Here’s what I read in 2020. Putting it out there as I’m always interested in the recommendations of others — figured doing the same might help others put together their own lists of what to read next.
I wouldn’t say there were any broad themes in terms of my overall reading, despite the fact that 2020 was a year like no other [1]. You will see ‘Pale Rider’ by Laura Spinney in here — the goto history of the 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ that many turned to, in order to understand what the world would be like for us, but other than that nothing obviously pandemic related. Given the constant overwhelming analysis of coronavirus in the media I felt little need to seek out more.
Given the extra time on my hands however, I did find the opportunity to return to things I love — popular music in particular. Book of the year for me was ‘Electric Eden’ by Rob Young — an awesomely comprehensive history of the British folk scene, something I never really understood well, leading a parallel life as it has done to the more familiar music of our time. This served as the springboard into other music books — ‘White Bicycle’ by Joe Boyd, a man at the very heart of things in the swinging 60s and 70s; a history of ‘Can’ also by Young and Julian Cope’s eye-watering tales of hedonism and excess ‘Head On/Repossessed’. Although I have a bias towards non-fiction these days I found the opportunity to complete my reading of the fiction of one of my favourite authors, Jonathan Coe with his debut ‘The Accidental Woman’, and what was his current book [2], the quite wonderful ‘Middle England’.
I’m placing an asterisk next to those books I would particularly recommend.
The List (in order of reading)
The Gathering — Anne Enright
To branch out a little now and then, I turn to the Booker winners, of which there are now 54, including the double winners in 2019,1992 & 1974. This novel won in 2007.
For me, this one falls into the category of ‘I don’t really see it’.
It’s concerns the affairs of a large Irish family, eight siblings, coming together in order to lay to rest their brother Liam, who has died of drowning. Obliquely it is given that it was suicide.
I found it hard to follow as the narrative shifts frequently between present and the many pasts of the protagonists. Overlaid is the intent of the author to demonstrate the lack of certainty we have over facts and the unreliable nature of memory. Additionally there are fictionalised accounts further obscuring an accurate sight of events. The many characters further challenged my ability to stay on top of the novel.
The main theme is the dark secret behind Liam’s death. The author is determined not to present this directly, but rather approaches via hints and titbits, with nothing known for sure. Similarly, there is a suggestion that the narrator’s grandmother might have been a prostitute, but then she might not. Near the end of the book a visit to the site of a former insane asylum is presented as most significant, but I have no idea why.
Quite probably you have to evaluate this on its merits, and look at what the author is trying to do. Doubtless she does succeed and with some aplomb given the plaudits. I found it unsatisfying and rather impenetrable.
Sparkling Cyanide — Agatha Christie
I really do think I read all of Agatha Christie’s work during my teenage years — not just saying I read a lot of it, but I sought out all the titles I didn’t have — mostly via long gone second hand bookshops. As a result, when I go ‘home’ it’s always very easy to leave with one for on the train reading, compatible as they are with a three hour window of opportunity. I was additionally inspired on this occasion by having watched the BBC’s excellent adaptation of ‘The ABC Murders’ with John Malkovich as Hercule Poirot. I’d have read more I’m sure except of course, this year, I only made two such trips by rail, covid 19 makings sure that the majority were by car.
Fairly classic Agatha Christie fare, set as it is amongst the smart set, with dinners & champagne at distinguished restaurants. Having poison as the weapon is similarly characteristic, now seeming old fashioned, but of course it does help open up possibilities in a whodunnit. There are wills, complications of inheritance, a colonel and a cad.
The ending is satisfying- I don’t think I saw it coming until the last minute even though, of course the clues are there if you look for them.
We Have Been Harmonised — Kai Strittmatter
This book is an in depth discussion of surveillance and control in modern China. If it is true, and it could be, it is terrifying. The internet is probably the greatest system yet devised for mass control if abused and the author says in no uncertain terms that that is what is happening in China.
I hesitate to repeat the arguments made and facts reported. All I will say is that it is extremely comprehensive. The author spent ten years in China and is a journalist for a national German newspaper so he knows how to report.
What this book does show you is how, if a government wished, they could control you. It made me more sympathetic to those fighting for privacy in an online world. Hopefully it does not matter in a benign environment, but we should be vigilant about what can happen if things take a turn for the worse and guard our freedoms accordingly. If you are worried about these things, and maybe we should be there is unlikely to be a better discussion of what’s happening in the here and now than this book.
The Templars — Dan Jones
In 1119, at Sarmada in what is now Syria, the Europeans occupying Antioch went into battle with Il-ghazi — a general occupying nearby Aleppo. At the time it was estimated that 7,000 Europeans died, many brutally tortured and killed after capture. It was known as the ‘field of blood’. It followed on from the massacre of three hundred pilgrims and capture of 60 more a few months earlier on ‘Holy Saturday’.
What were then known as ‘The Franks’ had established a presence in Jerusalem and along the Levantine coast over the preceding twenty years. It was a precarious existence, with the constant risk of attack and violence — as the events above illustrate.
Immediately following Sarmada, Bernard of Valence, the patriarch of Antioch stepped into the breach, organising the city’s defence. This leads to a change in policy at the Council of Nablus, a body looking at establishing laws for the Franks in the region — it became legitimate for a cleric to take up arms in self defence. From this we see the establishment of a community of quasi-monastic fighting pilgrims, evolving into a much larger organisation recognised at the Council of Troyes in 1129 and finally by the Catholic church as a whole in a papal bull of 1139. This is the story of the Templars.
Although the Templar story is seemingly classic narrative, with their rise from tiny beginnings, to being a large, extremely wealthy organisation spanning all the way across Europe and beyond, to their shocking fall and dissolution, it is a mistake to think that this is in any way a simple tale. Chronologically, events span nearly 200 years. The book’s index of ‘major characters’ lists nearly one hundred different individuals. The Masters of the Temple, most of whom are important to the story run to around 30, with the Kings and Queens of Jerusalem (similarly key) run to a similar number. The same is true of the Popes that come and go, the royal families of France, Spain, Germany and England, so say nothing of the many adversaries of the Franks.
So although Dan Jones writes in a very accessible way and marshals an enormous amount of historical expertise, this is a demanding read if you are to absorb the information. A tip I would offer a future reader is to make use of the maps at the front of the book — understanding the geographical context can help to grasp the narrative better.
The most striking thing about this book for me is the extraordinary violence and savagery of the time usually meted out presumably for the purpose of demoralising the adversary. I will not list the details here, but every barbarity imaginable is encountered, with many more besides. It was a brutal time and place to be alive. Often the survivors of battles would suffer fates worse than those who perished — at the very least they would usually be taken into captivity.
The other thing that strikes me is the number of occasions on which the ‘Franks’ were on the losing side — there are numerous battles in which entire armies perish — Hattin, Banyas, Artah and several battles without name. There are numerous accounts of the takings of cities, often accompanied by the massacre of the inhabitants. On each occasion it seems, the Templars were replaced with willing recruits eager to fight a ‘holy war’.
Dan Jones is particularly good at bringing alive the siege warfare of the time — castles and walled cities were attacked with trebeuchets ( giant catapults ), siege towers, with a particularly inventive technique, practiced on numerous occasions consisting of tunnelling under city walls and lighting fires, which would often be enough to see the walls collapse.
Certainly a panoramic read — many famous figures come and go including Richard the Lion Heart, Saladin, Philip IV, St Louis IX, Frederick II, Edward I, Clementine V, the Mongol horde, Marmaluks and even St. Francis of Assisi. The end when it comes, consisting of trumped up charges against the Templars, confessions extracted under torture and the perfidy of the French Crown and Pope of the time is well told. Dan Jones does well in explaining the great wealth of the organisation and blends the story successfully with the events of the time — most notably the Crusades with which it is intimately linked. The epilogue, considering the afterlife of the Templars in popular culture and descendant organisations is an informative coda.
In summary, this book packs in a lifetime of research — Dan Jones has written numerous other books covering allied territory, but in reading it you have to work hard.
Chernobyl — History of a Tragedy — Sergii Plokhy (*)
On the 25th April 1986 reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, an event that sent shock waves and radiation across the world.
At the time it was the most serious nuclear accident the world had yet seen. It resulted in the evacuation of a 3,000 sq km area around the plant, contamination of 140,000 sq km in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The eventual death toll is estimated at being somewhere between 4,000 and 90,000. Countless more suffered genetic damage. The New Safe Confinement project that contains the remains of the still active reactor cost €1.5 billion.
This book is the story of what happened, why it happened and what happened afterwards. It’s a serious piece of research written by a Harvard history professor. It won the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction in 2018.
The book is excellent at all levels. Plokhov starts by examining the climate in which Chernobyl was built and operated. He highlights the structural problems such as the adoption of the cheaper RMBK reactor type and an environment in which individuals are forever pushed to exceed targets regardless of inputs (for instance stone that is too large is used in reactor 5, leaving holes in the structure).
Then we get the build up to the explosion, the knock on effects of slippage in the timing of a safety test, the pressure to complete by superiors, the temporary disabling of the emergency water system and finally the fundamental design flaw of having the control rods tipped with graphite which temporarily accelerates reactions due to the ‘positive void’ effect.
The chaos of the explosion and the brave attempts to fight it are covered next, followed by the disastrous initial management of the crisis by the Soviet government — their confidence in the system blinding them to the possibility of failure and their prioritisation of the reputation of the state before all other things preventing them from quickly safeguarding the lives of citizens and the larger international community.
Once the authorities are forced into taking action the details of the cleanup are covered — use of ‘bio robots’ to sweep radioactive graphite down into the reactor core, dumping of 5,000 tonnes of sand, lead, clay and boron via helicopter to prevent radiation leaking into the atmosphere and surrounding area, and the digging by hand of tunnels underneath the reactor in order to freeze it using nitrogen and install an extra concrete layer to prevent contamination of groundwater or ‘meltdown’ below the base. Then come the show trials.
Finally Plokhy deals with the historic implications. In Ukraine the incident directly stimulates opposition politics, seeing critics of the incident elected to Gorbachev’s newly created Congress of People’s Deputies. Following the attempted coup in 1991 and Boris Yeltsin’s assumption of power, a vote led by the Rukh, a group formed in the wake of Chernobyl sees the Ukraine parliament vote for independence.
Plokhy juggles a vast cast of officials successfully, weaving it into a cohesive narrative while always focusing on facts. It’s a story the world needs to hear.
For those familiar with the excellent HBO mini-series it is worth reading this book. The mini-series makes it easier to follow the book, but as you would expect there are significant differences between the two in terms of their portrayal of individuals — the man at the heart of the crisis, Diatlov, perhaps most so.
The Science of Storytelling — Will Storr
Something of a mixed bag. The author’s stated aim is to make use of ideas from psychology to help us understand how better to structure stories.
Fundamentally however, the book ends up being a discussion of how to write, with the psychology contributing interesting asides rather than being core to the text.
Without giving too much away, Storr’s idea is that stories should be built around a character being required to change. The starting point may well be a character flaw requiring resolution, although in his analysis of the Godfather, it is more the case that Michael Corleone has to change to survive.
The best of the four chapters is probably the second one concerning character. Storr looks at the different psychological axes that can be used to construct a character ; how to demonstrate character ; triggers that show the character why their worldview is fragile ; the way in which flawed characters validate their point of view.
In the third chapter he poses ‘the dramatic question’ — ‘who am I’ — looking at examples such as Lawrence of Arabia or American Beauty. There are some interesting sub-sections such as discussion of anti-heroes, stories as propaganda, the importance of status and its opposite, humiliation, but I feel this section structurally lacks coherence as perhaps can be seen from this paragraph!
In the fourth and final chapter, he proposes a classic ‘five act’ structure along the lines of the required character change above. I do feel this section almost peters out — the text of the eight or so sub-headings such as ‘the power of story’ gets slimmer and slimmer, and again the sub-sections of the chapter lack coherence — the headings such as the power/lesson/consolation/lesson of story together with ‘story as a simulacrum of consciousness’ maybe give you a sense of this.
This book is quite powerful in terms of getting you to look at how stories are put together, getting underneath the surface and understanding the design. Invaluable if you are considering writing and haven’t been exposed to these ideas before. However I feel the author references too small a group of texts for his example — ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘The Remains of the Day’ in particular. Some of the texts referenced don’t always seem to hit the nail on the head e.g. ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ or ‘King Lear’. Finally he quotes well known analysis texts such as John Yorke’s ‘Into the Woods’ and Christopher Booker’s ‘Seven Basic Plots’ a little too much — more original insights would be preferable. The structure of the book could do with more work — the section headings are often good but in places they could do with more substance.
Humble Pi — A Comedy of Maths Errors — Matt Parker
Matt Parker is something of a renaissance man — a former maths teacher from Australia, he is now Public Engagement in Maths Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, stand up comedian and radio/TV populariser and evangelist for mathematics.
In this book he helps us realise the importance of maths in all our lives by bringing to our attention an abundance of different examples of maths going wrong in many different ways.
He has to be absolutely applauded for the wealth of stories offered in this book, together with meticulous detail where needed. Two good examples — one chapter deals with engineering mistakes and of course includes the famous example of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in the USA along with seven other anecdotes. What’s fresh here is that we discover it wasn’t due to resonance as we’re often told but ‘torsional instability’ (and worrying behaviour had been observed, but ignored). He’s similarly freshly informative on the infamous crash of the Mars Climate Lander — but we discover it was not due to confusion between feet/inches/yards/metres, but rather thruster force measured in pounds, but mistakenly assumed to be in Newtons by the system that controlled the internal gyros. I particularly enjoyed his explanation of the different types of year available — tropical vs sideral and discovering that again we’re marginally incorrect in our understanding of the need for the Gregorian calendar.
Amongst the different types of errors he classifies are errors in time measurement (the Russian shooting team arrives too late for the 1908 Olympics due to their still using the Julian Calendar) ; rounding errors leading to missile strikes hitting friendly locations ; otherwise undistinguished books being put on sale on Amazon for $23m due to rogue pricing algorithms ; innocuous programming errors leading to disasters such as the Ariane 5 crash and many more — all supported with numerous anecdotes.
All in all an excellent read with many stories you will hopefully remember.
Electric Eden — Uncovering Britain’s Visionary Music — Rob Young (*)
When I’m trying to figure out what to read next, the reason it’s hard to choose is that what I really want is a book that will take me into an entirely new world. Such books are of course few and far between, what is more is that the more your world expands the fewer are the ‘new’ opportunities.
But this book … that’s what it does. It takes you into a world that almost seems like a parallel universe. A product of vast scholarship, research, listening, scrutiny and understanding its breadth and depth are staggering. Not only is this a book about music, but also film, television, literature, history, politics, society, culture and above all people of whom there are a vast array in myriad fascinating form.
Rob Young says in his introduction that he set out to write a history of of British folk-rock’s high-water mark — Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Incredible String Band et al. That would be a useful goal in itself — these are artists almost always separate — through no fault of their own the mainstream passes them over, deeming the music ‘parochial and conservative’ in Young’s words. It ended up much more than that — ‘it is not so much about the source singers and players, guardians of the well of folk tradition. It’s really the story of people who have slaked their thirsts at the well, treating it as an oasis from which to refresh their own art.’
Rob Young traces the journey from the very start of the interest in folk music in this country — the likes of Cecil Sharp, George Butterworth and Vaughan Williams who roamed the counties of Somerset, Essex, Norfolk, Wiltshire and Yorkshire in the early years of the twentieth century — notating, publishing and archiving the songs of a fading world. This feeds into what might be regarded as the ‘classical’ music of the time — Delius, Holst, Bax but many lesser known figures such as John Ireland, Philip Heseltine and Ernest Moeran. His impressive notes on figures both major and marginal start here, with a particular eye for the outsider. John Ireland is inspired by bronze age forts, prehistoric remains, monuments and imagined ancient rites. Heseltine a master of the pseudonym dubbing himself Huanebango Z. Palimpsest, Apparatus Criticus and Peter Warlock variously, transcribing over 570 songs, writing chamber music but also scandalising his village of Eynsford with tribal dancing, raucous shanty singing and nude bicycle riding.
He moves on to the ‘second wave of folk’ — examining key figures such as Ewan MacColl, Marxist folk historian historian A. L. Lloyd; folklorist and archivist Alan Lomax; and researcher/broadcaster Peter Kennedy. He is excellent on the contrasts with the first wave — there was a far more political dimension to the likes of MacColl’s efforts (he and his concerts were monitored by British intelligence), they prize the music of the city, overlooked by Sharpe ‘the vast, still active canon of music which came to be known as industrial music: songs of the coal mine, weaving loom, conveyor belt, blast furnace, fishing trawler, road and railway. The dreams, desires, loves, fears, pain, deprivation and tragedy of working people were reflected in these songs.’ The rising popularity of the music is traced in the rise of the ‘folk club’ and the guitar playing troubadour — our misplaced stereotype of the ‘folkie’ today. In fact John Hasted who opened Britain’s first folk club, ‘The Good Earth’ in Soho had to search for a year before finding his guitar, such was their rareness up to the 1950s — ‘before prescient listeners like John Hasted began learning guitar, the instrument was practically unknown as an accompaniment to European popular and folk song’. This in turn feeds into the birth of the careers of artists such as Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, Mike Softley and John Renbourn. The stage is then set for its brief crossover to the mainstream traced through the likes of jobbing composer and jazz pianist John Cameron who wrote the soundtrack to Kes, Harold McNair a mixed-race Jamaican jazz flautist and reedsman, and ‘ubiquitous’ Danny Thompson … knots were tied binding a small coterie of musicians bridging the worlds of folk, blues, jazz, rock ’n’ roll and light orchestral music.
From here he moves to career analysis of luminaries such as Nick Drake; Incredible String Band; Fairport Convention — bringing alive the reasons behind ‘Liege and Liefs’ success and importance; Traffic; John Martyn and Sandy Denny. His musical analysis is piercing and makes you want to go out and listen to the likes of the ISB’s ‘The 5000 Spirits or Layers of the Onion’ or John Martyn’s ‘One World’. He is particularly good at analysis of album covers such as Denny’s ‘The Northstar Grassman and the Ravens’ or ISBs ‘The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter’. It’s hard to resist his quotations from ISB’s Robin Williamson on his trips to Morocco ‘legless beggars in carts and minstrels with drums and hrittas like ancient oboes or shawms with reed hard as an oyster. Buzzing flutes, and barbers plucking tunes on gimbris with mirrors on the back of them to show the customers the back of their shaved heads. Stoned, you would faint at the beauty of the king’s walled garden. Reflections beyond reflections and jasmine buds pressed would perfume your finger for a whole day.’ or lists of instruments played such as ‘guitar, gimbri, penny whistle, percussion, pan pipes, piano, oud, mandolin, Jew’s harp, shehnai, water harp and harmonica.’
Young does not limit himself to the better known — investigations of lesser known figures such as Bill Fay, Strawbs, Trees or Mr. Fox are undertaken with the same piercing energy. It is here too that he helps us understand how this music crosses over into that of Led Zeppelin, Marc Bolan or Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’.
Next we move into the ‘million volt circus’ — the electric mainstream — ‘On 28 December 1966 the spirit of English psychedelia took its first breath. That evening, BBC television transmitted Alice in Wonderland, a specially commissioned seventy-two-minute adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s celebrated children’s fable.’ He finds new things to say about ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and its accompanying video ‘the first example anywhere of what Ian MacDonald called ‘a sort of technologically-evolved folk music’. Pink Floyd, Third Ear Band, the Middle Earth Club, lesser known but key artists such as Mighty Baby and Sallyangie.
The final chapters deal with related topics such as the festival movement, paganism and the occult, disenchantment and the withering on the vine of folk itself before looking at how it lives on via the likes of Kate Bush, David Sylvian and Talk Talk. In ‘Towards the Unknown Region’ the future is considered.
This is not a book about the usual suspects. It is encyclopaedic. The author references long lost ‘plays for today’, 1950s radio broadcasts, British transport films, novels and photography. His range of listening is astonishing. It is not a hagiography — he considers the likes of Dave Harker’s ‘Fakesong’ — ‘More recent critics of the folk revival have suggested that the entire body of work considered ‘British folk’, from the Victorian age onwards, has been nothing more than carefully staged illusion, the product of a wholesale middle-class appropriation of working people’s culture.’ … ‘the folk canon was nothing but a house of cards’ He is far from universal in his praise — his analysis of Steeleye Span’s ‘Rocket Cottage’ which had a cover which showed ‘the picturesque Tudorbethan dream-house, sandwiched between the upper and lower halves of a gaudy space rocket, with its climbing plant, thatched roof and group members peeping out of the windows, is in orbit around what looks like a carpeted planet’ skewers the folly. It is a true history and a wonderful book.
Revolution — A History of England Volume IV — Peter Ackroyd (*)
Peter Ackroyd is a writer of the most astonishing talent and productivity. Perhaps best known for his writings on London and its history, his oeuvre is vast beyond that, encompassing biographies, fictions and his almost finished six volume history of England containing ‘Revolution’.
This fourth volume covers the period 1689–1815, the starting point being the reigns of Willam and Mary following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and the end being Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.
Ackroyd does an absolutely superb job of bringing to life a period often overlooked in schools and in popular culture and shows it to be an age of marvels.
What is impressive about this book is the breadth of the approach and the depth of the learning, you usually get one of these at most. Ackroyd frames the book using conventional historical narrative — the reigns of monarchs, tenures of prime ministers and wars. This is extremely well dealt with — he successfully fashions a clear narrative thread from the chaos of history. In this book, for me, he is at his very best however in documenting social change. A selective list of topics he covers includes changes in agriculture, the evolution of religion (treatment of Catholics, dissent, Methodism and more), gaming, clubs, urbanisation, life in the factories, the birth of consumer culture, the rise of finance, overseas territory (yet to be described as ‘Empire’ ), the growth of the middle classes, industrial revolution and of course the press. Given his literary interests he is expert in discussing cultural change including satire — a constant of the age, cartoons, poetry and the theatre, bringing to life men who were only names for me, such as Gillray (excellent on ‘Gin Lane’ )and Garrick. The excellent section on ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ and its reflection of the mores of the time is a particular stand out for me.
He is expert in constant brief biographical sketches of the likes of Walpole, Pitt the Younger, Adam Smith (‘he had a harsh voice and teeth like tombstones’), Samuel Johnson and Charles Fox which brings the text alive. This on the Duke of Newcastle gives you a flavour of the power of his pen
In an age of tears he was well known for copious weeping; he refused to sleep in beds not previously slept in, had a great aversions to chills and damps, would not travel by sea, and never stopped talking.
and the dazzling range of apt quotations is expertly marshalled
‘I had rather see the devil in my closet’, the king said, ‘than George Grenville.’ The king also said of him that ‘when he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch, to see if he may not tire me for an hour more’. But the arch-bore became first minister in the spring of 1763.
Horace Walpole remarked that the church bells had been worn thin by ringing in victories…
His careful use of statistics too to help us understand change.
In 1753 Bolton was little more than a village with one street of thatched houses and gardens; twenty years later its population had risen to 5,000; within a further sixteen years it had risen to 12,000 and by the beginning of the nineteenth century to 17,000.
Throughout his style really makes us believe that reading this book is time well spent. For instance this in conclusion to the long forgotten ‘war of the Austrian Succession’
The conflict was marked in its last six years by treachery and criminality, double dealing and division, defections and secret treaties, lies and bloodshed on an enormous scale. When peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, not a moment too soon, it could record no single important result.
What distinguishes Ackroyd particularly is his eye for the vivid and the peculiar — here he is on London superstitions
You should never listen to a cuckoo without money in your pocket. You should return home if a snake crosses your path. You should look down if a raven flies over your head. A screech owl in the morning presages a day of danger.
From the section on clubs :
At the Terrible Club, which met in the Tower at midnight on the first Monday of the month, its members had to cut their beef with a bayonet and drink a concoction of brandy and gunpowder.
and after the destruction by burning of London’s Albion Mill
the millers danced and sang on Blackfriars Bridge. Not everyone was enamoured of the age’s mechanical marvels.
All in, an excellent book. Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay it is that you wish to know more.
White Bicycles — Joe Boyd
Between 1963 and 1971 Joe Boyd was a music scene mover and shaker par excellence. He did the soundcheck for Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 where Dylan ‘went electric’ taking angry messages between the folk and electric camps. He opened the UFO club in London in 1967 with Barrett era Pink Floyd as the house band. He signed Nick Drake and produced his first album. Linda Peters, a former girlfriend goes on to marry Richard Thompson, forming one of the most heralded married couples in popular music. He knew well the likes of Sandy Denny, John Martyn and Chris Blackwell and rubbed shoulders with key figures of the day including Astrud Gilberto, Paul Simon and Pete Townsend.
He cuts his teeth as an organiser of tours — making sure people like Muddy Waters, Coleman Hawkins and their bands arrived in the right cities, on stage, on time, with places to stay, later moving into A&R work with Elektra records before coming to London, establishing the UFO club and then his production company Witchseason, who oversaw the production of albums for Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan among others.
The reader gets to be a true fly on the wall, listening to stories of the likes of John Hopkins who was instrumental in establishing Notting Hill Carnival, Elvin Jones — John Coltrane’s drummer ‘wearing a black suit with a bright orange shirt and restraining a huge Dobermann on a leash’ and spending two weeks in prison for a drugs bust with the ‘Surrey phantom’, Maltese pimps, and an organiser of orgies for cross-dressers.
His narrative thread is excellent, and there is a constant of throughput of weird and wonderful people such as Bob Squire who ‘was given a ‘grace and favour’ flat in Princedale Road by a villain who owed Bob an obligation — I never dared ask why’ or the Move’s ‘Fagin like’ manager Tony Secunda who had had ‘knocked around the worlds of music and professional wrestling since the early sixties. He was a cartoon villain, a reptilian hustler who bragged of his time in prison but was possessed of a ready wit and sinister charm.’
His insight and judgements are well worth noting e.g.
Friends of mine lived comfortably in Greenwich Village, Harvard Square, Bayswater, Santa Monica and on the Left Bank and were, by current standards, broke. Yet they survived easily on occasional coffee-house gigs or part-time work. Today, urbanites must feverishly maximize their economic potential just to maintain a small flat in Hoboken, Somerville, Hackney, Korea Town or Belleville. The economy of the sixties cut us a lot of slack, leaving time to travel, take drugs, write songs and rethink the universe.
or
Right-wing commentators still spit with anger when they contemplate how fundamentally the sixties altered society. The environmental and human rights movements and the theoretical equality of races and sexes are only the tip of a huge iceberg. Ideals that remain our source of hope for the future took root in the sixties.
As you might expect he has a lot of interesting things to say about the nature of recording and the music business itself. His neat portraits of unfamiliar musicians, managers, scenesters, artists and more provide yet more insight.
Overall, if you’re interested in this period of popular music, there’s unlikely to be a better first hand account.
James II — David Womersley
It is possible to argue that no monarch’s reign has been more important to the formation of modern British democracy than that of James II’s ignominious four years 1685–1689.
For the second and last time in British history, a monarch overreached himself and was contained. From this point on, the power of the crown would never again be the greatest in the land.
For those not familiar with it, the story of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ is that James II becomes king at a time when the religious mores of the time have become fixed. The ideas of the reformation have taken hold and Britain’s enduring of religious persecution in the reigns of Mary and Edward VI leaves few with an appetite for a return to Catholicism. Unfortunately James II is among them.
Unpalatable as it is now, such was the concern that Catholics were prevented from occupying positions in public life by ‘Test Acts’ requiring office holders to be practicing Anglicans. James II looks to circumscribe this via ‘dispensation’ — a legal mechanism allowing the monarch minor violations of law amongst his personal retinue — James looks to use this wholesale.
A series of further attacks on the status quo culminates in James effort to force the clergy to read a ‘Declaration of Indulgence’ from every pulpit in the land, allowing freedom of worship. A petition against this leads to the arrest and trial of the Archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops. Growing concern sees three Earls, a Lord and the Bishop of London write to William of Orange, James’ son in law, inviting him to intervene. He lands and marches to London. When James’ forces desert him, he is forced to flee.
David Womersley does an admirable job of taking us through the key events of James’ life with particular focus and clarity on the events leading to the ‘revolution’ and James’s flight into French exile. At approximately 100 pages it’s usefully concise and an excellent primer on a subject that deserves wider appreciation given its significance.
Seashaken Houses — Tom Nancollas
There were 27 rock lighthouses constructed off the coast of Great Britain and Ireland, 20 of which still stand. Tom Nancollas makes his way to visit seven of them, as well giving us details of their construction and subsequent history.
They are extraordinary constructions, built by extraordinary men such as James Kavanagh who lived for seven years at sea on the site of the ‘Fastnet’. It was dangerous work and very much terra incognita — no-one had any real understanding of what it took to construct a building that would withstand the worst of the sea, hence the fact that the Eddystone lighthouse today is the fourth to stand on the site.
Nancollas explores the design, details of construction, the lives of keepers, maritime history as well as commenting on the architecture and social mores of the time. He even manages to negotiate stays at several of them, giving a unique perspective on what life must have been like in these most isolated of places.
Finally he takes us to the modern day — the details of de-commissioning and automation. Something different.
The Girl On The Train — Paula Hawkins
Bestseller. A pretty compelling what just happened / whodunnit. Use of an unreliable narrator, Rachel, makes the book fresh, coupled with her really very three dimensional realisation as a damaged alcoholic.
The ending had the shock factor of ‘The Killing’ . Altogether very well put together and readable, although I did find myself rather confused at the start as I read some of Rachel’s flashbacks as narratives of an additional individual.
Man on the Run — Tom Doyle
Just the job. Like many I’ve ignored most of Paul McCartney’s solo work. Partly my fault, partly that of the critics, whose baseline is the genuinely world changing work he did with the Beatles. As a result it’s almost always ‘not good enough’. However, his work deserves to be evaluated on its own merits. When done so, guess what, there’s a lot of good stuff there.
This book sets the context for that. As the title says, it’s not comprehensive, only running up to 1982’s ‘Tug of War’, but it helps frame McCartney’s work and trajectory.
I think the author does a good job of painting a picture of a man who really didn’t know what to do at the age of 28, when the Beatles split. His adoption of High Park Farm on the Kintyre peninsula is much more down to earth than we might think — sparsely furnished with Linda and Paul sleeping on mattresses. Events such as the recording of ‘Band on the Run’ in Nigeria and his drugs bust in Japan are rendered more interesting by the author’s informed research. It’s interesting to hear of his taking the children ‘on the road’ and the book helps us understand how he dealt with the shooting of John.
I really recommend this as a primer on Paul. Helps you understand the man and the music. I’d love to read a book that goes beyond 1981 — after all that was only the first 10 of his 40 solo years.
Today We Die A Little — Richard Askwith (*)
Czech athlete Emil Zatopek is one of the greatest distance runners of all time. In 1952 at the Helsinki Olympics, not only did he become the first man to win both the 5,000m and 10,000m titles, but he also achieved something unlikely to ever be accomplished again — a unique treble in additionally winning the marathon — this on his first attempt at the distance, breaking the Olympic record by over 6 minutes.
He was famous for his unprecedentedly tough training sessions — said to be suicidal at the time. Built around the idea of interval training they saw him at his peak doing unthinkable repetitions of 400m with 150m recovery 100 times every day. That’s 55km of high intensity.
He set 18 world records and won 5 Olympic golds.
Perhaps his finest hour sees him in 1951 breaking both the one hour and 20km records simultaneously. Zatopek runs 20,052m in one hour — at the time only five other men had ever run the 10km in less than 30 minutes — he’d did it twice in under 60.
This is a book about a man who ‘upset all previous notions of limits of human endurance’ according to an Olympic games report.
That would be fascinating enough in itself, but the backdrop of Zatopek’s life is the backdrop of history. His athletic coming of age takes place under Nazi occupation. He starts to break national records at the time Allied bombs fall on Czechoslovakia, driving the German army out. He reaches the world stage in the 1948 London Olympics, winning the 10km by a margin of 48 seconds. He dramatically almost wins the 5000m, closing a 40m gap in the last 300m in filthy conditions. His golden years coincide with the rise of an oppressive Communist regime where the penalty for dissent was the concentration camps — Zatopek’s celebrity only saving him from punishment for ‘transgression’. In 1968 long retired, when the Soviet tanks roll in to crush the ‘Prague Spring’, Zatopek is a key figure in the dissent, but pays a price — he is fired from his army job and spends five years in internal exile working in a menial mining job, only allowed to return to a more comfortable existence after an appearance at the 1972 Munich games persuades the authorities he can be trusted to keep his opinions to himself.
A lion of a man, he learns to speak eight languages, was famous for his hospitality and encouragement of young athletes.
This book gives you all this and more. An astonishing, thrilling, inspiring and heroic life, expertly researched and vividly realised. Highly recommended.
Can — Gates All Open — Rob Young
For those unfamiliar with the name, Can were an experimental group from Germany, specialising in lengthy instrumental improvisations. They had their roots in the avant-garde classical scene. Their peak years were between 1968 and 1975, with noted fans including Mark E. Smith and John Lydon.
This is certainly a thorough examination of the bands career, looking not only at ‘official’ albums, but also at soundtrack work and material released after the band ceased to be an operating entity.
I think it’s fair to say that likely, if you are a Can fan, you will get a lot out of this book. That’s certainly not going to be everyone however. If you aren’t a fan, it will most likely prompt you to listen to one or two albums and the problem for me at least is that I just don’t like them very much, or at least, I don’t hear them as extraordinary masterpieces in the way that Rob Young does.
I’d maybe say, give ‘Tago Mago’ or ‘Future Days’ a go. If you really like them, consider reading this book. If you don’t, you’ll likely come away from it with the slight indifference that I did. The band’s story in it’s own right is not that interesting — despite the fact that they’re almost unique in having their roots in the classical elite ; that they worked during a turbulent time in Germany’s history ( their musical radicalism having little intersection with radical politics ), and the somewhat wayward nature of their various vocalists.
The second half of the book is composed entirely of interviews between Irmin Schmidt, the keyboard player, and various high profile fans. I think it’s safe to say that this section is definitely for enthusiasts only.
Offshore — Penelope Fitzgerald
‘Offshore’ was the third novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. It was published in 1979 and won the Booker Prize that year.
It is a slim, spare read, set in the early 1960s, detailing the fictional lives of a small houseboat community moored on the Thames.
The book centres on Nenna, a 32 year old woman estranged from her husband Edward. She lives on Grace with her two daughters Tilda aged six and Martha aged eleven. Other residents include Richard Blake, a former serviceman ; Willis, a river artist ; Woodie, the retired owner of a small company and Maurice, whose occupation ‘was that of picking up men in a neighbouring public house, with which he had a working arrangement, during the evening hours, and bringing them back to the boat.’ The characters are often referred to using the names of their boats, so Nenna is Grace, Willis is Dreadnought, Richard is Lord Jim, Woodie is Rochester. Maurice gives his boat his own name rather than being known as Dondeschiepolschuygen IV.
Penelope Fitzgerald did not have an easy life and spent some time herself living aboard a Thames riverboat. Owing in good part to this, the book is extremely good in its portrayal of river life. Residents are sensitive to the rise and fall of the Thames, there is much discussion of maintenance with the leaking Dreadnought an ominous presence in the first half of the book and the climax of the book takes place as a storm hits.
Her life also leads her to the characters she portrays ‘people who seem to have been born defeated … ready to assume the conditions the world imposes on them … but they don’t manage to submit … despite their courage and best efforts’ we are told in the introduction. They are not winners, but at the same time, they are not losers.
Fitzgerald turns an elegant phrase, deft in her sketches of people particularly — which often results in a strong eye for the comic. Nenna fell in love ‘as only a violinist can’ ; Tilda ‘cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness’ ; Richard ‘only estimated his age in relationship to his duties’. The period and place too are detailed with elan — there is a well described trip down the swinging King’s Road by the girls, with their sophisticated Viennese cousin Heinrich ; frequent visits by Father Watson, despairing of the girls’ poor attendance at their convent school and the GPOs mail delivery difficulties.
The action unfolds quietly but significantly — a boat sinks, a man is struck down with a spanner by a petty criminal, Nenna tries to save her marriage, there is an adulterous affair. Resolutions are reached.
All in a good read — helped for me by the economical writing. Fitzgerald writes effectively and memorably leaving me at least feeling that this was time well spent.
Grant and I — Robert Forster
The Grant of the title is Grant McLennan, one half of the song-writing team that powered much loved Australian band, the Go-Betweens. Robert Forster, the author is the other half.
Grant and Robert met in 1975, became friends instantly and formed the Go-Betweens at Robert’s suggestion in late 1977. An unusual pairing, Grant has at that point yet to pick up a guitar, but Robert decides it might be easier to teach his friend to play guitar than find musicians on his wavelength. It’s the start of a thirty year career career together.
The Go-Betweens never make it big but they do, via long hard slog build up a loyal following. Through the 1980s they record six albums, culminating in perhaps their best loved, 1988s ‘16 Lovers Lane’. Tensions within the band lead to their calling time, but 12 years later they give it another go. The 2000s see three more albums before Grant’s untimely death in 2006.
The book is a story of two love affairs — one with music, and the other with each other. Strictly speaking a friendship, nevertheless Forster’s great affection for Grant is most likely the reason this book got written.
It’s a birds eye view of being in a band. It’s not all glamour, in fact very little of it it is. The first six albums are on five different record labels and not until their fourth do they get a regular paycheck. At one point they are evicted from a squat. They see no royalties from their last three albums of the 80s for 26 years, owing money for relatively modest tour expenses. Nevertheless, they are in the thick of it — meeting Orange Juice and recording an early single improbably for Postcard records ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’, releasing an album on Rough Trade only to be dropped in favour of the Smiths. Touring with the likes of REM, Aztec Camera and Lloyd Cole; hanging out with Nick Cave and the Birthday Party.
But the music calls. Grant and Robert make it a band of two halves. Early on they agree five songs each per album, an arrangement that holds for their entire career. This often makes them a band of contrasts — Robert’s more angular intellectual songs counterposed by Grant’s often more melodic, accessible ones. Throughout Robert’s commitment to his own music comes through — he describes his songs and his feelings for them in a lot of detail.
Had they been more successful, we might regard the story as one of music’s great dramas — Robert is in a relationship for a number of years with drummer Lindy Morrison, while Grant falls in love with Amanda Brown whose violin and oboe adorns 1987’s ‘Tallulah’ and 1988’s ’16 Lovers Lane’, even though Robert only half jokes ‘we were never ABBA or Fleetwood Mac’. The group’s end of ’80s breakup catalyses Amanda leaving Grant in response, something Robert suggests Grant never really recovers from.
They definitely had something and although it is easy to scoff at the ‘indie Lennon & McCartney’ claims it’s a distinctive, significant and classy body of work.
I also recommend watching the Kriv Stenders documentary ‘Right Here’ about the band. The now elder statesman Robert is thoughtful and insightful when talking about the band, quietly emotional when recalling Grant. Other players have their time too — different points of view from Amanda and Lindy ( and Amanda is fabulous in the videos they made for ‘Was There Anything I Could Do’, ‘Streets of Your Town’) but perhaps most movingly John Wilsteed, the bass and keyboard player on ’16 Lovers Lane’ who at the time seems to have treated the band as a bit of a joke, but now, with visible regret, realises it was probably the best thing he ever did.
Definitely one of the best first person music memoirs and also a hymn to music itself — in Robert’s words, ‘we created the most romantic thing two heterosexual men can, a pop group’.
Head On / Repossessed — Julian Cope (*)
Actually two books, Head On / Repossessed is Julian Cope’s ‘memories of the Liverpool punk scene and story of the Teardrop Explodes 1976–1982’ and ‘shamanic depressions in Tamworth and London 1983–1989’ respectively. Weighing in at around 500 pages in total it comes nicely packaged as two separate books — if you flip the book horizontally you see the cover of ‘Repossessed’ and can start reading — there’s effectively no ‘right way round’.
For those not familiar with Julian Cope, his first band, the Teardrop Explodes had two mighty top twenty singles in 1981 (Reward/Treason) together with a still great sounding album Kilimanjaro. They then proceeded to messily fall apart partly fuelled at least by a heroic intake of psychedelic drugs. Cope documents the mayhem and the madness — kicking down doors on the ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’, tripping on Top of the Pops, driving vast distances across the US with no food and a ‘1000 tab bag’ and an ill advised acid trip on a flight to Australia. Band members come and go with bewildering speed. They record a follow up ‘Wilder’ which Cope describes as ‘the flop of the year’ — 50,000 unsold copies are returned. He is on twenty some front covers in 1981, none in 1982. A final US tour breaks the band. There are huge debts. Internal division lead to the sacking of band members. An attempted third album only sees the light of day 10 years later. After a, by Cope’s account, terrible tour as a three piece in the UK they split and ‘that was the bloody end of that’.
And yet, this is a great read and ‘the Teardrop’ as Cope calls them were a great band. Cope grows up in Tamworth and is fascinated by music from an early age. After dismal A level results his parents send him to a kind of crammer somewhere near Liverpool where he throws himself deeply into the scene of the time revolving round legendary club ‘Eric’s’.
It’s an astonishing who’s who of the period — Ian MacCulloch, Paul Rutherford, Holly Johnson, Pete Burns, Jayne County, Pete Wylie, Bill Drummond, David Balfe— Cope is quickly rubbing shoulders with all of them. Everyone’s in a group, sometimes almost entirely notional. Cope is good on the mores of the time — no-one wants to actually do anything in case they’re rubbish, new groups are only any good if you’re in them. Somehow Cope gets it together enough to form a band, record a single — it’s single of the week in the NME, he’s on the cover of Sounds — they’re off.
Written in staccato three page chapters this book defies summary because so much happens. Literally something of note on nearly every page. Wild and frenzied it beggars belief but amidst the clowning and the hedonism there is a piercing intelligence at work. Cope’s fierce commitment to rock ’n’ roll and his acute self awareness make this more than a catalogue of excess and it is very funny too — ‘We’d wake up early every morning. Gary and I would take acid. Then we’d ride down to the studio on imaginary horses’ or ‘Being married seemed like the most non-conformist thing I could do and I was always given to grand gestures’ or ‘Alan Gill left. In 5 months he’d written a new single, saved the LP and turned me into a raging lunatic’.
Repossessed is in part more of the same but also sees Cope making his way in the world. He ends up back in Tamworth, burnt out and broke, with worse still his arch rival Ian McCulloch building a successful career with the Bunnymen. The neighbourhood weirdos are trying to ‘sell us acid through our letterbox’. He loses a possible drummer who is advised by his manager ‘not to associate with Julian Cope’. Cope talks us through the recording of ‘World Shut your Mouth’ and ‘Fried’ with its famous cover of Cope crouched on a barren mound wearing only a turtle shell, pushing a toy van. Still there is method in his madness — he gathers like minded people and finds his direction via his listening and reading from the likes of Lester Bangs, John Sinclair, Carl Jung and George Gurdjieff finally arriving at a decision to be what he already was — ‘a shamanic rock ’n’ rolling inner space cadet’. Success beckons with the successful ‘Saint Julian’ album but the quickly recorded ‘Skellington’ sets him on a new path of spontaneity. The craziness is still there but he tires of the Syd Barrett comparisons. There is still the toy collecting, attempted self evisceration on stage, prolific drug taking, graphic sex (mostly with wife Doreen!) and gallery of madmen. A telling anecdote is Bill Drummond’s revelation that he attempts to have the Teardrop and the Bunnymen perform in Australia and Liverpool simultaneously to unleash the power of a ley line. There is however the sense of Cope slowing down and sometimes it is the antics of others such as Bunnymen drummer Pete DeFreitas and his mad ‘theory of the duck’ that are the most outlandish characters. He is clearly genuinely moved by DeFreitas untimely death in a motorcycle accident.
You get a ringside seat watching the life of a rock and roll lunatic, a cartoon, but Cope is a genuine original, a shaman and a pied piper. On a very deep level a man just looking to do his thing and we should admire and treasure that but have the good sense not to try it at home.
Middle England — Jonathan Coe (*)
If you had to summarise ‘Middle England’ quickly you would say it was a ‘Brexit’ novel. This would however do it a great disservice. Yes, it is a Brexit novel, but more accurately it is a state of the nation novel circa 2010–2016. Coe weaves in many events of the time — the 2010–2015 Con/Lib govt ; Mark Duggan riots ; London 2012 Olympics ; death of Joe Cox and 2016 Brexit campaign and result amongst other things. Against the backdrop of the times he explores the issues of a divided nation — immigration, racism, our vanished manufacturing industry, spin doctoring, political correctnesss, food banks, the nature of power and the tide of politics. In lesser hands this would be heavy clay indeed but not with Coe. This is a novel of sympathetic, well drawn characters and great comedy.
Fans of Coe will in fact have met some of the key characters before. They were first introduced in ‘The Rotters Club’ in 2001, a coming of age novel set in Birmingham in the mid 1970s, with a follow-up, ‘The Closed Circle’ concerning their adult lives appearing in 2004.
The further passage of time allows Coe to continue to richly develop the stories of Ben Trotter, his sister Lois and Doug Anderton principally. There are marriages, adult children, aging parents and divorces. Marginal figures from the previous novels are developed, some newly invented in the form of former school friend Charlie Chappell, one half of a feuding duo of children’s entertainers.
The core of the story concerns Sophie, Ben’s niece, an academic whose specialty is portraits of nineteenth century black European writers. A series of chance events leads to her forming a relationship with Ian who leads speed awareness courses. Their differences become increasingly obvious, significantly exacerbated by the pernicious racism of Ian’s quietly toxic mother Helena. Ian loses out in an application for promotion to his colleague Naheed, Sophie is suspended from teaching for an alleged trans-phobic ‘micro aggressions’. Then there’s Brexit …
Ian gave a satisfied smile and shook his head. ‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘Leave is going to win. Do you know why?’ Sophie shook her head. ‘People like you,’ he said, with a note of quiet triumph. And then he repeated, with a jab of his finger: ‘People like you.’
Through his characters Coe addresses the anger and division of our times, but with wit and verve. It’s never didactic and often extremely funny, the way the best insights can be.
On May 6th, 2015, Britain was asked to choose a new direction and the people spoke with a loud, unanimous, decisive voice and what they said could hardly have been clearer. They said, “We don’t know.”
Or speaking of the Brexit referendum, David Cameron’s imagined spin doctor says
‘It is a gamble,’ Nigel agreed. ‘A huge gamble. The country’s future decided on the roll of a dice. The fact that Dave’s prepared to take it is what makes him such a strong, decisive leader.’
The humour is never bitter or heartless however, and the book is overall one of great affection. Coe’s great love of Birmingham, prog rock, garden centres and England itself shines through — there is cause for hope and a happy ending.
One of his best books, this is vintage Coe, writing a book I can’t imagine anyone else being capable of. Wholeheartedly recommended.
The People’s Songs — Stuart Maconie (*)
What a pleasure it is to be in the hands of an expert.
In 2012 Stuart Maconie was asked by Radio 2 to write a landmark year-long history of pop. He agreed but asked if he could instead present ‘a social history of Britain as told through pop songs. We, after all invented it.’ The result is this book, subtitled ‘The Story of Modern Britain in 50 records’.
It contains 49 essays which ‘illustrate or illuminate a moment or an issue or a facet of British life since the second World War and the dawn of the pop single’. Each essay takes as its title a popular song. Sometimes the essays focus on the song, sometimes they use the song as a jumping off point to discuss wider concerns, sometimes both.
In the hands of many this might be an unedifying exercise, but Maconie brilliantly rises to the challenge. Firstly, his knowledge and understanding of popular music is utterly formidable. Secondly his abilities as a social historian are almost equally impressive — his marshalling of relevant detail and his ability to condense a subject into a few pages are superb.
He takes as his opening Noel Coward’s famous quote ‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is’ and uses it as his jumping off point — identifying the ‘cheap music’ Coward perhaps disdains as the popular music of our time. He is at pains to point out that this is not the usual roll call of the lauded — there’s no Nick Drake in here, for the simple reason that Drake was not popular in his day — this is the people’s music.
His thesis is admirably proved by execution. We can use popular records to examine society. The subjects covered are incredibly wide ranging — war, foreign travel, the Irish Question, the nature of work, the place of home, unemployment, the homosexual experience, radio, football, drugs, dancing, politics amongst others.
Maconie has been writing and speaking about music for around forty years. He wrote for many of the mostly now sadly departed key music magazines — Q, NME, Select, Mojo. He has presented on Radios 1,2 & 6 for many years, forming an enduring partnership with the like minded Mark Radcliffe. His ‘Freak Zone’ show on 6 Music has run for over a decade still managing to excavate the weird and the wonderful. All of this shows in his writing. He brings a keen ear to bear — I’d failed to notice the neat ‘kids are playing up downstairs’ line in Madness’s ‘Our House’ which he uses to discuss the place of home and the semi-audible ‘something tells you that you’ve got to get away’. In ‘Y Viva Espana’ which he uses to discuss the British travel experience he flags the double rhyme in the ‘chat a matador’ line and the music hall references to kissing behind the castanets and rattling his maracas. His wonderfully extensive musical knowledge allows him to tell us that the Tornadoes, who brought us ‘Telstar’ featured one George Bellamy, whose son Matt is the lynchpin of the rather more well known Muse. Similarly he picks out references to ‘the ‘Dilly’ in an obscure Tornadoes B-side — ‘a reference to the infamous gents toilet at Piccadilly Circus’ and informs us that Shostakovich was a qualified referee in the ‘World in Motion’, the chapter concerning football.
Sometimes he picks out topics we might not even think about — musicals or talent shows for instance. His chapter ‘Bleeding Love’ discusses the latter, taking its title from Leona Lewis’s monster hit. He makes us think in unexpected ways — the common response is to deride talent shows and give little weight to the artists they throw up but Maconie tells us that Jimi Hendrix got a gig with the Isley Brothers after winning a talent contest and Elvis and Bob Dylan took their first steps on stage via this avenue. He traces the evolution of the of musicals nicely showing us that Webber and Rice took the Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia as their inspiration, bringing the wheel full circle.
His eye and memory for a quote is fantastic. Satirist Tom Lehrer on folk singer Pete Seeger’s ‘Little Boxes’ — ‘surely the most sanctimonious song ever written’ or Bowie on himself as Ziggy Stardust ‘a cross between Nijinsky and Woolworths’. There are longer quotes such as Mark Ellen on Goths which is both funny and spot on as well as Morrissey on ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ which deserves reproduction, even if not for the right reasons.
Some of his essays are very moving. ‘Rehab’ which looks in part at the sad story of Amy Winehouse looks at the way women have been treated in the entertainment industry and reminds us of the similarly sad stories of the likes of Judy Garland or Lena Zavaroni. ‘Love Cats’ which deals with Goths reminds us of the murder of Sophie Lancaster in 2007 by a gang of thugs. ‘Ghost Town’ looks at industrial decline through ‘a record that reflected it’s era like a cracked and distorted hall of mirrors’.
I have on occasion found myself slightly ashamed of my love of pop music, feeling that it is trivial and perhaps I should devote my mind to more worthy things. After reading this book I’m less inclined to feel guilty. I’m not sure another art form could be used in the way Maconie has used it here. It is indeed extraordinary how potent cheap music is, and hats off to Maconie for illustrating this so well.
Pale Rider — Laura Spinney
The most visible goto book concerning the current Coronavirus crisis has to be Laura Spinney’s ‘Pale Rider’, detailing as it does what noted pathologist and virus researcher Jeffery Taubenberger called ‘the mother of all pandemics’ — the so-called ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918.
Many people are vaguely aware of the famous statistic that the Spanish Flu killed more people than World War I, but beyond that little else. There’s a reason for that, as Spinney notes. Despite the vast numbers of deaths, it seems to have left little imprint on history. She notes that there are over 80,000 books on World War One, but only 400 (across five languages) on the Spanish Flu, with even that modest total representing exponential growth in the past 20 years.
However, although we might not know it, the epidemic did have enormous impact. Our knowledge and need to research the nature of infection is one obvious area — the idea of a virus, something much smaller than a bacteria, was only conjectured for the first time during the crisis, and it wasn’t until the invention of the electron microscope that it could be seen, this only in 1943. Countries were spurred into action to develop national health care systems as a result. Anti-science (homeopathy and the like) moves to the mainstream due to a perceived failure of science. It has been suggested that it may have had an impact on the outcome of World War I, with the German army greater disadvantaged than the Allies. Spinney also suggests an impact on the arts, noting a move away from a belief in science and progress in the 1920s.
The Spanish Flu was a global crisis and this is something Spinney emphasises. In fact, Europe and North America were less hard hit than the rest of the world. In some parts of Asia the mortality rates were 30 times higher than in the least affected parts of Europe. In India it is now estimated that 18 million people died and in China upwards of 5m people. It affected some isolated communities horribly — 20% mortality in Western Samoa and 80% in Bristol Bay in Alaska.
There is good discussion of the history of the epidemic, although it was shockingly brief given its impact — mostly confined to the last three months of 1918. The various theories concerning its origin are considered — both from the human point of view and they way in which a new disease was effectively manufactured. The science of the virus is explained helping the reader understand what H5N1 etc actually means.
Although this is not a bad book at all, I can’t help thinking that a better one could be written. I feel there could be more of a sense of narrative, but maybe that is wishful thinking — a global calamity doesn’t necessarily have a plot as there’s no natural arc — no hero, no sense of problems overcome or ultimate resolution. Nevertheless the epidemic and its impact seems to get less emphasis that perhaps it should. There is a sense of jumping around — there is a long section on the Catholic church’s unfortunate worsening of the situation in Zamora in Spain for example and a lot of discussion of Brazil. Towards the end interesting connected topics get short shrift — just 6.5 pages on the development of health care systems globally. The section on how the world recovered is 12 pages, but 5 of those are given over to the story of a black South African lady who became a sort of preacher but ended up confined to an asylum as the authorities felt threatened by her messages. In summary, definitely worth a read, but I’d be interested to hear what else there is out there covering this most relevant of topics.
Canal Dreams — Iain Banks
I read Iain Banks’ infamous first novel ‘The Wasp Factory’ around the time it came out in 1984. At the age of fourteen, the title must have just caught my eye. It’s a hell of a book, cruel, with jet black humour and a brilliant ending. As a teenager the transgressive element was probably more of an attraction than it should have been. It drew me in and over the next five years I bought his next four books, enjoying all of ‘Walking on Glass’, ‘The Bridge’ and ‘Espedair Street’.
‘Canal Dreams’ was the fourth and it was where I stopped buying as a matter of course. It’s sat on my shelf for thirty years now. I’ve occasionally picked it up and tried to read it but never with enthusiasm. Finally with lockdown I decided to read it all the way through. Banks’ books are rarely long so it wasn’t too much of a stretch.
It’s hard to say what put me off at the time, but whatever it is, it’s still there now. For me the book just seems too forced, too contrived and hard to follow. In 2007 Banks’ himself rated the book as the least favourite among his then twenty some novels.
The story starts with the hijacking and marooning of three ships in the Panama Canal. The collective passengers and crew have been becalmed for several weeks, shuttling between each others ships. The central character is Hisako Onoda on the Nakodo, female, Japanese and a world class cellist with a fear of flying, travelling to Europe for a concert tour.
The book initially deals with the situation Hisako finds herself in. She strikes up an affair with a younger man, Philippe. He takes her diving and teaches her how to pilot the Nakodo. She in turn starts to teach him how to play the cello. Hisako’s back story is developed. At various points in the novel Hisako experiences the ominous eponymous dreams.
The book is divided into thirds and in the second third ‘Casus Belli’ (cause of war) the venceristas of the ‘People’s Liberation Front of Panama’ come aboard, taking all aboard prisoner and hostage. A series of violent incidents leads to Hisako being the sole survivor of the original passengers. In the final third, Hisako takes her bloody revenge.
I’ve seen it suggested, with no supporting evidence, that the book started life as a film script. It definitely has that feel about it however — it’s very much like an action movie. The author has a hard time putting the action into words and the reader similarly struggles to visualise a fast moving action sequence — imagine trying to narrate the final ten minutes or so of any Bond film and you get the picture.
In summary, I wouldn’t recommend this book. If you do read it, don’t let it put you off, Banks wrote plenty of good books after this one. Given his prodigious output the odd misfire from a highly creative writer should almost be expected.
The Accidental Woman — Jonathan Coe
The only one of Jonathan Coe’s 12 novels I hadn’t previously read, excluding this year’s ‘Mr. Wilder and Me’ which will be on my list next year!
As it happens it’s his first and something of an uncertain start in my view.
The ‘Accidental Woman’ in question is Maria. Her primary quality is that she is entirely detached from the world. She finds it hard to understand why people enjoy what they do and finds very little for herself that creates any sense of excitement or happiness.
Her life is largely composed of one set of unrewarding, unhappy and unfair events after another — partly a result of her failure to understand the world, but her luck does seem to be almost exclusively of the rotten variety.
Coe’s hallmark comedy is here — there are some excellent set pieces including Maria sharing a house with three girls who respectively constantly steal from her ; are caught writing ‘I hate Maria’ endlessly in small notebooks and continually inflict unwanted ‘acts of kindness’ on her.
What I didn’t enjoy was the somewhat cruel nature of it all — there is no silver lining to Maria’s tribulations and the reader is left wondering what the point of the book is. Amusing enough but more for completists when compared to his other excellent work.
Overlord — Max Hastings
Overlord is Max Hastings account of the Normandy invasion and subsequent campaign. Heads up — I didn’t really enjoy this very book very much, but then it might be a strange person who did.
There is no doubt that this is extremely well researched — the details of the Allied forces’ progress from the initial landings in June of 1944 to August 1944’s decisive battle of the Falaise pocket are documented in impressive detail, with a large number of individual testimonies being referenced. Perhaps therein lies the difficulty I had with the book — the level of detail makes it hard to form a clear picture of what is happening. I am tempted to believe that in the end what I’m getting is a fair reflection of ‘the fog of war’, it truly is a chaotic and unpleasant business and the book mirrors that.
This is also not a book for the novice. Hastings expects you to be familiar with military terminology, hardware, acronyms and the key personalities as well as ‘conventional wisdom’ concerning their performance and behaviour at the time. If you don’t have this at your fingertips, you will struggle. Better use perhaps could have been made of maps to help the reader understand troop movements.
Overall, although I’m sure it is a work of scholarship and perhaps captures well the terrible nature of war not a book I would return to.
Be Stiff : The Stiff Records Story — Richard Balls (*)
Tremendous fun. Out of print but I got a copy through EBay.
Stiff Records were setup by two graduates of the ‘pub rock’ scene of the mid 1970s — Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera the former doing it largely because he ‘hated the majors’. They were famous for their idiosyncratic line up, marketing stunts, package tours and art work. Famous acts included Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, The Damned, Kirsty MacColl, The Pogues, Tracey Ullman and their most successful, Madness. You may also recall the likes of Wreckless Eric, Nick Lowe, Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin, Jona Lewie and right at the end, a personal favourite, Furniture.
It’s mostly a ripping tale of derring do, getting by, blagging and chancing with some classic rock ’n’ roll tales, frankly just what I want in my music. They couldn’t necessarily hold on to everything they had, they just didn’t have the money, but they shook up the music scene and made it more interesting.
It’s a well researched book — over 50 interviews were conducted by the author and it helped me understand just where did some of these people come from. Recommended.
Database Internals — Alex Petrov
I work for a high speed database company so I read a lot of technical literature. Although last year I read around seven technical books looks like it was just the one this year.
As the title and sub-title suggest, this is a book about databases. Although there is quite a lot of theory and conventional wisdom to be had there are very few books that put it all together. Additionally, in recent years we have seen the more widespread adoption of distributed databases in response to the deluge of traffic that is now handled. The relatively new theory is often only to be found in papers. This book does a good job of pulling together fundamental database design in tandem with the options available for distributed systems.
The first section does a good job of discussing the different types of database — row store, column store, wide column store before jumping into how you build these things. The chief problem is continuing to make data available in the face of inserts and deletes — how do you keep your structures balanced, without fragmentation, while avoiding deteriorating access times and write amplification. B-trees, the standard way of doing this are discussed over several chapters. Different structures have particular suitability for different work characteristics and Kirov does a very thorough job of exploring the options. He also does a good job of discussing a newer method, log structured merge trees is suitable for immutable data. This underpins many key value databases, although Petrov perhaps wisely confines himself to theory rather than commenting on the different practitioners.
The second section, which deals with distributed databases is perhaps more interesting — the first section is very detailed and ultimately only relevant to enquiring minds and those who are actually building database storage. In the second section we encounter concurrency, consistency, failure detection, replication, leader election, anti-entropy, distributed transactions and consensus — many of which involve different engineering choices and result in databases with genuinely different properties necessitating the user to choose carefully.
As far as I can make out the author has covered his field extremely thoroughly — I certainly wasn’t conscious of anything he’d omitted. He’s made use of over 300 papers and 15 textbooks as well as looking at source code and innumerable blogs in putting this book together — you’re unlikely to find anything more state of the art.
It is a hard cover to cover read though and I found the content a little on the dry side, but maybe that is to be expected. I will say that the diagrams were good however and where supplied aided understanding. I think the author has ultimately balanced things well — it is probably true that a more thorough presentation would be helpful in many areas, but the result would be a book of impossible enormity. It is well annotated allowing the interested reader to proceed to the original papers (although be warned, they may be behind a paywall ).
The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century — Robert Lomas
There can be no doubt that Nikola Tesla was a remarkable man who lived a remarkable life. It might seem unlikely that anybody could claim to have ‘invented the twentieth century’, but when you stop to consider what our society might be like in the absence of electricity perhaps the man who ‘invented’ it might have such a claim.
Nikola Tesla’s greatest achievement was his realisation that alternating current was superior to direct current from the point of view of transmission of electricity. The greater the distance between generator and consumer, the greater the voltage drop. The only way to stop this dropping to zero is to raise the voltage to very high levels. Transformers let you do this with AC — DC doesn’t have a comparable option.
His second achievement was the construction of apparatus that allowed the sending of radio waves. He had become familiar with the work of Heinrich Hertz who proved that electromagnetic radiation exists and built on this knowledge, demonstrating transmission over long distances while Marconi was struggling with short ones.
Tesla’s stock has risen in recent years, but thirty years ago few would have known his name. The author attributes this to his lack of success in business. Although he did have his moments of good fortune, long term he received less than his due, losing out to bad luck, smooth operators and occasional skullduggery. Lomas is of the view that JP Morgan, an investor in Tesla’s AC success deliberately stifled his efforts to deliver power wirelessly.
Tesla is also known today for his possible near supernatural work. Various rumours circulate — that he could transmit power wirelessly using the Earth’s magnetic field ; that he created a ‘death ray’ ; that the FBI confiscated his papers after his death. Lomas reveals two of these to be, to a certain extent true. He was also able to create ‘ball lightening’ and investigated use of electricity for therapeutic powers.
Given the tremendous material there’s a stunning book to be written — but I’m not sure this one is it. Clearer explanations of Tesla’s inventions would be welcome — the author suggests that in his AC motors the magnetic field is made to rotate, more detail required. Exactly why Tesla has pre-eminence over Marconi isn’t very clear. A scan of Tesla’s wikipedia pages suggests there’s quite a lot of material not in the book (his gambling for example). Good to have more detail on this extraordinary man but I’ll look forward to a definitive biography.
[1] The year of coronavirus for those reading this 20 years from now :-)
[2] The end of the year saw publication of ‘Mr Wilder and Me’ which I very much look forward to reading.
