So,
we come to my final cultural blog of 2020, other than the end of year Top of the Pops style lists of
favourites that will be the last blog of the year, uploaded during the week
beginning 28th December 2020. As ever, in this missive from the
quiet year, there are a load of books to discuss, but also a few records. No
gigs sadly. In fact, the only ticket I’ve got is for Teenage Fanclub in Leeds
at Easter. Anyway, here goes….
Music:
Record Store Day was a bizarre affair in 2020; rather than a single instance of vinyl overdose, it was spread out across
3 Saturdays in Autumn. Also, rather than jam packed shops full of prog rock and
indie obsessives belching COVID fumes, almost all the business was done
on-line. Personally, I do my distant shopping from the morally impeccable and
unimpeachable Monorail Records, which
is why I got hold of a 7” by The Pastels. Culled from a 1997 BBC John Peel
session, the main track, Advice for the
Graduate, is a Silver Jews cover. As could be predicted, it’s an
intelligent slice of well-constructed baroque pop. Enjoyable, if not euphoric,
my preference is for the mildly experimental Ship to Shore on the reverse. A loose limbed, semi improvised
meandering piece that is right up my street; the sort of treasure from the
vaults it’s a delight to buyAlso
from Monorail in the Record Store Day offer was Dinosaur Jr’s
impressive, deafening live album, Swedish
Fist. Recorded in Stockholm in August 1993, it features one of the final
gigs played by the incarnation of the band that was denuded of Lou Barlow and
Murph. I’m rather cynical about those who replaced the defining, founding
members of the iconic band, though any such reservations are swept aside by a
performance of stellar, ear-bleeding proportions. Culled from across the band’s
whole career, the set that makes up Swedish
Fist starts off loud, gets deafening around Feel the Pain and doesn’t let up. Considering the band often sucked
on stage, this is a quality release, with Freak
Scene getting a respectful outing and Sludgefeast
blowing the covers off your speakers. A niche, curio release, but one I’m
delighted to have bought; even if it cost the thick end of £30.
Ever
heard of The Prats? A gaggle of Edinburgh school kids who Fast Product gave space to on Earcom
1. Back in 1979, they were a vital and unsettling presence in the post punk
world. Their most famous track is probably 1980’s Disco Pope, though I find it deeply annoying and probably the worst
thing they ever did. Early items such as Inverness
and Nazi Aeroplane are indicative of
their original DIY ethos and are here in all their glory. However, even better,
are the late era tracks such as General
Davis that showed the band, who dispersed in mid-1981, were expanding
towards a more Fire Engines or APB inspired nervous funk groove. It’s a shame
they called it a day, but some bands don’t see their art as a career or a cash
cow.
At
the other end of the spectrum, David Gedge does a fantastic job of maximising
earnings from The Wedding Present; rereleases, rerecordings and remixes
aplenty, not to mention touring and streaming sets of the band’s greatest
moments for top dollar to a large body of gullible, ageing indie kids with more
disposable income than sense. He was even knocking out Christmas jumpers with Bizarro and Seamonsters designs recently. Fair play to the lad; he’s just
turned 60 so I reckon he needs a decent pension pot in these challenging times.
One glorious find that appeared on the Scopitones website a bit back was a
slack handful of 1992’s Hit Parade 7”
singles, allegedly found in someone’s basement. Gedge isn’t thick; he was
punting these 28-year-old records at a tenner a pop. Personally, I didn’t buy
all the releases at the time, though I did subsequently obtain the album Hit Parade Volume 1 with the first 6
singles on it. Typically, the majority of the items on sale were from the first
6 months, though I did manage to source a copy of October’s Sticky; not one of the outstanding
numbers in the series, but a good, solid, thudding rocker, accompanied by the
worst choice of song to cover on the B-side, in the shape of Bow Wow Wow’s
disposable Go Wild in the Country.
Always nice to have another Weddoes single about the place though.
One
band I’ve only ever had a couple of 12” singles by are Bauhaus. Their
reputation was never the best and the passage of time hasn’t been kind to them
among the chattering classes, but they inspired a devoted following and always
seemed to be an intriguing lot. Seeing their 5 CD collected box set available
for a tenner on line, I made an impulse purchase and I’m very glad I did.
Containing their first four studio albums, In
The Flat Field, Mask, The Sky’s Gone Out and Burning from The Inside, as well as another disc of all their
singles and b-sides, it veers from banal pomposity to genuinely impressive
indie rock noir. You could whittle down the four albums into a brace of
absolute banger CDs, while the singles collection is great on its own. Almost
uniquely, the original Bauhaus consisted of the same 4 members (Murphy, Ash and
the Haskins brothers) throughout their career, which probably explains the
almost telepathic tightness to their music, such as you’d find in the otherwise
utterly different British Sea Power and Fugazi. I’m happy to report Spy in the Cab, Kick in the Eye, The Passion
of Lovers and Burning from the Inside
sound as vital, vast and visceral as they did 40 years ago.
Books:
Let’s
look at fiction first eh? I loved Hubert Selby Jr’s dystopian, revenge fantasy The Room, but never read the infinitely
more famous Last Exit to Brooklyn.
Having seen the jaw-dropping, slacker classic film Requiem for a Dream, I decided to read the book. Goodness, it’s
dull and uninspiring, or perhaps Selby’s deathly, as opposed to deathless,
mundane prose is supposed to reflect the realities of a life lived in slow
motion anomie by Brooklyn druggies in the 1970s. Despite only weighing in at
220 pages, this is a challenging read and I was almost pleased when the
biblical downpour at Haltwhistle against Hexham turned the book into literal
pulp fiction. Free to a good home….
I’m
still learning about on line shopping. Having bought the cheapest version
available of Roddy Doyle’s new publication Love,
I was dismayed to find I’d actually paid for a click and collect paperback that
isn’t out until June 2021. Instead of cancelling and trying to get the
hardback, I opted to wait and instead, got myself a copy of a Doyle book I
didn’t even know existed. Charlie Savage
is the eponymous story of a middle aged, lower middle class nice fella from Da
Nort Soide, told in episodic, undated diary form. Charlie is a good lad and
could easily be one of the heads enjoying a pair of pints in similar,
journalistic, micro fiction elsewhere in Doyle’s oeuvre. This is real life, so
not much happens as he interacts with the family, the pets, his pal (who
identifies as a woman and then takes up with Charlie’s high school squeeze) and
football. It’s a glorious slice of ordinary life, written in the DNS argot that
seems both gloriously nostalgic and poignantly contemporary.
The
big fiction release of the autumn for me was David Keenan’s Xstabeth, the arrival of which which was
heralded by the brief on-line only The
Towers The Fields The Transmitters.
I loved both This Is Memorial
Device and For The Good Times,
which encompassed the post punk music scene in Airdrie and Republican
volunteers in the Ardoyne respectively, because they were so different. Xstabeth continues this disparate theme,
which Keenan claims is because his writing is both automatic and beyond his
control. The Towers The Fields The
Transmitters is a prequel; set in St Andrews, telling the story of the life
and death of a paranoid engineer called David Keenan, who experiences a
breakdown when he arrives to audit a military air base, which is presumably RAF
Leuchars. Obsessed by his estranged daughter, who he believes is walking the
streets at night, he starts to look to art and ritual in order to redeem this
new reality, even as time itself appears out of joint, as old WWII fighters
appear in the skies and his twin brother, his double or personal daemon, wreaks
havoc in his name.
The Towers The Fields
The Transmitters
is best regarded as magic realist novella that channels the surreal paranoia of
Kafka, Burroughs and Philp K. Dick, while planting intertextual foundation and
grave stones for Xstabeth which
reveals itself as the next stage in Keenan's radical prose practise. In the way
he musically developed from the jolly, jangly indiepop of 18 Wheeler to the
bleak maelstrom of sound he created with Tight Meat Duo, Keenan is heading
deeper and darker underground with every Christmas card he writes.
Xstabeth begins in St
Petersburg, Russia, where the narrator Aneliya is torn between the love of her
father and her father's best friend. Her father dreams of becoming a great
musician but suffers with a naivete that means he will never be taken
seriously. Her father's best friend has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs and amoral
philosophy. When an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives, Aneliya
and her father's world is transformed. Moving from Russia to St Andrews,
Scotland, Xstabeth tackles the
metaphysics of golf, the mindset of classic Russian novels and the power of art
and music to re-wire reality. Xstabeth
is a haunting, visionary novel, with ghosts hovering over every page.
My
other fiction choices were a pair of independent collections of short stories
by outsider writers I’ve had the pleasure of publishing in Glove; both of these books need to be read. PJ Smith, who uses the comically
ordinary nom de plume of Roy, is a recovering addict who writes brilliant,
life-affirming stories of morality, redemption and revenge, set in the grimy
terraces and echoing council estates of Liverpool’s north side. His collection Algorithim Party tells tales of
justifiable violence and casual criminality, with the spectres of grotesque, Bud, bugle and Hugo Boss Scouse golem Brian Scanlon and a pervasive, invasive
soundtrack of late 80s pompous pop, comprised of Dignity and the Whole of the
Moon, hovering above everyday life and acting as harbingers of doom. It’s a
powerful and brilliant read; the sort of thing Kevin Sampson could have written
if hadn’t gone to a fee-paying school.
Going
back to his childhood in rural Nottinghamshire, Jim Gibson, who runs Hi-Viz
Press and has edited such magnificent journals as Low Life and Hand Job,
has relaunched himself into the world of publishing with the gloriously scary
collection, The Hidden Valley. This
is the stuff of nightmares; a weird kid who could have stepped straight out of Winter by The Fall, tells tales of
solitary play, with axe murderers and The Devil popping up to disrupt his
dysfunctional idyll in a kind of Cider
with Loonies way. This is Keith Waterhouse’s There is a Happy Land mixed with Blue Remembered Hills. A genuinely creepy and effecting read that I
enjoyed enormously.
And
now to the non-fiction. I never used to like Owen Jones, being deeply
suspicious of his familial ties with the Leninist cult that was Militant. Thankfully, he has distanced
himself from the dirigistic Trotskyiste Assemblies of Taaffe cult and
demonstrated he is capable of independent political thought. This Land, his forensic, disinterested
dissection of the Corbyn Years, puts forward a cogent argument as to why this
brave project was doomed to fail after the high water mark of the 2017 general
election.
Having
turned down a sinecure with the newly elected Labour leader, Jones looks at
events in detail and from a distance. He is remarkably generous about Ed
Milliband, who previously I’d only credited with being less of a shithouse than
his odious brother, before explaining the almost unreal 2015 leadership
election campaign that saw Corbyn swept home on a tidal wave of support from a
huge increase in membership. What
becomes clear from the very start is that the number one hero of this book is
John McDonnell, who is principled, articulate, moral and courageous; he should have
been leader. Corbyn, as we all know, was a terrible fit. He hated
confrontation, went missing for days on end, switched his phone off and lacked
interest in anything that wasn’t related to overseas development. He was
brilliant when compared to the intransigent, flaky, arrogant ideologue Seaumas
Milne though. However, the point must be made that devious right wing MPs were
the ones most keen on destroying JC’s leadership.
Despite
the worst efforts of the right wing, the absolute incompetence of Theresa May
and her squad meant that the 2017 election was something of an unexpected
fillip for Labour. Sadly, the crucial error was Corbyn opting not to stand
aside for a more dynamic leader, with McDonnell as the obvious dauphin, which
led to the absolute disaster of 2019, whereby the devious inaction of central
office and the rank amateurism of Team Corbyn, failed to get any message
across, failed to rebuff downright lies peddled as the truth by a vicious media
and above all, failed the very people who needed the Labour Party to act on
their behalf. Hence, we are where we are.
I’m
still a Socialist. I’m still in the Labour Party. And I’m proud to say I voted
for and support Keir Starmer. If that puts me up against the headbangers and
Johnny Come Latelys in Maomentum or on social media who’ve never delivered a
leaflet in their lives, so be it. I’m also dead against the right wing Blairite
hacks in the PLP and won’t forgive Tom Watson for his treachery until long
after he’s dead. If you want to know why, read This Land. I’ll lend you my copy when I get it back from Stoke
Dave.
Karl
Whitney’s Hit Factories is a
pumped-up, adrenaline and adventure-laced upgrade on Paul Hanley’s Mancunian
musical hagiography, Leave the Capital.
Instead of just concentrating on one city, Dublin born Karl (who I’ve had the
pleasure of meeting in the company of Harry Pearson) travels around England to
major cities with a stake in musical history, as well as taking in Glasgow and
Belfast. This whistle-stop tour of major cities and the bands who grew up there
is a glorious read. My favourite chapter, because of my musical tastes, was
Leeds and its reference to Gang of Four, Mekons and Delta 5 era Marxist
agitpop, but the whole book is a delight than can be devoured or dipped into
according to taste. I heartily recommend the fascinating Liverpool chapter,
that involves Karl walking from Paul McCartney’s modest working class terraced
house to the large semi on a leafy lane that Lennon was brought up in.
Finally,
more local talent in the shape of Dan Jackson’s The Northumbrians has caused me to be less ignorant than before. To
be honest, I don’t have a great, burning affection for the North East. Alright,
Newcastle’s a good place to live and Northumberland is endearingly pretty once
you get north of Blyth, but I don’t endure Busker or Leonard Osborne levels of
Geordie nationalism. However, Dan’s fascinating, detailed and relentlessly
enlightening history of a people he puts in a proper historical context could
almost change your mind. It was also good to read a proper academic text for
the first time in years.
