NEWS: Tam White RIP

MARK McLAUGHLIN
Evening News (Edinburgh)
June 22, 2010, Tuesday
1 Edition

TRIBUTES were today paid to legendary bluesman, reluctant actor and great-grandfather Tam White.

Considered one of Europe's greatest blues singers, Mr White was a fixture of the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival and played on the same stage as some of the world's famous musicians.

Friends said he had recently returned from a holiday in the Canary Islands, and collapsed yesterday after a trip to a health club. The 68-year-old was a heavy smoker, and suffered from emphysema.

Neil Warden, who had played guitar with him since the mid-1980s, said: "I'm devastated but he's left us with some very happy memories. He was the kind of guy that would always perform no matter what health he was in. I played a gig with him about six weeks ago and he was on form.

"He used to keep his work and his family separate but he doted on his grandchildren.

"A 100 per cent professional who always put on a good show, he was a true legend."

Mr White supported a string of stars including BB King, Al Green, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Paul Jones and Charlie Musselwhite, as well as fronting The Tam White Band in a sell-out week of shows at the prestigious Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London in the 1990s.

Despite acting alongside Mel Gibson in Braveheart, Geena Davis in Cutthroat Island and turning down a role with Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as making a string of TV appearances in everything from Rebus to River City, Mr White was reluctant to call himself an actor. "I'm always a bit suspect to call myself that," he told the Evening News last year.

Mr White was born in 1948 and brought up in the Grassmarket, where he lived till age 13 when the family moved to Saughtonhall. His mother, Marion, and grandmother, Agnes Sim, enjoyed singing and his great-grandfather was bandmaster in Gilmerton.

He completed a five-year apprenticeship in stonemasonry for James Turner's in Gorgie upon leaving school at 15, but found his true calling after hearing the Ray Charles hit What'd I Say on the car radio while hitch-hiking through Holland in a kilt at the age of 18.

He formed The Boston Dexters in Edinburgh in 1964 and, following a record deal with Columbia Records, moved to London to begin a six-month residency at the Pontiac Club in Putney alongside the legendary John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, featuring Eric Clapton on guitar. The band split after around three years and Mr White went solo.

He got his first acting break in 1987 when he provided the voiceover for Robbie Coltrane's Big Jazza in the BAFTA award-winning BBC TV series, Tutti Frutti, in 1987.

Fiona Alexander, producer of the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival, had known him since his days on Tutti Frutti.

She said: "We're all devastated. I was only talking to him a week and a half a ago about the jazz festival. He was in fighting spirit. He had a fantastic way of delivering a song which showed that it came from the heart.

"We're going to let things settle for a few days and then start thinking about what we can do for a tribute. His musical presence and wonderful personality are irreplaceable."

Tommy Smith, artistic director and leader of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, said: "All of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra are devastated, shocked and saddened by the news of Tam White's demise.

"A voice much missed already."

DIGEST: 28 June 2010

Today I listened to...

READING: Endorsement

Received a very welcome endorsement from Jean Sasson following my review of her book Growing Up Bin Laden:

"Hi Mark, Thanks for your very insightful comments on Growing Up Bin Laden.
"As someone who became quite close to my hero/heroine, I think you have very precisely hit the nail on the head.
"Cheerio, Jean Sasson."

It's good to know I'm not shouting into a void. Cheers, Jean.

PAINTING: Pollocks

Today I painted...

READING: Sasson & Bin Ladin: Growing Up Bin Laden

Jean Sasson with Najwa & Omar Bin Laden
Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
2009

THOSE that maintain fictional novels more entertaining or diverting than non-fiction – particularly “heavy” non-fiction on terrorism, Islam and geopolitics – should read Growing Up Bin Laden.

There are those who would never consider reading a book with Bin Laden’s name on the cover, but think nothing of devouring Khaled Hosseini’s fictional Afghan tales The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns because they saw them on Richard & Judy.

Growing Up Bin Laden seems tailor-made for such reading groups. It looks, feels and reads like a Hosseini novel and confirms that many of his semi-fictional plot devices [coming of age in an Afghan war zone / dodging male-rape gangs / living with an austere and abusive husband and father] to be based in fact.


“There was a sickening incident when [my friend]...was abducted and brutally gang raped. The rapists added insult to injury by snapping photographs of the young man during and after the rape.

“Those damning photographs ended up in the hand of Dr. [Ayman] Zawahiri, the leader of the al-Jihad group [and later founder member of Al-Qaida]. Zawahiri was incensed, believing that the young teenage boy was somehow at fault. There were pictures to prove it! In our world, sex between men is punishable by death...He was arrested by the group leaders, put on trial, and condemned to death.” (Omar Bin Laden)


“My brothers and I all suffered from asthma...but my father was adamant that we should not take modern prescription drugs, no matter how serious our affliction...
“After only a month in Jalalabad, [Osama] announced that we were travelling to Tora Bora [the Bin Ladins’ Afghan mountain home with a name that means ‘Black Dust’].

“I was foolish not to have sneaked my medicine past my father, for my breathing difficulties were becoming worse with each passing day...Once when gasping, I though I caught the scent of grave dirt. I was ready to trade my share of the bin Laden mountain for a single puff from my inhaler.” (Omar)


I read this book looking for some semblance of humanity in Bin Laden, the man who orchestrated the murder of 2,976 people in New York and many more elsewhere under the pretence of protecting his home and allies from foreign influence and spreading his religion with missionary zeal, aims which are not too dissimilar from warmongering fundamentalists in the USA, Israel and other countries that the UK regards as allies rather than terrorists.

However, in Growing Up Bin Laden I failed to find a modern-day Saladin defending Islam from modern day Crusaders, but a sociopath who used his money, family connections, influence and war-hero status to bend people to his own warped worldview.

Najwa Bin Laden, the first of Osama’s five wives [arguably six if you count one “unconsummated” annulment], introduces her cousin Osama as a quiet, surly and serious teenager. Her love for him is palpable throughout the book and she refuses to criticise him directly, but her insights and those of her favourite son Omar, who is less reserved with his criticism, reveal the inner-rage that would turn Osama into a monster.

Critics of Islam should note that in this book Osama’s rage against the world doesn’t appear rooted in his fanatical religious devotion, although this undoubtedly plays a part, but in a complex psychology and dysfunctional family background similar to many other run-of-the-mill sociopaths. Osama comes across as an unappreciated war hero and bitter exile, harbouring resentment of being both an unloved middle-child and product of an abandoned single-mother*. If he grew up in America he would be Rambo [the original “don’t push me or I’ll give you a war” psycho in First Blood rather than the anaemic hero of the sequels], but equally if he grew up in Kilmarnock he’d be skinning up joints in The Scheme before signing up to the army to shoot “rag-heads”


*Osama is 18th son of 22 sons and 23 daughters born to Mohammed Bin Laden, and the only child from Mohammed’s short lived marriage to Allia Ghanem. Following his role in Afghanistan’s expulsion of Russia in the 1980s Osama was welcomed back to Saudi Arabia as a war hero, but soon exiled to Sudan for his objection to the USA’s protection of the kingdom in the first Gulf War, and later back to Afghanistan when he was subsequently kicked out by the Sudanese.

DIGEST: 23 June 2010

Today I listened to:

BBC Radio Scotland: Old Hack, New Tricks
"Newsgathering is not what it used to be. Once upon a time newspaper journalists used to find their stories by getting out and about, pounding the streets, knocking on doors, and getting tip offs from ordinary people. Now they sit in offices peering at computer terminals. But which method delivers the best stories?"

It was good to hear from Jim Rougvie again (an old colleague from my Dundee Courier days), although I thought the young BBC lad was in for a bit of an unfair fight. Jim's an old hand but the BBC lad wasn't just less experienced at newsgathering, he didn't seem to know his way around the Internet either. There's more to Internet newsgathering than a few tweets and a glance at the council website.

DIGEST: 21 June 2010

MARK McLAUGHLIN
Daily Digest
21 June 2010

I've decided to start a new digest of my own daily reading. Like the book reviews in the Personal Reading section, it should give an idea of what I'm reading when I'm not reporting on Edinburgh. Given that I don't get much time to read these articles while I'm busy writing others, let alone blog them, I'll need to see how regularly I can keep this up.


General Franco gave list of Spanish Jews to Nazis (The Guardian)

It was the list that would have sent thousands more Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz and other extermination camps run by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime during the second world war, but this time the victims were to be Spaniards.

Israel bows to pressure and agrees to ease Gaza blockade (The Guardian)

Israel agreed tonight to a significant easing of its blockade of Gaza, under intense pressure from the international community after its deadly interception last month of boats attempting to break the siege.

Plan to pump water into Dead Sea makes environmentalists see red (The Guardian)

The gradual disappearance of the Dead Sea has alarmed environmentalists, industrialists and tourist authorities for years. It has been caused mainly by three countries – Israel, Jordan and Syria – diverting an astonishing 98% of its source, the once-surging Jordan river, to provide water for their citizens.