WorldCon on Monday 2 - Islands, Folk and Filk, and Closing Ceremony

When I went to FantasyCon last year, I really enjoyed the live podcast by Breaking the Glass Slipper.
In Dublin, they were doing it again, on the subject of islands, and it was a wide ranging and fascinating discussion (available on their website).
One of the panel, Vida Cruz, said she came from the Philippines, which is made up of something like 7,000 islands, so she might possibly know something about the subject! Most of the panel thought of islands as places of exile or isolation, which she said was a very mainland way of looking at things! To her, water was a bridge, not a separator.
The discussion about using islands as places to do things you'd never get away with in a mainland setting was fascinating, too, for instance The Island of Dr Moreau, or Lord of the Flies. And now I have to track down Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein, which was apparently written as an answer to Lord of the Flies, with the characters co-operating rather than descending into barbarism.
Vida Cruz also talked about the history of the Philippines, and how the Spanish invaders destroyed the indigenous culture in which women, and men who presented as women, were leaders of tribes, and storytellers were important. This led on to the panel wondering why white men, who wrote most of the classic texts featuring islands, were afraid of them. Was it because islands could be seen as places of feminine power, ruled by the tides and the moon?
Other islands mentioned were Earthsea, the Narnian islands of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Odyssey, and Robinson Crusoe's island.

It was time for more music after that, from Irish folk singer Daoiri Farrell. He commented between songs that, when he left school he had become an apprentice electrician, and he had helped to install the lights that were presently blinding him on stage! The only song I already knew was The Galway Shawl, and he did a variety of comic and serious songs, including The Mickey Dam, about Irish labourers working on a dam in Scotland - which just goes to show that the UK has always needed workers from other countries.

Then there was a panel about the influence of Irish folk music on filk, which was quite good fun, and rapidly broadened out into all sorts of musical influences, including Swedish influence in the case of the works of Poul Anderson. They also suggested places to find filk online - I have already warned Bob, who runs our local acoustic session, that my new Five Year Mission is to seek out new filk, and boldly sing songs no-one else has ever heard of!
So, there's the Filkcast podcast, and Spotify, and Bandcamp, and Xenofilk, which all have interesting stuff.

And so to the Closing Ceremony. There weren't as many people around by now, so wristbands weren't necessary to get in - but even so it was a nice surprise to end up sitting next to a lady I'd sat next to on a previous evening! Eoin Colfer was Master of Ceremonies, and the Guests of Honour appeared on stage with drinks in their hands.
James Bacon appeared on stage wearing a suit printed to look like R2-D2, and presented George RR Martin and his wife Parris with a special award. Other members of the Con Staff also presented him with a picture of himself on stage for the Opening Ceremony (when he'd worn a kilt) in the colours of the Irish flag - and he went round to shake the hands of all of them who were on stage.
And then it was time for the hand over to the next WorldCon committee - which will be in Wellington, New Zealand, complete with a tourism film extolling the delights of the area, and messages from the chap who runs WETA and the Prime Minister of New Zealand! George RR Martin will be Toastmaster.

I picked up the last copy of the Con newsletter, The Salmon of Knowledge - which had become The Trout of Doubt for its last issue, and staggered off to the very last filk circle in the Second Stage room, as the Dead Dog party got started in Martin's Bar. I was so tired by this time that I could hardly keep my eyes open, let alone remember the words to any songs, but the duet of penny whistle and collapsible didgeridoo playing When I Had Maggie in the Wood was particularly memorable!

Sunday at WorldCon 4 - Art and Politics, Filk and Hugo Awards

I thought that the only chance I'd have to see Jim Fitzpatrick was the panel on Art and Politics at the Point however, for whatever reason, he wasn't there, leaving Dr Mary Talbot and Dominic Riemenschneider to chat to moderator Siobhan Murphy, with occasional interjections from Bryan Talbot (graphic novelist and Mary Talbot's husband) in the audience. It was a huge subject, and they only scratched the surface of it, talking about abstract art being encouraged at the expense of figurative art by the CIA, for instance. It was also noted that there was a bid for the 2024 WorldCon to be held in the Chinese city of Cheng Du, which undoubtedly had the backing of the Chinese government.

To fill the time before the Hugo Award Ceremony, I went back to the filk room at the Convention Centre for a quiet sit down. Bill and Brenda Sutton were performing again, and I managed to get a CD of their songs, And They Said it Wouldn't Last. They were not officially selling CDs, so they asked instead that anyone who was interested should give tokens of their friendship in the form of paper notes, and they would give tokens of their friendship in the form of CDs in return. After all, there was no-one in the dealers' room selling any filk CDs or music books. The member of the Con Staff in the room then took the mic to say it was absolutely fine.

Once again, I found somebody interesting to sit and talk to during the ceremony while queuing up. Her boyfriend had the job of live tweeting the ceremony, and had been looking up interesting facts about each winner - which he wasn't allowed to tell her ahead of time.
Artist Afua Richardson and Michael Scott were the masters of ceremony for the evening - and it took me a while to realise that it was that Michael Scott - the author whose books retelling Irish myths I had adored when I first read them, an embarrassingly long time ago.
The evening began with an award that was not a Hugo - the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer. This was won by Jeannette Ng, who caused a sensation when she came up to give her acceptance speech. The first words out of her mouth were "John W Campbell was a fucking fascist!" She went on to say that people who were now winning the award named after him were far from the white male authors he had nurtured at Astounding magazine, and far more diverse than he could ever have imagined. She went on "you've given me the microphone now," and talked about the protests going on in Hong Kong, the city of her birth.
The speech certainly caused a stir. John W Campbell's grandson had been on the same stage only two evenings before to collect a Retro Hugo for his grandfather's work as editor, and he was of the opinion that Jeannette Ng should have the award taken from her. However, the sponsors of the award announced publicly only a few days later that the award would be renamed the Astounding Award. Jeannette Ng was not the only person to have criticised the name of the award, but her speech was the final action that made the change happen. And she did it while wearing an awesome peacock hat.
Nothing could quite live up to that beginning.
I was very pleased to see Charles Vess go up twice to receive a Hugo - once for the Best Art Book, for his work on the Complete Illustrated Edition of the Books of Earthsea, which was a special award for Dublin WorldCon only, as each committee has the right to create a special award for that year only, and once for Best Artist.
It was also lovely to see Likhain (Mia Sereno) win the Hugo for Best Fan Artist - she gave part of her speech in Filipino, which the caption service couldn't cope with (there were problems with the captioning throughout the weekend).
With Best Fan Writer being Foz Meadows and Best Fancast being Our Opinions Are Correct, hosted by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, this was turning into a very female and very LGBTQ+ Awards Ceremony.
Even better, the Best Semiprozine Award went to Uncanny Magazine - one of the ladies who went up on stage to receive the award had her guide dog with her, and announced that she was the first blind person in the history of the Hugos to win an award!
Part way through the ceremony, Afua Richardson made a speech to honour Nichelle Nichols, original Star Trek's Lt. Uhura, who was a great inspiration to her, and who has recently announced that she is suffering from Alzheimer's. She also sang, incorporating the Star Trek theme in the song.
Later, it was Michael Scott's turn to say a few words, and while he spoke Afua played the flute (a woman of many talents!)
When it came to the Dramatic Presentations, a clip of each show was shown. I voted for Demons of the Punjab, one of the two Doctor Who episodes in the shortlist (with Rosa next on the ballot paper), but the Award went to The Good Place episode Janet(s) - a series I haven't seen (yet).
Best film went to Into the Spider-Verse, which looks like a lot of fun.
Best Series of books went to Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series. I've read the first one of those, and enjoyed it a lot (I want to live on that space ship!), and it's strange to think that, when I was having fun at LonCon in 2014, Becky Chambers was also there with the manuscript of her self-published novel, trying to find a publisher - and here she is now, a Hugo winner!
Monstress won Best Graphic Story - I'd seen some of Sana Takeda's wonderful artwork in the art show earlier.
And then there was another moment of unusual excitement, as the Best Related Work was announced to be AO3 - the Archive Of Our Own, a website for fan fiction. At this point the house lights came on, so that everyone in the audience who had written fan fiction and posted it on AO3 could stand up - because this was their Hugo!
I was pleased for Zen Cho, who won Best Novelette for If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again - I enjoyed that one.
I was absolutely delighted that The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal won Best Novel! She also gave a great speech about noticing the people who get airbrushed out of history. That was a great end to my evening!

WorldCon on Saturday 2 - Filk and Libraries

One of the fun things about dressing as the Jedi Librarian is that people come up to you and tell you cool things about the libraries they're involved in - which is how I got talking to a Canadian chap who told me about how he was involved in the IT set up for the libraries in his local school district, covering around 230 schools.
Later, I saw a fun t-shirt: "Do not meddle in the affairs of filkers, for they are not at all subtle, and people remember funny songs."

One of the events I was determined to get to was the 20 minute concert by TJ Burnside. Back in the distant past of the 1987 Brighton WorldCon, I had seen her on stage with the group she performed with, Technical Difficulties. The concert had been on at the same time as the Hugo Award Ceremony, which I hadn't been terribly interested in. I did buy the Technical Difficulties cassette tape, though, which I still have.
Technical Difficulties finally broke up when TJ moved to California - they were already living in three separate states, as one of their songs lamented, but California was even further away. Her husband is an actual rocket scientist, and she talked about a song he'd written where the third verse was just marked 'Classified'. She assumed it was a joke until he met up with another scientist and said "Now I can finally sing that third verse!" In the secure facility where no-one else could overhear them.
She also talked about a Con where he wandered into the filk room while people were singing one of the songs he wrote - he was formally dressed for a scientific conference at the time. One of the audience said to him: "This song was written by an actual rocket scientist, you know!" and he beamed and said "Yes - that would be me!"
She sang several songs, including Falling Down on New Jersey (to the tune of Old Maui) and one of the songs from that old cassette tape, which everyone joined in with - Lullaby for a Weary World.

I was going to go off and attend another panel, but I was getting too tired to move, so I stayed for Bill and Brenda Sutton's concert, which was enormous fun. I liked their Tea and Beer song, and Life is Better with Lots of Beer. There was a small child running round the room, and after the song about Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men ("Crivens!") they joked that they had their own Wee Free Man running round. The kid's father said that they were trying to make a deal with the fairies for him - "but it's all right. I've seen Labyrinth; I know how to get him back!"

After all that singing about beer, I headed for the bar, where another lady chatted to me about libraries, and her friend 'George' who had gone to college to find that she had been assigned to a male dorm. She obviously couldn't stay there, and the only room they could find for her at such short notice was actually in the library. So they asked her if she would like to be the Night Keeper of the Library, which was her idea of heaven!
And there was another lovely lady on a mobility scooter, who said she was 4th generation Bay Area. We shared a common love of Diane Duane and Good Omens.

WorldCon on Saturday - Astronomy, Art and the Captain's Chair

The first panel I went to on Saturday was How Astronomy Might Break Physics.
One point that came up was that the universe was not expanding at the same rate in all directions, which was not expected.
There was also a good discussion about what might loosely be termed 'colonialism in space'. It is the case that only rich countries can afford the telescopes that are now studying the universe, so they tend to only look at the areas of sky above those countries, and assume that what they are seeing is universally true. However, there are lots of other directions to look in, and things might be different there.
They also talked about the sorts of things that telescopes couldn't detect, and someone in the audience shouted out "Phlogiston!"
"But that's combustible, so we'd detect it," was the immediate answer.
They also talked about the Hubble Constant, which is used to measure the speed at which objects are moving away from the Earth by looking at the red shift. However, the value of the Hubble Constant can change, so the panel said that it was more of a Hubble Tension, trying to make different measurements agree - and this could be the start of a change of understanding of the physics involved.

I thought it unlikely in the extreme that I'd be able to get into the next panel I'd planned to go to - Artemis: Apollo's Big Sister, so I went off to the Point to have a proper look at the Art Show instead. (This is where my plans collided with reality and the result was a totally different day!). I'd hoped to be able to buy a Jim Fitzpatrick print, as he was signing that afternoon, but I didn't see any at the print shop area of the Art Show. It was wonderful to see the pictures he did bring along to exhibit up close, some of which were also in this year's Con Book. There was a lot of good work there, by featured artists Afua Richardson and Sana Takeda (who is the artist for the Monstress graphic novels). Maeve Clancy had done a whole comic strip about Syrian refugees trying to find safety, which was very powerful. I think my favourite work of the whole show, though, was the Lady Astronaut panel, done like a medieval manuscript in English and Hebrew, with part of the Jewish Sanctification of the Moon prayer. It was stunningly beautiful, and the minimum bid for the auction was E1,000.
On my way out of the Art Show, I met some people from Blackpool, where I spent all my childhood holidays. I was dressed as the Jedi Librarian for the day, and the tall young man dressed as the Flash was really pleased to see someone else in costume so he didn't feel so self-conscious.
Off to one side a filk session was going on, by Kerri-Ellen Kelly - one song she performed was Carmina Burana in Latin and Klingon!

The absolute high point of my Con came a bit later in the dealers' room. USS Cuchulain are an Irish Star Trek group, and they have built the central part of the bridge of the original Starship Enterprise - and they were letting anyone who wanted to either sit in the Captain's Chair or at the Helm. They even had jackets in various sizes in the Starfleet colours for people who wanted to be in uniform.
So I now have several photos (slightly blurry) where I'm sitting in the Captain's Chair of the Enterprise, dressed as a Jedi Librarian! It was so cool!

Thursday at WorldCon 2 - Space Telescopes, Filk and Fantastical Travel

As people mingled in the Odeon foyer, I overheard someone say "The dolphin communication was really good."

And I plunged straight back in (to a smaller screen) for A Million Miles Beyond Midnight, a presentation about the James Webb Space Telescope.
Bill Higgins is part of the Solar System Ambassador Program, and he started his talk by mentioning the history of astronomy in Ireland, with reference to the telescope named Leviathan which was built at Birr Castle in the 1840s by the third Earl of Rosse. This was exciting, because I've visited Birr Castle, on a family holiday when I was seventeen, and I remember seeing the base of the telescope in the grounds. In those days, it was all a lot more informal than it is now. While ambling around the gardens we got talking to an older lady with secateurs in her hands, who told us all about the great magnolia bush we were looking at. We realised later she must have been one of the family who lived in the Castle.
The talk was actually about an ambitious project for the future, though. The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the administrator who led NASA during the Apollo missions. It will consist of a 6.5m segmented mirror - and it might launch in 2021. All the components need rigorous testing, so the launch date keeps getting pushed back.
All the details are at www.JWST.nasa.gov
It's a collaborative effort with the Canadian Space Agency and European Space Agency, and the mirrors are made of beryllium with a gold coating - it's so big that it has to fold up to fit inside the nose cone of the launch rocket. It will be picking up frequencies into the infra red so it can "see" through dustclouds, and it should be able to look out far enough to see the light of the first stars in the universe, at 0.3 billion years from the Big Bang. It has to be kept very cold, about 40 degrees Kelvin, to work properly, and it will be deployed further out than any previous telescope, at the Legrange Point L2, a million and a half kilometres from Earth. That's well beyond the Moon, and this is why it's so important that it works first time - it's too far out to ever be serviced by astronauts. The Hubble telescope has had regular services, because it's in an orbit far closer to Earth.

After that I went back to the Convention Centre to queue for my wristband for the Opening Ceremony that evening. They had decided to issue wristbands to make it easier for people to get into the Auditorium without vast queues, and it did seem to work. It did mean that we were queuing outside though. There was some good natured discussion about this, and I remembered queuing for the check in at LonCon 3, where the queue was entertained by a filker with a ukulele. The song I remember was Who The Bloody Hell was Tauriel?, a critique of The Hobbit films. Then we had to explain to the volunteer marshalling the queue what filk was. "It was a typo," said someone behind me - which is true. Someone in the early days of Cons was typing the programme, and put 'filk' instead of 'folk', and the term stuck, for SF and Fantasy themed music.

I admired the DeLaurean parked at the entrance to the dealers' room as I made my first pass around, and then I headed to Liffey 2 for the Fantastical Travel Guide. The four panellists took on the personas of characters from their works to explain why anyone would like to visit their worlds - the festivals, scenery, historical buildings, sanitation - and the dangers to unwary travellers.
It soon became clear that three of the worlds had rich and varied cultures, one world was run by a god who was a little bemused by the antics of her humans, and one was really, really grim! For the sanitation question, for instance, he answered "We have swamps...." and for the question about food delicacies of the region, one of the other panellists said to him: "You're going to say stew, aren't you?" At which he suggested taking a rabbit that had been mutated by magical anomalies, adding lots of spices to the boiling pot - after which you throw away the rabbit and drink the spicy liquid!
For the question about interesting architecture, the god recommended seeing her city, which was built of a white substance which was definitely not bone....
The only panellist I was familiar with was Juliet McKenna, the others being a Polish lady called Karolina Fedyk (she was the god), a Frenchman called Lionel Davoust (the one with the grim world), Melissa Caruso and the moderator Marianna Leikomaa.

Merlin's Isle of Gramarye

There was a record and CD sale in the Buttermarket during Hay Festival, and I always go along to see if there's anything interesting and folky - so this title leapt out at me.

Merlin's Isle of Gramarye is a collection of Kipling's poems from Puck of Pook's Hill, put to traditional music. It's by Peter Bellamy, and apparently it's a second collection (so now I'll be looking out for the first one).
Peter Bellamy is joined on the CD by Dik Cadbury, Nic Jones, Dolly Collins, Peter Hall, Chris Birch and Anthea Bellamy, and the songs include Puck's Song, Eddi's Service (the one where the priest says the service to the animals who are the only congregation in his remote little church), St. Helena, The Song of the Red War Boat, and the Smugglers Song.
I think Kipling would probably have been pleased to hear his words set to English folk music, but I did wonder about some of the choices. For instance, shouldn't the Harp Song of the Dane Women be sung by, well, women?

Many years ago, I became aware of the filk songs of Leslie Fish, and others who then put out cassette tapes through Off Centaur. Leslie Fish also adapted the poems of Kipling, and they're now available on CD - as soon as I re-discovered them, I sent off for them, having lent my precious cassette to a folk singing friend who never returned it.
She does Harp Song of the Dane Women too, and the Song of the Red War Boat which, in her hands, has a more emphatic beat as if the singers really are rowing through a storm to rescue their master. She also does the Roman Centurion's Song (which always brings me to the point of tears), and the Female of the Species, and many more.
I have Our Fathers of Old, where she performs with Joe Bethancourt and Kristoph Klover, and Cold Iron, where she performs with Catherine Cook.

I've known the Leslie Fish tunes for a very long time, so I tend to like them better because of the long familiarity, but the Peter Bellamy songs are an interesting different take on the poems, and I'll be listening to them again.

Filk Singing

I first became aware of filk - science fiction folk music - in the 1980s, when I was a regular attendee at Star Trek Cons, and (one of the highlights of my Con going) Conspiracy 87, the WorldCon in Brighton. There I went to a filk concert - I think it was on at the same time as the Hugo Awards - and heard groups like Technical Difficulties perform. I bought cassette tapes, and song books like The Old Grey Wassail Test and A Wolfrider's Reflections, which I still have. I discovered Off Centaur Publications, and singers like Julia Ecklar and Leslie Fish, and songs celebrating the novels of Mercedes Lackey and CJ Cherryh.

Every week I go to an acoustic session, where I sing. Occasionally I'll sing one of Kipling's poems that Leslie Fish set to music, but I don't normally do anything more esoteric than that, simply because no-one else in the room will know anything about the stories that the songs are based on.
But I'm heading off to FantasyCon soon (this year it's at the Queen's Hotel in Chester), so I thought I'd dust down one of the old filk songs I know to celebrate. I chose Threes, which I learned off Julia Ecklar's tape Horse-Tamer's Daughter, which tells (more or less) a Mercedes Lackey short story.
It occurred to me that I last sang it in public at the Wrexham Folk Club in 1989, which seems like a very long time ago. I was working on an archaeological dig at Bersham Ironworks, and got some of the other girls there interested enough in the song that they said they'd be my backing group if I got up to sing it. On the night, they chickened out and left me up there at the mic on my own. I have a distinct memory of seeing them in the audience, where it was nice and dark and anonymous, singing along quietly.
This time, I've got a lot more confidence when I'm singing, and it actually went pretty well - it's a song that doesn't need any prior knowledge of the books to understand the story (an ambush that goes really badly for the bandits).
Maybe I'll try Pride of Chanur next.... :)

Music at WorldCon - and Queues

There was a whole filk "track" to the WorldCon programme that we managed to miss entirely, with concerts running from Thursday afternoon to Monday night - though we were entertained in the queue to register by a chap playing a ukelele and singing "Who the Bloody Hell was Tauriel?", a musical critique of the Hobbit films.
The queue, by the way, moved at a reasonably fast rate, and there were plenty of volunteers marshalling the queue, unlike certain ComicCons my Young Man could mention (four hours in the queue, and volunteers who didn't know what was going on and didn't have access to a radio). Here it went smoothly, and with good humour, and the people behind the desk (also volunteers) were working as fast as they could.
I was talking later to a lady who had spent five hours volunteering on that first day - she had gone off to a talk she wanted to see after a couple of hours, come back, seen that there was still a need for help, and pitched in again. She said that the organisers hadn't realised that everyone would come at once on the first day - but they rose to the occasion and got through it, despite only having one sharpie! More sharpies arrived on the second day, to write names on badges that hadn't been printed, mainly for the people who were only coming for the day.
Queues for events, and the escalators, were also well managed, with volunteers coming along and making sure that people knew how late the previous event was running (the play before the Astronomer Royal's talk over-ran, for instance) and making sure, too, that people with mobility problems were sorted out properly. I was very impressed that the lifts were reserved for mobility scooters and wheelchairs and people with related mobility problems, and there were spaces in each room for mobility scooters to park that were nice and central, rather than being corralled into one corner or at the back. There were quite a few mobility scooters zipping around, as well.
There were also talks about music, and other concerts happening around the convention - I hadn't known, for instance, that Iain Banks, who had been one of the Guests of Honour until his untimely death, was a musician as well as a novelists, although I was aware of his book Espedair Street, which is about rock musicians. There was also a pipe and tabor workshop for the medievalists - I thought about going to that one, but left it too late to pre-book (there were limited places available).

And then there was the Philharmonic Orchestra.
ExCel has a huge Auditorium - even with the thousands of people at the Con, no event managed to fill it completely - and it also has a large stage with three big screens above it. And this is something else impressive about this sort of Convention - the tech volunteers who were able to manage the sound desks and lights and man the cameras that fed into the screens live, and even provide film clips to go with the music at the concert.
I think I'm right in saying there were something like 86 musicians on the stage, drawn from the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonia. They had an open rehearsal in the afternoon, and the concert on the Friday evening.
They alternated between well-known film, TV and game music and classical pieces, and it really was a superb evening. The standing ovation they got at the end was thoroughly well deserved. For instance, they ended the first half with Mars and Jupiter from Holst's Planet Suite, which are so well known, and they made the music exciting to listen to. The Song to the Moon, from Dvorak's Rusalka, was accompanied by film footage from the Apollo 11 mission that I'd never seen before.
In the second half there was a tribute to Iain Banks by a composer who was a friend of his, Gary Lloyd, who wrote The Bridge Redux, named for the Forth Bridge and Iain Banks' novel The Bridge - this finished with a crescendo that the audience were invited to join in with, as loud as we could!
The Hugo ceremony also featured music, from violin and guitar, as the names of all the SF novelists and creators and well-known fans who had died in the previous year were projected onto the big screen overhead. They even managed to include Robin Williams. I didn't manage to catch the name of the piece they played, but it was beautiful.
And there was dancing - period jazz and swing from the Brideshead Ballroom Stompers after the Retro-Hugo Awards, which were given for SF from 1939, and a Regency ball the following afternoon (I saw several beautiful Regency dresses and a few gentlemen in period costume around the halls).
So there really was something for everyone!

"Roll up, roll up, see the Sighthill circle..."

I happened to see an article in the latest Big Issue magazine called Save the Stone Circle, which talks about the Sighthill Stone Circle in Glasgow. It's not an ancient stone circle - it was built in 1979 - but it was the first astronomically aligned stone circle to be built in Britain for 3,000 years. The idea came from a competition for local primary schools, when a little girl suggested it.
Now Glasgow City Council want to knock it down, to make room for new development.

The story reminded me that I had heard the name Sighthill Stone Circle before.
Many years ago, when I was involved in Star Trek fandom, and went to lots of conventions, there was a style of singing called filk. This started off as a mis-spelling of "folk" music, and stuck, and it is SF inspired music. There are songs about Star Trek, and conventions, and vampire kittens, and various book series, either set to the tunes of genuine folk songs or to original music - and there are two which include references to the building of the stone circle. I looked them up in my copy of The Old Grey Wassail Test, a song book I bought at World Con 87. The first one is called Space and Scotland, and it was written by Duncan Lunan, to the tune "Fife's got everything", in 1982.

The relevant verse goes:
"The Sighthill megalith, the newest in the country,
We're waiting for midsummer just tae check on oor array.
It was done by calculation, and broadcast to the nation -
If it doesnae mark the sunrise, you'll find us in B.A.!"

The note at the end of the song says:
"This is the 'company song' of the Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics, Ltd. (ASTRA). The first verse relates to the Glasgow Parks Dept. Astronomy Project, which built the first astronomically aligned megalith in Britain for three thousand years, but without an opportunity to check the alignments by observation beforehand."

It turns out that Duncan Lunan was the manager of the project.

The second song, also in The Old Grey Wassail Test, is called Mythcon XV, and is sung to the tune of The Rawtenstall Annual Fair (ta-ra-ra), and was written by Duncan Lunan and Leigh Ann Hussey.

Mostly, it describes what was going on at the convention, but the last verse goes:

"Roll up, roll up, see the Sighthill circle,
See the modern Stonehenge put together bit by bit;
In came the fans, and they gave out a sigh,
When the bowed stone snapped and then was left behind to die.
And there was Braithwaite in a quarry, Gavin Roberts in a lorry,
And Lunan guiding sunstones through the air, ta ra ra...
Solstice, standstills, and sunrise in a notch,
The Navy flew the stones and all the schoolkids came to watch;
If the nets had given way then you'd have seen rocks upon the Scotch!
At the Mythcon annual tear, ta ra ra...."

Mythcon was actually held in Oakland California, but Duncan Lunan was there talking about the building of the Sighthill stone circle. He wrote: "At the Spring Equinox of 1979 the circle was completed by a Sea-King helicopter from the HMS Gannett which flew in the last seven stones, though not (as I explained in my talk at Mythcon) without some misgivings about the strength of the nets."

"Braithwaite in a quarry" refers to the astronomer who helped to choose the stones and work out their positioning, and he was the father of Stuart Braithwaite, member of Mogwai, who wrote the article in the Big Issue. "...the idea you have to knock down absolutely everything to rebuild is a sad philosophy," he says.

There will be a benefit concert for Save Sighthill Stone Circle at Platform in Glasgow on July 27th from 4.30pm.