Category Archives: Music

The war will be over by Christmas

Posted on 02/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

A reader has asked me to comment on the widespread phenomenon of “shruggers.” The term refers to that majority of people who downplay the significance of our situation: the suspension of the world’s economy for what is, in dispassionate terms, a run of the mill novel virus, a shut-down presaging what may be the deepest recession in historic memory; and riots which openly seek to overturn the entire basis of western civilization and its history, which leaders in politics, communication, business and even the church seem to encourage. The worst future shruggers anticipate is expressed in their mumbling about a “reboot” of society that may well, they say, turn out … Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

This is the Night

Posted on 04/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

Here’s another lockdown video for you , once more from a remix of an old recording of one of my songs. The views of The Vegetable Man have been encouraging, so the effort seems worthwhile. This one’s in darker vein than the last, and would probably be more effective when countries produce their first emergency budgets after lockdown and, in the UK particularly, reveal just how big a knife we’ve stuck in the economy. The Nobel Prizewinner Michael Levitt estimates that, whereas the usual averaged cost of a death (using “quality added life years,” or “QUALYs”), and therefore the “economic” health cost of saving it medically, is £40,000, the cost … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Medicine, Music, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

The Vegetable Man

Posted on 18/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

Here’s another lockdown video, in rather sillier vein than the last couple, to cheer up those still confined. It’s another remix of an old song of mine.

Posted in Music, Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

More more music

Posted on 06/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

I’ve posted another remix of one of my songs on YouTube, accompanied by another attempt at video support.

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More music…

Posted on 02/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

Since a few people took the trouble to watch my YouTube music video (or at least click on the article containing the link), here’s another. I’ve been re-mastering some old recordings, and some of them seem to lend themselves to visuals and a small YouTube presence. Embedded below the fold.

Posted in Music, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Substance and a smidgen of style

Posted on 22/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Well, Mick Jagger’s doing it and Paul McCartney’s doing it, so I thought I’d do it even though I don’t need to keep public interest alive under lock-down like they do… So yesterday I recorded a new song, and experimented with recording the effort in video. I think the thing’s come out OK, and Hump readers can view it absolutely free, gratis and for nothing below the fold.

Posted in Music, Theology | Leave a comment

Style over substance

Posted on 15/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

One group to do badly out of COVID-19 is the guild of celebrity charismatic prophets, who have uniformly both failed to predict it (except in the “Last September God gave me a secret message I can now reveal” manner), and who even got their false retrospective words from God wrong as they decreed instant death on the virus by Easter (or Passover, for some reason). Particularly instructive to watch on YouTube is Kenneth Copeland, whose spuriously authoritative curses on the thing, and demand for an instant vaccine NOW, almost tip him into apoplexy (though as he has also prophesied he will live to 120, I guess he’s safe). He dug … Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments

Faith, and faith

Posted on 05/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

This is taking time out from my “retrospective” series. Does anybody else remember the old Science Fiction story about an anti-gravity machine?

Posted in Hump Retrospective, Music, Politics and sociology, Prometheus, Theology | 3 Comments

Care to return to 1833? And 1970?

Posted on 10/01/2019 by Jon Garvey

Every now and again I like to regale you with some esoteric musical item, firstly in case you like the music, and secondly because there are all kinds of truths in music.After all, it’s my blog! For example here I discussed the phenomenon of  “swing” to show that human reality can’t be entirely captured by science.

Posted in Music, Theology | Leave a comment

The metaphysics of jazz drumming

Posted on 30/10/2017 by Jon Garvey

I want today to take another tilt at the question just how theory-laden our view of the world is, following a frustrating conversation with an atheist at BioLogos (whose posts were “liked” by a good number of non-atheists there). He just couldn’t see why his naturalist view of a “Nature” containing only the “material” governed by “laws” and “chance” (metaphysical concepts all) is not simply self-evident truth, into which one might somehow be able to fit a God if there were enough evidence. The “evidence”, of course, would have to be investigated using the methodological naturalism that excludes God a priori, and in the extraordinarily unlikely situation that it jumped … Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Music, Philosophy, Science | 13 Comments