The Latest

 What I've been reading and what I've been listening to in 2022 -:

Music:

Strangely for me, I’m not running to stand still among the young and trendy beat music connoisseurs as I’ve already purchased two newly released 2022 albums to discuss. Firstly, and fabulously I have to mention the impeccable dream pop that is Wilds by The Soundcarriers, a Nottingham band of perhaps 8 years standing, but of whom I was shamefully unaware.  I bought the album courtesy of the arresting nature of a single play of (what turns out to be) the stand-out track “Saturate” on Marc Riley’s show, heard in my mate Dave’s car on the way back from football one Monday night. When the CD popped through the door, the sounds carried within were, as I had hoped, the kind of exquisite keyboard and ethereal female vocal driven glories that oscillate between 1960s West Coast USA and contemporary West End Glasgow. We’re talking multi-tracked harmonies, Hammond organ, pounding drums, major chords and a bass that leads the line; all in all, simply too gorgeous for words. There are apparently other albums in their back catalogue and, if they contain polished jewels like “Waves,” “Falling Back” or “Happens Too Soon,” then I need them in my life.

Also just out is either, depending on how you look at it, the debut platter by Sea Power or the tenth album by the artists formerly known as British Sea Power. Unsurprisingly, it is the latter, which renders their decision to take a new name to reflect a supposed change in direction either erroneous or a deliberate red herring.  As the very word “British” has become toxic to all but the most rabid poppy fascist in these post-Brexit days, it is understandable that the band whose triumphant “Waving Flags” still resonates with a burning love for humanity, would seek to distance themselves from all such militaristic connotations. However, it seems that pettifogging, ideological hair splitting has seen (B)SP take their eye off the ball as, without putting too fine a point on it, Everything Was Forever is a bit on the dull side. Alright so “Green Goddess” and “Lakeland Echo” are right up there with the best of their chest beating, pantomime bear dancing, crowd pleasers, but they don’t show up until 75% of the way through the album. By then, one is reminded of the boring bits from Valhalla Dancehall and Let the Dancers Inherit the Party as, far from a change in direction, this appears to be a largely uninspired retread of some of the less interesting elements of their earlier career, though repeated listens to “Two Fingers” elevate the worth of that song.

One band who have a track record of giving fans what they want are The Mekons, whose lockdown recorded and download only released Exquisite is now available on vinyl. It’s fabulous as well; they very fact it was a record formed in splendid isolation across two continents, with mobile phones acting as mini studios appeals to me. Remember this band could best be described as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table, as Comte de Lautréamont observed. Consequently the fact we appear to be in an inspired fusion of the dub machinations of F.U.N.90 and the bucolic splendours of Natural is something to be loudly celebrated. Tracks such as West Yorks Ballad and What I Believe at Night show their well of creativity won’t dry up any time soon.

As I’ve written about elsewhere, I’ve developed a strong affection for TQ, the locally based magazine dedicated to the outsider, no audience music scene. Issue #52 will be accompanied by a copy of glove #9 for all subscribers, as I try to spread the gospel of outsider writing. This follows my interview in issue #50 and is an attempt to pay back, in a very small way, all the generous deeds of editor Andy Wood, which included 8 free CDs with issue #50. I only intend to discuss these briefly, but suffice to say, a benevolent gesture such as this needs to be praised unconditionally, even if I can’t do the same for the music. Dealing with them alphabetically, first up is So Waltz by Audiac, who feature the redoubtable Krautrock veteran Hans-Joachim Irmler, once of Faust. No argument about it, this is an excellent album that reminds me of nothing so much as early Be Bop Deluxe. Certainly, it is one I’ve decided to keep.

This isn’t the case for Velvet Teeth by Chlorine, which is one of those post-industrial drone things that I just can’t get my head around and also Dave Clarkson’s mainstream, ambient but unchallenging Magic Garden set. However, I am delighted to own Dementio 13’s wonderful Last Test album that features 27 carat banging and screaming throughout; the kind of distracted, top notch caterwauling I’m always happy to get in bed with. I’ll have to revisit Pinnel’s Dreamer, as the disc was a bit dusty and so became more and more muffled as it progressed. Interesting improvised, treated vocals that draw me back again though. Greg Neiuwsma’s Travel Log Radio, comprising cut ups and edits of found field sounds collected during his travels in India and America spike my interest as well, though I’m not sure I’d listen to it again. That is definitely the case with the punishing, emotionless Ministry style beats of Rafael de Toledo Pedroso’s Fly Like Chez Arvi or the not unpleasant but not engaging minimalist drone of XQui’s Elemental. Still, that’s 50% of 8 freebies that I’m happy to keep. The other 4 I’ll pass on to random glove readers who don’t subscribe to TQ with the next issue, which is due very soon.

Books:

The first novel I need to discuss is 2021’s Booker Prize winner, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. From the very outset, I have to say that it surprises me that this book was adjudged to be of sufficient quality to receive such an award, as the straightforward narrative is stylistically nowhere near the quality of such giants of Scottish Literature as Keenan, Kelman, Warner or Welch, nor of such recently passed figures as Gray or Torrington. The six novelists I’ve mentioned are all supremely talented and innovative writers, in a way that Stuart isn’t. For him the intention was clearly to write a character-based novel that is welded to a tragic plot that just stops short of the sentimentality of Angela’s Ashes.

This is a story about poverty, addiction and abuse. The main, though not titular, character Agnes slowly kills herself with alcohol, becoming ever more vulnerable to predatory men, even after her worthless second husband, the philandering Big Shug, has walked out on them. Her only constant relationships are with her children, whose response to her disintegration eventually involve escape. The oldest, Catherine, marries and moves to South Africa, which Stuart signals is the amoral participation in another form of oppression. Middle child “Leek”, a gifted, stays to try to teach the youngest, Shuggie how to conform to the norms of working-class Glaswegian masculinity. “Leek” also stays in the hope of saving Agnes, until one day, ravaged by drink, she throws him out, leaving young teenage Shuggie as her sole carer and witness.

Shuggie Bain is a miserable read, with neither redemption nor escape at the end of it. Degradation, in all its guises, drips from every page like A Boy Called Dave with a Tennents carry-oot.  Shuggie and Leek undress Agnes after a night out, looking away from her bruised thighs and gouged breasts, catching vomit and wiping bile. There’s tragic heroism in Agnes’s commitment to self-presentation and domestic order, making sure the house is immaculate before the next rapist stops by; and something sadder than heroism in Shuggie’s passion for his disintegrating mother, which is not a choice but a fact. The novel springs from a deep understanding of the relationship between a child and a substance-abusing parent, and is a bruising, scabrous read, but if Stuart is to build on this success it is to matters of style that his practise should be addressed.  

Shuggie Bain was a Christmas gift from my son’s partner, Lucy. The next two books, Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze and Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor were book recommended to me by David Peace. Well, you can’t go wrong if the lad who wrote GB84 tips you the wink can you?

Black Wings Has My Angel is a fairly hard-boiled crime noir, sophisticated pulp novel by Elliott Chaze, published in 1953. Narrated by an escaped convict, the pseudonymous Tim Sunblade, who had been convicted of car theft, it tells of the adventures when planning and revelling in the perfect heist. He is staying at a backwoods Mississippi motel, when he meets "Virginia", a call girl whom he hires for a night. After spending several days in the motel together, they head out West, with Tim thinking of when and how he is going to ditch her. Circumstances lead the couple, after trying to get away from each other, back together.  They settle into a love/hate relationship when Tim realizes that she might be the perfect person to help him pull off a heist. The two wind up in Colorado, where Tim discovers a part of Virginia's past and what she is running from. He lets her in on his plans and they plot to rob an armoured truck.

After spending weeks waiting for the right opportunity, the couple eventually steal the truck, with Tim killing the guard, who had sat in the back with the money. They reach Cripple Creek, a secluded ski resort in the woods where they push the armoured truck and dead guard into a nearly bottomless mineshaft to hide them. At this point in the narrative, Tim reveals that his account is actually his confession, which he is writing in his prison cell. He then recounts that he and Virginia go to New Orleans where the dynamics of their relationship change -:

I was sick of Virginia, too, and of what the money had done to the both of us, changing a tough, elegant adventuress with plenty of guts and imagination into a candy-tonguing country club Cleopatra who nested in bed the whole day long and thought her feet were too damned good to walk on.

They make their way to the Gulf of Mexico and end up in Tim's hometown of Masonville, Mississippi, when they are stopped suddenly by a two police officers. They make a panicked escape and start a police chase that ends with Virginia killing the first cop, leaving Tim with the second cop, who Tim shoots and kills. He is caught and badly beaten, burned with cigars, and thrown in jail. Virginia is also caught and thrown in jail. After she seduces and knocks out a jailer, they escape and return to Cripple Creek, where they blend in with the tourists, going skiing and finally renting a house out there. Virginia starts to obsess about death and being in the electric chair.

One day, they go out skiing and for a picnic near the mine shaft. They both feel drawn to it, tempted to look inside. They inch their way towards the open shaft and finally look into the 600-foot drop. Feeling relieved, they start to dance. Virginia suddenly slips and falls into the shaft opening and lands on an unstable rubble outcropping 40 feet down, but still alive and screaming. Tim panics and goes back to the hotel to find rope, where he runs into his "old FBI friend", Clell Dooley, who is hunting for him. When Clell and four or five other men find Tim, he is sitting near the mine shaft, thinking about Virginia. Tim had seen that 40 or so feet down in the mine shaft, there was "a lump", like a rock sticking out and nothing else. Tim asks the men if they have seen Virginia; they carry him off, presumably to jail, where he begins to write his confession.

I knew nothing of Chaze before reading this book, but enjoyed the unforgiving, brutal plot and characters hewn from the same base metal. If you enjoy Jim Thompson, you’ll love this one. Similarly, if you’re a fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, then Hurricane Season will be right up your street and not just because of its Mexican location. It opens in a blizzard of gossip related to the discovery of the corpse of a notorious local woman known as the Witch, who provided abortions for sex workers serving the nearby oil industry and whose rundown mansion was said to hold a stash of gold.

Immediately, the reader is plunged into the chaotic lives of several villagers in the Witch’s orbit, including druggy layabout Luismi, seen leaving her home the morning her body was found; his pal Brando, tormented by secret lust; and his lover, Norma, a 13-year-old runaway carrying her stepfather’s baby. What follows is a brutal portrait of small-town claustrophobia, in which machismo is a prison and corruption isn’t just institutional but domestic, with families wrecked by incest and violence. Melchor’s long, snaking sentences shift our grasp of key events by continually creeping up on them from new angles. The object isn’t clarity, but complication: The Witch, it turns out, might actually be a man and there are three of them.

The near-dystopian onslaught of horror and squalor leaves you dumbstruck, as Melchor shows us the desperation of girls cruelly denied their ambitions, railroaded into household service or worse, and the depravity of boys for whom desire comes fatally muddled with power and humiliation. It’s telling that the only characters with any real measure of control, a morally indistinguishable pairing of a police chief and a narco boss, are the only ones from whose perspective Melchor never writes. The narrative of Mexican society has hitherto mainly consisted of accounts from those in positions of privilege, such as those two.

While there’s no shortage of ugly moments, it’s often the smallest details that testify to how thoroughly Melchor has inhabited her often appalling material: at one point, Norma, unsure why she’s feeling sick in the morning, finds herself even less able than usual to tolerate the smell of her regular bed mate, a younger brother who can’t wipe his own arse. This is fiction with the brakes off and the arrival of a major talent. Personally, I can’t wait for the arrival of her next novel, Paradais, which will be out in English later this year.

As discussed above, the free CDs from TQ magazine should not be judged in terms of their artistic merits but celebrated because of the selflessness of the act of donation that gifted them to me. Similar, my Auchinleck Talbot supporting pal Kenny Yancouskie has gone beyond any ordinary concept of generosity by passing on almost a dozen books about sport, almost exclusively relating to elements of Scottish football, with the exception of Joseph Bradley’s The GAA and Irishness in Scotland. Ironically, I’d passed on Bradley’s Celtic Minded; a collection of essays about what it means to be a Celtic fan in Scotland, to Kenny in return for these wonderful gifts. Cards on the table, I’d found Bradley’s ponderous, academic writing style in the book I’d already read to be stale and unengaging, taking all emotion and poetry out of the equation. There was no essential difference when it came to the GAA volume, other than the somewhat bathetic conclusion that the importance of football and hurling in Scotland is restricted to university campuses, with only minimal outbreaks of popularity during times of higher than usual immigration. When the Irish economy recovers, emigrants often go home, resulting in a dearth of potential players and clubs folding. That really is the story, with Bradley explaining the existence of Celtic as the unifying behemoth that holds the sporting attention of the diaspora. As a devotee of James Connolly’s team, I find that too simplistic a conclusion.

The other book Kenny gifted me that I’ve got through, with 6 others sitting in the bedside pile, is the unbearably pretentious Labanotation: The Archie Gemmill Goal by Alec Finlay, which could surely only have appealed to Pat Kane and Stuart Cosgrove. Coming out at the turn of the century, it reflected the public art obsessed zeitgeist of those munificently funded New Labour days, by recreating the famous goal from World Cup 78 in terms of Ralph Laban’s method for transcribing dance steps, harnessed to an accompanying mini CD of sub On U Sounds found commentary and dub squelching by the Byres Road Casuals (I’m making that name up; sorry). It’s over 200 pages long. I got through it in half an hour, which is only a bit longer than the daft soundtrack goes on for.

To finish off with, I’d like to talk about a book that brilliantly combines the written word with music; Swell Maps 1972-1980 by Jowe Head. From the start of 1979, when I first heard the single Dresden Style until their demise in the middle of the year after, Swell Maps, like The Raincoats, Essential Logic and numerous other Rough Trade acts, produced a litany of the most wonderful, personally influential music of my life. I am unashamedly still a post punk disciple, though it is only after consulting the chronology of this glorious, if brief, account of the life and death of Solihull’s finest sons,  that I actually processed how short their career was. However, that’s not the main thing I took from this book; the standout fact for me was just what an awful person Nikki Sudden was. Unlike his adorable, fragile younger brother Kevin (aka Epic Soundtracks), who combined effortless musical genius with an unstinting collective ethos, Nikki was a bully and a boor. Of course, tragically, both of them are dead; Kevin for a quarter of a century now and Nikki for 15 years. How hard that must have been for their meek, God-fearing parents to bear. How hard it must have been for the narrator, and the only one of Swell Maps to still be involved in music, to hear himself being ridiculed in what was my favourite Maps song; Stephen Does, or to have his chosen career rubbished in the erstwhile classic, HS Art. Rather like subsequent revelations of the political inclinations and sexual proclivities of Phillip Larkin, one is forced to make a clear demarcation between the music they made and the people they are, or were. Otherwise you’d never listen to Nikki’s voice again.

Despite the coarse insults and personality clashes, Jowe Head is able to piece together an exhaustive, chronological account of the various members jamming in garages and spare bedrooms, recording everything on cassette for posterity, back in 1972 all the way to the collapse of the band in acrimony on an Italian tour, where their anonymity caused people to stay away from gigs in their hundreds. It is a wonderful read that perfectly recreates a sense of time and place, where 4 timid, lower middle class grammar school boys, scared of sports and petrified by pubs, were unable to make an unholy racket at the prompting of a nasty Marc Bolan obsessed control freak.

The book comes with a 6 track 7” single that is worth the price of admission on its open; we are blessed by another, previously unreleased take on Jowe’s piece de resistance “Harmony in Your Bathroom” from a 1977 demo tape that also provides the brief instrumental “Securicore” and another in the roll of honour of ludicrous titles Swell Maps were famous for; “Come Upstairs & See My Chemistry Set.” The flip side includes 3 curios from 1979; a Phones B sportsman noise piece, “Votive Offering,” a rewrite of “Cake Shop Girl” for a Swedish DJ’s jingle, Double Dose” and an outtake from the Jane from Occupied Europe sessions, “Elegia Pt1.” All in all, this is a brilliant package and I urge you to get on board the reprint, as the original edition has sold out.