Nolan, swollen

I got round to seeing The Odyssey. I won't go into great detail, as I don't like falling into the trap of my opinion on a film being influenced by prior knowledge of the source material, and there's been plenty of that already - but I will say I didn't loooove it.

More than in any previous case, I felt, while watching, that it was a bit overly Nolany in a way that was too distracting to ignore. I would say, in its favour, that I preferred the pacing in this film to some of his previous films, in that the third third was the most enjoyable and gripping.

Ultimately, it's still three hours of good, enjoyable, impressive cinema, so I won't gripe too much about outis and nausicaa and all that jazz, that would just be a lack of euDamonia ...

Nolan is a true phenomenon - the Radiohead of filmmaking, if Radiohead were still out there turning out increasingly ambitious, successful albums. There is no one else now who combines such critical acclaim with such commercial success, whose films are such an event. He is now the third highest grossing film maker of all time (unadjusted for inflation, of course) behind only Spielberg and Cameron.

I have seen most of his films - not Following, the debut, and not Insomnia, and, most to my chagrin, not The Prestige, which I think I would like a lot and I have often had lined up to watch, but just not got round to. Everything else, I've seen.

My favourite is still Memento. Even after all the murdering that go on. That was (at the cinema, i think) a film that made me go wow. Wow, this director has made a film under two hours! In the future, presumably, he will be incapable of doing that! I watched it two or three times and though, presumably, it doesn't make sense when you think about it, it did the job for me. I wonder why Guy Pearce never got the call again (presumably because he's not a film star, but still. Aah, here it is https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/16/guy-pearce-says-he-was-blocked-from-working-with-christopher-nolan-by-warner-bros). One can imagine Guy Pearce doing a great job as lead, or main support, in most Nolan films.

Of his imperial phase, I'd say my favourite is Dunkirk (interestingly the most "British" of his films) where the time conceit is simple and effective, the performances are affecting, the unsettling soundtrack really works (please use a different composer next film, though ...). Perhaps it's his least Nolany film. I watched it at the cinema, I think it may have been the first big film I saw at the big screen after Rosa was born, and I was very moved by it. and I've seen it since on the TV, and still liked it.

Everything else, all these smart blockbusters, I have enjoyed but have a certain ambivalence about. I think they're all too long. I don't think all long films are too long, but I think all the long Nolan ones are, by somewhere between 10 minutes and an hour. Some (Inception and Interstellar, say) have too much promise early on, too much sense they're going to be masterpieces, that the endgame is inevitably frustrating. Tenet is just too much hard work that even though it does come together to some extent, you ask yourself if it was worth it. Oppenheimer was very good, but I'm not sure I found Downey's character as interesting as I might have done. The Batman films wander a bit ...

Also, just comparing him to Spielberg - Spielberg made some real brave flops. There's really all sorts of films in there. Making Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in the same couple of years was really an incredible move. I'd like to see Nolan make a romcom, or, failing that, a pure pulsating action thriller. His subject matters are pretty different, but they are nearly all about arms and a man.

Anyway, many more people have written many more interesting things about Nolan, but, you know, good for him that we've all got an opinion.

Here is my ranking:

• Memento
• Dunkirk
• Oppenheimer
• The Dark Knight
• Batman Begins
• Inception
• Tenet
• The Dark Knight Rises
• The Odyssey
• Interstellar

It means nothing ...

Ok, i have now seen The Prestige. Bit of fun. But probably below Tenet.

Deep Cuts

I recently read a novel called 'Deep Cuts', being a sucker for a will they-won't they romance centred on music. It can be compared to yer Ones Days and yr Normals Peoples but - crucial difference! - is set in the US of A. Anyway, I liked it.

It's being made into a film - initially there were fairly big stars attached, and now the stars are smaller, but hopefully it will be good - the director has done some well-reviewed films.

After all, why shouldn't there be another will-they won't they romance covering several years in which music plays a significant role? This is a good type of book/film that people like.

What I liked most about Deep Cuts, by Hollie Brickley, is that it really is about the music, man. If nothing else, there are some pretty solid pieces of music writing in it. And, even more so, the music that it's about is the music I treasure. So it starts in around 2000 and goes up to, I think, 2009, and we cover the likes of the Shins, LCD Soundsystem, Joanna Newsom, OutKast, amongst many older classics. There is even a brief section relating to US hipsters in the 2000s going nuts to Britpop which really nails why Britpop was actually great pop music - I'm often very sniffy about Americans writing on British music and culture, but, in this case, the distance, the absence of self-loathing cultural hang-ups about flags, misogyny, race, guitars, politics etc, just means you get a couple of great sentences about why it was/is great pop by Brits.

The narrator is a young woman and her paramour is a singer-songwriter she meets at college. I certainly appreciated that she is someone who is utterly obsessed with songs who is not themselves musical (though the nub of the story is their songwriting collaboration). The romance is often quite secondary - indeed I've have been more than happy if it had petered out and we'd ended up at somewhere else more interesting - the relationship between her and the songwriter's original girlfriend is maybe the most well-drawn thing in the book.

I also appreciated that she describes herself as obnoxious and is, yes, obnoxious enough, but not too obnoxious.

Probably the most memorable piece of music writing within it (by the main character as aspiring music writer) is a scathing takedown of Lenny's Chelsea Hotel #2 and indeed Nash's Our House and all that kind of jazz. Also, the bit on Newsom was great - just reminded me, now it's been 11 years since she did an album and that may well be all we're going to get, how lucky I was to see this miraculous artist perform four times, that I was in the right place at the right time enough.

I'm glad, also, that it resisted the temptation to push the characters further into the next decade and beyond - the characters are very online, as not everyone was in the 2000s, and as the changes in technology multiplied and darkened in the 2010s and 2020s, that might have got a bit unbearable. As someone who is myself quite online, but online as a "stuck in online 2008" way, I found the cultural history quite nostalgic.

So, yeah, it's a nice book. This is the playlist of songs specifically discussed within it https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6ZN7YF1Kn24S2kaEGF5JOz

100s of 10s

In about 2009, on iTunes, I made a playlist in which I included 10 songs by 100 acts, so 1000 songs in total. It's one of those playlists that didn't survive a change of hardware at some point, so I can't find what was on it, but I do remember that it began, I guess alphabetically, with Band of Horses and also I remember thinking "hmm, well it's not that eclectic, there's a lot of country and indie rock there". Of course.

And, to be fair (in a way), it being on iTunes, rather than streaming, it was made up of music that I owned, so I couldn't just go "would be nice to have a bit more variety here" without paying for it, as I can now.

But also, I suppose, in 2009, indie-rock etc was still, kind of, within the peak of its critical powers, and I might not have felt the massive urge not to have all that stuff on my list, for the guitar music did contain almost all the multitudes.

Anyway, I thought I'd do the same again (always looking for different ways to listen to the same songs), which, though it is very easy to make now on Apple Music, has been pleasantly time-consuming for the last few weeks. Though, in fact, once I'd made one "101x10" list, I remembered lots of other acts who were ideal for the treatment, so did another one, then another. So I've made three 1010 song playlists.

There's a slight discrepancy between "fun to put on list" and "fun to listen to". It's more fun not to reduce my usual suspects to 10 songs, as I've probably made lots of lists of them all before, whereas an ideal act might be one where I know I like 5 or 6 of their songs, then find there are a couple more I'd forgotten about, and then use a bit of guesswork to choose two more (it's all done pretty quickly and without doing too much research). Equally, when it comes to actually listening to the playlists, which I'm starting to do (though I know I'll never get through them all), I'll be glad to have old favourites on them.

I definitely am just more into pop music than I was in 2009, notwithstanding any deliberate attempts to have a diverse roster. I do not listen to the same music I was listening to when I was younger, and there has not been as much memorable music in the same genres to replace it.

Anyway, not sure any of this is particularly interesting. Here are the three playlists - I think I forgot to include the Beatles and the Beach Boys in the end, so heyhey, maybe there'll be a fourth ...

https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/100x10/pl.u-JP6NGFjqxpe

https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/101x10part2/pl.u-aZd90CvWEd8

https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/101x10part2/pl.u-aZd90CvWEd8

If you're feeling sinister

I have had something of a turn-of-the-century summer, something of a classic-indie-EPs-of-the-late-90s summer. I have seen many musicians in their 50s,  in various states of preservation, playing songs from the late 90s and early 2000s, and why, goddammit, wouldn't I, when there are so few simple pleasures left? I've seen SFA (twice), Beta Band, Badly Drawn Boy, Rilo Kiley, St Etienne, Belle and Sebastian. The Maccabees, in their 40s, were a rare dip into yoof culture.

I could write something about any of them, about time moving forward and standing still, about stardom and the lack of it, about the certain lengthy moment most of them represent, that era when you could make marvellous, imaginative and tuneful, unkempt and magical, fairly but not very successful guitar music for a good long time and no one expected any more or less.

I could write about how many Top 10 hits they actually had between them, all these excellent and, in their way, iconic acts (somewhere between 1 and 3, and none, exactly, proper Top 10 hits).

But I've ended up thinking the most about 'If You're Feeling Sinister', the album released 30 years ago, and played in full by Belle and Sebastian at Dreamland, Margate, last Friday night.

'If You're Feeling Sinister' was at 25 on US publication Pitchfork's most recent list of the top albums of the 1990s. It crossed the Atlantic and it lasted. Hearing it at an ecstatic Dreamland on the summer Friday night before my 48th birthday was marvellous. But also, it was weird, when you think about what 'If You're Feeling Sinister' actually is. What it felt like at the time.

Well, actually, no, I can't really say what it felt like to anyone but me. Which was like a dream. Which is not what most things feel like to me. 

I'm not the hippest on this. I didn't buy 'If You're Feeling Sinister' on the day it came out. In fact, I've a feeling I didn't buy it all. I think it was copied for me in around 2000, by which time I already knew it inside out.

By chance, or why not, fate, I'd heard the B&S BBC session in the summer of 96. I hadn't sought it out, I rarely listened to Radio 1, certainly not late at night. My tastes were basic Britpop, Beatles, Dylan, Blondie, Bowie still - nothing wrong with that. I just happened to have the radio on that night. I remember Stuart's singing was so ropey, the playing was ropey. But it was The State I Am In, and by the end it was magical. It may also have been Like Dylan in the Movies. He sounded like a little boy, or girl - I pictured what he, or she, looked like, and I was completely wrong (I'll get to that). Stuart M was, I could somewhat tell then, and it turned out, more like me, or a certain aspect of me, than all the Britpoppers.

But, still, though I now had the name Belle and Sebastian in my head, that was all I had for a while, and I don't think I tried to change that. 

But gradually it changed. Those first three years that I listened to Tigermilk, If You're Feeling Sinister (by far the most), the EPs, and Boy with the Arab Strap, it wasn't me that put them on the stereo. I guess it was nearly always my friend/flatmate John. So, they just kind of drifted into my consciousness, quietly, persistently. I think I did actually buy the reissued Tigermilk at a certain point, so I have a more precise relationship with that, but 'Sinister', it still has this weird insidious place inside me. 

And, of course, at that point, it really is true that we hardly knew anything about Belle and Sebastian. I didn't know what Stuart M looked like, didn't know the history, none of it. They started to creep out of the woodwork around the turn of the century. The NME barely mentioned them, and when they did, it was often with loathing. One journalist in particular, the renowned Steven Wells, who could be very entertaining when you agreed with him, loathed everything about them - but I remember one very funny piece he wrote where he described his shock that Stuart was not at all as you'd think, that he was a really nice late-20s guy who was excellent at football (rather than, I guess, a vampiric shrinking manchild) and that was making it harder to hate them, but he was sticking to his guns.

Belle and Sebastian looked great on Friday night - all of them, really, are aging elegantly. Stuart Murdoch was always older than he looked, and he certainly does not look 58 now. He looks about 31. He still looks, maybe a couple of months post-fighting peak, like a featherweight boxer, or a gymnast, or a scrum-half, or a 1500m runner. He chats a lot on stage, maybe a tiny bit too much. 

The band are absolute pros, entirely suited to Friday night in a seaside town, in front of the rollercoaster. But still, 'If You're Feeling Sinister' remains an album written by a chronically ill, unsuccessful, church-tending, bus-riding small young man with a wavering, quiet voice. Its big singalong that got everyone dancing is called Get Me Away from Here, I'm Dying.

Still, the reason it's a canonical transcontinental classic and people around the world go out and get merry to it 30 years later is because the songs are brilliant, of course. As Stevie Jackson said, he simply could not believe what he was hearing when he first heard Murdoch's songs. He says it was like hearing Paul Simon or Bob Dylan. 

People have different favourites - even back then, sitting in our shared living room on Baker Lane, for me it was the central section of Dylan in the Movies, Fox in the Snow, Get Me Away, If You're Feeling Sinister which drew me in the deepest. But there are, as they say, no skips. On Friday, I was reminded how great The Boy Done Wrong Again is, and, just generally, how great all the little flair moments are, those little extras in the arrangements.

There's a case for Tigermilk being just as good. I don't think there's really a case for any other B&S album being quite as good, though I might just say I'm a Cuckoo is my favourite pop song of theirs, certainly when played live. Such wish fulfilment.

And though they've been "this" Belle and Sebastian for over 20 years, the live, all-singing, all-dancing, poptastic B&S, and though there's always some gap between recorded and live music, one does still sometimes stop to consider quite what a journey the songs of If You're Feeling Sinister have been on.

Rein Me In

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3triLkS0nq4&list=RD3triLkS0nq4&start_radio=1

What to make of this song, that has now been UK Number 1 for, all told, a record-breaking 19 weeks? I have seen some talk that its vast success is baffling, and exemplifies how little crossover there is between chart success and universal recognition these days, but I'm not sure that's true.

Firstly, I like the song. It's easier, obviously, to understand why something is popular if you yourself like it. When Drake's One Dance was Number 1 for 15 weeks a decade ago, there was no part of me that could understand that, even though I knew Drake was, at that point, the most popular artist in the world, known for his gift for a hook. But it sounded like drab shit to me, so my bafflement remained.

But, even if I didn't like it, the massive UK success of Rein Me In makes, to me, a very specific, and heartwarming, sense - a happy accident of timing and the culmination of certain trends in recent chart music.

At least, something of an accident, in that the collaboration was mooted before Dean's second album went massive - far more massive than anyone could have anticipated. At the time, Sam Fender was the bigger star, with three hit albums behind him. 

I'm not a huge Sam Fender fan - he happened to play early in the afternoon when Bob Dylan and Neil Young played Hyde Park in 2019, and I was impressed but not exactly enamoured. His sound is big, his voice is exceptionally strong. In the past, he'd have been positioned as the frontman of an indie band - not one I'd have loved - but bands don't have hits these days. Even before Olivia Dean's contribution, Rein Me In was one of his better songs. He seems pretty nice, and that certainly is part of his appeal.

They both come from somewhat "indie" or "authentic" backgrounds - indie soul and indie rock, while both are now pop stars. Dean is a very adaptable singer, I think - I don't imagine there's many markets, age-groups, that will feel too embarrassed about liking her. They're both pretty easily charming, lowkey, endearingly English - one North Shields, one South London - the viral success of Rein Me In seems to have been solidified by big gigs in Fender's team's football stadium, St James' Park, and Dean's, the London Stadium. That's where it seems like a bit of a masterplan. Two readybaked fanbases, some sense of a united, groundroots England. The England that gets behind the football, that sings the same song.

I've heard the song around a lot - of course, not as much as one used to hear Wannabe or Wonderwall, but enough, in different contexts, without seeking it out at all. And it just makes sense that this nice song by two nice, different but similar English artists, this nostalgic duet of a love song, has become quietly massive. Most of the big pop songs these days are nice to listen to - more in the tradition of classic AOR than youth-orientated dance music. I suspect that's the long tail of the Taylor Swift effect. Punks and contrarians would call these songs bland as hell, but I'm not a punk, and I much prefer them to the litany of awful cack that was topping the charts in the 2000s and 2010s.

So, anyway, there it is, Number 1 forever and a nice little song. What's not to like.