The Book Tower

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.