The Music's All That Matters (First Impression)

I’ve been reading one of my Christmas presents The Music’s All that Matters by Paul Stump (revised edition Harbour 2010), an engrossing examination of that most maligned thread in ‘rock’s rich tapestry’ Progressive Rock, or prog as it seems to be called these days. I have to confess that in my early teens, along with a large proportion of my male peers, this was my preferred listening from around 1971 to 1977 and I owned many of the records mentioned in the book. Memories were evoked of the soon-to-be-passed-around album (the most immediately recognisable being In the Court of the Crimson King) ostentatiously carried around school. It has to be added that during that time one or two school chums also introduced me to the Velvet Underground, Parliament/Funkadelic (I was in the stalls for their show at Hammersmith Odeon in December 1978 - what a riot that was) and dub reggae; things really weren’t as black and white as they were often subsequently painted.

Since the turn of the century my tastes have gravitated back to some of this music – there is somewhat less critical opprobrium heaped upon it these days and many groups I’ve heard have definitely been influenced by it, some of whom I like: bits of Mew, Jaga Jazzist, Sigur Ros, some I’m not so keen on: Muse, Radiohead, Elbow.

Stump’s analysis of many of the lps (Prog was ‘album music’ par excellence) is informed by musical knowledge and a familiarity with twentieth century classical composers, many of whom are new names to this reader. He also makes the point that the vast majority of rock ‘music critics’ then, as now, are woefully bereft of any technical knowledge of music and retained a preference for blues based tunes; even today most of them prefer to analyse the lyrics rather than tackle the thorny issue of how the music actually sounds or achieves its effects; from their ranks, possibly the late Steven Wells succeeded best in his manic metaphor and adjective strewn hyperbole, unfortunately the records he championed were invariably awful – Skunk Anansie anyone??

Stump also makes a good case for prog as the perfect musical form of postmodernism, especially in its 80s incarnation (I had jumped ship by then, never hearing the likes of Pallas, Twelfth Night or IQ, although I did go and see Marillion when I was bored one night in Rome in 1985 – whatever you may think of them, and I was never a fan, I suppose you have to admire their audacity for flying directly in the face of fashion). The effect of Live Aid in boosting the careers of many rock bands that had almost been written off at that point and concomitant rise of the cd also initiated the remaster/reissue industry, which kept the music business solvent for a couple more decades.

He charts the crossover into rave and ambient, principally by Steve Hillage and Gong and the far dodgier rise of New Age music to light an aromatherapy candle to. His in-depth knowledge of foreign prog has made me keen to hear some of the records, but experience has made me more resistant to many of their period charms. From his extensive list I’m interested in hearing Germany’s Anyone’s Daughter and Japan’s Mr Sirius.

There’s also an interesting, but probably superfluous, section on ‘Progressive telly’, obviously a personal obsession, mainly about children’s programmes, which featured pastoral, pagan and hippy themes, such as The Owl Service, Ace of Wands and Children of the Stones, which I remember and Sky and The Moon Stallion, which I don’t.

The best music books not only incorporate biography and analysis but also examine the business side of the equation and attempt to situate the musicians in their historical context. Stump emphasises the importance of the economic situation of the mid-seventies and the now largely forgotten fact that many British musicians and ‘celebrities’ were tax exiles, distancing them from their home fanbase – a crucial factor in the rise of punk. The increasing emphasis on technology meant that the bigger groups were locked into a ruinous circuit of acquisition of ever-more expensive and flashy equipment (especially keyboards), lighting rigs, and amplification for playing the huge stadia in the US market and spent longer periods of time in the studio honing their audio ‘masterpieces’. I recently read a quote from Kevin Godley saying that he and Lol Crème had been ensconced in the studio for so long creating their epic folie de grandeur Consequences that when they finally emerged in 1977 the musical landscape had totally changed and ‘everyone was wearing bondage trousers’; unsurprisingly the triple lp didn’t do well.

Bestsellers of 2010

Had a look at the Nielson Top 100 Bestsellers for 2010 in Saturday’s Guardian and didn’t find it quite as depressing as the lists from recent years. Stieg Larsson and Stephanie Meyer dominate the fiction – I already suspected that from a quick scan of the reading matter on any London bus or tube carriage.

At least the celebrity ‘autobiography’ fad seems now to be finally fading (no sign of Jordan) and ‘misery memoirs’ are no longer bestsellers (there will undoubtedly be enough misery to come in 2011). Similarly the ‘interesting trivia’ collections such as Schott’s Miscellany also appear to be a thing of the past. I felt a warm glow of satisfaction when I read that Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t feature at all, a similar fate befell Chris Evans’ heavily hyped autobiography, although no doubt it shifted thousands more copies than the new edition of my book and he trousered a considerably larger advance. The appalling Russell Brand’s Booky Wook 2 (truly a comic for our times) scraped in at No.97 but still made over £1million.

What is depressing for me is that a mere 18% of the total consists of non-fiction and that small percentage includes cookery books and autobiographies; only one history book, by Bill Bryson, and nothing on science and religion. I have no idea of my own book sales over the last year but, if the past is anything to go by, my earnings next year will continue their downward trend – and I’m an author who actually occasionally ventures out of his study to promote them; 190 people attending a talk does not necessarily translate into good sales.

There is also the personally dispiriting experience of seeing my books far less often on the shelves of the nation’s few remaining bookshops than I did even one or two years ago. I can remember the exhilaration and pleasure that I derived from walking past a bookshop in, say, Fleet Street and spotting Subterranean City, shortly after publication, in the middle of the window display; many of these shops now no longer exist. Supermarkets aggressively market the same small group of bestsellers and booksellers such as Waterstones have drastically pruned their stock of titles that only sell a handful each year. Amazon demands such huge discounts that many smaller publishers can no longer deal with them. There still seems to be a life for small publishers targeting a niche market in limited editions, but times are only going to get tougher as the generations that no longer read books gain dominance; at least I don’t have to rely on my writing to survive, unlike some scribes I know.

Records of the Year

From the huge amount of music released this year, only the tiniest fraction of which I actually heard, here are my favourites, in no particular order:

Field Music Measure
The Besnard Lakes ...Are the Roaring Night
Soundcarriers Celeste
Asaf Sirkis Trio Letting Go
Jane Weaver and Septieme Soeur The Fallen By Watch Bird
The Fall Your Future Our Clutter

Ghost story at Christmas

Note to those at the BBC who made' Whistle and I'll come to you', starring John Hurt and shown last night on Christmas Eve. If you're basing a drama on a very well-known short story ('Oh whistle and I'll come to you my lad') by one of the masters of the genre M R James, it's probably best to use the most effective elements of that tale: namely the relentless pursuit over the groynes of the beach by a mysterious figure and the final terrifying manifestation inside the bedsheets. If the film bears very little relation to the story you might have considered giving it an alternative title and then made a decent version of the original. Given that the ancient whistle found on the site of a Templar preceptory plays a major part in the story (and the title) it might have been a good idea to include it, especially as it apparently helps to 'whistle up' the wind and the apparition.

As a modern day story about the relationship of an elderly couple and the perils of Alzheimer's and loneliness it was pretty standard ghostly fare, but it could have been so much more - changing his profession from an academic to an astronomer added nothing apart from a joke about that old confusion with astrology and detracted considerably from the antiquarian bent of James's best stories. When he was booked into a double bed I pretty much gave up hope of even a vaguely faithful retelling of one of my favourite ghost stories. Despite some atmospheric moments (taken from the film The Haunting), a great disappointment. I never thought I would say this, but I much preferred the Jonathan Miller black and white interpretation with Michael Hordern.

Addendum 30 December: see also 'Who is this who is coming?' on the feuilleton blog from the list opposite

Tonight on Yesterday they are showing an entire evening of Nazi Collaborators, including a documentary on someone who ran an extermination camp in Lithuania - Merry Christmas.

New Year Rising

Once I am, hopefully, free of the midwinter torpor, I shall be able to make some plans for next year. The next event will be a talk for the Chelsea Society on Monday 10th January, snow and Southeastern trains permitting. A further underground-themed event may take place later in the year and perhaps one of my unpublished projects may finally see the light.

Storage

An interesting article by Stewart Lee - seen him at Fall concerts but never spoken to him - on the accumulation of archives of books, records and cds. I know the problem, I'm currently debating whether to buy yet another Billy bookcase or cull my books so that I don't need to. One of the most thought-provoking art installations I ever visited was the one in an empty C&A in Oxford street where the artist Michael Landy systematically destroyed all his possessions - I went 3 times, including the final evening when the very last things got the chop. It's only comparatively recently that I've acquired a large number of cultural artefacts, many of the cds have been given to me - I would find it difficult to lose them, but not impossible, I would like to think.

Lee also makes the point that all these media can be held on a small portable device these days, if most young men even want books any more and that he feels impossibly old fashioned; I get this feeling increasingly these days. There will be a dying race insulated behind their stacks of books and records; who will bother acquiring them when they're gone? It also means that those, like me, who like to determine a stranger's tastes and personality by scanning their book and record shelves will have an increasingly frustrating time (Facebook 'favourites' are no substitute).

Bad Writing

At this dark and gloomy time of the year I need something to cheer me up. I always derive schadenfreude from bad reviews (not of my own works of course, fortunately these are few - on the rare occasions when my books are reviewed). The new Christina Aguilera vehicle Burlesque seems to be this year's Christmas Turkey in the cinema (I watched Showgirls on telly a couple of years ago and it didn't seem as awful as I had been led to expect. although there were some choice scenes, mostly involving Kyle Maclachlan).

Probably my favourite book review is this one by Philip Henscher, makes me laugh every time; the book in question was heavily hyped in advance of publication and then disappeared rapidly. So intrigued was I that I went to a bookshop and leafed through it and indeed it was difficult to find a well written sentence anywhere within it.

I strive to ensure that my books are clearly written and I spend hours rewriting and proof reading, but errors always creep in, not always of my doing. Clearly I'm not alone in finding Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code the worst written bestseller I've ever read. Even the title really annoys me - art historians have always called him Leonardo and I've never heard of a 'symbologist'. The book is littered with incorrectly used words, poor grammar and the kind of sentences that would be rejected immediately in an evening class for aspiring writers. Mind you, he's done very well from it.

The bits that still stick in my mind are the occasion when someone at Scotland Yard picks up the phone and says, 'Hello, this is the London police' and the journey south from Biggin Hill airfield to London; it also seems to have been one of the first novels where the 'research' was pasted in from Wikipedia - see the description of the Louvre for example and don't get me started on the whole Templars, Holy Grail mish mash that overturned years of careful scholarship painstakingly debunking The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail construct. He also repeated the fallacy of millions of witches being executed in Europe in the middle ages which had been refuted by numerous academic works in the last 30 years.

Another writer who really irritated me when I read one of his novels was Colin Dexter: was it the use of 'hebdomodal' instead of 'weekly', or the sickening middle brow smugness of Inspector Morse as his eye roves his bookshelves and notes the intellectual tomes on display? I am not alone, as I've found on a site dedicated to poor penmanship. A contributor offers this from The Secret of Annexe 3:

"Soon the two friends were seated facing each other in the lounge bar, the surgeon resting his heavy-looking dolichocephalic skull upon his left hand.

But these minor worries could hardly compare with the consternation caused on the Monopoly front by a swift-fingered checker-out from a Bedford supermarket whose palm was so extraordinarily speedy in the recovery of the two dice thrown from the cylindrical cup that her opponents had little option but to accept, without ever seeing the slightest evidence, her instantaneously enunciated score, and then to watch helplessly as this sharp-faced woman moved her little counter along the board to whichever square seemed of the greatest potential profit to her entrepeneurial designs.

She could recall, quite certainly, clearing away after the soup course; picking up the supernumary spoons and forks that marked the place of that pusillanimous spirit from Solihull, Doris Arkwright; standing by in the kitchen as a Pork Normandy had slithered off its plate to the floor, to be replaced thither after a perfunctory wipe; drinking a third cocktail; dancing with the Lord High Executioner; eating two helpings of the gateau in the kitchen; dancing, in the dim light of the ballroom, a sort of chiaroscuro cha-cha-cha with the mysterious 'Rastafarian' - the latter having been adjudged the winner of the men's fancy-dress prize; telling Binyon not to be so silly when he'd broached the proposition of a brief dive beneath the duvet in her temporary quarters; drinking a fourth cocktail, the colour of which she could no longer recall; feeling slightly sick; walking up the stairs to her bedroom before the singing of 'Auld Lang Syne'; feeling very sick; and finally finding herself in bed."

That sentence would put Henry James to shame. More laughs can be had by reading Dexter's author blurb; it's because of that blurb that I keep my own short. I use it as a warning against pomposity.

Santa Con

I got caught up in the Santa Con 'celebrations' in central London yesterday evening around Leicester Square. This relatively new phenomenon is yet another American import which involves hundreds of people, mainly young, dressing up as Father Christmas, getting very drunk and shouting and singing in large groups in public places. It gets a mention in my Folklore of London book in Scott Wood's epilogue - I've personally witnessed it three times now, I admire the spirit of anarchism but with the recent events in central London I wonder whether the police took a stronger stance with the revellers this year.

SF

I read quite a bit of science fiction earlier this year. My favourites were Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds and Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatskii, the latter of course was filmed in 1979 as Stalker by Tarkovsky. Got it out from the library after reading the book and was very impressed - ok it was slow, but some of the images were stunning - especially the slow tracking shot over the water-covered floor towards the end. A moving documentary in the extras revealed that almost everyone involved with the film is dead. Thought the whole basic idea of Roadside Picnic was great - what if a vastly powerful intergalactic race just stopped off here for a quick break but left behind a contaminated area containing a collection of stunning technological wonders and deadly traps?

Obviously a lot of Ballard was devoured as well this year. For this reader much 'classic; science fiction seems very dated now or is so badly written that I just can't get into it - I wish it could be better. Apart from JGB the only other great writer I can think of in this genre is William Gibson or Burroughs if you count some of his stuff as SF - M John Harrison can also be included and mustn't forget Christopher Priest (another Hastings resident). Philip K Dick's ideas and outlook are fascinating, but I've found some of his books hard going - A Scanner Darkly is great, I thought The Man in the High Castle overrated. In some ways H G Wells has never been surpassed.

Worst book for me was one that has been voted best SF novel of all time in some places - Enders Game by Orson Scott Card - I think I'm probably 30 years too old for its thinly disguised right wing politics and queasy pseudo-mysticism that reminded me too much of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Winding down for 2010

Woke up last Wednesday to the thickest snow I have ever seen in Hastings (or the south east of England for that matter) - a foot high on the wall outside my study. Photo above taken from our front window. After a frustrating train trip (5 trains in 4 hours) last Friday I got to London for work. On my return on Saturday evening (3 trains in 4 hours) the snow had been washed away by heavy rain. The Wealds of Kent and Sussex received the worst weather.

In 2011 I intend to start up a further blog devoted to one topic and I'll try to get a few event ideas under way for the spring and summer. Any new writing will either go into the blogs or may end up in small one-off projects, given that I don't have the amount of concentrated writing time I once enjoyed.