tiresome virtue signalling

On 1^st January 2020, I and some tens of thousands of others pledged not to make use of air travel for the year for all the obvious reasons (and with all the obvious caveats about privilege etc; not everyone even has a choice).

Not only did I succeed in this personal commitment, global air traffic declined during the year by around 60%, to levels last seen at the turn of the century.

This - one item of good news this year, perhaps - also represents perhaps the most successful small political campaign since Bolshevism. (“Little did Vladimir Ulyanov know, on that bright May morning in 1908, as he bickered with his English landlady about towels, that less than a decade later…”).

I’m not personally pledging for 2021, for reasons...; if you feel able to, great, please do! (I last flew in 2018, to Bulgaria; previous to this, Spain to 2015 and, previous to that, Spain in 2010). Some suggest that no more than one short-haul flight about every three years and no more than one long-haul flight approximately every eight years would be long-term sustainable if everyone did it; inevitably, some won't – this might be something to mention when holidays come up in conversation with friends and colleagues, as they tend to in January.

(“Wow, you’re off to America again. That’s great. Oh, you remember that David Attenborough thing you mentioned the other week..?”). 

Goodbye Blackberry Way, or: How To Remember What Happened Before You Were Born

This article about John Lennon - more broadly The Beatles, more broadly the popular music of the 1960s and 70s, more broadly 'nostalgia' as a psychosocial category - is around 5,300 words long, so will likely take you around 20 minutes to read. It commemmorates the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon's assassination; images are mostly from the Underground press of the time (I.T., Oz, Black Dwarf, East Village Other etc - whose archives you can browse at will online; see side bar under 'archive', if you're seeing this site on a laptop/ PC and wish to lose whole afternoons), plus the Wikipedia page about Fluxus. Fair use. "Why in the world are we here?" 

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Down to the park

Overgrowing but the trees are bare

There's a memory there

 - The Move, ‘Blackberry Way’ (lyrics by Roy Wood).

 

Vladimir: Time has stopped.

Pozzo: (cuddling his watch to his ear). Don't you believe it, Sir, don't you believe it. (He puts his watch back in his pocket.) Whatever you like, but not that.

 - Samuel Beckett, ‘Waiting For Godot’

  

A Facebook friend asked me to name the ten albums that most influenced my taste in music. So for the record (pardon the pun), these are the ten:

The Beatles, Revolver

Lou Reed, Transformer

The Fall, Live At The Witch Trials

Talking Heads, Fear of Music

Teardrop Explodes, Wilder

The Shamen, In Gorbachev We Trust

Pavement, Perfect Sound Forever

The Orb, Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld

Stereolab, Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements

Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Bwyd Time

 

('Perfect Sound Forever' isn't strictly an album: it’s Pavement's second EP. I'm well aware of that, I'm just trying to signal that I was into them before you were. I was, respectively, minus six years old, minus one week, 6, 6, 9, 16, 18, 18, 20 and 22 when these records came out: hold that thought. Clearly the mid-eighties and/or my early teens were a bit of a dead loss. As lists go, it’s a bit ‘pale, male and stale’ – but we are who we are).

This article’s by way of an extended postscript to that list, though, in that my taste in music’s also been massively influenced, formed really, by the several successive two-, three- and five-cassette bundles of ‘your favourite songs from the sixties’ that mum and dad used to play on long car journeys to holiday destinations and (starting from North Yorkshire, or Leeds) to see relatives in Bedfordshire, Norfolk, London etc. There may also have been one or several actual, you know, long-playing records for home listening.

There were specific songs. Some were oddities; I've always liked things that are a bit sui generis – for instance, Keith West’s ‘Excerpt From A Teenage Opera’, possibly the finest because the only pop song about an octogenarian milkman being bullied to death by delinquent children egged on by their callous parents that anyone has ever heard, in its way as terrifying a depiction of social terror as Anthony Burgess’s (or Stanley Kubrick’s) ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Then there was Simon Dupree and the Big Sound’s ‘Kites’, a languid courtly-love fantasy in which a lovesick swain wonders what he wouldn’t do for his putatively Chinese or Japanese beloved (the band recorded this at Abbey Road using a range of unconventional instruments and props including a wind machine; the actress Jacqui Chan, a friend, recorded a spoken interlude in Chinese). The 'orientalism' which would tend to idealise the intriguingly pliable or passive beloved from the mystic East has been with us for several centuries now, and shows no signs of leaving the stage (l'm a Western European too, so as a complex of associations and ideas it's as deeply embedded in my psyche as in anyone's). The flipside of this is the venom that British people are capable of expressing towards, say, a female Japanese concept-artist who, through her work, interrogates gender, social class and cultural identity on her own terms and who is incapable thereby of following (though she may mock) the recline-and-look-lovely orientalist script. "Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey," you might say – and of course John Lennon did, referencing in song a newspaper cartoon in which his fianceé, Yoko Ono (for it is she of whom we now speak) was depicted as a monkey, clinging to his back and draining him of blood, talent and, doubtless, precious bodily essence. 

Thinking again about that wind machine and other sound effects, we should note that Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, like the Fab Four themselves, were initially signed to Parlophone, a label best known (at the beginning of the sixties) for comedy and novelty recordings. Giving up any expectation of having one's work taken seriously can be a powerful creative stimulus; certainly George Martin, who produced the Beatles during their earlier years, gained much by having cut his teeth producing records by the likes of The Goons, Bernard Cribbins, Flanders and Swann, the Beyond The Fringe team and so forth. You’re allowed to make funny noises if it’s meant to be a joke.

(Thinking again about Yoko, it's hard to lose an acquired reputation. My daughter Meg, thirteen, still resents her for having broken up the Beatles and it's been fifty years now; Meg’s been on Youtube, she’s heard Yoko “shouting at John in the studio.” But there’s plenty of time for her to learn about the conceptual and performance art movement Fluxus and the Unfinished Music album sequence later on. More on how to hold a grudge later.)

In the main, though, our favourite songs from the sixties - at least as listened to on aggregate, between two and six decades after the fact - sketch both a sociopolitical and a psychological landscape. The sociopolitical landscape is one which evokes concern, moral urgency even: bring to mind the Kinks' 'Dead End Street' or Cat Stevens' 'Matthew and Sons', songs contiguous with New Society magazine and the BBC's Wednesday Play in their "agitational contemporaneity" (to quote Sydney Newman, the BBC's then Head of Drama). Social concern and moral urgency are, in this context as so often, not unambiguous; the former song pits the energy of its own delivery against the possible fatalism of its words, whereas the atmosphere of the 'big night out' suggested by the latter's brass section and the grudging admiration latent in "he's got people who've been working fifty years" express an ironic counterpoint to the unending drudgery that the lyrics seem to protest. Still: the 1960s, seen through the lens of its compilation albums, feels like a decade in which
people cared, and cared about the right things.

Of course, no-one's in campaign mood the whole time - not authentically, anyway ("Do all these musicians have a social conscience? Well, only in their front rooms" - Mark E. Smith, fifteen years later; now there's a chap who liked a drink and hated well-meaning liberal media types). Other 1960s songs express a more wistful and escapist mood; there's the Small Faces' 'Itchycoo Park' which speaks to the lazy, truant side of me as, doubtless, to us all - hey yeah, why don't we bunk off and smoke weed in the park? - but, at the same time, annoys the side of me that's a Victorian old maid whenever the dignity of institutions of learning is threatened - hang it all you fellows, you can't really say "why go to learn the words of fools?" because our cultural inheritance matters and how are you even going to get into university if you mess up your exams? (Humblebrag ignorance in songs and poems has always bugged me this way. If you don't know what a slide-rule is for - as Sam Cooke doesn't, in 'Wonderful World' - then for goodness’ sake find out. Oh, alright. A slide rule is for making quick approximate logarithmic calculations if you don't have an electronic device handy, as most wouldn't have at the time. There. Do you not feel marginally improved?). To name this aspect of myself is to admit that I’d have been rubbish at sit-ins – present for political reasons, but conflicted and thereby a bit dithery in an Alan Bennett kind of way, Thermos flask and sandwiches in a bag no doubt.

Then there's the Move's 'Blackberry Way' - a stone-cold classic, as adept at evoking a mood of disorientation and loss as the Beatles' 'Strawberry Fields Forever' but in a way that's less expressive of its own specific cultural moment. What I mean is, while the former's a verse-chorus-verse pop song that you can perform at a festival or on, say, the TV show 'Colour Me Pop', the latter's a studio artefact dependent on (former novelty record) producer George Martin and sound engineer Geoff Emerick splicing together two versions of the song played at different speeds, folding time-reverse effects as well as unusual instruments (such as the svarmandal, a kind of Indian zither) into the mix; that kind of thing's impossible to reproduce live. The Beatles quitting touring and disappearing into the studio helped them achieve Sgt Pepper but also made them a hard act to follow as, if you're starting out, you have to play gigs – and a possible loose analogy with 1960s 'New Wave' science fiction's retreat from outer into 'inner' space, to some minds a necessary liberation of the genre and in others an unfortunate dead end, is left as an exercise for the reader.

The soundscape of 'Strawberry Fields Forever' is immersive. Its lyrics, which skirt the boundaries of what cannot be said at all (Wittgenstein spoke of philosophy as "thought running up against the limits of language"; John Lennon, with lines like "that is you can't, you know, tune in/ But it's all right/ That is, I think, it's not too bad," expresses how ungraspably lucid inarticulate speech can be), also express a sort of trance-like dissociative fascination with half-remembered childhood trauma. This song has a famous backstory. 'Strawberry Field' in Liverpool was, when the Beatles were growing up - until 2005, in fact - a Salvation Army children's home or, as we used to say, orphanage (while the
former term’s still used for actually existing social provision, the latter's been relegated to the thought-worlds of fairy tales and musical theatre); as such, it would have exercised a certain fascination upon the young John Lennon. Certainly he used to spend time there, sneaking into the grounds with friends for fun and adventures and being taken there for summer fetes and other occasions by his Aunt Mimi - who had been awarded custody of John by Liverpool Social Services when he was five as his mother Julia, later to give him his first guitar when he was fifteen and then to die in a road accident two years later, had been deemed incapable of properly looking after him. To name some of the worst things that can happen to a child in so blunt a précis feels disrespectful. It was certainly both a curse and a blessing for the young John Lennon that they also had to be lived through, a curse in that it 'did' for him in terms of applying himself in any conventional sense: school reports tended to say things like, "he has too many wrong ambitions and his energy is often misplaced" and "he is content to 'drift' instead of using his abilities" (living is easy with eyes closed). It was a blessing, though, in that he was able to alchemise such suffering through his art; indeed, his compulsive probing of these psychological wounds - a unfolding process both medicated and assisted by LSD and other drugs, later to reach crisis point if not resolution through the deliberately induced catharses of 'Primal Scream' therapy; you can hear the screaming in the music - came to stand in synecdochic relation to an entire youth cohort's problematic relations with adulthood and the straight world.

'Blackberry Way', by contrast, unlike 'Strawberry Fields' but like a lot of other pop songs, is about a girl. Whether we're living in a reactionary epoch or a progressive one, whether we're self-disciplined or congenitally lazy (bring back National Service! send youngsters from the technocratic elites back into the factories!), love problems are love problems. Even that formidable dialectician Herbert Marcuse, not otherwise known for his scrupulous avoidance of the notion that the personal might also be political, told an interviewer late in his life - with the merest perceptible grandfatherly twinkle in his eye - that "not every problem that someone has with their girlfriend or their boyfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production."

Speaking of dialectics, note the suggestion that music which aims to express a total reality or mood can thereby - ironically - be more narrowly expressive of its own particular cultural moment; music which is less ambitious, more surface-y can become harder to ‘place’ and thereby more universalised. The same can be true of poetry: watch Wholly Communion, the short Peter Whitehead film documenting the International Poetry Incarnation (1965) at the Royal Albert Hall, if you don't believe me. It’s an attempt to dig deep into the psyche and thereby revolutionise the world through poetry, sure… but what were those guys on? What were they on about? And then, by contrast, there’s Philip Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ about a train journey that begins in Hull.

To step back for a moment, it's interesting to say the least that we're still exercised by the Beatles and, more broadly, the popular music of the 1960s and 1970s after all this time. Some contemporaneous culture-watchers, shuddering at the sound of the band's first singles and noting Beatlemania as a phenomenon, a seen-and-heard adolescent frenzy, would have wondered whether the walls had been breached: the rest is idiocy, all that was solid melting into 'yeah yeah yeah' - and just why did everyone have to have quite so many babies just after World War Two? 

Yet here we all are: Meg and her muso-friends - she's attending a specialist music school; I own my privilege as we all must, one way or another - trade Beatles and Bowie CDs with one another when they're not, simply, streaming the songs (the isle is full of noises, the turn-of-the-century record industry having been slow to face the challenge of the internet which, to sharper eyes and ears, promised - if not total commercial ruin, at least a post-scarcity anarchism of content; while most horses have bolted, Digital Rights Management and subscription services have prevented the escape of older and slower nags). This has become a matter of cultural inheritance - when I was a teenage fan, it was only twenty years ago that Sergeant Pepper had taught the band to play (we traded home-copied TDK C60s; you could hear on the cassette tapes the crackle of the stylus meeting the lead-in groove and the creak of the record player's lid being lowered; some of us made our first attempts at cultural commentary on the inlays, e.g. John wrote in careful biro that the Yes album I'd asked him to copy, perhaps his dad's, perhaps from the Record Library, was in fact "flatulence and pomposity in a wilderness of pretension"); for Meg and her friends, it's a full half-century since the Beatles broke up.

Now, while I'm no expert in how my parents and their contemporaries would have experienced their own adolescence - I can listen to reminiscences and read fat Peter Hennessy social histories but, in the nature of things, I wasn't there - I'd put money on the fact that, as teenagers, they wouldn't have been enthusing about the popular songs that British Tommies would've been whistling as they marched towards the carnage of the Somme or Ypres. If they had been, they'd have presumably been trading yellowing sheet music and dusty 78s – and that's rather hard to imagine. Naming this chronological equivalence (as Meg to the Beatles, so Mum and Dad to Billy Murray and the Haydn Quartet) isn't intended gratuitously to embarrass; rather, it's to point up the comparative oddness of where we now find ourselves in relation to popular, populist art forms once celebrated for their modernity, disposability even.

In fact, a shared enjoyment of these songs has become a process of conscious cultural inheritance, music fandom as exegisis, which is fun and offers manifold opportunities to both connect and teach if you're a Cool Dad (don't look at me like that! I am!!). Meg, for instance, has needed help with understanding why 'Back In The USSR' is funny (a song more readily decipherable twenty years after the fact than fifty, during the Gorbachev as opposed to the Putin years) and with catching the parodic Beach Boys echo. And then there's the song 'Come Together' - "Here come old flat top/ He come groovin' up slowly" - which particularly caught Meg's imagination as we listened to Beatles albums together during one drive back to Somerset from Leeds. "What does it mean, though?" she asked - a fair question - so I asked her to reach round to retrieve, from the back seat of our car, Ian McDonald's 'Revolution in the Head: the Beatles Records and the 1960s' and to read aloud to me from it (I'm not the Cool Dad, in fact; I'm Thomas Gradgrind in army surplus and tie-dye). Meg did creditably at this exercise, stumbling only a little over phrases like "loosen the rigidities of political and emotional entrenchment" and "prevailing countercultural atmosphere of anti-elitism" and names such as Arthur Janov and Carlos Castaneda.

My contention - not only mine, for sure; it's a sort of received idea which I've done some of my own thinking and daydreaming about - would be that the 1960s and 1970s, for all sorts of sociopolitical reasons, were fulcrum decades for popular music (with the latter as, on the one hand, a sort of long troubled sigh of disappointment - "my brother's still at home with his Beatles and his Stones/ he never got it off on that revolution stuff" - and on the other, a creative fragmentation of a once more unitary pop scene into a slew of different sub-genres - pop, AOR, prog, funk, metal, disco, rap, reggae and the rest). As there arguably haven't been any new forms in classical music for a while - plenty of new content, of course - so there are no popular music forms which post-date 1980 if we're talking pop and rock, or the early 1990s if we're talking electronic dance music, rap, hip-hop. As Western philosophy's been said to consist mainly of "footnotes to Plato" (Alfred North Whitehead), so the popular music of our time consists of footnotes to The Beatles, Bowie, Kate Bush, Parliament-Funkadelic, Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaata. Have I missed anyone? No, don't think so. 

(The later albums on my list of ten would tend to bear this out, incidentally. Stereolab and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci are transparently reworking the musical inheritance of the 1960s. The Shamen, with 'In Gorbachev We Trust', released in 1989, were stumbling from shoegazery towards EDM as perhaps we all were back then but, you know, see above. Pavement always had a knack for the surreal and also - with lyrics like "there’s no castration fear/ in the chance you'll be with me" - for expressing the overthought overwrought overcaffeinated emotional lives of the sad young literary men of the 1990s. Still: thinking back to the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, Queen's 'I Want To Break Free', even the Mekons’ 'Never Been In A Riot', a shouty punk single featuring a male protagonist who hides in the lavatory when it all kicks off, intended as a sort of conscious riposte of the combat-rock posturing of groups like The Clash, the rock music of the 1960s and 1970s was hardly a wall-to-wall diet of unreflective, unreconstructed machismo).     

What I'm not saying, of course, is that we're at the end of history. "Whatever you like, but not that." When I was a young man, this was an important talking point (Francis Fukuyama must be sick of the reminders; honestly, you write one essay...) but post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-pandemic we're aware that history's very much still a work in progress and that any apparent cultural stasis we’re experiencing must be therefore the product of false consciousness, hegemony, mystification and other key concepts from the Verso Books desk diary. We've been talking about late capitalism and post-capitalism for a generation or two now - and it could well be that Meg and her friends, listening to Cave Town, David Bowie, the Beatles, Dexy's Midnight Runners and Billie Eilish now will later be the ones to break the old forms and make new; if not them, it'll be their children. I'm looking forward to hearing it, but I'm careful about what I wish for; if I get what I want, I might not even recognise it as music. Now will you turn that god-awful racket down.

 

Further Listening, Viewing and Reading.

The book on the back seat of the car was Ian MacDonald's 'Revolution In The Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties' (London: Vintage, 2008; third edition), in which the author brings detailed musicological, literary and biographical knowledge to bear on the entire oeuvre song by song, as well as - in his detailed introduction - situating them within the context of their time. Ian MacDonald seems willing to acknowledge the Jungian shadows in things, so to speak; he names the counterculture's enthusiastic reception of 'Come Together', for example, as a pivotal moment "when the free world's coming generation rejected established wisdom... for a drug-inspired relativism which has since undermined the intellectual foundations of Western culture."

The other best book to read about the Beatles would be Peter Brown's 'The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of the Beatles' (London: Macmillan, 1983). This has been criticised for not talking enough about the music - but if you own the albums and possibly Ian MacDonald's compendious guidebook to them, this shouldn’t be a problem. It's also been criticised for overemphasising drugs, bad behaviour on tour, cruelties, betrayals, Brian Epstein's possible homoerotic interest in his young protégés and so forth. This is an odd criticism, first because you'd be taking some strange views of art if you felt that such stories and inferences in any way diminished the work and second because you'd have to be gifted with an almost saintly lack of ordinary human prurience not to at least be interested in these facets of pop stardom. For younger or more sensitive readers, there's Philip Norman's 'Shout!: The True Story of the Beatles' (London: Elm Tree, 1981).

The recent documentary film ‘Eight Days A Week’ (dir. Ron Howard, 2016) also details with the Beatles' experiences on tour and their consequent decision to turn away from touring in favour of spending more time in the studio. Then, of course, there are the various films the Beatles themselves made.

I’ve mentioned, in passing, Herbert Marcuse as a 1960s thought leader. A book you could usefully read in order to find out more about him would be Stuart Jeffries' 'Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School' (London: Verso, 2016). In this readable and engaging work, Jeffries begins by investigating the earlier autobiographical writing of, in particular, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, asking what the relationship is between autobiographical reminiscence on the one hand and progressive, even revolutionary politics on the other. He goes on to outline contributions made by Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Jurgen Habermas and others to this influential Marxist-humanist school of thought from its origins in the early 1920s; in closing, he discusses Marcuse as a sort of grandfather figure to 1960s campus radicals (a relationship which was more salient, perhaps, to them than to him), contrasting this with Theodor Adorno's more troubled view of these revolts (troubled because, forced into exile from Nazi Germany in his early thirties, he saw proto-fascist tendencies in the anti-intellectual character of much of the student left activism of that time). The interview that I allude to was this one, with the writer and broadcaster Bryan Magee (I've written this appreciation of him) for the BBC in 1977.

There have been dozens of biographies, autobiographies, novels and so on dealing with 1960s counterculture more broadly. I'd particularly recommend 'Give The Anarchist A Cigarette' by Mick Farren; he was a musician and music promoter (the Deviants, the Pink Fairies, Warsaw Pakt; also Phun City, the UK's first large-scale free festival) as well as an underground journalist and writer (editing the International Times at one point, also writing 'The Texts of Festival' which owes something to Michael Moorcock and the sort of avant-garde science fiction being pioneered by New Worlds under Moorcock’s editorship). He appears to have gone everywhere and known everyone in British alternative culture during the 1960s and 1970s; more remarkably, he appeared to have remembered a lot of it. (Sadly, he died of a heart attack shortly after performing with the Deviants at the Borderline Club in London in 2013). I'd also recommend rock journalist Nick Kent's 'Apathy For The Devil: A 1970s Memoir' which, subtitle notwithstanding, begins with the author's encounters with the Rolling Stones from the 1960s on. Last but not least, I’d recommend both Sheila Rowbotham's 'Promise of a Dream: Remembering The Sixties' and Lynne Segal's 'Making Trouble', both of which describe their authors' experiences as part of the 1960s New Left and subsequent involvement in the emergence of second-wave feminism and then the socialist/ feminist community politics of the latter decade.

(Memoirs in general interest me for their busy-ness and their brief lives; my favourite character in all of these – aside from 'Magic Alex', aka Yannis Alexis Mardas, the electronics engineer whom the Beatles first met at the Maharishi's ashram and later installed as Head of Apple Electronics, a short-lived spin-off firm from the Beatles' own record label which attempted, wholly unsuccessfully, to revolutionise the consumer electronics market; Apple Computers, founded by Steve Jobs and others in 1976, was unrelated - is the 'bearded Sikh Maoist from Hemel Hempstead' who attends precisely one political meeting, entering and exiting Sheila Rowbotham's book within a sentence. There cannot, statistically, have been many people who would have fitted this description, so one likes to imagine this guy - now presumably into his seventies or eighties - picking the book up quite by chance and recognising himself. "Oh yeah, I was at that.")

Richard Neville's 'Playpower: Exploring The International Undergrouod' (London: Cape, 1970) is worth getting if you should come across it secondhand. (Less likely nowadays; I 'read' the sixties - Vance Packard, Theodore Roszak, John Brunner, J.G. Ballard - because I was a charity shop book magpie during my teenage years in the 1980s; charting the thriftstore demographics of cultural influencing and retro street fashion would be a whole sociology thesis in itself). Neville was the editor of the underground magazine Oz at the time (later to be tried and briefly jailed for obscenity in connection with the notorious 'Schoolkids Issue'); his book is, in part, a necessarily hazy explication of situationism-influenced and Yippie-style 'play politics' and, in part, a DIY manual on how to live the hippy lifestyle (ideally somewhere groovy like London but also hitching to places like New Delhi or Kabul from time to time for variety's sake) for very little money, i.e. obviating the need to hold down a straight job. This handbook would suit the naive, riding-for-a-fall time tourists of my short story 'Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind'.

"If we're talking electronic dance music," we've probably been re-reading Simon Reynolds' 'Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture' (London: Faber, latest edition 2013) or, more likely, we’ve been listening to dubstep and euphoric trance again while doing the washing up and wiping the kitchen surfaces down with anti-bac (I didn't get to many illegal warehouse raves back in the day; heard about them occasionally on 'News At Ten' though). His work on hip-hop I can't vouch for, but it's also worth getting hold of his equally exhaustive and exhausting 'Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984' (London: Faber, latest edition 2009). Is there no limit to this man's eclecticism, work ethic or, indeed, record collection?

Nostalgia - which is what this essay is primarily about – means, etymologically speaking, 'pain of homecoming'; the word's mostly now used to describe a kind of fond regret for ‘the good old days’. Time's a funny thing, though. We tend to experience it as part of various collectives as well as personally and some of those collectives have their own myths, concepts, eschatologies. Christians and Marxists, for example, believe in a perfected though difficult-to-picture future state into which we'll pass – either by doing the right things to deserve it or as an undeserved/ inevitable free gift, it depends on your theology - after a time of judgement or struggle; this perfected state may resemble earlier perfections (Christians picture Heaven as Edenic; Marxists may see the happy place as primitive communism plus running water and Netflix). While others are trying to retrofit the Whig view of history, hopeless though that might sound, some conservative theorists see life as more predicament than journey. These meta-narratives, if we subscribe to them, will colour how we experience nostalgia. More straightforwardly, individual memory can deceive and collective memory can be used to deceive. Are we remembering the memory or the photograph of that day out at Knaresborough Zoo, the actual 1940s or a plastic 1940s concocted for the purposes of political manipulation or to defend against trauma?

Links between popular music and nostalgia are well-explored: nothing takes you back like a good tune other than, perhaps, a bad one. The albums I'm nostalgic about were made either when I was in my late teens and early twenties - freedom! disposable income! first love! gigs! stomping around in a secondhand Russian Army greatcoat the whole time! - or when I was a small child or not yet born. Nostalgia for childhood's about being brand new, carefree, taken care of (but also: what secrets were the grown-ups holding? and what about those rumours or news images of, it might be, the Three Day Week or the Falklands War, vivid, remembered but not at the time understood? what do we see when we make the jigsaw?). Nostalgia for the years before we were born is subtler. We might be curious about our own individual prehistory (how did our parents meet?) or perhaps it's more that we find ourselves testing - as one keeps probing an uncomfortable tooth with one's tongue - the odd, existential fact that the world was there before we were and will continue after we’re gone. We could’ve been there; we weren’t.

Nostalgia, after all, can also be experienced in the subjunctive tense: we feel nostalgic for the ideas about adulthood or about the future that we used to entertain - those glittering prizes, perhaps, or rumoured twentyfirst century 'jetpacks' (see William Gibson’s short story, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’) or, to take a musical example, the way in which Kraftwerk in both music and iconography express nostalgia for the sane, social-democratic 1930s Germany that could have been and never was. There are specific forms of nostalgia that have seemed particularly salient recently - see, for instance, Andrew Irwin's essay 'Almost There For You: Friends And The Promise Of A Future Now Trapped In The Past' about the still-ubiquitous 1990s sitcom, popular amongst millennials and Generation Z - but it also feels right to suggest that, because of the interaction between specifically postmodern or late capitalist forms of trauma and the digitised omnipresence of all previous cultural artefacts, our entire cultural lives are swimming in nostalgia to a degree that we only rarely bring to mind. The cultural critic Mark Fisher - previously part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, alongside Sadie Plant and Nick Land (look up 'accelerationism' on twitter if you want to fall down an ideological rabbit hole for an hour or a decade) - has mapped these phenomena and the associated sense that "not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also… it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it" in books like 'Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?' and 'Ghosts of My Life'. Aside from one excerpt - at the online pop culture magazine The Quietus - I've only, at this point, read around him, so he's the chap that I'll be reading next. You can't just watch television or listen to music, you see, you've also got to take it seriously. 

 

 

rock family trees

Saara, my better half, was for a time a jazz vocalist in a group with someone who’d previously been (and subsequently was; they reformed!!) in mod hopefuls The Carnaby, whose insanely catchy single ‘Jump and Dance’ was released on Pye/ Piccadilly in 1965.

This is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to everything else featured in this blog; I’m just obliquely proud about it and like telling people.

But speaking of insane catchiness in music, do listen to Meg Curl’s ‘Distanced’; if there’s been a better song about what it’s like to be a teenager during lockdown, I’ve yet to hear it. The home-made video was shot in and around Windmill Hill, a council estate just adjacent to Glastonbury, ‘the oddest town in Britain.’ Windmill Hill is now the subject of its own documentary film.

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See also: the Beatles, missing the Watchet Music Festival, should I tell the children about Lou Reed?, 'Cats' starring Taylor Swift, watching 'The Filth and the Fury' with French subtitles on.

some people, they like to go out dancing

“Dad, have you heard of a band called the Velvet Underground?”

The part of me that’s a rock-and-roll fan – and left-libertarian free-speech advocate – is minded to say, straight off: yeah, they’re great.

The part of me that’s an inevitably and appropriately protective dad is minded to say: the Velvet Underground? No, doesn’t ring a bell. Still, I believe the Carpenters were around at about the same time; they’re great, you should listen to them.

“But if you haven’t heard of them, how do you know that…?”

Ah, fourteen year old daughter, you are too wise for me.

But the left-libertarian free-speech advocate side wins as it often does, and there are reasons for this.

First, our family culture just leans this way, sometimes to a fault. Partly it’s that (as far as day jobs go) we’ve worked for, oh, half a century between us in the sorts of welfare or therapeutic roles in which plain-speaking about what would otherwise be ‘hot potato’ subjects goes with the territory.

Second, it’s that Iris is, these days, a quasi-only child (quasi- because she has a brother fifteen years older; we're close, we see each other often but, in the nature of things – kids grow up, they leave home – he hasn’t lived with us since Iris was a toddler). While we actively try to make sure she’s had the chance to spend time with other small persons – during the summer holidays as she grew up, for instance, we arranged plenty of playdates with friends including other ‘onlies’* - inevitably she also gets included in the ebb and flow of grown-up conversations; she’s not one of two or more children amongst whom we’re having to arbitrate. 

*(Saara to me – as given our work schedules, I was being the main ‘summer holiday parent’ that year: “So do you think there’s going to be enough for Iris to do?” Self: “Yes, love, don’t worry; I’ve got the phone numbers of all the other mums. Saara: “Yeah, I bet.”).

Third, I think that these are the times we live in. A much younger chap I was talking to the other day mentioned that, as a child, he’d experienced an innocent and momentary curiosity about what it would be like to be Superman. So he did what small children now do: he typed “how to be Superman” into a search engine… then he typed it into Amazon, ordered up a few books and other resources, he’s been a Nietzschean ever since. (Joke).

Anyone now under twenty-five has grown up with, for better and for worse, the internet at their fingertips [..insert tedious reminiscences about payphones..]; the official remedy for this, at least if you listen to official guidelines handed out by schools along with NHS advice about nits and Comic Sans requests that cakes for the Summer Fayre are left with Ms Butskell in the office on Friday morning, is to screw things down nice and tight, firewall everything up to the hilt, parental controls, spyware, trackers, all the rest.

Some of this advice is good; some of it feels almost mandatory for anyone with any sense (meaning, it fits into the “why wouldn’t you?” category along with seatbelts, smoke alarms and vaccines); however, even as someone who’s helped hand the official guidance out (like I’ve helped arrange cakes on stalls; and don’t get me started about nits), I’ve sometimes had the nagging feeling that we’re just not doing enough, or we’re just not doing it right; possibly the official guidance doesn’t sufficiently address the positive, the sense in which the right response to the instant availability of information, misinformation, image, myth, rumour, isn’t some Canute-like* attempt to stem the tide but instead the determination to become, as a parent, a trusted source of – or conduit for - information and guidance.

*(Yes, he was a wise ruler attempting to demonstrate something to his courtiers, not some kind of Anglo-Saxon proto-Trumpian pathological narcissist – I know, I know).

By trusted source or conduit I guess I don’t mean ‘knowing it all’ – how could you? how could anyone? – more a commitment to being a sort of imperfect Socratic figure, open-handedly knowing and sharing what one doesn’t know etc. Whether that’s quite the right way to put it or not, what I’m suggesting is definitely both an epistemology and an existential stance more than it’s a specific body of knowledge. There’s perhaps a loose analogy here with drugs education* in schools: the ‘answer’ isn’t restricting information, still less prophylactic (in the sense of ‘prevenative’) lies, rather it’s countering inevitable street myth and rumour with balanced, accurate, age-appropriate information which, acknowledging the attractiveness of drugs as mood-altering substances (users aren’t drawn even to crack or to heroin for no reason at all; surprising how often even well-informed well-intentioned people miss this), also pulls no punches about actual and potential risks and harms.

*(I used to do drugs education in schools – oh, a decade or so ago now. Getting to the end of a PSHE visit to school; at the end, any questions? “Yes – was you one yourself?” Well, I’m not really here to talk about my own background – always best to leave ‘em with a sense of mystery. Then: a question on a standard Youth Service feedback form, ‘what was the worst thing about this presentation?’; Year 10 lad writes in,“not being funny, but D.S.’s t-shirt was the worst thing about this presentation.” Okay, okay; you got me there.)

Fourth, we live in a sort of hippy enclave and we’ve taken her to a lot of music festivals over the years.

If you’re determined that your child should never hear swear words, don’t ever take them either to the football or to music festivals - and if you’re determined only to present a sort of Ladybird Books picture of the world to them, don’t live even on the outskirts of the counterculture (now, I hesitate to use the word... but let me walk you around Glastonbury for the afternoon; yep, there's a counterculture). 

Of course, you still have to supervise. We were all at Glastonbury one year; Saara and I were working at a Churches Together-led welfare project – heck, I could tell you some stories – and there was one lad, about nineteen, who spent a lot of time with us because he was going through a various crises and needed that kind of adult grounding maybe, or to be part of a reparative pseudo-family for the duration: the heart wants what it wants. (Also, he didn’t have a wristband so was evading security; jumping the fence at Glastonbury takes real work and ingenuity since the Ring of Steel went up). He took a shine to Iris as a kind of temporary, honorary little sister, taught her to play the drums (naturally we had a drum kit), told her funny stories; I was there in the background, and intervened whenever he forgot himself and began to include drugs or other misbehaviour in these stories. “Josh, she’s seven.” “Oh yeah, I forgot, sorry, sorry.”

So, yeah: after running the numbers (one key determinant, three associated multipliers), it turns out I have heard of the Velvet Underground... and that I'm top of the world looking down on Creation about that.

[See also: rock family trees]

from lewisham to watchet by cormorant

“I didn’t know you wrote poetry, I didn’t know you wrote such bloody awful poetry.”

If this had been a normal August Bank Holiday weekend, I’d have spent it at Watchet Music Festival. We’d have been catching up with old friends, making new ones, drinking Sheppey’s Sweet, having those random conversations you tend to have at music festivals, dancing to the Bar Steward Sons of Val Doonican, you name it. This time next year, God willing.

At Watchet, I usually end up reading some of me poems into a microphone at the Something Else Tea Tent – because there’s nothing I like more than further confusing some twenty to thirty hungover and fragile-looking souls on a Sunday lunchtime, apart from perhaps a well-cooked vegan breakfast. Oh, and pina coladas. Getting caught in the rain. Alphabetising my CD collection. Actually, there’s quite a lot of things I like more than further confusing…

Enough of the Monty Python impersonations.

I don’t take my own poetry terribly seriously, you understand; it was a weight off my mind when I decided at approx. age twenty-five that “I am not T.S. Eliot, nor was meant to be.” The Pam Ayres de nos jours, perhaps, only slightly more influenced by Pavement than the original; certainly I wish I’d been more diligent about regular dental check-ups. But in lieu of getting those emotional self-immolation kicks in person (“your poetry is basically comedy, isn’t it, Dad?”; yes and no; just because people are laughing, this doesn’t mean it’s a comedy; just because they look confused, this doesn’t mean it’s a puzzle), here are a few which at least look alright on the screen.

Okay. So this next one comes to mind in a music-festival context, because Saara and friends worked it up into a song when she was in the band (and then there was ‘Yvonne’s Pickaxe’, the best socialist-feminist anthem I ever wrote… though in another Richard Curtis style timeline, I wake up after a minor car accident in a world in which Billy Bragg never existed; gifted with perfect recall, I then successfully claim to have written ‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards’).

---

Lewisham. Monday. 10:47a.m.

Elaine, there’s a cormorant
Outside the One-Stop Shop.

It says it don’t want
Housing Benefit help
And it says it don’t want
Energy-saving lightbulbs
Or Community Arts and Leisure News.

It screams that it’s
The crack in every windowpane
The asymptote of every graph
The gap in our integrated service provision.

Elaine, it’s thin and gaunt
And walking on the wall
Intimidating passers-by;
Plus its press releases and live webcast
Could give Lewisham a bad name
At this critical juncture.

I’m telling you Elaine:
You’d better call the Seabird Outreach Team.
Its claims to dwell in the ruined castle
In the back of every social worker’s head
Are scaring me. Bye for now.

---

The next is a bit religious and it partly takes place in Sainsbury’s. YES: turns out I'm George Herbert, only with Nectar points).

---

Stigmata

Mrs K.M. of Leatherhead, Surrey writes
“Can you get carpet burns from laminated flooring?”
Well, Mrs K.M., the answer to your query is no,
Those subtle but perceptible marks on your upper thigh
Are, in fact, stigmata, representations of Christ’s suffering
Showing where the nails entered his flesh.

Also, the light in your fridge is the light of life
Factories and outlet villages are the Spirit’s creative power
And the queuing system at the deli counter
Is the fearful soul waiting upon judgement.

Mrs K.M. of Leatherhead in Surrey,
My heart yearns to be with you –
You and your husband Alan,
Your lovely children John and Chloe
And the Alsatians Joe and Lizbet;
Our ordinary yearnings are images of that great desire
The restless soul panting for its God.

Do rest assured, Mrs K.M., Mr L.W., Ms G.F.
And everyone crouching out there in the warm darkness
That God will return at the same time next Wednesday
To answer more of your household and DIY queries. Amen.

---

The last of these three I probably wouldn’t read at a music festival; wrong mood.

When I did read it out at a poetry evening, it provoked “a sharp intake of breath.” This I like, just as I enjoy reading both hostile and appreciative responses to fanzine articles; a mixed response reassures me that I’m doing it right.

---

Rotterdam

My link worker visits; asks, “and how are you in yourself?”
I think: how am I in myself? As opposed to what, exactly?
How am I in a bag? How am I in a suburb of Rotterdam?
What, exactly? But Agnetha’s not so bad. She says,
“I’m going to put you down as a Level Five.” I think
She just wants to close the case, to step me down.
I can see she’s busy.

And how is Agnetha in herself? Agnetha pities me
If she thinks of me at all – I mean, outside of working hours.
Agnetha is getting married; Agnetha dislikes her name,
Tells friends she keeps it out of loyalty to her dead dad.
Perhaps he was called Agnetha also.

Today Agnetha feels scared when she watches the news
And that’s how Agnetha is in herself –
But how is she in a bag? How is she in a suburb of Rotterdam?
I voted to leave the European Union
But please don’t think the worse of me for that;

I am a Level Five.

---

(Oh, and speaking of the EU...)

The best poem I’ve yet written (in my own estimation) is a long sequence called ‘Burnham Beach Amusements’ which took a weekend to write and about fifteen minutes to read; it reworks Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, quoting from it, extemporising and folding in various other found texts and fragments of overheard speech. If you haven’t noticed a long, withdrawing roar lately, you haven’t been watching the news. 

By the way, I don’t include poetry collections in twenty-seven word reviews even though I read them. This is because there’s something inherently glib about summarising something you’ve read or watched in twenty-seven words; I just don't want to be or sound glib about other people's poetry collections (poets are delicate, prose writers can look out for themselves).

Quick ‘heads-up’ and ‘thank you’ then that I’ve recently enjoyed poetry collections by Ama Bolton, Rachael Clyne, Michelle Diaz, Jo Waterworth, and also that I’ve enjoyed listening to work by Ben Banyard, Chrissy Banks, Beth Calverley, Jinny Fisher, Tom Sastry, Louise Warren, and Pam Zinnemann-Hope. Much of this has been through Fountain Poets - for me, to look through the Fountain Poets website is both to remember some standout evenings (etymologically speaking, to ‘ex-ist’ is to stand out) and to look forward to meeting up again ‘when all this is over’ (and it will be).

-----------------------

(If you're a Christian or other festival-goer who'd normally join the Churches Together worship service on the festival site on Sunday mornings, here's a virtual act of worship put together by local Christians. Hopefully next year we can get together and lift our voices!)

(For more details of family leisure pursuits - and, frankly, what could possibly go wrong? - see Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind).