John Van Der Kirste, We Can Swing Together, the story of Lindisfarne (Fonthill) is a short but well-judged account of the folk-rock institution that all too briefly in 1971 seemed to have the world at its feet. Those of us who know and care know that Lindisfarne was really Hull/Jackson/Cowe/Clements/Laidlaw and no other line-up will do. I was glad they reformed by 1978 so that I could see them like that at Lancaster but, in keeping with their communal camaraderie, friends came and went over the years, keeping the spirit alive but, as with most pop music, it is mostly about the moment and it was never likely that Fog on the Tyne would be repeated.
Nicely Out of Tune might even be the better album, in keeping with the idea that it's where people begin and what they do to become successful, rather than what they do later, that their best work occurs. Dingly Dell was somehow the 'difficult third album' and, it is suggested here, the strategic marketing mistake was to make the political rant, All Fall Down, the single rather than the radio-friendly Wake Up Little Sister. I doubt if that made the difference.
More than once the idea arises that Alan Hull, the humanist Socialist poet, could be difficult, hero and father-figure to some of us though he was. And tensions arise among any group of creative types, however high their bonhomie index. So the long coda, even allowing for Run for Home, is about stunts like the outing with Gazza and the low-point of an album of rock'n'roll covers and the need to pay the bills, re-inventing the brand as best possible in between the likes of Rod working with luminaries like Bert Jansch and Ray being unsuccessful in claiming a songwriting credit for Maggie May. And, let's face it, providing the mandolin part is not songwriting.
Si Cowe makes his way to America to set up his own brewery which seems to have been what he was most interested in all along. But it's not a sad story. Lindisfarne were a very special band, Alan and Si lovingly remembered and Rod turned up on Christmas University Challenge, bravely trying to hold together a Durham team that lacked lustre.
Alice Kaplan, Looking for The Outsider (University of Chicago Press) elevates Camus' L'Etranger into that select group of novels that have had their own biography written.
I'm grateful to Alice Kaplan for the line,
Being laconic did not mean giving up on lyricism.
Once in a while, a sentence stops you and needs looking at again. Dare I use that as an epigraph for my own poems in The Perfect Book. It would take some nerve, who do I think I am but, then again, if you can call your book The Perfect Book, with however much ironic intention, perhaps I do have the nerve.
Not many novels, not many novelists, so successfully bring together literary, philosophical and political themes as L'Etranger and Albert Camus and I am so glad to be English and have its title translated as The Outsider rather than The Stranger. Just because the French word looks like 'stranger' doesn't make that the most fitting translation. And, whether we like it or not, it probably isn't possible to publish quite such seminal literature from the comfort of suburban Portsmouth in times of peace as occupied France in 1942.
Camus is never less than impressive and the book does make one wonder if this year might afford time to go back to the novels and essays again. I'm sure he had Sartre over and over again, not only with the Bogart looks, the less doctrinaire politics, the much better novels even though he wouldn't have put 'novelist' in his top few priorities. He might not have been quite so cogent as a philosopher but he could have got away with much less than the exemplary work he provided and I hope, not just because he left a good-looking corpse, he will continue to be regarded as a secular saint.
Alice Kaplan does a great job in detailing the life of this masterpiece, where it came from, how The Postman Always Rings Twice, a film by Fernandel and contemporary murder trials fed into it and provides a timely reminder to any of us who ever thought of writing a novel, or another one, to consider what it is we are up against.
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There is still Eleanor Cook's Elizabeth Bishop at Work to look at but one does not live by Elizabeth Bishop alone, exemplary though she may be.
One of the many impressive things about Elizabeth was her refusal to appear in women-only anthologies. I was disconcerted to hear how the New Year's Eve celebrations in London were on a theme of 'gender equality' and took it upon themselves to therefore have,
Songs by Aretha Franklin, Annie Lennox, Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa and Florence Welch...among those included in the women-only second half of the world-famous show.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there must always be something worth salvaging from whatever the wreckage.
I hope the Jess Davies Band will have a record out this year.
I plan to produce The Perfect Book sooner or later, for whatever it's worth.
But, above and beyond any of that, I did notice in the previews of 2018, a new title from Julian Barnes is due. So, Keep Hope Alive.
Happy New Year.
