Books & music......
BOOKS:
These last few months have seen some of the big hitters back in print; with David Keenan’s Monument Maker due out in the next couple of weeks, it really has been the summer of the unreliable narrator. I’ve worked my way through some hellish fiction, in order of preference: David Peace’s Tokyo Redux, Roddy Doyle’s Love and James Ellroy’s Widespread Panic, not to mention the first and probably definitive scholarly analysis of The Fall and their world, Excavate, edited by Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley.
On a personal level, the excitement of knowing a new David Peace novel is imminent is amplified by the sight of my own name in the acknowledgements section; humbled rather than flattered is the emotion. Only then do I begin to consider the work in front of me. By work I mean both the book itself, and the labours David has put into it, as well as the effort of concentration and cultural familiarisation, whether it be the geography of West Yorkshire, the results of Liverpool FC in the early 1960s or the commuter railway network of the greater Tokyo region, required to fully appreciate the world David has depicted.
Tokyo Redux, the final instalment of David’s eponymous trilogy, despite the use of three chronological protagonists, each blessed and cursed with parallel synchronous and asynchronous narratives, is the most straightforward of his books since The Damned United. As well as a more straightforward plot, the use of language is again reduced from boiling point to a gentle simmering. While there is still a degree of hallucinatory repetition and rhyme to the prose, it feels less of an incantation than in other novels, such as GB84 or RED NOT DEAD and more of an attempt to convey the sound of things, feelings, even ideas. Thus, ton-ton is the lexical sound of construction for the 64 Olympics, while trains say shu-shu pop-po.
As with the earlier two instalments, Tokyo Year Zero (2007) and Occupied City (2009), a corrupt cast of detectives, politicians, gangsters, geishas and seedy, drunken expats, both military and civilian, populate these novels. It could be Graham Greene’s Havana or James Ellroy’s Vietnam, where the past is a maelstrom of sex, violence and alcohol bordering perilously on anarchy. The crimes each novel is plotted around are real occurrences from post war Tokyo, acting as metaphors for the haunting of a city in search of a new identity, a tension that imbues everything with “the stench of the past, the noise of the future.”
Tokyo Redux concerns the “Shimoyama incident;” the death of Shimoyama Sadanori, the first head of JNR (Japanese National Railways), whose body was found dismembered by a locomotive in 1949. It’s the perfect mystery. Shimoyama’s sacking of 30,000 workers made him a target for the unions, providing David with the perfect excuse to explore industrial espionage, as he did in his savage dissection of the NUM in GB84. Connections with the 1948 Teigin poisonings central to Occupied City are hinted at, but this is David in straightforward (for him) narrative territory and we aren’t led away and astray into a labyrinth of plot interpolations and red herrings, even though we don’t actually learn what really happened to Shimoyama, for reasons linked to the fact the case remains unsolved to this day.
Always keeping this unsolved death firmly in mind, the narrative is told in three periods: 1949, during the occupation, 1964, as Tokyo hosts the Olympics and 1989, as Emperor Showa approaches death. Each period has its own protagonist: first, Harry Sweeney, a disturbed cop from Montana; then Murota Hideki, a wisecracking, boozehound private dick who got 86ed from the Tokyo force for chasing high class poon. Both are recognisable tropes, ideal for progressing the story while remaining the kind of nourish, rugged outsiders who take neither shit nor prisoners. The final vehicle for truth is a less stereotypical creation; Donald Reichenbach a detached and debauched literary genius, reduced to eking a living as a hack translator. He responsibility for the murder of a character upset me more than any death in David’s books since Eddie Dunford’s demise in 1974.
As in Occupied City, Tokyo Redux ascends from the workaday routines of jaded cops and arrogant gangsters into a world of government intrigue and black bag conspiracies. Although you don’t need to have read the first two books to enjoy Tokyo Redux, it lands harder if you have.
Roddy Doyle used to write novels that were abrupt, brief, vibrant and funny. Love is rambling, long, heavy-going and more likely to make you smile than laugh. There was a lively sense of expectancy, of a world that might open up, in his early fiction, but now there’s not much to look forward to, as the world has shrunk and the horizon is not far distant. Another way of putting this is to say that his later novels, including Love, are based on experience. This honesty may be bleak, but it rings true.
The protagonists, Joe and Davy, go on a crawl to a succession of Dublin pubs, mainly on account of the fact they both have something to reveal, though Davy is reluctant to say what this is in his case. They are old friends from boyhood, now with sixty in sight. Joe has remained in Dublin, Davy moved to England. Both are married. Davy returns to see his father, though his relations with him have always been semi-detached in a setting of shared grief at the early death of Davy’s mother. As old friends, over the first pints they hark back to their youth, their first experience of pub life and adult freedom. They remember with special fondness a pub they knew as George’s, which was the first place where they felt fully accepted as grown-ups. There was a girl there both fancied, without knowing much about her except that she played the cello and was called Jessica.
Joe is endlessly eager to share his secret, though he can’t come at it straight. Yet it’s all he wants to talk about; it’s the only thing on his mind, so that it’s not clear whether he is proud and happy or ashamed. He may be all three. The fact is he has met Jessica again, at a parents-teachers evening, and she kissed him on the cheek while his wife Trish is in another classroom. They exchange telephone numbers, though Joe, suddenly forgetting her name, puts George against the number on the screen. Davy questions Joe sharply, repeatedly, tiresomely. Has Joe really left Trish? Despite everything? And he goes back, again and again, over his own marriage with Faye. And that, for much of the novel, is that.
They go from pub to pub, drinking pint after pint as they did when they were young, but with none of the exuberance of youth, as Davy questions Joe about the reality of his love for Jessica and the guilt he feels about Trish. There’s a sharp edge to the friendship, a touch of jealousy, as they go on and on and round and round. Reading the novel is for long periods like being trapped in the company of two pub bores; an experience unrelieved by any wit or imaginative flight. And yet, so much rings sadly true in their narrow world, and Doyle is so adept a writer that he holds your attention, and this is rewarded by the surprise he brings off in the last fifty or so pages, a surprise that changes the mood of the novel and invites you to reconsider what has gone before.
There are echoes of Beckett throughout, and as with Godot, it’s strangely exhilarating, as there are sentences that would surely have had Beckett giving a mournful smile of recognition, even approval. For example: “He lifted both shoulders and extended his arms. Like a half-hearted Jesus on a cross built for a smaller man.” It takes courage for a novelist to demand you pay attention to bores. It takes rare talent to make this, first, acceptable, then weirdly enjoyable.
Stepping away from his Second LA Quartet after 2018’s This Storm, James Ellroy has presented us with Widespread Panic; the “confession” of Freddy Otash, who is both a historical figure and a mainstay of Ellroy’s body of work, which has always embraced the unreliable narrator’s approach to historical record. Both the real and fictional Otash were an LA cop of questionable professional probity turned enforcer and fixer for Confidential magazine, then, eventually, a private detective. The real Otash died in 1992. The fictional one is speaking to us posthumously from “Cell 2607, Penance Penitentiary, Reckless-Wrecker-of-Lives Block, Pervert Purgatory,” from where, he tells us, he has spent the twenty-eight years since his death. In Widespread Panic Freddy narrates the decade of his life from the tail end of the 1940s to 1960. He extorts, intimidates, eavesdrops and scams his way to being the sleaze king of Hollywood (or “Hollyweird” as the book calls it). There is a lot of sleaze about. Were Marlon Brando (fellatio artiste extraordinaire), James Dean (a human ash tray), Orson Welles (bestiality addict), Natalie Wood (nymphomaniac), Elizabeth Taylor (Sapphic pill popper) and any number of other stars of the silver screen still alive, they would eat Ellroy for breakfast.
Confidential, in this account,
reaches its tentacles into everything. Blackmail, erotic surveillance,
transactional sex, violence as spectacle, McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the
work of Confidential, the power of the studio system and the
interests of the police all tangle in this narrative. There are superb
depictions of A-bomb parties; debauched shindigs where the glitterati gather on
the roofs of their Beverly Hills bungalows to drink and pop pills with distant
nuclear tests standing in for fireworks.
The odd thing about Freddy is that, despite his casual propensity for fitting up scapegoats, plunging hands into deep fat fryers and cheerfully socking out citizens’ teeth by way of greeting, he is a romantic. He falls in love at the drop of a hat (and also falls into bed at the sight of one). Not that it does him much good.
Widespread Panic, like the pulpiest of pulp fiction early slasher trash novel Silent Terror, is a palate cleanser for Ellroy; something light and almost humorous, which hints when the Devil Dog reacquaints us with The Second LA Quartet, we’ll be heading to some dark corners of his mind.
Jokes are pretty thin on the ground in Excavate, although the assertion made in the preface by co-editors Bob Stanley and Tessa Norton that this book is not about a rock band. This is not even about Mark E Smith. The book is for Mark E Smith more than it is about him had me roaring with laughter. Smith would have hated this book which, after everything I’d read and learned about him post mortem, is a pretty good sign Excavate is worth reading, even if, like many Fall gigs and albums, it isn’t a case of enjoying it, but learning things or getting very angry indeed.
As a kind of vade mecum for readers both casual and obsessive, The Fall’s album covers are printed in chronological order from Live at the Witch Trials to New Facts Emerge. It’s fascinating to look at the early, good ones: Hex Enduction Hour with the scribbled annotations, the grotesque images on Perverted by Language and, well, the grotesque images on Grotesque. A chronological diary of events in the career of the Fall is also included, as well as typed and handwritten song lyrics and letters, flyers and posters and even Christmas cards that Smith sent to friends. Across 360 pages, Excavate‘s array of essays provide the brain food to the pictorial eye candy. It’s a lovely, lavish volume, half-way between a coffee table scrapbook and an über high-end fanzine, if you count Blast as a fanzine.
Like any fanzine, this means the contents are, effectively, a mixture of the compelling, the pretentious and the crap. The central theme, which I’m taking as the definitive line Stanley and Norton are pushing, is most clearly spelt out in Norton’s essay Paperback Shamanism, which contends that The Fall were the sum of an entire wide, messy web of influences and inputs, not unlike an alternative educational curriculum, each element of which can be isolated and considered. Hence fellow co-editor Bob Stanley discusses the value of amateurism, Paul Wilson looks at the world of the working men’s club, Owen Hatherley examines business management and Ian Penman celebrates the power of repetition, to make this point of view a compelling one. It has to be said though, some other bits are only minimally connected to the topic of The Fall.
Despite the lack of real relevance, several of these pieces are a good read on their own merits, like Elain Harwood’s history of Prestwich, and Manchester more generally, and Smith’s relationship with it. As someone who had zero interest in Smith’s literary tastes, Mark Sinker detailing the influence of Smith’s reading preferences on the band left me cold, as did the contributions by Michael Bracewell, Jon Wilde and Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, on the subjects of MES and his hero Wyndham Lewis. Sian Pattenden’s micro memoir about the group’s poppier Brix Smith period is refreshingly light and also takes the spotlight away from Smith. This highlights one of the key shortcomings of a book supposedly not about Mark E Smith. There isn’t enough about the other members; Karl Burns and Craig Scanlon still need to tell their stories. Few band members, even undoubtedly significant ones, merit much of a mention beyond the album credits. MES dominates here, as he tended to, right down to the inclusion of a couple of archive interviews.
The intention of Excavate to celebrate The Fall is unquestionably good. There’s a curious lack of variety and, perhaps most crucially, a lack of humour, always one of The Fall’s most overlooked qualities. You can argue that, when it’s at its most eccentric, baffling and challenging, Excavate is channelling the true spirit of The Fall. The best books on music are illuminating, insightful and inspiring, sending the reader back to the music in question with a fresh perspective and an injection of enthusiasm and Excavate does just that; read it from cover to cover to immerse yourself in the wonderful, frightening, wildly uneven and sadly curtailed world of The Fall.
I’m no longer a member of any lending library, but I do appreciate the loan of a good book and Tynemouth Cricket Club has good people who lend books out. I’m indebted to Di Brown for the chance to read the curiously affecting, slightly bitter and bathetic poetry cycle Man in the Long Grass by David Phillips. Despite the misfortune of being published by that notorious home to the pretentious and the preening, IRON Press, this is a genuinely affecting set of poems telling the story of a journeyman county cricketer’s final inglorious season of a less than stellar career. Struggling with the niggling injuries and disappearance of his talents that mark the signs of ageing in any cricketer, our anonymous hero also ponders over his recent divorce and what lies in store for his inevitable, imminent retirement. Thankfully, like a day’s play curtailed by rain, there’s neither a tragic nor romantic ending, just a kind of resigned acceptance of life ebbing away, as this is how things are and must be, providing the reader with an understanding of the essentially individual nature of any team game.
My thanks go to Brian Debnam who provided me with a chance to plug gaps in my ignorance about the evolution of pre-Industrial English rural and village life. Rather like E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, W. G. Hoskins draws a line in the sand beyond which his The Making of the English Landscape does not concern itself. For Thompson, the Great Reform Act of 1832 was his final curtain, while Hoskins calls time after the 1773 Inclosure Act, having examined the differing kinds of farming communities, hamlets and villages that prospered and died from the Iron age until the end of the three field system. Like Thompson, Hoskins adopts a hectoring, intolerant tone than comes across as comically furious, though from a somewhat more conservative (with or without a small c) perspective than Thompson’s. As someone whose only knowledge of landscape manipulation was via O Level History’s superficial peering at the Agrarian Revolution, I enjoyed this book, but can understand why rather more impersonal research tomes have become the go-to texts for undergraduates focussing on agronomic history in comparison to Hoskins, whose belligerence oft puts me in mind of Jimmy Edwards delivering a speech in Whacko!
MUSIC:
I await, with bated breath, Alex Rex’s next album, Paradise, and for my first gig since Alex Rex in Glasgow on February 1st 2020, when the Band of Holy Joy will play at Tanners Bank in Shields on August 7th. Before then there’s only been the 3 bits of vinyl I’ve been interested enough to buy since we last spoke. Things may have been different if the Dirty Three and Wire special editions for Record Store Day hadn’t been going for nigh on seventy quid, which I simply was not going to pay, or if the Bardo Pond releases had been available in Newcastle, as I didn’t see them anywhere. Instead I got myself the Mogwai soundtrack to the cult narco crime series Zero Zero Zero and the 40th anniversary rerelease of Lonely Man by the Eric Bell Band on 10”.
Firstly, the latter release, which was something I remember at the time but didn’t get hold of. The former Thin Lizzy guitarist has worked with hundreds of ephemeral pick-up blues bands since Scott Gorham and Gary Moore took over his role, but none of them achieved much in terms of fame. You sense this is okay with Eric as, obviously, his main musical love is playing live blues with extended jam sessions de rigeur. As such, Lonely Man and the other takes on this 5-tracker are somehow instantly recognisable as being of the Six Counties, making a great companion piece to Right Way Home by the Xdreamysts for instance. How do you describe the sound? Van Morrison jamming with The Clash’s 1978 vintage perhaps. Musically, it’s great, though the lyrics are clearly of another era. I’m glad I bought it.
That sentiment goes for the Mogwai album as well. I’m not necessarily a great fan of soundtracks. Yo La Tengo are one of my top 10 bands, but I’ve not bothered to collect any of their film work; same with British Sea Power. However, as Mogwai are skilled practitioners of short, atmospheric instrumental pieces (not songs as such), I thought I’d give this stylish looking double 12” a go and it’s great. I mean it’s not a work of clear and obvious genius like this year’s As the Love Continues so clearly is, but it’s not just a load of whimsical incidental doodling either. Unfortunately, I’ve not seen the television series, so I can’t comment on how appropriate these sounds are to the moving images. What I can say for certain is that I’m much more amenable to the idea of picking up Mogwai soundtracks in the future than I was before I purchased Zero Zero Zero.
Finally, I have to admit I’m a sucker for one hit wonder instrumentals; Hoots Mon by Lord Rockingham’s XI, Pepper Box by The Peppers and Telstar by The Tornadoes to name but a few. Another one I particularly like is Footsee by Wigan’s Chosen Few, mainly because the preposterous Stuart Maconie described it as an “execrable novelty” in one of his autohagiographies. I managed to track a copy of this one down via my Twitter pal Sam, who was about to stick it on Discogs. Luckily I dissuaded her and I’m now very glad to have a copy of it in my collection. Saxophones, car horns, whistles and football style chanting combine to make this a glorious slice of throwaway trash,
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