WHAT WOULD JOHNNY DO?
HERE’S A JOHNNY, THERE’S A JOHNNY, EVERYWHERE’S A JOHNNY JOHNNY
BY DAVID EAGLE
My finger is poised over the enter key, the press of which will complete my purchase, and instruct the people at Amazon to deliver me a phone charger. But then, something happens. I hear a voice in my head. It’s my conscience, which has recently undergone something of a surreal makeover. Usually, the voice in my head always sounded, I think, like me. But a few days ago it began morphing into the voice of Johnny Longstaff.
I suppose it’s little wonder that Johnny’s voice has crept into my consciousness and become the sound of my inner monologue. After all, for the last few months, Johnny has pervaded my days and nights, as I trawl through the hours of recordings made by the Imperial War Museum in the 80s, which contain Johnny’s life story, told by the man himself. A man who, despite having died eighteen years ago, is still nevertheless very much alive and kicking up a storm in my brain, berating me for my various quotidian choices, such as buying a phone charger from Amazon, a decision I am making chiefly because it will save me 2 quid.
Johnny was a great man of ethics, who took bold action to defend causes that he felt were implicitly right. This led him to fight fascism at Cable Street and in the gruelling Spanish Civil War, despite it being illegal and involving incredible personal sacrifice. Johnny’s story has made such an impact on me. Obviously I am a relatively privileged middle-class man who has had to make nothing akin to the kind of major moral choices that Johnny made. I think that my “liberal guilt” has been dramatically heightened by the persistent presence of Johnny in my life over the last few months, as I’ve ploughed through his hours of oral recollections, in order to compile the audio for this show.
There are so many examples of Johnny’s unwavering ethical boldness, and I have frequently found myself musing, in all manner of day-to-day situations, “what would Johnny do?” Obviously I have no actual thoughts of Johnny’s on the subject of purchasing mobile phone chargers from tax evading global corporations- he makes absolutely no reference to the subject over the six hours of his recorded life story, which is only to be expected, given that the recordings were made in the eighties.
So, back at my laptop, I try to justify my purchasing decision to myself with the excuse that loads of other people do it and that the ethics of it are too complicated to take a hard and fast line. Normally I’d let myself off with such reasoning, but now that the internal voice has changed to that of an imperious Johnny, it’s much less easy to shrug off my feeling of unease. I vacillate, my hand hovering over the enter key, while I consider what to do. A few seconds pass, I give a defeated shrug, hit the back button on my browser (Google Chrome, incidentally, because obviously Google pose no ethical quandaries). Instead I decide to buy the phone charger from Currys. I have no idea what Currys stand for and whether I should feel uneasy about giving them my money, but the voice of Johnny is quietened and so I make the purchase.
It has been a tremendous privilege and honour to have gotten to know Johnny so well over the last few months. He was an incredible person. But, as well as an honour and a privilege, it has also driven me completely mad, as the last few paragraphs have illustrated. Hopefully, when you listen to Johnny’s words in this production, you will easily be able to follow along, and his recollections will seem completely congruent and clear. Johnny’s storytelling is highly enthralling and captivating, but he does have a tendency on these recordings to flit from subject to subject. This can be rather frustrating when you’re trying to simply get a sound bite that sums up the story to neatly work with some musical accompaniment. Often, I will be listening to Johnny telling a story, and I’ll be making edits along the way, believing that I am on the cusp of the perfect summation of the tale, only for Johnny to suddenly wildly tangent onto a completely different subject. I then have to spend ages feverishly scrolling through reams of audio, searching for the moment that he finally returns to the original story. Still, in fairness to Johnny, he didn’t expect that his recollections would be forming the basis of an audio/visual performance of his life, and I’m sure that, had he known this, he would have timed his tales to work perfectly over a 4/4 musical backdrop; he seems like that kind of man.
There are also times during his stories where he gets people’s names mixed up, and suddenly starts calling someone by the wrong name, meaning that I have to go back and splice out the real name from another part of the audio. I hope that these various reparations are not too noticeable, although there are a couple of necessary, clunky emergency edits during the show, which I hope won’t sound too arresting and obvious.
I apologise to my housemate, who has also had to listen to the sound of Johnny’s voice on loop, seeping through the walls, and for the many times he’s heard me shouting, “bloody hell, Johnny,” whenever he goes off on one of his tangents or says the wrong person’s name in the middle of a story.
But again, I must stress what a tremendous honour it’s been to get so intimately acquainted with Johnny. We never met him, he died in 2000, when we were just fifteen; but after months of being immersed in his voice, stories and principles, I nevertheless feel a great affinity and comradeship with him.
This same sentiment is shared by Sean, who has spent even longer with Johnny’s voice than I have, sculpting Johnny’s words and stories into songs. So familiar are we with his oral history recordings, Sean and I have sort of inadvertently developed a strange Johnny Longstaff based parlance. There are lines of Johnny’s speech that have become catchphrases. There are also Johnny Longstaff related in-jokes, and we will often find ourselves both simultaneously responding to something that someone has said by reciting the same Johnny Longstaff catchphrase, in Johnny’s voice, much to the confusion of everyone else present. As I say, it’s been an honour, but one that has definitely driven us completely mad.
Thanks for that Johnny.
Here at the editorial desk of Advance we like to adhere to our motto:
“Terminological inexactitudes which circumnavigate the suburbs of veracity”
However, it appears that our colleagues at The North Somerset Times went that extra mile on May 4th 2016 when they managed to print the wrong photo of the wrong people at the wrong grave and, to cap it all, Sean Cooney of The Young’uns seemed to become one James Bond.
We heartily applaud their adherence to a new form of truth. Their article bravely reads:
"Graveyards tend to be a sombre place, however not so much in Portbury on Thursday afternoon. Folk music band The Young’uns visited St Mary’s Church and sangs songs at the grave of Johnny Longstaff. The North East band were struck by Johnny’s story, who used to live in Stockton-on-Tees and moved to North Somerset.
Singer Sean Connery said: “We wanted to sing at the grave of one of our heroes – the extraordinary Teessider Johnny Longstaff who fought prejudice and inequality all his life.”
Longstaff walked to London to find work at the age of 15 in the 1934 Hunger March and was at the Battle of Cable Street when Black Shirts were prevented from marching through the East End of London by anti-fascists.
Lying about his age he was smuggled out to fight for democracy with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. He also served in World War Two.’