Just finished reading Graham Kibble-White’s The Ultimate Book of British Comics: 70 Years of Mischief, Mayhem and Cow Pies, a diverting and occasionally very funny collection of pen pictures of weekly anthologies for children produced mainly by IPC and D.C. Thompson between the 1950s and 1980s. While not a definitive history of the UK scene - it begins with 1950’s Eagle and ends with late eighties effort Wildcat - this lively book captures the essence of the comics output of the era: the stock characters, the often ludicrous premises, the chummy editorial voices, the endless mergers, the bog-standard bogroll paper. 

Kibble-White mainly focuses on the first issue of each comic, pinpointing the USP, describing the initial line-up and the inevitable free gift stuck to the cover. As children in the monochrome world of the fifties and sixties were starved of colour, it was relatively easy to snare an readership of 200,000 youngsters with boarding school and ballet tales for girls, straightforward cowboy/astronaut/soldier derring-do for boys, and ho-hum japes featuring grumpy park-keepers and platefuls of sausages for the younger ones.  Girls’ comics were almost all had female monikers such as Judy, Tammy and Mandy (though Jinty remains a strange one) while boys’ comics had rugged-sounding titles like Victor, Tiger, Valiant and Hotspur. Hugely popular, they were being cranked out in their millions right up until the early seventies. 

But as Kibble-White demonstrates, there was a growing sense of desperation in the industry from the 1970s until its virtual collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was manifested in their attempts to compete with TV and then later with video games. With the advent of colour TV, and the emergence of blockbuster movies, children were now exposed to a host of shiny pop stars and slick, violent cop shows and disaster films that made the weekly comics fare look stale and tame. Traditional boys comics like Eagle, Lion and Valiant couldn’t compete with the more visceral delights of Dirty Harry and The Sweeney. And so DCT responded with gritty war comic Warlord and IPC with similarly martial Battle and then the bloodthirsty Action. Girls comics stories became crueller and nastier and the new humour titles took a turn for the zany with characters breaking the fourth wall and celebrities making regular appearances. Despite brief bursts of interest, and the uncovering of seriously talented writers and artists still plying their trade today, all-round sales of comics continued to plummet.  

Now, just three of the hundred or so titles Kibble-White writes about are still in existence - The Beano, 2000AD and Commando. The continued success of Commando is beyond me as war went out of fashion in the weeklies some time in the mid-1980s but Beano and 2000AD contain instantly recognisable characters who have attained iconic status over the years, and have gathered a loyal fanbase many of whom are much older than the actual target audience.  

Kibble-White’s book will provide a bit of a nostalgia buzz for certain middle-aged people from Britain and Ireland (and anyone with a love of the daft old titles such as ‘Spooky Cookie: He Cooks for the Spooks’ or ‘Pansy Potter, the Strongman’s Daughter’).  It’s also fun to read about the first issues of comics where desperate attempts are made to appeal to increasingly sceptical children. And it’s remarkable to see Look-In clone Tops feature a story starring Adam Ant as a kind of time-traveller adventuring through the centuries. Highly reccommended. 

Prince Philip's Death Coverage

 The record number of complaints to the British Broadcasting Authority about the BBC’s blanket coverage of reaction to Prince Philip’s death last Friday evening was indicative of changing times but was probably also connected to the pandemic. 

By replacing all advertising programming on their three terrestrial channels with lengthy tributes to the late consort, Britain’s national broadcaster was probably following the dictates of the ‘important royal deaths’ protocol. The last time a person of Philip’s stature died was in 1952 when Elizabeth II’s predecessor shuffled off his ermine furred gown. At that time few people had televisions - the coronation of EII the following year was a major catalyst for TV purchasing and viewing - and a cancellation of programming on the single available channel would have made sense to most British folk following the death of the head of the world’s largest empire. 

Flicking away at the remote that Friday evening, though, it just looked a bit odd to see the same glum, respectful faces on three consecutive channels while life went on as usual on the 97 other ones. Yes, there was extended programming on Philip on ITV, the BBC News channel and on Sky news, but at least there were different people, on different couches talking about life and times of the Greek.  

Unlike in 1952, when a small, select group of individuals decided what those with televisions should watch, the growth of online streaming means that today’s viewers are used to watching what they want when they want to. Another possible factor behind some of the outrage was the changing stature of television during the pandemic. Over the course of the lockdowns, TV has provided more comfort than ever to millions people with reduced options for entertainment and little to look forward to. The cancellation of ‘Gardener’s World’, a show greatly boosted by the increase of horticultural interest during the ‘stay at home’ era, was understandably a bridge too far for some. Of course, the BBC is an easy punchbag for anyone feeling frustrated with modern life and it gets a regular kicking from those on the right, those on the left and a fair number in the middle. 

But the filling up of three channels’ worth of screen-time with the same content as a mark of respect for the duke did seem like a gasp of stale air from a more deferential time.  

'Very 20th Century'

             I was recently teaching a novel set in rural Ireland in 1981 and was drawing the students’ attention to the influence on the community of the Catholic Church: the ban on contraception and divorce, the deference to priests.  One student commented that it was ‘very twentieth-century’. And after a moment’s thought, I realised she was right. The status of the church in Irish society began to crumble in the early to mid-nineties following the revelation that the Bishop of Galway had fathered a child and then the exposure of cases of clerical child abuse and the subsequent attempts to cover them up. Though the largely-discredited church retains a tight grip on education and still owns vast tracts of land all over the country, Ireland post-2000 is a very different place. But it felt strange to hear of something being typical of the century in which I grew up. 

‘Very 20th century’ was a term I’d never heard before.  I have used the term ‘19th century’ many times, though ‘Victorian’ is a more common appellation used to evoke a sense of strictness and deprivation, as well as bushy moustaches and music hall acts. I have also regularly referred to the post-war period, the fifties (characterised in cliche by rock n’roll, communist paranoia), the sixties (revolution, experimentation), the seventies (decline of the industrialised west, brown clothing), the eighties (nuclear threat, capitalism ascending). 

One decade I don’t tend to think about is the nineties because it was a formative time for me, a time when, like many 15-25-year-olds,  I was centre-stage in the film of my life.  In lazy shorthand, it was a time when it looked as though the west had won, and freedom was on the rise everywhere. And that of course, was a myth born of a kind of baby boomer triumphalism crystallised by Fleetwood Mac playing ‘Don’t Stop...thinking about tomorrow’ at Bill Clintons’s inauguration in November 1992. This was of course, a world dominated by privileged (and in hindsight, extremely complacent) white westerners. 

But while we regularly define the key characteristics of decades, how will we remember the entire last century? As my student suggested, there will be little debate about how we characterise twentieth century Ireland.  But on an international scale, I suppose we will also call it the age of the car and the age of the assembly line, maybe the great age of pop music. All of those are ‘very twentieth-century’. It might also be known as the century of nationalism and of brutality.  It was a time of mass destruction, a time when long-range weapons of mass destruction were created that put a desensitising distance between the perpetrators and the victims. 

There is now a growing divide between the last century and this one: issues that were bubbling beneath the surface (and in some cases, suppressed) such as climate change, immigration, the status of women and minorities, and the mechanisation of labour, are now at the forefront of daily discourse. And the pandemic is re-shaping our lives in a multitude of different ways. In the years to come, I expect to hear a lot more utterances of ‘very 20th century’.   

Changing Attitudes: Star Trek and Sub-Cultures

       Needless to say I’ve watched a lot of TV in the last twelve months, and various clips on YouTube. Thanks to the rise of the latter and to the large number of TV channels devoted to recycling old material, it’s now easier than ever to make lazy judgements on the mainstream culture of the past. Recently, two clips, both from the 1980s, stood out for me and got me thinking about the how attitudes change.

The first was of Terry Wogan asking Joan Collins about her appearance on an episode of the original Star Trek.  At the time, Star Trek was a growing cult with a relatively small number of devotees. The movies were being released every few years to healthy box office sales but the show had yet to become part of the world’s cultural wallpaper. When Wogan mentioned her guest starring role, Collins hooted with embarrassment, hinting that her career had been  at a low ebb when she took the role. The audience reaction was gleeful. Sci-fi, like fantasy and horror, was still on the fringes, usually considered frivolous and lacking in substance. My father would have fitted in well in that audience. He was generally open-minded as a film viewer but had a complete blind spot for science fiction - he couldn't accept imaginative worlds though he did enjoy A Clockwork Orange probably because it was so obviously grounded in reality. 

Looking at the clips over thirty years after they first appeared, it struck me how much has changed since then.  Dynasty now seems much more ridiculous than the ambitious, innovative Star Trek with  characters that are as recognisable and iconic as any in 20th century fiction. The long-standing jokes about Star Trek (the creaky sets, the primitive special effects, William Shatner’s overacting) have been superseded by an appreciation of the makers’ ideas and its afterlife has had a cultural imprint far deeper than the likes of Dynasty, which is a story that has been re-told constantly before and since: the recent Succession is a brilliant recent spin on power struggles inside a wealthy and entitled family. 

There is a possibility that Joan Collins will ultimately be better remembered for her sole appearance on Star Trek than for anything else she ever did. For billions, the brilliantly versatile Alec Guinness is Obi Wan Kenobi; for a dwindling number, he is a sophisticated actor in David Lean and Ealing classics.  Like Collins, he was scornful of his foray into science-fiction even though he took a chunk of the toy royalties as part of his fee.  

Now that Hollywood depends so heavily superhero blockbusters and TV, and streaming services are on the look-out for the next Game of Thrones, the sneery attitude towards celluloid fantasy and sci-fi is no more. Some argue that this is indicative of the infantilisation of mainstream culture but I prefer to see it as revenge of the nerds.   

         The other old clip that indicated changing times was an RTE investigation into youth culture in the late 1980s in which a reporter wandered the streets of Dublin city centre on a Saturday afternoon, looking for distinctive groups of young people - goths, punks, rockabillies - and asking them about their choice of clothing and make-up. The reporter had a bemused tone when interviewing her subjects and sometimes got a frosty reception.

Watching the RTE clip, I was struck by how the person who now looked the strangest of all was the reporter herself. Her big, big hair, big shoulder pads and big, big glasses make her look dwarfed by her clothes and accessories while the young people didn’t look remotely peculiar. And yet it was the reporter who was representing the mainstream, conventional world of the 90 per cent.   

Music 20/21

       I can remember the last gig I attended: the basement of a pub in Dublin City centre, a Sunday afternoon, all the way back in March 2020, the launch of a friend’s new album. The cosy faux-’old pub’ room was decked with an odd mixture of posters and pictures - black and white images of Ireland in the 1950s, GAA teams and scantily clad females - and planted against one of the walls, there was an awkward snug, done up like a shebeen with lattice windows. I gave in to temptation and had two of what tasted like the creamiest pints of stout that had ever passed my lips.

As ever, the drink knocked the itchy Sunday feeling out of me and I successfully unwound. A few numbers into the support act’s set, one of the songs sent me somewhere else for three minutes and as a result I was open to whatever was played for the rest of the afternoon. I find that happens at gigs: one good song or moment leaves you receptive to the rest and more generous and supportive of the artists. 

I had the usual little chats with familiar faces from previous gigs, some of them barely more than an exchange of a few words, and I ordered a bowl of chips with my second pint. I could feel the velvet balloon of wellbeing swelling up inside me and I smiled when I saw lovers entwined on a couch in one of the nooks in the venue.  

Stepping out of the venue, half-drunk and ready for a curry, the streets were lightly buzzing. A meal in a popular Indian and then a cycle home, my last night out in town for thirteen months. A few days later, Leo Varadkar delivered that unnervingly understated speech that introduced some ominous words like ‘wave’ and ‘cocooning’. The live music scene as it was went into hibernation, and musicians were limited to broadcasting performances from their own homes on social media platforms. I checked out a few of these but because I was already spending so much time online I wasn’t very enthusiastic about looking at screens again outside of work.   

Martin Carthy live from his house in Robin Hood’s Bay gave me cheer. He was rusty for the first half hour, inevitably I suppose, but then got into his stride, finding his unmistakeable foghorn voice and fluidity in his playing. The quality was of secondary importance to me. He is someone I have seen in concert five or six times so it was comforting enough to see him and hear him again in whatever capacity. A reminder of his tremendous knowledge and good humour.  

During the pandemic period, I finally bought a smartphone and then headphones and began to access as much music as possible using the Spotify app. This was facilitated by the daily dog walks and by my semi-regular runs. Thanks to Spotify’s enormous catalogue, I was able to dive into the works of Black Sabbath, sampling the first six albums, re-visit The Fall’s mighty oeuvre, listen to albums I’d always meant to try like PIL’s first two, The Human League’s Dare, The Court of the Crimson King, a lot of post-punk, a lot of krautrock, New Order, plus a fair amount of new music. 

Because it’s been such a long winter, I have found myself leaning towards bright electronic sounds - early albums by New Order, The Pet Shop Boys’ Very - and venturing into contemporary pop music which often sounds like the aforementioned acts. HAIM, Thundercat, Dua Lipa, Taylor Swift. Light, optimistic-sounding stuff, not very demanding, delightfully surface-y, a lot of it designed to be played in heaving pubs and nightclubs filled with shiny young people. A far cry from my last ‘gig, stout and chips’ outing but a cheerful vision to have in these times. 

          

ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas (2019 Documentary)

The iconic nature of a musical act can be judged by the speed with which you can draw a cartoon of them. The Beatles: four dark circles with offshoot side burns and maybe a pair of granny glasses. Madonna: conical bra. David Bowie: lightning bolt across a forehead and cheek. Grace Jones: black rectangle with wide eyes and big bared teeth. Slash: big hat, big sunglasses, cigarette dangling precariously from lips. Freddie Mercury: crew cut, moustache.

ZZTop are perhaps the easiest of all to draw: three faces all with sunglasses, two with rectangles of beard and hats, one with a moustache and curly hair. Like AC/DC, whose image has been defined since the beginning by Angus Young’s schoolboy uniform, the Top’s cartoonish look has given them instant brand recognition and also helped to deflect attention away from their personal lives. In the likeable documentary ‘That Little Ol’ Band from Texas’, the only dip into this area is the disclosure that drummer Frank Beard had been in rehab in the mid-seventies. There is absolutely no information about the non-Top lives of other bandmembers Billy Gibbons or Dusty Hill, a refreshing anomaly in an era when we are constantly being served the most mundane information about anyone who’s been on the telly.  

According to the film, in the band’s early years, manager Bill Ham had insisted that they avoid appearing on TV as a way of developing a sense of mystery. It’s possible that Ham’s decision may have had more to do with the fact that the band consisted of three very ordinary looking men. If so, it was a good move: during a two-year hiatus from recording and touring, Gibbons and Hill grew their now trademark ultra-long beards and later adopted the sunglasses that completely masked their faces and turned them into the most instantly recognisable band in the world.

The documentary is mostly about the early years, and while that is almost always the best part of any such film, I was surprised by the speed with which the MTV mega-stardom years were glossed over. There was a little bit about discovering a new, turbo-charged, processed sound and a bit about the making of the unforgettable video for ‘Gimme All Your Loving’, which looked incredibly slick at the time, and a clip of the follow-up ‘Legs’ and then a blank. Nothing about the global success that followed, the sudden jump to stadium concerts and life at the top table, no clips from the videos of subsequent hits. Was this the result of a contractual obligation? Was the recent death of Bill Ham a factor?  It reminded me of the Dolly Parton doc that omitted any mention of ‘Islands in the Stream’.  

Despite this puzzling omission, the film is worth a look. The three bandmembers make for genial, self-effacing interviewees and they remain a curious rarity as 1960s garage band also-rans who became superstars in the 1980s.    

Q Magazine, 1986-2020

‘Lock up your granddaughters: it’s The Rolling Stones!’ That was the caption on cover of the first issue of Q magazine I bought, back in September 1989. I suppose an updated version would read ‘great-granddaughters’. That same snoot-cocking irreverence is also in evidence in this month’s final issue of Q in a republished interview with Lou Reed. The godfather to a million rock bands, and writer of ‘Femme Fatale’, ‘Heroin’, ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ is described in the first paragraph as a ‘legendarily cantankerous old moaner’.  British rock journalists haver rarely had much time for preciousness and Q’s writers were no exception.

According to editor Ted Kessler, it was the pandemic that did for Q in the end, though apparently it had been operating on slim margins for most of his tenure at the helm. Truth be told, had I not learned of the magazine’s passing via the internet I probably wouldn’t have noticed its disappearance from the shelves of my local mag-sellers. The final issue was the first copy I had bought in over twenty years.

A thick square book of a monthly jammed with reviews of the latest releases, Q was pretty conservative. The editorial team invariably chose dependable mainstream megastars for their covers. Paul McCartney (desperately unfashionable for people under thirty) was the first cover star and the likes of Annie Lennox and Phil Collins (both of whom had entered dull mid to late eighties zones) made regular appearances.  Mark Ellen, the original editor, had seen a gap in the market (the music weeklies were at their most politicised and sceptical about the post-Live Aid ‘rock aristocracy’ and there was a large middle-aged pop music audience who were ready to shell out for CD re-releases of old classics) and he exploited it.

But despite its devotion to comfy shoe-wearing superstars, Q could be funny. As well as making fun of the ageing Stones, it also teamed grumpy Van Morrison with Spike Milligan for a photo shoot and for several years its opening feature was the often brilliant interview series ‘Who the Hell does … think s/he is?’ in which Tom Hiddleston regularly punctured the pomposity of stars of varying stature. Long before Louis Theroux, his interview with Jimmy Saville caught the spiky weirdness of the man. ‘I hate children’ was the eyebrow-raising quote highlighted in a text-box.

As a teenager just finding out about pop music, I had purchased it now and again but on discovering NME and Melody Maker it seemed immediately and irreparably staid. It was definitely not the place to go if you were looking for bands on independent labels and even ultra-populist throw-back merchants Oasis didn’t appear on the cover until ‘What’s the Story, Morning Glory’ was a global best-seller.

NME and Melody Maker were the angry teenagers to Q’s comfortable big brother. And they were also where I first read about Captain Beefheart, The Fall, The Velvet Underground and a slew of brilliant albums from the sixties to the nineties. There was less to discover in Q where stadium-fillers like Clapton, Collins, Eurythmics, Dire Straits, Peter Gabriel, Bowie and Sting always seemed to be in the spotlight.  But no doubt that changed over the years as younger readers got on board.

Like all magazines, it had been under the cosh for years, struggling to hold its head up within the flood of freely available digital content – I seem to recall it rebranding itself for a while as a ‘lifestyle’ magazine. and has now gone the way of the weeklies. All that’s left on the shelves are Hot Press (which I always thought survived because of its wide-ranging remit: music but also film, sport, politics and sex) and the rock heritage monthlies Mojo and Uncut. Both of the latter are specialist publications aimed squarely at collector nerds but they do provide oxygen for plenty of new artists. How long those three will survive is anyone’s guess. Online there is Pitchfork and the excellent The Quietus and millions of people blogging, vlogging and commenting on music as a hobby.