1.

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!

"Charge for the guns!" he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

2.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"

Was there a man dismay'd?

Not tho' the soldier knew

Someone had blunder'd:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

3.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley'd and thunder'd;

Storm'd at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

4.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,

Flash'd as they turn'd in air,

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wonder'd:

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right thro' the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reel'd from the sabre stroke

Shatter'd and sunder'd.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

5.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley'd and thunder'd;

Storm'd at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro' the jaws of Death

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

6.

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honor the charge they made,

Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred.

Along side the rare vinyl are hidden treasures that wouldn't be out of place in a museum, for instance this wax cylinder signed from the King of Italy to Thomas Edison, the inventor of the gramophone.

From one rare format to another and the 16 inch vinyl. These were used to archive BBC shows in the early days.

But the rarest of all is this, the world's smallest record, it plays one verse of God Save The King and was once owned by the Queen. A custom made miniature gramophone was built for the sole purpose of playing this record and currently resides in Windsor Castle.

You can listen again to the Sunday Service from the BBC Archives on the I Player for 7 days after broadcast.

The Sunday Service survey aims to get a snap shot of the 6 Music listeners by asking the same 5 questions to the 12 star signs.

So now to Aries - born between March 20^th and April 20^th - we'd like you to answer some simple questions.

Leave comments below with your answers and we’ll collate the information.

What is your favourite colour?

What is your favourite band?

What is your favourite vegetable?

What is your favourite mode of transport?

What is your favourite Double act – musical or comedy?

This feature will run throughout the year so every one of you can get involved!

Jarvis Cocker Blog BBC 6 Music

 Errr... Indian restaurant. Travelogue. George Harrison's patio in 1967. Actually it's some of the oldest, richest, deepest and most satisfying music in existence, but there you go.

As pop music's development continues to slow, there's still a certain Anglocentricism choking possibility. All too often, even now, you sense a blithe assumption of what pop is, and must be, forever – English speaking, burger eating, live at Shea Stadium. This great transatlantic stitch-up does no one any favours.

In almost every area where technology has increased choice, people seem dazzled and keener than ever to stick to what they know. It's not, you'd hope, that they're actively hostile to music which comes from further afield – perhaps for some, it's that too much cultural carbohydrate has left them unsure of how to listen to it. Still, the result is exactly the same: a massive and menacing contraction.

Most attempts to assimilate foreign styles into the basic thump of Anglo-American pop music have been ham-fisted or, at best, a bit silly.

To begin with, there was only novelty: songs like “Mecca” by Gene Pitney, which is brilliant but essentially a kind of joke.

But that was the sum total of outside influence on Western pop for many years - a vaguely comical bolting-on of unfamiliar scales and inflections. At best you had Rolf Harris, dipping into Aboriginal music and pulling out “Sun Arise” or “War Canoe”, which clearly did something for Adam And The Ants:

Can you tell what it is yet?

Beyond that, there was Exotica, a beguiling but consciously hokey kind of easy listening music, the whole point of which was to exploit that picture-postcard perception of tropical and Eastern styles. There's something fascinating about this kind of breezy, gleeful forgery, but for all its charms it's a branch line that ends in the middle of nowhere.

There was something of a breakthrough in the late 1960s, when Indian music suddenly got hip - but this mostly involved the sitar, one of the most complex instruments in the world, reduced to something that went “weeoooowwww” behind the guitars, to make four-chord rock songs sound exotic. More than 40 years on, we still haven't come a whole lot further.

When unfamiliar styles are taken seriously, it's often in a po-faced anthropological way which only emphasises place, and as a consequence, distance. Or else, and this is worse, it's with an earnest hipsterism left over from the 80s World Music boom or the sudden, forgotten trendiness of the Buena Vista Social Club. A lot of the attention foreign-sounding music does receive is shot through with the smugness of a broadsheet travel section.

It seems so wasteful and vaguely unsavoury to examine this music under glass, or to use it as spray-on sunshine or a chucklesome break from the serious business of doing the same thing over and over. Better to unlearn bad habits picked up from living in a culture which turns  uncommon modes of expression into a sideshow. The manipulation of context is the key to musical discovery, here as elsewhere, and it doesn't take much to hear this fascinating noise as something nearby, and relevant, and revelatory.

Perhaps, as people, we need a better understanding of where these sounds come from, and why - but as listeners, the first thing we need to do is ditch all our associations, all our reference points. Better to hear what's actually there, as though this were the first music we'd ever heard.

This is “Lover Of Smiling Girls” by the Burmese Mandalay Sein (note to self: SANE) Mottah: it's unmistakably a pop song, and does what too few pop songs manage – it's instantly captivating and yet so explosive and intriguing, melodically, rhythmically, sonically, it creates a space of its own.

Empire, even the ghost of empire, degrades the senses as well as the soul. One of the deepest cultural wounds of Britain's colonial history – at this end, anyway - is an inability to approach the music of other lands with genuine humility and unconditionally open ears. Globalisation, a one-way process, only reinforces this - the English-speaking world still has a tendency to view faraway goings-on purely in terms of how they relate to “our” interests, real or perceived. This is as true in music as in geopolitics, and one result is a certain resistance to unknown and extraordinary sound whose origin is clear and possible to patronise.

But pop is essentially amoral, and doesn't need worthy lectures about being a citizen of Planet Earth. This is about new methods of movement - towards and between extraordinary and imaginary places.

There's a lot to learn from the countless attempts by foreign musicians to shift or dissolve these make-believe borders - like the one coming up, “Hop Hop Gelsin” by Erkin Koray, Turkey's top rock star of the 60s and 70s. This came out of Istanbul, the exact spot where East meets West, and that's precisely what it sounds like. Nothing about this music is unapproachable or difficult, and the way it so effortlessly straddles the Bosphorus makes a lot of British pop sound miserably parochial.

 

Photograph courtesy of Peter Whitehead

 

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This week on the Sunday Service Michael Horovitz. Michael is a poet, singer-songwriter, jazz & blues anglo-saxophonist, impresario, visual artist, translator, arts journalist, editor-publisher, and neo-Beat trouble-shooter. He was characterised by Allen Ginsberg as a "Popular, experienced, experimental, New Jerusalem, Jazz Generation, Sensitive Bard". He founded New Departures publications and Live New Departures bandwagons (which first introduced the Beat writers to the UK) in 1959, Jazz Poetry SuperJams in 1963, and the Poetry Olympics festivals in 1980. Among his productions on stage and page which have featured the Beats are the POM! (Poetry Olympics Marathon) and POT! (Poetry Olympics Twenty05) Anthologies, and also his own Wordsounds & Sightlines and A New Waste Land.

The Monkees – the most peculiar manufactured pop group in history. What happened here, and how, and why?

The Monkees' story is over-familiar: hired off the back of a hip-talking advert to play the roles of hip-talking musicians in a well-bankrolled TV show - then worked half to death, in the television studio by day and recording studio by night. At first they were only allowed to add their voices to pre-prepared backing tracks, written by the finest professional songwriters of the era and performed by LA's slick batallion of rock and roll session men. Sometimes that meant being dropped into stuff like this:

...but more often, it meant being blessed with stuff like this:

Aside from the fact that they made people happy, most of these records are great, and not diminished by their pre-fabricated nature any more than all those hits by The Supremes or The Ronettes or Rihanna. But what makes The Monkees special, and so endlessly fascinating, is the way they turned their situation to their own advantage.

The members of The Monkees were chosen in horribly modern focus-group style, by showing kids a load of screen tests and gauging their reactions, but the results were fortuitously strange. If you were putting together a boy band now, you probably wouldn't choose a Christian Scientist country singer, a banjo-playing folkie pothead, a Hollywood brat with a concave face and a failed jockey from Manchester. You certainly wouldn't choose a bunch of awkward sods whose egos and imaginations compelled them to strain at the leash.

The early Monkee records were rather like the first few Girls Aloud singles: state-of-the-art pop records put together by talented professionals, fronted by conveniently good-looking hopefuls. Some of these so-called professionals, it turns out, are in fact quite professional, and rather good at what they do. But it's hard to imagine Girls Aloud, much less any of the boy bands, wandering off the reservation in quite the same way as The Monkees. That's because there's a difference between accepting the process and using it. The Monkees developed, contrary to popular belief, not by insisting that they have it all their way but through a fine mixture of arrogance and humility - a need to impose themselves and an understanding of their limits.

Once they'd wrestled creative control from music supervisor Don Kirshner, they only made one album - “Headquarters” - as a self-contained band. After that, they tended to do their own thing in separate studios, recording their own songs and hand-picking the best or weirdest tunes available on the market, backed up by their favourite session men, or friends from West Coast rock bands – Doug Dillard, Stephen Stills, Ry Cooder – some of the best musicians in LA at the time. So even when they lapsed into total self-indulgence, The Monkees always sounded great. For talentless triers like Davy Jones, it helps to be able to say "I'm going to record my new song in Sunset Sound studios in Hollywood. I think I'll ring up the 23-year-old Neil Young and get him to play lead guitar."

So, the lesson most people think they've learnt from The Monkees and their struggle with giants is that you have to do your own thing, man. But I'd say another lesson well worth learning is that “your own thing” can be approached from several different angles, and for all but the genuine one-offs, ploughing a single, determined furrow may not be the answer. No one likes being told what to do, but most of us are good at some things, not so good at others, and we operate best with gentle guidance and a careful division of labour.

The sheer strangeness of the records that The Monkees made once put in charge of their own destiny was partly a product of the times, partly the product of those naughty 60s drugs, partly the result of their unique opportunity to do whatever they wanted with a backup team sufficiently skilled to make it sound convincing. In other words, manufacturing provided a framework within which their talent could suddenly function in a way which never would have happened in a bedroom or a garage.

And part of what makes The Monkees such an interesting group is the fact that they weren't a band. No conventions, no hierarchy, no trademark sound on which to fall back whenever they got lazy. On those later albums, patchy as they are, almost every track sounds wildly different from the last: psychedelic country music, acid ragtime, frazzled soul, hard rock, folk ballads, queasy bubblegum, raga jamming, Soft Machine-like freakouts, the first appearance of a synthesizer on a pop record... directionless perhaps, but creative in a way that few bands ever can be.

Received wisdom tells us that pop music is about total freedom – but few of us know how to use freedom. You can hear it in the useless meanderings of rock's free-est men. You can see it in the workshy wastefulness of brand new bands who think they're The Rolling Stones before they've even made a record: acting world-weary while reeking of desperation to gain access to the world, or what they imagine the world to be... a sealed, exclusive space. This is meant to stand for liberty. Somehow, this is meant to have something to do with self-expression.

Well, we're all manufactured. Forces beyond our control make us what we are, and it's just a matter of how we choose to move within that cell. If we try to pretend that's not the case, or that it's not important, we can end up restricting ourselves further.

It's not that young artistes should submit to manipulation by tired know-nothings, or that The Beatles would have been better if they'd relied on Tin Pan Alley and the British showbiz tradition. It's just that this insistence on total self-sufficiency, which has become an orthodoxy in modern pop music, is nonsense.

The unspoken conventions of rock and roll, meant to protect and encourage self-expression, often stifle creativity, because they make it hard for unexpected things to happen. Anything that breaks those lines will generally be interesting at least – it's not manufacturing that's the enemy of ingenuity, it's dogma. Even when it's rooted in undying faith in your own “vision”.

Without the lessons learned and the connections made in their first six months, I don't think The Monkees would have become one of the strangest and most rewarding groups of the late 1960s – I don't think The Monkees would have become anything at all. Maybe we should understand that sometimes creation is about knowing what we should react against and what we shouldn't. Maybe we should accept that sometimes our untrammelled fancies aren't as worthwhile as we'd like, and mean no more to other people than the details of our dreams.

Maybe there really aren't that many auteurs in the world. Maybe we should stop pretending that there are.

Jarvis Cocker Blog BBC 6 Music

This week on The Sunday Service Gaz Mayall joined me to talk about his new book, Gaz Mayall's Rockin' Blues - 30 Years. He also donned the wheels of steel to treat us to a mini mix of his favourite tunes.

 

 In other news, we talked about an article written by the journalist Taylor Parkes on the early Beatles story. You can view the sotry here.