Monday 31 December 2018

101 Faces - 7

31-35, more people i find interesting

BILL DRUMMOND
It seems a bit silly now to say how inspiring I found Bill Drummond’s book ‘33’ with its dry tales of mad stunts and art terrorism – that was a wilder, ruder me, who had some aspiration to subversion. Still, it’s easy enough to love the music of the KLF and the silliness, but I mark Bill Drummond above all for his description of a still landscape a few minutes after a plane crash. One of the indelible images constantly in my head.

SONNY LISTON
Sonny could lick all them cats. To me, everything about the 20th century, all its anger, its hypocrisy, its violence and sadness, its failures and successes, its misconceptions and propaganda, its journey of exploitation, its squalor and glamour, is there in the face and the story of Sonny Liston. 
When I started back trying to write poems a few years ago, one of the first things I tried to do was, as an exercise, write 6 poems about Sonny Liston. The first five weren’t good, but the last one, I still really like a couple of bits of it (it owes something to the Mountain Goats song Love, Love, Love…

I’LL WRITE A BOOK ABOUT SONNY LISTON

Sonny Liston found a way to turn hate into love;
Death did not defeat him like Muhammad’s phantom punch.
He might well not believe it if you told him of the songs,
 the books written to save his soul long after he is gone.

I’ll write six poems about him just to tell him someone cares
About the misbegotten, vilified and easily led .
There’s no worthwhile 20th century if Sonny is erased,
The light will shine upon him, though too little and too late.

I’ll write six poems for Sonny Liston, making one for every round
He lasted with Ali on the grim night his life fell down.
History needs it villains, but those villains need a break -
Sonny Liston’s afterlife need not be marked with shame.

Line the streets of Philadelphia ‘cause it’s Sonny Liston Day.
History’s been rewritten and his reputation saved.
All around St Louis I hear crowds of people shout
God save Sonny Liston, you can’t keep a champion down.

JULIE CHRISTIE
Mainly by various coincidences, like studying the source material as a school text and the kind of things they'd show on idle Bank Holiday Mondays, I saw several Julie Christie films when I was a teenager. Mainly they’re great films. Then there’s Dr Zhivago, a slightly flawed film which centres itself on her character as a quasi-mythical romantic figure. So Julie Christie has always been my favourite film actress, as surely as The Big Lebowski’s been my favourite film. 
She also, emerges, almost uniquely, from the bacchanial expose of 70s Hollywood that was Peter Biskind’s ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’ as a completely solid and tremendous character. She has, since being one of the world’s most famous faces for a few years, just flown over the fray, popping up with the occasional great performance every few years before disappearing back to her own life.

PAUL NEWMAN
I see Newman as the male Julie Christie – iconically beautiful in the 60s whilst also making a series of genuinely excellent films, someone with hinterland and sense, who rose above the fray of it all. I know there are several other male icons of that era like Brando, Steve McQueen, James Dean, who you might say have a greater mythology surrounding them, but I’d take Newman’s life and filmography over all of them. 

ZAHA HADID
I wanted to include an architect to indicate that I love buildings, and that looking at buildings with absolutely no knowledge or expertise is a huge part of what's going on in my head. I know how silly that sounds.
I wouldn’t say Zaha Hadid’s are my absolute favourite buildings, but she was a good representative of the mad ambition and cost of magnificent buildings, and how it’s nearly always worth it. I wouldn't say that applies to all vast ambitions. But with great buildings, well, the huge and lasting joy and purpose they bring can really override all negativity about cost.




Saturday 29 December 2018

101 Faces - 6

26 to 30 of these interesting people

MARIAN REJEWSKI
I read up on him this year. Though I said at the start it wasn’t the unseen heroes I was necessarily drawn to, I can make exceptions. Just a Polish Maths student who did so much of the work to crack the Enigma codes, then went back to being an accountant.

CHIMAMANDA NGOZIE ADICHIE
A great writer and also a great icon, a voice on a Beyonce album and a prized interviewee and spokesperson. It seems an obvious, perhaps reductive, thing to say, but it is surely important that one of the world’s most famous and acclaimed authors is an African woman.
On a personal note, a book-within-a-book in her great novel ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ (not to mention many of the themes within it) triggered what I felt for a long time was the truest thing I ever wrote …
THE WORLD WAS / SILENT WHEN WE DIED


The world was silent - all the bombs had faded
and I died quietly, as I'd always wanted
The fireworks had been unimpressive, and I
walked home alone as the crowds shouted dry
then, in silence, chose my last memories.
The world was silent, you say, when you died
Looking elsewhere, at its shoes, shamefaced
Too busy flitting through its own little tiffs
While you screamed in rage and pain
Disbelieving that no one was listening
And when you died, I, I was silent
Because sometimes my nothing's not enough
And grief and horror need meeting in kind
But i could muster no words when you died
Just dodged through crowds, deathly, dull,
Innocent or ignorant, both or neither.
The fireworks fire, the choirs sing,
There's beauty in places, why deny?
And the world groans, and I'm dancing
with my friends, and we're laughing
And I walk home alone and free to go
And I fall silent and you fall silent
And there's silence as the world dies.

JOHN CUSACK
Pair of Cusacks. I love John Cusack because he’s an iconic film star who starred in a huge run of great films which inspire not just admiration but love, also because he’s genuinely really tall and doesn’t pretend to be, also because he has managed to not let people into his personal life extremely successfully, while also, conversely, being constantly on twitter getting into arguments with stupid people and being nice to nice people.
PS... aah ... bollocks ...

JOAN CUSACK
I love Joan Cusack because she’s one of the best scene-stealers of all time, she’s brilliant opposite John Cusack, and generally ought to be one of the biggest stars on Hollywood. Also because she’s the voice of Jessie, and Jessie is the best thing in the Toy Story films I’ve had to watch relentlessly in the last year.

JOHN BARNES
Barnes never really made it as TV presenter or as a manager – he just seems like he thinks a bit too much for that. This interview he did recently is so compelling and so brilliant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f4rVvpmzJ0
You realise what an unsettling presence he must have been in the unambiguously dark ages of English football - the best, the smartest, the most phlegmatic - just subverting all those prejudices.
He was such a great footballer, underrated because his greatness was in an era with not much football in TV, and perhaps because people mistook his occasional unpopularity with England fans for anything but racism. 

Thursday 27 December 2018

101 Faces - 5

Here now, 21-25
PAUL ROBESON
I have had a fascination with Robeson for many years. It is still sinister that such a huge figure should be so marginalised in history. Had he been born 100 years later (well, maybe 95, not 100, since he was born in 1898) whose role would he be fulfilling? Colin Kaepernick, Kendrick Lamar, Obama, Deray Mckesson, Samuel L Jackson, Eric Holder? Or all of them? Or would he be mainly just a great baritone singer, as he is mainly remembered.

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI
Well, it’s just funny the kind of people that people hate these days. Is this a person so worthy of vitriol from so many angles? Really? How will we look at this era? – it was an era when people from all sides of the political spectrum took against Shami Chakrabarti. Why? Because we're at the same time morally supercharged and morally defunct. So tiresome.

EMMA POOLEY
If you want an example of the bias that faces sportswomen, Emma Pooley was one of the best cyclists in the world for many years, (Olympic silver, World time-trial champion), is a multi-world champion in the duathlon, has a PhD and has been in the winning team in Celebrity University Challenge. But is still pretty unknown.

WILLIAM POOLEY
This nurse who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone and, once he’d recovered, flew back to his work there. I’m rarely struck like that, I rarely believe in the better side of human nature, but I thought, jeez, some folk are just like that, aren’t they?

HAL BLAINE
The sound of rock’n’roll is Hal Blaine drumming. Truly. That’s quite a recent revelation for me, but it’s true. Without Hal Blaine drumming, what would we have, or what would we not have? We’d not have the sound we hear on .. deep breath, because there could be 1000s … Be My Baby, Good Vibrations, Wichita Lineman, Bridge Over Troubled Water … you know what I mean? He made that sound.

Monday 24 December 2018

101 Faces - 4

Here are some more ... 16-20

MARTINA NAVRATILOVA
There’s a time in every great sportsperson’s life when they come second in a reality show to Joe Swash. Navratilova is seen as a hero now, but as I was growing up she was put in the villain role, let’s not forget, just like Serena Williams for many years. Definitely one of greatest sportspeople ever.

GORDON BROWN
I hope this whole project doesn’t reek of great man theory. I like to think I don’t subscribe to it. Certainly when it comes to world affairs. See Churchill’s dismissal of Attlee. 
But I think if there’s one great figure in our modern politics it’s this one. When his autobiography came out last year, various enemies lined up with predictable churlish takes, generally all said “such a shame Brown was just a terrible PM and is so bitter, as that overshadows these couple of actual great achievements and he was actually right about these things” … and, across the reviews, there were, like, 10 achievements greater than anything anyone else in modern politics has accomplished, and so many things he was right about. What he wasn’t right about, and its crucialness is underrated, was doggedly sticking to a low threshold for inheritance tax. I hold that Osborne’s seizing on that while Brown was dithering over calling an election in 2007 was the moment the worm turned for good. Still, while I bet he was a nightmare at times, I see Brown as a great achiever, a non-hypocrite, a genuine human being.

ODETTA
If you’ve never seen footage of Odetta in her prime, it is extraordinary. Momentous. I love her for various reasons, personal and general. Here, years ago, I wrote about seeing her and the next guy on stage together ... it's a bit clumsy, but it's got heart

In the back room in the White Horse Tavern
One parting glass to toast days of the past
the fetid air filled with rebel songs, fervent
desires that the best days will forever last.

In your unfurnished flat off Harrowby Street,
we soaked up your folk songs from a world we didn't know
Tommy Makem, Liam Clancy, low, bold and sweet
children's songs, rebel songs, strong, proud and slow.

She had Odetta, you had Liam Clancy
but those were the days and they didn't last forever
though last night, my eyes saw the sweetest surprise
Odetta and Liam Clancy were back together.

She had Odetta, you had Liam Clancy
and I've got Bob Dylan at the centre of all
from strange fruit hanging to blowing in the wind
from the White Horse Tavern to the Barbican Hall.

These rebel songs, Paddy, they will not accept
the lot they've been given, beaten and bowed.
What's happened to us all, Dad, what happened to you?
Where's your rebel song now, where's my rebel song now?

A billion exile hearts keep on fighting
to find a solution, a direction home,
So where's the fight now, the will to escape
from the fate of the unmourned, incomplete unknown?

She knew enough and she loved Odetta
She knew enough to go where she needed
History's given a million clear warnings
but I ain't got the rebel heart to heed it.

Liam led us in Those Were The Days
but, fuck, I'm still young, it's not yet my time
to give up on the present and cry for the past
So I'll bid farewell and move on down the line

LIAM CLANCY
Not something to over-romanticise, but he was pretty much the definitive Irish bard/storyteller. I've listened to him singing all my life

AMELIA EARHART
Katharine Hepburn never played Amelia Earhart, which just seems wrong. She did play an Earhart-like character in 1933 film Christopher Strong. Amelia Earhart’s life and death are really eerily fascinating and also tremendously impressive. Did she cheat death or did death cheat her? And there's a great Joni Mitchell song about her.

Thursday 20 December 2018

Wilco

I have been trying to write about Wilco for ages. I've tried writing a long piece about why Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is my favourite album, why it's the greatest album of the century, how it's about everything, how it's the defining document of modern anxiety and dislocation, how it came together, what it means etc but gave up, because I wasn't doing it any justice.

I've wanted to write about, though I've seen 100s of bands down the year, Wilco and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are the Ronaldo and Messi of the whole thing - just better, on a different level, from the other bands I've seen.

I've wanted to write about the funny phenomenon of a band being in its recording prime while it was still coming together as a live act. Wilco didn't hit on their great settled live line up til about 2004, by which arguably they'd made most of their most acclaimed albums. Who else does this apply to? Belle and Sebastian? The Rolling Stones? Lots of others, I expect.

I've wanted to write about the steady genius of the frontman Jeff Tweedy, about his great memoir, how he's a bit of an American Damon Albarn, an enabler, a bandleader more than a talisman, but that's not to underestimate his prodigious gifts. How one interview with Tweedy is worth more than some band's whole recorded career.

But anyway, hopefully I'll do all those things, but for now, reverting to type, here are my 100 favourite Jeff Tweedy songs

  1. She's a Jar
  2. Misunderstood
  3. Radio Cure
  4. Hummingbird
  5. Jesus Etc
  6. Reservations
  7. On and On and On
  8. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
  9. Candyfloss
  10. The Late Greats
  11. Ashes of American Flags
  12. You Never Know
  13. Random Name Generator
  14. Spiders (Kidsmoke)
  15. I Might
  16. What Light
  17. Sunken Treasure
  18. Monday
  19. Theologians
  20. Hate it Here
  21. Either Way
  22. Via Chicago
  23. Impossible Germany
  24. New Madrid - Uncle Tupelo
  25. Say You Miss Me
  26. California Stars (with Billy Bragg)
  27. Wilco
  28. Pieholden Suite
  29. Dawned on Me
  30. I Got You (at the end of the century)
  31. How to Fight Loneliness
  32. I'm a Wheel
  33. Can't Stand It
  34. ELT
  35. I'm the Man Who Loves You
  36. I'm Always in Love
  37. You Satellite
  38. Everlasting Everything
  39. Nothing's ever Gonna Stand in My Way Again
  40. Standing O
  41. When You Wake Up Feeling Old
  42. Bombs Above - Jeff Tweedy
  43. I Must Be High
  44. Outtamind (outtasite)
  45. Shot in the Arm
  46. Company in My Back
  47. Screen Door - Uncle Tupelo
  48. Poor Places
  49. Country Disappeared
  50. Heavy Metal Drummer
  51. Taste the Ceiling
  52. Side with the Seeds
  53. Summerteeth
  54. Kamera
  55. Magnetized
  56. At Least That's What You Said
  57. One Wing
  58. We Aren't the World (Safety Girl)
  59. The Joke Explained
  60. Pot Kettle Black
  61. Looking Forward to Seeing You - Golden Smog
  62. What's the World Got In Store
  63. Box Full of Letters
  64. You and I
  65. Born Alone
  66. Art of Almost
  67. Happiness
  68. Diamond Lights - Tweedy
  69. Some Birds
  70. Locator
  71. I'll Fight
  72. Handshake Drugs
  73. Normal American Kids
  74. Far, Far Away
  75. I Know What It's Like - Jeff Tweedy
  76. Cry All Day
  77. Less than You Think
  78. One Sunday Morning
  79. Just Say Goodbye
  80. My Darling
  81. Passenger Side
  82. The Lonely 1
  83. Low Key - Tweedy
  84. Wishful Thinking
  85. Muzzle of Bees
  86. We've Been Had - Uncle Tupelo
  87. You Were Wrong - Loose Fur
  88. Summer Noon - Tweedy
  89. Having Been is No Way to Be - Jeff Tweedy
  90. Casino Queen
  91. We're Just Friends
  92. Shake It Off
  93. Watch Me Fall - Uncle Tupelo
  94. Gun - Uncle Tupelo
  95. Lost Love - Golden Smog
  96. One by One - with Billy Bragg
  97. Shouldn't Be Ashamed
  98. In a Future Age
  99. Please Be Patient With Me
  100. Kingpin
It's already wildly inaccurate, but I hope it tells you how much I love Wilco. That's all I want to do for now.



101 Faces - 3

11 to 15 of 101 people I find interesting.

LAURA MARLING
As remarkable as the fact Debbie Harry became a pop icon in her mid 30s is the fact that Laura Marling has now released six albums of greater depth and wisdom than any other British songwriter of this era and she’s still not even 30. I think Marling remains underrated, an absolute one-off of accomplished songcraft it’s hard to categorise.

DAVID CAMPESE
From Campese I learnt to love the enemy, more so than from the great West Indies cricket team of 1984, who I didn’t really see as the enemy. But Campo, I did want him to lose and to fail, but I marvelled at him, and, at that age when I still played rugby rather well and could still have gone on to love it, I imitated him, or tried to – his hitch kick and his tiptoes, his one hand on the ball arrogance. He occupied the same space as Shane Warne – the one-off, the maddening, irritating, Aussie glorious sporting genius. Campese could have turned me into a rugby player, more so than the other rugby players I’ve loved who would follow. I was too far gone by then. I’m relieved he didn’t.

HARUKI MURAKAMI
For his mesmeric novels and also for his validating, revelatory book about running above all, which assured me I was on safe ground with his novels.

CASTER SEMENYA
There was some awfully shitty BBC piece about Semenya during the 2017 World Championships. It literally contained the line “Is she … actually a he?” I was surprised by the strength of my feeling. For sport, this is going to be an increasingly tricky issue, and I don’t know for sure how it should be handled, but I do know Semenya has been through great amounts of dehumanising bullshit, and just strides through it like an absolute star.

JUSTINE GREENING
Firstly, Justine Greening’s my favourite high-level Conservative politician, the kind of politician it’s important to acknowledge in order to hold on to your sanity and pretence at balance, that there can be someone who rises high in that party who seems sensible, reasoned, decent, highly competent. But what puts her here is that, ironically, her face was my first harbinger of doom. It was early on in 2005 election night and yes, of course Labour were going to win, but Justine Greening unexpectedly won Putney for the Tories and then, contrary to what I’d naively thought about the Conservatives pretty much fading to obscurity as a political force, I realised they were coming back. They came back, didn’t they?

Favourite 12 Albums of 2018

I usually spend quite a lot of time thinking about and writing about my favourite music of the year. I won't this year. I'll just write a tiny bit about my twelve favourite albums.

My tastes have been pretty unadventurous this year. In recent years, I've tried to stay on top of all the lists, dug deep into acclaimed stuff even if it's not my natural milieu. I just haven't had the inclination to do that this year. I may write separately, because I've been thinking about it, about the extent to which it's really and truly possible to make your taste in music more varied/more woke, for want of a better word. But that's for another time.

I have listened to plenty of new music this year, but usually not given stuff more than one listen if it didn't grab me. So, this 12 will be pretty conservative. How conservative? Well, my favourite album of the year was by Paul Weller. Yay dadrock ...

1. Paul Weller - True Meanings
What can I say? I think this may be Weller's most wholly pleasing solo record, up there with Wild Wood and 22 Dreams. The melodies are straight and true, the orchestration is lovely, I listened to it over and over again. I found the most memorable songs to be at the backend but there are no tricky moments to navigate. It's just a great record.

2. Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour
This might well have been my favourite album of the year were it not for the song which critics have called its standout track 'High Horse' which for me just sounded like some Shania Twain-y pop-country irritation compared to the beautiful songs which filled the rest of the album. Just me, probably. So many good songs on this album.

3. Courtney Marie Andrews - May Your Kindness Remain
More country-soul than the country-pop and country-folk of the Kacey Musgraves record, I loved the drama of this record. I'm surprised it hasn't turned up higher in more end-of-year lists

4. Marianne Faithfull - Negative Capability
This has got the crack team on it - Cave, Warren Ellis, Ed Harcourt, etc. Enjoyed much more than I thought I would - moving and full of great songs.

5. Gruff Rhys - Babelsberg
Heavily, beautifully orchestrated, like Weller's record. Everything you'd expect of Gruff, really. I'm unlikely to ever not like one of his records, but I listened to this as much as anything this year.

6.Idles - Joy as an Act of Resistance
Surprisingly fun. Couldn't quite tell if it was a bunch of kids trying to sound like grown-ups or a buch of grown-ups trying to sound like kids. Lots of interpolated hooks, wild sloganeering, but generally just an attention-keeping listen. And Danny Nedelko is a great, great song.

7. Mitski - Be the Cowboy
Been listening to it a lot recently - critics are right on this, great songs, great writing.

8. Manic Street Preachers - Resistance is Futile
Sharp and poppy, but not excessively so, this felt like a very comfortable Manics record. And 2 or 3 of these would have been big hits in the late 90s, which is fine with me!

9. Natalie Prass - The Future and the Past
Maybe not quite as much of a revelation as her debut album, but full of brilliant songs

10. Janelle Monae - Dirty Computer
This album was a mild disappointment, but still enjoyable to listen to. The ArchAndroid was so mindblowing, so eclectic, so deep, this, I don't know, the songs were just a bit ... trying too hard but also not pushing it out enough.
You kind of feel this was a big attempt to have a massively successful record, which it wasn't quite ...

11.Arctic Monkeys - Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino
I think this has warmed on me more as the year's gone by. Quite a brave thing to do really, but you feel like every album they do gives them space to do something else interesting next time.

12. US Girls - In a Poem Unlimited
This was a cool album at the start of the year - rich in tunes and ideas







Wednesday 19 December 2018

101 Faces - 2

Here are some more great people with great faces

DEBBIE HARRY
It shouldn’t be, but it’s incredible that Debbie Harry was the great teen/pop icon/pin-up of the late 70s when she was already in her mid-30s. She was born in the same year as my mum, and I was a 4th child being born when Debbie Harry was starting to get famous. She’d already had such a life before – there’s a story about her escaping from a car driven by serial killer Ted Bundy which is a little discredited, but it always struck me. I also think of the story of love and sacrifice at the centre of Blondie, the ongoing partnership between Harry and Stein (alongside whatever sadness and darkness). Most of all, I love Blondie songs, their range, their thrill. I love Rip Her to Shreds, it’s so nasty, and I love Call Me and Sunday Girl and the rest.

ALBERT CAMUS
There’s a lot I like about Camus. I love his face, I even enjoyed reading his books, but that football quote on that football t-shirt really is the icing on the cake. “Everything I know most surely etc” you know the one. Because it really articulates that thing that is really very important to me – sport is not just games for boys, it’s deep and brilliant and art and politics all at once. Kind of not-quite connected, but I enjoyed this quote from author Sally Rooney about footballers recently, “through no fault of their own they have a sublime gift and there’s nothing in their personality that would necessarily mean they enjoy fame. They don’t choose to be celebrities in the way that actors do. They just have it heaped on them.”

VALERIE SOLANAS
I’ve thought about Valerie Solanas a lot down the years. Really ahead of her time. Still, don’t go shooting people. 
I tell you, I wrote this  coupley I was proud of, then I not only ruined the poem that it prompted, I actually ruined the line itself by embellishing it. The original couplet was 
“Fame is for the few, whatever Andy Warhol said
 to Valerie Solanas as his holy torso bled”
Then I added “Fatal” at the start which takes away a lot more than it adds.  Still, I wrote that line, and I tell you, I like it a lot.

CURTLY AMBROSE
Curtly in his prime was, to me, the most fearsome thing in sport. More than Tyson, or Roy Keane, or Martin Johnson, or whoever. Fluid and deadly, and author of one of the great catchphrases “Curtly talk to no man” – except when he finished playing, he did start talking, and that was great too.  And he played bass in a band with Richie Richardson called Big Bad Dread and the Bald Head. Find me a greater man. "Curtly talk to no man", Curtly said curtly.

THOMAS HARDY
I always loved Hardy – and his writing straddles several eras. He writes about a shifting world and seems both ancient and modern – tremendously humane and deep. One of several famous people called Thomas Hardy, but this is my favourite.

Monday 17 December 2018

101 Faces - 1

Having hit a brick wall writing about music, or anything else, I've come across quite a simple - actually, pretty well-worn - idea to fill up some space.

I get bored of myself on social media. I mainly put stuff to do with cricket, quizzing or crap jokes. I wondered if I can see myself as a person with a wide range of interests anymore. What was I "in to"? I realised that I can give a pretty good picture of myself by listing the people I have a special, or burgeoning, interest in.

I could probably fill up a monotonous list with rock guys and cricketers, and, sure, there'll be some rock guys and cricketers, but I hope I can do a little better than that. I wouldn't say my people are obscure - they're mainstream, or just a little off mainstream. I'm not quite at the "I'd have to say my hero is Ian "Beefy" Botham, because he was such a maverick" level of mundanity, but I won't kid myself I'm that far off it.

There are many, particularly in quizzing circles, who search out obscurities, fascinating unsung tales. I like a bit of that, and I love people whose minds work that way, but it's not really my thing. I'm arrogant enough to think the people I have heard of are, by 40, more likely to be great and fascinating than those I haven't. Most of these are people you may have heard of, definitely you should have heard of.

I'm not going to use the word icon in the title, but "iconic" is a word that may crop up. I've gone for "Faces" because I think nearly all these people have great faces. Most faces are great when you look at them long enough, but these are my kind of faces.

On that topic, I could have included "anti-icons" within this, people who we can't escape and inform our worldview by our opposition to them. We probably know who a lot of those are. But ...I have long been taught not to comment on people's personal appearance, and I stick to it pretty well in public. So, in these cases, I won't go beyond saying I like how these people look and they've got great faces.

To go the other way, to link people's malignance with what they look like (of course we all know what the likes of Farage look like) is a dangerous path to go down. Horrible people can look great. One of the worst tricks we humans play on ourselves is ascribing moral virtue to someone's appearance. Fuck honest faces.

But, ok, this lot will have great faces. Iconic faces. They're not all good people. Some of them are, or were, bad people. But I don't hate them. I either admire them or am intrigued by them (I'm not intrigued by Farage and his ilk, not one bit). I don't know how many there'll be - probably 101, knowing me.

It is, I found, hard writing little soundbites about why you like people, so they take a turn to the odd or minimalist at various places ...

Here are the first five:

ROBBIE ROBERTSON 
      At different times Robbie Robertson was the main sidekick for Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese. I guess I can use him to avoid filling up spaces with my obvious ones- I don’t need to write about Dylan, Scorsese, De Niro, Ryan Giggs, David Gower, Paul Weller, now, do I? So they’re covered. I like them. 
He’s really vitriolically disliked by some who’ve studied The Band- they say he was a player and a swindler. But, I don’t know, he wrote those great songs, he played that guitar, and he was that fucking cool. It’s sad when great things sour, but that doesn’t take too much shine off Robertson for me.

MARTHA REEVES
Martha Reeves sang several of Motown’s greatest songs - the really, really good ones which are greater than the absolutely most famous ones. She sang with pure joy and an absence of trickery. She was then a Detroit councilwoman. This seems a great life.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS
I went to a big exhibition of Louise Bourgeois stuff in Stockholm – it was fabulous, very varied, funny and dark and memorable, not just massive spiders, and she looked supercool and lived to be 101. Excellent.

TOM STOPPARD

 A lot of events are enjoyable, but it’s rare that you get the feeling at a gig/comedy show/play – “this is exactly how I want this form to be”. I’ve had it at Wilco, at Stewart Lee, and I’ve had it more than once at Tom Stoppard plays, as he deals with Classics, Words, Philosophy, Politics, Cricket, Football, Love, Rock’n’Roll, Classical Music, Mythology, History, all while regularly throwing in brilliantly silly clever jokes. Obviously, great face, too.

ED MOSES


On a holiday to Devon in what must have been the summer of 1987, I remember my cousin Joseph telling me that Ed Moses was the fastest man in the world. No, I patiently explained, Moses is great, but Ben Johnson is the fastest man in the world. Ben Johnson, he calmly stated, is a ponce. He was right, I was wrong. Moses, and the story of how he got himself to be the best by being really clever, is fantastic. He's a beacon of greatness in the tawdry world of sport.



Wednesday 28 November 2018

Books

At the start of August 2018 (which happened to coincide with my 40th birthday) I hadn’t completed a full-length work of adult fiction for well over two years. There was one particularly significant reason/excuse for this who came along in June 2016 (no, not Brexit), but that was, in terms of the absence of free time, not worth two years’ worth of excuses, nor did it explain the number of barely started/unfinished novels in the time before.

I had really lost confidence in myself as a reader – self-pitying as that sounds. We all have the experience of reading a few pages into a book then giving up – no harm in that -, but more damaging were the books I felt I’d got past the first hurdle, but still gave up on – 70 pages into Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, 30 pages into The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle, 150 pages into Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (I mean, I expect there are 1000s who’ve got 150 pages into Infinite Jest, but still) … then, perhaps the most damaging blow was the first novel I tried to read post-parenthood, a Christmas present from my mother, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright. It’s not an especially long book, and I got nearly halfway through it, terribly slowly, before feeling worn out by the slow plot and the narrator’s thought processes. This isn’t the one I’m coming back with, I said to myself.

I managed a few non-fiction works last year – on pop music, sport, my safe ground. And, of course, I had read an awful lot of words which weren’t novels for adults. I’d read children’s books, poems, plus so many Wikipedia articles, long read pieces, witty twitter threads, funny takes on things, background materials for work. I had become consumed by my need to be on top of what was going on, to be informed and with it. A form of madness.

So much of what I took in I then spat out – I don’t think I’ve written so much as in the last couple of years (clearly giving the lie to the notion that I didn’t have time to read novels). All well and good, there are pieces I’m glad to have written, but also several overwrought attempts to process ephemera, which instantly felt like a gigantic waste of time.

Wasting time/using time, that’s really what I want to write about. Perhaps the turning 40 isn’t entirely coincidental. Perhaps I’m thinking more and more pointedly about how to make sure my time isn’t waste. Endlessly checking to see what self-defeating argument various left-wingers I used to respect are making with each other on twitter is not good time …

I didn’t set out to make reading novels a task, a project, an accomplishment, an exercise in time well spent. I knew I was missing reading books, but I was feeling it was out of my reach, it had become something other people did, and I’d lost the knack for. Fortuitously, my mother was telling me about the English author JL Carr, who she’d been reading about, and, in Waterstones to pick up some full-length works of children’s fiction (of which I have, of course, read vast numbers) I spotted Carr’s most acclaimed book, A Month in the Country, on a table of “Short Classics” (or something). Just over 100 pages, I knew I had a way in. If I finished it, I’d be able to speak to my mother about it – it was a task, an achievable task.

It was a struggle to start with, but it was very readable, an English elegy of sorts which somehow felt timely, and, reader, I read it … talking of which, I’d picked up Wide Sargasso Sea in the same deal, and, high on my own success, I moved straight on. Dense and heady as it is, completing it gave me an even greater sense of accomplishment, and suddenly, the project was on.

I have become project-focused in the last decade or so. It was always in me to be so, but in my childhood and early adulthood, I was disorganised, undermotivated and rarely completed anything. I changed significantly between 2007 and 2009. The nature of my work played its part - the need to organise myself to complete tasks day after day and over long period, but more significant, for some reason, was my first DVT. Almost instantly, my need and ability to organise myself increased vastly. Initially, this applied to necessary changes to lifestyle and fitness. It felt like a must, not an option.
Then came the self-perpetuating writing projects. This blog basically. It began as a one-off thing, 101 lists of songs about things with poems – that took 18 months and I finished it. It was something. A couple of years later, I realised there could be more somethings. I’ve spent a great deal of time on further projects – 200 Greatest British Sportspeople, 40 Sporting Moments, 1001 Songs, An Album a Year, 101 Sporting Haikus etc … I completed them all, and it was the completion that was important to me. What have you done, David? Well, I’ve done these things.

And it could be the same with reading books, I realised. Each one could be an achievement and a tick. It could be a number. Now, one might think that would suck the joy out of reading, that everything should be a task – Done, done and I’m on to the next one … but I think reading a novel is such a necessarily engaging and emotive activity that you simply cannot just tick a book off – you can with albums and, to a lesser extent, films (I have – of course! – also taken this completist approach to both) but you cannot simply pass over the pages of a novel, completely giving up on the idea of understanding.

It turns out that this brutal approach to reading novels is suiting me. I quickly set myself the task of 25 novels in 25 weeks – I was extremely careful at first, making sure that everything was in my range, and failure and discouragement was unlikely. I looked through my shelves, in bookshops and online for short novels. I knew I’d have to get to more challenging works, but they could wait till I had a bit more confidence in my own reading.

I had some demons to slay first. After Wide Sargasso Sea, I turned to The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes, which I’d carried with me, forlornly, time after time, as I’d travelled up to London and back over the last year, without getting past the first couple of pages. Pausing only to demolish The Old Man and the Sea (the recollection that some classics of literature can be ingested as swiftly as a Peter Jackson film was a great boon), I then returned to Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, picking up where I’d left off. This time, the reading was so much easier and more enjoyable. Under less pressure, the book opened up to me, and had such a glorious kick on the last page, it really brought my previous struggles with the narrator’s inner monologue into perspective.

Mainly, as I said, I’ve been reading short books, though my ambitions have increased. Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing was almost 300 pages, and then came Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, which packs so much into its 220 pages, so much complexity, intrigue, history, good and evil, I felt like reading it was a real accomplishment.

I mean to read some longer books, though, in truth, I haven’t ever read all that many novels over 600 pages. I managed The Corrections (which, though I can barely remember a detail of it, I was sure was the best novel I’d read when I completed it, in around 2003), Alan Hollingsworth’s The Stranger’s Child, and, ludicrously, Lord of the Rings, twice. I’m sure there have been others, but I think a weighty tome has always scared me a little.

Maybe I’ll return to Infinite Jest – I do remember I was quite enjoying it, I just think I probably saw a sports biography I quite fancied reading in media res, and then couldn’t bring myself go back to it. I guess there are folk who’ve read one or all of Ulysses, À la recherche du temps perdu and Infinite Jest, and, having been nearby to friends when they’ve been working their way through the two former and being in no way attracted to that worthy torture, I guess Infinite Jest is my best shot.
But. Is. Life. Too. Short? It’s a (slightly) serious question. Time well spent becomes more of an obsession as I get older, as seems inevitable. One of the pangs during my long exile from literature was a sense of despair and reproach at all the time I wasted when I was young. Why, when there was no twitter feed, no sky sports, no internet, no rocking child to sleep, no this, no that, did I not then read all the books I could? What was I doing that was more worthwhile?

There are some decent answers … I was playing football and cricket, I was in pubs, I was cultivating a backstory to rail against, but, you know, I never read enough. And I did have the chance. I’m probably less well-read than I seem. I’ve loved the oblivion of watching sport (and TV in general) too much. It’s always been a bit sporadic – two or three novels on the bounce then a few months off etc … perhaps finally I’ve had the wake-up call about the need … the need to read. The stories to be told.

But, yes, it matters how long some novels are. I’ll read Middlemarch, I think … how long … fuck …
 will reading Infinite Jest really be time better spent than, say, Scoop, Under the Net and Normal People (not chosen at random but staring at me right now …)? Come on, I haven’t got all day.
Will reading a short novel be a better use of time than, say, watching Killing Eve… oh, all those TV series, why did I not watch all the TV series when I had the time?

You can be as philosophical as you like about time until it comes to fitting worthwhile stuff in. I mean, why in the name of shit am I writing this? Time’s a wastin’ …

… I return to this two months later! I literally stopped in the middle of a sentence, thinking why am I complaining about time while writing a fairly meaningless blog?

So, the good news is I’ve carried on reading. I’ve completed 30 novels/novellas in less than 4 months, which is pretty good going. I’ve slowed down a bit though.

I have about 30 more lined up – I think they might take me a bit more than 30 weeks, but I think I’ll keep reading.

I’m not sure it’s done the job of removing me from twitter and facebook as much as I’d like, but so be it.

Here is the list of books I’ve read so far … none of them has been a waste of time, and that’s good enough for me

Reading novels is good time … or at least it’s not really bad time … any well-chosen, well-written book is worth at least something.

05/05/23 - i've been seized by the urge to give each of these books a score. I might delete later. It's an obscene thing to do, but it's kind of a test of how well i remember my experience of them ...

  1. A Month in the Country – JL Carr 9
  2. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys 7
  3. The Noise of Time – Julian Barnes 7
  4. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway 7
  5. The Forgotten Waltz – Anne Enright 6
  6. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut 7
  7. Nutshell – Ian McEwan 6
  8. From a Calm and Narrow Sea – Donal Ryan 7
  9. The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes 8
  10. Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward 6
  11. Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd 8
  12. Midwinter Break – Bernard MacLaverty 7
  13. The Little Sister – Raymond Chandler 7
  14. The Gathering – Anne Enright 8
  15. Train to Pakistan – Khushwant Singh 7
  16. Under the Net – Iris Murdoch 8
  17. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn 6
  18. Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney 7
  19. Sula – Toni Morrison 8
  20. The Quiet American – Graham Greene 7
  21. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo 6
  22. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan 7
  23. The Beginning of Spring – Penelope Fitzgerald 7
  24. Normal People – Sally Rooney 9
  25. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro 8
  26. Hot Milk – Deborah Levy 7
  27. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene 7
  28. Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss 7
  29. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 7
  30. Moon Tiger – Penelope Lively 7
  31. In a Free State - VS Naipaul 6
  32. Heartburn - Nora Ephron 6
  33. Autumn - Ali Smith 9
  34. Grief is a Thing with Feathers - Max Porter 6
  35. Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin 8
  36. The End We Start From - Megan Hunter 7
  37. Seize the Day - Saul Bellow 6
  38. Quartet in Autumn - Barbara Pym 7
  39. 13 Ways of Looking - Colum McCann 7
  40. Winter  - Ali Smith 8
  41. The Fall - Albert Camus 5
  42. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark 9
  43. The Vegetarian - Han Kang 7
  44. Regeneration - Pat Barker 7
  45. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon 4
  46. Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner 8
  47. The Postman Always Rings Twice - James Cain 7
  48. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin 7
  49. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 7
  50. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor 8
  51. The Ghost Road - Pat Barker 7
  52. Spring - Ali Smith 7
  53. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway 7
  54. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford 9
  55. Tin Man - Sarah Winman 6
  56. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh 6
  57. Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh 8
  58. Oranges are not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson 6
  59. Stay With Me - Ayobami Adebayo 7
  60. Swimming Home - Deborah Levy 7
  61. The Ghost Writer - Philip Roth 6
  62. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston 7
  63. Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie 8
  64. Train Dreams - Denis Johnson 7
  65. A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch 7
  66. In Our Mad and Furious City - Guy Gunaratne 7
  67. I Heard the Owl Call My Name - Margaret Craven 8
  68. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse 7
  69. Home - Toni Morrison 6
  70. Exit West - Mohsin Hamid 7
  71. Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban 10
  72. History of Wolves - Emily Fridlund 7
  73. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov 8
  74. Everything Under - Daisy Johnson 7
  75. A Room With a View - EM Forster 7
  76. The Man Who Saw Everything - Deborah Levy 7
  77. Days Without End - Sebastian Barry 9
  78. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton 8
  79. The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka 7
  80. Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 8
  81. My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite 7
  82. Heatwave - Penelope Lively 6
  83. So Long, See You Tomorrow - William Maxwell 7
  84. The Wall - John Lanchester 8
  85. How to be Both - Ali Smith 7
  86. The Order of the Day - Eric Vuillard 6
  87. An American Marriage - Tayari Jones 6
  88. Girl - Edna O'Brien 7
  89. Rabbit, Run - John Updike 7
  90. The Green Road - Anne Enright 10
  91. Songdogs - Colum McCann 7
  92. The Italian Girl - Iris Murdoch 7
  93. I Who Have Never Known Men- Jacqueline Harpman 8
  94. Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers - Ryan O'Neill 10
  95. ness - Robert MacFarlane and Stanley Donwood 4
  96. Queenie - Candice Carty-Williams 6
  97. Actress - Anne Enright 8
  98. The Awakening - Kate Chopin 7
  99. Weather - Jenny Offill 6
  100. Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie 8
  101. The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead 8
  102. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 7
  103. A Whole Life - Robert Seethaler 7
  104. The Cockroach - Ian McEwan 5
  105. Sweet Sorrow - David Nicholls 8
  106. Summer - Ali Smith 7
  107. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens 6
  108. Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald 7
  109. Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie 7
  110. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong 8
  111. Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes 7
  112. Summerwater - Sarah Moss 6
  113. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver 8
  114. Fighter - Andy Lee 7
  115. Small Town Talk - Barney Hoskyns 7
  116. Face It - Debbie Harry 7
  117. When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro 7
  118. Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward 8
  119. The Country Girls - Edna O'Brien 7
  120. Apeirogon - Colum McCann 8
  121. The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon 8
  122. The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett 7
  123. Beautiful World, Where Are You? - Sally Rooney 5
  124. Lanny - Max Porter 9
  125. Everyman - Philip Roth 7
  126. The Lonely Girl - Edna O'Brien 7
  127. Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell 6
  128. Open Water - Caleb Azumah Nelson 6
  129. Lessons - Ian McEwan 7
  130. Snow - John Banville 7
  131. Assembly - Natasha Brown 7
  132. Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan 7
  133. The Book of the Gaels - James Yorkston 7
  134. The Death of Francis Bacon - Max Porter 5
  135. The Winter Garden - Nicola Cornick 5
  136. The Heat of the Day - Elizabeth Bowen 8
  137. The Ice Palace - Tarjei Vesaas 8
  138. Second Place - Rachel Cusk 7
  139. Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan 8
  140. The Fell - Sarah Moss 8
  141. Treacle Walker - Alan Garner 7
  142. A Far Cry from Kensington - Muriel Spark 7
  143. That Old Country Music - Kevin Barry 8
  144. A Different Drummer - William Melvin Kelley 8
  145. Burnt Sugar - Avni Doshi 6
  146. The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark 10
  147. The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison 7
  148. Cove - Cynan Jones 7
  149. No One is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood 8
  150. The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge 7
  151. The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark 8
  152. Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members - Ray Padgett 9
  153. George's Marvellous Medicine - Roald Dahl 6
  154. August is a Wicked Month - Edna O'Brien 7
  155. Journey into Fear - Eric Ambler 7
  156. The Twits - Roald Dahl 5
  157. Old God's Time - Sebastian Barry 9
  158. The Wren, The Wren - Anne Enright 7
  159. Harlem Shuffle - Colson Whitehead 9
  160. Western Lane - Chetna Maroo 8
  161. Antarctica - Claire Keegan 8
  162. Girls in Their Married Bliss - Edna O'Brien 7
  163. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson 9
  164. World Within a Song - Jeff Tweedy 7
  165. James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl 6
  166. Everything in this Country Must - Colum McCann 7
  167. Study for Obedience - Sarah Bernstein 2 (well, in this whole experience, this is the first book I hated)
  168. Leave the World Behind - Rumaan Alan 8 (I also somewhat hated this, but it was well done)
  169. Danny the Champion of the World - Roald Dahl
  170. Excellent Women - Barbara Pym
  171. If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin




Thursday 1 November 2018

Subversively Sad Songs

In his marvellous lecture 'Secret Life of the Love Song' Nick Cave talks about the quality within certain songs called "saudade" ... a Portuguese word meaning a certain kind of longing, of sadness - you really need to listen to the lecture, but hopefully you get the idea ...

But anyway, he uses the example of Kylie Minogue's 'Better the Devil You Know' to explain that saudade can lurk in the most unlikely of places - a superficially upbeat banger hiding an inner core of utter desolation.

I've always been fascinated by this. The right combination of singer and song can steal heartbreak and despair into the most unlikely places.

The modern maestro of smuggled saudade is Robyn - whose songs seem to permanently hover between euphoria and unbearable sadness. I wrote years ago about 'With Every Heartbeat' (rather clumsily),  and my feeling for that song has only grown. It is a thing of uncommon, uncomfortable beauty, and perhaps the definition of what I'm looking for.

It's a certain type of song, this. Not just a sad song. There are 1000s of those.

Of course, there are ballads, and big sad pop songs, but that's not quite what I'm talking about. Not something like 'Someone Like You' or 'In the Air Tonight'. The sentiment there, and the desired emotional effect is clear.

It's the ones which are somehow joyful and danceable but then gradually something nags at you that all is not quite right ...

It can only be personal taste. I'm quite sure 'Baby One More Time' would fit the bill for a lot of people, but it's never done it for me ... the lyrics are there, but somehow the vocal and tune aren't. Likewise 'Tainted Love' ... I feel that too much was given over to it being a banger in the Soft Cell version for its dark heart to quite survive, though Marc Almond's voice ought to ideally suit that balance.

Anyway ... here are a few across a few different eras. Can you think of any more?

Umbrella - Rihanna
Into the Groove - Madonna
Chandelier - Sia
Help! - The Beatles
Green Light - Lorde
A Little Respect - Erasure
Dancing On My Own - Robyn
Burn Baby Burn - Ash
Get Happy - Judy Garland
What a Fool Believes - The Doobie Brothers
Born Slippy - Underworld
I Wanna Dance With Somebody - Whitney Houston