So Here It Is - Dave Hill

 SO HERE IT IS - DAVE HILL

You've got to wonder though, haven't you? What must it be like being Dave Hill of Slade? Pretty surreal, I imagine. I mean, he was always more Ziggy than Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars put together. An ultimate Man Who Fell To Earth. Stranger in a strange land but completely unaware of the fact. The haircut, the boots, the outfits, the teeth, the accent. What the fuck? So yes, being Dave Hill must be a pretty hectic affair. At the same time, however, it's also been pretty obvious he was always a good soul possessed of a solid, working class heart of gold.

There was a time in their early days when Slade's publicist cast them as a skinhead group - all boots and braces and shaved heads - but this was but an aberration of management. For a start, skinheads back then tended to be called Masher, Bruiser, Psycho or Mongo but never Noddy. Apart from this, Dave Hill was always the Glam Pop-God in waiting, not some caricature on the back of a Weetabix box. He was the council estate boy from the Black Country destined to be a British pop culture icon.

So Here It Is, is Dave Hill's autobiography and an interesting thing about it is that it's not like how you might imagine it's going to be at all. At peak-fame during the early 1970s, Slade were all about being loud and entertaining on all levels, and whilst there are tales of mansions and Rolls Royces being bought there's no pop star ultra-decadence or tales of sex and drugs to be found here. In fact, quite the opposite. The book is totally grounded in Hill's working class background and the mental health problems of his mother and it's for this that it's very heartwarming, inducing much respect for him more so as a person rather than for him as a pop star.

The pop star stuff, however, is why anyone would be here of course, and Hill delivers it accordingly. Slade were massive in the early 1970s but unless you were there it's probably going to be hard to fully comprehend this. They were a part and parcel of the British cultural landscape during a time before the Internet when there were only two music programmes on the three available television channels. Top Of The Pops on a Thursday evening was where they ruled, and from where they would cast their light upon the nation. Slade were a good-time band acting as an antidote to the direness of the news and the economic gloom that held sway.

Their manager, Chas Chandler, always knew however, that the mega-fame and the mega-money was to be found in America so in 1975 Slade relocated there so as to be able to tour there more easily as they strove to crack the American market. Essentially, it was a failure and Hill offers some interesting explanations as to why - mostly all cultural ones. On returning to England, Slade then realised that musically everything had changed. Glam Rock was out and Disco was in, whilst on the horizon something called Punk Rock was looming.

Rather than using a ghostwriter, Dave Hill has written his autobiography himself, which is always a good thing in my eyes. Whilst his writing is nothing exceptional, it does the job and tells the story. It's unclear how Glam Rock is actually viewed these days as in whether it's with fondness, incredulity or derision. One thing almost for certain is that it's not really taken seriously but to counter that, it's clear that a band like Slade once played a big part in people's lives. For this reason alone, though So Here It Is doesn't necessarily need to be read, it definitely needed to be written.

John Serpico

The Islanders - Pascal Garnier

 THE ISLANDERS - PASCAL GARNIER

I should by now have learnt my lesson and know not to be swayed into buying and reading a book based on the blurbs on the cover but what can you do? I'm a sucker for this stuff and though a hardened cynic when quotes from reviews are used to sell something, my defenses sometimes fall and in I go. In for a penny, in for a pound.

The Islanders by Pascal Garnier and no, I've never heard of him either but apparently he's the prize-winning author of more than sixty books and a once leading figure in contemporary French literature. Born in Paris in 1949 and died in 2010.

According to the Sunday Times, The Islanders is 'A dark, richly odd and disconcerting world... devastating and brilliant'. According to the Financial Times, it's 'A mixture of Albert Camus and JG Ballard'. Well, that did it. I was going to have to read it now.

Like in a Robert Altman movie, the main characters are introduced one by one and we see how their lives are either already entwined or become entwined. There's Olivier, whose mother has recently passed away and he's travelling to Versailles for her funeral and to sort out her estate. There's Roland, a young homeless man. And there's brother and sister Jeanne and Rodolphe who share an apartment together. Rodolphe is blind and Jeanne looks after him. When their lives collide, tragedy unfolds and murder is the game both past and present.

Beyond this, it's hard to say too much about the plot as it would give too much away. Too many spoilers spoil the broth, you might say? If, however, you like your noir as cold as a new razor blade then Pascal Garnier's your man. Cynicism, fatalism, moral ambiguity, it's all here.

I'd say there are echoes here too of Jean Cocteau's 'Les Enfants Terribles' and Gilbert Adair's 'The Dreamers' (perhaps more widely known by Bernardo Bertolucci's film version of it starring Eva Green?). It's in the way that civilization breaks down within four walls of a house and how another world is born bearing very little resemblance to what has gone before.

Pascal Garnier's The Islanders is a book of interest. Whilst not really on the same level as Camus or Ballard, it's still a good read. Noteworthy, might be a better way of putting it? A significant player.

John Serpico

Beautiful Chaos: The Psychedelic Furs - Dave Thompson

 BEAUTIFUL CHAOS: THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS -

DAVE THOMPSON

How to explain the Psychedelic Furs? How to put into words? Well, firstly let's break them down a bit because as with the life of many bands there are phases, usually dictated by changes in line-up. With the Psychedelic Furs I'd say there are three phases to them. The first phase being their early days, up to the release of their debut album. The second phase being their 'Americanization'  and their subsequent mainstream success following the Pretty In Pink movie. Their third phase is that which followed their splitting up and subsequent reunion - the phase they are still in to this day.

It's the first phase that I'm mostly interested in because during that time I believe the Psychedelic Furs were tuning in to something very special. Something that was beyond words. Something unspoken. The audience they were attracting was essentially a punk one, although the kind of punks who had a very refined taste in what they considered to be 'good punk'. And remember, this was at a time when punk was a broad church.

Those who appreciated the Psychedelic Furs might also for example like Crass, early Antz, Poison Girls, Crisis, early UK Subs, Chelsea and the Lurkers. The kind of bands that still possessed a punk spirit. Bands who like moths drawn to a flame, continued to orbit around the punk ideas of individualism, outsider art, and - for want of a better word - belief. Fundamental belief. Punk was a word trying to describe a feeling, as Mark Perry once put it, and the Psychedelic Furs in their early days were very much a punk band though to recognise this took a certain awareness of the fact that punk was multifarious, multifaceted and multidimensional.

Like all the best and most interesting bands, the music press hated them - which in itself was always a good sign. The abuse heaped on them by music journalists being at times the equivalent of what was always heaped upon Crass and early Adam And The Antz: 'Psychedelic Furs give being bad a bad name', as Sounds music newspaper declared, as a typical example.

Almost every time the Furs were written about there was also an inevitable mention of the Velvet Underground, as though to have been influenced by the Velvets was somehow a bad thing. Yes, the Psychedelic Furs wore their influences on their sleeves but when those influences are the Velvet Underground, Bowie and the Sex Pistols, then they are not only good influences but ones to be worn proudly.

Very few journalists, however, seemed to pick up on and give much thought to the influence upon the Psychedelic Furs of the 1960s. The name of the band in itself would have rang alarm bells but it was hardly ever delved into. The music they played couldn't really be described as 'psychedelic' as such (putting aside the question as to whether The Stooges could be called psychedelic) as it was more a bass-driven, forward-moving wall of sound entwined with saxophone and rasping vocals.

The sound they created - the world they created, even - was that of the Sixties being waved goodbye and having the last word on the subject: 'This is the pulse of fools like you, who sound so red and turn so blue. The sound of uselessness in summer, the war is over if you want,' from the song 'Pulse'. Or putting to bed forever the hippy trail to India notion with the line 'Needles on the beach at Goa', from the song 'Fall'.

The summer of love was done. The dream was over. And if the Manson killings and Altamont were the cultural low points of the psychedelic Sixties, the Psychedelic Furs were providing the final comments along with the full-stop at the end of the exclamation mark.

This is all, of course, my own interpretation of what the Psychedelic Furs were about and it's one that differs somewhat from Dave Thompson's in his book Beautiful Chaos: The Psychedelic Furs. But then that's always the beauty of a band when they refuse to explain themselves, or to explain their lyrics. It leaves the audience free to apply their own meanings to the songs and to perceive the band on whatever level suits them.

Thompson's book tells the story of the Psychedelic Furs in a very A to Z manner, starting from the witnessing of the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club Punk Festival in 1976, to them achieving the American success they always sought. It is also, however, a classic case of 'For what good is it for a man to gain the world but to lose his soul'.

Come 1987 and there they are, all big hair and shiny suits, touring an album in America, on heavy rotation on MTV, girls down at the front of the stage, cocaine on tap - and coming to the horrific realisation that they are hating every minute of it.

There was always - in their early days in particular - a certain mystique around the Psychedelic Furs that added to them being somewhat apart from other bands of that time who also ended up throwing themselves at America. Think: U2, Simple Minds, The Cure, Depeche Mode, etc. A problem with Dave Thompson's book - though unavoidably so - is that it goes some way in dispelling that mystique. Weirdly, however, there are also a lot of contradictory quotes throughout its pages, so rather than revealing the truth about the Psychedelic Furs it somehow wraps the band up in barbed wire and protects them against too much invasiveness. 

Was vocalist Butler Rep an unacknowledged genius or a pretentious prat? Were the Psychedelic Furs important players in the story of music culture or just an accident of the times who sold their integrity for a swift one off the wrist down on the old main drag? The answer is that we'll probably never really know and it's probably even better if we don't ask because as with the Sixties, when the dream is over all that remains is the memory. And when the memory is tempered with the mother of all hangovers, all that is left is the wreckage and you crawling out from under it.

John Serpico