Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Radio – Better, Longer, Less Often

Behind the scenes at Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Radio.

A recent dramatic development in the Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Radio office has been my decision to compile it monthly, rather than weekly, and make it two hours long instead of just one.  There are no particular reasons for this, other than I just felt like it.  And it’s my show and I’ll do what I want.  So there. (Not that it’s actually a radio show, it’s just a Spotify playlist.  But you’re not paying for it so just get off my back, ok?  Jesus, some people.)

Anyway, you can access it as always by clicking on the ‘FSRAR Radio’ link on the sidebar, that’s if you live in a country that’s a member state of the SU (Spotify Union).  I’m not putting them up on Share My Playlists for posterity any more as I’ve decided I find their ephemeral nature arousing.

I have to say that Spotify has pretty much re-ignited by love of music.  Before, I was suffering from a form of musical ennui.  My record collection would sit glaring at me from the corner of the room, angry at the tiny amount of time I now gave it.  Absorbing new CDs seemed like a chore, what with most releases now being approximately nine years long as artists widdled away, trying to fill in every available microsecond of the CD format.  The fact that I’d paid money for it made me persevere, even though I knew really that it wasn’t worth my time.

Spotify wipes all those problems away in a stroke.  There is no physical object, so the question of whether a particular album justifies its place in a limited storage space is redundant.  Also, the very fact that no money has changed hands for a particular recording means that there’s no incentive to get your money’s worth.  If something’s just not doing it for you, it can be deleted from your playlist and it need never bother you again.

(The crucial psychological difference between paid downloads and Spotify is that with the former, you’re cherry-picking, deciding what you might want from a sample.  There’s no room for reflection.  Spotify returns the listener to thinking about albums as a whole.  You can hear everything in the context the artist intended before making a judgement about how much you like it.)

That’s not to say Spotify doesn’t have it’s downside.  Even Spotify Premium doesn’t yet have CD-level sound quality, although I’m confident it’s only a matter of time before it’s on its way.  What is there already, however, has to be seen as a major improvement on your average MP3, which loses 90% of the digital information of its source.

MP3s are to CDs, I believe, what piss is to wine.  They have a particularly thin sound which is fantastically unlikable.  Pre-recorded cassettes may have sounded like mud most of the time, but at least it was a nice, friendly mud.  And yes I know vinyl has a warmth to it that can’t be found in any other medium blah blah fucking blah.

Other issues with Spotify are that it’s not entirely stable, with record companies mysteriously pulling down albums that have been put up, and some albums being available in some countries but not in others.  And, of course, it doesn’t need mentioning that the adverts featured on the free service will eventually drive someone to suicide or worse.

But overall, by making me think of music as a resource to be accessed rather than a thing to be owned, Spotify has reinvigorated my relationship with it.  I’m listening to things I never would have done before, for reasons far healthier than ‘it’s there’ or ‘I paid for it so I better bloody listen to the thing’.

It’s not ever going to make me feel like a teenager buying my first second-hand Bowie album again, but what it does do is give me a framework for listening to and thinking about music that feels more appropriate for an adult.  So, to quote the supremely irritating man who pops up every five songs (at least until I can afford Spotify Premium), ‘Thank you, Spotify, a hundred thank yous.’

Inconvenient Music Club: Robin’s Reign

In 1969, Robin Gibb left the Bee Gees.  Although they had just recorded their arguable masterpiece, the psychedelic epic Odessa, he and his brother Barry had clashed over the choice of A-side for their latest single, and Robin was rumoured to perhaps not be in the best of ways.

Nevertheless, his solo career got off to a flying start with his single, ‘Saved By the Bell’ going to no. 2 in the British charts.  The accompanying album, Robin’s Reign, with the lone Gibb brother standing in full Royal Guardsman’s regalia on the cover, did less well.  As always in the world of Inconvenient Music, there’s a reason for that.

A track-by-track analysis of the album would be pointless, as by and large they all do the same thing.  Never getting above mid-tempo, the mood is generally mournful, with relationships crumbling and hard facts faced at every turn.  Occasionally, whimsy breaks out, when the eponymous heroes of ‘Mother and Jack’ go to see the Emperor in order to stop their house being knocked down.

The album’s appeal isn’t really found in its songs, however, good though they are.  Ultimately, its most striking quality is its overall sound.  Drums are often absent, the beat kept instead by a primitive drum machine.  On top of this are thick string arrangements, and on top of that, a choir, all the members of which being one Robin Gibb, overdubbing himself, and on top of all that, Robin’s lead vocal, quivering with more vibrato than Marc Bolan sat on a washing machine.

Listening to the album is like bathing in a warm, thick, melancholy soup of sound.  It’s surprisingly relaxing, although you wouldn’t want any getting up your nose.

More than this, it feels like a tremendous act of will on Robin’s part; a fragile soul producing something eccentric and glorious because it simply has to.  It’s an orchestrated MOR answer to Skip Spence’s Oar and Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, although it never gets as excited as either.  The terminal heartbreak would later be echoed in the oeuvre of Daniel Johnston, while the funereal pace would be taken down a notch by the moribundly odd outsider musician Jandek.

Like Brian Wilson, Robin Gibb was, briefly, an outsider artist who operated on the inside of the music industry.  Then, while a second solo album Sing Slowly Sisters was left in the vaults, he rejoined the Bee Gees, and it would not be too long before disco changed their path forever.

With his brothers or by himself, Robin would never again make anything that touches on the strangeness of Robin’s Reign.  Long out of print, it still occasionally haunts car boot sales and record fairs, a reminder of a sad, sweet moment when the disco ball was definitely not spinning for Robin.

Learning From Edna Welthorpe

Some green ink, yesterday.

I’m trying to break a bad habit.  No, not the one you’re thinking of.  I have no intention of breaking that one, however shameful and disgusting you might think it is.  I mean, it’ s my life, isn’t it?  And it’s not like the anteater really feels anything…

No, the habit I am talking about is reading the comments underneath opinion pieces on newspaper websites.  I just can’t resist it.  If I read an article that’s even vaguely thought-provoking, I have to see what people are saying about it.  And often, what they seem to be saying can be roughly summarised as ‘GGGRRAAAARGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!’

After reading message upon message filled with bad feeling, intolerance and pure blind rage, the world often seems a bleaker, more cruel place than it did before.  But time after time I go back for more.  Yes, I have become addicted to green inkers.

The phrase ‘green inkers’ originated, of course, in the pre-internet age, when correspondence to newspapers of an overly angry, obsessional and seemingly deranged nature was observed to be for some weird reason to be often written in green ink.  These letters were generally treated at best as sources of humour for the recipients, or at worst inconveniences to be ignored.  They very rarely, however, made it to the letters page of any publication they were sent to.

With the arrival of the internet, all that changed.  Now, with the opportunity to add comments to articles, the green inkers could display their bile for all to see, as long as they stayed vaguely on topic and didn’t threaten to kill anybody.  Consequently, any attempt at expressing an opinion in a popular publication with an online presence is now often met with an awe-inspiring public wave of negativity, running from sneering contempt to the plain strangeness of paranoid thinking, where anything can be seen as part of a plot by the government to punish people with reggae, or make fun of people in wheelchairs through the medium of dance.

The upshot of this is that the green inkers now have a much louder voice than they’ve had since Mary Whitehouse had the ingenious idea of mobilising them as a campaigning army back in the sixties.  On the one hand, it’s a great demonstration of free speech, albeit one that can be quite grim to wade through.

It does, however, also create a false impression of what people actually think, while discouraging others of a more moderate and timid sensibility from saying anything at all.  It’s sometimes hard to remember, when reading these shrill missives, that the vast majority of people who read any given article aren’t going to bother commenting on it.  The views at the bottom of the page aren’t a cross-section of all the thoughts the piece has prompted.  It’s just a cross-section of the views of those who could be bothered to type something.

Now, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be lively debate, and the issue is complicated by the fact that even the broadsheets run opinion pieces and blog entries that are clearly designed to wind people up as much as possible (the late Steven Wells was a master of this, over at the Guardian music blog).  Also, sometimes the piece in question is so vile in itself that nothing but contempt is appropriate.  See: Jan Moir.

But wouldn’t it be great if, in general, it was all gone about in a more civilised way?  Then, many who might have something to say but are scared off by the sheer intensity of some posters’ style of expression might feel more inclined to put forward their thoughts.  The key, in my view, is to recognise the spirit in which something is written and respond in an appropriate manner.  For example, if some idiot journalist writes a thinly-veiled hate-piece about a minority group, tell them that their attitude is disgusting.  If, however, someone puts forward a thoughtfully constructed argument about an issue, the conclusion of which you happen to disagree with, just point out the flaws in their argument and present a counter-argument.  Don’t jump down their throats for daring to exist on the same planet as you whilst in the possession of an opinion that in some way differs from your own.

I was thinking about all this because I’ve been reading the diaries of the playwright Joe Orton.  While the diaries themselves contain some things that are unpalatable (No Joe, don’t sleep with underage Moroccan boys!), in the appendix you will find what I consider to be some of Orton’s finest achievements.  There, collected together are the various letters Orton wrote under the pseudonym of Edna Welthorpe.  In this guise, he wrote to various organisations, individuals and publications, railing against home shopping, raspberry pie filling, Juke Box Jury, and his own plays.

The Welthorpe letters are hysterical, because she is the ultimate green-inker.  Her world-view is blinkered, uncompromising and egomaniacal.  Because of this, she can never be satisfied.

This is worth remembering, I think, when navigating the reams of mean-spirited verbiage online.  There’s no way you could ever make these people happy.  They don’t seem to do happiness.  Writing a nasty comment in a box and posting it is probably the closest they get to pleasure.  Equally, it’s not very much good arguing with them, as admitting they’re wrong doesn’t appear to be in their arsenal either.

As it stands, the best way to deal with the new online breed of green inkers 2.0 is the old-fashioned way.  Ignore them.  Unfortunately, that essentially means ignoring the forums for reasoned debate that they’ve set up camp in.  Oh well, I guess somebody’s got to compromise round here.

Choices

Recently I’ve been getting more and more into just picking up second-hand books from charity shops that I’ve never heard of before, but look interesting.  Although they very rarely turn out to be lost masterpieces, they generally have some odd quality about them that you just don’t find in books that manage to stay in print and gain a reputation for being of merit.  While those are usually as worthwhile as people say they are, they’re often good in quite a boring and predictable way.  Charity shop purchases, however, often have the capacity to make you re-evaluate your personal understanding of what ‘good’ is.

Choices by the actor Liv Ullmann is perhaps such a book.  Her second volume of autobiography, it details the slow disintegration of a relationship with a partner she calls Abel, while her role as Goodwill Ambassador for Unicef changes her life.

Much of the book is given over to what Ullmann witnesses while in her official capacity.  It’s well-written and very moving.  Between this, however, we have conversations between Liv and Abel where they pull apart their relationship like it’s a toad in an American high school science class.  And what conversations they have.  Here is an example:

“Abel, I am alone.”

“Sometimes I am afraid that you need me only as a confirmation that you can love and be loved.”  He wipes my eyes and holds me close.  ”I love you.”

“You told me – ‘use me’.”

“I told you – ‘take me’.”

“Abel, why are you always so angry at me now?”

He says quietly, “I’m not.  You and I, we live so impatiently, with such lack of understanding.  You and I are dreamers, both wanting the impossible to happen.

“My hope is that, through you, I’ll lose my past.  I promise I won’t leave you, unless I grow certain that we two shall never be like one.  Without a past.

“Though if I leave, I’ll never look back.  I’ll leave you with no regret.  I’ll dream no more, but I’ll have no regrets.”

We are both silent.

Does anyone fancy a pint?

Some stuff that happened

Giacomo Leopardi in one of his lighter moments.

Just a couple of things I’ve done over the past few months I’ve forgotten to mention.  I was a guest blogger at Scott Pack’s Me and My Big Mouth blog a while back, talking about 19th Century miserablist poet Giacomo Leopardi, and his somewhat odd collection of stories, Moral Tales.  Go and have a look at it here.

Also, a while back I wrote the script for a graphic novel adaptation of the tedious, unloved children’s classic The Swiss Family Robinson for an Indian company called Elfin Kids, now reborn as Campfire.  The finished book has now hit the shelves, in India, at least, although you can order a copy here, or you can buy an electronic version from Scribd (which has a preview).  The artwork by Amit Tayal is great, and it’s worth buying it for that alone.  The final script doesn’t really resemble what I actually wrote that much, but you can just about see what I was trying to do, if you squint.  Anyway, it’s out there, but you don’t need to consider it part of my official canon or anything.

Been on holiday. You got a problem with that?

Just back from a week in Malta.  Not the sort of place I’d normally choose for a holiday, but we were staying in someone else’s timeshare apartment, so it was pretty much a free holiday.  Don’t want to bore you too much with holiday stuff, as other people’s holidays tend to be terribly boring to hear about, but there are a few things I found interesting there that I nevertheless want to sear onto your brains via the medium of language.

The first was the hotel itself.  It had done a deal with the timeshare company that meant that it’s representatives had a permanent office onsite, right next to the swimming pool.  The scam they would pull was that they would accost holiday-makers in the street, telling them they’d won a prize.  All they had to do to pick it up was give them an hour of their time, which would be spent, of course, verbally pummeling them until they bought a timeshare they would later regret.

Sitting by the pool, you could see a steady traffic of timeshare salesmen, dressed in smart black trousers and nice shirt in 30 degree + heat, escorting their victims to and from the office.  They had the air of desperate men, as if they’d wandered out of a David Mamet play, their faces a strange purple, the combined result, I should imagine, of an Englishman in a climate he was never designed for and excessive alcohol consumption.  Every so often, a tourist would walk out in a huff, and the salesman would run out apologetically, begging them to come back.  It was all rather seedy, although undeniably fascinating to watch.  Malta noir.

Another thing that was interesting was St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valetta.  Normally I’m not huge on cathedrals unless they’re particularly spectacular, but this one was notable for not only containing two masterpieces by Caravaggio, but having been built for the Knights of Malta, an organisation of arch-mentalists who ruled the place from the 16th to the late 18th Century, when they were kicked out by Napoleon.  During this period, they policed the Mediterranean, fighting pirates and pesky Turks, with Malta acting as their super-special gang HQ.

St. John’s Co-Cathedral is essentially what a place of worship would look like if designed by the SAS.  There are memorial plaques in the floor for fallen knights, decorated with skulls not as a reminder of the inevitability of death, but just as a sign of how hard they were (below).  Portraits of the knights look down at you from the ceiling, with all the reservation of pissed venture scouts in a rural pub.

Most bizarre of all is the memorial of one grand-master, in which his services to the enslavement of the people of both Asia and Africa is immortalised in marble (above).  The building is still a functioning place of worship, so one has to maintain the respectful behaviour this demands whilst confronted with possibly the most hateful and inherently un-Christian object you could possibly come across.

Other things of interest in Malta are the semi-famous buses, which are old models from the US and the UK, shipped out there in the sixties and still going.  There also lots of old cars out there and still working, living rust-free in the dry heat.  A metal-flaked gold Cortina caught my eye at one point, looking particularly marvelous.

There are a number of prehistoric sites there, including the oldest free-standing structure in the world, and a museum that displays the things they dug up in these places, which are pretty amazing (below).  Unfortunately, I went to what was the probably the least interesting prehistoric site, and not only that, the bus timetable for there and back was very misleading.  Worst day of the holiday.

Anyway, those are a couple of things I saw.  And that’s it for holidays until next year, when I shall by staying in my own timeshare apartment in Hull.  Now that was one deal that definitely wasn’t a rip-off.  Still twenty-seven years left on it, but I don’t think I’ll ever get bored there.  I’ve got a spare room if anybody feels like joining me for a week or six.  Anybody?  No?  Oh well.

Read Some Books. You Got a Problem With That?

I haven’t been doing much with this blog recently, as I’ve been knocking out a novel (as opposed to cracking one out).  Anyway, that’s pretty much finished now, bar the editing, the reluctant acceptance by my agent, and the inevitable rejection by my publisher (joking, I’m sure they’ll love it).  Anyway, in my time away from here, I’ve been praised and damned in equal measure, and have read a few books.  As I know my opinion counts for a lot round here in Internetland, here is what I thought about what I read.

I don’t read much contemporary fiction, partly because there’s so much old stuff still knocking about I don’t know if I’m going to get through it all in time, but also because I don’t think it’s a good idea for an author to read too much new things, or their influences will be too obvious, and they’ll end up being ‘fashionable’ and ’successful’ and ‘not bankrupt’.  I do read the odd thing, however, and only five years after everybody else, I decided to read Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre.

I was attracted to this title because I’d seen the author behave in a pleasingly insane manner in a documentary he’d made about the Aztecs on telly a few years ago.  I was hoping that anybody that barking would surely have written an amazingly unhinged novel that would be right up my street.

Unfortunately, I was a bit off on that front.  Don’t get me wrong, the novel’s ok, there’s a lot of good stuff in it, but like our own Will Self, Pierre’s public persona is ultimately more imaginative and more finely honed than his actual writing.

(I’m not entirely sure exactly where Pierre is from.  He manages to carry off that trick that only literary types can really manage of apparently being from several different places simultaneously.  As far as I can work out, he’s French, Australian, and American.  And Aztec.)

The book itself is a decent enough tale of a teenager wrongly accused of a Columbine-style massacre.  It takes a while for it to really find its voice, with teenage first-person narration littered with observations and metaphors no teenager would ever come up with, but once it gets going the sense of a life being manipulated to meet the agendas of others is very well done.  The build-up to the climax is very exciting indeed, only for it to – well, I’ll just say the ending isn’t exactly the one the story seems to demand.

Vernon God Little won the Booker Prize which is a bit surprising because it’s a very rough and ready novel, and I think could have benefited from another draft or so.  As we now know, however, the Booker entries are read very fast indeed by the judging panel, so perhaps in their haste, they awarded the book they glimpsed within the one that’s actually on the page.

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I first became aware of 20th Century intellectual giant Arthur Koestler when, some years after his death, it was claimed that he had raped film-maker Jill Craigie, wife of Michael Foot.  I was studying at the time and I found one of his books on a shelf of withdrawn books in the university library, free to take away.  Opening it, however, I found that it was not an old library book at all, but from someone’s personal collection.  It seems they could not bear to have it in the house anymore.

Anyway, that’s just an anecdote, and doesn’t really have any bearing on his 1940 novel, Darkness at Noon.  This describes the process by which an old Bolshevik is convinced to admit to crimes against the state in the (unnamed in the book) USSR.  The warped logic by which a Marxist revolution was subverted into its seeming opposite of totalitarianism is precisely laid out here in a slow unnerving game of wits in which there can be only one outcome.  It helps to have a bit of an understanding of the rhetoric of the time, but it’s a key text of the period that’s perhaps been overshadowed by Orwell’s narratively richer 1984.  With a state leader known only as No.1, and its theme of detainment, it also foreshadows Patrick MacGoohan’s The Prisoner TV series.

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Finally, I read The Fate of Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood from 1981.  I just bought this in a charity shop because I liked the look of it, and had no knowledge of the author, but it turns out she was Lucien Freud’s first wife, and is the girl with the scary big blue eyes in his early paintings.  She was also of that post-war generation of creative folk who spent a lot of time engaging in histrionics, driving each other to drink and just generally needing to bloody calm down.

The novel is about a misanthropic historian whose wife becomes obsessed by the murder of a local girl, and must attempt to face up to his previously neglected role as a father and rescue his daughter from his growingly deranged wife.

At times, it is very atmospheric and genuinely scary, with some real psychological shocks.  Unfortunately, Blackwood relies on a rather clunky device of having many scenes related in conversation, with far more detail included than anyone would ever reasonably give.  Also, the whole story is essentially scuppered by some plain unbelievable behaviour by the investigating police force.

So there you have it.  Koestler wins by a comfortable mile, Pierre and Blackwood battling it out for a distant second place.  Next week, Koestler must take on literary giant Irene Handl in a no-holds barred death match.  There can be only one winner, and Handl’s looking tasty.

Lucien Freud, Girl in Bed, 1952.

I Ain’t Got You Babe

Ali Dixon, an artist I know who now lives in Japan after being kicked out of the UK for being too dangerous, has done some iphone animation based on an idea I gave him.  I think it all turned out rather excellently.  See for yourself below.

Ali Dixon on Youtube and Twitter.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Project: Well-Read B4 Dead, in which I attempt to achieve a working knowledge of literature before my death at age ninety, continues with my reading of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne.

Although the book has the reputation of being an all-time classic, it also has the reputation for being practically unfinishable (the only attempt at anything approaching a film adaptation, A Cock And Bull Story, plays on its apparent unreadability), so naturally I made a point of reading to the very last page, because I’m hard that way.

The book, famously, is what we now know as a shaggy-dog story, with each scene interrupted by a deviation, which is itself interrupted and so on, until the book finishes with the story of Tristram’s life barely begun (whether the novel is even finished is open to debate, as it was published episodically over a period of years (1759-67), and further volumes could well have been planned).

The book is indeed often difficult to read, not least because much of the deviation relates to now-obscure intellectual and scientific argument (or at least a parody of it) and without endnotes, the book wouldn’t make a great deal of (non)sense. Every so often, however, the clouds of historical distance part and some wicked humour at the expense of Tristram’s father and Uncle Toby shines through. One of the book’s final scenes, in which the amorous Widow Wadman attempts to find out the exact location of a war wound on Uncle Toby’s groin, is an example of timeless comic writing (and if anybody ever tries to tell you that crude humour is of no cultural merit, point out to them that Tristram Shandy is absolutely full of nob gags, and then push them under a bus).

Tristram Shandy has been adopted as a pre-modern-post-modern text, and seen as a deconstruction of the whole Enlightenment idea of knowledge. I think it’s something simpler than that, however. It’s inevitable, it seems, that if a medium has been in existence for a few decades, someone will have a naughty desire to pull it apart for laughs. We can see this happen in the Twentieth Century in films like Hellzapoppin’, the cartoons of Tex Avery, Monty Python on television and the comedy jazz of Spike Jones. Also, Sterne had a model in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which itself was a demolition of the pre-novel storytelling format of the romance.

And it is this, I feel, that makes Tristram Shandy important, and why it’s still worth bothering with today, despite the difficulties. The novel as a medium was coming into focus, with Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding smoothing the edges of the rather bumpy model established by Daniel Defoe (and yes, I know the novel has a longer, more complicated history than that, but I haven’t got all bloody day), both of them establishing something vital about what it is a novel is meant to do.

In his million-word epic, Clarissa, Richardson presented the reader with interiority of character. We get to see inside these fictional people’s heads, and understand to a fine point what they are thinking, and how they are thinking, what they feel, and why. Richardson proved that the novel could create complete inner worlds in which the reader could understand what it was like to really be somebody else.

Fielding, on the other hand, didn’t really do this. We never get to ‘know’ Tom Jones, for example, as well as we do Richardson’s rakish rapist Lovelace. What we do get is expert organisation of incident. Although Tom Jones appears to be as rambling a picaresque as Don Quixote, it ultimately all ties up completely, without a loose end to be seen.

Shandy blows this all apart. It’s title suggests that it’s going to present us with the ‘inner world’ of Tristram, but the constant deviation means that we barely get near it. It’s also meant to to tell us a story, but the innumerable threads mean that any sense of linear progression is lost.

What Tristram Shandy shows us is that novels can only do their work through a process of omission. Only by ignoring certain probable aspects of a fictional character’s ‘character’ can we get any real sense of their being one at all. Clarissa would be a very different and peculiar novel if it included the title character’s feelings about her bowel movements. In the same vein, if different activities that Tom Jones no doubt undertook, but are not mentioned, actually were, with some that are mentioned omitted, then the sense of being told a coherent story would probably be lost.

Novels tell the truth by lying. But Shandy warns us that the truth they tell is only partial and temporary. Which I suppose is quite post-modern after all.

The Rocker

I was listening to Spotify radio the other day, and one of the songs the musical aleph picked out for me was one called ‘The Rocker’ by Thin Lizzy. I hadn’t heard it before, but was immediately struck by the informative nature of the lyrics. In this song, Phil Lynott claims not only to be a ‘rocker’, but also, perhaps unintentionally, provides an invaluable guide to their identifying features. I couldn’t help feeling, however, that the song ultimately raised far more questions than it answered.

Here I present a breakdown and analysis of the lyrics, in the hope of achieving some sort of understanding of the nature of the tendencies that mark out a ‘rocker’.

‘I am your main man if you’re looking for trouble,
I’ll take no lip ’cause no ones tougher than me.’

In this opening couplet, we see that a ‘rocker’ has a propensity towards violence. If you go looking for him, it seems, he will immediately reward your interest with a display of aggression. This is unavoidably anti-social.

‘If I kicked your face you’d soon be seeing double,
Hey little girl, keep your hands off me ’cause I’m a rocker.’

Here, it gets more troubling. The ‘rocker’ is blatantly threatening to kick a ‘little girl’ in the face, simply because the small child touched him. ‘Rockers’ are often viewed as existing somewhat outside society, and this couplet offers a clue as to why this may be a good thing.

‘I’m a rocker!
I’m a roller too, baby.’

Now this is quite interesting. Not only is he a ‘rocker’, but also a ‘roller’. The two are clearly intended to be distinguishable, although what separates the signifying tendencies of a ‘rocker’ from a ‘roller’ is not clear. One can clearly be both, and the prominence Lynott gives to being a rocker suggests that one can be the former without necessarily being the latter. But can one be a ‘roller’ without first being a ‘rocker’? The question is not answered in the song.

‘Down at the juke joint me and the boys were stompin’,
Bippin’ an a boppin’, telling a dirty joke or two.’

Here it is stated that a ‘rocker’ will ‘bip’, ‘bop’, and ‘tell a dirty joke’. Or two. Presumably one can tell a dirty joke without being a rocker, but are ‘bipping’ and ‘bopping’ exclusively ‘rocker’ activities? Can a ‘roller’ who is not a ‘rocker’ (if they exist) also ‘bip’ and ‘bop’? Again, a pertinent issue is not explored.

‘In walked this chick and I knew she was up to something,
I kissed her right there out of the blue.’

The ‘rocker’ considers a sexual assault acceptable if a woman appears to him to be ‘up to something’. No further comment is needed here, I feel.

‘I said “Hey baby, meet me I’m a tough guy,
Got my cycle outside, you wanna try?”‘

The ‘rocker’ has only a very basic grasp of English, it seems.

‘She just looked at me and rolled them big eyes,
And said “Ooh I’d do anything for you ’cause you’re a rocker.”‘

Here it is evident that the ‘rocker’ is a fantasist, believing that his victims are willing participants in their degradation.

In summary, the ‘rocker’ can be seen to be violent, even towards children, and sexually aggressive, with a questionable grasp on reality. Also, there is a propensity to ‘bip’, ‘bop’ and ‘tell dirty jokes’.

‘Rollers’ remain undefined, but are rumoured to be marked by their desire to ’shang a lang’. Further investigation is required in determining the nature of the ‘lang’ and how one would go about ’shanging’ it. Any offers of help with funding for this research are greatly appreciated.

The First Psychic

You may not have heard of him, but Daniel Dunglas Home was a Victorian who crossed paths with or at least caught the attention of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Elliot, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday (amongst others).  Some, such as Dumas (who was his best man at his wedding) loved him. Others, like Robert Browning (who objected to his effeminacy) couldn’t stand him. So why would someone so good at getting themselves noticed by the great minds of his time now be virtually written out of history?

The answer, perhaps, is because he’s rather inconvenient.  Home was a medium, the man for whom the term ‘psychic’ was coined.  Unlike his contemporary table-tappers however, Home’s feats were never shown to be fraudulent in his lifetime.  Even now, they defy easy explanation.  Exactly how, for instance, did he manage to float out one window and through that of the room next door?

Peter Lamont’s biography, The First Psychic entertainingly faces up to the conundrum of documenting an impossible life.  Sometimes the facts seem a bit too awkwardly shoe-horned into the story structure the author is aiming for, with a grand face-off hinted at between Home and his arch-rival, John Henry (the first magician to pull a rabbit out of a hat), only for the latter merely to drunkenly shout at him in public and drop dead a short time later.

Overall, however, it’s a fascinating book that raises interesting questions about how we ‘know’ things and the limitations of the scientific method.

(I’ve been wondering whether Tim Burton knows about Home. He’d be the perfect subject for one of his films, with Johnny Depp, naturally, in the lead.)

Cooking with Sophia

These frankly odd (but wonderful) pictures of Sophia Loren in the kitchen date from 1970, and were taken by Iranian photographer Vahid Sharifian (courtesy Cakehead Loves Evil).  They appeared in her cookery book, In Cucina Con Amore.  Of course, cooking with Sophia looks great fun, but can it compare to…

cooking with Vincent?

I am the DJ, I am what I play

Little Jimmy Young discovers a phat breakbeat on a Frankie Laine b-side.

 

Flying Saucer Rock & Roll has been up and running for four weeks, and as it’s listened to by somebody rather than nobody, I consider it a success.  Spotify is an ocean of sound in which I’m drowning, and I plan to write a blog post about why it’s the spiritual salvation of all mankind quite soon.

In the meantime, just to say I’m now uploading all my playlists to sharemyplaylists.com, so if you miss one, they’re there, ready to be enjoyed for all eternity.  Just search for ‘Richard Blandford’ or ‘Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Radio’ and they’ll all come up.

Meanwhile, as it’s summer, I’m compiling a special playlist for next week on the theme of communication with the dead.  As always, it’ll be up about midday on Thursday, and can be accessed by clicking on ‘FSRAR Radio’ on the sidebar.  Enjoy!

Dandy in the Underworld

I think it was William Burroughs who said that all junkies become the same person in the end. If that’s true, then it seems that the person they become is one who, if they ever kick their addiction, feels compelled to pen a memoir describing their self-inflicted hell in harrowing detail.

Sebastian Horsley is just such a recovering addict with a book out. What raises his above the rest, however, is that it is very funny.

Horsley is an artist and dandy of independent wealth who, in Dandy in the Underworld, writes in an impressively Wildean style about his various exploits. He is particularly strong on his childhood years, portraying an upbringing of startling insanity amongst the moneyed class.

So good is he at setting up his story, that much of what follows falls a bit flat. His wit can’t quite disguise the fact that the decadence he indulges in as an adult is pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. Drugs. Prostitutes. More drugs. Actually being a prostitute. Heard it all before, I’m afraid. At this point, he’d need to engage in an act of horrifying perversion involving at least six members of the Royal Family, including Prince Philip, AND the funny-looking one from Girls Aloud before I could really give him my full attention.

Also, sometimes his wit fails him, and arch wickedness descends into plain misanthropy. For instance, here he is on his stepmother:

Where Mother had chosen to drink herself out of the world, Stepmother had chosen to eat herself into it. There is nothing remotely heroic about an eating problem. Worse than this she had no style. In India the elephants wear better emeralds.

This wouldn’t be so bad if later on, he went swimming with sharks and got all awe-inspired at their terrible power. Sorry, Sebastian, if you want me to care about your tedious sharks, you’ve got to care about my tedious human beings first.

Anyway, all in all it’s a good, clever book. Somewhere in-between My Booky Wook and The Naked Civil Servant.

Bang A Gong

Susan Boyle duetting with a cat, yesterday.

 

I came to the Susan Boyle story late.  Britain’s Got Talent isn’t my type of show, and she doesn’t make my kind of music (or Michael Barrymore’s, apparently).  Channel flicking on Saturday night, however, I did catch a bit of the final, and what I saw was rather worrying, for reasons that will now be all too obvious.  ’That woman’s got learning difficulties,’ I found myself saying, ‘don’t they realise that?’

Following a brisk bit of Internet research, it turns out that yes, they did know that, and so did loads of other people as it had been in the papers.  Which is fine, no reason for her not to compete, as long as they were taking it into account, I thought. Later on, I found out that Boyle had lost to a Transformers-inspired dance troupe, and that, I presumed, was the end of it.  

Except that it wasn’t, of course, and as you all know, the story’s since moved on in a darker fashion.  But in-between the contest and Boyle’s anxiety-induced incident that led to her current stay in the Priory, I found myself intrigued by the idea of someone with learning difficulties doing so well in a show such as Britain’s Got Talent (normally they get knocked out in the preliminary rounds after being publicly mocked by smug millionaires) and did a bit of background reading.  Two things struck me as being of particular interest, and somewhat worrying.  Firstly, it seems that Boyle may not have put herself forward for the programme in the first place, but was actively sought out by the production team, who were already aware of her (thereby somewhat demolishing the ‘well, she shouldn’t have applied if she didn’t want the attention’ defense).  Secondly, in the week leading up to the final, she expressed a strong desire not to take part, but was nevertheless somehow talked back into it, with mixed results.

I don’t want to go into that much analysis of it, as that’s what the columnists at the Guardian are for (and I wouldn’t want to deprive them of any of the frothing comments that come their way online), but this does seem to have been a situation where a vulnerable adult with a temper, who had been managing their own stress levels all their life, recognised that they were reaching breaking point, but found themselves in a situation where they didn’t have an independent advocate, and were not taken seriously by the people around her, many of whom had a financial stake in making sure she performed.  Anyway, as a good citizen, I complained to Ofcom who, I understand, aim to do nothing.

What I really want to talk about here are the roots of Britain’s Got Talent, namely a seventies American programme called The Gong Show.  This was the first time that a talent show’s main selling point was not how good the acts were, but how bad.  It was devised and hosted by one Chuck Barris, a man who will surely go down in history as one of the most important figures in television.  British shows such as Blind Date and Mr & Mrs are variants on formats he created.  Barris also claimed to have been a hit-man for the CIA in his autobiography Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (made into a film by George Clooney), but this might be a lie.

The format of The Gong Show was simple.  Barris would introduce acts of varying degrees of weirdness to a studio audience.  Like Britain’s Got Talent, there was a panel of three judges, who sat in front of a large gong.  When a judge could bear an act no more, they would hit the gong, and the act would have to stop.  Not all the acts were bad, however.  Some, such as The Unknown Comic (a comedian with a paper bag on his head) and Gene Gene the Dancing Machine (essentially just a man dancing in an amusing manner) became viewer favourites,and would come back regularly.  Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee Herman) was just one of the performers who would go on to become professional entertainers.

Now, on the one hand, this programme reintroduced the idea of the freak show as entertainment, and when watching the clips, the sound of the crowd jeering some of the acts is not pleasant.  Crucially, however, I would argue that it has one fundamental virtue above it’s bastard offspring, Britain’s Got Talent.  There was hardly anything to win.  Whereas Simon Cowell dangles fame, fortune and a full showbiz career as a carrot, thus drawing in the unintentional comedy acts he needs simply by playing on their sheer desperation, The Gong Show’s top prize was $516.32.  All that was really on offer was a chance to take part in the carnival.  And even if the performer’s role in the carnival was to be gonged off the stage, there was always a sense that they weren’t being rejected due to their strangeness, but in a weird way, embraced because of it.  The gong was almost a symbol of belonging.  ’Gabba, gabba, we accept you, one of us.’

In Britain’s Got Talent, the buzzers are a means of division, separating the acceptable from the freaks, ‘us’ from ‘them’.  This year, someone who had spent her life being a ‘them’ was seemingly sought out and let through the barrier as a gimmick.  Now she’s stranded in the world of ‘us’, wondering how she’ll ever get back home.

Anyway, here are some Gong Show clips.

Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Radio

The Devil talks to children via the radio.

 

I have recently been getting to Spotify which, for the uninitiated, is a massive online music library (over 6 million tracks, I believe, and growing) with high quality streaming audio.  It’s a very exciting thing indeed, the true level of its very excitingness I’m only beginning to grasp.

One of the very exciting qualities that it possesses is that you can make playlists from the tracks available and share them with other Spotify users.  Assembling these is a bit like doing a mix tape, only without the click between tracks where you press the pause button and the awkward seduction technique associations.

Because of this, I have been inspired to launch ‘Flying Saucer Rock & Roll Radio’.  This is not a radio station.  It is not even a radio show.  The title is totally misleading.  

It is in fact an hour-long(ish) playlist assembled by me, hopefully on a weekly basis.  It will consist of tracks arranged in an artful manner that are either favourites of mine, are considered interesting by me, or just have the power to really do people’s heads in.  

In this way, I shall demonstrate how music, and indeed all existence, is tied up with the opposing forces of ‘rock’ (Dionysian, destructive, spontaneous) and ‘roll’ (Apollonian, ordered, rational), with harmony achieved only by the mysterious balancing presence known variously as ‘and’, ‘&’ and ”n”.

In the first week, through the medium of music, we explore how rock ‘n’ roll itself is a) revolutionary b) conservative and c) from Mars, take a trip to three different moons of varying hues, find out what colours the respective Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are, and hear Paul McCartney inventing acid house. 

By this time next week I’ll have a link on the sidebar to the right that will take you to the latest playlist, as well as posting links via Myspace bulletins and Twitter.  Anyway, If you give it a play, please drop me a line, not least because otherwise I have no way of knowing if people are actually listening or not.  

So to hear the first one (if you’re based in a Spotify-friendly country, which as I understand it is much of Europe – bad luck, rest of world!) go here to rock, roll and, most importantly, &.

Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older

 

I said I wasn’t going to write about my non-fiction library book reading pile. I also said I probably wasn’t going to write anything on this blog for a bit. Well, here I am doing both. But as Walt Whitman said, ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.  So, you know, just fucking get over it.)’

I just wanted to draw people’s attention to one book I found particularly interesting, this being Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past by the Danish psychologist Douwe Draaisma.  It’s essentially a collection of essays dealing with questions regarding memory such as that which gives the book its title.  Also dealt with are subjects such as photographic memory, déjà vu, why our lives may flash before our eyes before we (almost) die, and why we forget being a baby.

The thing about memory is that by its very nature it’s a subjective experience.  Consequently, there’s not an amazing amount that can be said about it with any certainty.  Perhaps because of this, Draaisma talks around his subject rather than answering his questions directly, examining different possibilities and suggesting as to why one might be more likely than another.

What makes this book truly fascinating are the remarkable examples Draaisma finds of people’s attempts throughout history to preserve their memories.  For example, there’s Richard and Anna Wagner, a married couple who took a photo of themselves enjoying Christmas in the same room, every year from 1900 to 1942.  The slow process of aging, invisible on a day-to-day basis, is all too observable in the series of photos.

Then there’s the case of Willem van den Hull (1778-1858), a most peculiar Dutch gentleman who was a schoolmaster by profession.  Near the end of his life, van den Hull wrote his autobiography, in which he detailed all the personal slights borne him over the course of his life.  These include being caned in front of his own pupils by the school’s headmaster, being mysteriously laughed at by a group of young ladies, and the emotional fall-out that resulted from his eleven year obsession with a young woman who was probably completely unaware of his existence.  If only his life story were to be translated into English, I for one would definitely buy it.

If you’re even remotely interested in psychology, and why we remember (or don’t remember) things the way we do, Draaisma’s book is well worth checking out.  That is, if you can get all the way to a bookshop and still remember how to spell ‘Draaisma’.  Best if you write it down.

Please Hold

I’m not updating this blog much at the moment, as I’m trying to get to grips with a particularly tricky section in the novel I’m writing, and there are enough distractions as it is, what with All Creatures Great and Small AND The House of Elliott being repeated on Freeview.

So in the meantime, here’s a video of John Wayne punching Baldrick into the Thames, then jumping Tower Bridge in a Ford Capri.

Introducing: The ‘Inconvenient’ Music Club

 

When I think of the music that I find most interesting, much of it, when seen in the context of an artist’s career, could be described as ‘inconvenient’.  What I mean by this is that its very existence seems to defy common sense.  Either the music does not have any ready audience for it (for example, the album A Midsummer’s Day Dream by Mark Eric, which captured the style of the mid-60s Beach Boys, but in 1970, a period when the Beach Boys themselves couldn’t get arrested), or it has the potential to alienate an artist’s existing audience while not having the capacity to win them a new one (as in the case of Frank Sinatra’s Watertown, a concept album about a man’s marriage breaking up that not only sounds like nothing else in Sinatra’s oeuvre, but also like nothing in anybody else’s).

These records fascinate me so much as they are often clearly made not in order to please an audience (although that would be nice), but in spite of the fact the audience almost certainly won’t be pleased.  

They are almost perverse acts of will, existing because someone feels they have to.  They are the creative force captured in an almost pure state, and often of a visionary intensity.  Not always perfect, and not always even good, they nevertheless have their own distinctive character that shines through, making them far more worthwhile to my mind than most music that aims to please and plays it safe.

(I should make it clear that what I don’t mean is atonal or openly experimental music, or anything that sounds like a shouting tramp, such as Captain Beefheart or Tom Waits.  This music is effectively guaranteed an audience of some kind.  There are people who want to hear stuff that sounds like a box of tic-tacs in a washing machine, and if that’s what you do, chances are they’ll hear about it.)

So, this is the first in an occasional series in which I highlight albums in my collection which I consider to fall into the category of ‘inconvenient.’

First off is Paint America Love by Lou Christie, from 1971.  Christie had numerous hits in the 60s in the UK and US, such as ‘Lightnin’ Strikes’, and ‘I’m Gonna Make You Mine’.  Excellent though they were, they were essentially bubblegum (a genre that does, of course, bring you the Naked Truth).

The ‘Paint America Love’ album, however, is a different proposition.  The cover depicts Lou in red, white and blue braces with a little American flag on a stick held nonchalantly over his shoulder, and a knowingly winsome expression on his walrus-mustachioed face.  The vibe is M*A*S*H*-era Robert Altman satire.  Inside, however, Christie is seen with his writing partner Twyla Herbert, a  classically-trained clairvoyant twenty years his senior, with a feather boa wrapped round the pair of them.  The vibe here is a bit Harold and Maude.

‘Wood child, I saw the devil on his knees, I saw the angels tasting tea…’ And so the record begins, as Christie intones the dense lyrics of opening track ‘Wood Child’ over a reverb-drenched piano.  Intriguing, although there’s no real sense of where the record is going.  It could begin to sound like King Crimson at any minute.  Then, on the line, ‘And the riverboat will take you sailing on a sunday morning’, something happens.  Not just a switch from the metaphorical to the specific, but from Christie’s normal voice to falsetto.

Falsetto in pop is a curious thing.  It can be sublime (Brian Wilson), or ridiculous (Frankie Valli).  Christie’s falsetto, which was his USP on his 60s hits, is both sublime and ridiculous simultaneously.  He sounds like a chipmunk, but a chipmunk who’s seen through the doors of perception and glimpsed the infinite.

After this, Christie then alternates his natural voice with his falsetto, repeating the line ‘take a ticket and get on this boat’ in both until the song fades.  The effect is jaw-dropping and achingly beautiful.  Like The Band, Christie is harking back to a disappeared (and possibly non-existent) America, looking for a purer, more innocent time (when non-interventionist foreign policies stopped things like Vietnam from happening, although you would still have had racism and stuff, so it wouldn’t have been all good, whenever this lost era was).

Next up is the jaunty ‘Paper Song’.  ’Everything is done electric’lly,’ we’re informed, ‘pots and pans and now astrology’.  The song is either a warning about environmental depletion, or a celebration of the logging and paper industries.  I’m really not sure.  It doesn’t really matter though as it’s irresistibly jaunty, and ends with a pathos-drenched coda of ‘penny paper, get your paper…’ sung a cappella like an old-time paper boy.

The next three tracks, ‘The Best Way to See America’, ‘Chuckie Wagon’ and ‘Waco’, continue the Americana theme, celebrating the country in all its vastness.  Sample lyric:  ’Waco, turn down that radio, you got six more brownies left till you get to Ontario. You call your cousin when you get to the border now, she’ll put you up for the night…’

Side Two opens with ‘Campus Rest’, a lush instrumental interlude.  Following that are two songs, ‘Lighthouse’ and ‘Look Out the Window’, which respond to  the unrest of the time with both anxiety and hope.  The album is no longer looking back, but staring at the America of 1971, wondering if it’s all going to work out for the best.

Of course, things must get better, because the alternative is George W. Bush.  But how to bring about a resolution to the country’s apparently irresolvable conflicts?  The answer is, as ever, love.  ’Paint America Love’, Christie pleads on the title track that closes the album.  And the way he puts it, it sounds like a good idea.

On release, ‘Paint America Love’ sold to not many people, and Christie descended into drug addiction (although not without recording the fine follow-up, Beyond the Blue Horizon in 1974, the title track appearing years later in the film ‘Rain Man’).

‘Paint America Love’ was never going to find an audience, at least not in 1971.  It strayed too far from Christie’s home turf of high-intensity love songs, and although it shared a world-view with the then-huge California singer-songwriter scene, it maintained a precise and thickly-orchestrated bubblegum sound, mostly arranged by the magnificently-named Ronnie Frangipani, rather than the looser acoustic feel fashionable at the time.

Nevertheless, in retrospect, it’s Christie’s take that now sounds fresher, and his earnestness is far more endearing than that of, say, James Taylor or Crosby, Stills and Nash, who these days come across as smug, bordering on punchable.  To some ears, they probably did at the time as well.

The album has been out-of-print for years, and I had to order my copy over the Internet for many pounds (before finding a mint copy in a second-hand shop for just three quid several years later).  It has, however, finally now been reissued on CD.  You should buy it because it’s good.

The Oddness of Charlie Shedd

 

Like many, I was intrigued by this book that appeared on the legendary Fail Blog this week.  Why would anyone write a book with this title?  And just who is Dr. Charlie Shedd?  I had to know.

Well, it turns out that Dr. Charles W. Shedd (1915-2004) was an American Presbyterian minister and, according to the official website, ‘a master communicator  of homespun wisdom’.  ’The Best Dad is a Great Lover’ is not an argument in favour of extreme wrongness, it seems, but a presentation of the simple truth that a good father should be loving, and therefore a good ‘lover’.

Shedd wrote over forty books, the quality of which I cannot possibly comment on having read none of them.  What I did find striking, however, was his talent for a really zinging title.  He really did have a knack for it.  Here are a few of my favourites.

 

How To Treat a Woman

The Exciting Church Where They Give Their Money Away

Grandparents: Then God Created Grandparents and It Was Very Good

Celebration in the Bedroom

The Fat is in Your Head

I’m Odd, Thank You God

Bible Study in Duet: Charlie and Martha’s Melody For a Happy Marriage

If I Can Write, You Can Write

The Stork is Dead

Talk to Me!