Can't Buy a Thrill

Money can't buy a thrill of excitement and pleasure of re-hearing a long forgotten favourite piece of music that instantly puts you back in the time and place with the people when you first heard it.

According to Wikipedia 'Reelin' In The Years' is a song by jazz-rock band Steely Dan from the album Can't Buy A Thrill. How we love to categorise and how we get it wrong. Personally I wouldn't describe Steely Dan as a band never mind jazz-rock. The combined musical output of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker that went under the name of Steely Dan was performed by a revolving cast of session musicians, some of whom may have also done some jazz-rock. Mark Radcliffe hates jazz-rock but he likes Steely Dan and 'Reelin' In The Years' seemed an appropriate title for a musical memoir covering every year of his life (up to 2009/2010 anyway).

This book is an easy and nostalgic read for music fans of a certain age. I didn't even mind him taking the mickey out of jazz-rock combos like Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra and a few other sacred cows like the Stylistics because I reckon they can look after themselves and I'd rather hear an amusing savaging than bland sycophantic praise any day.

Radcliffe's radio style sometimes suffers from a stuttering rambling delivery but with the written word it all comes out with a flourishing aplomb. Nonetheless there is something lazy about this book (and I don't just mean his inexplicable praise, as a drummer, for 4/4). It is just a list. A top ten. This is what happened in Year X, this is what happened in Year Y and so on. I'd really have liked a bit more of a free-wheeling approach to building up some themes about growing up in the North, the social and political landscape and, crucially, greater depth of musical analysis. This isn't that book. It's a book everyone could, and possibly should, write about their lives and music. Better still make a mixtape/playlist.

Afterword

For fans of trivia, and I don't think you would have got this far unless you were, he berates the specialist music show. Ironic then that he should end up taking over the Folk Show but if someone is going to pay him to do it or to write/buy/read this book then why not? He is a lucky, lucky man. Shame about the hat though.

Bear Sax in the City

Sometimes great things come from unlikely combinations - Sweet and Sour, Laurel and Hardy, Lennon and McCartney, Beauty and the Beast, Sax and the Bear...sorry, run that last one past me again. The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor is a book about a bear that plays the sax? You're kidding, right?

It shouldn't work. It damn near doesn't work sometimes. There are very occasionally some highly creative phrases and spellings but all are clear and perfectly understandable and that is surely the point of language. I just think it's written in jazz by which I mean the writing is in the same style as the music - sometimes slightly bonkers but full of energy and a sense of fun. It reads like a kind of brilliant improvisation between the characters where you are pushed to the edge of disbelief but everything is so realistically and thoroughly narrated that the fact that the basic premise is complete nonsense doesn't matter. It has a surreal and magical quality but is by no means a fairy tale about a cute cuddly type of child's anthropomorphism. The bear feels its wildness and that sense of power and menace is part of his character which makes him a misunderstood slightly grumpy outsider. A bit like a jazz musician then? Yes exactly. It captures what it is like to have a burning sense of an almost spiritual vision of his own nature and music and a fragile sense of being able to interpret it in live performance. 

By the way its' a long book and has a number of fairly detailed musical expositions but don't let that put you off because it doesn't drag; it fizzes along and veers from semi-tragedy to joyous and exuberant humour.

Personally it led me to listening to a lot of referenced material by Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and others, some of which I knew but much of which I could now listen to with a much greater empathy and appreciate the combination of restraint and wildness in it - the way that a tune would be taken and bent out of recognition. This is a fictional biography of a character that is so human and yet bent out of all recognition as a bear to come back and throw fresh light on what it is to be truly human. That's totally cool and that's Jazz.

Good Girl Not Gone

Like any avid reader I tend to let random choices take me to unexpected places. In this case it is Grand Marais, Minnesota and a straightforward kidnap caper called The Good Girl by Mary Kubica. The press seem to equate this novel with Gone Girl which I saw part of the film of recently and am looking forward to reading as I missed the ending. It's thankfully part of a big pile on the bedside table. But this is not Gone Girl and doesn't pretend to be. The similarity is just for lazy journalists and marketers who haven't read either. Sure it's a psychological thriller and it involves a central female character. That's your similarity for you.

I found the style of The Good Girl both fascinating and irritating. The chapters are mostly 2 to 3 pages long. It clearly signposts which character you're reading and where it is on the timeline. There is a fair bit of repetition and making sure you know what's going on. It results in a story that reads like a TV script, which is not helped by the "even Jessica Fletcher could work it out" twist at the end. Nonetheless the shifting moral standpoint, the common humanity and the claustrophobic relationships all make this an efficiently compelling read and the threat of violence is refreshingly restrained rather than graphic and explicit.

Oh boys - read the news but don't dwell on it

The unseen story behind the music is a good read for anyone that appreciates the music of the Beatles - and don't ever trust anyone who doesn't like the Beatles, especially those that say they were more of Rolling Stones sort of a person. 

Hunter Davies' analysis of the Beatles lyrics in 'I read the news today, oh boy' shouldn't work and in many ways it doesn't. Hunter warns us not to over-analyse the Beatles lyrics and this is self-evident. It's the music that counts and without it the book is starved of it's real oxygen. Fortunately I had pretty much every song in my head and by reading the lyrics could hear it play in my memory. Then there's the lyrics. Most of the early stuff is pretty much 'I love you baby - yeah, yeah, yeah'. There's nothing wrong with that because, like early Motown, the music is great and the lyrics incidental.

Then John goes and gets all poetical on us. It's no good blaming LSD. They were always fond of puns, wordplay and visual imagery. Some of the later lyrics are really interesting and I don't just mean the surreal ones but both John and Paul's take on everyday characters. But they were all put together pretty hastily and if the words scanned into the overall rhymes and rhythm then they didn't bother to polish it or dwell on it. George wrote some of the best Beatles tracks but his lyrics tended to be more devotional and emotional than the others. I don't count Ringo. He was my favourite character from the films but his artistic contribution brings back one of John's throwaway comments that he wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. Some say that's apocryphal. Welcome to the world of urban mythology.

What's great about this book is that Hunter was there, hanging out with the Beatles when many of these songs were created. So his memory of things that triggered ideas and songs is priceless. But his insight into events is not matched by his literary analysis. Simple things like going into the deep psychological meaning of INTO written on the beginning of a lyric sheet when it is obvious that it is just a lazy writing of INTRO or just refers to a musical link. Other interpretations are ambiguous to say the least. One of the fun things about song lyrics is being able to interpret them at a personal level in ways that the artist didn't originally intend. I've even heard Paul McCartney do this with his own lyrics where he has enhanced the meaning in interviews beyond what was originally there. So long live the Beatles - in music and cultural history. If you want pop inspired poetry of the time and place try Adrian Henri, Brian Patten or Roger McGough. 

Height and Depth - the drowning of Dendale

Apologies to Tom Blackwell for lightly modifying his excellent photograph of Thruscross Reservoir under license
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Reginald Hill wrote the Dalziel and Pascoe novel 'On Beulah Height' in 1998 and it follows the mores and tropes of detective fiction of the time in dealing with the agony of murdered children in a fairly superficial, even entertaining, way. The Depth of this story is not so much in the detection (or having well rounded and flawed detectives which has subsequently become standard in the genre) as having a small glimpse into the child's eye view. This comes in two art forms. The folk tale monster hiding under a stone in Nina and the Nix and Mahler's songs for dead children Kindertotenlieder which (spoiler alert) the abused child wields as a weapon of revenge. Added to this is a sense of the isolated rural North England landscape drowned so that the masses of Manchester (or wherever) can pour it down the sink. As in Thruscross bodies, headstones and a sense of historical continuity are disrupted in the drowning of the fictional Dendale. So much is inevitable to enable the living to go on dying. Just a shame that Reginald Hill is now amongst them. 

PS. If you want to enjoy Hill without feeling the novel is overshadowed by the late great Warren Clarke's TV portrayal of Dalziel then I heartily recommend The Woodcutter of 2010. It will surprise you.

The Last Hundred Days of a Fictional Poet

Patrick McGuinness is an extraordinary man worthy of his own parade of big black cars and well-behaved bystanders waving flags and cheering. In this case it is Ceaușescu's regime and the fall of Communism in Romania that provide the emperor's new clothes and form the background to this well written and entertaining fact based fiction (if you'll forgive that description because it does read like a factual memoir). The writing is delicious in it's own right because of it's precision and grim faced humour. That's because McGuinness is really a poet. But you can't make a living as a poet. So by profession he is an academic. He presumably does this fiction lark as a semi-lucrative diversion. That's really annoying - that he can invade other people's memories, other people's countries and other people's professions and be so exquisitely expressive in all of them.

The old maths teacher tortoise drawling, stretching and fainting in coils

There's a lot of nonsense written about Lewis Carroll's Alice stories so I don't intend to add to it here. I recently re-read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the extended version in Alice's Adventures under Ground and Through the Looking Glass and probably enjoyed them less than you'd think so I have only a few simple observations.

There's a tendency to see Charles Dodgson's life through a contemporary looking glass whether that's unhealthy relationships with children or sixties drug induced psychedelia. This is, as I say, complete nonsense. 

What comes through most strongly in my reading is a profound other worldly imagination that is wild and wonderful and also curiously Victorian and moral in its outlook. Don't look here for deep characterisation - you won't find the inner turmoil of a modern psychological fantasy. So it is difficult to identify strongly with the characters, even, or especially, Alice. Dodgson's note about the stories is steeped in very conventional Christian feeling and sentiment. What he wanted to do was entertain and amaze small children. This he does mesmerically in concept and comes up with great images and some really natty one liners in dialogue which continue to amuse adults. In this regard these books contain strong visual imagery and some poetry. The facsimile edition show his own original illustrations which are just as good as the brilliant John Tenniel illustrations that we all know and love (and that I have attempted to match with the Duchess above).  But they ain't novels. They're just not.