From the Archives - Steel Pulse

Reggae Britannia is forthcoming at the Barbican shortly, a concert featuring some of the British contribution to the genre that was ground-breaking if never quite as good as the real thing from Jamaica.

The unlikely joining of forces of young punks with West Indian music was an almighty movement at the time, in retrospect slightly more explainable in terms of the dull, conservative music that one lot were rebelling against and the dumb, uniformed and uninformed control that the other was subject to.

It was an exciting time, even though debates over whether some crossover had happened when The Police and Elvis Costello were credited with playing 'white reggae' now look as if they were trying a little bit too hard.

It wasn't the worst time to be at University, one's room within 5 minutes walk of the concert hall on campus and, when wised-up in the third year, having an understanding with a doorman who will remain nameless - but, thanks, Mick - that if we were outside the back door at exactly 8 o'clock then he could let us in for nothing.

It must have been in 79 that we found our way into the backstage room with Steel Pulse and someone kindly tore their bit of paper in half so that I could get all Steel Pulse's autographs as well. They were most hospitable and shared with us what they were having after the concert. Oh, I had some of their Perrier water and I think there were some biscuits or sandwiches as well. And I bought a T-shirt while I was there. They still like money, these people. It's not just principles they work on.

Nice people, though. Here they are
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULRZ3zLXc8&feature=related

Maximum Respect.

From the Archives - F.C. Spartak

It is a quiet period on the website at the moment, it has to be said, and in need of features to keep us entertained here, I have excavated the archives for items of the most arcane interest.

My first episode here goes back to 1975-6 in the lower divisions of the Gloucester Sunday League where I played just about the last of my football and ended a promising career at the untimely age of 17.

On the day that the transfer window closes and Newcastle United might suddenly be in need of a new striker, I must point out that I'd prefer to play for Fulham, Notts County or Forest but since I've been out of contract for these last 35 years, the transfer deadline might not apply.

My club, F.C. Spartak, were headline makers in November 1975 when finally scraping a win but in Feb 76, the Gloucester Citizen's now fading parchment records the predator snapping up an unconsidered trifle against the mighty G.P.O. Reserves in a gripping match report. My value to Mark Hughes would be enhanced if I could find the piece that shows I bagged a brace in another match but it hasn't come to hand yet. I've already got some club issue white shorts and my boots with some 1976 mud on them are still in a bag somewhere so I'm waiting by the phone.

Goodbye, Chief Inspector Barnaby

And so Wednesday sees the last Midsomer Murders featuring Chief Inspector Barnaby.

Not my usual sort of entertainment but a 'guilty pleasure', with its supply of caricatured suspects, unlikely murderers and picturesque settings.

I'll miss it but must remember to use the transition to a new detective as a chance to give it up.

There'll be not a dry eye in the house.

Architecture

I've never been able to think of a favourite building whenever asked, if only by myself. I like a bit of architecture now and then but never get further than thinking I'd better not pick the Houses of Parliament and then trying to choose a favourite cathedral.

So, I'm glad to be able to nominate the Hotel Marquez de Riscal by Frank Gehry.

I can see that this is a bit like nominating the rarest orchid as your favourite flower in some impressionable craze of teenage infatuation with the exotic, but it's somewhere to start.

How Many Books Should One Have Read

How many books should one have read?

The more one finds out about, the less it seems one has covered. One realizes that one isn’t ever going to find the time or commitment to have another run at Proust, read Tolstoy, probably not Cervantes and highly unlikely to venture into those big early novels by Sterne or Fielding or Smollett. Having only gazed at the pages of Mansfield Park and no other Jane Austen, not got very far into Dickens and reading no more than the merest handful of all the new books that are published each year, the pile of unread books and the list of titles one really ought to know something about is increasing exponentially and in the end one’s conclusion, by which I mean mine, is that one has hardly read anything. I don’t mean you. You might have read everything.
Being qualified in a subject is often taken to mean that you know a lot about it but a degree in Eng Lit doesn’t mean you’ve read everything and postgraduate study only seems to take you deeper into more specialized areas rather than widening one’s remit.
Although three years of full-time reading suggests one might have found the time to read extensively, students have to write essays, get drunk and get off with each other, attend pop concerts, protest about things generally, take part in other extra-curricula activity and have all those formative experiences that set one up for a lifetime of work, these days in a call centre or delivering pizzas. The last thing one is likely to find on a campus is young people reading books.
Doing four or five courses a year but taking the summer out, it is not a 12 month reading year. Victorian Literature, on my course, allocated a week to Dickens in which I read the first few chapters of Bleak House, made a mental note of the symbolic fog, abandoned it and decided to negotiate the period without its most famous novelist. I struggled with but counted Middlemarch as a text I’d done, disliked Vanity Fair and did an essay on Matthew Arnold’s poetry. It wasn’t my strongest area.
Elizabethan Lit was dominated by Shakespeare, of course, which meant knowing little more than what I’d picked up about him, plus Marlowe, Ben Jonson and the poems in England’s Helicon. I was lucky that some courses overlapped with others, Aesthetics with Stylistics and Criticism, and a concentration on C20th literature that meant I left anything pre-Shakespeare unconsidered, missed out the C18th and avoided an exam in C17th lit by doing a dissertation on Marvell.

It has to be said that poetry was a clever option to do essays on when one could conjure and mumble a few thousand words based on a handful of poems- very closely read, of course- when having to get the grasp of novels ostensibly took much longer to do.
Even with a 52-week year, it’s not usually possible to read a book per day, so even if one read one book for each course each week, that would be 13 texts on which to base one’s experience of, say C20th American Literature. So let’s not assume that a degree is any guarantee that anybody’s read anything. Not the B.A. they gave me anyway.
Once one leaves behind the requirements of education, one is free to follow one’s particular interests and so, yes, I’ve read all of my favourite poets, and several novelists but the dutiful pursuance of developing any comprehensive knowledge of literature as a whole long since stalled.
Having been impressed by the depth and breadth of reading of some professional academics whose job it is to know about their areas of expertise, and having compared notes with others whose knowledge is far greater than mine, it is obviously possible to do a lot better than me if gifted with the necessary desire, acuity and avidness. But I’ve also met respected figures, reviewers of books in high places and, no, they haven’t read that. Or that. And not that, either. So I’m not alone in some of my failing.
So, how many books should one have read? More than me. It might be polite not to ask if I’ve read this, that or the other because, nah, I’m sorry, but I probably haven’t.

CeeLo Green - The Lady Killer

CeeLo Green, The Lady Killer (Warner Bros)

The hilarious addition of a Parental Advisory sticker to a CD case these days is of more use to parents wishing to avoid the teenager's fascination with 'adult' language than help protect the little cherubs from a few epithets that would go unremarked in the playground.

Whereas these stickers once indicated a product aimed at mature people and not fit for an audience of minors, they now flag up the fact that there might the sort of tiresome attemps to shock that many of us grew out of decades ago.

CeeLo seems a sensible enough sort of dude, man, protecting his eyes against the sun's harmful rays with sensible eyewear and is apparently understated in his exhibition of expensive jewellery. There is also an engrossing game to he had with his attitudes and songwriting in which one tries to guess which elements of his vocabulary are the explicit bits that we have to be careful of. In one song he informs one object of his affection that 'being in love with your ass ain't cheap', whereas elsewhere in the same song are 'shit' and 'nigga' and the most successful song on the album Forget You is the radio-friendly version of a different title beginning with the same letter. So, not really anything to suggest that the Parental Advisory label is any more than a way of making it seem interesting to children.

CeeLo is a proper singer, though, and Bright Lights, Bigger City takes a riff that sounds very like Billie Jean and adds a voice that has more in common with Mark Morrison than our namesake, Al. Whereas CeeLo does involve himself in lovelorn suffering from time to time his basic message to the world is that he's out for a good time with the ladies and though keen to gain satisfaction for himself, a useful bi-product of that will be some for those ladies, too.

Much of this is, of course, as conventional as an Elizabethan sonneteer writing about nymphs and shepherds. But whereas Al Green and Gregory Isaacs were often more plaintive and either tired of being alone or lonely lovers, CeeLo is more upfront and passionate whether in times of romantic success or in defeat.

But it's a great record, produced and arranged to the minute, and perhaps more enjoyable than I might have hoped this excursion into pop-picker territory at my time of life might have been. I'm sure it's meant to be funny in places; Please sounds as if it's going to be Misty Blue for a few bars; Cry Baby is cheerfully apologetic and possibly my favourite on first few hearings but I'm sure I'm going to get quite used to this album. You take all the swagger and pomp and excess as read and then see what's left and on this record there's plenty.

Julian Barnes - Pulse

Julian Barnes, Pulse (Jonathan Cape)

Every so often one sees an article about how difficult it is to market books of short stories. Not only is that a shame but I don’t understand quite why it should be either.
Icons of literature like Joyce and Salinger have volumes of short stories among their finest work, there are great specialists in the genre like Katherine Mansfield, Maupassant and William Trevor and, at their best, short stories provide the perfectly-sized piece to read in the bath or at bedtime. I don’t like the idea that any writing is written for a specific market or made to fit a certain size because I’d prefer it if writers could write exactly what they feel the need to write but, sadly, most writing is inevitably produced with a market in mind. But not much of that need apply if you happen to be Julian Barnes, who presumably by now exercises more control over his output than most and whose publishers are likely to be grateful for what they are given.
This new book is divided into two parts, the first very contemporary and each alternate one set at Phil and Joanna’s where a group of friends provide dialogue at dinner parties. While immaculately observed, the very credibility of the conversation makes it difficult to judge whether Barnes is capturing the middle-class zeitgeist, satirizing it or presenting the reader with an awkward encounter with their own likely attitudes, anxieties and would-be wit. Global warming, the smoking ban, recycling and the sex lives of the middle classes are their main areas of interest. In a recognizable mix of concern, complacency and guilt. When one of them says, ‘I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or not.’ and they reply, ‘Neither can I.’, the dinner parties and these stories are summarized very neatly. In the last story of this section, Marriage Lines, the woman of an unmarried couple on a walking holiday in the Hebrides wears a wedding ring for form’s sake, which makes ‘them feel both superior and hypocritical at the same time’ and that might apply to much of Barnes’ accounts here of relationships.
East Wind is a topical story of a very downbeat English affair between an Estate Agent and a waitress from Eastern Europe that ends rather abruptly while Gardener’s World shows a marriage defined by attitudes to the garden with the man interested in growing fruit and vegetables and the woman gaining influence with her preference for wisteria and more decorous flora and fauna.
The second section is themed around the senses and are immediately more literary, impressive and accomplished in a different way.
The Limner is about an itinerant deaf, mute portrait painter and the somehow inevitable tension between his ways of seeing the world and the expectations of those prosperous enough to employ him to paint their portraits.
A tremendous moment comes with the disarmingly simple last line of Complicity, which after detailing the early stages of a relationship and a sort of meditation on aesthetic themes, it ends,
And then I touched her.
Harmony is another story on a theme of misunderstood motives in a basically unsympathetic world, in which innovative medical practice involving magnetism temporarily cures a pianists blindness in a big European city beginning with a V in the time of Haydn and Mozart. I don’t know where that could be and I don’t know why the old ruse of deleting precise fictional dates, places and names is used. But it’s interesting that she needs to be taught to play again having had her sight restored, when being able to see her fingers on the keyboard ruin her ability to play. And, of course, when the healer is demonized and the pianist returned to her family, she goes blind again.
The final story, Pulse, is about the sense taste of taste and perhaps also a sense of taste as well the closing down of the senses and as such is the most compelling and moving in the book. Barnes’ writing is exquisite at times and a transparent window at others in an age when prose style doesn’t seem to be the issue it might once have been. He is a candidate for the title of most accomplished English prose fiction writer and on this form is perhaps ahead of MacEwan, Boyd and Sebastian Faulks with Ishiguro somewhere thereabouts but they all have Alan Hollinghurst to think about, too, and with him due along in the Spring with his most broad-canvas novel yet, they might have some thinking to do.