'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.

Death and Rembrandt

Watching the excellent BBC 4 documentary on the life of Rembrandt over the last few weeks got me thinking about our relationship with death. The artist’s life was presented as being dogged by personal and financial difficulties. As well as being a genius, Rembrandt was improvident with money, a spendthrift whose profligacy and poor management led to chronic debts. But his life was also touched by tragedy with the deaths of three infant children, his wife Saskia, and then Hendrickje, the woman who succeeded her as his live-in lover.  Modern viewers would of course view this as tremendously unlucky but while death and illness are of course still central to our lives they tend to jump out at us like proverbial bogeymen. In the 17^th century, they were part of the fabric of everyday existence.

 Death is something most of us wish to avoid contemplating until it becomes unavoidable. I sometimes wonder if people lived more intensely in the past.  In my lifetime, I have had little exposure to illness and death. I don’t know anyone who has died giving birth, or anyone who had a stillborn child or whose infant died from illness or complications. Cancer has cast its shadow over my life as it has done over the lives of most people in the western world but it tends to creep around in the dark corners rather than stride through the main thoroughfares of existence. Modern medicine has made pain quieter; thicker walls and greater privacy have made it quieter still.

                How different were the lives of Rembrandt and the people of his time. Life was a toss-up. Pregnancy was a hugely dramatic, and much more painful, event and the death of mother, child or both parties was commonplace. How must that have made women feel? How much stress must they have experienced over the course of their child-bearing years? Imagine being continually pregnant and constantly unsure if you or the child would make it out alive? If you were lucky enough to survive the rocky passage into existence or giving birth to a baby, you then had to contend with various pre-penicillin ailments and diseases – plagues and poxes, infections caused by the tiniest of cuts. Making it to forty must have felt like something of a victory. Sixty must have been considered positively ancient.

                I wonder how the pervasive fact of death affected people?  These days, most of us are insulated from death – it’s tucked away behind the walls of hospitals, hospices, and houses populated by small numbers of people. When we do see it, it’s a rare and haunting occasion featuring a family member or an accident. We are considered very unlucky if it touches us during our childhood or young adult years and we call the death of a young person a tragic event. We can plan for our retirement years, confident that we will be thriving at seventy and still relatively healthy ten and twenty years later.

In Rembrandt’s times, the opposite was the case.   I wonder if the greater fragility of existence had a profound effect on how people saw the world and other people, how they experienced life. 

Scott Walker

                The first time that the name ‘Scott Walker’ properly impinged on my consciousness was when the NME published in successive issues, their critics’ choices of best albums of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and of all time. This was simultaneously a celebration of the rich legacy of thirty years of proper pop lps and a submission to a wave of nostalgia and ‘look back’-it is. It marked the beginning of an era when many acts began to wave their influences about like gaudy flags. But for people like me, it was also an education and from those lists I found out about many, many great works of art. Before those lists, I had never heard of ‘What’s Going on’, ‘Exile on Main Street’, ‘Blue’, ‘Trout Mask Replica’, ‘Innervisions’, ‘Spirit of Eden’ and host of other brain-bending records. Somewhere on the 1960s list, there were the curiously titled Scott 3 and Scott 4.

A couple of years later, I was in a workmate’s flat.  He rolled a joint and put Scott 4 on stereo.  It was a surprising listening experience: some of the songs had MOR show-tuney arrangements but others were startling, sparse and strange. There were glacial harp sounds on the breathtaking ‘Boy Child’, distorted narcoticized keyboards on ‘The World’s Strongest Man’. And on top of everything was the almost comically velvet voice of the intense young man staring disconsolately from the cover.  My next encounter was through a compilation which included jaunty Brel-influenced songs of seedy glamour ‘The Girls on the Streets’ and ‘The Amorous Humphry Plugg’, and those wonderful immersions in pure melancholy ‘The Bridge’ and ‘Big Louise’. Like a lot of the best pop music (and other artforms too, I imagine) the songs teetered on the brink of the farcical, and were perhaps too daft for a lot of modern listeners, but I loved them.

Later on, I was amazed to learn that his first three solo albums had been huge sellers, no doubt partly to do with the phenomenal success of his previous band, The Walker Brothers, and his status as a gloomy pin-up. The fourth of the ‘Scott’ series had been the first to feature all original material but he made the apparently fatal error of crediting the record to his real name (Scott Engel) and without brand recognition, it disappeared and Scott entered the wilderness.

What followed was one of the most curious journeys in the history of recorded music. Walker retreated into MOR covers albums, heavy drinking and drug use and then, in the mid-seventies reconvened The Walker Brothers to produce the hit ‘No Regrets’, two straight albums and then one leftfield leap into art rock with their final lp, Nite Flights. From there on, Walker slid into wilful obscurity, re-emerging once a decade for the next thirty years with a group of increasingly dissonant and confrontational albums that sounded next to nothing like the glorious quartet of ‘Scott’ albums.  I’ve only attempted to listen to one of the later albums but couldn’t get to the end of it.  Watching him being interviewed in the 30 Century Man documentary, he is down-to-earth, plain-speaking, bright-eyed; he seems utterly uninterested in image or in the kind of reminiscing that is the staple of this kind of film. The work he is doing right then is all that matters to him and his past is of no importance. In a more recent BBC interview now on youtube, he is asked about his reputation as a recluse and how he feels about people wondering why they haven’t heard from, or seen, him. ‘I’m not a recluse; I’m low-key,’ he says smiling. ‘Generally, if I’ve got nothing to say or do, it’s pointless to be around.’ Spoken like true artist. Scott Walker R.I.P.