Introduction

The first "Clarion Cry” consisted of various unrelated writings which I painstakingly knitted together to make a suitably grand finale towards the end of 2007. Its starting point was “Apologia for a Cyber Church”, a piece written specifically for Pastor Lane Nickerson of the Church of Philadelphia Worldwide which I believe can still be found at his church website at Blogster. To the apologia I added a prose section from the former “Some Perverse Will”, originally published at Blogster on Christmas Day 2006, while the poetic soul of the piece was incorporated into another story. Also grafted onto “Final Cry”, and specifically “Waves of Bohemia” and “The March of the Modern”, were excerpts from “The Redemption of a Rebel Artist”, which dates from the 14th of September 2006. The remaining four sections were written specifically for "Final Cry" which in August 2008 was divided into two parts, one being apportioned to "The Twilight of an Actor", the other becoming the authoritative version, notwithstanding last minute revisions made in late September 2008.

The Wilderness Decade
 

I haven't been settled within a church since 2001, which points to a restlessness which may be at least partly attributable to the fact that I accepted Christ relatively late. After all, the Bible makes it clear that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm for Christ's sake will know incessant tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this is especially true of repentant Christians who come to faith following a relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid flunkies of the Flesh. However, as comfort these late converts have a true and infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that constantly escaped me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism of my beliefs and ideals.

 In many ways though I've been my own worst enemy. One by one I've had to slay evil habits left over from my pre-Christian existence. In my early days as a Christian for instance I still entertained a fixation on the occult, albeit from a Christian perspective. Now I can barely stand to look at pages filled with occult information and symbols. Most recently I've had to address the matter of my attitude and appearance. If my behaviour fails to reflect a changed life, then I may be cheating others of the opportunity of coming to Christ through me, and that is a wicked thing to do. I think it's high time I actually start acting like a person worthy of the name Christian.

In a general sense the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning point for me, not just spiritually, but in terms of my entire personality, which has become more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years. Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since I was about 17 that I faced the world with my hair its natural medium brown after having dyed it for nearly three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based streaking kits I  favoured were causing me to have mild breathing difficulties.

 At first I missed being blond, but in time I came to enjoy being my natural dark-haired self after years of androgynous affectation...for throughout my twenties and for much of my thirties I effectively remained in a state of protracted gilded adolescence. As a result I took no real responsibility as a man in the purest sense of the word, which is to say as leader, provider, protector, etc. Instead, I opted for a variety of marginalised male personas, including man about town and dandy, Punk agitator, hellraising libertine, self-destructive genius, shadowy man of learning and so on ad nauseum...I've ditched them all as so much pretentious nonsense. And I thank God for being offered the chance to repent of them and the unholy chaos I caused by attempting to take the romantic bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion.

 Young people still worship at the altar of romantic rebellion, but perhaps not to the same degree as those like me who came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the tail-spinning nineteen sixties. Who can say effect it had on us, this music tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification and for whom the nowness of the hipster was everything. But a music that was far more than mere music...a total art involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that...a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation. And yet, the rites of the Rock religion such as the embracing of excess of every kind while more widespread than ever before in modern history in the 1960s were far from new. Indeed, they can be traced back to Man's initial attempts at attaining spiritual ecstasy beyond the will of God. However, with regard to the modern world, it could be said that the true ancestor of Rock culture was the great 19th Century artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism. The notion of the artist as tormented genius at the vanguard of social revolution and eternally defiant of middle class restraint and respectability is widely believed to have originated among the Romantics. Although how true this is, it's impossible to say.
 

The March of the Modern
 

It was the great English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who may have been the first to give expression to the notion of an artistic avant garde by asserting that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Then, in the post-Napoleonic Paris of the early 1830s, a seminal avant garde emerged. They were the Jeunes-France, a band of young Romantic writers allegedly dubbed the Bousingos by the press following a night of riotous boozing on the part of some of their number. Their leading lights, among them a fiery Theophile Gautier decades before he became an establishment darling, cultivated dandified and eccentric personas intended to shock the bourgeoisie, while inclining to political radicalism. Needless to say perhaps, they owed a great debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, as well as previous generations of dandies, such as the Muscadins and Incroyables of the dying days of the Revolution. They were the Rock 'n' Roll bad boys of their day.
 The first Bohemian wave eventually produced the Decadents, and the great Symbolist movement in the arts, both of which came into being around 1880, notably in Paris, where the so-called Decadent Spirit was born, whose most infamous fruit could be said to have been the novel "Against the Grain", an account of the sensation-seeking existence of a reclusive aristocrat Jean des Esseintes by Joris Karl Huysmans. However, the spirit of the avant garde arguably triumphed as never before through the Modernist movement, which was at its level of maximum intensity from about 1890 to 1930. This extraordinary period birthed such masterpieces of innovation as Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" (1913), T.S Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922), James Joyce's "Ulysses" (1922), as well as dozens of revolutionary art movements including Expressionism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, as well as Serialism in music, and the ascent of Jazz which together with the moving picture industry formed the bedrock of Popular Culture.

One possible definition of Modernism in an artistic sense is the avant garde removed from its true spiritual home of Paris (via Germany and England), and then transformed into an international movement of cataclysmic power and influence. When it comes to Modernism as a cultural phenomenon, on the other hand, some critics trace its roots to the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which produced great defiance of God on the part of lofty Reason, and so for them, Modernism is a precursor of the avant garde, rather than a spirit that arose out of it. Others go even further back into the depths of Western history for its origins, to the Renaissance and its revival of Classical Antiquity .

 What is certain is that the contemporary West has reached the very limits of the Modern Revolution, and one of the results of its having done so as I see it is the mass acceptance of revolutionary beliefs once seen as the preserve of the avant garde; especially with regard to traditional Christian morality. This process could be said to have accelerated to breakneck speed around 1955-‘56, when both the Beat Movement and the new Pop music of Rock ’n’ Roll were starting to make strong inroads into the mainstream. Some ten years after this, there was a further frenetic increase in momentum as Pop began to lose its initial sheen of innocence, and so perhaps evolve into the more diverse music of Rock. This coincided with the growth of the Hippie counterculture.

 The eclectic art of Rock went on to run the gamut from the most infantile pop ditties to complex compositions influenced variously by Classical music, Jazz, Folk, and other pre-Rock music forms, and so become an international language disseminating values traditionally seen as morally unconventional as no other artistic movement before it. As a result, certain Rock artists attained through popular consumer culture a degree of influence that previous generations of innovative artists operating within high culture could only dream of. Much of this influence was rightly perceived by many who continued to value the Christian fabric of Western society to be wholly detrimental. From its inception in fact Rock became one of the supreme bete noirs of traditional Evangelicals, and it remains so today, although many of these would sooner be seen as Fundamentalists.

I myself fell under the influence of various Fundamentalist Christian critics of Rock music for a brief period in 2003, which made me feel feel inclined to destroy all traces of Rock music in my possession, even though I'd long lost any real taste for Hard Rock by then, whether in the shape of Metal, Punk, Goth, Grunge or whatever.  However, by the summer of 2003 my attitude had mellowed to the extent that I felt able to write about an hour's worth of Rock songs in response to a request from my father Pat for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of a close friend, but these were as far from Hard Rock as it's possible to be, being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop and Soul.

 The songs, some new, some reworkings of old tunes of mine, were recorded on a Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder, which I think has been discontined, and were generally well-received despite having been crudely recorded. Pat even went so far as to suggest that I record them properly in a studio, which was a high compliment indeed, given that unlike me, he's a trained musician who's been a professional since the age of 9, where I'm just a primitive with an ear for a pretty tune.  

 Then a project was mooted by Pat which involved the recording of a popular standards album featuring myself and harmonica genius James Hughes as well as his own London Swingtette as they became known. In the summer of 2007, the master was finally created with arrangements by John Smith, and the title "A Taste of Summer Wine" given it in honour of the much loved long-running situation comedy "Last of the Summer Wine". This was due to the fact that Jim's playing had long been featured on the programme, which'd been orchestrated by Ronnie Hazelhurst, who sadly died late last year, and Pat had served as leader for the show for some time. In Spring 2008, the CD finally came to fruition after three and a quarter years of gestation. A few months later, the writing project "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child" followed suit.
 

Time Alone Can Tell