But signs mounted rapidly yesterday that a deal was in the offing, as Mr Perry flew to Dayton, swiftly followed by the US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, who cut short a visit to Japan.Anthony Lake, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, was reporting to the President last night after secretly visiting Dayton on Thursday. "The hope is to be able to announce initials on an agreement Monday or Sunday night," said a senior US official travelling to Dayton with the US Defense Secretary, William Perry.A settlement, if concluded, would end a war in which as many as 200,000 people have been slaughtered and up to 3 million displaced from their homes. The conflict, which erupted in June 1991, has produced such savagery against civilians that the United Nations felt obliged to establish a war crimes tribunal that has so far indicted 52 people, including several Serb and Croat leaders.The Ohio talks were placed under a news blackout from the start on 1 November as a way of concentrating the minds of delegates on securing an agreement. TONY BARBER Europe Editor Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia's Muslim-led government are expected to announce a historic peace settlement for former Yugoslavia this weekend, ending Europe's bloodiest conflict in 50 years.Senior US officials attending peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, said the three Balkan delegations had narrowed their differences on most issues, and were within reach of a final agreement.
The EMI recording team - and the Birmingham Symphony Hall acoustic - must take part of the credit; but Rattle does seem to have found a convincing tonal and textural compromise between the old and the new - clarity and warmth, lightness of touch and depth of tone Is this the way forward? It's an attractive prospect.. The slow movement, with its solo cello and muted trumpets and drums, is remarkable both as sound and as musical drama - expression and formal understanding finely balanced. The minuets in all three symphonies are sympathetically paced, and the remarkable adagio first movement of No 22 (a kind of parody chorale prelude with two fruity cor anglais in place of the usual oboes) comes over particularly well - dignified, poised, but with just a hint of Haydnish humour.It all sounds very beautiful. The bass, however, continues to deliver a hefty thump - my normally capable speakers are reduced by the album to worrying distortion.So how did a nice East End boy become so interested in the arcana of mystical bollocks? "I was always looking for something else just around the corner," says Wobble, "and I found booze, and then cocaine, and it was like, 'wow, this is it'. The results are interesting, but the two funky New York tracks are largely subsumed within the polyglot Bladerunner mix of the other tunes, where oriental textures are used to decorate the big, bass-heavy riffs familiar from his previous work. Looking more like a scaffolder than a musician or a guru, he presents you with a beguiling mix of the sublime, the gorblimey, and the ridiculous - rather like the sleeve for his new CD Heaven and Earth, which sets pictures of sheds alongside a shot of Wobble as a crucified scarecrow in a farmer's field.In an attempt to break the cycle of slavish dependence, I've come along to his studio, the Greenhouse off the City Road, to beard him in his lair.
The promised re-mixing appears to have been postponed, and instead I watch while the first home-demo version of Wobble's new "Requiem" is plugged into the brain of the studio's computer. We talk downstairs in the rest and recreation room, with the ghosts of pop stars past hovering around the pool table and fruit machine. "The title always seems to come last," he says, "but there's that whole ethos of the meeting of the physical and the spiritual worlds, like in martial arts, or in the Lotus posture. The basis is very, very simple, and it pertains to the world of the spirit as well, so, Heaven and Earth..."In fact, the album mixes tracks recorded at the Greenhouse with the results of an excursion to New York, with cult producer Bill Laswell at the controls, in which Wobble's mighty bass is earthed to the contributions of Pharoah Sanders on sax, Bernie Worrell on keyboards and Nicky Skopelitis on guitar, plus sundry DJs and percussionists. Wobble is such a nice bloke that you get sucked in, and instead of asking about Johnny Rotten, PiL and the years of drugs and degradation, you end up participating in a seminar about metempsychosis.
When I transcribe the tape later, Wobble is babbling on about all kinds of mystical stuff while I can be heard agreeing sagely like a disciple, before the conversation suddenly veers off into football as he recites from memory the line-up of the great Leeds United side of the Seventies. I'd been warned about this. "Well," says Wobble, "there's deserts and there's deserts..." and he does his excited "yeh, yeh, yey, yey" laugh, like Muttley in Wacky Races. "I actually like bleak and barren landscapes," Jah Wobble says, "because only in those sort of places can you find God, and it's like the wilderness, you know?" He speaks with a heavy East End accent and I somehow hear "wilderness" as "Willesden". In by-play between scenes, the stage-hands kept being shooed off by Le Mar, so they exacted revenge by scrawling the graffiti "Angie is not funny" on a backdrop Oh yes she is.n To 25 Nov Booking: 0181-534 0310. This was typical of a show that managed to be political without being preachy. In a courtroom sketch, Martin made an uncannily plausible feckless father, grabbing his crotch defensively as a judge urged him to take more responsibility for his children. When "he" was ordered to swap his BMW for a Lada in order to pay maintenance, he broke down in tears.
In an uproarious send-up of Stars in their Eyes, Johnson captured precisely the Thunderbirds walk and constipation-afflicted face of Tina Turner. In performing sketches about everything from Aswad to absentee fathers, the five-strong team of Angie Le Mar, Sharon Campbell, Adele Johnson, Jo Martin and Yvette Rochester Duncan were greeted throughout with whoops of delight by a highly vociferous audience. One woman in the stalls got so carried away she shouted out, "You're the man", when Le Mar, the show's quite evidently female star and writer, walked on stage after the interval. There is a great tradition of black revue at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East; Philip Hedley, the theatre's artistic director, calls it his "Alan Ayckbourn", a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
