The Energy Of Slaves - Leonard Cohen

THE ENERGY OF SLAVES – LEONARD COHEN

So you see a book for 10p and you buy it. Right? And if it's a book of poems by Leonard Cohen then it's a double bargain. Right? Double bubble.

It's a curious thing but most of the poems in The Energy Of Slaves by Leonard Cohen are untitled and undated so from the off it's a bit of an enigma – wrapped in a shroud of mystery. The only clue given that puts the collection into some sort of context is that it was published in 1972, and bearing in mind that Robert Altman's film McCabe & Mrs Miller (that featured a Leonard Cohen soundtrack of his songs, including Sisters Of Mercy) was made a year earlier in 1971, this tells us a litle bit as to where it's coming from.

If you're familiar with Cohen's oeuvre then there are some poems though untitled that are easily recognised such as the one that starts 'I left a woman waiting', which turned up on Cohen's 1977 Phil Spector-produced Death Of A Ladies Man album. It's also apparent that some were written when Cohen was living on Hydra, in Greece, whilst others were obviously written when living in New York. Suzanne even makes a cameo appearance in one when Cohen writes: 'The whole world told me to shut up and go home, and Suzanne took me down to her place by the river'.

Once you get past the puzzles, the hints and the undisclosed and simply settle down for the cruise, as might be expected there are some fine lines here that are a joy to read, showing Cohen at his best. For example:

'I didn't kill myself when things went wrong. I didn't turn to drugs or teaching. I tried to sleep but when I couldn't sleep I learned to write. I learned to write what might be read on nights like this by one like me'.

Or: 'So I sit down with the old men watching you dance. We never found a way to outwit your husband. I suggested a simple lie. You held out for murder'.

And this, to 'Mailer', whom I presume to mean Norman Mailer?: 'Dear Mailer, don't ever fuck with me or come up to me and punch my gut on behalf of one of your theories. I am armed and mad. Should I suffer the smallest humiliation at your hand I will k—l you and your entire family'.

And at one point he even gets political: 'Each man has a way to betray the revolution. This is mine'. And that's it. Broken down into just a four-line haiku but managing to speak volumes.

Leonard Cohen was a saint among men. Derided by some as being miserable and his recorded work labelled as music to slash your wrists to, he was in fact a man of much grace and humility. Yes, a lot of his songs were indeed dark but at the same time very beautiful. Many were very serious but also many very (darkly) comical. The same goes for his poems, the one addressed to Mailer being a good example due to the fact that whilst he threatens to kill Mailer and his family in the poem, the truth is that everyone knows Cohen would never have harmed a fly. Did he not go on to spend 10 years as a Buddhist monk? Which means this particular poem, when taken at face value is a death threat is actually Cohen being amusing.

The words, the voice, the music, the songs and the poems of Leonard Cohen are life-enhancing, and to those curious and open of mind there are lessons to be learned from them. There are lessons to be learned from the way he conducted his entire life, even. 

Today's lesson, however, is that if you see a book for 10p then you should buy it. Right? And if it's a book of poems by Leonard Cohen then it's a double bargain. Right?

Double bubble.

John Serpico

They Shoot Horses Don't They? - Horace McCoy

THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY? - HORACE MCCOY

According to Simone de Beauvoir, They Shoot Horses Don't They? By Horace McCoy is one of America's first existentialist novels. Not that it's ever presented or even typically read as such but once you think about, it's clearly true. In fact, in some ways it's even on a par with one of the greatest existentialist novels ever written, that being Albert Camus' The Outsider.

In Camus' book the main protagonist for no apparent reason kills an Arab on the beach, saying only that it was 'because of the sun'. In McCoy's book the main protagonist for no other reason than 'she asked me to', kills his dancing partner.

'Ain't he an obliging bastard?' says a policeman whilst arresting him 'Is that the only reason you got?' To which the reply is simply 'They shoot horses, don't they?'

Gloria, the girl who is killed by her partner, is the classic exponent of the 'why kill time when you can kill yourself' school of thought. As revealed throughout the book she is all too aware of the absurdity of life and the apparent futility of existence, stating right from the start: 'It's peculiar to me that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me – who want to die but haven't got the guts.'

To all the people around her, Gloria is nothing more than a consistently gloomy person but actually it's much more than that because Gloria has conviction on her side. All the evidence points her to the idea that she would indeed be better off dead. From her broken childhood, the grinding poverty of everyday life, to her ending up as a contestant in a dance marathon where couples literally dance until they drop, the winners being the last ones standing.

This is the world of the Marathon Dance Craze that Gloria has found herself in, the 1930s near-equivalent of any number of today's reality TV shows where people come and watch other poor and somewhat desperate people physically and metaphorically tear themselves apart for the entertainment of others and the lure of a cash prize. Round and round the contestants waltz or more often just shuffle until they can shuffle no more, all promoted by various businesses only too happy to use the contest and individual contestants to advertise and promote their brand.

'I'm tired of living and I'm afraid of dying,' Gloria says at one point, essentially declaring that she's stuck at the end of her tether with no discernible way out. 'This whole business is a merry-go-round. When we get out of here we're right back where we started. I wish I was dead. I wish God would strike me dead.'

According to Albert Camus, suicide is not a legitimate act and rather than trying to escape from life it's important to remain within it, utilizing creativity and rebellion as a rebuke against the absurdity of it all. For Gloria, her creative and artistic leanings are to be found in her desire to be an actress but through no fault of her own she's locked out of her Hollywood dream due to being unable to get onto the books of the big casting agency that all the studios go to when looking for extras.

Her rebelliousness, however, is unfettered and shows itself to good effect when she confronts some members of The Mother's League for Good Morals who are seeking to close down the dance marathon due to it being 'a degrading and pernicious influence in the community'.

It's interesting that whilst Gloria herself hates the dance marathon and all it stands for, she takes a stand when others try to close it down on moral grounds: 'You're the kind of bitches who sneak in the toilet to read dirty books and tell filthy stories and then go out and try to spoil somebody else's fun,' she tells them 'Do you ladies have children of your own? Do you know where they are tonight and what they're doing? Maybe I can give you a rough idea. While you two noble characters are here doing your duty by some people you don't know, your daughters are probably in some guy's apartment, with their clothes off, getting drunk.'

The women of the Mother's League are aghast at Gloria's outburst: 'Young woman,' one of them says 'You ought to be in a reform school!' To which Gloria replies 'I was in one once. There was a dame just like you in charge. She was a lesbian...'

They Shoot Horses Don't They? ends, of course, in tragedy when Gloria gets her wish and her partner shoots her dead. It's how the book starts and it's how the book ends. At the moment of her death, however, Gloria is relaxed, comfortable and for the first time – smiling.

There is no real great lesson being imparted in these pages and neither no philosophical treatise, but rather it's just a snapshot of a certain time and place in American history that still echoes down the ages. It's probably just by accident that there are existentialist themes running through it but it's a happy accident that launches the book into a whole other territory, taking the reader with it and dropping them there to ponder life's complexities as the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat.

They Shoot Horses Don't They? is a strange book but even stranger is that it was made into a film in 1969 starring Jane Fonda in the role of Gloria, which also in itself stands as an accidental paean to existentialism and the idea that in the midst of winter there is within us an invincible summer.

John Serpico

Under Exmouth skies (Part 49)

UNDER EXMOUTH SKIES (Part 49)

There really is a place in Exmouth called Pirates Cove, believe it or not. Which all makes for a better world...

To Throw Away Unopened - Viv Albertine

TO THROW AWAY UNOPENED –

VIV ALBERTINE

As is my wont, after reading a book I tend to write down a few thoughts and reflections on it though it's purely for my own benefit, I might add; it being a bit like visiting somewhere and taking a photograph of that place. It's never a review or a critique of the book as such but rather a lot of doodling, really. A blurry snapshot taken on an old Box Brownie.

Having jotted down my reflections (which is usually in a notepad as I gaze blankly out of the train window at the sea on my daily commute) I sometimes then google the book I've just read to see what other people have said about it – on Goodreads, Guardian Review, etc. A lot of these writers, book reviewers and critics, however – they're not very good, are they? Do half of them even read the book they're reviewing or do they just skim through it, I wonder? Have they even read the same book as me I sometimes even ask?

After reading Viv Albertine's debut book, Clothes, Music, Boys, one of the things I noted was that in as much as the book is about the Slits and Viv's life post-Slits, it's also very much about her mother. In fact, it was Viv's mother, I wrote, who was the true heroine of the book and that she deserved to be honoured in some way for her services not only to Punk Rock but to creativity, art, and womankind. 'Thank you, Mrs Albertine, for giving the world your daughter', I wrote 'We salute you'.

I lay no claim to having any special insight into these things. My perception is in no way unique. So this being the case, how come no-one else seemed to pick up on this and give it a mention? How come no-one else deemed it relevant to mention that the underlying theme of Clothes, Music, Boys, isn't Punk Rock or the author's personal demons but Viv Albertine's mum?

And so to Viv's second book, To Throw Away Unopened, where in a lot of the online interviews with Viv in which she discusses it, she tells us how she started writing it as a work of fiction about an angry, middle-aged woman with murderous thoughts, before changing course after realising that actually Viv was writing about herself. Why not just go the whole hog, Viv told herself, and be honest about the matter and write about herself in the most truthful and open way as possible?

And indeed, Viv is extremely open and truthful in what she writes – at times startlingly so. The thing is, however, To Throw Away Unopened isn't really about Viv but like her last book it's about her mum again. I say this with the caveat of it being about Viv as well but only in the sense of the impact Viv's mum has had upon her and in particular, the impact of her mum's death.

It was from the arena of Punk Rock that Viv sprang during her time in the Slits and it was seeing the Sex Pistols and Johnny Rotten in particular that gave her the impetus to pick up a guitar in the first place. Both Viv and John went to to become iconic figures and because they're from this same cultural gene pool it's interesting to compare how they dealt with the same experience as in the death of parents – an experience, of course, that we've all faced or are all going to face at some point in our lives.

Following the death of his mother, John recorded Death Disco with Public Image Ltd, a song that subsequently enjoyed good radio play and engendered appearances on all the relevant television music programmes at that time. 'Final in a fade, seen it in your eyes. Words cannot express', John lamented to the tune of Swan Lake.

Death Disco was John's mother's epitaph. To Throw Away Unopened is Viv's mum's epitaph.

In his song Public Image, the debut single from Public Image Ltd, John declares that there are 'two sides to every story', and again there is an unspoken link here with Viv's book. Having been thrown to the wolves during his time with the Sex Pistols and his personal identity blasted and mis-represented by Malcolm McLaren and a thousand-and-one journalists, John was asserting his own truth and his own actual identity, starting simply by using his own surname - Lydon - rather than Rotten. 'I'm not the same as when I began', John informs us 'I will not be treated as property'.

In To Throw Away Unopened, Viv is relentless in her search for the truth about her parents and the reasons as to how she's ended up as the person she is. There is absolutely nothing that Viv is unwilling to write about. There are no secrets to conceal and no opinions to withold. Ever forward she ploughs through the details of her family background, her family life, her relationships, her sex life, her bodily functions, her darkest thoughts, her parent's private diaries even.

At times what Viv writes is disturbing and upsetting, particularly when going through the diaries of her parents and when at her mother's deathbed. There is no stone left unturned to get at the truth and to be truthful, and it's this that makes Viv's book so powerful. The fatal flaw in it, however, is that through no fault of her own Viv ends up not with the truth but with a version of the truth. Her version.

As John Lydon declared, there are 'two sides to every story' – and on occasion even a million. Truth is semantic. Whether there is but one Universal Truth or not is a question the greatest of philosophers have mulled over since time began. In regards to the lives we live, there is no one single truth – in my opinion. The world and life itself is fragmented, fractured and multi-faceted. It's a hall of mirrors. It's never simply black or white, or a question of right or wrong, or of Left or Right but rather it's in blazing, psychedelic technicolour and all rules are already broken. There are no rules. Life is essentially anarchist by its very nature. The world is a free-for-all.

In the final paragraph on the very last page of To Throw Away Unopened, Viv writes three very simple words that after all the spilling of guts, the pulling of skeletons from closets, and the standing naked before the world slips by almost unnoticed: 'Truth is splintered'.

This is the open-ended truth that Viv arrives at and what a relief it comes as. This is the lesson that Viv has learned and the lesson Viv departs to the reader. It is the lesson Viv's mum has passed on to her daughter. There is nothing more really to say or to add to it, leaving only the reader with the clear realisation that To Throw Away Unopened is a very good book indeed. Powerful, disturbing, fascinating, and emotional with flashes of anecdotal incidents that are not only humorous but inspirational to boot – calling herself Mrs Fuck Bollocks, throwing drinks over men who annoy, and ejecting 'posh twats' from bus seats. It begs the question, however: What might Viv write about next for her third book? It's almost too scary to think about.

John Serpico

Last Rockers: The Vice Squad Story - Shane Baldwin

LAST ROCKERS: THE VICE SQUAD STORY – SHANE BALDWIN

Highly amusing but for all the wrong reasons, Last Rockers: The Vice Squad Story, written by their drummer, Shane Baldwin, is a comedy of errors with added strokes of incredible good luck. Right from the word go, for someone on the road to becoming a superannuated punk rocker under the Thatcher junta, the jury is out as to whether Shane has been born in the wrong place at the wrong time or exactly the right place at the right time? Gays Road in the Hanham suburb of Bristol, to be precise. Not exactly inner-city or council estate but the kind of place that punk culture post-'77 had spread out to and taken root. Not that many of the other Bristol punk rock movers and shakers of old could boast of any more credible backgrounds it should be noted, what with a majority of them coming from such middle class Bristol areas as Henleaze, Clifton and Hotwells. All hail The X-Certs, then, for coming from dirty old Barton Hill.

Vice Squad's first gig - and their first stroke of good luck – was at Bristol University playing to an audience of 500 people, only ending up on the bill as a last-minute replacement for John Cooper Clarke. Their second major gig – and their second stroke of incredible good luck – was at the Bristol Locarno, playing to an audience of 2000 people, in support of The Damned and The Ruts.

Now, I was actually at a lot of the early Vice Squad gigs and it's always been a mystery to me as to how they ended up on the bill for this one? The Damned and The Ruts were doing a UK tour and the premise was that on each date in each city they would be supported by that city's 'local heroes'. At the time, Bristol's 'local heroes' would have been The X-Certs, if anyone, so how Vice Squad trumped them along with everyone else and managed to wrangle this coveted support slot was baffling.

It turns out that Shane himself doesn't really know, putting it down to the promoter being too busy to think about it, someone mentioning Vice Squad's name and the promoter saying “yeah, they'll do”. Whatever the reason, this was the gig that put Vice Squad on the map and under a torrent of spit and to shouts of 'get yer tits out', in one fell swoop they were introduced to the entire Bristol punk scene. From there on, their lives were never really the same again.

Shane offers up an interesting anecdote about the gig regarding The Ruts and a back-stage gangbang that shows chivalry wasn't exactly on the agenda that night. To look at the two remaining members of The Ruts these days you'd think butter wouldn't melt in their mouths and couldn't imagine they got up to such things in their distant past. Then again, you also wouldn't imagine that just a relatively short time after the gig, lead singer Malcolm Owen would be dead.

Not being privy to the back-stage shenanigans, out in the audience we had to make do with additional support act Auntie Pus getting his cock out on stage and saying “a fiver to anyone who's got a smaller one than this”. And 2000 people not taking up the bet – including all the girls.

Fair play to Vice Squad, however, for as well as landing these prestigious gigs they also played far more dangerous places such as a bikers festival near Trowbridge (being a year before the infamous bikers 'riot' at the Stonehenge festival where all punks were violently attacked) and the community centre on the notoriously rough Bourneville estate in Weston-super-Mare.

Landing a spot on Avon Calling, the seminal Bristol compilation LP, eventually led to their début 7” single, Last Rockers, being released on their jointly-owned independent record label, Riot City. This in turn led them to being championed by journalist Garry Bushell who began name-dropping them in Sounds newspaper which led them to being signed by EMI who subsequently released their début album.

All well and good but for every step forward there came two steps back. Their inclusion on Avon Calling caused other Bristol bands (to name names: Gardez Darkx, the Colourtapes, and the Spics) to boycott the album due to not wanting to be associated with a band like Vice Squad. No big deal really, apart from the fact that a couple of years later Vice Squad would echo this attitude when it came to them not wanting their Riot City label to be associated with Disorder or Chaos UK.

Then there was the actual Vice Squad track that was chosen for the album, a two minute punk work-out entitled Nothing. Described by one reviewer as being 'rabid minimalism', in all honesty it wasn't really that exceptional, setting a trend for all other future releases...

Having Garry Bushell as a fan was a massive bonus due to the publicity he could engender though it also meant vocalist Beki Bondage being promoted by him as a kind of cartoon dominatrix that belittled every other aspect of the band – including Beki's promotion of vegetarianism in her lyrics. Signing to EMI meant money up-front to record an album but to a chorus of 'sell-out' it also led to their almost immediate ostracising from the Bristol punk scene. Then on its release the début album was universally slated as being one of the worst punk albums ever, due to it sounding as if it had been recorded under mud. And so on and so forth through every step of their career culminating in the most hilarious of ironies with their Chaotic Dischord venture.

Vice Squad held no sympathy or liking for hardcore punk as played by fellow Bristol bands Disorder and Chaos UK, insisting that they could knock out similar stuff in ten minutes. To prove their point, they did indeed record a number of songs in this style, passing them off as coming from a Swindon-based band called Chaotic Dischord, who would have no truck with the music business. Essentially, this was Vice Squad without Beki, drafting in their roadies instead to cover vocals. The problem for Vice Squad being that this 'joke' band was actually ten times better than Vice Squad themselves.

The curious thing about Shane's book is that he proffers very little insight into the whole story of punk rock and the period of it that he was very much a part of, choosing instead to relay it as a series of events and encounters. There's even, I would say, a sense of anti-intellectualism going on that reminds me of the Sid Vicious quote when Sid described the Pistols thus: “We don't think, we do”.

Again, this is all well and good for someone living in the moment like Sid seemed to be doing but for a book dealing with the past and what should actually be a valuable account, it's disappointing. There's not even any insight into the reason Beki Bondage left the group. Does Shane even really know, I wonder? Is it mere coincidence that her departure coincided with the launch of Chaotic Dischord?

Shane quotes liberally from various reviews and interviews in the music press and is obviously pleased when it's good ones but when it comes to anything critical he rebuffs it and almost petulantly so. The interview with Paul Morley in the NME is a prime example where rather than addressing Morley's observations he dismisses them with a curt 'Quoting Orwell. Classy, eh?', which serves only to reinforce Morley's criticisms and simply leaves Shane looking stupid.

Throughout the book there's also a sense of a lack of confidence, covered up by self-effacement and a constant stream of terrible jokes. It's good that Shane doesn't attempt to defend the début album and instead admits himself that it's rubbish but following its release it's as if he's on a constant mission to prove Vice Squad worthy of their newly acquired status. What Shane fails to understand is that it didn't matter whether Vice Squad were as good or not as Chron Gen, The Wall, Anti-Pasti, or whoever because punk was changing and becoming more a question of attitude and politics.

After signing to EMI, Vice Squad may well have fallen out of favour with the Bristol punk scene but it didn't mean they were hated, it was just that they were no longer deemed as being relevant. The Bristol punk torch was now being carried by the likes of Disorder, Chaos UK, Amebix – and even Lunatic Fringe who, whilst not being as musically adept as Vice Squad at least went off to the Stop The City protests in London, which Vice Squad never did. And therein lay the difference.

Amusingly, the closest Vice Squad get to the kind of politics becoming ever more prevalent during the early Eighties is a brush with the local SWP who were meant to set up a national tour for them. It failed, of course, to materialise but it did bring them into contact with Alan Pullen whose chosen weapon on marches was his trusty claw-hammer. Alan went on to become a leading figure in Class War and Shane relays a funny anecdote about visiting Alan at his home one day where his wife is busy doing some sewing. Shane presumes she's stitching together some car seat covers or something but when she shouts out that it's finished and proudly holds up her work for approval, he sees that it's a massive banner depicting a yuppie with a brick bouncing off his head and the legend Class War – Kill The Rich. Alan loves it and declares 'We'll stick it in the front garden to piss off those fuckin' dentists an' doctors'. Shane writes he can see why Alan might love it so: 'It was a lovely bit of needlework'.

Vice Squad may well have become irrelevant in terms of meaningful punk culture but that's not to say their story itself is irrelevant. Their story is part of a shared history and therefore in the grand scheme of (some of) our lives is significant. Punk rock enriched the lives of the members of Vice Squad as it did many others and in turn Vice Squad returned the favour and through their music, their gigs and their lyrics enriched other lives themselves – even if only briefly. They should all be proud of what they achieved.

Regrets? Shane's got a few but he's not too proud for them not to be mentioned: Getting a band by the name of Flowers Of The Past to pay to play with Vice Squad on their second British tour rather than inviting them along for free; portraying their new vocalist after Beki left as a 16-year old rather than her true age of 22, replacing their bassist in the end days of the band; and of course, releasing a crap début album.

It would be interesting to ask if he could do it all again would there be anything he would do differently but then it would be a moot point because what's done is done. Vice Squad's success can only really be measured by the individual members personal goals and whether they were met or not. Yes, they failed to get on Top Of The Pops, for example, but in a similar fashion Crass failed to change the world and at the end of the day, the weight and value put onto both of these goals is a personal choice. And who's to say one is any less important than the other?

Apparently, Shane is writing another book about the whole of the Bristol punk scene but when it might be completed is anyone's guess? It's going to be a dirty job but someone has to do it – so why not Shane? All I would ask is that he cuts out the terrible jokes, gets himself an editor, and considers at least for a few pages what punk meant for those involved with it because beneath the bluster, the noise, the gigs and the records there was a whole other world going on that was life-changing and that still resonates with a lot of people to this very day.

John Serpico

Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck

OF MICE AND MEN – JOHN STEINBECK

Am I the only person in the world who hasn't read Of Mice And Men before? Just a quick google search reveals universal acclaim for it but also reveals a near-universal declaration of having read it at school. Was it just my school, I wonder, that didn't have it on the curriculum that year? Swapping it instead for Lord Of The Flies and A Complete History Of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24)?

Whatever.

'The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry', as Robert Burns once wrote, and that in a nutshell is what John Steinbeck’s book is about: The failure of plans to come to fruition. The smashing of dreams. The failure, in effect, of the American Dream.

There is the joy of sex but then there is the joy of books. A joy so inexplicable. A joy so hard to define and so impossible to explain to the illiterate because there simply are no words. It's a brainiac-amour, as Patti Smith would say.

Of Mice And Men is such a book that offers such pleasure. It's a joy to read. A book in which nothing much happens apart from the observing of lives being squandered before exploding into violence. It's a book carried by dialogue, by conversations held by men at the end of their tether. Men caught-up in the American Depression, working for a pittance from which others always prosper. Never able to rise above their station and nothing but troubles to occupy them.

The dialogue is natural and easy, spoken by characters both believable and sympathetic. The descriptive passages between conversations being lyrical visions in their own right. There's no moral to the story, no lessons to be gleaned; rather it's just a snapshot of some people's lives as they come together through circumstance then fall apart in similar fashion.

Whether they're black or white, man or woman, old and infirm or as strong as an ox, their lives are no different to that of a dog. And that, as Steinbeck shows us, is the great tragedy of it and the reality of the (American) dream.

John Serpico

Under Exmouth skies (Part 48)

UNDER EXMOUTH SKIES (Part 48)

Sunday afternoon stroll through the wastelands of Exmouth...