THE YEARLINGS AT PIKE'S 70TH

With the help of good friends with their own private vehicular transport, I got to Pike's 70th at Sellick's Hills Wines on Saturday, and home again praise Bacchus and Lino Ramble. Empty vehicles going everywhere all the time but they're tricky to intercept, so thankyou comrades. Anyway through my own mismanagement I lobbed late and The Yearlings were coming up to the top of their set in the gloaming chill and they sounded very different to what I'm used to..

Rob Chalklen had let go the steeltrap precision of the old Martin dreadnought to return to the softer wood and honeyed sweetness of a big old Gibson, whilst in the US tour Parks found a vintage Gibson archtop with voodoo wiring that replaces the old honey fuzz of the Danelectro with pure golden syrup. Parks is wallowing! Shit it's sweeeet. They're so sweet. The Yearlings just changed gear. I wonder who their new songs will be? Can't wait.

And I must reiterate: I reckon Rob's as good as rhythm guitarists get anywhere on Earth. She plays like a geological epoch. Masterly. Not even going near that haunting voice. Which only haunts when we need haunting. Love youse.

Like Pike, I found my camera devoid of other images of the following revelry. So forgive my simply posting the lad in his teens:

all photos©Philip White ... but I didn't write this

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date:
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them-
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them-

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly toward me, watching.

Ted Hughes
1930-1998

Pike with Irish John by me ... to hear Ted read Pike hit this