The Girl From U.N.C.L.E - The Global Globules Affair - Simon Latter

 THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E -

THE GLOBAL GLOBULES AFFAIR - SIMON LATTER

Pulp fiction for the broad of mind, based on the cult television series The Girl From U.N.C.L.E starring Stefanie Powers and Noel Harrison that itself was a spin-off from the classic cult television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E starring Robert Vaughan and David McCallum. The Global Globules Affair written by Simon Latter gives nothing away in its title as to what it might actually be about although at the same time it tells us all we really need to know, that being it's the brand that counts not the content.

Published in 1967, it starts off quite fittingly in Carnaby Street where everything's groovy baby until U.N.C.L.E agent April Dancer who's on holiday in London for a few days sees some girl model-types sashaying along dressed in fashion garments woven from what looks like metal armour. At the same time she also spies an ex-professor of hers from when she was studying in Paris and her special-agent intuition is immediately buzzing. Something was going on warranting further investigation.

To cut to the chase, the professor has invented a fluid designed to attack all known banknote paper and reduce it to mush. Administered as a fine mist, the only thing it cannot penetrate is the metal armour material as sported by the Carnaby Street girls which means no money is safe anywhere, not in your purse, your wallet, or even your bank. The metal material has also, of course, been invented by the professor and the girls are agents of his.

The plan is is to destroy as much money as possible so that financial chaos ensues throughout the world leaving the professor and the forces of global crime embodied by the T.H.R.U.S.H organization to step in with their own currency and become the new financial rulers.

It's all good, ludicrous stuff and preposterous with it but weirdly it all makes sense and makes for a ripping yarn. U.N.C.L.E agents Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin are given brief mention whilst the weapons of choice are Karate chops, gas guns and high explosives in the form of saliva-activated chewing gum.

As an aside, there's an unexpected and very good description of Dartmoor (where the professor has his secret base) that Simon Latter should be quite proud of that anyone with any knowledge of Dartmoor - of its beauty but also of its hidden dangers - should recognise: 'Like a woman full of promise, beckoning you to her scented embrace. And two men friends waiting behind the curtains with coshes.' Isn't that so very spot-on? Next time you go hiking on Dartmoor remember this.

As stated, The Global Globules Affair is pulp fiction for the broad of mind, and you can take it or you can leave it. Interestingly, the fact that Stefanie Powers name has been misspelt on the cover - spelling it with a 'ph' instead of an 'f' - serves only to add to the overall kitschy, daft but enjoyable quirkiness of it all.

John Serpico

Not Just Bits Of Paper - co-edited by Greg Bull and Mickey 'Penguin'

NOT JUST BITS OF PAPER -

CO-EDITED BY GREG BULL AND MICKEY 'PENGUIN'

Some might find it hard to believe and others impossible to comprehend but there was a time when the Internet didn't exist. A time when there was no Facebook, no X, Instagram or even MySpace. 'But how did you message anyone?' all the children ask in wide-eyed wonderment 'Or did you not message anyone ever and just sit instead around the piano of an evening singing songs?'

'Well, we had landline telephones and there were these things called 'pens' that you could write a letter with and send to people by something called 'post'. Have you heard of it?'

But by this time the attention of all the children has wandered so you instead open up your copy of Not Just Bits Of Paper and cast your mind back to slightly more interesting times when communication required effort and was a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

Not Just Bits Of Paper is a portal into a world now diminished, a world where the importance of specific bits of paper cannot be overstated. Not that these bits of paper had any intrinsic purpose beyond the sole reason they were produced for - that being to advertise and publicise events - though paradoxically, without it ever being stated or even considered they also represented nothing less than a vision.

The bits of paper we're talking about here are the flyers and posters created to announce upcoming concerts of the more 'earthy' punk rock type prevalent throughout much of the 1980s. Black-and-white, made with scissors, glue, pens, Letraset and found images. Utilising the 'cut'n'paste' method rather than desk-top publishing, then photocopied, fly-posted, stuck up in record shops, given out by hand and sent out by post enclosed with fanzines and cassette tapes purchased from various mail-order lists.

This was the way we communicated before the advent of the Internet and social media. Slow, time-consuming, sometimes wearisome but effective.

Many of these flyers and posters could be really basic in design and layout whilst others could be veritable mini-works of art. All, however, whatever the quality of them were meant to be throwaway. Ephemeral. To serve their one purpose then binned, which is what most people tended to do with them once the publicised event had passed. Very few people thought of saving them and those who did so saved them essentially for the sake of it. Not for having an eye on one day them being collectible or of any possible future monetary value to anyone. They saved them without thinking and for no reason but saved them - thankfully - they did.

Unlike nowadays, back then hardly anyone took photographs at concerts so the flyers and posters advertising these events are the only physical evidence of a lot of them ever happening. For sure, they're held in memories but memories tend to fade so the flyers and posters compensate, prod and serve to remind. Just as importantly if not more so, however, these flyers and posters - these bits of paper - acted at the time as seeds blown on the wind, as conduits for messages. Weaving gossamer-thin threads between not only friends and neighbours living in the same city, town or even village but between strangers and people of like-mind living in cities throughout the whole country.

It was subliminal. Unspoken. Like tiny beacons being lit on top of hills or flares being shot up into the night sky. These bits of paper acted as signals announcing an alternative to mainstream entertainment, mainstream news and even mainstream values. Announcing a vision. They were the corpuscles in the bloodstream of an underground punk culture that sought legitimacy not through commercial success but through the instigation of consciousness raising, further creativity and political action. Just as fanzines and concerts themselves were deemed to be, these bits of paper were the very life-blood of that punk culture.

Co-edited by Greg Bull and Mickey 'Penguin', Not Just Bits Of Paper collates a wide selection of flyers, posters and handouts from the anarcho punk era of the 1980s and for posterity lays them out and presents them in all their ragged, torn and tattered glory. As to be expected, Crass are heavily represented alongside The Mob, Flux Of Pink Indians, Antisect, Conflict, Poison Girls, Chumbawamba plus many more others. Thoughts are collected also in essays of various length and size written by some of those who were there at the time. Noticeably and interestingly they're all written from the audience point of view rather than from any band members and in doing so adds a whole other dimension to the book. Quality-wise these essays differ and again that's only to be expected but in among them are some very well-written pieces indeed, most noticeably from Ted Curtis, Rich Cross, Tristan 'Stringy' Carter and in particular one by Tim Voss.

Not Just Bits Of Paper documents a period in time that is unlikely to be ever repeated again. A period in time that impacted mightily upon a significant number of people to such an extent that their lives were inexorably altered - some say 'ruined' - for the better. A period in time that though now long gone still resonates, and that under the noise and technology-driven haste of modern day living still echoes.

John Serpico

Blood On Satan's Claw - Robert Wynne-Simmons

BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW -

ROBERT WYNNE-SIMMONS

Along with Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, the 1971 film Blood On Satan's Claw is considered to be one of the main pillars of what is today referred to as 'folk horror'. As a genre, folk horror is a genuinely fascinating one though its meaning and what might fall under its umbrella is somewhat open to interpretation. According to writer and horror anthologist Johnny Mains, the definition of folk horror is 'the upper-class demonisation of lower/working classes' and this is true but it's only one aspect of it. Folk horror is much more to do with a certain 'something' lurking under the veil of nature. A presence that is beyond words. There is a distinction also between city and countryside folk horror, where the horror of the city is usually born of man as a freak of nature whilst the horror of the countryside is born before nature and only manifesting itself through nature, rather like the force behind the changing of the seasons.

There is a scene in Lars von Trier's film Antichrist where Willem Defoe pulls back some foliage to discover a self-disemboweling fox that then speaks to Defoe and says 'Chaos reigns'. This one scene is as close as anything to defining the true meaning of 'folk horror' though you probably require a sense of an understanding beforehand to actually fully appreciate it.

Published in 2022 via a crowdfunding venture, Blood On Satan's Claw is the first time a novelization of the film has been created. Written by the film's original screenwriter, Robert Wynne-Simmons, what it does is to expound upon the film's original premise as any good book of this type should be able to. So rather than being a typical movie tie-in it's more of a companion-piece with many of the film's themes fleshed-out and added to. In this instance, does it mean that the book is now better than the film? Yes it does, but at the same time the book compliments the film and vice versa.

Quite apart from the presence of the Devil lurking behind the simplicity of peasant village life, one of the main themes of Blood On Satan's Claw is the involvement of children in the unfolding events. One of the main conduits of the horror, for example, is a girl by the name of Angel Blake, who only when disrobing in front of the village chaplain in a bid to seduce him is it stated that she's all of fifteen-years of age.

It is this and similar aspects of the story that whilst not making it disturbing as such, adds to the sense that this is an adult tale. Subsequently this then lends weight to the idea that the countryside is all about sex, violence and strangeness where 'chaos reigns', and that 'folk horror' as a manifestation of this is a serious subject that demands adult consideration.

Read the book, see the film. See the film, read the book. Then under a blazing sun go lie-down in a field somewhere and try and feel the centuries of untrammeled life-force rumbling away underneath whilst you let your mind wander.

John Serpico

The David Bowie Story - George Tremlett

 THE DAVID BOWIE STORY - GEORGE TREMLETT

There are some books you read purely because of the cover and The David Bowie Story by George Tremlett is one such example. Published in 1974, the cover is pretty wonderful. Bowie in Ziggy Stardust mode against a backdrop of fractal art. What more could you ask for from a music book from the 1970s? It's Pop Art, man. It's psychedelic, Eric.

Books on Bowie, of course, are two a penny which means that for any to stand out there has to be an angle. With George Tremlett's book it's obviously the cover art but there's also the Kenneth Pitt connection. Pitt was Bowie's manager in his very early days and Pitt also happens to have been a long-time personal friend of the author and it's from talks between them both that the vast amount of the material in the book is drawn.

Pitt was dropped from his managerial role by Bowie in 1969 to be replaced by Tony De Fries, although Pitt's influence upon Bowie should not be underestimated. Bowie was always the proverbial social butterfly, flapping between different interests whenever the mood took him. One minute it was Buddhism up in Scotland, the next it was mime with Lindsay Kemp. One minute it was bit-part acting in The Virgin Soldiers, the next it was hanging out with Marc Bolan (and furiously taking notes). Pitt by all accounts was a very cultured man, a collector of Victorian literature and an authority on the works of Oscar Wilde, so you can see why Bowie might have been attracted to him. Significantly, it was Pitt who introduced Bowie to the music of the Velvet Underground.

Tremlett's book deals with the period in Bowie's career from his early days in 1966 of supporting The Who at the Marquee on Sunday afternoons, up to Ziggy Stardust's retirement announcement at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973. For most, this was Bowie's most iconic period and there are clues given - particularly once Tony De Fries had taken over - in how this iconic status was achieved. It makes for an interesting read but for all the hype, the media manipulation and the projection it still at the end of the day comes down to how good the songs were. Media hype doesn't last, neither do styles of clothes, theatrical costumes and lightning streaks across the face. Songs do. And Bowie irrefutably had some very, very good ones.

John Serpico

Space Gypsies - Murray Leinster

 SPACE GYPSIES - MURRAY LEINSTER

Space Gypsies. Why would you not want to read a book called 'Space Gypsies'? Especially when looking at the cover it gives little away as to what it might actually be about, leaving you essentially dependent on the title for clues. Written by Murray Leinster. Never heard of him but then I'm not really up to speed with my sci-fi. And actually, do people still call science fiction books 'sci-fi' or is that term now past its sell-by date? Written in 1967. Which means it falls into the New Wave of science fiction - I know that much.

'Why should humanity destroy itself?' asks the blurb on the back cover 'The Marintha hurtled into space to discover the secret of the galactic ancestors of the human race. In the shattered rubble of great civilizations they discovered bizarre remnants of humanity beside whom they would battle the poisonous forces arrayed against all human life.'

Blimey! So in I go, and immediately find myself in a kind of forgotten episode of Star Trek where it turns out the space gypsies are an alien race of men-children, all looking about 12 years-old but with whiskers. They're encountered when a spaceship on a mission from Earth is attacked by an alien spaceship and crash-lands onto a planet where the men-children are hiding. Mankind, it seems, had long ago conquered space and had once inhabited various planets throughout the universe. The cities they had built upon these planets are all now just ruins and Earth is the only remaining world where man still exists, the human race being the ancestors of those long-gone space conquerors.

The spaceship from Earth is on a mission to explore these once-inhabited planets in a bid to understand where man has come from and what has led to the demise of their galactic empire. The presiding theory is that having reached the zenith of their capabilities and fulfilled their destiny, mankind's forefathers had destroyed themselves in some mad suicide pact. Being attacked by an alien spaceship, however, immediately dispels this theory, suggesting that rather than destroying themselves, mankind's forefathers were destroyed by these same alien forces. The space gypsy men-children, it turns out, are also descendants of mankind's forefathers but are fully aware of the homicidal aliens which is why they are in hiding on the planet the spaceship from Earth has crashed down on.

From there on, the battle is joined.

Space Gypsies is essentially light entertainment though of course there's nothing wrong with that in the slightest. There is no 'big idea' going on here nor does it have any message to convey. There's nothing in it to think about or ponder, which leaves nothing but the genre - science fiction itself - to consider.

What makes for a good science fiction book? What compels a man to write science fiction? Is the medium - the science fiction genre itself - the message? In the case of Space Gypsies it would appear so. In its pages are various tropes that anyone familiar with science fiction films would recognize, in particular Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus', although interestingly the thing that stands out about the book the most is the misogyny encapsulated by a line spoken by one of the main protagonists:

'"Karen," said Ketch in the same authoritative tone "is a woman. And a woman glories in being the wife of a fighting man."'

Now, I acknowledge this line is spoken by a fictional character but still, for a writer to come up with such a line and have one of his characters say it is pretty dire. How does a writer have his imagination fly off into the most fantastical realms yet his basic human sensibilities remain at knuckle-dragging level? That is the question. Murray Leinster in Space Gypsies leads by example and shows how.

John Serpico

Blood Brothers - Ernst Haffner

 BLOOD BROTHERS - ERNST HAFFNER

There are other things to do besides reading a book, of course. There are games to play, TikTok to watch, Twitter to follow, Netflix to view. There's shopping to be done, places to go and people to see. There's drugs to take. Who's got the time to read a book nowadays? Especially when there's a hundred other things that flash and bleep in 40 different colors to entertain and provide some sort of light relief.

As enjoyable as all these things are, however, and not to denigrate them at all, I take the side of the angels and say the book is better. I take the side of Patti Smith who once said "Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

To read a book is to enter into a relationship. It demands commitment. It's not an instant hit. It's not a shot of Vodka to down in one go. It's not the mindless act of scrolling nor a tip-toe through the tulips. It's not a paddle along the shoreline and a dipping of toes. No, it's more a swim out into the ocean or sometimes even a deep sea dive. It's immersion. It's submersion. It's entry into another world and all which that entails. If a book is a gift of life, then to read is to live and then some.

And so to Blood Brothers, by Ernst Haffner, a book that most people would probably pick up and not know what it might actually be about. The premise, however, is the key and the invite to enter. Blood Brothers is the only known novel by Ernst Haffner, a German journalist and social worker who disappeared during World War II. Originally published in 1932, Blood Brothers was banned by the Nazis a year later, and then thrown onto their book-burning pyre. All records of Haffner subsequently disappeared in the 1940s and his fate during the war remains unknown.

Written in a peculiar documentary style, Blood Brothers tells the story of a gang of homeless teenagers in Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power. It's the story of an underworld where petty crime and prostitution - both male and female - is a way of life and but a means to survive the cold and the hunger of the city. It's the story of underground bars and makeshift hostels where extreme poverty is just a spit away from decadence and wealth. It's the story of gang loyalty, friendship, pickpocketing, teenage prostitution, and snatches of hope and happiness before the increasing encroachment of German authoritarianism. 

Blood Brothers is like Oliver Twist but without the Fagin figure. It's like Once Upon A Time In America but without the leap into adulthood. It's like Jean Genet's 'The Thief's Journal' but without so much of the gay sex. It's like Cabaret but without the music. It's like Lord Of The Flies but without the pig's head.

Blood Brothers is strange and somewhat unique in its depiction of pre-war Germany and of Berlin in particular. Interestingly, the Berlin it depicts has direct links to the Berlin of the 1980s where another kind of underworld once flourished as represented by the likes of Christiane F, David Bowie, and the impoverished yet creative squat culture caught in the twilight world between Western capitalism and Eastern communism before gentrification won out.

Blood Brothers is very much a book worth reading.

John Serpico

The Year Of Dreaming Dangerously - Slavoj Žižek

THE YEAR OF DREAMING DANGEROUSLY - SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

A problem that Slavoj Žižek has is that even though his public profile is pretty large, nobody actually reads his books. This then begs a few questions: is it just that the mediums of television, YouTube and public speaking are more suitable for him and what they provide to the public discourse? If so, does that mean those mediums are the most effective in terms of communication? If so, does that then mean the effectiveness of books as tools for communication has now been surpassed? And does it actually even matter because is it all not just entertainment at the end of the day, anyway? Is Slavoj Žižek essentially just  entertainment for the high-browed?

To understand what Žižek is talking about half the time it helps if you have prior awareness of Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lacan and a few others that he's always referring to. If you do indeed know these great writers and philosophers then it probably means you've read them or at least read of them? If this is the case then we can all probably agree that Hegel, for example, isn't really very entertaining. He's important without any question but he's a bit of a slog. A bit light on the having a laugh level. In comparison to Hegel, Žižek is one of the funniest men in the world which perhaps explains rather than books why the platforms of stage, television and YouTube are more suited to him and his peculiar brand of entertainment?

The Year Of Dreaming Dangerously is Slavoj Žižek ruminating over the events of 2011, from the Arab Spring, to the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the riots in the UK triggered by the killing of Mark Duggan. All water under the bridge now, you might say? Things have moved on a bit since then. And yes, things have moved on but in terms of significance to the modern era, Žižek puts it very well by citing an old Persian expression - war nam nihadan - which means 'to murder somebody, bury his body, then grow flowers over the body to conceal it'. And isn't that just a wonderful expression? Isn't that just the way the world is these days? Isn't that just a wonderfully entertaining expression?

Nobody seems to point out that it's the application of austerity that is one of the prime drivers to social discontent, and in the case of the events of 2011 one of the prime causes of the urban riots that swept the UK, the student riots and the attempted storming of Conservative Party HQ in London the year previously, the riots in Greece, and to some extent the emergence of the Occupy movement. Nobody seems to point out that it's austerity that acts as a catalyst for the Far Right to rise within Western Europe. Nobody, that is, apart from Žižek and a few other like-minded political thinkers.

Of course, it's not as black and white as that - to simply lay the blame entirely upon austerity - and if we're talking Slavoj Žižek then nothing is ever black and white because with him everything always comes with multiple tangents and off-shoots.

Žižek's strength is in his capacity to throw up ideas and insights regarding geopolitics and culture, quite often simultaneously and in tandem. It's not mine to diminish such a strength and in fact it's one that I applaud and appreciate. This strength, however, is limited to just that. There are really no avenues open for Žižek to take his ideas and insights, which means they remain on the platforms from which he generates them, as in upon the stages on which he's invited to speak and the media channels viewed by - what is in the scheme of things - his limited audience. Which means that when Žižek says something insightful such as 'the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode', it goes no further than his own estate, serving ultimately only to add to his profile as a man of ideas, and going no further. It's a problem that Žižek never addresses so he remains stuck in aspic as a novel but niche entertainment. As the world goes by outside.

The irony is that Žižek recognises this very same thing in others, for example in the Occupy Wall Street movement where his critique of it is spot-on. In what is one of the best sections of The Year Of Dreaming Dangerously, Žižek highlights a danger the Occupy protesters face: that of falling in love with themselves, with the fun they are having in the 'occupied' zones. 'Carnivals come cheap,' Žižek writes 'but the true test of their worth is what happens the day after, how our everyday life has changed or is to be changed'.

Does Žižek not recognise this in himself? In love with his position as a political philosopher, enjoying the acclaim and the plaudits from his fellow travellers? Surely he does. To step out of and beyond it, however, is no easy thing. There are no immediate answers, not helped by the fact that it's an ongoing process. As with the Occupy movement, Žižek offers a formal gesture of rejection that initially is more important than any positive content because only such a gesture opens up the space for a new content.

Žižek's gestures of rejection, however, are failing to open up such a space and just as with the Occupy protesters when they were physically removed from their occupied zones by baton-wielding police - it's a painful truth to face up to when after all the words, the world has not changed one iota and if anything, continues to get worse as the engine of capitalism drives it inexorably towards its own grave. Entertaining and amusing us all to death in the process.

John Serpico

Into The Valley - Richard Jobson

 INTO THE VALLEY - RICHARD JOBSON

Everybody likes The Skids, surely? And if you don't then you've obviously not been paying attention? And everybody loves lead vocalist Richard Jobson, don't they? What with his Sunday matinee film idol looks and his high-kicking dance routines on Top Of The Pops, how could you not? So as night follows day, everybody's going to want to read Jobson's autobiography, aren't they? Of course they are.

Published in 2020, Into The Valley by Richard Jobson is the story of his childhood up until the point of when his band, The Skids, split up. Interestingly, the immediately striking thing about it is how it reads because it's not well-edited at all. In fact, I wonder if before publication anyone apart from Jobson even went over it to check not so much for spelling mistakes but for composition and syntax? It's something that Jobson acknowledges in his introduction, however, where he tells us he didn't write his story in the conventional way of sitting down with pen and paper or even sat at a keyboard typing it. Instead he spoke it, recording his thoughts as they came into his head. It makes for a distinctive and somewhat more personable style, particularly if you can keep in mind that he's talking in a Scottish accent though at times admittedly it does jar.

Another striking thing about it is the absence of tales from the coalface of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. At the time of The Skids initial success and them appearing on Top Of The Pops, Jobson was just 19-years old, straight out of a small mining village near Dunfermline. He tells us he was never interested in drugs, and that's fair enough but surely he would have been meeting a few girls along the way even if it was Cynthia Plaster Caster's British cousin? The years 1979 and 1980 was also the time of a rise in skinhead violence at gigs and surely The Skids would have encountered this also? It's not important to have this kind of stuff in an autobiography of a lead singer of a punk band, of course, but it's just that it's noticeable by its total absence. 

What we get instead - and the main, underlying theme of the book - is the story of Jobson's relationship with fellow band member and lead guitarist Stuart Adamson. Following The Skids splitting up in 1982, Adamson went on to form Big Country but then in 2001 he took his own life. Throughout the whole book Jobson speaks of Adamson as though he was a troubled soul but there's absolutely no clue or indication of what Adamson was actually troubled about or where his troubles stemmed from. 

Adamson was in the habit of suddenly walking out on the band and not being seen for days, and there was also an obvious divide between his wish for security and a family life and Jobson's London and Berlin-centred more freewheeling life but you get that in a lot of bands. There are probably things that Jobson isn't telling us about and of course that's his prerogative, but it tends to leave a large, unexplained hole at the centre of the book.

Jobson and Adamson obviously had a very special creative, working relationship together and so even after The Skids split they remained friends. On the subject of Adamson's passing, Jobson remembers his big smile, his amazing talent, and the way they passed each other in mid-air during a live gig - young and free. It's a wonderful image and very heartfelt. The way that Adamson's presence is there throughout the book and more so than any other person in Jobson's life tells us that getting all this down in book-form is probably a kind of catharsis. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that in the slightest.

Beyond this, it's interesting to note the path that led Jobson to meeting Adamson and forming The Skids. Starting with a somewhat isolated childhood, then the joy of Marvel comics, listening to John Peel, reading the weekly music newspapers, then to reading the more 'difficult' books you tend to read as a teenager such as those by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. It's classic stepping stones and a well-worn path taken by many of the same generation. And the outcome, the question always arrived at particularly when coming from a working class background is 'how do you make a move into the arts when the arts are completely controlled by the class system?' By 'the arts' this also means playing music in a band and for Jobson and others of his generation the answer was 'punk rock' - it being the metaphoric and even for some the physical key to the door.

As for his views on punk rock, Jobson offers up various observations: The Clash were majestic and terrifyingly brilliant, The Slits were a crazy noisy mess, The Damned were confusing because punk was meant to be much more than mere comedy, the Buzzcocks (when The Skids supported them) were drunken arseholes, and Richard Hell was a 24-carat tosser. His criticisms are also at times aimed inwardly, advising one of the most frequently requested Skids songs, TV Stars, with its chorus of 'Albert Tatlock' is idiotic and stupid, whilst he - Richard Jobson himself - is sometimes a bit of a wanker.

It's all good stuff and all makes for an interesting read. Into The Valley isn't the best rock'n'roll autobiography by any means and I'd say Jobson should probably have employed a proper editor to go over it with but for all that, for any fan of The Skids it's probably essential reading.

John Serpico

31 Songs - Nick Hornby

 31 SONGS - NICK HORNBY

If you're a writer and you like music it should be relatively easy to combine the two, should it not? One should compliment the other to make a third unique thing unto itself. A significant other. Not everyone can write or rather they can but not everyone can write well, although everyone likes music, surely? In fact, there are only two instances that come to mind when someone said they didn't. One was John Lydon though with the added caveat that he likes his own, that being the music of Public Image Ltd. The other instance being Mick Jagger's character in the film Performance, said as a reply to being asked to play a tune.

Writing about music is like dancing to architecture, of course, though that's not to say the reader can't glean anything from it at all, and actually some of the most enjoyable writing I've ever encountered has been about music but only when it reaches the point of metamorphosing into something of its own. How to explain this? Mix two colours together and you'll get a different colour. Mix two shades of the same colour and you'll get a different shade. It's not alchemy at all, in fact it's really very simple - but it can be magical.

So, to Nick Hornby's book 31 Songs where he tells us what music means to his life through a soundtrack of 31 of if not always his most favourite songs then what are some of the most meaningful to him. Nick Hornby's a well-established writer - Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, About A Boy - that everyone knows of even if they've only watched the film adaptations of his books. It's also well-known that he's a big football and music fan so a book by him where he writes about specific songs should be of interest. Right?

"I wanted mostly to write about what it was in these songs that made me love them," he says "not what I brought to the songs." And that's a good distinction, actually. Writing about what a song reminds you of is actually writing about memories rather than the lyric or the music itself.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" as Hunter S Thompson once said and the weird thing about Nick Hornby is that he's got a pretty weird taste in music. Not weird as in experimental or 'alternative' but weird as in boring. Very, very boring. So boring that it kind of pains me to even list some of the bands and singers he approves of: Santana, Aimee Mann, Ben Folds Five, Badly Drawn Boy, The Bible, to name but a few. There are some that get a pass such as Patti Smith, Rufus Wainwright, and Teenage Fanclub and some that I'd not heard such as a song by The J Geils Band called First I Look At The Purse but on checking it out on YouTube my worst fears are confirmed. 

Music is a personal thing and I wouldn't say that I've got the best taste in the world when it comes to it and as the Rolling Stones sang, it's only rock'n'roll, but then as Bowie said on Diamond Dogs and somewhat applicable to Hornby's book: 'This ain't rock'n'roll, this is genocide.'

31 Songs is money for old rope, actually. It's comprised of the kind of stuff you would typically post up on Facebook not make into a book. Hornby's publisher obviously thought differently, however, and suspected on the back of Hornby's name there was going to be an audience for it. And they were right. And I know I'm not really in a position to criticise because unlike Hornby I've not sold more than 5 million copies of books worldwide but criticise I will: 31 Songs is the book-form equivalent of another nail being hammered into the coffin of music being a medium of any relevance. It's that bad.

John Serpico

Life On A Dartmoor Scrapyard - Peggy Harris

 LIFE ON A DARTMOOR SCRAPYARD - PEGGY HARRIS

Gentrification has a lot to answer for. Unless you're middle class and slumming it or you're living in downtown New York during the early 1970s, no-one likes to live in a crap hole. There's nothing wrong with a bit of tidying up, a bit of good housekeeping, or even a bit of modernization which is all things gentrification brings but the problem is the displacement. The pushing out or even the forced removal of the local populace to make way for a whole other and mostly much wealthier populace. With gentrification comes also homogenization and the flattening-out of culture where everyone likes the same things and behaves the same way. Where the only areas that cultural differences are exchanged are safe ones such as in the liking of culturally-different music or clothes. This then all leads to a monoculture, terminal boredom, the death of imagination and ultimately the death of any sense of real community.

Gentrification is mostly associated with cities but it also takes place out in the countryside where once-working farms and even chapels are turned into holiday homes or are bought-up by would-be developers, renovated and then sold at prices well beyond the means of local people.

Life On A Dartmoor Scrapyard by Peggy Harris is a collection of childhood memories and anecdotes from when the author did indeed grow up on a scrapyard on the edge of Dartmoor, near a village called Chagford. It's a collection of stories about a time, a place and of people that you just don't encounter nowadays, having all been squeezed-out and side-lined by economics and legislation. Leaving the world, it must be said, as a much poorer place.

To be clear, Peggy's childhood was never an easy one not least from having no mains water and no mains electricity, where the family's drinking water was fetched from the nearby river. We're talking the 1970s here. Her childhood was, however, a very special one and though money may have been in short supply she and her family were rich in the things that money cannot buy: a closeness to nature, the freedom to roam, the schooling in life-lessons and life-skills far beyond anything the national curriculum could ever imagine.

Peggy's father was called Sam, and that's him in the photo on the cover of the book. 'A gentleman and friend, known by all, loved by many' as it declares on his gravestone, having passed away in 1988. Sam Harris was the kind of character you would only find in the countryside. Devon born and bred. The kind of character that nowadays you very rarely hear of the one-time existence of let alone actually meet. The kind whose home and birthright has now been taken over by more often than not Londoners with more money than sense. 

'He often said that he never wanted to be the richest man in the churchyard,' Peggy writes 'As long as he had enough food to eat and enough money in his pocket to have a deal, he was happy.'

Sam was a legend and an example to us all of the heritage we are losing and are never going to get back, and Life On A Dartmoor Scrapyard is an ode to him. It's a love letter from Peggy to her Father, her Mother, her two brothers and also to her childhood self. It's a reminder of a time now gone. A funny and very wonderful picture of what it was to be young when the world was what you made it, not something you purchased online.

Apparently, the original print run of 1,000 copies of Peggy's book sold out in a fortnight and when she did a book signing at a local pub in Chagford she signed and sold over 250 copies, with people queuing up all the way down the road to get in and meet her. Which all goes to show, of course, an interest in if not a yearning for the world that Peggy describes from those who are aware that another world is possible.

John Serpico

A Happy Death - Albert Camus

A HAPPY DEATH - ALBERT CAMUS

A Happy Death by Albert Camus was conceived and composed between 1936 and 1938 so he would have then been about 25 years old. He died in a car crash in 1960 at the age of 47 and this particular book was published posthumously in 1971 after his death. It's commendable and it's appreciated that his estate allowed it to be published because Camus is obviously a towering figure in the worlds of philosophy and literature so anything written by him is of interest. The slight problem with it, however, is that up until the time of his death Camus was on a roll, with every new book written by him being another step forward in his thinking. A Happy Death is a step backward. At the time of his death, Camus was actually writing his autobiography, entitled The First Man, that he felt was going to be his masterpiece but unfortunately it was never completed though an incomplete transcript of it was eventually published in 1974. Before that, however, came A Happy Death.

This is a book that was written before Camus wrote The Outsider and essentially it's a precursor to it. A practice run. The main character in The Outsider is called Mersault and so too is the main protagonist in A Happy Death. In The Outsider, Mersault kills an Arab and in A Happy Death the Mersault character murders a crippled man although both are under completely different circumstances. In The Outsider, there is no real reason for shooting dead the Arab only that it was done in a moment of illumination but in A Happy Death, the crippled man is shot dead because of money though possibly with the victim's consent.

A Happy Death is Camus ruminating on the question of freedom and how to achieve and retain it. What he's doing here, however, is rather than calling it 'freedom' he's calling it 'happiness'. So is freedom and happiness one and the same thing? Well, no it's not and I think Camus whilst writing his book had some kind of epiphany and realised this too, leading him to scrapping what he'd written and starting all over again. The result being The Outsider.

It can happen. Once you start writing down your thoughts, they're captured on the page and cemented, enabling if not causing you to look at them afresh. If you're happy with what you've written then you leave it as it is but if you're not then you re-write it or even scrap it entirely. Sometimes the words you write fail to convey what you mean but sometimes they invite other extended thoughts. This, I believe, is what happened with Camus, that when writing about happiness he realised that what he actually meant was 'freedom'. So when Camus asks 'How to die a happy man?' what he really means is 'How to die a free man?'

'What matters - all that matters, really - ' Camus writes 'is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest - women, art, success - is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for embroideries.' Swap the word 'happiness' for 'freedom' and this sentence suddenly becomes a lot more relevant.

For Mersault, 'happiness' seems dependent on having money though not because money can buy happiness but because money can buy time to be happy. Having money is a way of being free from money. This, however, begs a lot of questions: In having no money is there no happiness? In poverty is there no time? Is poverty but a ghetto to escape from? If so, is wealth not also a ghetto?

Mersault murders a crippled man and steals his life-savings, making the murder look like suicide. He then leaves his native Algeria and travels through Europe only to fall sick and miserable. He returns home, sets up house with three women before finally moving to a quiet coastal village to play out his days in longed-for solitude, face-to-face with his own self.

A Happy Death is Camus casting around for answers to the questions in his head. It's his first tentative steps into exploring the questions of human existence. The Existential questions. The heavy stuff. It's a very well-written book and very descriptive but Camus still chose to scrap it, and this is a very important point about it. For all that, however, though it may not have been good enough for Camus, it's certainly good enough for me.

John Serpico

Angela Carter's 'Provincial Bohemia' - Stephen E Hunt

ANGELA CARTER'S 'PROVINCIAL BOHEMIA' -
THE COUNTERCULTURE IN 1960s AND 1970s BRISTOL AND BATH -
STEPHEN E HUNT

Fascinating and genuinely so on many levels. Stephen E Hunt's Angela Carter's 'Provincial Bohemia' - The Counterculture in 1960s and 1970s Bristol and Bath is a unique insight not only into renowned novelist Angela Carter's life of which she spent twelve years of it during the Sixties and Seventies living in Bristol and Bath but more so into the radical and artistic countercultures that flourished in the two cities during that period.

Between 1961 and 1969 Carter lived in the Clifton area of Bristol, in a ground floor flat on Royal York Crescent and then following this between 1973 and 1976 she lived in Bath. Her time in Bristol was arguably her most productive and was where she found her writerly voice, whilst her time in Bath was when she was arguably at her peak as a writer.

Clifton is a place that every Bristolian has an opinion of. It's the area in Bristol that has always been associated with wealth and prosperity and it's where you'll find some of the biggest and most expensive properties. For some it's the area they aspire to live in one day whilst for others it symbolizes nothing less than class division and wealth disparity. Within Clifton itself there is an additional aspect to it that acts as another clear dividing line, that being whether you own the property there or are renting. And if you own a property there is a further division of whether you come from 'old' money or 'new' money and if you rent, if this is privately or from a housing association.

People don't tend to pay much attention to nuance, however, so for most Clifton is simply posh and rich but this works both ways, meaning that if you move into the area you can adopt a position of privilege if not one of splendid isolation even if you're neither posh or rich.

During the early 1980s there was some graffiti on a wall in St Paul's that read 'I'm bored of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, let's go up to Clifton and smash it up'. Whenever a riot might occur in Bristol there was a similar underlying whisper that said rather than damage be caused to the local community, to go mob-handed instead to Clifton and cause damage there. And when a riot would occur in St Paul's for example, those up in the Clifton heights would peer down upon it with but one thought in their minds: that the rioting remain in St Paul's and for it not to travel.

Language, as William Burroughs once observed, is a virus and so too I would argue is radicalism be it in the form of politics or culture, meaning it will traverse and mutate. Countercultures know no boundaries be that of class, wealth or geography which is why in a place like Bristol an idea born from a cultural tangent in Clifton might be picked up in the outer council estates of Hartcliffe and Southmead or the inner city of St Paul's and ran with -  and vice versa. It's called cross-cultural pollination and it's this very thing that Angela Carter tuned into during her stay in Bristol.

Carter's involvement with the 'provincial bohemianism' of the book's title began with her support for nuclear disarmament and a commitment to CND along with an enthusiasm for folk music. The relationship between the peace movement and the folk revival in the 1960s was mutually inspirational, both being well represented in Clifton. Along with a number of clubs and venues sympathetic to hosting folk nights around the Clifton area there were also a significant amount of pubs where the new bohemians of the period would meet. It was these clubs and pubs that Carter would frequent and from where she drew a lot of material and inspiration for her first books. One of the most prominent of these places being The Berkeley opposite the museum on Queen's Road where Carter would meet and chat to various local situationists and anarchists.

This is where Stephen E Hunt's book gets really interesting. Was The Berkeley a regular haunt for Bristol anarchists during the 1960s? It's a venue I used to personally go to myself during the 1980s to see all kinds of wonderful punk and post punk bands from the Angelic Upstarts, Killing Joke, the Fire Engines to the Polecats. It was never a well-known venue in the slightest and actually seemed at times as if it was in fact a somewhat secret venue. To know that it was also a place where local anarchists and situationists would hang out in the Sixties adds further to its near-secret history.

Mention of this in the book gives rise to a quote from a long-term friend of Angela Carter's in regard to Bristol being an important place for anarchists back then, with even arch anarchist and would-be Franco assassin Stuart Christie staying for some time. This connection to Bristol anarchists allows Hunt to then explore the tangents, off-shoots and cross-pollination of this nascent hippy/alternative/bohemian scene of which Carter herself might also have explored dependent upon the timeline: The 1968 student occupation of Bristol University's Senate House, for example. The Bristol Free Festival of 1971 held on Clifton Downs, organised by a group calling themselves The Bristol Dwarves with links to the Provos and Kabouters of The Netherlands. The Bristol Women's Liberation Group, the Bath Arts Workshop, and Comtek. 

All of these things went into forming a West Country counterculture, a 'provincial Bohemia' that though not on the same scale at all as what was going on in Haight Ashbury, Amsterdam or Notting Hill during the same period was certainly on the same page. The kind of things that Angela Carter if not directly involving herself with would have observed and been privy to discussions of, subsequently going on to influence and inform her writing.

If it was ever even the intention, it must be said these things in themselves emanating from the Clifton area of Bristol and the Walcot area of Bath that fed into the counterculture failed to change the world in any obvious and concrete way. Using Angela Carter as an example, however, very subtly they influenced. They echoed, travelled, traversed and cross-pollinated. Spreading out from epicenters subliminally like fractal strands of Chaos Theory. Like William Butler Yeats' gyres. Like tributaries feeding into larger rivers before entering the sea. 

This is what Stephen E Hunt's book is about and though it may not quite be the definitive book on the subject it's certainly an important one. Angela Carter's 'Provincial Bohemia' is a genuinely interesting and fascinating account of what went on up in Clifton in Bristol and out at Walcot in Bath during the Sixties and early Seventies with the repercussions of it still to this day echoing.

John Serpico

Dirty Harry - Phillip Rock

 DIRTY HARRY - PHILLIP ROCK

There are two options, basically. One, to watch the film again to see if it still stacks up nowadays. Two, to read the novelization of the film and see how it pans out in relation to the film. One or the other? So I do both. I watch the film again and I read the novelization written by Phillip Rock, based on the screenplay of Dirty Harry featuring of course, Clint Eastwood. I'll never make a film critic so all I can say is yes, it's still a classic. As for the book, well it does exactly what it's meant to do.

Dirty Harry is pulp fiction essentially but with a definite 1970s slant when it comes to violence. The storyline moves along at full-throttle but then so it should. Descriptions of the weather and of the violence taking place are the only points at which the pace goes into a sort of slow motion but of the kind you would get in a Sam Peckinpah film when bodies are hit by bullets.

The film script is adhered to faithfully but then you would expect nothing less and the dialogue is duplicated almost exactly apart - bizarrely - from when the "Are you feeling lucky, punk?" line is spoken. In the book it's slightly different from the film and there's no obvious reason for it. The slight change in the line doesn't make it any less effective but it doesn't make it any better either.

Interestingly when reading the book, when it comes to Scorpio the psycho killer it's impossible to not visualize the actor Andrew Robinson who played him in the film, which just goes to show what such a good job he made of it. When it comes to the Detective Harry Callahan character however, you don't automatically visualize Clint Eastwood. The book doesn't really add anything to the character but it's very easy to imagine a host of other actors in the role from Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty or even Robert Mitchum.

Noticeably as well, there's a distinct lack of women in the story apart from when they're victims. There's also a lot of attention to detail when it comes to naming the streets and areas of San Francisco, which is fine but pretty meaningless to anyone who doesn't know the city at all.

There's nothing ultimately to gain from reading Dirty Harry though of course that could also be said about a lot of other books. It's an enjoyable read, however, which is also more that can be said about a whole lot of other books.

John Serpico

Nina Simone's Gum - Warren Ellis

 NINA SIMONE'S GUM - WARREN ELLIS

Warren Ellis is most commonly known as the musical collaborator of Nick Cave in the groups the Bad Seeds and Grinderman as well as on various film soundtracks. In his own right he has also composed solo film soundtracks and has had eight albums released of his own band, Dirty Three. In 1999 Nick Cave curated the Meltdown Festival at the Royal Festival Hall in London and Warren Ellis was obviously there too. It was an eclectic line-up of artists but the biggest scoop was to have Nina Simone perform.

In 2014 the Nick Cave documentary 20,000 Days On Earth was released and in it was a short scene of Cave talking to Ellis about the Nina Simone performance where Cave mentions Simone taking some chewing gum out of her mouth and sticking it under the piano. To Cave's surprise, Ellis tells him he has that chewing gum, that after the show he had gone up onto the stage and taken it, wrapped up in a towel she had used to wipe her forehead with. 'Oh, fuck. I'm really jealous,' Cave says.

On the surface this is what Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum is all about. How a piece of discarded chewing gum gets elevated to a near religious status and the whole process of how this came about. The real story, however, is below the surface and is about ideas and how they're born and how they take on their own life once released into the world. It's about synchronicity and how one thing leads to another. It's about the magical and why not to be afraid of it. It's about the magic of life.

For good reason the book doesn't begin with Nina Simone at the Royal Festival Hall but with a story of when Ellis was five-years old and is woken up one night by the giggling of his slightly older brother sat on his bed peering out of his window.

'What is it?' Warren asks. 'Come and have a look,' his brother replies. So Warren joins him on the bed and when he looks out the window he sees the backyard is full of clowns. Bathed in light, eating hamburgers, climbing, doing somersaults, smiling, contorting, hanging upside down in the trees. The boys laughter wakes their father who calls out and asks if everything is OK? 'There's clowns in the backyard!' Warren yells to which his father replies sleepily: 'They'll be gone in the morning. And if they aren't, your mother will scare them away when she hangs out the washing on the clothes line.'

The boys grow tired and fall back to sleep and when they wake up in the morning and look out the window, all the clowns have gone. Such a scenario, of course, could easily be a nightmarish one for such a little boy but Ellis writes that he's been looking for those clowns/spirits ever since. Waiting for them to return.

Whether or not there really were clowns out in the backyard that night or was it dreamed or imagined isn't the question. Everything can be real yet unreal at the same time and that juxtaposition can often birth something other. Like a stone can be dropped into a pool of water and the ripples edge out forever. What we do in life echoes in eternity and likewise for a dream or a thought, or an idea once hatched.

Did the scene in 20,000 Days On Earth where Cave and Ellis first discuss the chewing gum really take place? Probably not or if it did then the scene in the film is just a reenactment but again that isn't the question. The important thing is the idea.

Nina Simone's Gum is a very wonderful book and Warren Ellis is certainly an interesting character. For all that, nothing can eclipse or be compared to the presence of Nina Simone who is there throughout like the sun in the sky even when reflected by the moon. The anecdote regarding her request for some champagne, cocaine and sausages backstage at the Royal Festival Hall when asked if there's anything she needs thirty minutes before going on stage is even worth the entrance fee alone.

John Serpico

The Art Of Travel - Alain De Botton

 THE ART OF TRAVEL - ALAIN DE BOTTON

Firstly, what exactly does it mean to 'travel' and what exactly is the art of it? As Alain De Botton points out in his book The Art Of Travel, if you say 'He journeyed through the afternoon' it's never quite as simple as that. It's never a straight, uncomplicated going from A to B, from one place to another. It's all the things in-between, all the unacknowledged if even tedious things that are done along the way whether it be on foot, by car, train or aeroplane. It's the showing of tickets or passports, the stopping off for a rest, a snack or for the toilet. It's the swatting away of a fly, an irritable itch, the sighting if even only briefly of faces and objects. Cursory glances, fleeting comments during brief encounters, and no end of thoughts, dreams and reveries passing through your head.

Then when you arrive at your destination, what is so very different about it from where you have left? Is it all just a shuffling of chairs, a movement of furniture and a change of temperature? As again De Botton points out when describing a holiday to Bermuda: 'I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.'

I'm not sure if it's still the same nowadays but when at the age of seventeen I set off on a trip around Europe and then down to Greece (a country then considered to be the half-way stop between the West and the East more than being European) it was whilst living on the island of Crete that I first came upon the notion that there was a difference between a traveller and a tourist. A tourist would typically have a date in mind as to when they'll be returning home, whilst a traveller had no such date and often no home to even return to. Would De Botton be aware of such a difference?

Alain De Botton is very well read and what he does in The Art Of Travel is to write about such people as John Ruskin, van Gogh, Wordsworth, Flaubert, Edward Hopper and Baudelaire in regard to their thoughts and relationships to travelling and then he applies his own thoughts and experiences to it. It's all good stuff without any question but there seems to be a certain element missing from it all and that's the lived experience of being a traveller rather than a tourist.

Has De Botton ever hung out with the hippies of Katmandu, or slept in the caves at Matala, or pitched up in Amsterdam looking for a squat to stay at with just the hope that it won't be too drug-devastated? Of course he hasn't. Not that there's any intrinsic value in these experiences but when you're writing about travelling rather than cheap holidays in other peoples misery then it probably counts for something at that point if no other.

De Botton has a background of wealth and privilege behind him alongside a healthy trust fund which means most of his life would have been a physically comfortable one. This doesn't of course make him exempt from having inner demons, in fact it's pretty apparent he has an abundance of them although one advantage of this is that they drive his writing. They're the engine behind his curiosity of the kind that gives him cause to wonder why he has a fascination with service stations, motels and airports? He finds an answer in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Why does the idea of travelling appeal? He finds an answer in Gaustave Flaubert. Apart from inner demons, what drives a curiosity about other places? He finds an answer in Alexander von Humboldlt.

A good education gives access to the art and the writings of such people whom De Botton discusses. A good education points you in the direction of where to look to both enhance or satisfy a curiosity. For those without that privilege, however, there is but the public library of old (or nowadays in more likelihood the Internet) and maybe a weeks holiday in Majorca to explore the world, sold by a picture seen in a brochure or on a web page of a palm tree on a beach. Or else there's the option of simply throwing yourself into the world to see what happens when you land. If you ever actually do land?

On reading The Art Of Travel, 'throwing yourself into the world' is something that may well have benefitted Alain De Botton far more than all the books he has read and all the paintings viewed. Or better still, to have combined both: For him to be well-educated, well-read and then to throw himself into the world with abandon. Letting go of his security and his metaphorical lifeboats. To sink or swim.

The Art Of Travel is a decent enough read but it's scraping the bottom of the barrel pickings when it comes to philosophical insights - and philosophy  is meant to be De Botton's forte. It's an assemblage of notions that aren't particularly earth-shattering, hung out and strung together between musings from various writers and poets and De Botton's interpretations of them in relationship to his own life. If travel is meant to broaden the mind then either De Brotten isn't doing enough of it or he's doing the wrong kind.

I'd suggest it was the latter and that he needs to shake off all this jetting off to the Sinai desert 'in order to be made to feel small', or driving down to Provence to spend a few days with friends in a farmhouse because he's not really getting much out of it when it comes to validity. Instead he should perhaps try a bit of hitch hiking, navigating the sexual advances of hairy lorry drivers and spending a few nights sleeping under hedges after nobody cares to stop to give him a lift when standing at the edge of a road at midnight. That would give him something to write home about, for sure.

John Serpico

It's The Truth - Making The Only Ones - Simon Wright

IT'S THE TRUTH - MAKING THE ONLY ONES -

SIMON WRIGHT

The Only Ones were a quintessential English rock'n'roll band and whilst vocalist Peter Perrett was so obviously influenced by Bob Dylan, that influence was thoroughly rinsed through deep layers of Englishness. In Simon Wright's book It's The Truth - Making The Only Ones, Perrett is quite open about his Dylan influence but he also mentions the influence of the Velvet Underground and their first album, on which Heroin is the first track on side 2...

Do you know those moments in conversations when there is sometimes a pregnant pause? Those moments when eyes meet and for a second lock on to each other as if the subtext of the conversation has suddenly been revealed and eyes are fleetingly meeting in recognition of this? Peter Perrett mentioning the Velvet Underground's first album with the first track (on side 2) being called 'Heroin' is one such moment. A moment when time suddenly stops and everything hangs suspended in mid-air. It's only ten pages into the book but it's almost as if the book should end right there.

When you think of The Only Ones you can't but help thinking of heroin and Peter Perrett's long love affair with it. The Only Ones were a functioning drug band with their most famous song, Another Girl Another Planet, being one of the most splendid odes to heroin ever recorded. Typically, Perrett denies the song is about heroin but then so did Lou Reed about Perfect Day and Hugh Cornwell about Golden Brown, although Perrett is happy to cite drugs as being the problem that led to The Only Ones breakup. Whatever. 

Heroin isn't cool, heroin isn't clever and taking heroin certainly isn't romantic but there's no denying that drug bands of certain denominations occupy significant places in the pantheon of rock'n'roll, and when it comes to The Only Ones their position is a pretty prominent one. 

Wright's book focuses on the formation and early days of The Only Ones up until the release of their debut album. It's a fan book, essentially, written by a fan for fans. I'm not sure, however, if it's been fully thought out as it comes across as not quite knowing where it's going and what its point is, though it does tend to make some interesting points and raise some interesting details.

Wright admits rather weirdly that the debut album on which the book focuses isn't even his favourite Only Ones LP and in his opinion the second album, Even Serpents Shine, offers a better selection of songs. So why not write a book covering all their output and the whole of their career rather than only up to the debut album? 

But back to the drugs. Prior to The Only Ones, Perrett played in a band called England's Glory whose debut album was made possible primarily due to the funds generated by Perrett's rapidly developing drug dealing business. So even before forming The Only Ones (inspired after witnessing the Sex Pistols at the Chelsea School of Art in December 1975) Perrett was not only a habitual user but an established dealer. 

Like calls to like, as any Zen Buddhist would know, and in their very early days The Only Ones caught the attention of Keith Richards who was particularly taken by their song 'Prisoners'. On hearing that Keith Richards rated them, Johnny Thunders paid them a visit and became friends with Perrett due to them 'sharing the same interests'. Richards was apparently interested in doing some production work with The Only Ones in the studio but in the end nothing came of it. Perrett did, however, go on to work with Thunders on his debut solo album, So Alone, providing guitar and backing vocals on some of the songs including You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory.

Keith Richards, Johnny Thunders, and Peter Perrett. A near-holy trinity of a very particular kind.

Whenever it comes to writing or talking about The Only Ones, the question always arises in regard to why they never achieved far greater commercial success than what they did, particularly with a song like Another Girl Another Planet in their roster? A song, of course, that some consider to be one of the greatest of all time. Simon Wright doesn't come up with any specific answers although in contrast to what Perrett says, he's in agreement with guitarist John Perry's assessment in that it had nothing to do with drugs. In comparison, he cites the Pretenders who have a variety of similarities with The Only Ones including not least the use of heroin within the band. Guitarist James Honeyman-Scott OD'd and bass player Pete Farndon was sacked for drug-related unreliability but this did nothing to deter or impinge upon the massive success the Pretenders achieved.

So why did The Only Ones split? John Perry suggests it was more down to maladministration, which is a bit of a boring reason but probably close to the truth. For all that, however, The Only Ones' legacy is a good one. Near-golden, in fact. Flawed but genius.

John Serpico