Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 The trouble with Johnnie Walker's Sounds of the 70's was rarely better demonstrated than this afternoon. Absolutely top marks for Curtis Mayfield but Queen and now Sultans of Swing, that most dreadful dirge so beloved of guitar-heads.

Yes but, so what. But that is what the 70's were like. Memory becomes selective and lines up the T. Rex, Bowie, Chi-Lites, Chic and late Motown, not to mention Hurricane Smith but there was a lot of long hair and interminable self-indulgence. It has been a long process rather than a Damascene moment converting from the 70's to the 60's but that process is complete, notwithstanding that decades are only for convenience identified as those periods ending in 0's and, given the option, I'd have 1963 or 64 to 1972 or 73. I think that would cover it as best possible.

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About Larkin 57 is out and about with the essay and poem in it. And there they go, released into the world to find their own way. There's no more I can do for them now.

Compare and contrast is the short cut to any 'critical' essay, providing any number of ways of putting two or more things into context in comparison with others. You can't miss, really, and I understand that that is what students ae given to do these days to help them on their way.

So, Larkin is downbeat and ironic, is he. Considered in isolation one would have to admit, no, not all the time because there was The Trees but you stick him up against Rosemary Tonks whose levels of dissatisfaction are more passionately expressed and he's clearly of a different temper and so both writers can be assessed against their opposites without either losing out in the process.

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40 years is it, since John Betjeman died. Well done, BBC4 for a whole evening of him tonight.

Fair to say, I think, he was the subject of my first 'criticism' in print in the ill-fated Allusions magazine that was as much my fault as anybody's at Lancaster University in 1979. A very routine review of The Best of Betjeman wasn't the worst of it. What a mess it was. Don't ever blunder into editing a magazine unless you know what the aim of the project is and those who do it with think so, too.

A couple of subsequent such involvements weren't quite such disasters but it's a role best left to those with a talent for it.

Until having to go to a new record price a couple of years ago to secure Rosemary novels, a signed Collected Betjeman was the most I'd paid for a book. It's not a brilliant signature - quite late, one might think, or a bit hasty- but for all his retro refusal to be anything more than a quaint versifier, I'd have him rather than Ezra all day long.

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Give Johnnie Walker his due, though. We've had Metal Guru and a feature on Diamond Dogs in the meantime and no show that has those two should have too much to apologize about. Bowie did take himself seriously sometimes but even that was somehow part of the act. Maybe we all need to be able to do that.