The Book Tower

This is a brief review of some of my favouite music from the last year, a year when I found myself downloading just as much music as I bought in the shops. My favourite two albums of the year however were both hard copies, Back to Black by Amy Winehouse and Favourite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys. I’ve come late to the music of the Arctic Monkeys, and Gordon Brown was already declaring that he liked them before I’d even heard any of their songs. But FWN has become one of my most played albums lately, and I think Flourescent Adolescent is a brilliant little pop song, up there with Up the Junction and Lady Madonna.

The good: The Arctic Monkeys

2007 was the year I feared the worst for myself. Waking up in the middle of the night panicking that I had become mainstream with my musical tastes. There’s no denying it, Amy Winehouse and the Artctic Monkeys are now both musical mainstream. I even quite like James Blunt. So I was relieved to find that I really, really like The Young Knives and their album Voices of Animals and Men. This was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize but lost out to The Klaxons. I haven’t heard The Klaxons album, so I can’t comment, but it must be pretty good to be judged better than The Young Knives. They’re a weird bunch, I can’t deny that, although not by Mercury standards. And any band from the excellently named Ashby de la Zouch who have a band member called House of Lords gets the thumbs up from me.

The mad: The Young Knives

In the last year I also continued to keep a close watch on Damon Albarn, and his The Good The Bad and The Queen project was a masterpiece. His old mucker (or should that be mocker?) Graham Coxon released a criminally ignored EP together with Paul Weller called This Old Town. Other favourites were Thirst for Romance by Cherry Ghost and Yours Truly, Angry Mob by The Kaiser Chiefs. However, I may have saved the best till last. Although I only bought it yesterday, An End Has a Start by Editors is already shaping up to be something special. if you like dark, serious, emotional stuff then this is it.

The scary: Editors

My favourite bands aren’t the most photogenic. I’m glad of that.

And at last I’ve found a job where they let us listen to music in our quieter moments. Until next year, happy listening…

Comment

As a fan of Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy I was looking forward to The Golden Compass, the film of the first instalment Northern Lights. After seeing it, I wasn’t disappointed or let down, but I wasn’t excited either. It’s something of a Goldilocks film, just okay, and I’m not sure if this makes The Golden Compass good, acceptable or only mediocre.

It was my fantasy film expectations that were eventually satisfied more than my literary ones. The special effects were very good, especially the cinematic realisation of Pullman’s daemons, where the people in his alternative world are accompanied by the animal embodiment of their souls. Like the novels, what at first comes across as weird and unsettling is in fact very easy to get used to. By the end of the film you will be looking for the daemon of every new character you see, and judging that very character by their daemon. You will be wary of the ones with dogs or wolves, suspicious of the man with a grasshopper, respectful for Lord Asriel’s leopard and fearful of Mrs Coulter’s monkey.

Nicole Kidman brought life to the Mrs Coulter, who has already lived in my imagination for a long time. From the moment we see her I knew she was going to get the characterisation right, both for me and and for anybody who hadn’t read the books. Kidman let you know right away that Mrs Coulter was one to watch out for. In the cinema, my daughter leant over to me and whispered “she’s bad, isn’t she?” and The Golden Compass does exceed with its choice of cast. There’s the usual company of skilled British thesps, including the excellent Tom Courtenay, Jim Carter and Derek Jacobi. Even Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee, who you would think are growing bored with this sort of thing, make their contribution. But its the lesser knowns who are good too such as Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra. With a bad Lyra this would have been nothing more than a Christmas turkey.

What is strange about The Golden Compass is its confidence that today’s cinema audience can expect their entertainment to be episodic. Weaned on Tolkein and Harry Potter, they consume their films in instalments and, being the first of three, this opening to The Dark Materials goes nowhere. We are literally left up in the air. What’s even stranger is the casting of Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel. Something of cinema’s golden boy since Casino Royale (but a very fine actor nevertheless), you would expect him to have made more than the couple of the brief appearances he makes. No more than a days work for Mr Craig, who still manages, strangely, to have a shave halfway through the film. Was there a continuity problem, or will his loss of beard be explained in the next film?

The Golden Compass has been accused of toning down its take on theology, and coming to it straight from The God Delusion I was interested in seeing what truth there was in this. The answer is that I really don’t think there’s a place for such intellectual and philosophical debate in a family film, and anyway – it’s all there for you to read into. The Magesterium and authority, those who question it and are themselves questioned when they decide to seek out the real truth. Science and religion, those old chestnuts. I’m glad this film didn’t try to spell out any message too much. I was far too busy cowering from Nicole Kidman.

As I’ve said, this could have been more polished and accomplished but it could also have been far, far worse. It’s a film that would have been difficult to imagine pre Lord of the Rings, but it’s also a film that takes this genre (literary fantasy?) and pushes it a touch further forward in terms of visual spectacle. I just hope it’s successful enough to allow the next two books in the trilogy to be filmed, otherwise it will remain an inconsequential oddity. And by the way, don’t rush out of the cinema at the end and stick around for Lyra, the rather excellent theme song from Kate Bush.

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So onto my pick of the older books I’ve enjoyed in the last year, where I’ve made a point of reading several authors I’ve always had in the back of my mind. The most prominent of these was probably Mervyn Peake, and I managed to complete the whole of the Gormenghast trilogy early in the year. I also made a point of catching up with Graham Greene. The other two authors I read several books by were both new to me – Cormac McCarthy and Neil Gaiman. Two writers who couldn’t be more different, but there’s diversity for you.

My non-new favourites of 2007, in no particular order:

• Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake (although to be brutally honest, I can give or take part three)
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
• The Outsider by Albert Camus
• In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu

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