Playing Catch Up

Two months in and 2018 has got every sign of upping the cultural ante as March arrives. During the next 31 days, Irvine Welsh’s novel Dead Man’s Trousers as well as albums by The Mekons 77, Trembling Bells and Yo La Tengo will be dropping. Those three bands are all touring, though none of them are playing Newcastle; Leeds is the closest they’re coming, though I doubt I’ll make it down to see all of them, with Yo La Tengo in early May the favourite, on account of the bairn’s expressed interest in seeing them. Despite the disappointment of their non-appearance on Tyneside, some promising future shows have been announced. I’ve invested in tickets for Pete Astor, who has also got a new album due any day, at The Cumberland on March 23^rd and, further ahead, The Wedding Present at The Academy to do their Tommy album in June.

As an aside, I was deeply dismayed to see the Mouth of the Tyne Festival is welcoming back the FLA Dadsuals’ dreary dauphin, Paul Heaton. I’ve loathed that man and his music for more than 30 years, from The Housemartins onwards. Along with the evil Paul Weller, any proponents of Ska music, faux soul pap a la Smoove & Turrell, New Order with or without the vile Peter Hook, the aptly named Charlatans, the irredeemably awful Oasis, the emperor’s new clothes that were the Stone Roses and that shithouse Morrissey, it’s music for scowling, social inadequate baldies in chunky Italian knitwear and garish socks. Thankfully I’ll be watching Tynemouth at Whitburn that day, listening to the music I like and hopefully reading a book.

BOOKS:

So far in 2018, I’ve read 3 books; all published in 2017, but you know it’s the thought that counts. First up I finally tackled Harry Pearson’s masterful and affectionate biography of Learie Constantine, Connie. This meticulously researched and articulately written love letter to the first great superstar of Trinidadian cricket is by turns illuminating and infuriating in the way it shines a torch on the past. Cheek by jowl with misty-eyed recollections of Constantine flaying the ball to all corners of Lancashire league grounds in the inter war years, are genuinely sickening accounts of racist attitudes of the day. The prejudice of the West Indies hierarchy is something of a shock to someone whose first recollection of the Caribbean tourists was the 1973 test series that beguiled and fascinated the 8-year-old me, to the extent I decided to become a slow bowler, inspired by Lance Gibbs. Suffice to say it was not a successful impersonation.

Harry’s book has as its main strength, the sheer size of Connie’s personality, especially in such wonderful vignettes as his disapproval of the loose morals of priapic Trotskyist CLR James and his endless attempts to inveigle the womenfolk of Nelson, Colne and all parts thereabouts into making the beast with two backs. As is the case with so many cricketers, the post retirement story is a compelling one, of legal studies late in life, corruption and patronage in his home country and a slow, graceful decline in the country he chose to settle in. A truly compelling read.

Someone who I think would enjoy Connie is Durham CCC’s foremost female supporter Jane Gulliford Lowes, or Lydia as she’s known on Twitter. Mainly on account of her regular and perceptive analyses of Durham’s woes, not to mention the endless proselytising of her beloved Black Caps, Lydia and I became Twitter pals. Last December, her book The Horsekeeper’s Daughter was published, and I’d hoped to make it a Seaham double, by seeing Benfield at Red Star and then dropping into her local for the launch. Sadly, a frozen pitch put the football off the agenda and prevented my attendance. However, as she’d previously provided me with info about how to get from Dalton Park shopping centre (boss trabs etc) to Red Star’s ground, I had promised to buy her book.

Frankly, I’m very glad I did as it tells a complex tale of family separation, Victorian poverty, emigration and astonishing coincidences that provide resolution at the denouement, though it tells them in a lucid, unambiguous fashion that perhaps belies the author’s place in the legal profession. Despite the appearance of many possible sources of melodrama, this is far from Catherine Cookson territory, though neither does it stray towards ultratragedy in the style of Toni Morrison. It reminded me of a factual Kate Atkinson, telling the story of Sarah Marshall’s upbringing in Seaham and her attempt to make a better life by emigrating to Queensland in 1886, weaving in the complex threads of the lives of other family members. All of this inspired by a battered attaché case of yellowing photographs and crumbling letters of starched formality. It is an absorbing page turner where the key character emerges as being Jane / Lydia herself, as the ending grows close.  I recommend this unreservedly.

In September 2006, heading back from a brilliant weekend in Glasgow (Teenage Fanclub at the Barras and Benburb 5 Royal Abert 1 at the late lamented Tinto Park the day after), I read Scotland on Sunday through shaking fingers on the rattler back. In the arts section, I read about David Keenan, proprietor of avant garde record shop Volcanic Tongue, and his partner Heather Leigh’s project Dream Aktion Unit with Thurston Moore. Immediately I got home, I bought the album, Blood Shadow Rampage; it’s a tough listen. Free improvisation, rock style, rather than jazz is a demanding taskmaster and I think I’ve only made it through 3 times in total. That’s more times than I ever got to Volcanic Tongue, one-time workplace of the mercurial Alex Neilson, which shut for good in 2014 without me ever darkening its doors. However, I bought several crazy releases by mail order which intrigued, amused and baffled me by turns.

Therefore, when I learned Keenan had turned novelist, to produce This Is Memorial Device, an imagined oral history of post punk in Airdrie 1983-1986, I sat up to take notice. However, it was only in February I got around to buying it. Within 48 hours I’d read the words off the page; Kim Gordon said it’s a book she wishes she’d lived through and I understand where she’s coming from. This Is Memorial Device is brilliant; rather like that lost classic The Shoe by Gordon Legge, it forensically reconstructs the imagined, realistic world of the novel and a huge array of credible characters who inhabit it. Keenan has made a bid for creating the new genre of kitchen sink magic realism. The fact we don’t explicitly learn what happened to Memorial Device or hear from the members, despite Keenan constructing a multifarious set of narrators, all of whom tell their part of the story from slightly varying perspectives, is irrelevant. It is a book you find yourself reliving, using the locations, sounds, attire and personalities from your own experiences. A remarkable achievement.

MUSIC:

One band I’d expect would have been all over This Is Memorial Device are Mogwai. It’s their territory, geographically and musically. For some reason I’ve never seen them live before; their 2013 show at the Tyne Theatre was on a Thursday, when I was teaching an evening class and their 2015 appearance at the Radio 6 festival in Newcastle sold out in minutes and I was one of the unlucky ones. Therefore, news that their 2018 tour was kicking off at Northumbria University was heartily welcoming. Many others must have thought the same, as the gig sold out weeks in advance. I’m very glad I got a ticket; not only is this a great venue, but this was a stunning show.

I think the last time I’d been at Northumbria was to see British Sea Power, another band that toured in 2018 but didn’t get anywhere near Newcastle, who are always brilliant live. However, I’d venture that the antecedent of this gig was My Bloody Valentine’s legendary performance in December 1991 when, about 15 minutes into Feed Me With Your Kiss, the very best efforts of Kevin Shields fused the entire building’s electrics. Despite shrinking PAs, fewer punter per square foot, bouncers recruited from Russian hooligan firms and punters behaving like gigs were tea parties these days, Mogwai, alongside the incomparable Godspeed You! Black Emperor (obviously), are one of the few bands able to truly test, cajole and punish the audience with a fearsome aural assault. The formula is simple; a line of hard looking blokes playing hypnotic guitar and basslines louder and louder, faster and faster, then exploding the piece into shards of feedback drenched, squalling white noise.  Goodness, it works though; an exhilarating, cleansing experience that replays in your inner ear for a couple of days after.

Out of a sense of duty, I completed my Fall collection with New Facts Emerge; 2017’s album and the only one I’d not bought when it first came out since Dragnet in 1979. As I’d expected, it isn’t much cop. The opening piece of studio whimsy, Segue, and first track proper, Fol De Rol, hint at something better than what unfortunately transpires. A swollen, psyched, hypnotic stagger that verges on being half melodic, if far too fast, gives way to the usual 40 minutes of samey, dull, blundering sub Killing Joke style dirge. How many times have we said this since The Marshall Suite? The closing Nine Out of Ten is a curiosity; guitarist Peter Greenaway plays an unaccompanied guitar riff for nigh on 9 minutes. Again, it’s too fast, but it’s a poignant portent of the imminent gap in The Fall’s sound that Mark E Smith’s death has caused.

Until I caught up with Michael Head and the Red Electric Band’s classic Adios Senor Pussycat last year, I will admit my knowledge of Liverpudlian indie music, such as the work of Shack or Pale Fountains, was limited to the very obvious; Bunnymen, Teardrops, OMD and the many incarnations Wah! At the time of writing, I’m still ignorant, but showing a willingness to learn. On Easter Saturday 1995, I saw a fella by the name of Dave Wiggins score for Tranmere Rovers Supporters in their 4-3 loss (having been 3-0 up) against a bunch of Irish lads who were over as guests of Tranmere and ex-Newcastle legend Liam O’Brien. I must admit the chat with the man who scored that free kick at Roker Park was more memorable than the Wiggins lad’s performance, but it was a point of conversation on Twitter some 23 years later.

Dave is the author of the sleeve notes for Candy Opera’s CD 45 Revolutions Per Minute, which is the definitive collection of the great lost Liverpool band’s career. Recorded between 1982 and 1989, it shows that the 23 years since Dave and I met was only a short time in reality. Loyalty made me buy the CD and I heartily recommend it; the style of luxurious, elegant, articulate pop it contains takes us down the Aztec Camera, latter Orange Juice, Prefab Sprout and Friends Again route. C86 this is definitely not; it’s better dressed, better played and less consciously experimental than the defiantly iconoclastic purveyors of wilful obscurantism. Candy Opera’s songs are gorgeous, gregarious, lush and luscious; 18 slices of wholesome, holistic pure pop that deserves a far wider audience than hitherto. Get this while you can.