Eyes Down & Ears Open

Before I begin this first cultural blog of 2016, I must pay my respects to David Bowie. He was, by any measure, an iconic genius. His work from the 1970s is uniformly brilliant and Diamond Dogs would be my album of choice, though everything from Hunky Dory to Lodger is superb. Who else could seamlessly move from Suffragette City to Young Americans, making both hard rock and blue eyed soul equally compelling. I haven’t even mentioned the Berlin trilogy. I’ll leave it there though; my words could never adequately pay tribute to his body of work.

If there was one sin of omission in my cultural life in 2015, it was that I didn’t read enough. Consequently I resolved to do better this year and, with that in mind, picked up a dozen books for a quid in a clearance sale at our local library; some of great quality, others less so. I intend to give a whistle-stop guide to what I’ve consumed. However, before that, there are some proper books I borrowed from friends to discuss. Harry Pearson loaned me I’m Jack, Martin Blacklock’s factional retelling of the Jackie Humble Wearside Ripper hoax. Unsurprisingly this was shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize, but unlike that late, talented writer or the stratospheric genius of David Peace, clearly both influences, Blacklock is less than convincing in his need to write this account. Sure he gets inside Humble’s head, at a superficial level, but he doesn’t invest this well-known tale with any compelling insights.

At the other ends of the spectrum, and also shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize is Duncan Hamilton’s The Footballer Who Could Fly, a restrained tribute to his late, emotionally buttoned-down dad. My mate Ginger Dave recommended this to Laura, who got me it for Christmas; very much appreciated. The Hamiltons only found a way to communicate via football, often travelling from their Nottingham home back to Tyneside, as the father (a Scottish miner) was a Newcastle fan. Hamilton talks of the players his father loved and the ones he loved in turn, of the growing disenchantment with the game they both suffered. It’s a touching, affectionate and superbly written work. Highly recommended.

Another mate Rod gifted me Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist, the first of his I’d read since Portnoy’s Complaint twenty years ago. While that novel was fun and full of exuberance, I Married a Communist is an infuriating read; by turns fascinating and engaging in its portrayal of the McCarthy era from the perspective of those who suffered at the hands of HUAC, it is also bitter, misogynistic, overlong and structurally flawed at certain points. However, it is a worthwhile read, if only for the description of Richard Nixon’s funeral, which is hilarious in its bile-spitting contempt of the Republican Party.

Clearing out my office from where I used to work back in the summer, I found a half finished copy of The Beggar Maid; Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro.  January 2^nd I finally got to read it; if you know the work of Canada’s greatest short story writer, you’ll know how wonderful her depictions of a philistine upbringing in West Hanratty, a loveless marriage to a rich bore and the difficulties of making a living as a single mother working as an actress and drama teacher, while having endless failed relationships with married men. Munro is in her 80s and has retired from writing; her legacy is assured as the Grande Dame of Canuck fiction.

Wandering through Tynemouth Market today, in search of a copy of The Winter’s Tale (unsuccessfully), I spotted a 1987/1988 Rothman’s Football Yearbook; it’s one I didn’t have, so my extensive collection has a gap plugged. It was a tremendous bargain at only £2. Looking forward to dipping into the stats and editorial to be transported to a time when even Jamie Fender didn’t complain about football, amazingly enough.

Now, as regards the pile of fiction I bought for a quid; the logical approach was to reject all fantasy, chick lit, historical fiction, sci fi, gore and so on, in favour of realistic fiction. That done, I put them in reverse order of length (shortest first) and got stuck in. The first one was A Clockwork Orange, which kind of invalidates what I said were my criteria. I’d never read it or seen the film, though I’ve caught it on stage before and knew the plot. My residual knowledge of Slovak helped me with the Nadsat vocab and I adored it, especially the final chapter. While Burgess rejected the book because of how it was misinterpreted, I found it a compelling argument against macho violence.

I read The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass when they came out, but my subsequent Ian Banks experiences have been rather scattergun to say the least, though I’ve loved them all: Whit, Crowd Road and now Canal Dreams. Implausibly a Japanese cello virtuoso, who is scared of flying, finds herself on a ship in the Panama Canal on the way to Europe, when a civil war breaks out. All passengers and crew, including her French lover, are killed, so she revenges this atrocity by assassinating all the rebels, including a final enormous fireball that burns the surface of the canal as she scuba dives away. Marvellous fun, in a preposterous way.

Martin Millar caused a bit of a stir with Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation about 30 years back. I never got around to reading it, so was pleased to get hold of Suzy, Led Zep and Me; it’s an asynchronous bildungsroman. The narrator (a Brixton based author called Martin) is attempting to resurrect a relationship with a former flame, now a single parent on the rebound. His way of doing this is a painstaking retelling of his friendship group going to see Zeppelin in Glasgow back in 1972. Five of them, three boys and two girls in an untidy set of shifting teenage relationships. A cataclysmic climax means the night they saw Page, Plant et al changed their lives forever, meaning their home town would never be the same to them. Meanwhile, in London, his glacially paced chat up lines get him no further forward at the end than the start. Not bad, but the London stuff is a distracting, unnecessary hindrance to the real interest in the story.

Another Scottish novel is Grass by Cathy McPhail, telling the story of a pair of teenage lads trying to stay safe in a gangster-infested small town where drugs are rife. There are deaths and threats, but the dialogue is wooden and the plot skimpy at best. I read it without thinking. A far better book with a young narrator is Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, which is loosely based on the tragic murder of Damilola Taylor; an understated, beautifully observed book whose tragic denouement is heart-breaking, even if it is predictable.  A writer I will look out for.

Babak Ganjei is one I’ll avoid; his Hilarious Consequences cartoons about a failed musician slacker, who is also a lousy husband and dad, living in Shoreditch and trying to make his name, has zero humour and a thoroughly dislikeable cast of other second generation Nathan Barleys. There was a CD that came with it, containing a load of bands I’ve never heard of. I listened to it and there was some pleasant second generation shoegaze stuff, but only Cheatahs with Froshed made any lasting impact.

You’ll have seen a couple of my blogs involved stuff I’ve written for the Gob on the Tyne project. In return, I’ve been given a whole load of obscure albums and CDs on the iconoclastic Fuckin’ Amateurs label. These are seriously limited release, limited appeal DIY noise projects from the wilds of south east Northumberland. Often, there comes the question, rather like with amateur dramatics or Sunday pub football, at when do we reach the point where the enjoyment is more for the participant than the consumer? I think I’ve come to realise that point is encapsulated by Wrest’s Live at CSV, a one-sided release that combines a surreptitiously recorded Job Club advice session (real, patronising, League of Gentlemen stuff), with found sounds, bit of classical music and DIY percussion. I’ll never listen to this again.

Posset use the Burroughs cut-up technique with a Dictaphone. Their album Banjaxed is a dissonant, messy, self-indulgent swamp of formless pretension. I’ll never listen to it again.  Lobster Priest’s Crucial Trading has a track on either side; Suzie Fuckin Q Death Trip on side is a glorious, swampy Velvets type impro rock thrash out and I loved it. I had to take the b-side Free Radio off after about five minutes as I thought I was developing tinnitus. Funeral Death Party’s pair of improvised noise live albums, MMX and RIP, astonishingly gain applause at the end of each piece. I can’t understand why. If you want any or all of these records, drop me a line…. I’ll pay the postage!

One CD I am keeping hold of is the double live anthology of Rhombus of Doom stuff from the mid-80s to late 90s. Astonishing how good they were; to my ears, there’s as much of an A Certain Ration influence as there is from anything across the pond. Solemn, serious, metronomic rhythms embellished by squalling guitars, squealing sax and shrieked vocals, they deserve far more of a place in the history of NE post punk than they seem to have. This is a very good and very valued release.

Finally, I received The Land and The Garden by Vic Marrs from Santa. It’s another glorious, pastoral, album of gentle, almost fey instrumentals on the every wonderful Clay Pipe Music imprint. Beautifully designed, beautifully played and beautifully executed as an artefact, it is a world away from Wrest, Lobster Priest and Posset. Thank goodness.

Right, I’m off to finish reading a biography of Kim Hushes that Harry loaned me, Heller’s follow-up to Catch 22 and a Howard Linskey police procedural, as well as a couple of novels by blokes I’ve never heard of.