Rock ‘n’ roll rows hit a bum note
QUESTION
What are the biggest rivalries between bands or singers in the rock world?
ROCK rivalries such as those between Oasis and Blur, and between the Gallagher brothers themselves, can often feel dull and manufactured.
A more interesting example is how Robert Smith of The Cure seems to wind people up. In the 1980s, Morrissey, then of The Smiths, dubbed Smith a ‘whingebag’ and stated that The Cure were ‘a new dimension to the word “c**p”’. The droll Smith scoffed: ‘At least we’ve only added a new dimension in c**p, not built a career out of it.’
Oddly, Paul Weller, formerly of The Jam, decided to pile in.
In a 2022 interview with Record Collector magazine, it was suggested to Weller that a Noel Gallagher song sounded like The Cure’s A Forest. This led to an expletive-laden tirade in which he dubbed Smith a ‘fat c***’ and threatened to slap him.
Weller had held a grudge. In 1985, Smith got under Weller’s skin after the latter took part in Band Aid and then put together a benefit record for the UK miners’ strike; ‘People who think they’re socially aware and lend their names to things, like Paul Weller and stuff... I mean it does no good at all, ultimately,’ said Smith, ‘because you’d have to be particularly stupid to believe someone like Paul Weller.’
The feud between Taylor Swift and Kanye West is probably the best documented in recent music history. It began with the infamous moment when West interrupted Swift’s winning speech at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009, saying that Beyoncé should have won instead.
Michael Grey, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire.
QUESTION
The rhetoric of Greek sophist Gorgias was said to be so great that it was ‘magical’. Do we have any record of what he said?
GORGIAS hailed from Sicily and was thought to have been born in 483 BC.
He was one of the leading figures of the Sophist movement, a group of itinerant teachers who travelled throughout Greece.
The sophists taught that the most important thing in an argument was winning and succeeding, regardless of the credibility.
We now have the term sophistry: the use of clever arguments that sound convincing but are in fact false. Gorgias’s skill in persuasion was so great that after his oration following the Pythian games, the Greeks installed a solid gold statue of him in the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
Gorgias employed logos (persuasive reasoning) to sway audiences to his way of thinking.
In ancient Greece, poetry was believed to be divinely inspired, and Gorgias’s talents with rhythm and style contributed to his supernatural reputation. He famously declared: ‘Nothing exists; if anything exists, it cannot be known; if it is known, it cannot be communicated.’
He died at Larissa, allegedly at the age of 108. There are four extant works attributed to Gorgias:
On Nature or the Non-Existent, Encomium of Helen, Apology of Palamedes and Epitaphios. These are characterised by Gorgias’s penchant for macrologia – using more words than necessary to make one’s point.
Iris Holloway, Bedford.
QUESTION
Which is Britain’s oldest surviving brick building?
THE Romans introduced fired clay bricks to Britain in the first century AD.
These bricks were wider and thinner than those of today and were used in various ways: as lacing courses in walls of rubble stonemasonry and in the construction of supporting pillars for underground hypocaust heating systems, used in Roman baths and other public buildings.
The Balkerne gateway in Colchester, which dates to at least the second century AD, is an early example of Roman brickwork. A fine example can be found at Burgh Castle in Norfolk, a third-century AD Roman fort which features alternating courses of flint and brickwork. There are examples of hypocaust systems, such as that at Cilurvum, a fort on Hadrian’s Wall at Chesters, Northumberland.
After the Romans left in 410 AD there was a 600-to-700-year gap in brick production. Some buildings were built with reused Roman bricks, for example the nave of St Albans Cathedral. Construction on this began in the 11th Century, reusing materials from the town of Verulamium.
The earliest known use of brick manufactured in Britain is thought to be Coggeshall Abbey in Essex, the oldest parts of the monastic buildings dating to 1190. Herstmonceux Castle, a brick-built castle dating from the 15th Century, near Herstmonceux, East Sussex, is one of the oldest and finest brick buildings still standing in Britain.
Stephen Ross, Carlisle.
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