One For The Road - The Life & Lyrics of Simon Fowler & Ocean Colour Scene

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Fowler blames the huge increase in poverty on the economic downturn after the Napoleonic Wars in the mid-1810s and takes a Malthusian view that over population is largely to blame for the plight of the poor of this period. He includes a detailed account of the shortcomings of the out-relief system and briefly touches on how the Speenhamland system pushed more and more families to seek relief. (The Speenhamland System of 1795, was a method of giving relief to the poor, based on the price of bread and the number of children a man had but became widely abused and an increasing burden on the local tax payers. “It depressed the wages paid by farmers and removed the incentive for labourers to seek work.” Fowler.) Suggesting that the Poor Law worked well in the 17th and 18th centuries, and blaming the poverty on economic conditions seems to me to be missing the main cause of 19th century poverty. In The Silence of the Archive , David Thomas , Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson challenge the imagined notion of the archive as a comprehensive repository by exploring their silences, gaps and elisions. While the book could do more to draw out its hopeful implications, this is a timely and valuable call for a new relationship between archivists, archival subjects and archive users, writes Peter Webster . This is an intriguing book for any Nonfiction reader. Heartbreaking, of course. These were real people. Some reformers and advocates really did want to help...in the right way...but most viewed the poor as an illness or something to be avoided and they suffered as a consequence.

This may sound platitudinous: something a history student might write in an essay. This chapter, and the next, explore why this has long been the case in the context of traditional, one might say analogue, archives. In this chapter we will consider how archival institutions have traditionally failed to meet the needs of host communities and why there have been great gaps in the collections, and in archival collecting policies. In the words of the great French historian Marc Bloch, the records of a society are ‘witnesses in spite of themselves’ (Bloch, 1953, 51). That is, on the one hand the records become witnesses in the evidentiary sense arising from the process of record making and record keeping and, on the other, also bear witness to the lives of those who are the subjects of the records. Collaborating with his lifelong friend, award-winning author, Daniel Rachel, One For The Road is presented as an extended conversation featuring 69 personally hand-selected songs by Simon, including never seen before original handwritten lyrics, 13 unreleased songs, and over 350 hand chosen photographs and rarely seen items of memorabilia.

Today the workhouses conjure up images of abuse and horror, and rightfully so, but they actually began as charitable institutions to look after the poor, elderly, disabled, and unmarried mothers. In effect, they functioned as an early type of social welfare, something that was not seen in many other Western countries until much later. Like many well intentioned ventures, the workhouses were not without their problems, and many of the same problems still occur today - like 'concerns' about people becoming too reliant on welfare to the point where they 'decide' not to work, or the overseers taking cuts of the money or produce to fund their own lifestyles.

Collaborating with his lifelong friend, award-winning author, Daniel Rachel, One For The Road is presented as an extended conversation featuring 69 personally hand-selected songs by Simon, including never seen before original handwritten lyrics, 13 unreleased songs, and over 350 hand chosen photographs and rarely seen items of memorabilia. This new stunning book offers a unique and illuminating visual record of one of the great songwriters. The Workhouse by Simon Fowler is a well-researched, fascinating (though somewhat grim) account of life in Britain's workhouses. Fowler ‘I made the recordings (some appear in the release) in my Mum and Dads house on a tape, which is how I still record ideas for songs. Daniels’s Mum was very close to me and my partner Robert. The cassettes that Daniel owns were made for Daniels Mum who was a big influence on me for caring and reaching out to me and Robert’. I think that half of songwriting is actually just sitting down and being bothered to do it. You can have as many genius thoughts that you can prescribe yourself but if you don’t sit down and do it then you’ve got nothing.’ SIMON FOWLERNonetheless, The Silence of the Archive is throughout a call for a new relationship between archivists, the ‘archival subjects’ (those whose lives are documented) and those who use the archived record. Johnson writes of the process whereby those archival subjects are engaged in the process of creating the archive of their existence, thus becoming co-creators with the archivist (149-53). Thomas points out the acute need in a digital archive for close engagement with end users, both in the selection of material and in the design of the interfaces that make those records first discoverable and then usable (70-72). It is a shame, then, that this call for change – necessary and urgent – is somewhat muted here; indeed, in general, the authors have a tendency to quote and expound the work of others rather than elaborate an argument, and could have been bolder. However, it is a case that should be widely heard. Records managers, archivists, historians and other users of archives should read this timely and important book.