Men & Boys

Here's what I've been reading & listening to over the last while...

MUSIC:

Since I last wrote about my cultural adventures, I’ve had the pleasure of 3 live experiences, all of which had their merit. First up was the King of New York and the real Poet Laureate of North Shields (Sam Fender; who?), the genius that is Johny Brown at Pauline Murray and Rob Blamire’s Polestar Studios. Along the street from The Grove and in the lee of the Byker Wall, this is the first time I’d been in Polestar since they decamped from the Ouseburn. It was a real family affair that night. Rob was outside having a smoke and a cuppa, Pauline was inside, being the perfect host and the bairns Grace, behind the bar and Alex, doing the sound, gave the place a lovely, warm, dynastic feel.

I met up with Craggsy and Mike, so we felt obliged to have a quick detour to Two By Two to try some glorious Snake Eyes in its natural environment, before returning to see Johny, who was accompanied by BOHJ cohorts James Stephen Finn on guitar and Pete Smith on keyboards. The gig was to showcase Johny’s stunning recent, bildungsroman album “Dream A Memory of Home.” It’s a brilliant record and it worked equally as well live, with standout tracks such as “Hymn to Speed” and “When Football was our Game” garnering warm, supportive applause. Johny can even take that old Roxy Music smoocher “Dance Away” and turn it into a compelling torch song for the lonely and lost, but it was the anthemic “Rosemary Smith” that really had the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

Having had some serious health troubles over the past few years, Johny has embraced his mortality and come back fighting, in one of the most intensely creative periods of his nigh-on 50-year musical career. He’s a poet, a prose writer and he’s playing acoustic guitar. The man is a marvel. He also told a rather risqué (risky?) story about the late, great Les McKeown of the Bay City Rollers, but we’d best not go into that here. Much love to one of the world’s greatest musical treasures. Johny, not Les.

 

In contrast to the cosy intimacy of Polestar, the next venue I set foot in was the bleak, cavernous expense of the O2 Arena in Leeds, where Ben, Dave and I journeyed to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor play one of only 2 English dates on their 2026 tour. Now I love Leeds, having spent a dizzying year as a postgrad in the LS6 area in the late 80s and Ben spent 4 years there in his student days, but neither of us feel a remote need to overnight there any longer. There just isn’t enough of a sense of adventure, compared to visiting Glasgow for instance, to draw you in. The three of us have seen GY!BE perform jaw-dropping sets at Barrowlands and the Manchester O2, so expectations were high, especially after a couple of enjoyable liveners in North Bar, which seems to have dialled down the Nathan Barley tribute vibes since I was last in, but this was a gig that just didn’t catch fire for any of us. The last time we’d been here was for Mogwai in February last year and I secured a superb spot against the far wall, stage right, to rest my weary legs and aching back. It was pretty packed that night, but not as oppressively rammed as this one, which was to be expected with the scarcity of GY!BE’s live appearances on these shores.

As ever, O2 security checks were as intrusive as anything the IDF could have come up with and having been corralled into the venue, it remained so full we couldn’t get forward in any way shape or form. Stuck behind the mixing desk in an oblong room with an intrusive, overhanging balcony, we barely saw the video projections, never mind the band. With such unfortunate circumstances, I felt curiously disengaged from a band who normally scoop me up into their emotional maelstrom. Yes, it was good as the sounds produced were as fabulous as ever, but it wasn’t great. For a start, they simply weren’t loud enough.

The backing videos seem to have changed from trains and buildings to flowers and trees, and the lead instruments are now as much the bass and drums as the violin. The focus of GY!BE seems to have changed, even if there was no new material to consider, to a more compassionate, less intense vibe. I’m fine with that, but I do hope they return to Barrowlands next time they visit, as it is the best venue on earth. Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the night was investigating the new Greggs product, the chicken roll. Avoid. It tastes like sawdust.

The third and final gig I’ve seen was at a third different venue. The Lumiere Experience; a candlelit classical string trio doing Fleetwood Mac covers at Trinity Church on Gosforth High Street. Now, like everyone I suppose, Fleetwood Mac are a secret pleasure we don’t talk about in public, but this was really good, compared to the execrable Rumours of Fleetwood Mac at North Shields last year (night before Mogwai in point of fact), when we walked out halfway through. Not only were the band lousy, but the audience consisted of beery, coked-up radgies who ignored all the basic protocols of gig etiquette. This was a very different experience, and one I’d quite like to repeat in Winter when the effect of the candles would be even more impressive. The three piece consisted of cello (taking the bass parts), viola (rhythm guitar) and violin (vocals and keyboards). These classical musicians did justice to the whole Fleetwood Mac oeuvre but particularly impressed on “The Chain.” Thankfully we were sat on comfy chairs, which was a relief for my bony arse, and the audience (apart from a wearying number of latecomers) were attentive, though the presumed TB patient in our row did annoy me slightly. In all seriousness, this was a wonderful take on the cover band genre. Imagine how this would work with Teenage Fanclub songs? Perhaps less so with Whitehouse, to be honest.

Another band that probably wouldn’t cut the mustard when reinterpreted by a classical string trio are Throbbing Gristle. Next year marks half a century since “Second Annual Report” was released and I’ve been tasked with reappraising it for TQ magazine. Guess what? I’ve never previously possessed a copy, despite still owning “Third And Final Report” and “20 Jazz Funk Greats” since they hit the racks. As part of my research for this piece, as well as getting a copy of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s “Art Sex Music,” which is next on the to read pile, I sourced a CD of “Second Annual Report” on Discogs. I tell you what, it’s still an astounding piece of work. God only knows what people made of the lyrics to “Slug Bait” or “Maggot Death” at the time, not to mention Genesis haranguing the audience in Southampton. Aside from the violent imagery and confrontational words, it is the primitive electronics that really set TG apart from other acts of that era. Eerie, creepy and utterly unlike anything else at that time. Or now. Glorious.

That’s a word I would also use to describe the Fleet Foxes debut album that I found in a charity bin for a couple of quid. The main question I have is how did I miss this lot almost 20 years ago?  This beautiful record has a timeless quality, drawing on music from many places and periods, including the pre-rock era. The astonishingly accomplished five-piece labelled their work as "baroque harmonic pop jams", a neat way of encapsulating their vocal-led creations that feature a complex mesh of voices but have the instant allure of the most commercial chart hits. Probably their most famous number “White Winter Hymnal” perfectly captures the magic Fleet Foxes weave, with its sense of quasi-religious devotionals, while “He Doesn't Know Why” dovetails the two versions of California suggested by much of Fleet Foxes' music: the doo-wop and barbershop-influenced pop of the Beach Boys and the harmonically rich folk-rock of Crosby Stills Nash & Young. Bloody great.

As is St. James Infirmary’s “At the Globe,” recorded live at a TQ soiree in September 2024. I attended this gig and remarked at the time, “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 enjoyed the release of the 2-track CD of the performance from wormhole World even more. Both “Kanthing” and “Dogzenkatz” are excellent bits of work. Well done lads.

I really want to like the current iteration of Swell Maps, as I absolutely adored the original band but, as we sadly know both the Godfrey brothers, Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden (who was a bit of a dick it has to be said) are no longer with us. Hence, the band that released “C21,” which I bought against my better instincts are basically Jowe Head plus some hired hands. Admittedly, these hired hands, including David Lance Callahan and Luke Haines, have got some pedigree, but it’s basically Jowe Head and a backing band. I’ve got a Jowe Head solo album; “Unhinged.” It’s alright in a self-consciously whacky sort of way and “C21” is far better than that, or the live Swell Maps album I got on Record Store Day a couple of years back, which is pretty rank. The Peel Sessions album last year was brilliant, but that was the original band and “C21” sadly isn’t. Several of these songs were written back in the day, by Epic, Phones B Sportsman (David Barrington) and John Cockrill, but only the single “Vertical Take Off and Landing” really hits the spot. The rest of the album is frankly a bit dull. I’d still go and see them mind.

The other little curio I’ve picked up recently was the Norwegian CD zine “Stoy Staffet” #2. This includes 4 different electronic sound artists, the first (Marg) invited by the editor, the second (J. Folke) invited by Marg, the third (Markus Lipsoe) invited by (J. Folke) and the last (Absalon Paaske) invited by Markus Lipsoe. It’s an excellent concept and an intriguing listen, even if electronica isn’t really my bag, but I will be investigating it again, especially if guitars are involved.

BOOKS:

I mentioned last time that I’d bought a load of books from my pal Matt Moir and I’ve slowly been going through them. Some of them I already owned, some I’d read and didn’t have copies of, while others were duplicates and there were some, such as Matt’s A Level History book on Stalin by Alan Bullock and a biography of The La’s that didn’t appeal. Obviously Alan Bullock’s thoughts on The La’s would have been a good read. Hence, after charitable donations, I ended up with 38 books to get through, many of them on music. I’ve found my way quickly through Sam Knee’s photobook of late 80s / early 90s grungy guitar bands and punters, “A Scene In Between,” that was cute and nostalgic. Other titles that didn’t detain me long included plodding, chronological, though superficial biographies of Syd Barrett (“Crazy Diamond” by Mike Watkinson) and the appallingly entitled trustafarian slob Gram Parsons (“God’s Own Singer” by Jason Walker), as well as Tony Wilson’s less than trustworthy hagiautobiography “24 Hour Party People,” which is a jolly good read, even if we’re in the presence of the epitome of the unreliable narrator. Why is he so nasty about A Certain Ratio and Vini Reilly I wonder?

There’s also Mick Middles book “The Fall,” written about 25 years ago when Mark E Smith was still an objectionable drunkard, but at least a talented one, before it all came tumbling down. Middles is at pains to point out how good a pal he was to MES. Whoopee eh? Bryan Charles writes 154 wildly pretentious pages of memoir interspersed with a lucid dissection of Pavement’s “Wowee Zowee.” Lots of long words, but I very much enjoyed it. I also got a lot out of a couple of historical books Matt passed on to me; Jack House’s proto-psychogeographical analysis of his home city, “The Heart of Glasgow,” that I found fascinating. Equally good is the first volume of Robert Kee’s history of Ireland, “The Most Distressful Country,” that mainly covers the 1789-1866 period and leaves the reader in no doubt that Robert Emmett was an absolute charlatan.

I’ve also acquired some other books of my own choice. Staying in Ireland, Brinsley MacNamara’s “Valley of the Squinting Windows” talks of small town prurience and bigotry in County Westmeath around the turn of the twentieth century. It’s a good read, encompassing sexual morality, sexual jealousy, the influence of the Church and Nationalist aspirations. Obviously it was banned by Dev and his lot for years, which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. Collected from the local free library, “The Naked Face” by Sidney Sheldon, is a rattling good whodunnit page turner, whereby a psychoanalyst starts having his patients murdered, but it soon dawns on him, he is the eventual target. Mafia hitmen, a good cop and a bad cop, not to mention an eccentric private dick and lots of blood loss make this is a truly entertaining read, with a trademark plot twist at the end.

When I read “The Shipping News” back in the day I enjoyed it very much, so I was pleased to find E Annie Proulx’s diverting collection of short stories, “Heart Songs” in the free library. It’s a series of brief, homespun country tales that while not establishing her as the Flannery O’Connor of New England, does have some bizarre and surprising takes on rural life in the backwoods near the border. The last free book was Bohomul Hrabal’s “Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age,” a dizzying 100-page sentence about a drunken, lecherous shoe maker in inter war Prague and Moravia. Silly rather than sexy, I still found it a lot of fun. Perhaps I’ll look up “Closely Observed Trains” in the future.

The best and most important book I’ve read this year is David Keenan’s stunning “Boyhood.” The book begins with the abduction of a young boy is abducted outside Partick Thistle’s Firhill ground, the first timestamped reference in a journey that takes the reader from World War II to late 1980s Glasgow. Loosely based on the Ancient Greek concept of anabasis, meaning ascent or journey, multiple histories and story arcs intertwine, drawing on a whole galaxy of characters and ideas.

The relentless pace of Keenan’s anarchic narrative and sense of place demands to be experienced rather than passively read. Huge, monolithic slabs of text, with barely a full stop in sight, give way to shorter bursts spat out like a flurry of blows to the solar plexus. The result is exhilarating and overwhelming in equal measure. Guardian angels, ritualistic murder and talking horses are just a few of the gems in Keenan’s kaleidoscopic imagination. When Keenan’s on this sort of form, he deploys imagery that provokes hilarity, disgust and pure wonder, sometimes at the story’s expense. That said, when one strand of the book melds into another, it feels like a direct hit with an Exocet of language or plot; a bright flash of connection in a deluge of history, mythology and Glaswegian surrealism.

Cutting a clear route through the sensory jungle is Keenan’s love for his home city, soaked into every page. Anyone with a vague memory of those hedonistic times will revel in his descriptions of the rough-and-tumble of those streets and the wild energy of late 80s culture. “Boyhood” is another awesome Keenan book. Genuinely thrilling; furiously precise and furiously ordered. Magnificent is the best word for it. An utterly essential read.