Strong Words Softly Sung

As I’m off to see and talk to David Peace, Macdara Yeates and Nick J Brown in the next couple of weeks, I thought I’d best tell you what I think of their latest words and sounds in a cultural blog that encompasses August and September. Oh, we also went to the pictures. For the second time this year, if you please. The Critic is a preposterous slice of melodramatic cheese, but McKellen, as ever, is worth the entrance fee alone. Anyway, now on to proper culture.

Music:

Despite the fact I’m about to praise one of the finest CDs I’ve heard in years; this latest set of observations is about to be overshadowed by live performances by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, not to mention their latest soon-come album and other new products by Bardo Pond, Jill Lorean and Shovel Dance Collective. This is not to say I’ve endured some crap gigs and releases of late, far from it. Certainly I can’t praise my mate Richy Hetherington and his song-based project Lovable Wholes or his more experimental solo stuff as Katpis Tapes highly enough. The former project came about after the tragic suicide of Richy’s younger child and many of the songs Lovable Wholes, which mainly consist of him and his other child Hope, perform live, such as at The Globe in mid-August and on their wonderful Show You’re Working Out cassette, are slow, sad, gentle, loving numbers. The bring a righteous tear to the eye in public and floods of them in private. If you haven’t done so, grab a copy of the memorial Songs for T album that Richy curated. All profits go to teenage anti-suicide charities.

Richy gave me a couple of CDs for my birthday; Drooping Finger’s Arthur’s Hill and the remixed version of the same, Arthur’s Hill Reimagined. I strongly prefer the first one as I didn’t really get much from the remixed efforts. It’s an interesting ambient concept, but not as appealing to these ears as Lee Dickson, in his alternative guise of Gerry Mandarin, cutting up the back catalogue of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for the mind-bending esoterica of Sound Affects. This one is very much worth hunting down. Another pal, Canadian Dave, has long felt I need to have gaps in my back catalogue plugged, so he got me Royal Trux’s Accelerator album for my birthday. I’d seen them live in 1993 I think it was, but this album was a new one of me. Vicious, abusive, brief and bawdy, it spits in your face and then punches you on the jaw. Just the sort of horrible, bratty noise punk that couldn’t last. And it didn’t, when they chose heroin over music as a lifestyle choice. Hell of an album though. The neighbours hate it.

In terms of other gigs, there was Wrest at Barrowlands that I mentioned in this blog: https://payaso-de-mierda.blogspot.com/2024/09/wrest-be-thankful.html and we’ve sorted out tickets for their show at The Grove in December. A whole family outing indeed. If they take off, as looks likely, they’ll never play a venue that small again. The same probably won’t be said of that Wansbeck institution, St James Infirmary. At the last TQ Live event of the year, Gary Lang was accompanied by Mark Oliver, for a Krautrock influenced set that sounded, by turns, remarkably similar to Can and then to Soft Machine’s We Did It Again. No bad thing of course and I enjoyed this. I also enjoyed the next act, the more improvised and less structured Modulator ESP. In parts, it sounded almost like a gamelan orchestra, in others like a munitions factory on overtime, but never less than impressive. Ideal music for drawing pictures in your head to.

Now, to finish with, one of the finest albums I’ve heard in years; Traditional Singing from Dublin by Macdara Yeates. I’ve always been a sucker for unaccompanied Irish songs, especially the sad, almost sentimental numbers that establish cruel England is to blame. There’s no rebel songs here, and some of the best numbers are from well without The Pale, specifically Galway and Leitrim, but Yeates’s voice can stand alongside anyone you want to name. Luke Kelly, Joe Heaney, Christy Moore; Macdara is on the one road to being as great as anyone of them. Now, the album as a whole isn’t perfect by a long chalk. In fact I’d go as far as to say there are 3 songs on here I don’t like at all, but when he gets it right, the music soars, it flies, it explodes. It’s a thing of beauty talking about ugly times and awful events, but that’s the lot of the Irish and it makes me so proud to be one of the second generation diaspora mourning, like earlier emigrants in far Amerikay, for a distant land they’ve half forgot, and which has changed beyond all recognition since they were last home. I tell you what though; I challenge anyone to listen to The Shores of Lough Bran (a song I’d not heard since 1983), Rocking the Cradle (the auld fella made sure I was familiar with Paddy Clancy’s version from infancy) and Joe Heaney’s awesome Boys From Home without bursting into floods. Fine songs given fine, fine treatments by a truly exceptional talent.

 

Books:

This autumn has seen some of the big hitters release their new works, but there are still a few other books I picked up on the way. My mate Harry gave me Wisden 1965 for my birthday, which is helpful to look back on what was happening that sunny Tuesday when I emerged into the word in 1964. Not much really, to be honest, other than the first day’s play at Lords in a two-dayer between the Combined Services and Provincial Universities, where one of the umpires was the marvellously named J. F. Crapp. Another pal, Rod, gave me the mildly diverting bog read Cricket’s Craziest Moments by Will Wooton, which kept me amused on a bus journey at least. Rather more seriously, I was given a £30 book token by my friends Christine and Brian, for which I was enormously grateful. With it, I bought three books I’d long wanted to read; ee cummings The Enormous Room, William Faulkner As I Lay Dying and Peter Handke’s The Left Handed Woman. The latter, which is about 80 pages long, is one I meant to read as an undergraduate, having been beguiled by The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, but never got hold of it. Very modern, very Socialist, as Basil Fawlty would say. The other two, which are by turns a charming autobiographical sketch of the insanity of war (rather like a Catch 22 set in the 14-18 conflict) and a grandiose, Southern gothic dynastic masterpiece, were ones I’d didn’t get round to during my MA in C20th American Literature, but that everyone else praised to the high heavens. I think Faulkner’s is the greater work, but I’m glad to have read both.

Tonight, before sitting down to write this, I was dropping some recycling off at my local Sainsbury’s where, totally by chance, I came across an abandoned, unread 40^th anniversary edition of Alastair Gray’s sublime Lanark. Of course I’ve read it and of course I’ve loaned it to someone who didn’t give it back, but no matter I’ve got another copy now, as well as a still-wrapped musicological study of Don Cherry that looks a tough read. So confused was I by my discoveries that I forgot to buy bread, muesli, mouthwash and shower gel. No wonder I got my weekly shop for a shade over £20. However, talking about books in supermarkets, back in mid-August, Shelley and I were out in Hexham and browsing through the charity book pile in Waitrose (man), I came across one of those OUP Open University playscripts of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise that was on a module about the enlightenment. It’s also supposed to be one of the earliest German language plays by the inventor of Deutsch dramaturgy. It is quite daring, as it is a plea for religious tolerance and inclusivity among Christians, Jews and Muslims. Not the sort of thing I’m normally keen on reading, but well worth 20p anyway.

Nick J Brown is a fella I’ve got to know via Twitter, partly on account of his passion for German football and his love of County cricket, which obviously elevates him in terms of civilised attitudes. I’m hoping to meet up next week in Manchester when I go down with Ben and Dave to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Long story short, Nick is a writer and now, indeed, he is a published novelist with the appearance of To Rise in the Dark. In a yet to be published review for TQ magazine, I decry the lack of quality fiction about music, but I wrote that piece before I had a notion this book would exist. It’s a great read; three teenage bandmates meet up again after 30 years at the funeral of the other original member. Accompanied by the deceased’s daughter, they go on a Mancunian pub crawl and during it scores are settled and axes ground. It’s a book that boasts excellent character delineation, a realistic and manageable plot, along with punchy dialogue and real sense of location. Like all the best writing about music, it doesn’t dance about architecture, as there is no attempt to describe the music itself. Instead, you care for these three ageing, fallible blokes and the distraught daughter. There’s a minor shock at the end, like all good books, but nothing terrible happens, which I was glad about. I strongly recommend this read.

So, that only leaves us with, in chronological order of reading, Irvine Welsh’s Resolution, Roddy Doyle’s The Women Behind the Doors and David Peace’s magisterial eulogy to the Busby Babes, Munichs. Where to start, eh? Well, I’m not really into compiling orders of merit here, but I will say, even if I’m bound to be accused of favouritism, that David’s book is the one I enjoyed the most. His solemn, forensically elegiac account of events from the crash in February to the bathetic cup final loss to Bolton in May, never strays near sentimentality, but provides a truly compelling and convincing narrative. We are actually in the heads of Jimmy Murphy, Bobby Charlton, Bill Foulkes, Harry Gregg and Matt Busby. We understand and we empathise, assisted by a superb ear for the cadences of ordinary speech from Barnsley and Dublin, as we intrude and share the grief of those left behind. It is truly a stunning novel, but I do wish he’d hurry up and get that bloody book about Yorkshire CCC written.

I also enjoyed Doyle’s book very much. Those familiar with his work will know the northside everywoman that is Paula Spencer; now 66 and with an on / off older lover up by Howth. It’s the time of COVID and Paula’s eldest child, the one who’d made a packet materially, has jacked it all in and left the family behind, to come back home to Mammy. It’s a profound shock to Paula, dealing with ageing, loneliness and the utterly unexpected difficulties provided by lockdown. Despite Doyle’s tendency towards pedagogical preaching, it is an excellent and important book. Certainly, if his work now sees him trying to tie up the loose ends of the lives of the characters he’s returned to previously (specifically the Rabbitte family), then I won’t be complaining. All you need to know is that Paula is a fighter and a survivor, who never gives up. I’ll always be in her corner, cheering her on. DNS forever!!

On the subject of tying up loose ends, the clue to Irvine Welsh’s intentions are made clear by the title of Resolution. Like several of his other novels, such as The Sex Lives of the Siamese Twins or The Blade Artist, the book moves at full pelt, sacrificing nuance and subtlety for broad brush dollops of plot. It is almost as if he needed this book to be written, to allow Ray Lennox some closure, so he can move on. Yes I enjoyed the rattling, breakneck pace, which allows you to ignore many of the less plausible plot devices, but when you think how the young lads in Trainspotting were immaculately delineated to the last fibre, in a book where they were almost paralysed by their surroundings, you feel that Welsh has lost something of his art by churning out glorified pot boilers like this.

Well, the next time I’ll be culturally blogging, new works by Michael Houellebecq and Ian Rankin will have come and gone. Told you it was an Autumn for big hitters.