Dancing About Architecture #3

 Taken from the latest issue of TQ (#76), here's my analysis of some works of fiction about bands -:

 This is the third musical book review I’ve done for TQ; unlike the other two, which have, by turns, contrasted autobiographies by the formerly wedded Sonic Youth pair Kim Gordon (Girl in a Band) and Thurston Moore (Sonic Life), and compared the lengthy overviews of a particular musical genre (David Keenan; England’s Hidden Reverse) or period in time (Nige Tassell; Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids?), this review concentrates on works of fiction that have music, or specifically bands, at their core. I’ve got a pretty extensive literary library, consisting of approximately 2,000 novels and, much to my surprise, I only found 3 books that are focussed on being in a group. However, see the postscript to this piece for an update on that situation. One of th works about bands is This is Memorial Device by David Keenan, and I don’t think I’m saying anything rash when I tell you it is the best book I’ve ever read about music and that if you’ve not read it, that is a situation which requires remedying at the earliest opportunity. However, as I’ve already written about one of his works in these reviews, he has to take a step back here.

The two novels I’m reviewing here are Espedair Street, by Iain Banks and Powder by Kevin Sampson. An immediate point of contrast is the reputation of the two writers: Banks (1954-2013) was the author of fourteen novels and one non-fiction book. Many of his novels contain elements of autobiography and feature various locations from his native Scotland. In the case of Espedair Street, we’re in Glasgow throughout. Additionally, the non-fiction work Raw Spirit (subtitled In Search of the Perfect Dram) is a travel book of Banks's visits to the distilleries of Scotland in search of the finest whisky, including his musings on other subjects such as cars (he liked them big and fast) and politics (Socialist first and Nationalist second, out of an understandable hatred of English Tories).

As well as these works, Banks wrote thirteen SF novels, nine of which were part of The Culture series, and a short story collection called The State of the Art (1991), which includes some stories set in the same fictional universe. The Culture is a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens, and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way. Each novel is a self-contained story with new characters, although reference is occasionally made to previous novels.

Privately educated Kevin Sampson began his career writing gig reviews for the NME in the 80s and contributed regularly to The Face, Arena, i-D, Sounds, Jamming, The Observer and Time Out before joining Channel 4 as an assistant editor for Youth Programmes, returning to Merseyside in 1990 to help set up Produce Records, enjoying a string of Top 40 hits in the early 1990s, including The Farm's Groovy Train and All Together Now. When The Farm broke up Sampson completed the draft of his unpublished first novel, Awaydays, based on what he saw during his youth at football grounds up and down the country. Awaydays was an immediate critical and commercial success on its release in 1998. Despite having published 10 novels in total, Sampson earns a lucrative living as a TV drama scriptwriter, penning such works as Anne, produced by ITV, which centres on Anne Williams' crusade for justice after the death of her son Kevin in the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. More recently, he was responsible for another ITV product, The Hunt for Raoul Moat.

Iain Banks burst on the literary scene with his extraordinary debut novel, The Wasp Factory, which was published in 1984. This was followed by Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986) and Espedair Street, his fourth novel, in 1987. In short, though like almost all Banks novels, reducing the plot to a single sentence removes almost all of the colour and strangeness of the book, Espedair Street tells the (fictional) story of the rise to fame of Dan “Weird” Weir, bass guitarist in multimillion selling rock behemoths Frozen Gold, and of his continual struggles to be happy now that he is rich, famous and bored out of his skull, as the group is on indefinite hiatus.

Weird starts out in the Ferguslie Park area of Paisley in a very underprivileged Catholic family. He is impressed by a group named Frozen Gold when he sees them live, in the Students’ Union Bar of Paisley College of Technology, and auditions with them. After he joins the band, he ends up writing all their material and playing bass guitar as the band rises to super stardom in the drug and booze-fuelled 1970s. He reminisces about those experiences from 1980s Glasgow, where he lives as a recluse in a Victorian folly, ever since the tragic events which led to the temporary but lengthy pause in the band’s world domination. He is posing as his own caretaker, and his friends McCann and Wee Tommy know him as Jimmy Hay. After a memorable fight in a nightclub, his real identity is revealed. He has grown uncomfortable with fame and wealth, and eventually visits his first girlfriend, Jean Webb, now living in Arisaig, out in the wilds near Mallaig in the Scottish Highlands.

The band Frozen Gold is loosely modelled on Pink Floyd or Fleetwood Mac, although Banks has said that the character of Weird was in part inspired by Fish, the ex-Marillion singer and lyricist. There is a tone of rock journalism in the parts of the book about Frozen Gold, although crucially, and effectively, Banks makes no effort whatsoever to describe the sound produced by Frozen Gold, allowing the reader to conjure sounds from their own imagination.  As Banks' first novel to eschew 'special effects', not being Gothic horror like The Wasp Factory, a literary mystery like Walking on Glass, or science fiction like The Bridge, most critics regard it as one of his most accessible works. Incidentally, Espedair Street is also a real street in Charleston, Paisley, where some of the significant events in the book take place.

Looking at the book objectively, it is more of a novel of character, specifically how an ordinary person deals with extraordinary events in their life, such as unimaginable wealth and insane levels of fame, while wanting to remain a down to earth bloke. This is what makes it work all the more effectively. In contrast, Kevin Sampson's second novel, Powder, which ostensibly reflects some of his experiences of the music business with The Farm and Produce Records, and subsequent adventures in Ibiza, is more of a performative autobiography than anything realistic. As a public-school boy growing up in an avowedly working-class city, Sampson had to work hard to show his credentials and adopted an air of false authenticity when working with The Farm. If their dull, worthy, indie plod offered them no lasting place in rock’s great pantheon, other than another, interminably cheesy Christmas slice of pop pap in All Together Now, then Sampson is prepared to spin the yarn that their time on the road made Led Zep’s adventures (Google “Shark Episode” for further reference) seem like a vicarage tea party with McFly and The Housemartins.

The main problem is that The Revs, the band at the centre of Powder, just don’t seem to be worth bothering with. A weak as water guitar band, presumably akin to the infamous Colon from The Fast Show’s brilliant Indie Club pastiche, their single album stardom and fall into obscurity seems a fitting trajectory for them, while any hope that the reader will sympathise with their manager, Wheezer, a light-fingered pornography addict, is scuppered by his endless immoral acts. All in all, Powder shows why rock band novels is such a niche genre; my advice to all potential authors would be, don’t write about what doesn’t need to be written about.

POSTSCRIPT: In the months following this review, I managed to read 2 further novels about being in a group. One of them, To Rise in the Dark, by Mancunian postman Nick J Brown, is a tremendous read. Three once-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 for the people they were and are, and obviously for the distraught daughter as well. 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 book to you.

The other, The Last Mad Surge of Youth by Mark Hodkinson came into my possession when I afforded myself of the wonderful offer made by Hodkinson’s now sadly defunct Pomona Press imprint, whereby the remnants of their stock was available for postage only. Now admittedly two of the books I ordered failed to turn up, but I did have the pleasure of reading two titles by publisher, owner and author, Mark Hodkinson. Having come to public notice with Life at the Top, a study of Barnsley’s sole Premier League season and later books on Man City and his own beloved Rochdale, Hodkinson branched out into fiction writing as well as football journalism. The Last Mad Surge of Youth is an enjoyable rites of passage, bildungsroman about four mates who start a band that allows three of them to become famous. Unfortunately, the most famous and talented of them become a self-hating, destructive alcoholic, whose only chance of redemption is the process of having his autobiography ghostwritten by a long-lost pal who’d once been in the band but stayed at home to be a small-town journalist and got into a rut. There is also the unspoken ghost of a woman who came between them and left them both. It’s a good read, closer in scope to Powder than the magisterial This is Memorial Device. You could look for copies here: https://www.pomonauk.com/