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