By The Landlord
”These little grey cells. It is up to them.” – Agatha Christie
“Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.” – Charles Dickens
“I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white. Whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.” – George R. R. Martin
A gloomy hue of blandness or many levels of subtle, beautiful nuance? A sky of dark, almost-black, dramatic bruises, of smoky restlessness, clouds like some billowing duvet, or like a ribbed body, a cloud-corrugated fence, or bright, almost-sunshine milkiness? So many greys in a single day …
The colour of conformity, school uniform, of bureaucracy? Of diplomacy, or sensitivity? Or of the stylish, the subtle, niche and chic? From bright shimmering silver and towering steel to dark bold slate, from warm, rich hues, to tepid, or cold, from the wild and stormy, to states of neutrality, from penumbras and other shadows, from age to maturity, grey is a colour that is perhaps among the least popular, but also frames, and attentively goes with everything. And it can also be oddly beautiful, subtle, poetic, lyrical on its own.
This time of year, if you live in the northern and western hemisphere, it's a colour you might be sick of, desperately seeking to escape for some winter sunshine, where bursts of bright blue and yellow can revive you. I quite agree, but for some a little grey shade and shelter might bring relief from the burning, relentless sun. Grey is a colour that expertly sets off contrasts.
And at the same time, life is neither black nor white, so why not also notice, embrace and enjoy the gradients and subtleties of one our most prevalent, naturally occurring colours? From pigeons to pavements, gorgeous Egyptian Mau, Burmese or Russian Blue cats, to Percheron, Andalusian, or the Lipizzaner dappled horses? Or manufactured matt and shiny steel, fashionably coloured or ageing human silvery hair, to sheep and wool, atmospheric, moody coils of smoke, to many names of paint - dove, slate, mountain, pewter, flint, pebble, dawn, snail trail, bark, granite, graphite, bone, frost or mist.
Grey goes with everything …
Potentially anything within that spectrum and shade can count, as long as that grey aspect is highlighted and described in lyrics and or title. And there can also be metaphors, from grey matter or cells to grey areas. Embrace the grey in all its contradictions, from Oscar Wilde’s creation - Dorian Gray and his anti-ageing pact with the devil, to the endless advert for ageing that is George Clooney.
From the Middle English grai or grei, and also the Old English grǣġ, related to the Dutch grauw and German grau, this mix of black and white has always been important in art to in modern-day architecture. In my area, you can't walk down a street without glancing at a bold splash of something like in-fashion slate #708090. But much earlier, embraced by the likes of Rembrandt, El Greco and Anthony Van Dyke, it has formed a vital, subtle layered hue, imbued not only with black and white, but also yellows, blues and browns.
El Greco: perhaps a self-portrait, perhaps an anonymous man, all surrounded by a rich, warm, mysterious grey
From past to future … “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” comes that striking opening line by American-Canadian author William Gibson, from his acclaimed 1984 science-fiction novel Neuromancer. Set in a near-future dystopia, ever more relevant in our ongoing era of AI, it follows Case, a computer hacker enlisted by some omnipotent, omniscient artificial intelligence, and is an expansion of an earlier story of 1981, Burning Chrome, which introduced the idea of cyberspace. But for all the issues that book brings, that opening line oddly enough might summon different images in readers’ minds, depending on your age. On my gradually greying temples, it's a fizzing static-electric grey that would appear on the push-button, clunky, non-digital TVs of my youth and early adulthood, but for any newer generation, only familiar with the internet-based high-definition flat-screen sets which we mostly now have, they might just picture this non-channel state as a uniform, flat-sea blue. How much more interesting, and image-summoning, is the messy, buzzy grey Gibson had in mind:
Static, but not stationary
America is also constantly on many minds right now. What will the big, orange-dyed, clumsy big-mouth bull in a China-, Gaza- or Ukraine-shop smash into next? Meanwhile what are the background men in grey suits planning, plotting or anticipating with him in the Oval Office? Could this actually be a job in which they keep in check?
David Bowie remarked in his 1970s US touring days, with generalising, mischievous nuance that: “Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It’s either 'rawk' or it’s not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.” Whether or not that is true, there’s a current relevance. It is the grey areas of tricky diplomacy from the likes of Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron or any others that are absolutely vital in steering a black-and-white attitude deal-bribe disaster monster from starting more wars and destroying the world. Right now we arguably really need those boring, diplomatic, grey men in suits to keep us from teetering over the edge.
While politicians strut and flutter around, feral pigeons, formerly domestic pigeons (Columba livia domestica), are mostly grey, often with a hint of phosphorous green on their necks, and are a familiar sight in many cities around the world. As a child, I never chased them, just found them fascinating and wanted to befriend them, perhaps with any food I could find. I still think it’s weird when I see young children endlessly and pointlessly chasing them in parks. They will always simply flap away and then come down to the ground again until the child grows bored or tired. When I see that, I can't help but worry that is pattern of repeating human stupidity that will continue into adulthood.
Pigeons are a grey matter of former human communication
But still, what’s even stranger is that this species of pigeon are the trained dogs of the bird world. With their fabulous homing and navigational talents, generation after generation, they were repeatedly bred to carry military and other messages, long before the telegraph, the telephone or the internet were invented, and even into the earlier part of the 20th century, including as vital carriers in the World Wars. That is why they still instinctively hang around us like stray creatures, hoping for crumbs, but also subconsciously awaiting instructions, half-belonging, but also oddly redundant, living in a grey, concrete, claw-in-circles limbo. It’s strangely rather sad.
But while grey can be the colour of the bland and melancholy, it can also have associations with catastrophe. In the age of AI, but in particular nanotechnology, there exists also grey goo theory, a dystopian scenario in which self-replicating nanobots collectively decide to consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves, resulting in a frightening efficient, malevolent but also monstrously indifferent process, creating a massive muddy detritus of human and other cellular organic grey sludge soup. Uh-oh! Very grey matters indeed.
But let’s not dwell too much on that! Not just yet anyway. From the bland to beautiful, grey is then a fascinating colour in many contexts. For final inspiration, let's leave you with a poem, simply titled Grey, by Edwin Morgan, the first Glasgow Poet Laureate. It’s about the strange beauty of this colour, a tribute to the unheralded, the necessary, of rain, of bland democracy, of the plain and pleasing, the “gorgeous dance or drizzle-dazzle”:
What is the nub of such a plain grey day?
Does it have one? Does it have to have one?
If small is beautiful, is grey, is plain?
Or rather do we sense withdrawal, veiling,
a patch, a membrane, an eyelid hating light?
Does weather have some old remit to mock
the love of movement, colour, contrast –
primitives, all of us, that wilt and die
without some gorgeous dance or drizzle-dazzle.
Sit still, and take the stillness into you.
Think, if you will, about the absences –
sun, moon, stars, rain, wind, fog and snow.
Think nothing then, sweep them all away.
Look at the grey sky, houses of lead,
roads neither dark nor light, cars
neither washed nor unwashed, people
there, and there, decent, featureless,
what an ordinariness of business
the world can show, as if some level lever
had kept down art and fear and difference and love
this while, this moment, this day
so grey, so plain, so pleasing in its way!
Let’s leave the window, and write.
No need to wait for a fine blue
to break through. We must live, make do.
So then, it's time to turn your own grey matter to this colour and all of its contexts in song. No doubt helping to bring all the nuance and subtle shades to this is this week's guest playlist picker, the excellent ajostu! Place your suggestions in comments below for deadline at 11pm UK time, for playlists published next week. Having a grey day? Now it has a new shade to it.
Solid granite …
Confused? Grey’s a beautiful area of ambiguity
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