Hudson Records have shared the accompanying music video for Karine Polwart’s Cassiopeia from her Laws of Motion album, reviewed here. Cassiopeia tells a story from her own childhood and sees Karine revisit the government’s Protect and Survive advice of the 1980s, through soft starlit nights, shattered by martial drums and disquieting keyboards.
The video is accompanied by a personal message from Karine which you can read below, a reminder that this threat is far from over.
And then, in a flash, it was gone?
I grew up overlooking the Forth Valley, where the petrochemical towers of Grangemouth still dominate the skyline. As a kid, I found the neon flames and flashing lights both oddly magical and terrifying, because, by the age of 9, I’d figured out for myself that the BP Plant on the banks of the River Forth was one of the key nuclear targets in Scotland.
I made emergency plans for my family. Why wouldn’t I? The Government of the day was instructing us at the time in the domestic mechanics of radioactive fallout shelters. I’d seen the leaflets and the ads and the nightmare-inducing television dramas. Mattresses and water buckets. Blankets and newspapers taped to your windows.
As if.
It was ludicrous, of course, this notional resilience, this 3-weeks of supplies survival. But I didn’t know that. Internally, in between watching Grange Hill and Flash Gordon (Flash! We only have 24 hours to save the Earth!) I debated the pros and cons of (a) trying to stick it out behind the louvre doors at the end of our hallway versus (b) jumping in our beat up VW, all six of us and our dog, and driving straight towards the blast, for a quick, clean end.
I was, I think, in Primary 5 at the time, just a year older than my daughter is now.
I wonder now what my kids are thinking, and whether they tell me even the half of it.
There are, of course, myriad ways now in which we humans are fucking it up. But there’s a core truth that remains the same between my generation and my children’s. We have such power as humans, and such responsibility, such capacity for compassion and such callous capacities for imagining and making. We are on a knife-edge.
Cassiopeia, the final track of my 2018 album Laws of Motion speaks to this fear, and this reality. Our Governments, and modes of representation, and means of living, as they currently stand, will not save us. But we’re more than that. And there are others ways, no? Maybe we haven’t imagined them yet. Or maybe those stories just aren’t being told loudly enough. Yet. But there’s such possibility, such energy, and so many dogged, beautiful, resilient, rule-busting, truth-seeking, peace-making souls amongst us.
Thanks to all of you, wherever you are.
Now there’s work to do.