Writer of songs & poems, teller of tales
On Friday night I sing at my local folk club. It’s the Castle pub in Bradford, and it’s great; they have a raffle and do a collection to pay the singers. I write songs about things that happen to me – it might be going to a political demonstration or falling in love.
I’m a political animal. I was enrolled in the Independent Labour Party on the day of my birth and named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I went on my first demonstration at seven, and when I was eight I saw the police charge peaceful demonstrators – I never forgot.
In 1983 I became a Christian, after 49 years as an atheist. I’ve always prided myself on having a scientific frame of mind, but I realised that the idea that the universe started by accident goes against the second law of thermodynamics. It was quite scandalous – all my comrades were saying, “Are you taking the piss?”
My wife and I are supposedly separated. In fact, we are closer now than when we lived together. She has Parkinson’s and I spend a lot of time as her carer. On weekends, we go for walks in the countryside. My favourite is up to Top Withens, near Haworth – reputed to be the setting for Wuthering Heights. All you can hear is the skylarks singing, and if the weather’s fine you can see for miles. It’s very good for the spirit.
Guardian interview (April 27, 2013): Becky Barnicoat
“Hey, I know you. You like all kinds of stuff.”
— A musician I met in Houston, Texas
Indeed I do (the word he used began sh** rather than st***).
My name is Karl Dallas and I celebrated my 82nd birthday on January 29, 2013. I’ve been at it since I was a grammar schoolboy, listening to Midnight in Frankfurt on AFN via a short-wave radio while the Nazi V2s were landing in Tooting Broadway. I wrote my first article for Melody Maker in July, 1957, and I’m still doing it today, as you can see if you go to my archive.
I was so much younger then – At the National Media Museum Film Festival, June 12, 2011
Scan this code with your smartphone to go to The Karl Dallas Archive of Contemporary & Popular Music.
Go to The Karl Dallas Archive of Contemporary and Popular Music for some of my writings.
HEY SAY men can’t multitask, but since I was voted an honorary woman in Baghdad on International Women’s Day, 2003, that might explain why I’m into so much different stuff simultaneously all the time (in no particular order:
* Music
* Poetry
* Audio editing
* Video editing
* Politics
* Church
* Etc etc etc
Have I forgotten anything? Most probably.
That’s why I’ve got so many different websites and blogs, eg www.karldallas.com, houstonmedia.tv, not to mention reality2012.wordpress.com.
From now on, thanks to some helpful advice I’ve received from Pan Aveyard, I’ve decided to cut the crap and put everything through this site (because Pan recommended I move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, since the latter is the more powerful option, I’ll be running two versions of this blog in parallel, until I’ve got the measure of the WP.org capabilities; trust me to make complicated even a resolution to simplify stuff. Go to houstonmedia.tv/KarlDallasDay to see the other version.)
All of my various websites etc will still work, but this is where the main action will be.
Now, back to my real work, which is writing. I feel a new song coming on.
