The seventh long player from P J Harvey is a return to form.
The follow up to Stories from the City, Stories from the Seasees
Harvey returning to a much more acoustic sound, very different to
the lush production of Stories. At first, Harvey seems to have
calmed down; the cover shows her looking composed, passive even,
and the initial track ‘Badmouth’ is a melodic refrain
revolving around the repetition of “wash it, wash it
out.” But judging by ‘Who the Fuck’ (a track
which, if we are to take it literally is a story of a bad
haircut) Harvey is as angry as ever. The overall impression of Uh
Huh Her is not one of anger; rather the album gives a clear sense
of Harvey’s particular brand of humor. From the minute-long interlude of seagull’s squawking to
the lyrics of ‘Who the Fuck,’ “I’m not like
your’ girls, you can’t straighten my curls,”
against a background of screaming guitars Harvey seems to be
resisting taking herself too seriously. Because of its less polished sound, Uh Huh Her sounds more
emotionally raw and encompasses Harvey’s entire vocal range,
from the shrieking ‘Radio Oh Oh,’ to the hushed and
melancholic ‘No Child of Mine.’ The album gets quieter
towards the end, which allows Harvey’s lyrical poignancy to
come to the fore. On first hearing, Uh Huh Herappears to
vacillate from one end of the emotional spectrum to another, but
on closer inspection it presents a coherent depiction of love in
the Twentyfirst Century.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

The pumping beats and synthetic effects of the first track on
Chikinki’s latest album signal what has been heralded as an
‘electronic dawn,’ with an audacious blend of sounds to
create genre-defying music. Not quite rock, not quite electrobeat, the album’s
inventive sound has won the five-piece band a reputation as being
a breeding ground for electronic innovation. The music revolves
around a synthesizer, yet its abrasive quality soon settles into
the background, mixing with drums and guitars to produce an
explosive sonic boom. One band member describes the album as having a ‘broad
mix’ of sounds, and its diversity is striking, proving that
the band can do so much more than mess about with fabricated
music. Which is just as well, really, since the bizarre sound of
the opening track has a tendency to grate on the expectant
listener. I have always thought that you can tell a lot about an
album from its opening track, but Chikinki have defiantly proved
me wrong. The musical quality of the album improves significantly if the
listener can break through the blippy beginning, and those
patient enough to do so will be rewarded. The vocals are hardly
dazzling but they serve their purpose well, and the original
sound more than compensates for what the vocals lack. Chikinki
present their listeners with catchy, sing-along choruses, giving
most of their tracks an underlying pop feel, although this is far
from the overall style that the album aims for. Try it and see,
and don’t let the words ‘synthesizer’ and
‘electrobeat’ put you off.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

For those seeking relaxing classical music outside the
wearisome confines of Classic FM, solace comes in the form of
Vista Musicale. Their album, From Innocence to Age, is jointly
composed by homegrown music talent Charlie Mauleverer (St
Peter’s College), and performed by some of Britain’s
best young musicians (including BBC Chorister of the Year 2001)
from Winchester College. Harmoniously using string, piano flute and voice, it seems
inspired from the past in its form. Yet there is an undeniably
contemporary air about it. The choral elements rise above
sometimes banal verse to achieve sublimely romantic effects. The pieces glide seamlessly into each other whilst works like
‘Enigma’ and the ‘String Quartets’ add life
to the soothing experience. Some of the tracks leave the listener
with the sense they should have been allowed to develop their
themes more fully. Overall though, this is a solid debut and not just a cure for
examstress. It’s an enjoyable experience in its own right
and with a high standard of composition and performance the album
could be ‘Music to watch clouds by’. The CD can be purchased from www.vistamusicale.comARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

The acknowledgment of Islamic culture’s contribution to
Western civilisation remains, for the most part, restricted to
the margins of public knowledge in the West. In similar fashion,
much of the Islamic world remains unaware of its rich medieval
past, its scientific and philosophical dialogues with classical
antiquity and medieval Christian Europe. The figure of the cleric
played, and still plays, a blocking role in the interpretation of
history. The image of the terrorising “heathen Turk” in
sermons of Pope Urban II and St Bernard of Clairvaux proved a
comforting notion to the Crusader imagination. It was not just a
mere war, but became a Christian jihad. Despite this perception
of Islam, many denizens of medieval Christian West believed
otherwise. The Englishman Adelard of Bath (died 1142) was the
first significant populariser of the achievement of Islamic
learning. In these achievements, Adelard saw the apotheosis of
human knowledge. The Bodleian Library’s new exhibition, ‘Medieval
Views of the Cosmos’, centres on the Bodleian’s newly
acquired medieval Arabic treatise, the Book of Curiosities,
containing diagrams of the heavens and maps of the earth, many of
which are without parallels. It dispels the miasma around this
period of history and charts an eclectic history of medieval
Islamic and Christian cartography, lodging the Book in its
various cultural contexts. The reception of Greek, Arab, Persian
and Indian influences aided the creativity of Islamic celestial
and terrestrial cartography. One such treatise, The Book of the
Constellations of the Fixed Stars demonstrates the cultural
diversity of Islamic civilisation. The teastained hues of the
folios display drawings of each of 48 classical constellations
overlapped by the pre-Islamic categorisation of stars called
“lunar mansions”. The representation of Orion as a
long-sleeved warrior armed with a celestial dagger, formed by
red-dotted marks, marries the potency of the visual imagination
with the human desire to make sense of one’s surroundings. Indeed, the spirit of human exploration lurks within maps of
five river systems in the Book of Curiosities; the Nile, the
Oxus, the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Indus. The serpentine
quality of the Nile, as it endlessly meanders from one end of the
manuscript to another, marked by small tributaries, is
remarkable. Furthermore, legends and myths come to form an aspect
of the tradition of Islamic cartography with the waqwaq tree, a
frightening component of the spirit of exploration. The depiction
of brown bodies sprouting out of green vegetation, hanging from
the branches, connected by voluminous capillaries of blood wavers
between grotesque and grand-guignol.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

The world of literature boasts a vast and varied landscape. The compulsive reader may wander through dense forests of almost impenetrable prose translated from the original Russian, concerning an hour in the life of a bus conductor and lasting for six volumes. But eventually, the traveller’s heart cries out for a book which will be a genuine pleasure to read. In such time of need, the weary reader would be wise to head for Cold Comfort Farm.
The heroine, Flora Poste, is an educated, civilised girl of the city. Orphaned at 19, she accepts an offer to live with her cousins, a farming family deep in rural England. The Starkadders are a living encyclopaedia of rural stereotype, a collection of hardships and repressed passions. Cold Comfortis primarily a satire on the over-written, stereotyped romantic fiction of the Nineteenth Century, but manages to transcend the genre it imitates to emerge as a fully-rounded work in its own right. The satire never becomes mechanical or repetitive, and never tires; the targets are too varied, and the characters too entertaining in themselves.
While the genre of pastoral melodrama may have long since faded away, the targets of the satire remain fresh, and often disturbingly prescient. Amos, the religious fanatic, preacher to the Quivering Brethren, is as relevant today as ever. In the vacant, upper-class Richard Hawk-Monitor, the tediously modern Mr Mybug and the naïve Elfine, who writes bad poetry and quotes it at length, the reader might be forgiven for recognising her own tutorial partners. Mockery of bad writing, needless to say, is timeless.
The Farm is not perfect. First published in 1932, it contains a few strangely anachronistic details such as videophones and private aircraft which sit oddly with its otherwise archaic world. Critics often claim, furthermore, that the characters are more like types than real, multidimensional people. To a more sensitive reader, however, this is an integral part of the charm of the book. Gibbons parades the stereotypes of romantic literature, but then introduces unexpected and interesting traits into each character to draw out the empathy of the reader. The result is a warm, witty and illuminating analysis of the nature of people, as accurate today as sixty years ago – a priceless antidote to an overdose of Dostoevsky.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

On the evidence of Midnight Cab, James Nichol, established as one of Canada’s prominent playwrights, has made a perfectly seamless transition from acts to chapters. This, his first novel, however, is drenched in an intensity of atmosphere and emotion that have long been his stock in trade.
The story itself is enrapturing and demands to be read uninterrupted, such is the intrigue surrounding its central character, Walter Devereux, who is abandoned, aged three, by hismother at a roadside, with no clue as to his identity except a photograph of two girls and an adolescent letter.
Just who are his parents, and why would they abandon him? These are the burning questions that torment Walker and provoke him to undertake a relentless search for his own identity, uncovering, in the process, a series of chilling family secrets.
The trail leads Walker, accompanied by Krista, his invalid lover and work colleague at A.P. Cabs, from Toronto to Jamaica, and eventually into the murderous clutches of Bobby, a sadistic sociopath.
Bobby, it transpires, is Walker’s uncle and was also neglected as a child, by a father who thought military camp would make a man of his mentally deficient son; this only worked, however, to develop Bobby’s psychological dislocation into a clean break from all sense of social propriety.
While such a plot might seem concerningly reminiscent of a Sunset Beach episode, Nichol transports the reader into the mind of a madman and leaves him breathless and disturbed, as Bobby’s trail of ritualistic murder is conveyed in hypnotic, fastpaced prose.
With his mother and father already disposed of, Bobby targets Walter, in an insatiable pursuit of slaughter. By this point in the novel, the intrepid reader, having been ruthlessly harnessed by the gathering momentum of Nichol’s narrative, is rapt to discover whether Walker can break the chain of destruction, or whether the problems of nurture can never be overcome by one’s nature.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

20/20 Cricket Oxford UCCE 137-8
Oxfordshire 138-5 Thirteen runs in the last over of this TwentyTwenty encounter
saw Oxfordshire home after two and a half hours of drama, mixed
with some razzmatazz and entertainment, in the Parks. It led to heartbreak for Paul McMahon’s Oxford UCCE side,
who had watched the game seemingly slip away during a highly
impressive display of disciplined hitting from Ian Crosby before
battling back in front of a huge crowd. The UCCE side won the toss and chose to bat, and McMahon
immediately set high standards when he declared, “It looks a
decent wicket, so we’re looking to put pressure on
Oxfordshire and hopefully leave them an exciting chase.”
Though the side fell short of the total he had in mind –
“probably about 160” – his words were otherwise
prophetic. The minor counties side opened with two quick wickets. Luke
Parker’s middle and leg stumps were disrupted at the end of
the first over and Steve Hawinkels was caught at slip from his
first ball. However, the run rate soon began moving steadily
upwards, despite the further loss of Amit Suman for five, during
a pair of fruitful partnerships. Firstly Mula Richards and Will
Howard opened up, finding the boundary five times before Howard
was run-out in a mix-up, and then Richards and Simon Chorlton
took the score to 63-4 before Keith Arnold trapped Richards
leg-before for 29. With five wickets down after eight overs, Oxford consolidated,
as the Oxfordshire bowlers increasingly found bounce from a
length and a tight line, reducing Chorlton and McMahon’s
run-scoring opportunities. McMahon was well caught in the covers
by Ben Thompson with the score on 100, and 13 runs later a
simpler take for the same fielder removed Chorlton after an
innings of 35. The students were grateful for a few late swings,
particularly Josh Knappett’s pull for six and cover drive
for four in the last over, and finished on 137-8. Suman opened the bowling for the UCCE with a promising spell,
with the game’s only maiden followed by the removal of Adam
Cook for a solitary boundary, caught behind by Knappett. However, McMahon and wristspinner Steve Moreton were helpless
to prevent a superb salvo by Crosby, who reached 50 after just 38
balls, with five fours and three sixes. The Oxfordshire opener,
his footwork outstanding, ruthlessly exploited the slightest
abberation in line or length – one Moreton over was hit for
two maximums over mid-on, one of which cleared the pavilion. The
UCCE were understandably delighted when Hawinkels, from the
Norham Gardens end, enticed him in to one shot too many and
Moreton held the catch at deep backward square leg. Oxfordshire found the runs drying up from then on as Parker,
Hawinkels and the returning McMahon all found a length similar to
that of the opposing bowlers at the same stage in their innings.
Though singles kept the scoreboard ticking, boundaries were
becoming increasingly rare and a succession of attempted reverse
sweeps seemed to show the batsmen’s frustration. Callum Taylor therefore came to the crease with the score at
116-5 after a pin-point throw had run out Chris Knightley with
two and a half overs remaining. A superb over from Suman,
conceding just three singles and a leg bye, left Thompson and
Taylor needing a momentous effort to win the game. However, after a Taylor single, one Thompson shot was enough
to reverse roles entirely. Cross-batting the ball over mid-on, he
watched it sail over the rope and leave just six to win from four
balls. The UCCE took the contest to the very last ball, but Thompson
struck it down the ground and a slight misfield was enough to
allow the scampering Taylor back for a second run, ending a
thrilling encounter in fitting fashion. McMahon, though “obviously disappointed,” said that
the game “could have gone either way,” and predicted,
“I’m sure that The Parks hasn’t see the last of
20/20 cricket.”ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

Mention the letters RBT to anyone involved in Oxford rowing
and they’ll know who you are talking about: Robin
Bourne-Taylor, of Christ Church, and more recently Great
Britain.Whilst his contemporaries were on the Isis two weeks ago,
Bourne-Taylor, described by Sydney veteran Tim Foster as a
“rising star” of British rowing, was in Munich
competing at the second world cup regatta of the season, in his
third consecutive year in the Great Britain VIII. He will now head to the Olympics in Athens to compete in a
boat that won gold last time around. In September, he will return
to Oxford as President of OUBC and look toward finishing his
engineering degree, another Boat Race, another world
championships, and finally, Sandhurst. Exuding a quiet confidence, he is obviously somebody who is
sure of his own abilities, yet unpresumptuous about what the
future might hold. When I ask him how he thinks he will feel if
the schedule allows him to go to the opening ceremony of the
Games, he stresses the fact that official selection is yet to be
made but says, “I’m a patriotic type of guy, so I
imagine it would be pretty special.” Equally, the respect
for the abilities of the people he competes with is palpable. When Robin arrived in Oxford, he rejected the life of a
typical student and devoted himself fully to OUBC. “I made
the conscious decision that I wasn’t going to go out and get
pissed every night. I wanted to win the Boat Race and see where
my rowing went from there.” One sacrifice he does seem to
lament a little is his involvement in college life, but again
emphasising the positives, he says, “The relationships you
have with the guys in the crew are pretty tight, and I don’t
feel I’ve missed out too much.” Anybody who watched the
Boat Race in 2002 or 2003 would be inclined to agree. The other thing about Bourne- Taylor is that unlike some
university oarsmen, he seems genuinely enthusiastic about college
rowing. “I can’t think of anywhere where there is such
a massive enthusiasm for rowing concentrated in such a small
environment,” he says. He has acquired legend status within
his college Boat Club. Affectionately referred to as the RBT3000,
freshers are passed down a mantra attributed (no-one is sure
whether accurately) to him: “I do not feel pain, I feel
electrical impulses to my brain.” In his first Summer
Eights, stroking his college 1st VIII, he won first division
blades without having to row out of the gut; last year, in the
midst of finals, he rushed home from a GB training session to
race in the top division. Conversation naturally moves to the Great Britain squad and
his hopes for this summer. Bourne- Taylor says whilst the fifth
place at the first international regatta of the season was below
par, the fourth achieved in Munich was more encouraging. As he
points out, the important thing is to be quick in August, not
June, and he has great belief in what the crew can achieve then.
Whilst he will not be drawn on whether he is expecting a medal,
highlighting that the goals the VIII have set themselves are not
about potential outcome, one senses that as a highly competitive
individual he has his sights set on gold. After that, as a member of Oxford University Officer Training
Corps, an organisation that he cites as giving him support over
the past four years, he is relishing the prospect of Sandhurst. I
ask him whether he will continue to row to such a high level when
in the army, and his response is typical: “I hope to, but
we’ll see what happens.” Given his track record, I
wouldn’t bet against it.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

Queen’s followed their victory in the Ultimate Frisbee
League by winning cuppers, beating Pembroke/Jesus 5- 2 in the
final. Their run of competitive victories now extends to over a
year, blemished only by a single preseason friendly defeat at the
hands of Christ Church. With Ultimate continuing to grow in Oxford, cuppers took the
total of colleges entering teams into tournaments this season to
20. Big in America and catching on here, the sport is a fast team
game in which each side aims to catch a frisbee in the
other’s end zone, without dropping it on the way or moving
while holding it. The game is particularly strong in Oxford with
the University women’s team having recently been declared
Team of the Year by the Sports Federation. Queens’ cuppers victory was made possible by a mix of
longterm squad development and the good fortune to possess gifted
players. They have had the largest Ultimate squad in the
University for some time and regular practice sessions and
technical drills have given the team consistently high standards
and a comfortable knowledge of one another’s game. It was
this strength in depth that gave Queen’s the edge in the
final against opponents who relied too heavily on the admittedly
flawless handling of GB Junior international Adam Lerman and the
pace and athleticism of Joe Devietti. The champions succeeded in
stifling the pair and patiently worked the disc upfield with
series of short passes centred around their key handler, Chris
Brown, and his fellow Blue, Mark Rogers. However, with Brown, Rogers and much of the rest of their team
leaving this year, Queen’s will be hard-pressed to defend
their double crown. Such news will be some relief to last
year’s double winners, Linacre, who could only manage third
after being beaten by both finalists. Christ Church will also be
encouraged by the prospect of a potentially open path to
silverware, after surpassing expectations and only narrowly
losing the third place play-off.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004 

Before the Blues game against Oxfordshire on Friday evening,
it was the turn of the colleges to try 20/20 cricket as last
year’s cuppers winners Pembroke defeated Keble by 7 wickets.
Coloured clothing and music may have been the order of the day
but Pembroke’s victory was largely thanks to a disciplined
bowling and fielding performance. Having won the toss and elected to field Pembroke skipper Paul
Ramsay led the way making a breakthrough with his third ball
removing Booth for a single. When Chris Stearn nicked his next
ball to Jonathon Fennell at slip, Keble were reeling at 3-2. They took time to recover with captain Rafe Roylands (23) and
Ross Bland (14) putting on 31, but were unable to score quickly.
Ramsay, who finished with figures of 4-1-10- 2, was ably
supported by offspinner Adam Hunter (4-1-6-2). A rally from Stuart Drury (29) and Alan Bannister (22) boosted
the Keble score to a competitive 116 with 31 runs coming from the
last two overs. Keble required early wickets to put pressure on the Pembroke
but had to wait until the eighth over when Dan Fox was caught
superbly at backward point by Booth off the bowling of Stearn for
13. Any hope of a Keble fightback faded with Laurence
Parker-Brown (39) and Nick Warrillow (22) adding 44 runs for the
second wicket in just 6 overs effectively ended any Keble
resistance. Warrilow fell in the 14th over, attempting to repeat a huge
six off Roylands getting stumped by Tim Oliver in the process,
the same bowler finding the edge to remove Parker-Brown two overs
later. Fennell and Tom Bullock required just 3 overs to score the
remaining 23 runs, with Fennell squrting the winning run to third
man with on over to spare.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004