Last Sunday I dashed home from a weekend away in order to catch the end of the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage. To be honest I didn’t really have high hopes about the closing set by Blur. Although a big fan in their heyday, I never thought they managed to recapture the brilliance of the Parklife album, and I eventually lost interest in them after the departure of Graham Coxon. However, with Coxon back in their ranks the reunion was something of an event and I confess that Sunday evening did become rather special. No new material, and I counted at least seven songs in the set from Parklife (including the inevitable walk on from Phil Daniels). But they were on fine form, and Damon Albarn, garbed in his black Fred Perry, worked the crowd with aplomb. The sense of occasion was further heightened by some enthusiastic Blur related activity on Twitter. In fact whatever the event, be it Blur or Wimbledon, I find I can’t resist the Twitter allure. But that’s for a different post.
It was good to see Blur again. Although, despite my continued enthusiasm for 80s and 90s bands, I try not to wallow in nostalgia too much. I’ve followed the post-Blur careers of both Albarn and Coxon and think they have produced their best work in this later period. Perhaps their best is still to come. There’s a new Gorillaz album on its way from Damon and Graham recently released his The Spinning Top album. This is easily the best thing he’s done to date, a folksy record that recalls Syd Barrett and Nick Drake with a nod to Coxon’s pal Paul Weller. It’s a mature piece that shows how far he’s travelled since the days of Girls and Boys, Tracy Jacks and Badhead (although I must point out that this last song is one of my all time favourites).
People tell me that I’m the age now where I ought to be listening to Radio 2. Actually, I’ve been tuning in for years although I’m becoming increasingly despondent with the music they play. It’s the nostalgia thing again, and I wonder how long they can continue to play Blondie and Abba records and expect people to happily accept it. It isn’t that there is a case against the current crop of pop stars. Actually I think the opposite.
Recently I have enjoyed three recent releases that stand up to all of the pop music before them. Ladyhawke, which came out last year, are a New Zealand band who surpass the likes of Blondie with good pop music. It’s retro stuff, recalling the 80s and in parts the sound of Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac, but a highly infectious album. My two other recent discoveries can also be described as 80s retro. Both have been hyped quite a lot; easily justified although I hope it doesn’t harm their careers at this early stage. This is the weird thing I can’t resolve; although I am bored with nostalgia my current favourites all recall the period when I was young and started getting into music. It’s a paradox, but a pleasant one.
Hands by Little Boots is a very commercial album, so much so that it has invited criticism, although commercial pop is no bad thing when the songs are so good. There’s also an excellent guest appearance from Phil Oakey, which is worth the price of admission alone. Little Boots has often been lumped together with La Roux. I can see why; their self titled debut has many similarities although I think it has a harder edge and is slightly less accessible. It recalls the weirder side of Soft Cell and, again, The Human League. In the old days, I would imagine Janice Long playing Little Boots with John Peel going for La Roux. Little Boots or La Roux? I can’t recommend either enough. So I suggest buying both.
Whatever your tastes, and if you agree with mine or not, I’m content to be discovering new music in 2009. Especially being the same advanced age as Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. Rock on.
But the thing in her hand was not quite silent, after all. As she raised the cup to her ear she could hear, coming from it, a faint, moist susurration – as if wet silk, or something fine like that, were being slowly and haltingly drawn through the tube. The sound, she realised with a shock, was that of a laboured breath, which kept catching and bubbling as if in a narrow, constricted throat. In an instant she was transported back, twenty-eight years, to her first child’s sickbed. She whispered her daughter’s name – ‘Susan?’ – and the breathing quickened and grew more liquid. A voice began to emerge from the bubbling mess of sound: a child’s voice, she took it to be, high and pitiful, attempting, as if with tremendous effort, to form words.
The Little Stranger was my introduction to Sarah Waters, and I have come away very impressed. Her latest novel is a brilliantly written study of the shifting changes in the English post-war class system. It is beautifully paced, full of subtle observations and quite simply a pleasure to read. It is also one of the most effective, chilling and original ghost stories I have read for some time. I finished The Little Stranger a few days ago but, still thinking it through, I have been unable to start a new book.
Hundreds Hall is a crumbling mansion and we find it in disrepair just after the war. The Ayers family, mother son and daughter, are struggling to keep alive the dusty rooms and prevent their home sinking more and more into decay. The middle aged Doctor Faraday narrates the story, which begins when he is called to attend to one of the few servants the Ayers can cling onto. Their maid, feigning sickness, claims to Faraday that the house is haunted. Whilst he dismisses this belief, Faraday is slowly drawn into the Ayers world and the family are indeed revealed to be haunted, although Waters is clever enough not to reveal the true cause of their resulting anguish and tragedy.
And being a very intelligent and clever novel makes The Little Stranger such an achievement. Waters creates an intriguing narrator in Faraday, a middle aged man who at first appears to be dull, lifeless and set in his ways who begins to slowly reveal a deep resentment for his working class origins and a fascination with the Ayers family that grows more uneasy with every page. The book has received few criticisms but one of them is its lack of likeable characters. The Ayers family are indeed odd; the eccentric and nervous brother who eventually loses his mind, the plain and frumpy sister who Faraday slowly begins to fall for. Faraday himself is almost a misfit, a tense and unimaginiative loner, but I found them all fascinating. And fascination, and obsession, is something that makes this novel tick.
The Thirteenth Tale has been cited as a comparison to this novel and I can see why; The Little Stranger is certainly as good. I also thought of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, which constantly taunt the reader with seemingly supernatural events then only to wring out the fantastic and reveal the rational reasoning behind them. The Little Stranger taunts in similar ways, with many spooky scenes that Faraday urges the reader to dismiss as thinking the work of ghosts. They are still chilling though; the sudden fire in the house, creeping irrational madness, strange childlike writing on the walls, mysteriously locked doors, footsteps forever out of sight. It’s all so well crafted you begin to secretly hope that there is a ghost at work, although Waters ultimately delivers something far more subtle and imaginitive.
The Little Stranger kept me gripped right to the end of its 500 pages. The ending, which I was expecting to reveal a twist, was far from the conclusion I was expecting. But on reflection I think that Sarah Waters delivered a masterly ending, and one that had me rereading it several times, along with the novel’s opening and several other key scenes. This is an ambiguous book, where the reader cannot firmly conclude on the role of the supernatural or if there really was one at all, but for this reason I found the almost uncomfortable outcome all the more unsettling. And it’s one I’m still deciding about. I cannot recommend this novel highly enough.
When I was aged 14 I asked for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album for one of my Christmas presents. It was already quite a few years old at the time, but a friend and I had decided to form a band and were plundering classic records for ideas (I forget what he was getting that Christmas, possibly a Who album). My mother had hidden Ziggy Stardust somewhere in the house and one December lunchtime, the place empty, I decided to try and find it. Although she hid it well it didn’t take me long to find the album, concealed amongst her jazz LPs. This was somewhere I never ventured, hating jazz and the music I was often forced to put up with as a background noise. But there, sandwiched between the Ella Fitzgerald, was Bowie.
Like Simon Armitage, I’ve tried to get a grip on jazz and try to like it over the years but have always failed. Also like him, I’ve always much preferred the music I was told I’d grow out of. But I never did grow out of the likes of The Smiths, and I probably never will. In his musical memoir Gig, Armitage also has an enduring Bowie memory, where his father shows a not untypical reaction to the androgyny of Ziggy:
As I walked through the living room with Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars under my arm, he pointed at it with the mouth-end of his pipe. ‘What’s that then?’ And he’d obviously heard of the man and his music, because when I told him, he said, ‘David Bowie? He’s a homosexual.’
My mother probably had a similar attitude, although ten years after Ziggy Stardust was first released she had at least mellowed enough to buy me the album.
Gig documents Armitage’s enduring obsession with a number of bands that include The Smiths, The Fall, The Cocteau Twins, The Blue Nile and The Wedding Present. Most of them are still going strong today, and he writes about seeing many of them perform live in recent years. He also meets a few of his icons, not always with satisfying results. As a responsible adult and parent, Armitage is like me still excited by the music that inspired him as a youth. He writes very amusingly about the cantankerous Mark E. Smith of The Fall, muses on the brilliance of Liz Frazer of The Cocteau Twins and ruminates rather movingly on a Morrissey concert. Again, it is his father who turns enjoying the music of Moz into a guilty pleasure:
‘So who is it you’ve been to see?’
He knows.
‘Morrissey.’
‘Who’s he then?’
He knows.
‘He was in the Smiths.’
‘And what did they ever do?’
He genuinely doesn’t know the answer to this question, though he does know how much I liked them, and therefore that I’ll protest too much and in all probability collapse under cross-examination. I can’t believe I’m debating indie guitar music with my dad, but I’ve swallowed the bait and I am.
Although a successful and acclaimed poet (he’s on the GCSE syllabus) Simon Armitage laments the fact that he never made it as a musician. His dream is to be or be like David Gedge, the kitchen sink songsmith fronting the thrashy guitared Wedding Present, everyone’s second favourite band as he puts it. I can understand why as well; being an ordinary guy in many ways an ordinary band Gedge is oddly appealing. He’s also an artist who’s kept at it now for two decades with an enduring fanbase and a strange kind of enviable respect. I agree with Armitage. I’d sooner be David Gedge than Bono any day.
But like mine the Armitage electric guitar stayed mostly unstrummed, or unthrashed, eventually being packed off to a buyer on eBay. The dream sort of comes true towards the end of Gig, however, when he forms a musical duo called The Scaremongers although, strangely, I would have preferred it is Simon had remained the musical bystander. He’s best as the commentator and the dreamer.
In addition to the musical ones, Gig follows some of the poetic, describing his role as a literary performer. Armitage also writes about the lengths he goes to to find inspiration. A trip on a mail train to help shape his excellent poem The Last Post, a visit to Surtsey and work inside prisons to produce his series of films for Channel 4. He’s a likeable man with a witty and self-deprecating sense of humour. Most of all, even in a mostly prose book such as this, a strikingly imaginative voice.
As well as collections of poems, Simon Armitage has also written two novels Little Green Man and The White Stuff. Whilst I enjoyed the first the second was a little disappointing, and the essay-structured yet informal Gig is the kind of book he writes best. In many ways it is similar to his All Points North, which is reissued as a companion to this and is also worth catching.
As a footnote, my mother decided to get rid of her vinyl collection a few years ago. She’d completed the transition to CD and was about to move house, so the heavy collection of LPs had to go. I was invited to take my pick from them before they were hurded off to a car boot sale. Alas I found no Bowie there, not even my missing Cocteau Twins albums hiding between the Stan Getz. After flicking through I took away a couple of Frank Sinatra records. But the reality still is: I don’t like jazz.
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