Going back to my roots

When I was little, Ireland was a caravan site in Owenhincha, West Cork and nothing more. I first went to that place with my family, aged three, to the mobile home that my Mayo-born grandmother Madge had recently bought, and I was captivated by the place, with its playground and sweetshop and gaggles of kids playing outside late into the evening. A couple of years later, on our way to the caravan again, we stopped off in Dublin to stay with a family friend. “When are we going to Ireland?” I asked my mum in in the kitchen.

Those holidays were a regular feature of my childhood and for many years in my mind Ireland was all indulgence, freedom, fun and fresh air, though I eventually did get to understand that the country stretched beyond the boundaries of Owenahincha. When I was seven I was taken back to Dublin by my mum and on that trip I was introduced to the Dart and the big grey pillars of Trinity and the busy roads of the city centre. None of this stuff captured my imagination in the way that little coastal town had, though, and it wasn’t until I moved to Dublin myself, some fifteen years later that I really got to understand the city.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Irishness recently, such as it is, watered down by two generations but bolstered over the years by those holidays, a Catholic education alongside many other second and third generation kids, a year studying Irish literature in Dublin in my early twenties, many boozy days and nights in the Irish pubs of London, and my current little corner in the north of the city, which is full of Irish pubs and accents and newsagents selling every local paper, from Donegal down to Kerry. I’ve been following the discussions and commemorations of the upcoming Easter Rising centenary, feeling some kind of stake in it all, while at the same time wondering what, if anything, gives me the right to have that feeling. You could say that I’m one of those annoying descendants of the diaspora, burrowing around looking for their connection to the old country, their narrative amidst all the bigger, more obvious ones. 

But it’s my nan, Margaret, or Madge, who is the thread running through all of this, the woman who bought that caravan back in the day so that her grandchildren, in her words “would grow to know Ireland and love it.”  She was from Ballina and in 1938, armed with her Leaving Cert, she left Ireland for London to look for work, as so many did; but she remained fierce about her Irishness and about the politics and history and culture of her country. She died last April aged 96 after a spell of dementia, a good innings if ever there was one, and I find myself talking and thinking about her a lot, wanting to explain her to people.

Of course I don’t quite have her fierceness about Ireland, though I certainly have something approaching it about London, and in a strange kind of way I think she played her part in putting it there. I say strange because my nan herself never quite “got” London, never felt as if she fitted in and Ballina was always very definitely home for her. In 2003 she was interviewed for a film made by the Irish Studies centre at London Metropolitan University. It’s called “I Only Came Over for a Couple of Years” and features her and people of her generation talking about their experiences of leaving Ireland and emigrating to Britain. Stories, words, talking, these were Madge’s thing, and her account is sharp, clear and full of vivid detail. She describes her loneliness when she first arrived in London, her bewilderment at the crowds and at the anonymity after coming from a town where you knew everyone. She talks about going to work in High Holborn and the tiny sliver of solace she found when she saw the sign for Mooney’s Irish House.

To some extent this bewilderment with London never went away and Ireland was always there in the background ready to surface in conversation. I studied Joyce and Yeats for my A-Levels and my English teacher was a Scottish-Irish woman whose lessons included long rambling monologues about Irish history, the fight for independence, the lives of Parnell and Michael Collins, the Celtic Revival. These speeches weren’t to everyone’s taste but I loved them and of course I would report all this back to Madge. This gave her an opportunity to press items from her book collection on me and to say things like “Ah, Joyce may have left Ireland, he may have criticised it, but he never wrote a word about anywhere else.” Debate and argument about Ireland had rumbled around me as I grew up, about the rights and wrongs of the actions of Michael Collins and de Valera, about the Troubles, about the north and what was to be done about it all. Madge had made it her duty to be armed with facts and arguments that would back her up in those discussions; she was a voracious reader of pretty much everything but her Irish history library was particularly impressive. And it was during this time as a sixth former that I got my own slightly dewy-eyed grasp on it all.

But despite all this some of my strongest memories of her are to do with London. She learned how to make the most of the city, its public transport, its museums, parks and libraries, its shops, its history. She often took us – me, my siblings, my cousins – up to town, on shopping trips, for wanders through museums or by the river. She loved travelling by bus, in particular on the top deck. One day when we were on a bus together she turned to me and said, “More people should travel on the top of a bus. That Maggie Thatcher should try it – she might see things differently.” (In case it needs spelling out,  she was very definitely not a fan of Maggie Thatcher.)

She turned 80 in March 1999 and as a belated birthday present during my university holidays I took her up to town and bought her lunch. We went to a restaurant on Charing Cross Road, then went for a wander around the National Portrait Gallery. I was meeting a friend in town that evening so she made her way back home on her own. It was of those exhilarating sunny London spring days, the kind of day when the sky spreads out above you, when the idea of going underground seems all wrong and you want to be out and about among it all. So as we walked out of the gallery, although it wasn’t the quickest route, Madge decided she would take the bus to Liverpool Street and then get the train to Highams Park, where she lived.

We had a lovely time that day, chatting, eating, wandering, looking at art, but when she talked about our trip in the following weeks, what kept on cropping up was how much she’d enjoyed that bus journey. I can understand now that it would have been one of those surprising little delights London can offer up, and I can picture the route of the bus: she would have gone up the Strand and along Fleet Street. She would have passed by St Paul’s, normally seen as a flat, faraway feature of the skyline and always somehow more thrilling and technicolour up close. She would have gone through the City, past the big hulking monolith of the Bank of England, before arriving at Liverpool Street and getting her train home.

That story sums up something quite specific about Madge and her relationship with London I think; while she never quite felt that it was her home, she was never afraid of it, at least she never appeared so to me, and was always interested in it. There’s a line I read in The Green Road by Anne Enright recently and it reminded me of her: “Beauty in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required. That is the drop of water on the tongue.”  The phrasing is of a kind I can well imagine her using, and she was always very good at finding those glimpses and flashes, even in among the ugly bits and pieces of a city she claimed never to have loved.

When I moved to Dublin in 2003 i certainly felt no great love for London. Growing up in the suburbs, the city proper had offered itself to me only in fragmented bits and pieces, like those trips up to town with my nan. I’d spent four years studying then working in Brighton, a place that felt like a gigantic playground, but in Dublin I got to know the excitement of living in a real city centre, on Capel Street and then North Great George Street. I wandered the streets that I’d read about in Joyce and Yeats and my way home from college took me across the Liffey, where I would often catch a lovely shimmering sunset out to the west. I had a year of writing, thinking, drinking and arguing the toss about books and it was all terribly romantic.

When I came back to London again, I was twenty three and a little lost and directionless. I spent a lot of time in Irish pubs during this period, watching football with my Celtic-supporting friends. I would get involved in pool games and lock-ins and try and impress the punters by knowing all the words to rebel songs and plucking anecdotes from my time in Ireland that I thought proved some kind of gritty authenticity: living on the northside of Dublin, visiting friends in West Belfast, watching the hurling at Casement Park, my heritage in Ballina. Obviously, this stuff makes me cringe now and I doubt I impressed anyone. But I suppose it was a way for me to somehow hang on to that time in Dublin, as I hadn’t really yet figured out a way of being in London, beyond bumming around in temp jobs and getting drunk.

I sort of figured it out in the end though –  got something resembling a proper job, found my niches in Kilburn, then Stoke Newington and now Archway – and these days I love London in a way that can be hard to describe. For me one of the great pleasures of this city is finding beauty in unexpected places – those glimpses and flashes again – the line of a concrete tower block against a blue sky, the flash of a railway bridge across a road, the light catching a building in a certain way in the evening. And now I “get” London, while feeling strangely connected to Ireland up in my little bit of it. The North London Irish presence here jostles pretty amicably with the other immigrant communities in the area and on St Patrick’s day you can feel a kind of manic festivity in the air, with people on the streets, drunk by noon, spilling in and out of the pubs on Holloway Road.  Businesses deck their windows with tricolours and green banners and food shops put out displays of Kimberley biscuits, red lemonade and Barry’s Tea. These are the kind of things that my nan enjoyed hearing about and I miss being able to tell her about them. It has begun to panic me, the thought that the Irish connection in my family is getting weaker, and I’ve started to think crazy things. “We need to move to Ireland and have Irish babies!” I said to my partner a while back, even though in other contexts I’m perfectly happy with my baby-free London existence. It amuses me how these primal instincts around family and roots can surface even when you think you’ve got a perfect handle on it all.  

But I content myself with the Irish boozers of Holloway for now, with their pool tables, jukeboxes, end of the night singsongs. I love these places – they’re sociable, fuss-free, low-key – and I feel very at home in them. In one way, my attachment to the Irish pub is something I certainly did not inherit from Madge – she was not a great drinker and her Irishness away from home was a scholarly and civic-minded business. When she first married my granddad, it was about getting involved in the local parish and local politics; later on in life, when she retrained as a teacher, it was about a belief in education and a sense of responsibility.  It became about getting to grips with her origins – after her retirement she dedicated herself to genealogy, going through the archives, and traced some strands of the family tree back to the 16th century. It was also about studying and understanding the history and culture of her country and sharing it with us through the lend of a James Joyce or Tim Pat Coogan book or an outburst about Sinn Fein at a family gathering. (I’m sad she’s not around for the Easter Rising centenary, to throw herself into all these questions of memory, ownership, power and storytelling being raised by the commemorations.)

But in other ways, my fondness for these big public-spirited spaces does come from her. Though she had no great love for The Pub, she was very good at being out there in the world, at chatting to people at bus stops, in the market or at church. She liked talking and wasn’t scared of an argument or debate. She would always intervene if she thought that people were behaving badly, scolding people for selfishness or casual prejudice. She taught us all many things about getting along in London – how to get about, not be scared, how to look and notice, think about and learn from what you see, how to get angry about it if necessary and do something and how to be kind. And she also taught us how to be excited and thrilled by London, not just by museums and galleries and big grand buildings, but by the ordinary every-day things like sitting on the top of a bus.

Love is difficult: some songs

I don’t like Valentines Day. I know I’m far from alone in this and that if you want to you can quite easily ignore the whole thing. I dislike Valentines far more now i’m in ‘a couple’ than i ever did when I was single, I think because it makes me think about the unhelpful and dishonest ways that love is often represented and talked about in our culture. It makes me think about the way that having a relationship, ‘finding the right person’ can be represented as some kind of holy grail; the weird false binaries of ‘singles’ and couples that often get set up in, for example, awful adverts like those Match.com tube ones (‘Imagine if everyone in this carriage was single’ etc etc).  I’m happy in this relationship but I don’t think there’s anything inherently worthy about being in a relationship per se or indeed about monogamy in general. Love, relationships, sharing your life with another person – this can be wondrous, joyous, fun, but it can also be difficult, confusing, deeply challenging.

Most pop songs are about love in some form or another. But if you actually stop and listen to them, even some of the best ones are either talking over-idealised bollocks or have some weird, slightly scary element of compulsion and/ or coercion in them (variations on please don’t leave me/ I’m gonna make you love me etc). So I’ve been thinking about songs that give a more honest version of love and acknowledge some of the struggle that’s involved. Here are five.

1.My Girl – Madness

This is one of my favourite songs about being in a relationship, partly I think because of its almost complete absence of ego. I love its vulnerability, the way he’s so open about being completely confused by his girlfriend’s reactions, but also sort of tender and loving:“Why can’t she see she’s lovely to me?” It’s such a plain, descriptive lyric – there’s no attempt to generalise or make it about some bigger rejection. Just some bloke, trying his best, getting a bit wrong and feeling sad about it.

2. If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme) – Gruff Rhys

On the surface, this just seems like a sweet simple almost nursery rhymish love song. But the full chorus is “I’d never claim you were mine/ Just if we were words we would rhyme” . The whole idea of possession/ wanting to possess somebody is one of the most problematic things about the way love is talked about and it’s nice to see Gruff sort of acknowledge that. At one point, he also sings: ‘And I will always wonder/ How it would be if we never had met/ Life would be easier, But dull, I suspect.’ YES, Gruff, love is hard!

3. Jealousy – Pet Shop Boys

Nobody could ever accuse the Pet Shop Boys of having an oversimplified take on love and nobody has a perspective on relationships quite like them. Sometimes this manifests in their trademark archness, like in 2013’s Love is A Bourgeois Construct , but sometimes it’s about confusion, anxiety, ambivalence, rejection and, in this case, jealousy. Jealousy is doubtless the most painful, agonising emotion involved in love, partly because there is absolutely no reasoning with it, and the Pets capture its all consuming nature here: “I tried to see your point of view/ But could not hear or see for jealousy” It also down to that possession thing and how difficult and painful that can actually turn out to be.

4. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood – Nina Simone

Nina on life being hard, love being hard and how, you know, if you will insist on being in a relationship with me, sometimes all that is going to show in my behaviour. “Doncha know noone alive can always be an angel?” Obviously this is originally an Animals song, but Nina owns this, she knows what she’s talking about. It’s brilliant on the desire to be a good person, a good partner, but how those pesky demons can sometimes just get in the way. “You know sometimes baby I’m so carefree/ With a joy that’s hard to hide/ And then sometimes it seems again that all I have is worry/ And then you’re bound to see my other side” 

Sometimes I’m a nightmare. This is me. Take me or leave me.

5. Count on Me – Kirsty Maccoll

Leading on from Nina quite neatly is a song expressing similar sentiments, from my spirit guide Kirsty: “And if you weren’t expecting trouble/ And I burst your little bubble/ Well I’m sorry babe/ but you can count on me.”  What I love about this song is that, like in My Girl, there’s love, there’s tenderness, but there’s also honesty about the process. I am an individual, with my own struggles, my own desires, ambitions, not to be subsumed and which will be brought to the relationship: “And I know I should remember/ Never never lose my temper/ But you know it isn’t easy being me”. There’s love here, Kirsty wants to get it right, but wants their love to exist in the world.

So that’s my top five love and struggle songs. Would be interested in people’s suggestions for more, if they have them.

Now let’s leave it on a slightly more upbeat note with Stevie Wonder and one of the greatest love songs ever written, the wonderful, poetic, impressionistic celebration of love, in all its forms,  existing out there in the world.

 

Thanks to Hannah and John for their ideas on this 

Joy and struggle: a little review of 2014

To put it mildly, the world out there in 2014 has been a bit fucked. Injustice, violence, war, poverty, inequality, racism and powerful people who are either incapable of doing anything about all of this or have no interest in doing so. I refer to these things in broad terms partly because there have been so many examples, but also because others have written – and will write –  on these subjects far more knowledgeably and eloquently than I can.

There have been many things which have brought heart to this heartless world for me in 2014. Some joyful live music in the form of the lovely Gruff Rhys and his American Interior gigs, the pure unmediated joy of Dexys in concert and the Manics just being intense and crazy and making me feel 17 again. Clickhole has brought much delightful silliness into my life (if you haven’t yet taken the Hey Ya quiz, you really should). Sarah Waters finally wrote another brilliant book for me to tear through in two days. And I’ve spent lots of time with brilliant, thoughtful, funny people who I can rant, dance and drink with and laugh at life’s absurdities with.

Politically, the fucked-up-ness of the world has been challenged by wonderful, committed, intelligent people and I’ve been directly or indirectly involved with three things this year that I want to just briefly give props to.

New Left Project – Contemporary City series

I joined the fantastic New Left Project collective in autumn 2013 and one of the first things I got involved with was putting together this series, which was published early in 2014. Inspired by my massive unease at the grotesque inequalities of my beloved home city London, I brought together articles on urban space and gentrification and housing activism by lots of great writers. I learned an incredible amount editing the series and it made me realise how much important stuff is being done to resist the commodification of urban space and reclaim our cities.

Radical Housing/ Focus E15/ West Hendon / New Era/ Tenants

Partly stemming from the things I’d learned during the NLP series, I got a bit more involved with some bits and pieces of housing activism this year. On a housing bus tour of North West London, part of the Radical Housing weekender, I met activists from Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group, and Our West Hendon, who are fighting the eviction of residents by the regeneration of their estate. The amazing Focus E15 Mothers, have been fighting a powerful campaign against evictions and housing inequality in Newham and more widely, and in September occupied an empty flat on the Carpenters Estate and set up a social centre there, which i visited. I made contact with Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth, a group of housing activists who helped me advise a student being threatened with eviction, and who do great work resisting evictions in the area. Others have been more closely involved with all these housing campaigns and written more extensively about them, but the contact I did have with all this was inspirational. The housing situation in London now is beyond critical, but thanks to the hard work being done by these groups it is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

Lambeth Strike

Earlier on this year, while working as an ESOL Lecturer at Lambeth College, I went on indefinite strike with my UCU colleagues for 5 weeks against the imposition of new contracts by management, contracts which brought in substantially worse terms and conditions for employees at the college. (This fight is part of a wider fight against the government’s attempt to screw over education and the support we got from across the sector and beyond was really quite something).  Like all similar fights, it was hard work and involved a lot of daily struggle, but within all this I was reminded of the joys of activism – that is, working on a day to day level with committed and principled people, discussing and sharing ideas, and feeling part of something.  As a result of the action some small concessions were offered by management. but they were not enough and the fight continues. But campaigns like the Lambeth strike create spaces for good things to happen, for people to act on their principles, share ideas, make alliances and friendships and, in itself, this is an achievement.

So here’s to more fighting in 2015 and sustaining ourselves with bits of fun and laughter and joy on the way where we can. Wishing you all a very happy, successful and fulfilling 2015. Onwards!

A note on Bob

I’ve not been able to bring myself to properly read any of the stuff about Bob Crow in the press today. Not Decca Aitkenhead’s Guardian interview from February bumped to the homepage in the wake of the news, or Christian Wolmar’s no doubt very even-handed obit in the same paper, nor any of the other appraisals of this ‘controversial character’ elsewhere in the mainstream media (CERTAINLY not the one in the Evening bloody Standard, who I notice, from the quick cursory look I just took at their site, couldn’t resist printing the picture of him on his hols in Brazil).

The main reason I’ve not been able to face any of this is because, like loads of people, I am just gutted. I know why Bob Crow was a great union leader and a great political figure and I don’t particularly feel the need to be reminded of what we’ve just lost. But I was also put off by the idiotic language in the teasers for these pieces. Here’s one: “RMT trade union leader who, despite his apparent militancy always saw his first task as improving the lot of his members”. And here’s another one: “Bob Crow was the belligerent RMT leader whose tough tactics were loved by union members but hated by commuters.”

Both these quotes point to the ways that those in the media willfully misunderstand – and misrepresent – what it means to be a good trade union leader and what unions actually are. The first quote does it by putting Crow’s “apparent militancy” in opposition to his commitment to his members, when it would perhaps be truer to say that the two fed into each other. The second quote pulls that classic media trick of representing union members as some weird, otherly breed apart, nothing like ordinary folk. Here such folk are represented by “commuters”,though it is often “taxpayers” – and the truth is of course that there is often significant overlap between these categories.

Obviously one of the best things about Bob Crow was the way that he responded to this bullshit. He’d challenge it or ignore it as appropriate and never be defined by it. He would go about the business of getting better pay for his members or defending their jobs without trying to make any of this palatable to some projected middle England audience. He had a brilliantly clear understanding of what his role was, of struggle and of how capitalism worked, which meant he never wasted time worrying about popularity in irrelevant quarters. Want something? Then you need to force the bastards to give it to you. People don’t like it? Fuck ’em.

Of course, there are times when you need to win people over to your cause, to cajole, seduce, plead even. But more and more, in this absurd system that we’re living in, we need to fight, to say “I’m sorry, but no”. Bob Crow understood power and he knew all this, but he was only one man and others do know it too. The RMT members who voted for him knew it. Elsewhere, the Focus E15 Mothers know it. 3 Cosas know it. Occupy Sussex know it, as do many other brilliant militant political campaigns, inside unions and outside them. Change does not, generally, involve politely asking for it and waiting patiently for it to be granted. It involves struggle and not chasing after some abstract idea of “approval”.

RIP Bob – you are an inspiration to us all.

2013: the year of Nile and Paddy

2013 has been a bit restless and hyperactive for me. I’ve begun some new and exciting projects, but I’ve not read or written or done as much as I should have done. I don’t really feel I’ve properly got my teeth into anything, and I would struggle if I was forced to produce one of those ‘cultural highlights of the year’ lists. I’ve not read any new novels that came out, because I hate hardbacks and don’t have an e-reader, and I’ve only been to the cinema two or three times.

So while restlessness is not particularly conducive to reading or writing or sitting in the dark concentrating on a film for ninety plus minutes, music is a bit different. You can consume it while doing other stuff or procrastinate by dancing around your room to it or by making playlists out of it. And it’s music which has probably provided most of my cultural nourishment this year. In general, I am LAZY when it comes to contemporary music, so a lot of what I’m talking about here are old favourites or the discovery of new dimensions in old favourites or new discoveries of old bands and singers. I can’t really be bothered to go out hunting for new stuff so if I’m to pay attention to anything vaguely current it needs to be handed to me on a plate. Happily, this happened with two songs this year (which may sound a pathetic number but this is good compared with past years). And, completely non-coincidentally I’m sure, these songs involved two of the veteran popsters I’ve recently discovered (and become mildly obsessed with).

The first song, earning me zero marks for originality, is Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, which involved the majestic talents of Nile Rodgers. It’s not strictly true that I’ve only recently discovered Rodgers as, like anyone with any knowledge of the last thirty years of pop music, I’ve known lots of his stuff for years and loved it too (how could you not?) But only in the last 18 months or so have i become properly aware of his specific role in the Sister Sledge and the Bowie and Madonna I’ve loved and of the funky, gorgeous, life-affirming beauty of his work with Chic. There was a time last year when I would play Chic’s I Want Your Love over and over, fixating on the beautiful simplicy of its guitar hook and I truly believe that I could do this with many Chic songs and never, ever get bored.

People had been going on about Get Lucky for ages before I finally caught on and, like with many songs before, I had to hear it in a particular context to properly appreciate it. It was during that ridiculous sweaty heatwave of late July and I was on the South Bank after work one evening, just under Waterloo Bridge. A crowd had gathered around the spot where some kind of youth music group was performing. There were samba drums and a brass section and a group of dancers performing routines in front. As we stopped to watch they launched into Get Lucky, the chorus transformed into a glorious cacophony of brass instruments, and it was one of those magic spontaneous London moments. You could feel the thrill of recognition going through the crowd and that sense of being in the presence of the Big Hit of the Summer. I was totally sold. “What a tune,” I thought. “What a TUNE.” It’s that beautiful simplicity of Chic that Nile brings: that infectious guitar riff and his effortless musical touch shining through. Every year needs to have its song, the one that you hear wherever you go and that you can’t escape. It was played on Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and commercial radio and everyone became sick to death of it, but you know if it was played in a bar, at a party or at a wedding disco everyone would know it and sing along and dance a bit. And that’s when music truly becomes pop, when it’s out in the world, living and breathing and making people dance.

My second song of the year, involving another musical genius, is The Best Jewel Thief in the World by Prefab Sprout. My older siblings all loved this band when I was growing up but, like many people, I just knew them for the Hot Dog Jumping Frog song (or the King of Rock and Roll, to give it its proper name). Until quite recently, the only association I had with their lead singer and songwriter Paddy McAloon was the weird and pointless lie my older brother and sister once told me as a child about having seen him drinking in the Rose and Crown pub in Woodford (what fun we had growing up in the suburbs). But earlier this year, while faffing about on on Spotify when I should have been writing, I came across Prefab Sprout’s 1990 album Jordan: the Comeback and gave it a listen. I don’t know why or how it took me so long to get round to doing this, because MY WORD, what an album it is. Jordan, for those who don’t know, is a 19 song epic, a concept album about “Love, Elvis, God and Death”, according to the NME, and it is utterly sublime.

McAloon is more cerebral in his songwriting than Nile Rodgers – his lyrics are full of poetry and cultural reference – and much of his work is way more laden with sadness and longing (according to an unattributed line in this Wiki article , McAloon counts Stephen Sondheim as an influence, which totally fits). But he shares with Rodgers a kind of exquisite musicality. Like with those Chic records and their apparently simple, catchy hooks, there is something sublime about the melding of music and lyrics in Paddy’s songs.

Discovering Prefab Sprout is without doubt one of the best things to have happened to me this year. So imagine my excitement when I heard the new single on BBC London and realised they had a new album coming out. The Best Jewel Thief in the World is a quirky choice of subject for a pop song – it’s basically about what it says its about – but is very much in the tradition of McAloon storytelling. And more importantly it is a fantastic bit of exhilarating power pop. The musical arrangement is lush – layers of synth, jangly guitar, topped off with Paddy’s lovely dreamy vocals – and is almost breathless in its speed and pace. An absolute gem of a song.

It’s the last day of the year and I always get a bit sentimental at the end of things, so forgive me for this. But there are times when the music of Rodgers and McAloon seems almost transcendent. Something about them which – as with Shakespeare, Mozart and Scott Fitzgerald – leaves me wondering how on earth somebody could create something so good. When I listen to Chic and Prefab Sprout, there’s a part of me that feels as long as they’re in the world making music, that everything’s going to be ok.

Why we should all shut the fuck up about Miley Cyrus

When it comes to feminism, I have to say that what Miley Cyrus is up to is pretty far down on my list of priorities. So I can’t really believe I’m writing this. But I am, because I’m annoyed. 

The whole Miley-twerking-hammer-licking furore has hit the headlines again today thanks to Sinead O’Connor’s open letter to her. And it reminds me (as if i needed any reminding) that, when it comes to a young woman’s behaviour, people always want to have their say. As a female, from a very young age you get used to being commented on all the time. You get told to cheer up by strangers in the street, you get wolf whistled at, you have your choice of clothing or your hair or your arse or your tits remarked upon. Women are public property and everyone feels entitled to say something about us. And so it is with Miley. 

In a strange way all this fuss has reminded me of the tedious ‘banning the burqa’ debates that periodically pop up among the media and political class. Anxiety about a separate issue becomes projected onto the female body, which then serves as a proxy for various arguments to be thrashed out, often by men. (Amazing how many people suddenly discover feminism when it involves having a pop at Muslims). Nobody ever asks the women themselves what they think about it. 

One suspects that Cyrus is probably having a great time and not that bothered about what Sinead O’Connor or the Daily Mail or the Guardian thinks about her. But because she was once sickly sweet Disney pop star Hanna Montana (when of course she wasn’t exploited or objectified at all) there is some mass anxiety-projection going on, all about young women and their sexuality. (It’s been pointed out by several people how telling it is that Rhianna, purveyor of some of the most sexually suggestive videos ever made, has never been singled out in quite this way). 

Of course the record industry, like many industries, is exploitative. Of course female pop stars are objectified and manipulated in unpleasant ways. But if those are the worries let’s direct our anger and comment at the people controlling that. Or better yet, have a broader conversation, about culture, capitalism, exploitation and patriarchy, and listen to what the women affected have to say about it. Let’s stop focusing our anxieties on young female individuals. Because it really, really doesn’t help. 

When did pop music become so capitalist?

First, a caveat: I know that pop music has always been capitalist; it’s always been about buying and selling a product and making money. But it seems, somehow, to have reached insane heady levels. I haven’t paid much attention to contemporary pop for years but this question occurred to me after reading about Justin Bieber’s UK tour this week. There’s the car crash stuff, of course, that shows the beginnings of a teen star in meltdown: starting a concert two hours late, being taken off midway through another concert for breathlessness, losing his cool with the paps.

This is all pretty sad, and will no doubt be the subject of some ponderous articles about the price of fame for a youngster thrust into the limelight. What struck me, though, when reading about his Believe tour, is this VIP ticket nonsense, obscenely expensive tickets you can buy for the o2 concerts which entitle you to various perks, including goody bags, signed programmes and, in the most expensive package, getting to meet the star himself.

The same is available for One Direction’s upcoming tour and presumably for lots of other pop concerts. Not only is this pretty exploitative but it is obviously designed for the richer of these pop fans (or, rather, the fans’ parents); it imposes big have-and-have-not divisions onto the pop concert experience, something which, I reckon, should be pretty democratic. Now, don’t get me wrong, if such a package was available back in the days of my mad devotion to Jason Donovan in the late eighties, I would definitely have pestered my mum for it (who, I am pleased to say, would definitely have told me to go and whistle for it). But what would the point have been?? I had the records, articles in Smash Hits, the posters on my wall, the dance routines in my bedroom, all of which were huge fun. What, really, would a star-struck meeting have added to this?

This morning out of interest, I had a look at some of Bieber’s music videos on the internet. The music itself seems pretty dreadful, but I accept it’s not for people like me and the same could easily have been said of the dross churned out by PWL so adored by eight-year-old me. What made the videos so unwatchable was their cynicism: Bieber’s every move, facial expression and tortured look into the camera was obviously so utterly manufactured and finely tuned to appeal to the imagined desires of his teeniebopper audience.

The appeal of pop stars like Jason Donovan and Justin Bieber has always been to some extent what fans can project onto them – excitement, a sense of possibility, burgeoning sexuality, all that stuff. You don’t need to have an awkward meeting with the object of your fanatic devotion to get that or to be bludgeoned around the head with it when you watch their videos. But now pop fans must have their impulses and desires obsessively controlled and packaged. The music industry seems increasingly unwilling to leave anything to their imaginations, which is surely where so much of pop’s magic resides.

The Next Big Thing

Last week, my friend and writing colleague Shahla answered 10 questions about her novel, VamPR, on her blog. It’s a fascinating read and I can’t wait to read her book, a futuristic, dystopian take on London, the corporate world and the city’s wild side. You can read what she wrote here.

In her post, she tagged me and our very talented friend Rebecca, the idea being that we would follow suit and answer the same 10 questions about our own novels on our blogs. You can read Rebecca’s answers here, and I’ve done my best to make my own novel sound sexy and interesting below:

1. What is the working title of your book?

The working title is The Rest is Noise, though I may well have to change it as there’s already a fairly well-known non-fiction book about music with the same name. It’s an inversion of ‘The rest is silence’, the last line of Hamlet. The book is a kind of buddy story and is a (platonic) love story about two female friends. The title comes from the idea that the two main characters are surrounded by clutter and irrelevance and struggling to work out what is really important to them.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book? 

There are two main themes in the book; the first is female friendship, and the second is how one handles being a woman in conventionally male spaces, doing conventionally male things – pubs, playing pool, gambling, football, etc. My interest in this stuff comes from my own experiences. I’ve spent a fair amount of my adult life mucking around in pubs with my friends – male and female – and I’ve always been fascinated by the way different people behave in those spaces. I have also had a lot of close female friendships throughout my life. I wanted to explore the dynamics of these friendships – the intensity, the closeness – but also the darker stuff –  the competition and the jealousy – and how you negotiate all those things.

The main characters Sam and Anna first appeared in a short story I co-wrote with my brother Tom when I was 18, which was about an afternoon in an Irish pub in North London (based, it’s fair to say, quite heavily on our own experiences). A few years later, when I was in my 20s, I was in a writing group with my brothers, my sister and some of our friends. Every six weeks or so, we would take it in turns to suggest a title, and we would all write something – usually some kind of short story – and send it round to each other. Sam and Anna kept resurfacing and I found that, instead of writing self-contained short stories about them, the writing became increasingly episodic, with me picking up from where i’d left off with them each time.

3. What genre does your book fall under? 

I struggle with this question. It’s probably straight-down-the-line contemporary fiction, with a feminist edge. I used to define what I was writing was anti-chick-lit but now, if anything, I’d say it’s feminist chick-lit.

4. What actors would you choose to play the characters in a film?

This is such a hard question. I find myself just thinking of all my favourite British actresses – Maxine Peake, Sally Phillips, Caroline Aherne – even though none of them are quite right, appearance-wise or age-wise, for my characters. It’s a good question, though, and probably one I’ll think about more as I write.

5. What is the one sentence (or two!) synopsis of your book? 

Sam and Anna have been friends since school, but are on uncharted territory: chaotic, tomboyish Sam, struggling to come to grips with adulthood, has just started a new relationship, while Anna, a competent, serial-monogamist, is newly single. A look at the dynamics of friendship and femininity set among London’s pubs, clubs and betting shops.

6. Is your book represented by an agency? 

I’m not at that stage yet, but will hopefully be there in the not-too-distant future, when the second draft is finished.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 

Another tricky question. As I’ve said, I’ve been working on the characters and their stories in a kind of piecemeal way for quite a few years, with bits and pieces being jotted down here and there. It’s only really in the last 18 months that I’ve got serious about writing the novel as a whole and got into a writing routine. I finished the first draft in August, so I would say, all things considered, the proper first draft probably took about a year.

8. What other books would you compare this to within your genre? 

When I read One Day by David Nicholls, also about a friendship, though with a romantic angle, I thought ‘This is the kind of book I want to write’. I thought he was so good at conveying time and place. More recently Zadie Smith’s NW looked at the themes of female friendship too, and was also great on character and place.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

It’s probably something which I’ve always wanted to do, but I did have a bit of an early thirties panic a couple of years ago when I thought, ‘Actually, this is something I’ve got to get on with’. There came a point where I just thought that the consequences of not writing this would be so much worse than actually giving it a go.

Then, just after I finished my first draft, I went on a fantastic writing course at the Moniack Mhor writers’ centre near Inverness, where I met lots of other fellow writers, who inspired me to keep up with the whole thing.

10. What else might pique the reader’s interest about the book? 

From Chapter 2:

Paul had a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth and she heard its paper crackle as he inhaled. She moved in closer and as the play resumed, as they sat there together, drinking tea, watching O’Sullivan hammer Hendry, there was established between them a strange kind of intimacy.

A quote about happiness and struggle…

…from Jeanette Winterson, which I find great comfort in, as I sit here thinking about what the bloody hell I’ve got to show for the last year.

“If the sun is shining, stand in it – yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass – they have to – because time passes.

The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred.

What you are pursuing is meaning – a meaningful life. There’s the hap – the fate, the draw that is yours and it isn’t fixed, but changing the course of the stream or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use – that’s going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.

The pursuit isn’t all or nothing – it’s all AND nothing.”

From Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? 

My 18 year-long love affair with Pulp

Back in 1990, aged 10, I went to my first ever pop concert – Kylie Minogue at the Docklands Arena – and the pre-concert excitement proved so much that when Kylie finally appeared on stage, I burst into tears. I have managed to get a bit more control over my emotions since then, but my life has been littered with many such moments of overwhelming joy at pop concerts.  I don’t go to gigs that much anymore, but when I do I still love that 5-minute buildup you get before the main act comes on, when the lights go down, everyone screams and that delicious sense of anticipation fills the air.

On Saturday night, while waiting for Pulp to come on stage in Sheffield, I was actually quite surprised at how much of this old magic I felt. This band, probably more than any other, defined my adolescence – I think I went to see them five times in the year between ’95 and ’96 – and here I was in my early thirties, about to see them again. I got a bit emotional thinking about all this. When they finally appeared, I couldn’t see Jarvis. ‘Where is he?’ I asked impatiently.  When I finally did see him, I leapt up and down and whooped. There he was, bounding about the stage, limbs flailing about, singing Do You Remember the First Time. It was just like 1995 again.

I first became properly aware of Pulp in 1994, when I watched the Mercury Music Prize Awards on telly. They performed Babies and Jarvis wore a lime-green shirt. I was a full-blown indie kid by this point and loved all the bands that my older siblings had listened to– The Smiths, The Pixies, Joy Division, all that. But I was beginning to realise I needed a band that was mine (I think I had scrawled words to this effect in my teenage diary). And here came Pulp, fronted by the tall, eccentrically sexy Jarvis Cocker, playing a catchy number about hiding in wardrobes and teenage sex. Yes, this would be my band.  A few months later my sister gave me the cassette of His n Hers for my 15^th birthday and I listened to it obsessively in the coming months. The sexy melancholia of that album will forever be associated in my mind with bored, winter evenings in my bedroom, lying on my bed, kicking my feet and waiting for life to happen to me.

1995 was most definitely my year of Pulp and is a bit of a study in the tropes of mid-nineties indie music. On TV, I watched them perform on Channel 4’s short-lived but brilliant music show The White Room, and on Channel 4’s coverage of Glastonbury. I had these performances on video and watched and re-watched them religiously; as a result I knew certain songs off A Different Class by heart months before the album was released. I listened to and taped Jarvis co-hosting the Evening Session with Jo Wiley on Radio 1 and standing in for Gary Crowley on his Sunday show on GLR.

Just after the majestic Common People came out my best friend and I went to a record signing with the band at HMV on Oxford Street, at which we both pecked Jarvis on the cheek and I can remember the waxy, slightly clammy feeling of his skin. We were furious that Robson and Jerome had stopped Common People from getting to number one so on a shopping trip to Our Price in Ilford one day we moved all the Pulp CDs to the top spot in the shop’s chart display. I wrote Jarvis a four-page fan letter which, thankfully, I never sent. I first saw them live in October, at the Shepherds Bush Empire and then again the following night at Kentish Town Forum, and then again, a month or so later at Brixton Academy. I think I can safely say that I have never loved any band as fervently as I loved Pulp in that year.

In a way, looking back, it seems a bit strange that they were such a hit with teenagers like me. They had already been together 15 years at that point and Jarvis was the age that I am now. Most of their songs were not really in any obvious way about the usual teen angst preoccupations. Jarvis sang about thwarted lives, class revenge, dead-end relationships. Monday Morning, about being stuck in an endless, soul-destroying cycle of going out and getting drunk, would have gone way over my head. The same must have been true of Bar Italia, about those desperate early hours of the morning when the ‘broken people’ congregate to put off the inevitable end of the night. Although I loved the tunes and the energy, these songs would not have meant much to me because I hadn’t really experienced any of this stuff.

But still, I did listen to Pulp when I felt sad or heartbroken or alienated. I projected what I wanted onto those songs. I sensed sadness in tracks like Have You Seen Her Lately and appropriated them as unrequited love anthems. And, of course, in another way, it isn’t really strange at all that people like me loved Pulp so much. There was sex and excitement and possibility in those songs, which is, after all, sort of what being a teenager should be all about. This possibility was summed up by Jarvis himself in Stacks: ‘There’s stacks to do and there’s stacks to see/ Stacks to touch and there’s stacks to be’. (It didn’t matter at the time that that song was the first in the tragic arc of the Inside Susan trilogy, which ends with Susan trapped in a loveless suburban marriage)

So things are different now. I’m 33 and Jarvis is 49. I now know what Monday Morning and Bar Italia are about. I can even admit to finding a few feminist bones to pick with some of Jarvis’s lyrics (women are almost always tragic figures and are often the locus of his class hatred). He isn’t really to my knowledge a sex symbol anymore and I suppose he may have even drifted dangerously close to the asexual arena of the ‘national treasure’.

But I do still love him. Pulp put on a fabulous show in Sheffield on Saturday night. They wheeled out all the old favourites and played them like the Pulp of the 90s. Jarvis is, I think, instinctively a populist and treats being a pop star as a job – there is no way he would ever get up on stage in a sulk, mumble into the mike and play songs that nobody had ever heard of. He knows people are there to see him perform and this is what he does.

So, many things have changed since 1995. My life is very different to what it was 17 years ago and I am, in lots of ways, a different person. But, there is also a comforting continuity when bands come through for you again and again, like Pulp do. And my obsessive gig rituals were still there. I felt the same sense of nervous excitement and, just like the first time at Shepherd’s Bush, I was determined to be at the right place in the crowd to watch them (down the front and to the right, if you’re interested). Throughout the gig I stubbornly refused to go to the bar or to the toilet for fear of missing my favourite song. There’s a part of me that thinks that maybe I should’ve grown out of this stuff, that I should have calmed down, got some perspective. But there’s another part of me that is relieved I haven’t. After all, isn’t it sort of the point of pop music that it makes you feel 16 again?