Here we are then; 2014 moves into its seventh month and it
seems time for me to discuss this year’s cultural meanderings for the second
time. This juncture seems particularly appropriate as we’re now at the start of
football’s pre-season and the summer gigging frenzy (Ouseburn, Mouth of the
Tyne and Americana outdoor festivals, not to mention performances by Midlake,
British Sea Power, Death Shanties and The Mekons in the next few weeks). Not
only that, I’ve got my annual leave to look forward to and the chance to catch
up on some reading. I’ve still not seen any telly, bar the World Cup, so we’ll
stick to sounds and the printed word…
Books:
Obviously the most important book to have been published so
far this year for persons of my taste and demeanour is Irvine Welsh’s latest
novel, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins. It is his first since the
magnificent Skag Boys in 2012 and frankly it wasn’t worth waiting for.
Welsh doesn’t so much phone this one in as Instagram or, more damningly,
Snapchat it in to his readers. This is Welsh by numbers. Multiple narrators?
Check. Vicious attacks on consumerism
and consumption? Check. Grotesque vignettes? Check. Massive plot holes? Check.
Lucy Brennan, the primary narrator, is a thoroughly detestable narcissistic fitness
trainer in South Beach, Miami, who becomes a hero when she disarms a gunman.
This makes her a star on local news and inspires pudgy loser Lena Sorensen to
track Lucy down the following day.
When Lena turns out to be an artist who constructs distorted
human figures from animal bones, it seems we have a stalking narrative on our
hands, but it's personal trainer and all round body fascist Lucy who gradually
becomes obsessed with Lena, and specifically with carving the fat off her. She
drugs Lena and imprisons her in an empty apartment building, where Lena at last
loses weight. This intriguing concept is spoiled by inappropriate narrative choices.
For a start Lucy is boring as well as unsympathetic, though I suppose it's
reasonable to suppose that a South Beach fitness trainer would tediously count
calories, itemise her meals, and assess everyone by their physical appearance. For
light relief, Welsh introduces the less loathsome and more convincing shy small
town girl Lena as the secondary narrator. However her sheer ordinariness makes
her less than believable as the world-class artist we're told she is, much less
as the focus of a stranger's obsession.
Rather like the earlier Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs,
this novel is simply frustrating. It could have been a powerful and profound
book, with just a bit more thought. One reads it wishing vainly for Welsh to
humanise some of Lucy's reactions; to motivate some of Lena's decisions; to
allow any character the range of expression of Welsh's best creations. Most of
all, The
Sex Lives of Siamese Twins would have been a great read if it were
narrated not by Lucy and Lena but, as in the highly effective Florida based
novel Crime, by Irvine Welsh himself.
On the day Hibernian were relegated from the Scottish
Premier League I met Sandy McNair, the man who is Boswell to Welsh’s Doctor
Johnson and wrote a kind of biography of their formative years in Edinburgh,
entitled Carspotting. For the most part it is a readable and accessible
contextualisation of Welsh’s formative years with a low-rent Gonzo feeling to
it. However the endless accounts of bevvy sessions can get a little repetitive.
There’s a whirlwind of weeks, months and years squandered away mindlessly in
bars and clubs in the company of an assorted cast of geeks and weirdos, while
people get chibbed, nicked or die.
Carspotting could have been a true coming-of-age tale, but
there is absolutely no moment of epiphany, perhaps because any biography of a
famous author that’s written by a good friend will always be unreliable and
hagiographic. Welsh becomes famous and
rich almost incidentally, leading one to wonder just when he sat down and wrote
his books. Perhaps the mainly bolloxed Sandy just didn’t notice him putting in
the graft and honing his craft, which is really rather sad. In the end, after
the dizzying uppers and horrifying downers, the pervasive emotion of Carspotting
is not of a life well spent in reckless hedonism, but of one wasted in all
senses, leaving the reader and narrator with a sense of estranged
loneliness.
I came across Crap MPs by Bendor Grosvenor and
Geoffrey Hicks in a 10p bargain book bin at North Tyneside General Hospital
when I was in visiting my mam. This short, less-than-taxing little hard back
kept me entertained for the 25 minute journey home on the 309 when we were
kicked off the ward at 7pm. It is a book that ‘outs’ the forty worst Members of
Parliament in British political history. This book is not about shaking the
foundations of Parliament; instead it is a well-researched, intelligent and
amusing little pamphlet.
The format sees a list of MPs, presented in descending order
of crapness. Each MP gets a glossy photo, a brief textual explanation of why
they are considered to be crap and visual icons indicating such things as ‘Dodgy
Friends’, ‘Sex’, ‘Inappropriate Animal Behaviour’ and ‘Nutter’. The raison d’etre of this small book
comes from flitting through the entries and sardonically chuckling at the
arrogance, deceit and / or incompetence that leads to each individual’s
downfall. You get to read such gems as the MP who collected horses’ ears (cut
from the still living horses), the politician who simply couldn’t resist the
temptation of pick pocketing his fellow members and the cross eyed MP who had
difficulty catching the eye of the Speaker. The entry for George Galloway reads
‘George Galloway is very litigious. But we still think he is a crap MP.’
Certainly this was a case of two bob well spent.
In one of those strange twists of fate, I’ve found myself
playing Over 40s football for a team connected to the world famous Wallsend
Boys’ Club. Not only that, we won the double last season and had the trophy
presented to us by Alan Shearer on Football Focus; pretty good eh? This
is why I was delighted to take possession of a copy of The History of Wallsend Boys’
Club by my former colleague Margaret Scott, ostensibly co-written with
Vince Carrick (father of Michael) and Michael McGill. Several years in the
making, the book is already out of date as it does not mention the demolition
of the Boyza in 2013 after a storm took the roof clean off. The story as to why
it wasn’t insured is another matter entirely…
Anyway, the book is told with the help of articles from the
local press and the personal recollections from the public and founding
members. It goes back to the original Swan Hunter apprentice club, on a site in
Station Road, in 1904 and then on to the formation of Wallsend Boys’ Club on a
different site in Station Road, in 1938. From the 1960s onwards football,
rather than gymnastics or Am Dram, became a much bigger part of the Boys’
Club’s activities, producing a host of leading professional footballers such as
Shearer, Beardsley, Carrick, Bruce, Steve Watson and Lee Clark, with more than
50 ex-members going on to play first team professional football in the English
and Scottish football leagues. It’s an interesting slice of local history and,
if the launch hadn’t been botched in such a ham-fisted way, it could have been
a lucrative source of income for WBC, but typically the book dribbled out
apologetically late with no real fanfare. This is a shame, especially for
Margaret who did a great job making the text a lively, intriguing,
chronological read.
Music:
I don’t allow myself to go on www.discogs.com too often, as I’d spend my
life savings on cluttering the house up with 7” singles from the 77-81 period.
However, I finally relented when I accepted that I was never going to see the
copy of IRT by Snatch that I loaned to Don in September 1981 and so
bought what my Ben had intended to make as my 50th birthday
purchase. I even managed to move it up a
notch by replacing my 1978 UK Lightning re-release with a 1977 US original on
Bomp. Judy Nylon and Patti Palladin’s languid delivery of this proto-lo fi tale
of paranoid trips on the New York subway is as magnificent today as it was when
I first heard it. File alongside Piss Factory, Roadrunner, Shake Some Action,
Marquee Moon and Blank Generation in the annals of
vital US punk. The attitude and insouciance still knocks spots of the cartoon
UK version of 77, Wire and Spiral Scratch excepted…
The other 7” I bought was Trembling Bells with Bonnie “Prince”
Billy doing bassist Simon Shaw’s keyboard-driven stomper New Trip on the Old Wine,
which is both a radical departure and a thoroughly entertaining release. It
came out on Record Store Day 2014 and was one of the few products associated
with that debased feeding frenzy that didn’t seem to be a grotesque cash in. It’s
great to see Trembling Bells recording again and I have strong hopes that they’ll
produce a new album to tie in with their rake of live appearances across Europe
and North America. Mind I’m also looking forward to seeing Alex’s free jazz
project Death Shanties at the Bridge on 5th August for a slight
change of mood.
Two nights after the Death Shanties gig, we’re down to The
Cluny 2 to see The Mekons doing an acoustic night. This replaces the
Three Johns tour that had to be cancelled which John Hiatt was diagnosed with
throat cancer, from which he is making a good recovery. Last year Jon Langford
came to The Sage for Americana, played a blinding set and sold Laura a painting
for £200. This year, I dipped my toe into the pool of www.pledgemusic.com to sign up for an
autographed copy of his vinyl release Here Be Monsters, which was a richly
rewarding experience.
Since his earliest days in the Mekons, there's always been a
compulsory aura of ragged amateurism in Jon Langford's music, as the rough
textures and blunt corners reflected the hard lives and mean circumstances of
the people he most often wrote about. Here Be Monsters is, like many of
his albums before it, a snapshot of the world at the time it was made, and once
again, Langford and his crew have offered us a handful of well-rendered
sketches of young men waging war like it's a video game, older men making a
fortune from life and death conflicts, regular folks struggling to get by as
mere survival becomes a greater burden, and the despair or casual hopelessness
that sinks so many.
The messages on Here Be Monsters are painful and
timely; this is smart, dynamic indie rock, mature but passionate and
unpretentious, with Langford and his partners bringing a tough but artful sound
to the state of the world in 2014. Langford's ideological standpoint may not be
optimistic, but Here Be Monsters never strives to be despairing, simply honest,
and the music is rich and pleasurable while carrying messages more people need
to hear.
Back to Record Store Day and, with the shocking news that
they’ll be by-passing Newcastle on their autumn tour of Watusi and Mini,
the only product that The Wedding Present will be releasing this year is the
follow up to French and German language releases on RSD in 2012 and 2013
restectively, with the Welsh 4 Can EP. What does it sound like?
Basically, a barrel being scraped. There’s Meet Cutie from the last album Valentina
and 3 tracks that came as part of the supposed bonus package EP, released only
for those that stumped up £100 to help the Weddoes record that album. The sad
thing is that these 3 tracks are utterly unremarkable and frankly dull. It
makes this concept truly seem to have run its course. Faithful rehashes of less
than wonderful songs with different vocals isn’t the greatest of concepts and I’m
wondering if I’ll ever get to listen to this limited to 1,000 copies 10” clear
vinyl EP again. Certainly it seems to scream EBay at me every time I look at it…
However, there was one sublime jewel from Record Store Day;
legendary laze rockers Bardo Pond’s 2 track album Looking for Another Place
is my favourite release of the year. Side A is a cover of the minor Velvet’s
classic Ride Into The Sun, while Side B features Brian Eno’s solid gold
masterwork Here Come The Warm Jets in Bardo Pond’s inimitable feedback and
shimmering guitar post-rock style. I adore it. This is an inspired release as the
group produce brain-melting élan that builds to an apex of slow peaking ecstasy.
A timely reminder that Bardo Pond remain the kings of contemporary fuzz.
When it comes to live music, I should be reviewing 2 gigs,
but in the end I only made it to 1 of them. The local Election Day on 22nd May
was both taxing and tiring. Alongside doing a normal day’s work, I was at the
Polling Station from 7am and then again from 5pm until they closed. On the Friday,
I did a half day at work, and then went to the Civic Centre for the count. All
that out the way, Laura and I headed off to The Forth for pints and
tapas. Senselessly, I didn’t have my ticket for The Swans with me so, refreshed
and somnolent, I headed home for it. I was in the house for 7.30 and they were
due on at 8.45. I shut my eyes for 5 minutes and woke on the sofa at 11.45, had
a slash then went to bed and slept until 7.30, by which time it was almost
departure time for Scotland. Hence I missed Michael Gira et al.
Having seen The Swans 4 times previously (deafened in
successive nights at the Riverside and Leeds Poly on the Children of God tour in
October 87, charmed on the Love will Tear Us Apart tour at the
Riverside the next year and pompously lectured at in 92 when they played
Middlesbrough), I wasn’t heartbroken about this, but it was irritating and a
total waste of £20. Nice kip mind and I wouldn’t have missed the cider battered
black pudding at The Forth for anything…
We had some lovely bait before our last gig as well; in
Artisan at the Biscuit Factory, we celebrated Ben’s 19th with North
Shields sourced fish soup and sea trout and fennel with the poshest cheesy
chips in the world; French fries in Gruyere. Nice. Then indie mam and dad took
the bairn to The Cluny to see The Pastels. Last June I’d seen them in
Glasgow at the CCA on Sauciehall Street and they were awesome in the midst of a
large and partisan hometown crowd. In front of a much smaller gathering on
Tyneside, they were simply wonderful, but in a much more charming and
traditionally foppish way. While the set was mainly reliant on the brilliant Slow
Summits album, such unexpected joys as a tearjerking Different
Drum and an endearingly shambolic Speeding Motorcycle made this a
wholly glorious evening. Though the most memorable moment was Stephen
dedicating Baby Honey to Ben, which seemed to truly make his night and
that of his parents.
Music? It never lets you down… Roll on the summer gig season…
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