Two songs for President Putin

There is no reason on the face it why Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine should have been more upsetting than any other of the horrors going on in the world. An atrocity is an atrocity, whenever and wherever and whoever

You can imagine people in other war-blasted countries watching the hand-wringing in Europe and the US and saying what about us? Aren’t our sufferings worth a look? And what about you and your wars?

There is no short answer to that one. But the Ukraine war transfixed Europe because it was on our doorstep, its cruelty was on our screens every night, and it looked horribly like a replay of history. The parallels between Putin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany of 1939 were terrifying.

Both countries had suffered a period of humiliation: Germany from defeat in the first world war and a ruinous peace settlement; Russia from the collapse of communism and the empire built in its name, aka the Soviet Union. Both suffered a traumatic economic collapse before being stabilised by a murderous, inadequate leader with imperial dreams. Both lived in a propaganda bubble capable of inducing national psychosis. Both used stoked-up grievances of minorities in neighbouring countries as an excuse for imperialist invasion.

Hitler launched the second world war. Where was Putin’s recklessness going to lead? A nuclear catastrophe? Did we not have enough to worry about with the climate teetering at a tipping point?

Vanishingly trivial in the circumstances was the fact that I was upset enough to record and stream a song, called The Poisoner, about it all — the first I had written for years. Almost no-one noticed, and there was no reason why they should. I am unknown, I don’t perform live, and I had done nothing to promote the track. Still, it was disheartening. What was the point of singing if no-one listens?

This mattered to me because, I’d spent years writing two books and recording songs and I’d done nothing with them either.

My ‘singing book’ Tigger and the Tantric Princess had been ready for publication for at least three years. I have no excuses for the delay other than a series of marriages and deaths, lockdown, two bouts of Covid, fear and dread, incompetence in musical production, decrepitude, and above all a wish for a quiet life. I’m self-publishing and have no appetite for the self-promotion needed for it to succeed.

But persuaded by the failure of The Poisoner, I decided that a few readers are better than none and resolved to put the book out regardless, though it would take me a while to straighten out the accompanying album, Henry the Hippy’s Songs of Peace and War.

The book is not only about war. But it does pitch wartime military attitudes, as preserved in boy’s adventure stories, into the peaceable anything-goes milieu of the hippies of India in the early seventies.

Henry the Hippy, who teams up with Tigger and the princess of the title, says at one point: “Hippy talk of peace is only another way of talking about war. How can anyone of our age ignore it? We’re living in the shadow of two horrendous world wars in which our fathers and grandfathers were sent out to kill and die. And it’s still going on. The world wars never stopped. They fragmented into smaller wars, just as terrible for anyone involved, but for the rest of us they have become background noise, something to watch on TV. War has become normal, like bad weather that you hope won’t come your way.”

Now it has come our way, and it could come closer. I don’t pretend that my paltry writing could make a spot of difference, but Henry has a song called The dream of a ridiculous man. The title is taken from a story by Dostoevsky about a man who has a vision of a perfect world in which people live in peace and harmony. He does not say it will happen, only that he has faith that people can better themselves and that it is a vision worth striving for. It’s a very Russian story. If only the Russians, indeed all of us, could take heed of it.