Culturally, I’ve had an interesting couple of months. In many ways I could, and indeed probably
should, legitimately, have written about my trip to Northumberland v
Bedfordshire in the Minor Counties Cricket at Jesmond with Harry Pearson and
the events of the Durham Miners’ Gala the week after; in fact, it has been
quite remiss of me not to do so. I could have mentioned them in a special
category of Outings, but that would have been to understate the massively
important political significance of The Big Meeting, which has
unfortunately gone unrecorded by me; though I suggest you listen to Bob Crow’s
characteristically pusillanimous and conciliatory oration here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVihB2hEW9E
As regards the cricket, it had been my intention to write a
specific cricket blog about the game I attended and to compare it with my
intended visit to Durham’s 20/20 game with Derbyshire, but squally showers on the
Saturday night previous suggested a delay in play and persuaded me not to
attend this game, which was a mistake as Durham thumped 183/7 to win by 33
runs. Therefore, sadly, another blog opportunity was lost; of course I wasn’t
going to lash out on a ticket for the test match just for the sake of writing a
blog. A third gift horse missed a dental check-up when I failed to attend my
annual Shakespeare in Jesmond Dene soiree; Romeo & Juliet on August 1st,
my dad’s anniversary, went unwatched and an £18.50 ticket went unused as I
simply couldn’t face the world that night. However there was plenty of other
stuff to enjoy, which I’ve listed below.
Art:
The last time I voluntarily took myself to sunderland for a
cultural event was the sparsely attended gig by Jonny in February 2011.
Frankly, there’s generally not a great compulsion for me to visit a place where
the cutting edge of the local music scene is provided by the pedestrian
Futureheads or the laughable Frankie & The Heartstrings, the latter who
have just opened a samizdat, pop-up record shop called Pop Rec Ltd on Fawcett
Street. All well and good that they’re putting on free gigs and selling new and
old vinyl, at premium prices it has to be said, but my trip there coincided
with someone doing a drums soundcheck for that evening’s gig, driving me back
out the door. Nice to see the “beautiful and creative” people of sunderland
involved in this adventure to the extent that the bar is being done by Wylam Brewery and the café by Ouseburn Coffee Company…
And so to the real reason for my visit; an exhibition of
Grayson Perry’s dystopian tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences at
the Museum & Winter Gardens on Burdon Road. I like Grayson Perry a great
deal; I find his work amusing, challenging and incredibly inventive. To be
frank, I feel he has excelled himself with these six large tapestries (The
Adoration of the Cage Fighters, The Agony in the Car Park, Expulsion from
Number 8 Eden Close, The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, The Upper Class at
Bay and Lamentation) that are a loose retelling of Hogarth’s
A
Rake’s Progress in a contemporary context, with knowing intertextual
nods to Renaissance devotional paintings, on which many of these tapestries are
based. Perry gives us the life and death of Tim Rakewell, born to a
dysfunctional family in a rough part of sunderland, but blessed with
intelligence and the opportunity to escape his background through education,
whereby he marries in to the middle classes, makes his fortune, before dying in
middle age at the wheel of his crashed Ferrari after a drunken race.
Perry has produced a series of enormously intricate, vibrant
celebrations of the demotic, particularly in his minutely observed celebrations
of the destructive, escapist, hedonistic lifestyle of Rakewell’s family in the
first 2 tapestries, which are perhaps the most relevant to sunderland, being
topographically and temporally located in the town. The text that Perry
inscribes among the visual images was based, loosely, on conversation he
overheard when in sunderland, on boozy nights out, preparing himself for his
art. A sample being from The Adoration of the Cage Fighters;
“I could have gone to Uni, but I did the best I could, considering his father
upped and left. He was always a clever little boy, he knows how to wind me up.
My mother liked a drink, my father liked one too. Ex miner a real man, open
with his love, and his anger. My Nan though is the salt of the earth, the boy
loves her. She spent her whole life looking after others. There are no jobs round
here anymore, just the gym and the football. A normal family, a divorce or two,
mental illness, addiction, domestic violence… the usual thing… My friends they
keep me sane… take me out… listen… a night out of the weekend is a precious
ritual.”
Perry’s particular skill is how he is able to portray the
poverty of aspiration is such a non-condemnatory fashion, where the
self-destructive reality is combined with garish colour in an unsentimental
fashion that acts as a celebration of many diverse aspects of working class
culture. It is once Tim has been absorbed into “The sunlit uplands of the
middle classes” that Perry turns the focus of his work from the observational
to the scornful. Sarcastic depictions of aspirational, petit bourgeois life in
the middle 2 tapestries give way to a nightmarish vision of Tim’s millionaire
lifestyle in the final two tapestries that could almost have been a retelling
of Hieronymus Bosch, but is actually a bitterly ironic take on a Thomas
Gainsborough painting.
All in all, this exhibition is a triumph for Perry and a
real coup for sunderland, though I’m not sure it will boost tourism to the
town. My only moment of sadness was on realising that Alan Measles hadn’t been
involved…
Books:
Unlike last time, when I’d only managed to leaf through a
couple of texts, I’ve done quite well this last while in the reading stakes;
some of the stuff I’ve ploughed through has been rubbish like. I don’t know
what it is with comedians, but what may seem hilarious when delivered live or
on film, can seem flat and banal on the page; for instance, Harry Hill’s spoof
diary for the year 2010, Livin’ the Dreem was both painful
and pitiful to read. Frankly, it is definitely the worst book I’ve read this
year and I honestly did not even smile once; rather than amusement, boredom and
a vague sense of irritation were the primary emotions it engendered. If the
Hill effort was irritating, then the scrapings from the bottom of Spike
Milligan’s creative barrel, Box 18 (so named as this was the
number of the Lever Arch File in his study that contained all his unfinished
ideas) was actually quite upsetting. Obviously some of Milligan’s work,
especially Puckoon, the War Memoirs and the Q series were some of the
most hilarious, anarchic comic moments I can recall from my childhood, even if The
Goon Show leaves me completely cold (an age thing I guess); I do wonder
if Milligan’s reputation would have been enhanced by the production or
publication in his life time of these vague, meandering sketches and stories.
Clearly his bi-polar condition affected his self-criticism at many times, but
even he must have realised that a great number of the letters he submitted to
newspapers were curmudgeonly, mean-spirited and decidedly socially intolerant,
especially in his later days. This depressing collection did absolutely nothing
to advance his memory in my eyes; a thoroughly dispiriting read.
If Milligan was part of my childhood comedy memories, then
The Clancy Brothers were avowedly part of my childhood musical ones. With my
mother downsizing to a retirement apartment, there is a great deal of personal
clutter to be removed from the family home before she finally leaves. I’ve done
my part by accepting some of the decent music (my dad’s Irish folk collection),
but other stuff will have to go to landfill, such as the 70 James Last LPs she inherited
from my late aunt in 2008; actually that was all she inherited from her sister,
as my sister pocketed the rest of it and wouldn’t give anyone the skin off her
shite, never mind the money my aunt had borrowed from my dad. Still, that’s
between my sister and her conscience now I guess, though it’s noticeable she
didn’t visit my dad’s grave on his anniversary, choosing instead to read some
of her embarrassing attempts at poetry to 40 ego-massaging non-entities in The
Ballarat that night instead…
As well as records by The Dubliners and The Clancy Brothers,
I reclaimed the last book I ever bought my dad (well, there were only two; the
other being Angela’s Ashes which he proclaimed “canny”); this book is The
Men Behind the Sweaters by Connor Murphy, which is a dreary chronology
of The Clancy Brothers, their lives and careers. It’s lavishly illustrated with
a series of blurred black and white photos, includes hundreds of statistical
errors and inaccurate comments about Irish history and geography, as well as
being blessed by containing not a single quotation from any member of the band.
Frankly I can understand why my dad didn’t rate this one as “canny,” but as
“alreet.” The other book I’ve recently read that is set in Ireland was my
friend John McQuaid’s beautiful and evocative tribute to his late wife Mary’s
illness and death from cancer; A Very Special Lady is a very
special book and a deeply fitting tribute to a wonderful person. I feel
privileged to have been given a copy.
I was lucky to have been donated a couple of thoroughly
enjoyable sports books recently; firstly Harry Pearson gave me a copy of his
devotional text to the dying art of medium pace bowling, The Trundlers, which I
found to be fascinating and educational, as my knowledge of cricket prior to
1970 is sketchy at best. Not having read any of Harry’s last 5 books, I note
that is style his now much more factual rather than replete with comic asides;
perhaps this is a sign of either his maturity (I’m joking) or the more serious
discipline required for cricket writing. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed this
book and his prose style, meaning I may just investigate those books of his I
missed out on. “Fascinating and educational” would also be how I would describe
Paul Brown’s labour of historical love, The Victorian Football Miscellany,
which intricately details the lives, decisions and places that helped to shape
the game we all love so much. The men, clubs and grounds detailed within this
volume are long dead and in many instances long forgotten, but Paul’s book gives
them a fitting valediction and makes the early players, administrators and
managers more than just a dusty footnote in history. This is the ideal book for
those who still believe football began with the advent of Sky TV and The Premier
League in 1992.
There were some serious novels to be read as
well; while Roddy Doyle’s The Guts came out just too late to be included in this
round-up, I did read the eagerly anticipated Red or Dead by David
Peace. While his fame may have been assured by the furore surrounding The
Damned United and, in retrospect, the utterly bizarre film based on the
book, and while the stylistically brilliant but challenging and, as yet
incomplete, Tokyo trilogy may have split critical opinion, it is my
contention that 5 of the most important contemporary British novels are Peace’s
Red
Riding Quartet and his coruscating account of the Miners’ Strike, GB84
that provides an unremittingly bleak but completely honest portrayal of the
fascist Police State that was Britain under Thatcher. Consequently it is
something of a disappointment to discover that his account of Bill Shankly’s
life, from assuming the role of Liverpool manager in late 1959 until his
relatively early death in 1981, is by turns a monotonously repetitive, almost
self-parodic series of exhaustive match reports and a mawkishly sentimental
hagiographic veneration of an undeniably talented football manager. It is a
moot point, but as an aside I’d say both Bob Paisley and Alex Ferguson subsequently
outdid Shankly’s achievements as a manager in the English game; the latter is
also much more real as a figure in the modern game as Shankly, almost 40 years
retired and over 30 dead, is almost receding into the historical distance the
way Herbert Chapman, Major Frank Buckley or Alf Ramsey did for my generation.
Of course, like Chapman, Shankly’s early days in management
involved a spell at the old Leeds Road home of Huddersfield Town, the team that
David Peace supports. Heartwarmingly, he is taking his role as a supporter
seriously by attending their home game with QPR on August 10th. How
do I know this? David Peace told me in the rarefied environs of Durham Castle
for the event that marked the launch of Durham Book Festival; it wasn’t quite
the basement of Millgarth Police Station in Leeds in the mid-1970s, but it was
the best I could do.
On a blindingly hot and beautifully sunny, first Wednesday
in August, I lashed out £20 on a ticket to hear David Peace read. To be fair,
there were 4 free canapés (Northumberland Blue cheese and organic leek mini
tartlets and peppered chorizo and rocket on mini focaccia) and a glass of
Prosecco each; “one glass is no fucking use to me, sonna” as I said to the
barman before liberating an unclaimed brace of fizz, one having been discarded
after a fly drowned in it. Mind, looking around the room before the start I
wished I’d brought a carry-out with me; still, I suppose if these were the
beautiful people, I no longer felt quite so ugly. Most of the NE literary set
were augmented by a Durham academic elite who appeared to have been sculpted by
Fluck and Law, then provided with a script by Chris Morris; Hosannah Bell and
Nathan Barley in real life.
The event kicked off with some functionally illiterate 23
stone Labour councillor speed babbling a few shallow inanities at 78rpm, before
this American bloke who is on an Arts Council sinecure as writer-in-residence
for the Ashes (!!) announced how pleased he was to be there. I suppose with
expenditure like that, it is why the Lindisfarne Gospels are free to see at the
British Museum but a tenner a pop up here; shameful. Next up, last year’s
Durham Book Festival writer-in-residence Linda France, read a fabulous poem
about ants in Australia, before the camp and dull Stevie Ronnie droned on for
20 minutes about a trip to the Arctic, and then read 2 shit stanzas; the
creative urge and how to avoid it…
Finally David Peace appeared, initially to introduce the
shortlist for the fascinating and entirely praiseworthy Gordon Burn Memorial Prize
that he is judging, before reading two sections from Red or Dead. His flat
Yorkshire monotone has been untamed by years away from home and it helped to
pay tribute to the cadences and inflections occasioned by the repetitive
structures of the language in this novel; aloud, rather than on the page, the
hypnotic, almost Nymanesque and scarcely perceptible changes in word patterns
and patterning struck home with genuine poignancy. Perhaps Red or Dead’s effect is a
cumulative one, borne from 270,000 words of dense semi-poetic, semi-banal
prosody.
Peace’s most fascinating insight was how the relentless
depiction of evil in his work has had a draining effect on his demeanour; his
candour explained his need to write about a “good” man in Shankly, who affected
Peace’s psyche as he grew by being both a Huddersfield Town legend and “at
whatever simplistic level” a socialist. The event was then curtailed by someone
fainting and the need for half a dozen busybodies to bring glasses of water at
near hysteria levels. As Waterstone’s were sponsoring the
event and urging people to buy books, I realised I’d need to jump in quick if I
wanted a word with Peace. Ignoring protocol, I presented him with my pre-owned copy
of GB84,
mouthed some glib, fawning platitudes about football and evil, and then wished
The Terriers all the best against QPR, while he signed it for me. He came
across as a genuine, interesting man and someone I would love to spend time
talking to again.
However, Peace’s work is as a novelist and it is by this criterion
we must judge Red or Dead. While the final 200 pages of the novel, if one
accepts that Peace is intent on venerating Shankly, are genuinely engaging and
affectingly elegiac, showing a man utterly cut adrift from life when work is
removed from the equation, these interesting aspects of Shankly’s otiose final
days do not make up for the frankly boring opening 513 pages. Peace is a master
stylist, who managed in the Tokyo novels to engage in an
anti-Platonic dissociation between sign and signifier, whereby language became
redundant as a medium for presenting messages and meaning itself. Unfortunately,
Peace’s attempt at hypnotic patterning in language, presumably as an attempt to
show the driven nature of Shankly’s personality and the cyclical nature of the
game, fails and it comes across as almost laughably unconvincing and, sadly,
dull. Many readers have admitted to skim
reading large sections of the book; this is the greatest condemnation of
Peace’s work imaginable.
While I am tempted to reread GB84 every few months and
remain genuinely excited by future Peace projects, such as the final instalment
of the Tokyo trilogy, UKDK his account of the fall of
Harold Wilson and The Yorkshire Rippers about Geoffrey Boycott, I am afraid that Red
of Dead will take its place on my bookshelf and remain there, as
forgotten as Shankly is, outwith his dwindling band of worshippers.
Music:
Somewhat surprisingly, during the period since my last music
blog, I’ve only obtained 1 new release, which was gifted to me by my mate Chris
Tait (Happy Birthday for 9th August; you’re still 2 days older than
me!!). It is the Australia 6-track EP by The New Mendicants, who are Norman
Blake from Teenage Fanclub and Joe Pernice from The Pernice Brothers. Unsurprisingly
considering who it features, the harmonies are as beautiful as the tunes and it
augers well for their forthcoming album. The EP begins with a thoroughly
convincing and beautifully executed cover of This Time by INXS and
includes versions of Norman’s trademark number I Don’t Want Control of You
and The Pernice Brothers’s track Amazing Glow, as well as three gorgeous
new compositions: Follow You Down, High on the Skyline and the closing highlight
of the whole release, Sarasota that is as glorious and
fragile a slice of articulate, harmony driven pop you could wish to hear.
Certainly a 2013 highlight for me.
Sadly, I didn’t get to see The New Mendicants on tour,
mainly because their Glasgow date coincided with a must-see for Laura and I;
Trembling Bells with Mike Heron, late of the Incredible String Band, at Sage 2.
Having just managed to get over the disappointment of the cancellation of
Trembling Bells at Morden Tower at the end of June, there was no way I was
going to miss this. Obviously, I knew what to expect from Trembling Bells, but
I felt I needed a brush up on the Incredible String Band, so I bought The
5,000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion in preparation. Rather like
the Dr. Strangely Strange CDs I bought back in January, it had that wigged-out,
beardy-weirdy, late 60s hippy folk vibe to it. The strange thing is that
Heron’s collaborator Robin Williamson (not Mike’s dad….) has that odd Stewey
from Family
Guy vocal phrasing thing going on in his songs, rather similar to
certain Dr. Strangely Strange numbers, while Mike Heron’s are somewhat more
straightforward. That is in the context of the times of course as The
Hedgehog Song is one of the maddest, trippiest numbers I’ve ever come
across.
The night before the Sage gig, Mike Heron fell over and
broke his arm, meaning he couldn’t play guitar. Just as well Mike Hastings is a
musical genius, like all of the Bells (Alex’s drum work tonight deserved an
encore all of his own; in fact he deserved an Oscar), and could fill in both
lead and rhythm. The first number saw the lanky Scotsman having to almost limbo
dance his way through the harmonica solo as his mic stand collapsed, but it
wasn’t the only Spinal Tap moment of the evening; when the Bells took a spell
off stage to allow Heron and his daughter, who played keyboards, to take centre
stage, this ended in hilarity as the duo got lost trying to find a way off and
ended up wandering in to the disabled toilet. So much for a spine-tingling end
to the set.
However, I’m pleased to say the gig was an absolute gem,
with the particular highlights being Lavinia’s magnificent take on Williamson’s
Cold
Days of February, an almost soca version of The Hedgehog Song and the
absolute sold gold classic moment of Trembling Bells doing The Wide Majestic Aire; this
song must be released soon. Even better afterwards was grabbing a word with
Alex, Lavinia and Mike and being presented with one of the exquisite
hand-printed posters Lavinia had designed for the tour that deserve a mention
in the art section of this blog; an absolute treasure that I was humbled to
accept. I love this band.
I bought the ISB album on Monday 1st July, which
is Canada Day; consequently, I also got myself a plug for a gaping hole in my
music collection and invested in Blue by Joni Mitchell at the same
time. By popular acclaim, Blue is regarded as one of the
finest 50 albums of all time and that is a verdict I will not deviate from.
Though it is 42 years old, it is as fresh and fragrant as when first released;
simply put, I could listen to this album straight through three times in a row
and not tire of it. People claim they have listened to it frequently since it
was released and constantly find new things to adore about it; the slide guitar
on This
Flight Tonight, hidden depth in the lyrics to Carey, the poignancy of The
Last Time I Saw and the amazing vocal dexterity of A Case of You are all
instances in point. If you don’t own this album, please go out and buy it; only
£3 in HMV.
I’ve only been to one other gig of late; Jon Langford at the
Americana Festival at the Sage the Sunday after Trembling Bells. However, I’ve
only missed one gig I wanted to see though; Jon Langford at The schooner the
Saturday after Trembling Bells. I’ve only been to one other art show; Jon
Langford’s exhibition of his paintings of country and western influenced
musical heroes at the Sage as part of the Americana Festival, when Laura
spoiled me for my birthday by buying me his painting of Gram Parsons. I also
put my hand in my pocket to buy Jon’s wonderfully anarchic, bellowing cowpunk tour de force All the Fame of Lofty Deeds CD,
on which he’d based much of his acoustic set. While he did a couple of bars of Never
Been in a Riot, I was out of luck in my request of Corporal Chalkie. In all
seriousness though, it was both a great set (we did get Millionaire and Wild
& Blue from The Mekons) and a great afternoon. Jon has promised
that The Mekons will be back here soon, not having last appeared in the city
since February 1994.
The free Americana Festival is always a highlight of the
Tyneside summer season. We took a picnic and plenty of booze, meeting up with
friends like Garry and Deborah from growing up in Felling days and several lads
from Winstons, meaning that I simply don’t recall any of the other acts.
Indeed, we were in The Central Bar awaiting a taxi by the time Tom Russell
closed the show. At 6pm… However, after my birthday I’ll have the Gram Parsons
painting to remember the day by, along with the CD; the autobiographical Sputnik
57, the biographical Nashville Radio and the affecting
cover of Homburg make this an excellent purchase. I intend to search out
more of Mr Langford’s solo career.
I did the same with Cornershop; following Ben’s insistence
on hearing all their early 7” vinyl releases, I went on their website to
purchase what they had going cheap; a one sided 7” The Roll Off Characteristics of
History in the Making for him and the fantastic Battle of New Orleans EP for me. I love the idea of Tjinder Singh doing
a down-home truckers C&W recipe song on Houston Hash, as well as
paying homage to Lonnie Donegan on The Battle of New Orleans. A great,
fun release and well worth £2 of anyone’s money!! Go to www.cornershop.com to find out more…
That’s it for this bulletin; I’ll be back early in the
season of mists and mellow fruitfulness with more consumerist crap.
