Showing posts with label Polly Samson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Polly Samson. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Jane Eyre by Polly Samson



On the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth

Jane Eyre

by Polly Samson







Polly Samson


Polly Samson

Saturday 16 April 2016 08.00 BST
I read Wide Sargasso Sea before I ever got to Jane Eyre. It wasn’t until my youngest son was set Jane Eyre for A-level that I finally read it (I thought I had but it turned out I’d only osmosed it from the air and screen). Wide Sargasso Sea, I’d read several times. Reading them the wrong way round, which happens to be chronologically the right way round, does rather spoil the romance: leaving you alert to a morally derelict rather than a Byronic Rochester. Jane falls for a man whose degeneracy and sadism drove his first wife mad. Lushly erotic and deeply disturbing, Rhys’s book bleeds very darkly into Brontë’s.

Throughout the exquisite suffering and withholding dance of Jane and Rochester’s courtship, you are thinking, ‘Please no, Jane, not after all we’ve been through so intimately together, the beatings and privations, the humiliations and near-starvations. Did love deafen you when he told you of roaming Europe and setting up home with three separate courtesans? What of his STDs?’
And what of poor little Adèle, the abandoned child of his Parisian mistress? There he is, pampering her with cadeaux while referring to her repeatedly and within her hearing as “it”, and remarking on her stupidity. Why did he take her in if he despises her so? And then, Rhys whispers in your ear and you shudder to remember that in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester has sex with a servant girl, who can’t have been more than a child.
And on to the spectacle of the mad woman in his attic: unkempt and ugly, raving and knifing and biting. Rhys won’t allow you to dismiss her as some sort of mythical vampyre, or even Jane’s rebellious alter ego. In Wide Sargasso Sea, she is a beautiful but fragile Creole heiress whom Rochester marries for her fortune, and on his honeymoon is already resenting for her “disconcertingly non-European” eyes.
It is never made clear in Jane Eyre from what form of madness the first Mrs Rochester is suffering. Something must have turned her from a beautiful bride into this swollen, purple monster. Given what Brontë tells us of his decade-long lost weekend, does it seem unlikely that Rochester has given her syphilis?
And then, up on the roof, among the flames of Thornfield Hall, Rochester loses his hand, his left hand, the one he gave in marriage. According to Jane Eyre, the woman he gave it to jumps, thus freeing him to marry Jane. Oh dear. Reader, I can’t help but think he pushed her.


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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Pink Floyd / The Endless River

Pink Floyd to release a new album in 2014, entitled The Endless River

David Gilmour's wife Polly Samson has described the new album, out in October, as 'Rick Wright's swansong'

by Sean Michaels
The Guardian, Monday 7 July 2014

Pink Floyd publicity shotPink Floyd, England, 1973. Left to right: Rick Wright, Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives
David Gilmour's wife has revealed that Pink Floyd will release a new album this October. The Endless River is the group's first album since 1994's The Division Bell, and was reportedly inspired by the same recording sessions.
Polly Samson, who married Gilmour in 1994, unveiled Pink Floyd's secret plans on her Twitter account. In addition to announcing the album's title and release date, she referred to the record as "Rick Wright's swansong". Wright, who co-founded Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett, Nick Mason and Roger Waters, died in 2008.

Polly Samson @PollySamson
Btw Pink Floyd album out in October is called "The Endless River". Based on 1994 sessions is Rick Wright's swansong and very beautiful.

Vocalist Durga McBroom-Hudson, who has toured with Gilmour and Pink Floyd, subsequently shared some further details. "The recording did start during The Division Bell sessions (and yes, it was the side project originally titled The Big Spliff that Nick Mason spoke about)," she wrote en Facebook. "David and Nick have gone in and done a lot more since then." That "Big Spliff" session was described in Mason's memoir Inside Out, where he called it "ambient mood music" akin to "bands like the Orb".
According to McBroom-Hudson, The Endless River "was originally to be a completely instrumental recording". But Gilmour gradually changed his mind, inviting McBroom-Hudson to record backup vocals last December and adding more singing since then. Gilmour has "done a lead on at least one [track]," she said, and Samson, who co-wrote seven of The Division Bell's tracks, described herself on Twitter as one of The Endless River's lyricists. 
In addition to finishing Pink Floyd's 15th studio album, Gilmour is also allegedly still working on a new solo album. And McBroom-Hudson said that the band could indeed mount a new tour. "STAY TUNED," she wrote. When Pink Floyd last hit the road, in 1994, it was the highest-grossing rock tour in history.
The Division Bell, which originally debuted at No 1, was reissued in a deluxe set on 30 June. This new edition landed at No 52.


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