book ever

It's a beautiful book with stunning climbing shots as well as some of the author posing around on rock.

There is some juicy gossip about what was going on in Llanberis at the time.

He writes about climbing in a way that you wouldnt recognise it as such.

I think the misogyny is just to wind people up. You can choose to bite or not.

I like a bit a painting but his art mostly looks like coloured scribbles.

It's a great book and well worth the money

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=&an=john%20redhea...

Not cheap, but not £600.

I'm only really familiar with his work from the mid 70s to early 80s and it is astonishingly detailed and otherworldly; shade and light falling over vegetated human forms which link what look like tears in space and time. Definitely a bit more than 'coloured scribbles'! 

Couldn't you say that about anything? Would that make racism ok - if you're just doing it to wind people up?

It's a lovely book. I shan't say what his touching dedication alludes to, but it involves bells. 

Which means that anything you say about the book is totally pointless. 

Toby was commenting on things he had read though; reviews of the book and other posters attempts to explain away the misogyny. So not pointless.

It's a long time since I've seen a copy, but from what I recall it's a book that will appeal to some and not to others. I remember John as an artist who seemed keen on challenging the norms and expectations of readers/viewers, often in ways that clearly would make some people uncomfortable.

I was never taken by his artwork. It seemed to me to be very keen to shock (which is no bad thing in itself) but then offered little in the way of resolution or substance to take shape within the mental crater that such shock inevitably creates. I'm quite a fan of a lot of modern jazz, and I'm very aware of how targeted disharmony can be powerful and thrilling; but if all one hears is disharmony, there can be no resulting thrill.

So it is, I think, with John's art and to a certain extent also his writing. I think there are few among us who would not feel a reaction to the tales and the images, often an uncomfortable one but also sometimes impressively aesthetic. The extent to which a reader will perceive value beyond that will, like most challenging art, be very much up to the individual.

The thing is that Redhead has painted several different styles over the years. I'm not sure if you've seen his early works (such as 'Disillusioned Screw Machine' or 'Tormented Ejaculation'), but the stuff around this time is way different to some of the more phallic-centric provocations in OFTC. That in turn is different to the 'scribbles' referred to above. He'll have painted other styles I'm not aware of but much of what I've seen does not fit the descriptions in various comments above!

Which was why I referred to the reviews. The one in OTE by Dave Whats-his-face... the chap who went on to edit Climb and do E9 in Pembroke IIRC, I remember really sticking out as it was very critical of the book on the grounds of misogyny, much more so than was normal back then. Drasdo's review also nods to this although he does that thing that maybe many did a generation or two ago, of putting that to the side almost as just unfortunate and focusing only on the climbing.

Something that Redhead said being interviewed by Grimer on Jam Crack podcast more recently, I found disturbing and made me think I didn't want to read the book. Redhead's writing that was published on the Footless Crow blog, particularly during the pandemic, didn't change this feeling.

Interesting discussion, can we ever separate the artist from the art?

Another successful climber/author who is now generally regarded as being a deeply misogynistic gaslighting abuser was granted a lengthy UKC interview in recent times. I have enjoyed several of his books. Would I buy any more? No. Would I get rid of them? No.  Life is not black and white unfortunately. 

Assuming you're talking about Perrin here I got the impression that it was very far from an open and shut case? What I've seen of the whole sorry story looked to me like so much he said/she said/they said that it seemed almost impossible for anyone not intimately involved to come to a conclusion on. It's a shame that people not intimately involved should be involved at all really but I guess that's inevitable where one of the parties is relatively well known.

Have we found climbing's statue-toppling equivalents?

For my money most people will have the 'average morals' of their society of the time. I'm sure Whymper, Brown, Whillans and much more recent climbers would fail trial by social media against modern benchmarks of behaviour.

Before climbing became the modern, anodyne, middle-class lifestyle choice, it attracted broken people from the edges. No surprise there are some unpalatable opinions & beliefs amongst them. If you grow up on the edge, life breaks you and its hard not to grow up somewhat damaged or misguided.

We evolve over time as does the notion of what is deemed acceptable.

Very well put.

Perhaps, but it probably depends on whether you think toppling a statue is sometimes good or not. These stories have always been out there amongst the community - D. Haston killing someone in a hit and run while drunk driving was known about but didn't seem to change his reputation that much. Hero worship based on only one aspect of someone's life seems likely to lead to disappointment, or at least needs us to ignore other aspects of someone's life. But I think that has been the norm in climbing as elsewhere. Perhaps it is changing.

I doubt that was ever really that true - you can romanticise the post war predominantly working class clubs, but university clubs, including Oxbridge, were important prior to that. And alpine climbing of course began with aristocrats and bourgeois gentlemen of means who could afford to summer in Zermatt and the like.

Plus I reckon plenty of odd-balls and people who think differently still seem to end up climbing - and long may that continue.

People can make their own minds up but I think not highlighting and calling out such behaviour is perpetuating the horrendous treatment too many women face. If the jacsisters website was just "she said" it would have been forced to close. https://www.jacssisters.org/

On a more general level the highly contrasting views on the deaths of Alison Hargreaves and Paul Nunn were the most recently highlighted here.  https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/expedition+alpine/tom_ballard_documentary...

I think they should be moved to museums. Toppling them doesn't undo the damega that person caused. The longer a statue stands after its erection makes its subsequent removal part of the story.

Are you conflating hero worship with inspiring acts - be they on rock, with a paintbrush, or other? At the risk of invoking Godwin, Churchill did some terrible things, but his role in the war effort was immense. There's a danger in reducing people down to a single dimension - something I feel we both agree on here?

Hmm...  Shani's comment is highly relevant to Stoney/Llanberis/Ambleside in the 1970s and '80s. Also pretty relevant to developments in Ireland in the same era. Also (I believe, but haven't as much personal experience) pretty relevant to developments in Scotland in the same era.

Well, I'd like to think that too!  But I suspect the percentage has dropped - and very considerably indeed.

On the positive side, these days nearly everybody's nice and relatively well behaved - which I really do like.

Mick

Well, yes, exactly. Three villages, two decades. And an important part of the development of British climbing, but very much only one part. How many of the top British alpinists (and often Scottish winter climbers who weren't Scots themselves) seemed to have been at Cambridge and Oxford at time? Didn't Fowler try Sheffield for a bit and decide it really wasn't for him and go back to being a civil servant in London? Hardly "the broken fringes" of British life.

Arguably the engines of rock climbing were in those three villages for two decades. And as for "the broken fringes" of British life, you've made that point for me above; as a crude generalisation the lineage of climbers tended to be well heeled types from Cambridge with Alpine pedigree, or the working class, unemployed who were happy to dirtbag through life. Two different fringes, but hardly representative of 'British life' - and climbing WAS a fringe activity until the last 30 years.

As climbing evolved in to much safer disciplines and has become air-conditioned, weather-proof, accompanied by expensive coffee, and now recognised with Olympic medals, of course it's appeal has widened.

I thought most of those thatcherite dole climbers were supposed to be middle class? The earlier working class heros mainly had jobs until they became famous.

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/rock_talk/were_you_a_dole_queue_climber-7...

I'm not defending Perrin, far from it, what I am saying is that based on the info I've seen I'm struggling to come to any sort of conclusion and therefore withholding judgement seems to be the best policy.

Forced by whom? And what does it actually say? I really don't want to judge any party in this for the reasons I've already mentioned but that website is an absolute car crash of vague innuendo.

At the risk of being boring, I'll give you another working class 'village' - Carlisle. Once reckoned to have more E5 leaders than anywhere else in the UK.

When Dirty Alex and Black Nick wandered up the FA of the hardest route in the Alps, perhaps they were Oxbridge in absentia...

I don't know about Fowler; sounds as though he made a sound, if safe, career choice. But if you went out on grit or lime in the early '80s, 'the broken fringes' of British life were all over the place. It was heartbreaking.

Mick

Don't know about Oxford, but I think the only figures from Cambridge you could plausibly describe as top alpinists/Scottish winter in the 70s and 80s were Mick Geddes, Al Rouse, Robert Durran, and Brendan Murphy.  And of those, Rouse subsequently tried Sheffield and seemed to like it... (apologies to anyone I've forgotten). 

Well that's not a bad turn out for one uni club is it?! Steve Venables was at Oxford if I remember correctly from reading his stuff long ago, and there might have been others. But I'm not trying to claim that ALL the best alpinist were just from there, more just that it seems pretty apparent that for a good long time lots of different types of people (well, ok, until relatively recently mainly white men, but white men of all sorts of different backgrounds) ended up climbing. Of course anyone who dropped out of society entirely to just climb would be on the fringes in some way - as Mick is describing - but those type of people are perhaps remembered, and perhaps even romanticised - in the sense that Mick is suggesting there were plenty of people in that scene who had their own troubles.  But there were (and are) other people who were/are plugging away climbing very well while doing what most of us would consider normal jobs (from unskilled to fancy-pants professionals), while others found a way of making an OK living through climbing, such as guides, teachers who ended up specialising in outdoor ed, entrepreneurs in the sport, and so on. 

I don't know much of the history of the climbing in the Lakes, but of those talented Carlisle based climbers, were many "doleys" or in other ways sort of people on the margins? Or were they climbing those very impressive grades at the weekend while doing jobs through the week? For instance - one generation down from when you're thinking of probably, but I've always thought it was pretty impressive that Dave Birkett can be one of the best climbers in the UK while not being a professional climber - obviously spending lots of time doing a physically demanding job. 

Perhaps another aspect to this is that many of those who were on the fringes of society in the sour economic & political climate of the late 70s/early 80s were precisely the ones who developed new ways of making a living from climbing, e.g. through the creation of the roped access industry, the invention of Himalayan guiding, and developing new gear and clothing businesses.

A very good and pertinent point, I would only - and half in jest - point out that if you not only started a successful business but really invented a whole new industry in the 1980s, weren't you living out the Thatcherite dream? And if so could you really be considered to be on the margins?

Yes, that's precisely the paradox that a few of them embody - on the fringes in the early 80's, but now pillars of society, looking back on their successful entrepreneurial careers.  

Lots of fringe activities move mainstream. Look at Hip Hop as a musical force, its fashion sensibilities, graffiti ('Graffing), breakdancing - you can earn a fortune in all of them. Or consider Parkour; it is a career option now - but in the 80s we climbed buildings because we couldn't get to the crags and there were no climbing centres nearby.

There have been threats of legal action and some cases on other matters

http://tohatchacrow.blogspot.com/2012/12/copyright-shenaniginswhen-climbing...

That website may be messy, broken in places and obsessive but what would you expect from the greiving (on a blog converted into a web page with no previous e-publishing or technical web expertise), angry about what they portray as abusive treatment of a loved one, in life and in death. The main detailed accusations are not so hard to find but that's all I'll say here now given this site had enough problems with previous threads.

Were they really fringes though, say in the same sense as early hip-hop? Much of the most lauded art came from fringes that were really artists from middle class backgrounds who rejected the option of conventional lives.

I'm too late into climbing to experience the full Stoney experience but a good friend of mine was there: a middle class kid who dropped out of Uni with very serious mental health problems, who acted as a free belay service from Stoney Cafe. He was broken and found great solace and structure in climbing.

So I'd ask what proportion were from working class backgrounds (compared to the population at the time), in the main areas? My impression of the Sheffield dole scene was it was over-represented by those from middle class backgrounds (not that that's a bad thing).

That’s a fair description of a few of the people I knew in that scene, but I wasn’t close enough to it to generalise.  I hung about in Stoney quite a lot myself around 1979-1980, though very much not as part of the elite of the time.  The people I climbed with at the time were a loose collection of mostly Notts based youths; a squaddie drifting a bit after buying himself out from an unhappy time in the Royal Marines, a miner already wondering about the longevity of his career choice, a few like me on their way to Uni. 

My best friend at the time certainly fitted your profile; his father was a successful small businessman but he’d been a troubled youth, expelled from school, lasted about 6 weeks on a course in quantity surveying at Sheffield Poly.  He ended up focused on the twin goals of becoming a great alpinist and testing the limits of wild and hedonistic partying, and found that Hunter House Rd & other squalid shared houses in Nether Edge served as great bases for both. 

My memory of the early 80’s were of a real end-times feeling.  With mass unemployment, collapsing industry and bitter politics, for many there didn’t seem much point in committing to jobs and careers, and in Sheffield there were many like-minded people with whom to pursue alternative goals.

One of my abiding memories of the Sheff scene in '86 was all the people I was hanging out with and climbing with were all quite damaged myself included. All just 18/19 and here was a group of people that you could be who you wanted to be and essentially you were a gang, didnt mind what background you were from. In the house I lived in there was working class/middle class etc etc but collectively all had issues with parents/home life/underlying mental health issues that hadnt fully surfaced yet. 

Was an extremely fun time to be a climber though....