Thursday 14 March 2024

In The All-Night Cafe - Stuart David

IN THE ALL-NIGHT CAFE - A MEMOIR OF BELLE AND SEBASTIAN'S FORMATIVE YEAR - STUART DAVID

There's an argument to be had to say that all the best bands from the United Kingdom come from Scotland. Think about it. Just make a list of all the Scottish bands you can remember off the top of your head from any era and the evidence will be right there. It certainly puts paid to any foisted-upon-the-world notions of Scottish culture as being all kilts, caber tossing and those tins of biscuits tied with tartan ribbon. Adding to this illustrious off-the-top-of-your-head list is Belle And Sebastian, from Glasgow. The uncrowned doyens of Indie, and according to the blurb on the back of Stuart David's book 'one of the most influential and beloved bands of all time'.
Stuart David is the co-founder of Belle And Sebastian and In The All-Night Cafe is exactly what it says in the strapline: 'A memoir of Belle And Sebastian's formative year'. That's 'year' as in the singular and it's an important point.


Obviously, it needs to be asked: Why would anyone want to write specifically about a band's formative year? Why would you not rather just go straight for the jugular and write about the sex, the drugs and the rock'n'roll? The reason, of course, is because this is Belle And Sebastian we're talking about and it's one of the reasons why they're so likeable.

Belle And Sebastian are a nice band of nice people playing nice music, and rather than mocking this in an Alexi Sayle 'Nice! Nice is a biscuit!'-type way, it should be welcomed and applauded. Just as there is room in the world for a band such as Insane Clown Posse for example, so is there room in the world for Belle And Sebastian. Who's to say that one is better, more worthwhile or even more rock'n'roll than the other? Alice Cooper would famously cavort onstage with a python whilst chopping up baby dolls but then after the show he'd go home to play a nice round of golf. Who's to say that after playing what might be called by some as the musical equivalent of a round of golf, that Belle And Sebastian don't go home and cavort with pythons and chop up real babies? Who knows?

Stuart David, it should be noted, played bass in Belle And Sebastian but left the band in 2000 to concentrate more on his writing and his own band, Looper. Stuart Murdoch is the lead vocalist and still sings with Belle And Sebastian to this day.

Anyone who has ever been in a band will recognise and no doubt identify with what Stuart David is writing about as he lays bare all the frustration, the doubt, the hardship and ultimately the satisfaction that comes with forming a band. In Nicolas Roeg's 1970 film, Performance, the character played by Mick Jagger at one point says 'The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness'. It's a very good quote and if true might this idea also apply to Belle And Sebastian, that most gentlest of bands?
The answer on reading David's book is an unequivocal 'Yes' due mostly, it must be said, to the singularity of vision of their lead singer. Were it not for him, Belle And Sebastian would never have existed or at least not in the form that caused Seymour Stein, the head honcho of Sire Records, to fly over from America to Scotland to personally meet them, wooing them with a display of wealth and decadence reminiscent of a Roman emperor. 

Belle And Sebastian with the backing of Seymour Stein (who had previously signed Madonna and given The Smiths their American deal) could have ruled the world but because the band didn't wish to tour America at that point, the deal fell through and instead (like the title of one of their songs) they ended up ruling their school. Following on from this, however, Belle And Sebastian have gone on to release twelve studio albums, to play a sell out concert at the Hollywood Bowl and even more importantly to become immortalised with an appearance in The Simpsons where they were depicted as the band playing at Groundskeeper Willie's wedding.

In regard to Stuart David, his moment of madness came one afternoon in 1994 when he decided to learn how to play bass guitar as a way of starting afresh in forming a band. The idea came to him from nowhere but was one that was to change his life forever. Previously to this he had been claiming benefits for eight years and trying to form a band but with him on lead guitar, foiled constantly by the failure to acquire a bassist. Almost as soon as he began learning to play bass himself, along came guitarist, vocalist and song-writer Stuart Murdoch. The rest, as they say, is history and the first year of their playing together leading up to the recording of their debut album is the whole story of In The All-Night Cafe.

It's a very heartwarming story that ends happily, and it shows that the success of Belle And Sebastian as a band is well deserved. Nowadays they're obviously not quite the same band as when they began as penniless, geeky outsiders but the fact that they're still going whilst so many other bands from that period have long since died is testament to their belief in the gift to life that is music. 
John Serpico

Tuesday 12 March 2024

Tarantula - Bob Dylan

 TARANTULA - BOB DYLAN

First published in 1966, Tarantula is Bob Dylan's only ever work of fiction published in book-form unless, of course, you're someone who subscribes to the notion that everything Dylan has ever done is fiction and therefore Tarantula is simply business as usual? It's a moot point.
It's a book I first read as a teenager and at that time, a book I failed to understand. I had been baptised in the unholy waters of hardcore punk rock and what that had given me was a near-cleansing of the doors of perception. Never mind what Mott The Hoople had once said about 'who needs TV when we've got T-Rex?' How about who needs lysergic acid diethylamide when we've got punk rock?


The Year Zero concept promoted in some quarters of the punk fraternity where the past is erased as in 'No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones' was always mere posturing, I always thought, and was never really something I went along with. Patently, punk rock didn't just come out of nowhere. It might well have been 'here today gone tomorrow' for some but it was never 'here today not there yesterday'. In fact, punk rock actually presented the keys to the past where a whole treasure trove of culture and experience lay waiting to be ransacked. And so ransack it I did. Pillaged it, even.

During the years of the Punk Wars, Dylan had been cast as anathema and his songs almost as crimes against humanity but for me this actually made him a person of interest. It was Caroline Coon who hit the nail on the head with all this when she rebuked Johnny Rotten for him denigrating hippies. "The newspapers are going to come after you in the same way they came after the hippies", she told him. And she was right. So, Dylan being such a cultural icon and an ever-looming presence over the 1960s was obviously someone who demanded investigation and so investigate him I did. Which is how I first ended up reading Tarantula.

Not that they're fully-honed now at all but back then my critical faculties weren't even in their infancy. I'd had no education to speak of but school had at least taught me to read and like so many other others before me, I found that reading was the route to the root of the world. 'A house without books is like a body without a soul' as Roman philosopher Cicero said, so to the public library it was along with visits to the second-hand bookshops of Bristol. 'Libraries gave us power', as the Manic Street Preachers once sang, and it's true. This being one of the very few things of note they've ever come out with, I might add.

On first encountering and reading Tarantula I didn't understand it at all. It was stream of consciousness stuff without punctuation or form. It was gobbledygook. It was gibberish. It made no sense in the slightest and even searching out the odd, single slither of a line containing a hint of meaningfulness was a task too far. There was nothing in there of any note. Nothing to latch onto apart from a sense of cleverness for the sake of being clever but even this was quashed by the much larger sense of it not being half as clever as it presented itself to be.
There was a smugness about it, as if it was talking its own language and if you didn't understand that language it was because you were 'square'. You just wasn't hip to the beat, daddio. You were nowheresville. It was all just Greek to me, however. Double Dutch. Couldn't make head nor tail of it. I was failing to catch the wind. Falling at the first hurdle of the acid test.

So, years later and on reading Tarantula again does it now make any sense? The answer, not surprisingly, is 'No'. It's still very much gobbledygook, still very much gibberish. I have, however, now become wise to it. Tarantula is a vanity project that if written by anyone else other than Dylan would have been binned immediately. It's a disservice to book publishing. It's a fraud. An insult to intelligence. A waste of time and a waste of paper. It should never have seen the light of day let alone be presented as 'essential reading' and 'verbal playfulness and spontaneity'. 

It serves no use. It serves no purpose. It's the literately equivalent of erectile disfunction except it's not even literature. Rather than the works of Shakespeare, it's what a thousand monkeys clattering away on typewriters for a thousand years would come up with. It's rubbish. Utterly. Never in a million years would Dylan himself consider giving it a second glance let alone reading it, so why should anyone else? Why not instead consider destroying it, that's if anyone could even be bothered spending any energy on doing so? That's right, wipe it from the face of the earth metaphorically at least. Slap a sticker on every copy in the world like those 3 for 2 Waterstones ones as a public health warning stating something like 'Pretentious drivel. This book can seriously waste your time'.
John Serpico

Sunday 10 March 2024

Whatever Happened To The C86 Kids? - Nige Tassell

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE C86 KIDS? - AN INDIE ODYSSEY -
NIGE TASSELL

C30 C60 C90 - go! C86 on the radio - or on the Janice Long or John Peel show at least and, of course, in the NME who in 1986 produced a cassette tape collating into one place a selection of happening bands of that year, awarding it the title of 'C86'. Whether or not it was the intention of the NME to try and create and label a scene (as was always the wont of the music press) is beside the point as these things like a Frankenstein's monster often tend to take on a life of their own, becoming something other than what was originally envisaged or intended. 

Was C86 meant to be a celebration of independence from 'the music biz'? It certainly gave that impression even if it was all being done by smoke and mirrors. For sure, all the featured bands had only ever released anything on an independent label as opposed to a major one but for a fair few this wasn't out of any ideological stance, it was just that no major record label had ever approached them. For a fair few, having a record released on an independent label served a dual purpose: Firstly, it being the only way they were ever going to get a record released at all but secondly, serving as a potential stepping stone to a major record deal that they'd have no qualms about jumping at.

The meaning of 'independence' at this point began to get distorted, particularly when the word was shortened to simply 'indie' and began to be used as a description of a type of band - a style, an aesthetic - rather than a state of being and an attitude in the way that Crass, for example, had been doing. John Peel preferred to call them 'shambling bands', particularly in regard to Bogshed but with the weight of the music press behind it, the term 'indie' stuck.

The C86 cassette tape proved to be for the A&R departments of major record companies a godsend. Here for the princely sum of £2.95 were twenty-two newly endorsed-by-the-NME bands, already brought to the attention of the music-buying public through simply being included on the cassette tape in the first place. The featured bands were all pretty much easy pickings, a vast number of them still only teenagers with no business acumen in the slightest. 
So what could possibly go wrong?


Whatever Happened To The C86 Kids? - An Indie Odyssey by Nige Tassell is the story of those bands and of what became of them after being thrown so suddenly into the spotlight. Or rather, what became of them after being thrown to the wolves.

1986 was interesting year when it came to music and the pop cultural wasteland it inhabited. The punk rock free-for-all was practically over and its various threads unravelling though not without leaving tidemarks, sediment and noxious smells of the kind to sniff in the vain hope of getting high on. It was also on the cusp of the Dance, House and Rave tsunami that was about to swamp everything. It was the year of the non-sexist haircut and the casually shabby. It was the year that Primal Scream - the band that most successfully straddled all these things - first came to much wider attention, essentially by their inclusion on the C86 tape with Velocity Girl, their song and ode to Edie Sedgwick.

If the shambling bands, as Peel called them, were an unspoken riposte to 'rockism' and the testosterone-fueled, boorish attitudes that came with it then Velocity Girl was the antithesis of everything rockism stood for. It also happened to be the opening track of the C86 tape, acting therefore as a kind of masthead. Ironically, however, Primal Scream were probably the worst band of all on the tape to represent any anti-rockist sentiment as they quickly morphed into would-be rock stars themselves, espousing and trying to conduct their affairs in a similar fashion to any Led Zeppelin-style rock band from the Seventies. Unfortunately for Primal Scream, their lead singer Bobby Gillespie with his lank hair, awkward dancing and rubbish hand-clapping wasn't really suited for it, looking more instead like a bus conductor from the 1970s ala the guy from On The Buses. Tickets please! Moreover, according to Tassell's book, Bobby Gillespie's middle name is Bernard, one of the most un-rock'n'roll names imaginable.
In his book, Tassell talks to Gillespie but he also talks to Primal Scream's tambourine player from their earliest incarnation who jumped ship (before being pushed) around the time of the recording of their debut album, Sonic Flower Groove. Between the two, the tambourine player sounds like he would have made for a much better rock star.

For all that, Velocity Girl was and still is a classic song as were others on the tape such as Therese, by The Bodines. So whatever happened to The Bodines? "We signed to Magnet Records - home of Roland Rat and Alvin Stardust. It was tragic." comes the reply from the guitarist.
And Stump? "We signed to Chrysalis and despite all their press officers, we got no coverage. And when the press stops, everything stops." Prior to their signing, Stump were constantly in the music press due to them knowing a lot of journalists and phoning them up all the time hassling them for interviews, a tactic for some reason Chrysalis told them to stop doing. 'Leave it to the professionals', was what Chrysalis were essentially saying but it obviously didn't work out very well.
And Age Of Chance on signing to Virgin? According to their lead vocalist "The thing with being on a major record label is that you're getting money thrown at you. It's just that it's your own money. You realise that way too late."
And so on and so forth.

It's understandable why a band would want to sign to a major record label - the main reason always seeming to be the need for support in the form of distribution and funding - and only purists and idealists would condemn a band for doing so. And besides, it seems like most independent labels operate in the same way and have exactly the same ethics as a major but just on a much smaller budget. So, there isn't actually a lot of difference between them.
The problem with many of the C86 bands signing to major labels was that 'roughness' and 'independence' was part of the bands' initial appeal. It was part of their brand, their shtick, and part of the reason why they were liked to begin with. On signing to a major they immediately lost their 'independent' guise and their music smoothed out by better production in a bid to appeal to a wider audience but in doing so the baby was being thrown out with the bathwater. Hence why so few of the bands who appeared on the C86 tape failed to cross-over into the mainstream.
There's a lesson in this, of course, and it's something to do with mountains and Mohammed, borne out by the success of Half Man Half Biscuit and We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Going To Use It who through not compromising anything both ended up having the mainstream come to them rather than them chasing the mainstream.

There were twenty-two bands that appeared on the C86 tape and there are twenty-two stories and then some within the pages of Nige Tassell's book, among them being a lot of personal stories of what became of various members of those bands. Ultimately, it's the personal aspects of these stories that makes the book so engaging. These are stories of what Warhol called '15 minutes of fame' but followed then by a lifetime of obscurity. These are stories of those who went on to success in other fields of work and activity, stories of those who returned to their bedrooms to continue making music and who have been there ever since, and these are stories of those who have now passed away.

And then, woven in between all of these stories is the story of the author himself tracking down the bands and their individual members, how he goes about it and where he ends up. All in all it's a veritable odyssey but an odyssey of an unexpected kind. The author himself calls it an 'indie odyssey' but actually it's slightly more than just that. It's a looking back at a time in his life that obviously meant something not only to himself but to all the other participants be they individuals within the bands or within the audience. It's a coming to terms with that period and a coming to an understanding of what it was all about. It is an indie odyssey but it's also very much an unpretentious, heartwarming spiritual one.
John Serpico

Saturday 17 February 2024

Black & Free - Tom Skinner

BLACK & FREE - TOM SKINNER

Well, to say I'm disappointed is an understatement. I'm underwhelmed, and it all started off so promisingly. From the title 'Black & Free' and the front cover picture in almost dayglo pink and blue of black men facing off gun-toting National Guardsmen. From the introductory first few pages describing a rumble in Harlem between rival gangs wielding bicycle chains, bottles, knuckledusters, and lead balls in socks. All good stuff but by page 26, however, the author is talking about Jesus and Christianity and it's suddenly one of those Talking Heads moments where you might ask yourself 'How did I get here?'


It turns out that author Tom Skinner is a Baptist minister and Black & Free is his memoir. Doh! as Homer Simpson would say. I've nothing against the author personally, of course - how could I, he's probably been dead for years - but the story of how he came to accept Jesus Christ into his life is not what I'm after. In fact, I couldn't give a flying fucking fuck, to be frank.

Written in 1968 at a time when the barricades were going up in Paris, when Vietnam was a slaughterhouse, and revolution and emancipation was on the agenda along had come Tom Skinner - self-proclaimed peoples' prophet - declaring that all the problems of the world, all the social injustice, prejudice and oppression was all down to the sin in the hearts of men. Live and let live and each to one's own but as Patti Smith once advised, Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine so you can stuff such ideas as 'original sin' where they belong in the dustbin of history or better still up your arse.

'Forgive them, for they know not what they do' is the reply. So the crusaders, the ministers and all the soldiers of Christ are right and I'm wrong. Which is a bit presumptuous, is it not? A bit arrogant? A bit overbold? To believe and then exclaim that you're right and everyone else is wrong isn't 'faith'. It's self-idolatry and it's the seed of prejudice that when pronounced as a sin in others goes unrecognized in the self because it also serves as a blacked-out mirror. 

'Love does not come naturally. Love is not part of human nature. It is not in the nature and desire of man to love instead of to hate. That type of life can only be produced by the person of Jesus Christ,' the author says. But I beg to differ. And actually, this is a fundamental building block of a person's worldview that dictates their course through life. Personally, I'm with Kropotkin and the idea that man is a naturally social creature and the key to his welfare and survival is through co-operation, mutual aid and altruism. It's obvious. If it wasn't then we'd all be out in the streets killing each other, or at least absolutely despising each other. 
What a horrible life it must be to believe that man is naturally hateful? No wonder anyone thinking this might turn to Jesus for salvation. For sanctuary. For a crutch.

I bought Black & Free on the strength of its cover and the series of photos enclosed within its pages showing the ghettoes of America in flames during the race riots of the Sixties but on reading it found myself caught-up in the tortured fantasies of a Baptist minister. I wanted revolution and the Black Panthers but found myself being told it's better to suck it up and to turn the other cheek. 
Well, thank you for the advice. But no thanks.
John Serpico

Sunday 4 February 2024

Wayward - Vashti Bunyan

WAYWARD - JUST ANOTHER LIFE TO LIVE -
VASHTI BUNYAN

Like a lot of other people I was quite late in coming to Vashti Bunyan, perhaps even later than most? It was on YouTube where her name first popped up and a picture of her standing in a fur coat next to a brick wall that was used for the cover of her Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind compilation LP. The black-and-white photograph was reminiscent of Rita Tushingham in A Taste Of Honey, or football pools winner Viv Nicholson even, and it immediately caught my eye. Algorithms can be a curse but every once in a while they might also be a blessing?


Vashti Bunyan is an English singer, often labelled as a folk singer but actually having more in common with Nick Drake though it's a comparison she would immediately shy away from just as she would vehemently deny the folk singer label.
During the 1960s, Bunyan was heard singing at a private party and her name then mentioned to Andrew Loog Oldham, the twenty-one year old manager of the Rolling Stones and ex-manager of Marianne Faithfull, who subsequently invited her to his Mayfair office to meet and for her to sing him some of her songs. Oldham immediately offered to make a record with her but insisted it had to be a Richards/Jagger composition called Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind.

To a lot of singers back then, this would have been a dream come true but Bunyan wasn't best pleased because what she really wanted was to record and release her own songs. Oldham advised that one of her compositions could be the B-side, and on the advice of her father to "compromise, dear girl", Bunyan went ahead with the deal.
Despite various appearances up and down the country for local TV stations the record failed to capture the public's imagination and so sunk without trace though to listen to it nowadays, in hindsight it's a veritable pop gem - a veritable pearl before swine.

Bunyan was sucked into the machinations of the music business of the 1960s where it became clear to her that all Oldham wanted was for her to become a replacement for Marianne Faithfull, a role she was eminently unsuitable for and that went against all her instincts and desires to be a songwriter and musician in her own right.
Come 1968 she'd just about had enough of it. Tired and broken by the constant male chauvinism of the music industry, tired of being pushed every which way by those who thought they knew best and all to a distinct lack of any sort of success, Vashti Bunyan walked away from it all. Not to take up another career or to marry and have children or any of that stuff but to simply walk away. To escape. So, Bunyan went off to live in a bush in a wood.


It's too easy to say that Bunyan had a mental breakdown ala Peter Green or Syd Barrett. She admits to not being well at that time and had been diagnosed by her family doctor as being hypoglycaemic though how accurate that diagnosis was is impossible to tell. The bottom line of it is that after an accumulation of events, something snapped inside of her and Bunyan turned her back on everything, including not least the promise of pop stardom and Andrew Loog Oldham's plan to sell her as the next Marianne Faithfull.

Into the wilderness she went. To live in a bush. In a wood. In Bromley. To join a student boyfriend who was living likewise in a bid to save money. It didn't last as they were soon discovered and evicted by the landowner whereupon they then had the bright idea to purchase a horse and wagon and head to the Outer Hebrides to live there.
Into the wilderness. Like Christopher McCandless heading off into Alaska for a new life, as depicted in the film Into The Wild. Potentially like Lawrence Oates on Scott's expedition to the Antarctic, leaving the tent one night with the words 'I am just going outside and may be some time'.

This strange, long trip by horse and cart from London to the Outer Hebrides is what the bulk of Vashti Bunyan's book Wayward - Just Another Life To Live is about, bookended by tales from her childhood (at one point describing a backstage encounter with a young, unsmiling and angry Cliff Richard looking at her with hatred) and from 1997 onwards which is when Bunyan went on to the Internet for the first time and discovered that not only was her debut album she'd recorded in 1970 (of her own songs) now a collectors item but even that a cult audience had developed around it.

Vashti Bunyan's story is ultimately one of triumph over adversity, of how talent will always out, and of the importance of being true to oneself. Being 'wayward' is simply another way of describing being singular of vision. A way of describing the importance of keeping safe the flame inside even when it's but a flicker. A way of describing the importance of when having a dream to hold onto it forever even if it's but a memory of a dream thought long dead. Being 'wayward' is just another way to live your life but on your own terms. And Wayward is a good book and a joy to read.
John Serpico

Wednesday 10 January 2024

Kid - Simon Armitage

 KID - SIMON ARMITAGE


"I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it," as Howard Devoto once declared in Magazine's outrageously good A Song From Under The Floorboards, and it's something we would all probably nod sagely along to and agree with. Beauty, however, is subjective and in the eye of the beholder, and when it comes to something like poetry I'm never too sure whether it's a good thing or not?
What makes for a good poem? Does it need to be stained with the blood from failed suicide attempts? Stained with the sweat poured forth at night whilst under the duvet in fear of all the children who won't know how to cope (with a world in rack and ruin from their technocratic dope)? Stained with the tears shed for the poor unfortunates of America?

What is a poem anyway? Is it making play with your native language and in Simon Armitage's case, making fun and games with the English tongue? Displays of dry wit? Observations made?
And how to read poems by the likes of Simon Armitage? One at a time with ten minute interludes so as to savour the flavour of each one? At your own pace or like having a deadline to catch? Who knows? These are things never taught in schools. What would Simon Armitage himself advise? Perhaps not to even bother because who would even be a poet nowadays let alone read poetry? Shouldn't you instead be more inclined to be a singer/songwriter? A lyricist? A rapper? A pop star with an almost guaranteed audience of some kind or another to cling on to your every word?

And apart from fragile youths chasing butterflies with big nets in open fields during long summers, truculent old professors in dusty chambers under the gleaming spires of Cambridge, and politically redundant malcontents on the East Devon coast, who exactly reads this kind of stuff nowadays? That's what I want to know.
John Serpico

Thursday 4 January 2024