Songbook (7 page)

The Bible are a now-defunct English band who you probably won't remember. They got good reviews, and they had a near hit in '86 or '87 with a song called ‘Graceland', and towards the end of the eighties they were able to fill
medium-sized venues in the UK, but they split after a couple of albums, to the sorrow of thousands, although possibly not hundreds of thousands; the absence of a more frenzied and universal grief tells its own tale. There are countless bands like The Bible, bands with talent, loyal and discriminating fans and a couple of good albums in them, but the wrong sort of record label, or manager, or haircut, or trousers, or simply the wrong sort of luck. My record collection is full of albums by groups who didn't quite manage the long haul – Friends Again, and Hot!House, and The Keys, and Danny Wilson, and Hurrah! (avoid those exclamation marks, kids, if you want a long career in music – The Bible had one once, and dropped it, but it was too late) – and all of them, it seems to me, could have gone on to fame and fortune if . . . Oh, never mind. Pop snobs always think that the bands they love have been treated unfairly, that their failure is evidence of a tasteless, ignorant and tone-deaf world, but the truth is that invariably these bands are too quiet, too anonymous, too ugly, too smart and they've spent too much time listening to Chris Bell or The Replacements or Bill Evans instead of dressing up, taking drugs, trying out make-up and picking up fourteen-year-olds; I may prize the songwriting craft of Paddy McAloon over the vulgarity of Eminem, but it would
be stupid to pretend that I don't know why Eminem is the bigger star.

Anyway. I learned to love The Bible because a couple of the band members were friends, or at least, friends of friends – Boo Hewerdine, The Bible's lead singer and songwriter, worked in The Beat Goes On, a record store in Cambridge, with my friend Derek, so Boo and I were on nodding terms, when Boo could be bothered to nod. (Later I found out that it wasn't rock-star arrogance that made him look through me when we passed each other in the street, but chronic short-sightedness. His myopia still serves him well – on stage he looks as though he's lost in his music, when in fact he stares straight ahead because he doesn't know where else to look, and he can't wear his glasses because they get steamed up.) I presumed – well, you do, don't you? – that he and his band would be embarrassingly talentless, and that once I'd heard his first record I wouldn't know how to keep the pity out of my nods; in fact his first record was intimidatingly good, and I was duly intimidated. I started going to see the band play a lot, in their various incarnations (before they were The Bible! or The Bible they were The Great Divide, and Georgia Peach) and with varying degrees of elbow room: there were about seven of us watching when they were a support act at the Marquee in
1984; four years later I couldn't get in when they played the Town & Country Club, which holds a couple of thousand. (I did know Boo well enough to get on the guest list, honest. It's just that I'd forgotten to ask him, and I didn't think there'd be a problem, and . . . Oh, believe what you want.)

It is only when you know and love a band that you become the kind of music critic that every magazine and newspaper should employ. I have been doing some writing about pop for
The New Yorker
over the last couple of years, a gig that necessitates having hundreds of CDs you don't want thrust through your letter box every morning. (I suspect that the record companies somehow end up guessing your tastes and cunningly omitting the CDs you might want from their mail-outs, thus obliging you to buy them anyway.) My usual response to these unwanted CDs is as follows: a) I look at the cover. If it has a Parental Advisory sticker, and the artist is called something like Thuggy Breakskull, or PusShit, I don't play it. Nor do I bother if the artist in question is pretty, or has big hair, or is snarling, or has blood coming out of his or her nose, or looks like he or she has appeared in a teen soap, or looks very old, or looks very young, or simply vaguely clueless (a complex judgement, this last one, and possibly not one I can describe coherently – something to do with the eyebrows, I think,
although occasionally there is a helpful tattoo, or smile, or sneer, or item of headwear), or records for a label that I don't like. Sometimes – although admittedly not often – I turn the CD over, to check song titles, song lengths, occasionally the name of a producer, hoping something will lead me to conclude that this album is Not For Me – that it's for teens, or squares, or ravers, or headbangers, or Conservatives, or anarchists, or just about anyone other than a 44-year-old who lives in North London and likes Nelly Furtado and Bruce Springsteen. If I still haven't managed to form an antagonistic prejudice, then b) I look at the press release. If it uses as a comparison any of the approximately 300,000 names whose music I don't have time for (and it usually does, because my 300,000 names have been very carefully chosen), well, I don't play it then, either. So very, very few albums make it as far as step c), which is where I actually put the fucking thing in the CD player and listen to it. ‘Listening', however, in this context, means waiting for the first chord change in the first track, at which point I can breathe a huge sigh of relief and dismiss the whole thing out of hand as a joke, a talent-free zone, a cacophonous mess created by know-nothings. It's a pretty impregnable system.

I do concede that it's not a fair system, however, and if
you or your record company have, in the last couple of years, sent me an album that you were hoping I might review in
The New Yorker
, I can only apologize, and suggest that next time you don't wear a stupid hat in the photo shoot for the cover art. (And if you have a nosebleed, then please wait until it stops and you've cleaned yourself up.) If, however, you ever worked in a record store with one of my friends, you can expect entirely different treatment. I will listen to every song you ever record. The ones I don't like very much on first hearing, I will play again, on the assumption that I must have missed something the first time around. And if I still don't like something, I will not allow this rogue composition, this one bad apple, to contaminate my enjoyment of the next, almost certainly great, track.

‘Glorybound', a pretty, mid-tempo shuffle which begins, promisingly (promisingly, note, and NOT, in this case, derivatively, as would have been the case with a song sung by someone who used to work in some other record shop that I've never been in), with the same two-note bass riff as ‘Rikki Don't Lose That Number' (which in turn starts with the same two-note bass riff as Horace Silver's ‘Song For My Father', so you could argue that The Bible are respectfully honouring a glorious musical tradition), and which
contains a gorgeous, slinky guitar solo by my other friend in the band, Neill MacColl, was a B-side, but that, of course, didn't stop me from finding it and playing it and playing it until it became a part of me, a permanent deposit in my tune bank. And that's what music needs: this kind of devotion, this assumption that the artists know what they're doing and that, if you give them the time and the requisite confidence, they will deliver something you will end up cherishing. Who knows how many great songs I've missed (and ‘Glorybound' is a great song, that's the whole point – this is not about how I'm making a silk purse out of the family sow's ear, but about how I usually end up doing the opposite), songs written and performed by people who are your friends but not, unfortunately, mine?

The magnificent version of ‘Caravan' on
It's Too Late to Stop Now
(Van Morrison's most enjoyable album, unarguably, so don't even think about arguing) sounds to me like it could be played over the closing credits of the best
film you've ever seen; and if something sounds like that to you, then surely by extension it means that it could also be played at your own funeral. I don't think this is overdramatizing the importance of one's own life. Not all films have to be like
Lawrence of Arabia
or
Apocalypse Now
, and you'd have to have been pretty unlucky, at least in our part of the world (and if you walked into a bookshop and bought this book, you live in the part I'm talking about), not to have experienced a few moments of joy or pure hope or clenched-fist triumph or simple contentment amongst all the drudgery and heartbreak and pain. To me, ‘Caravan' recognizes and synthesizes all of it, and the fact that what it produces from the whole extraordinary mess is something that sounds cheerful doesn't mean that the song is trite.

‘Caravan' isn't a song about life or death, as far as I can tell: it's a song about merry gypsies and campfires and turning up your radio and stuff. But in its long, vamped passage right before the climax, when the sax weaves gently in and out of the cute, witty, neo-chamber strings, while the piano sprinkles bluesy high notes over the top, Morrison's band seems to isolate a moment somewhere between life and its aftermath, a big, baroque entrance hall of a place where you can stop and think about everything that has gone before. (Gosh. A sudden panic: can you hear
any of that, those of you who already own the album or who are interested enough in this description to check it out? Possibly not. But – panic over – this book isn't predicated on you and me sharing the ability to hear exactly the same things; in other words, it isn't music criticism. All I'm hoping here is that you have equivalents, that you spend a lot of time listening to music and seeing faces in its fire.) And, though it won't be me doing the thinking, as far as we know, is it arrogant to expect a little reflection from friends and family? It's my funeral, after all. And they don't have to think only about me; they can think about all sorts of things, as long as they're worthy of the occasion and the music, and don't involve foodstuffs, emails, footwear, etc.

The only thing that worries me about having ‘Caravan' played at my funeral is that string section. Will people think I'm making some concession to classical music when they hear it? Will they say to themselves, ‘What a shame he lost the courage of his convictions right at the end there, just like everybody else'? I wouldn't want them to think that. Unless something unimaginable happens to me over the next couple of decades, I will have gone through an entire life listening more or less only to popular music in one or other of its forms. (I have a few classical CDs, and sometimes I play them, too; but I never respond to Mozart
or Haydn as music, merely as something that makes the room smell temporarily different, like a scented candle, and I don't like treating art in that way, with disrespect.) And I'm unrepentant, too. ‘I'd see him banged up for having anything to do with the inanity that is pop, full stop,' said a famously sour writer and newspaper columnist recently, while attempting to defend a well-known music-business mogul who had just been imprisoned, but you've heard this stuff before.

I have no idea whether his use of the word ‘pop' is the same as mine, whether he thinks that all of it, Dylan and Marvin Gaye and Neil Young, is inane. I suspect he does. It's not a complaint I've ever understood, because music, like colour, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent – it just is. The chord, the simplest building-block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. I don't want to read inane books, but books are built from words, our only instruments of thought; all I ask of music is that it sounds good. Despite its crudity and simplicity, ‘Twist and Shout' sounds good – in fact, any attempt to sophisticate it would make it sound
much worse – and I fundamentally, profoundly disagree with anyone who equates musical complication and intelligence with superiority. It doesn't work like that, which is maybe why these people despise pop music, because it's one of the very few things that doesn't. (They often hate sports, too.) I don't dislike classical music because of its cultivation – I'm not an inverted snob. I dislike it (or at least, I'm unaffected by it) because it sounds churchy, and because, to my ears at least, it can't deal with the smaller feelings that constitute a day and a week and a life, and because there are no backing vocals or basslines or guitar solos, and because a lot of people who profess to like it actually don't really like any music (or any culture) at all, and because I grew up listening to something else, and because it does not possess the ability to make me feel, and because I don't need my music to sound any ‘better' than it does already – a great, farting, squelching, quick-witted sax solo does the job for me. So ‘Caravan' will be played at my funeral.

The problem with the extended passage that I mentioned earlier, the bit that I hope will make the mourners think and reflect is that . . . Well, OK, here's the thing: it's the bit where Van Morrison introduces the band. ‘Terry Adams on cello . . . Nancy Ellis on viola . . . Bill Elwin on
trumpet . . . David Hayes on bass . . .' Is that too weird? Can people really file out of my funeral listening to a list of names of people they (and I) don't know? I've started to think of this passage as a sort of metaphorical dramatis personae now: granted, I don't know David Hayes or Nancy Ellis, but, you know . . . I probably knew someone like them. That's the best I can come up with, and it'll have to do, because I'm not changing my mind, so there.

Some time in the late eighties, I went to see Butch Hancock, the Texan singer-songwriter, play in a large and draughty local pub. I distinctly remember feeling underwhelmed by the prospect on the way there. It was a cold,
wet London winter night, and I wasn't in the mood, and the pub was notoriously grim and there have been times when I've found solo acoustic shows hard work, a little too much meat and potatoes and not enough dessert. But Butch Hancock is a legendary figure in country-folk music, and he'd come a long way, and he certainly wasn't in Finsbury Park very often . . . It seemed churlish not to go.

But Butch wasn't playing on his own. He was accompanied that night by another singer, a woman called Marce LaCouture, and the moment the show started my mood was lifted. They sounded terrific together, this pair, and it seemed like a small miracle that two throats and one acoustic guitar could transform the draughty (and frankly three-quarters empty) pub into a place where nice things could happen.

After a while they took a break. Marce stayed around to sell cassettes from the side of the stage, and I bought one off her, having first ascertained that it contained ‘So I'll Run', the song I'd liked the most in their first set. (It turned out that ‘So I'll Run' was just about the only song they played that wasn't theirs – it was written by someone called Al Strehill, and I still don't know who that is – so my enthusiasm for it was probably slightly tactless.)

Anyway, that was it. I had a nice time, nicer than I'd
expected, and then I went home. But for some reason, when I was writing
High Fidelity
, the evening came back to me, and I made Rob, my narrator, go to a shitty pub to see a singer-songwriter called Marie LaSalle. He likes the music, not least because it lifts, or at least alters, his mood, and he buys a cassette off her in the interval, and develops a crush on her. Later, she visits him in his record store, and they end up sleeping together. I am sure that Ms LaCouture would confirm – with hurtful alacrity – that we didn't sleep together. And she'd also confirm, probably with similar alacrity, that she didn't play a cover of Peter Frampton's ‘Baby I Love Your Way', and she certainly didn't visit my record store, because I've never had one. And even though she seemed very nice, I didn't develop a crush on her; I don't even think I had a passing fantasy about dating a musician and being thanked in the sleeve notes of her CDs, as Rob does while he's watching Marie perform. And yet I know that my Marie character somehow derived from her, which is why she has a similar name and the same initials. I suspect that it wasn't Marce LaCouture I was writing about, but the song she sang. I had retained memories of the evening because of the alchemy she wrought in turning a wet night and a crappy PA system into a few moments of magic, and I was effectively trying to do the same. Like her,
I was stuck with unpromising ingredients (a morose narrator and his moronic friends, a dismal pub), and, like her, I was trying to entertain people despite the idiotic restrictions I had imposed on myself. Recently I have been attacked in newspapers by two ‘fabulist' writers, as far as I can make out for the ordinariness of the worlds I portray. To which the most obvious reply is that it's all very well writing about elves and dragons and goddesses rising out of the ground and the rest of it – who couldn't do that and make it colourful? (Readable, of course, is another matter . . .) But writing about pubs and struggling singer-songwriters – well, that's hard work. Nothing happens. Nothing happens, and yet, somehow, I have to persuade you that something is happening somewhere in the hearts and minds of my characters, even though they're just standing there drinking beer and making jokes about Peter Frampton. Genius is an overused word, but . . . No, OK, I won't push it. The point is that I gave my character the same initial letters as the singer I'd seen because I was hoping that something might rub off, that somehow this would make it easier for my readers to understand how my narrator's mood might be transformed because, in similar physical circumstances, mine had been. In other words, it was pure superstition.

I have done this before and since, presumably to similarly little purpose. The first thing I ever wrote, a TV play that I never sold, I wanted to sound like the piano part on the intro to Aretha Franklin's ‘I Say a Little Prayer'; maybe the reason I never sold the play is that the piano part is less than thirty seconds long, which isn't really enough to sustain a whole play.
About A Boy
, my second novel, was intended in some way to resemble ‘E-Bow the Letter' by R.E.M. How? I don't know how. I just know that there was a tone in the song that I wanted to replicate in the book, something simultaneously mysterious and wry and reflective. Generous readers might give me the wry part of it, anyway. And, though I have never managed to pull any of this off to my own satisfaction, though I have never read any of my books or scripts back and said to myself, ‘Yep, that's it, that's exactly what I wanted it to sound like', I know that without the pieces of music the writing would have been so much harder. So, thank you, Marce and Butch. Without you, Rob would never have got to sleep with a singer-songwriter, and he would definitely have been the unhappier for it.