Latest news with #ManoftheWorld
Perth Now
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac lyrics for sale
Handwritten Fleetwood Mac lyrics are expected to sell for up to £15,000. A composition sheet, which also included instrumentation notes, for the group's 1969 single Man of the World will be auctioned by Ewbank's next week, with an estimated value of £12-15000. The document was written in blue ballpoint pen and corrected in black ink and showed Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green - who left the band in 1970 and died in 2020 - had changed three lines of the lyrics and ticked off each finalised line in the song. Ewbank's specialist John Silke said: "Few musicians can claim to have been as talented and as important to the development of rock music from the blues and folk movements as Peter Green. "The founding father of Fleetwood Mac, who have sold more than 120 million records over the years, it is an incredible privilege to be able to sell his own handwritten lyrics and instrumentation for one his most important songs." Man of the World was Fleetwood Mac's only single for Immediate Records and appeared on an early greatest hits album in 1971. The track was never played live after Peter left the band until almost 50 years later, when they played it in Australia on their 2019 tour. Band member Mick Fleetwood previously said the song was "very prophetic" and gave an insight into Peter's mental state at the time. He told Rolling Stone in 2020: "It's a very prophetic song. When he made those songs, we had no idea that he was suffering internally as much as he was. But if you listen to the words, it's crucifyingly obvious what was going on. But a beautiful song. A poignant song." Peter left the band after taking drugs and struggling with his mental health and Mick previously recalled feeling "devastated" by his departure. He told The Times newspaper: "It was out of the blue. I don't think he knew what he was getting into (with LSD) and when he left the band we were devastated." And the 78-year-old drummer recalled how he and his late bandmate were the group's "odd couple". He added: "Peter would be the East End kid shouting, 'F****** give is the money now', to some promoter who had short-changed us. I would be the public schoolboy going, 'Maybe we shouldn't upset him too much...' "Peter certainly knew what he wanted, but that didn't transfer into his ego, which is why he named the band after John McVie and myself. He was funny, he was strong, he loved life. And emotionally he had a lot to say after having had a s***** childhood of being bullied and so on." As well as Peter's lyrics, the Entertainment + Memorabilia Music, Film / TV Popular Culture auction also includes various Rolling Stones documents, including a previously-unseen draft legal statement by Sir Mick Jagger relating to a 1967 drugs raid. Live online bidding for the auction is available via
Spectator
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The fragility of the modern city reflects humanity's vulnerability
As I reached the final pages of the German writer Gregor Hens's essayistic travelogue The City and the World, news of the blackout across Spain and Portugal snatched my attention. Madrid and Lisbon were at a standstill. Images of gridlocked round-abouts and commuters rushing out of pitch-dark subway tunnels plunged me into a fatalistic mood. When will it happen here? Hens, I realised, had nailed an important point: the 'stunning complexity' of modern cities makes them fragile. The metropolis, he writes, has become so intricate, its limits so stretched, that in it, 'we are always living on the verge of catastrophe'. A seasoned globetrotter who spent his formative years 'guzzling jet fuel with abandon', Hens has lived in cities around the world, from Berlin (his current home) to Los Angeles. He has visited a host of other far-flung locations, from Shanghai and Shenzhen to Las Vegas. Each place a person visits, Hens suggests, becomes plotted in the 'galactic city' of their mind, a network 'whose intricately folded map actually offers the most surprising connections'. This is urban wandering on a rather different scale to that of Charles Baudelaire, whose 1863 essay 'The Artist, Man of the World' paved the way for a host of successive writers, most notably Walter Benjamin, to delight in roaming a single city on foot. Hens takes stock of our modern technologically dictated movements within and across cities, investigating how these places have come to sprawl far beyond the possible step-count of even the most determined walker. His understanding of the word 'city' encompasses entities that aren't cities in the obvious sense: libraries, viruses, cemeteries and the brain. These each have 'cityness', apparently, because they are networks. Hens is careful to acknowledge that this insight owes something to the work of writers like Rebecca Solnit ('a city is built to resemble a conscious mind… a network') and Michel Foucault ('our experience of the world is… that of a network'). His critique is bricolage-style: he makes incisive links between ideas, even if not quite delivering a decisive overriding argument of his own. This suits his subject. Cities are, he argues, constituted of 'the rubble of history', so are 'no longer spatially and temporally comprehensible' as a whole. Messiness is, for Hens, what makes cities interesting. He sees Los Angeles, in its orderly layout, as an outlier, envying 'anyone who manages to get lost' in it. The greatest cities, it seems, allow room for the inhabitant or visitor to forge their own geography, one which overlaps with but doesn't quite match what's on Google Maps. Our encounters, Hens suggests, are many-layered and varied. Some cities, like New York, are so ingrained in the public imagination that 'we first know [them] from our dreams'. Others, like Chongqing or Wuhan, are 'generic cities' that 'arouse no longings' for Hens. Mostly, though, we can know a city only 'in an excerpted form': outside of the webs we weave between bars and offices, homes and parks, much remains terra incognita. This is Hens's second book to be published in English and in it he has doubled down on a tested formula. In his 2015 memoir Nicotine (also elegantly translated by Jen Calleja), he surveyed his life as a smoker, using stories of memorable cigarettes like signposts in the mazy network of his experience. In The City and the World, the mechanism is essentially the same, but this time cities are the cigarettes. It works and it doesn't. On one level, the book satisfyingly blends memoir with literary criticism, travelogue and social commentary to create an experimental text reminiscent of other Fitzcarraldo Editions favourites such as Brian Dillon's Essayism. At the same time this fragmentary approach, which jumps back and forth between different cities and does away with chapters, doesn't feel quite as fresh as it did in Nicotine. That book's central subject was precise and sexy enough to carry the reader through its more meandering passages. The concept of the city isn't as tight – especially not once houses and children's playgrounds are included in Hens's definition. Yet his tentacular style makes sense as a response to the overstimulating, frenetic character of modern cities. How we think and live is mapped on to the metropolis. If the city is fragile, then we are too.
