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