One For The Road - The Life & Lyrics of Simon Fowler & Ocean Colour Scene

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It is only when Fowler ventures into the causes for the 30% that lived below the poverty line, that the book fails, in my opinion, but that is not the main point of the book, which is to 'reveal the reality behind the legend'. As he writes “these institutional monsters became what the New Poor Law intended – the last resort of the desperate.” In exposing that 'reality' Fowler does an excellent job. Collaborating with his lifelong friend, award-winning author, Daniel Rachel, One For The Road is presented as an extended conversation featuring 69 personally hand-selected songs by Simon, including never seen before original handwritten lyrics, 13 unreleased songs, and over 350 hand chosen photographs and rarely seen items of memorabilia. In this extraordinary book, Simon Fowler recounts his life and songwriting through the prism of 69 songs from all stages of his career – from the first song he wrote when he was sixteen, through his formative groups, The Great Betrayal and The Fanatics, to Ocean Colour Scene and their multi-platinum selling albums in the mid-nineties. Revealing a panoply of influences from William Yeats and Cole Porter to David Bowie, Lou Reed and Neil Young, the book reveals the stories behind the songs, the people and the places that inspired them and how Simon feels about them now. Presented with an astonishing treasure trove of ephemera including 13 unreleased songs, over 200 personal photographs, never seen before original handwritten lyrics, and more than 150 rarely seen items of memorabilia, it offers a unique and illuminating visual record of one of the great songwriters.

Simon Fowler is a success because of being blessed with a wondrous voice. He writes stunning songs. And he tells a damn good yarn. They are three critical elements that make this book.’ DANIEL RACHEL Lyrics have been a focal point for Fowler, which get extensive coverage in the book ‘99% of the (OCS) lyrics are written by me, apart from Riverboat where the music came first. For me to write a song I would have to sit down with a guitar and start to write. When I started out the songs I wrote were very derivative of my heroes like Bowie and Dylan, but isn’t everyone out to follow their heroes’. This is an intriguing book for any Nonfiction reader. Heartbreaking, of course. These were real people. Some reformers and advocates really did want to help...in the right way...but most viewed the poor as an illness or something to be avoided and they suffered as a consequence. Archival institutions are not neutral places. Nor are their archives neutral. Nor indeed is the subject of this book: what the archives do not have. When I was a teenager, my dream was to become a football commentator. Wanting to become a pop star seemed a stretch too far. It seemed daft enough to want to be John Motson, let alone John Lennon.’ SIMON FOWLERNonetheless, The Silence of the Archive is throughout a call for a new relationship between archivists, the ‘archival subjects’ (those whose lives are documented) and those who use the archived record. Johnson writes of the process whereby those archival subjects are engaged in the process of creating the archive of their existence, thus becoming co-creators with the archivist (149-53). Thomas points out the acute need in a digital archive for close engagement with end users, both in the selection of material and in the design of the interfaces that make those records first discoverable and then usable (70-72). It is a shame, then, that this call for change – necessary and urgent – is somewhat muted here; indeed, in general, the authors have a tendency to quote and expound the work of others rather than elaborate an argument, and could have been bolder. However, it is a case that should be widely heard. Records managers, archivists, historians and other users of archives should read this timely and important book. It was also clear of the thinking of the Christians of the time when there was no welfare state, the rich expected the poor to stand on their own two feet and that they were responsible for being poor and could work their way out of their situation. Fowler again uses the evidence of the Poor Law Guardians of their thoughts on the poor and that relief was corrupting the independant nature of the poor.

Collaborating with his lifelong friend, award-winning and bestselling author, Daniel Rachel, One For The Road is presented as an extended conversation and arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscope rather than chronological account. The result is a revelatory self-portrait and a testimony to friendship. Fowler blames the huge increase in poverty on the economic downturn after the Napoleonic Wars in the mid-1810s and takes a Malthusian view that over population is largely to blame for the plight of the poor of this period. He includes a detailed account of the shortcomings of the out-relief system and briefly touches on how the Speenhamland system pushed more and more families to seek relief. (The Speenhamland System of 1795, was a method of giving relief to the poor, based on the price of bread and the number of children a man had but became widely abused and an increasing burden on the local tax payers. “It depressed the wages paid by farmers and removed the incentive for labourers to seek work.” Fowler.) Suggesting that the Poor Law worked well in the 17th and 18th centuries, and blaming the poverty on economic conditions seems to me to be missing the main cause of 19th century poverty. The Workhouse by Simon Fowler is a well-researched, fascinating (though somewhat grim) account of life in Britain's workhouses. At much the same time, the transition from paper to digital in records management and archiving has presented the profession with challenges of exceptional scale and complexity, as laid out by David Thomas, former Director of Technology at the National Archives of the UK, in Chapter Three of this fascinating book. This transformation has fundamentally changed the ways in which live records are created and managed by organisations, with the significant added risk of mis-description as frontline staff are pressed into becoming their own archivists, and also of discontinuity in working IT systems such that data is lost or rendered uninterpretable. As these records pass to the archive, new and intractable challenges of scale come into play as archivists must select content for archiving and appraise it, presenting the difficulty of finding effective ways of describing these records and designing access systems that meet the needs of users. The Workhouse by Simon Fowler is one of the best and well researched books on The Workhouse something that hung over the poor like Damacles Sword and sent fear through the massed ranks of the poor. The publication of this book is well timed especially when people are researching their family tree’s and find that ancestors were sent to the workhouse, many want to know what the workhouse was. If one was to look at the former workhouse in Hampstead Workhouse now you would never understand what passed as life there looking at the expensive apartments that have been converted from the building.Fowler explores all aspects of the workhouse, including (but not limited to) the working conditions, daily life, and the organisation of the workhouses. There are also images, and inclusions of memoirs and letters by people who lived and worked in workhouses. In the past two to three decades, the archival profession has been caught between two currents of cultural and technological change: simultaneous, largely unrelated, both apparently inexorable. Largely confined to the academy, but resonating beyond it, has been a radical scepticism about the stability of meaning in language resulting from the postmodern turn in historical thinking. Coupled with this epistemological scepticism has been a hermeneutic of suspicion of the power relations that are embedded in the creation, description and accessing of archival records. This has been bound up with the emergence of a wider politics of identity, and the assertion of the experience of marginalised groups as being equally worthy of documentation and study as those more ‘official’ voices that have traditionally dominated archives. In The Silence of the Archive , David Thomas , Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson challenge the imagined notion of the archive as a comprehensive repository by exploring their silences, gaps and elisions. While the book could do more to draw out its hopeful implications, this is a timely and valuable call for a new relationship between archivists, archival subjects and archive users, writes Peter Webster . I think that half of songwriting is actually just sitting down and being bothered to do it. You can have as many genius thoughts that you can prescribe yourself but if you don’t sit down and do it then you’ve got nothing.’ SIMON FOWLER