Songbook

by Nick Hornby

  22 ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3’

  – Ian Dury & the Blockheads

  23 ‘The Calvary Cross’

  – Richard and Linda Thompson

  You could, if you were perverse, argue that you’ll never hear England by listening to English pop music. The Beatles and The Stones were, in their formative years, American cover bands who sang with American accents; the Sex Pistols were The Stooges with bad teeth and a canny manager, and Bowie was an art-school version of Jackson Browne until he saw the New York Dolls. But you’ll never hear England by listening to Elgar or Vaughan Williams, either: too much has happened since then. Where’s the lager-fuelled violence? Where’s the lip, or the self-deprecation, or the lethargy, or the irreverence? Where are the jokes? Where’s the curry? You may not want to think about any of that when you lie back and think of England, but it’s all undeniably there, and if you’re English, the odds are that you’ll eat a curry more often than you see an ascending lark.

  You couldn’t really find anything more American-sounding than the music Ian Dury’s band the Blockheads play on ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’: chicken-scratch James Brown guitar, a sax solo which quotes from the theme to A Summer Place . . . except, right there, in that odd combination of late-fifties American kitsch and early-seventies American funk (and ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ is funky enough to bring on a patriotic, we-can-do-it-too glow), there is something uniquely English: Dury’s generation was not afraid of the past, nor of popular culture outside the rock and blues tradition. (Compare The Beatles or The Kinks to just about any American band of the same era, and you can only conclude that our bands liked their parents more.) ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ is, as its title implies, a list, and in the way the list consists of a great many things that are not English, it is as curiously representational of a certain kind of post-war Englishness as the music. Stephen Biko, for example, the black activist who was murdered by the South African authorities, was an integral part of our liberal-left political landscape of the early eighties – it was an English singer, Peter Gabriel, who wrote a song about him. And the trombonist Rico is Jamaican, but our 1970s obsession with reggae wasn’t shared on the other side of the Atlantic, and Rico was a reason not only to be cheerful but also why The Specials sounded so distinctive (and, at the time, so distinctively un-American). I’m not attempting to claim British credit for any of these people or their achievements, merely pointing out that they are meaningful to us, that they are part of what being British has involved in the last few decades.

  The more I listen to ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’, the more it sounds like the best kind of national anthem, one capable of inspiring pride in those of us who spend too much time feeling embarrassed by our country. In fact, if Tony Blair has any guts, he should explain to the Queen that, because none of us cares about her any more, the old anthem is no longer applicable, and that Dury’s tune will henceforth be used at all sporting events and state ceremonies. Just imagine: before each England international, David Beckham sings ‘Summer, Buddy Holly, the working folly, Good Golly Miss Molly and goats’, while the rest of the team chants ‘Why don’t you get back into bed?’ The boost to national morale would be incalculable. And the beauty of it is that the song could evolve. If we decided as a nation that, say, Jarvis Cocker or Judi Dench or Michael Owen are reasons to be cheerful, then the Poet Laureate would be told to knock up a couplet for insertion. (An added bonus would be that we could dispense with military bands, none of whom possesses the requisite swing, let alone the requisite electric guitars.)

  There hasn’t been much, certainly since punk, to inspire pride in anyone who doesn’t buy the John Major vision of Britain, a vision involving old ladies cycling to evensong and cricket; the re-energizing effects of Tony Blair’s election in 1997 are long gone now that he and his government have been exposed as a bunch of hollow, career-preserving hacks. I can’t get excited about our foolish, phony gangster films, or most of our leaden, snobby authors, or much of our leaden, philistine pop music (and if you think all pop music is philistine, then compare Lennon’s influences – the Goons, Chuck Berry, music hall, Surrealism, loads of things – with Noel Gallagher’s, which seem to consist entirely of The Beatles). But Dury’s song is a reminder that there is (was?) a different British heritage, something other than Cool Britannia and Merchant Ivory. ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ mentions Health Service glasses (we still have a Health Service), and the Bolshoi Ballet (we never had a Red Scare) and singing along to Smokey (we love, have always loved, our black American music – indeed, we have turned into its curators – and we never thought that Disco Sucked) . . . And when Ian Dury gives thanks, in that art-school Cockney voice, for ‘something nice to study’, it almost breaks your heart: self-teaching, too, is part of our twentieth-century history (think of the Left Book Club, Penguin’s original remit to provide cheap classics to the masses, the Open University) although one suspects that it isn’t going to be a big part of our twenty-first. For a piece of funk whimsy, ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ is culturally very precise, if you listen to it closely enough; whether it refers to a vanished golden age, only time will tell.

  In Richard Thompson’s ‘The Calvary Cross’, it’s possible to hear an older England, the one that Blake and the Brontës write about, the old, scary place, full of dark satanic peasants and howling winds and pigs’ bladders and what have you. And though there is a lot of English folk music that can conjure up those dark days, when there were only three terrestrial TV channels and no decent takeaways, Thompson is the only one who does it using an electric guitar – he’s swallowed rock ’n’ roll whole (he’s not averse to the odd Chuck Berry cover, and his version of The Byrds’ ‘Ballad of Easy Rider’ is a wonderful, folk-inflected hybrid of Here and There) and coughed up something that could only have been made in Britain. The first time I saw him and his ex-wife Linda perform, in 1977, they looked like a couple of Hardy characters: the gig was in an austere lecture theatre in Cambridge, and Thompson’s gaunt, haunted, old-fashioned face made me think of poor Jude Fawley and his doomed attempts to study at Oxford. Linda, meanwhile, was wearing a smock and a headscarf, sat on a stool (she may have been pregnant) and looked miserable, as though Thompson were trying to sell her, just like Henchard sold his wife in The Mayor of Casterbridge. It was all very bleak, and curiously memorable, and though I’m glad I saw them, I never felt for a moment as if I lived, or even wanted to live, in the country that had produced their music. Does that matter? Probably not – I have never wanted to live in Mali, or in Trenchtown, Jamaica, either, but I’ve got a few good records that have come from those places. It’s just a little uncomfortable, though, hearing music of and about your native land that makes your native land sound like the coldest, bleakest place on earth. I want to live where Ian Dury lived; I hope I still do.

  24 ‘Late for the Sky’

  – Jackson Browne

  What was I listening to in 1974, when ‘Late for the Sky’ came out? Not Jackson Browne, for a start. I wasn’t really aware of him until 1977, when my musical microclimate was way too ferocious to accommodate delicate Californian flowers; the ubiquity of ‘The Pretender’ in all the record collections of the girls I met at college confirmed my suspicion that when it came to music, girls didn’t Get It. And then, a couple of decades later and going through a marriage break-up, I found that Blood On the Tracks and Tunnel of Love, having been mined exhaustively during peacetime, didn’t have much left in them, and meanwhile, The Clash and the Ramones, the people who, I felt, had wanted me to turn my nose up at ‘The Pretender’, had long since ceased to be much use to me. (Which is not to say that the college girls had, after all, Got It back then. We were nineteen – we should all have been listening to punk, not listening to songs about marital discord and early mid-life crises, although considering that the boys were listening to punk while studying English literature or law at the University of Cambridge, you could argue that either option involved an element of make-believe that young adul
ts should have grown out of.) So, after taking advice from my friend Lee (q.v.), I returned home with a couple of Jackson Browne albums, and found within minutes that I had made a new friend.

  I didn’t know any of the great songs on those first three or four albums, apart from ‘Doctor My Eyes’ and ‘Take It Easy’. I’d never heard ‘Late for the Sky’, or ‘These Days’, or ‘For a Dancer’, or ‘From Silver Lake’, or ‘Jamaica, Say You Will’. It was almost like discovering a writer I’d never read – except we discover writers we’ve never read all the time, and only rarely, as adults, do we stumble across major pop artists with a decent back catalogue: it is usually prejudice rather than ignorance that has prevented us from making their acquaintance, and prejudice is harder to overcome (indeed, much more fun to maintain). And, yes, of course it was prejudice that had stopped me from listening to Jackson Browne. He wasn’t a punk. He had a funny pudding-bowl haircut that wasn’t very rock ’n’ roll. He wrote ‘Take It Easy’, at a time when I didn’t want to take it easy. And though I hadn’t heard any of the songs, I knew they were wimpy, navel-gazing, sensitive – American in all the worst ways and none of the best.

  And suddenly, there I was, aged forty-plus, lapping it all up, prepared to forgive all sorts of lyrical infelicities and banalities in the sad songs; prepared to forgive, too, all the limp, hapless, thankfully rare attempts to rock out (although I would have been much less forgiving in vinyl days, when I had no access to a remote control and a skip button). I’m prepared to forgive the bad stuff because the best songs are simply beautiful, and beauty is a rare commodity, especially in pop music, so after a while anything which stops you from embracing it comes to seem self-injurious. I can’t afford to be a pop snob any more, and if there is a piece of music out there that has the ability to move me, then I want to hear it, no matter who’s made it. I used to have a reason not to like Little Feat (too polite, as far as I can recall, and maybe too musically precise) and Neil Young (over-long guitar solos) but no one can nurse those kinds of quirks in taste now. You’re either for music or you’re against it, and being for it means embracing anyone who’s any good.

  The pop snob’s dismissal of people like poor Jackson would be forgivable if everything we spent our snobbiest years listening to was of comparable worth, but of course most of it was the most terrible (and ephemeral) rubbish. Recently, Mojo magazine ran their list of the 100 Greatest Punk Singles, and it would be fair to say that probably eighty of them were and remain simply awful – derivative, childish, tuneless even within the context of punk, nothing I would ever want to hear again. And yet at the time I would have taken Half Man Half Biscuit or The Users over Jackson Browne any day of the week. (What am I talking about? I did take Half Man Half Biscuit over Jackson Browne, every day of the week.) I didn’t hear David Lindley’s hymnal, soulful guitar solo in ‘Late for the Sky’ for a quarter of a century because I was a bigot, as narrow-minded and as dumb as any racist. (And speaking of which: I was old enough to vote, and yet still I made excuses for ‘Belsen Was A Gas’ by the Sex Pistols, while simultaneously finding myself unable to absolve a man for an iffy haircut and a touch of introspection . . . It was all pretty scary back then, now I come to think about it.) Now, I feel far more belligerent about Jackson Browne than I ever did about the Pistols: ‘You don’t like “Late for the Sky”? Well, fuck you, because I don’t give a shit.’

  This may simply mean that I have become old, and so therefore Jackson Browne’s sedate music holds more appeal than punk – that all this is a long-winded way of saying that I’m forty-five (today, as I write!), and so I listen to folky singer-songwriters now, not bratty and loud guitar bands . . . kids . . . lower-back pain . . . a nice night in watching The West Wing . . . blah blah. And yet I still appreciate, and recognize the value of, noise, as my partner would no doubt unhappily concur. None of my friends likes The Strokes as much as I do (although admittedly this is because they feel they’ve heard it all before, whereas I like having heard it all before, so this might not be the incontrovertible evidence of hard-rockin’ eternal youth I’m looking for); Marah’s recent live shows, the volume of which reminded Lee of Ted Nugent at his most terrifying, simply made me realize that I should allow my ears to ring more often. So I don’t think that my new-found love for Jackson can be explained away by my advancing years.

  He would have been wasted on me at the time, though; I wouldn’t have understood. I’m not referring to the lyrics, which, after all, are hardly opaque (my late-seventies singer-songwriter Elvis Costello made me work much harder at my practical criticism); I’m referring to the soul. And that’s where being older helps, because just as I was mistrustful of any melody that didn’t come wrapped in a heavy-metal riff when I was fourteen, I was at twenty-one unable to distinguish between soft rock that expressed pain, and soft rock that expressed a smug stoner’s content with his wife, his dog, and his record-company advance. There are so many bits in Jackson Browne’s music that I don’t think I could have responded to as a young man, because their delicacy and fragility I would have mistaken for blandness. The fragment of chorus in ‘The Times You’ve Come’, when he sings, in a climactic harmony, ‘Everyone will tell you it’s not worth it’, the piano intro to ‘I Thought I Was a Child’, the first few bars of ‘Late for the Sky’ itself, when Lindley’s guitar, Browne’s piano and an organ create a breathtakingly sombre beauty (and how many record labels would allow a major artist to kick off an album with that now?) . . . You have to have lived a little, I think, to be able to recognize the depth of feeling that has shaped these moments, and these songs, and if ‘Late for the Sky’ is perfect accompaniment to a divorce, it’s not just because its regretful lyrics fit; it’s because divorce peels away yet another layer of skin (who knew we had so many, or that their removal caused such discomfort?), and thus allows us to hear things, chords and solos and harmonies and what have you, properly. I should add that I’d rather not hear things properly, that part of me wishes that I had all those extra layers of skin, and I was still in a position to dismiss the music as Californian piffle. But I’m not, and I’ll have to make the best of it, and to tell you the truth, the best of it is much, much better than I could possibly have imagined. And isn’t that just like life?

  25 ‘Hey Self Defeater’

  – Mark Mulcahy

  Some time in 1996, soon after the paperback edition of High Fidelity was published, I walked into a small music shop on Upper Street, in Islington, North London – not very far from where I had placed the fictional small record shop which the narrator of my novel owned. I’d never been into this particular shop before – it was relatively new (it had opened, in fact, round about the time High Fidelity was first published, a coincidence that has led to a great deal of confusion since) – and in any case, for some reason – the smartness of the shop, perhaps, or its name, Wood, which somehow suggested a taste for jazz, or medieval music or something – I’d always presumed it didn’t sell my kind of stuff. But it did, and I’ve been using it ever since.

  Lee, the proprietor, wasn’t there on the day I first visited. He’d gone to Liverpool, to see Bob Dylan, an unambiguous indication that he was serious about his music. Later, when I met him, I found that he was serious about his football, too, just as I am, and that when his two passions clashed, the collision was spectacular and bloody: Dylan was playing Liverpool the night that England was playing Germany in the semi-final of Euro ’96, and Lee had got straight off the train to watch the game in a pub round the corner from the concert hall. The game went into extra time, and then there was the agony of the penalty shoot-out . . . He walked out of the pub just as the last Dylan fans were walking out of the gig. He’d travelled 200 miles to watch England play on the TV. This was a man I could do business with.

  I have much to thank Lee for. His appearance in my life came at a time when one can find one’s commitment starting to eat itself; without him, I can imagine an increasing reliance on reissues and reviews in broadsheet newspapers, which wou
ld eventually have led to dissatisfaction with most new music (because I would have been tempted to shell out for a daring new hip-hop album that I’d never play) and therefore, eventually, with music itself. Your old music cannot sustain you through a life, not if you’re someone who listens to music every day, at every opportunity. You need input, because pop music is about freshness, about Nelly Furtado and the maddeningly memorable fourth track on a first album by a band you saw on a late-night TV show. And no, that fourth track is not as good as anything on Pet Sounds or Blonde On Blonde or What’s Going On, but when was the last time you played Pet Sounds?

  I wouldn’t have missed out on Lauryn Hill or Radiohead if I had never met Lee (although he’s very good at telling me whether or not to believe the hype, and has more than once told me not to bother, to put my credit card away, and you can’t ask more of a retailer than that), because nobody misses out on Lauryn Hill or Radiohead; but I would have missed out on people like Mark Mulcahy, whose first album, Fathering, I bought on his recommendation, and played repeatedly for months. ‘Hey Self Defeater’, the first track (and the song that made it on to just about every compilation tape I made that year), manages to convey an earned optimism and compassion through the filters of truth and a sort of conversational sarcasm; it talks to you, and to sarcastic, compassionate people just like you, and me, and because there aren’t many of us, apparently (although God knows why, seeing as sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable), it was only ever going to find its audience through word of mouth and recommendations by the like-minded, which is where Lee comes in.