Post Christmas Steps

 So here's what I've been reading and listening to so far in 2023 -:

MUSIC:

 

This blog has been inspired by the predictably astonishing performance I witnessed at Sage Hall 1, by Mogwai on 12 February, along with a couple of thousand bald blokes with beards. It’s only the second time I’ve been lucky enough to see these Central Belters in the flesh, having missed out on Radio 6 weekend tickets about a decade back and being stuck at work until 9pm when they played the Tyne Opera House in 2007. Last time around, they were at Northumbria University and it was genuinely one of the loudest, most intense experiences I’ve ever had, leaving my senses shredded and ears ringing for days afterward. Yes they were loud this time, but the beautiful acoustics of the Sage meant it didn’t have to be so oppressively deafening that your fillings fell from their mountings to have an impact. One important factor of Mogwai’s art, which is often overlooked, is the subtle beauty to be found in the quiet, almost pastoral parts of their music. It just makes that switch when they turn things up to 11, even more awe-inspiring. Nothing could have prepared you for the assault section of Mogwai Fear Satan when it kicked in during the last encore. There were highlights throughout the set: Christmas Steps, Summer, I’m Jim Morrison I’m Dead and, of course, New Paths to Helicon. A mighty and magnificent set drawn from all points of their 25 year career, with Braithwaite and the boys in top form, really enjoying being there, playing loud and playing with sheer joy. It’s a shame Ceiling Granny didn’t make the cut, despite being played at every other gig on the tour, but there was genuinely nothing to complain about. This was power, beauty and love all wrapped in one delightful parcel.

The only other gig I’ve been to this year was with Shelley to see TQ Live #3 at the Lit & Phil back on 20 January. Again, a massive thank you to Andy Wood for curating this event, which saw Culver supported by Firas Khnaisser and Sgerbwd. As ever, there was the renowned TQ tombola for the first 40 punters, primarily bald blokes with beards in woolly jumpers who are all artists themselves, that saw Andy divesting himself of most of the unnecessary CDs from his collection. Shelley selected A Reggae Tribute to the Fab Four, Volume 2 that consisted of some bland, cod-Jamaican covers of Beatles songs. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t exactly innovative and could happily act as a soundtrack to cheap cocktails in Tiger Bay at the Gate, if you were that way included. Personally, I think I can probably do without a further exposure to John Holt interpreting Yesterday or The Heptones doing Ticket to Ride. However, I was pleased to get my Canterburied Sounds CD back from Andy, as it had cost me £3.00 in unpaid postage to loan it to him. Ironically, I got £1.50 of that back when he didn’t put enough stamps on issue 59 & 60 of TQ when that was sent out.

Even better, I saw Kev Wilkinson for the first time in years and he passed on a copy of his 2022 BRB Voicecoil release Dissolve into the Now, which was far more disciplined than the ambient / improvisational stuff on show this evening. It’s very good stuff, almost dancey in parts, and Kev is someone who recorded output and live activities I need to keep an eye on. The same is true of Stephen Evans, whose CD Songs for TQ comes with the latest double issue. Stocks are running low, but I’d suggest you get on this work of absolute genius. Like a cross between Guided by Voices, the Flaming Lips and English eccentricity in the manner of Bevis Frond or Robyn Hitchcock, Evans veers between totally straight cover versions such as, implausibly enough, The Lady in Red, to sludgy guitar drones that really hit the spot. I can’t recommend this highly enough.

Anyway, first up on the night was Sgerbwd who, instead of being two baldy blokes with beards in woolly jumpers standing in front of laptops, making a horrible noise, consisted of one woman in a Meg Griffin style beanie, making a dissonant and disconcerting electronic clatter. She manipulated the destruction of a Strongbow Dark Fruits can, making it sound like a plane taking off then flying overhead. Genuinely impressive, if a little punishing for the average punter. I found it quite an intense event, but thoroughly enjoyable. Seeing Joe Murray from Posset in the audience reminded me that the first new CD I’d bought in 2023 was his release with Graeme from Chlorine, under the name Molar Crime. The CD, New Fun, is utterly unlike what I’d expected, with a kind of free jazz vibe permeating throughout. I’d definitely recommend this to anyone who wants to find out more about the No Audience Underground in this region.

Next up, Firas Khnaisser brought the volume right down, and invited audience participation by utilising a pair of radio operated toy cars, one of which this non-driver kept dunching into the furniture. A percussive genius, he brought strange and beautiful sounds from everything from a snare drum to a tin of sand, like the Buddy Rich of the No Audience Underground. Switching to a yellow, toy trumpet, he veered from relaxing sounds that accompanied a recording of flowing water, to Casio produced electronic scree that jarred and disturbed. This was a lot of fun.

Culver was more serious. Cathartic even. You know where he is going each time he plays and picking up his 2016 CD Terra Incognito on the night, recorded with Cathal Rodgers, you realise his art is not so different to how it was in the past, or how it will be in the future. It certainly affected Shelley who, transfixed and tearful, sat cross legged on the floor, utterly absorbed in the moment. I understood exactly where she was coming from. This was profound, healing noise; a comforting, insulating blanket of sound that made us all feel better for being there. Even better, Martin from Shunyata Improvisation Group gave Shelley and I, along with the haul of CDs, a lift home, which was just brilliant, like the whole evening.

The final bit of music I’ve got to report about is The Fall Live @ Newcastle Riverside 4 November 2011. This was my penultimate time of seeing them, along with Ben on his only ever Fall gig. I only discovered the CD of this gig existed as I read Steve Pringle’s exhaustive and informed chronological account of all Fall releases, You Must Get Them All, that Shelley bought me for Christmas. It’s a great read and, because it is written by an informed enthusiast, it is honest about The Fall’s output after 2000 or so. Whilst I tend to write off everything post Scanlon and Hanley, Pringle has evaluated this body of work both honestly and dispassionately. Perhaps my cynical intolerance was what had caused me to misremember the set as a shambolic racket. It isn’t at all. In fact, the whole thing is bloody excellent, though with typical cog sinister amateurism, the set list is completely wrong. It is incredible to get both Psykick Dancehall and Printhead in one performance, but even better finds are Elena singing I’ve Been Duped and an absolutely barnstorming climax of (I’m Not From) Bury. Being honest, I wholeheartedly recommend both the live CD and Pringle’s excellent book, which I suppose I should really have talked about in the next section. Oops….

Books:

I started off the year with a bit of a Teesside flavour to my reading. The first novel I read, after the Steve Pringle book, was Bob Mortimer’s The Satsuma Complex. Now, I’ve always been a bit of a cynic when it comes to celebrity books, as I’m unsure how much they’ve written and how much is the work of a ghostwriter. Also, has their talent or their name secured the publishing deal? All cynicism is parked when it comes to Bob Mortimer though, as I regard him as an absolutely, cast iron genius. Alright, so The Satsuma Complex will never be a Booker prize contender, but it is a diverting and entertaining read, despite some questionable lapses, such as the irritating presence of a talking squirrel in the narrative. The whole book pans out reasonably convincingly with a chocolate box happy ending and you can close the cover with a smile on your dial at the end of a rom-com meets police procedural meets bildungsroman. Yes, I truly did enjoy it.

I don’t know if enjoy is the right word for Glen James Brown’s masterful Ironopolis, but this tale of losers and psychopaths in a crumbling, dystopian Middlesbrough council, sink estate, has a truly effecting narrative. The tale of domineering estate paterfamilias Vincent and his timid, dead wife and inadequate son and how their doomed lives touch others in this area, is both profoundly shocking and grimly fascinating. This is truly an excellent debut novel, and I am eager to read more by Brown.

I managed to get myself in print, by having a short story, The Sporting Life, included in East London Press’s anthology, Songs from the Underground, edited by Joe Ridgewell. It’s a combination of out of copyright pieces from Blake, Burroughs, Larkin and many others, together with contributions from contemporary outsiders writers such as Michael Keenaghan, Ridgewell himself, Ford Dagenham and me. While it does have the air of something phoned-in to fill a gap in the schedules, it’s nice to receive a copy and even nicer to be included alongside such stellar talents, even if isn’t a story I have any affection for.

This is not true of the entire published output of Cormac McCarthy. I was excited beyond words to receive both The Passenger and Stella Maris for Christmas from Shelley. Bobby Western, the haunted central character at the heart of The Passenger, works as a salvage diver in the Mexican Gulf, tending to sunken barges and stricken oil rigs. Published16 years after The Road, The Passenger is like a submerged ship itself, a ruin in the shape of a hardboiled thriller. McCarthy’s saga covers everything from the atomic bomb to the Kennedy assassination to the principles of quantum mechanics. It’s by turns muscular and maudlin, immersive and indulgent.

Some 40 feet below the surface, Western explores a downed charter jet. Inside the fuselage, he picks his way past the floating detritus and the glassy-eyed victims, still buckled in their seats. The plane carried eight passengers but one appears to be missing and the subsequent investigation hints at a government cover-up. Except that this may be a red herring; we’re still in the book’s shallows. Western’s troubles, we realise, are altogether closer to home.

McCarthy began work on The Passenger back in the mid-1980s, before his career-making Border trilogy, building it piecemeal and revisiting it down the years. Small wonder, then, that this family tragedy feels filleted, part of a larger whole and trailing so many loose ends that it requires a self-styled “coda,” the companion novel, Stella Maris, to complete the story. So this is a book without guardrails, an invitation to get lost. We’re constantly bumping into dark objects and wondering what they mean.

Ostensibly the narrative sees Western pinballing around early 80s New Orleans, hobnobbing with the locals, trying to outflank his enemies. But it also casts back through the decades, mining his quasi-incestuous bond with his suicidal sister, Alicia. Along the way it introduces us to her nightmarish hallucinations: “the Thalidomide Kid and the old lady with the roadkill stole and Bathless Grogan and the dwarves and the Minstrel Show”. Alicia likens these demons to a troupe of penny-dreadful entertainers. They materialise at her bedside whenever she skips her meds.

On a prose level, McCarthy – now 89 – continues to fire on all cylinders. His writing is potent and intoxicating, offsetting luxuriant dialogue with spare, vivid descriptions. The bonfire leaning in the sea wind; the burning bits of brush hobbling away up the beach. As a storyteller, though, I suspect that he is deliberately winding down, wrapping up. This novel plays out as a great dying fall.

Western and Alicia, we learn, are children of the bomb. Their father was a noted nuclear physicist who helped split the atom, leading to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Western, in his youth, studied physics himself. He became familiar with protons and quarks, leptons and string theory, but gave up his calling for a life of blue-collar drifting. Quantum mechanics, he feels, can only take us so far. “I don’t know if it actually explains anything,” he says. “You can’t illustrate the unknown.”

McCarthy’s interest in physics has been stoked by his time as a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, a non-profit research centre. Since 2014 he’s largely been holed up with the scholars, exploring the limits of science, and presumably of language as well, only to conclude that no system is flawless. High-concept plots take on water; machine-tooled narratives break down. And so it is with The Passenger, which sets out as an existential chase thriller in the mould of No Country for Old Men before collapsing in on itself. Western might outpace his pursuers but he can’t escape his own history. So he heads into the desert, alone, to watch the oil refineries burning in the distance and observe the carpet-coloured vipers coiled in the grass at his feet. “The abyss of the past into which the world is falling,” he thinks. “Everything vanishing as if it had never been.” What a glorious sunset song of a novel this is. It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic. McCarthy started out as the laureate of American manifest destiny, spinning his hard-bitten accounts of rapacious white men. He ends his journey, perhaps, as the era’s jaundiced undertaker.

For a writer who spurns the conventions of punctuation, Stella Maris feels a lot like a full stop, a parting pronouncement on the whole sordid human experiment. After 16 years of literary silence, McCarthy has produced a drought-busting, brain-vexing double act: first The Passenger, a nihilistic vaudeville; now, its austere sibling, Stella Maris, helmed by the first female protagonist McCarthy has dared to write since 1968.  McCarthy’s attempt at cross-gender empathy is Alicia, a former child prodigy turned rogue mathematician. Stella Maris opens in the autumn of 1972 when the 20-year-old checks herself into a private psychiatric clinic in Wisconsin. She arrives with a bag full of cash and an accompanying cast of hallucinations led by a flipper-handed dwarf who calls himself “the Thalidomide Kid”. A world away, on life support in a European hospital, Alicia’s brother, Bobby, lies braindead. Or so she thinks. (The Passenger tells his post-coma story.)

Stella Maris is a transcript of Alicia’s therapy sessions. The book hangs on her voice, and that voice is doomed. Listening to Bach is the closest she comes to joy. The mystery at the heart of Stella Maris is just how far Alicia has taken her brotherly lust. There’s the link McCarthy makes between Alicia’s madness and her menstrual cycle; her certainty that motherhood is the cure for all her existential woes via an incestuous subplot.

Alicia works in “topos theory”, at the sharp frontier of mathematical thought. In case readers miss the analogy, her last name is Western. And like the grand dream of the American west, our beautiful heroine is doomed. Grieving for her brother, and disillusioned by maths, Alicia is destined to kill herself (in the opening scene of The Passenger, McCarthy describes her dangling body like a gruesome Christmas bauble). With no prospect of hope, Stella Maris is the literary equivalent of a slow-motion study in obliteration. “I’ve always had the idea that I didn’t want to be found,” Alicia explains. “That if you died and nobody knew about it that would be as close as you could get to never having been here in the first place.”

Alicia’s conversations with Dr Cohen are combative, cerebral and theory-heavy (Kant, Wittgenstein, Feynman, Gödel): less a therapeutic dialogue than a Platonic one. The questions the pair tackle range from the eternal (is the self an illusion?); to the mind-knotting (if mathematical objects exist independent of human thought, what else are they independent of?); to the hazy, late-night realm of the weed-addled (why is a dying dolphin’s last breath not considered an act of suicide?). “I want to be revered,” Alicia declares, “I want to be entered like a cathedral.” It feels like a tacit instruction for readers. However, Alicia is less a character than a receptacle for eight decades of snarled (and snarling) ideas. As her conversations with Dr Cohen deepen, she slips into McCarthy’s own narrative voice, with all its rococo cadences and tell-tale tics. “If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be?” Dr Cohen asks Alicia. “It would be this,” she answers. “The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.” It’s textbook McCarthy nihilism, boiled down to a noxious concentrate: no country for old mathematicians. Perhaps that’s the true McCarthy mythos: he spent his career staring into the void, and now it’s staring back.

To finish with, I’ve just been through a couple of gorgeous cricket books. Firstly, Gerald Brodribb’s Next Man In, a quaint and eccentric looks at the laws of the game, illustrated by famous instances where they needed to be interpreted, sometimes wrongly. It’s a gloriously dated and funny trawl through the minutiae of the world’s most beautiful game. Finally, Mike Brearley’s gorgeous On Cricket, which is part memoir, part political treatise and part philosophical meditation on the morality of the game and the world in general. As it is told in Brearley’s inimitable style, his discussions and interpolations on aesthetics and personal responsibility remain fascinating and never pretentious. As he’s now over 80, I trust we may see him spared for years yet.