The Lexicon of Love

Which might have been yet another name for this project. I reach for this particularly glittery star now partly out of a need to establish my contested credentials for writing about 'romance'. I may not have been a very romantic lover, Madame, but I've always been a lover of romance. I judge this by an awareness that the first songs to stir me as a child were highly sentimental ones. I remember weeping (and enjoying it), to Terry Jack's 'Seasons in the Sun', aged 7. Surely an age when the recent realisation of the reality of death should preclude any such indulgence in the sweet melancholy that song induces. At the very least, I should have found it irredeemably 'soppy'.

I would love to be able to claim that I had been a punk. It's a pre-requisite of cultural commentary these days. It appears every soundbitist wheeled on to give talking head on the countless TV histories of pop feels duty bound to claim they were there at the Roxy, back in the day, and how much they were inspired by punk (the most absurd claim on this score I saw made recently was by Pete I-am-responsible-for-more-aural-misery-than-any-other-source-in-the 80s-especially-Rick-Astley Waterman, showing just how bogus it is, and suggesting it's only a matter of time before The Krankees, Keith Harris and Orville, and Rene and Renata claim the same). I was too young to be a punk, being 9 in 1976, but then I was also too young for the music I was into. Far too young. I was into Buddy Holly, Neil Sedaka, and Phil Spector groups. Very uncool next to punk. I didn't want to destroy. I wanted to dream.

I mention all this because I want to understand the role played by pop music in forming my own sensibility and outlook, and specifically what so-called 'New Romanticism' has with the old sort. How can I save its best bits from being considered either punk's camper cousin, or Thatcherism in fancy dress? I intend to give my penny's worth on New Romanticism in quite a few installments over the months, but thought I'd just jump straight in here with my belief that ABC's Lexicon of Love was one the best albums of the 80s, and certainly the best to be tarred with the 'New Romantic' mascara.

For in it I had found the same sentimental heart-tug that I had experienced with Buddy Holly and the Shirelles. If 'New Romantic' has any meaning at all, then it resides in the suave symphony of sentiment that is The Lexicon of Love. Roxy by proxy, perhaps. But I wasn't really aware of Roxy Music back then, or if I was Ferry had grown a tad too pompous to interest me. Pomposity, alas, was endemic in the 80s. A decade that took itself far too seriously. Even the bands that are supposed to really 'own' New Romanticism - those Blitz Kids with record deals: Visage, Spandau Ballet and Ultravox - fall foul of this tendency. There aren't many laughs from that lot (from, not at, the ludicrousness of it all is quite another matter). ABC at least had a sense of humour. Gold lame suit against Spandau's highland drag. I rest my case.

It was partly Trevor Horn's obsession with opulence, with the album's production shimmering like Fry's suit caught in limelight. And it was partly the hommage they played with their styling to the matinee idol lovers of lyrical long ago. But mostly it was Martin Fry's lyrics, that make his New Romanticism, true Romanticism. Other bands dressed up, wore their art on their sleeves, and packaged their pretension from the dressing up box of cliches past. But ABC matched their style with real substance in their lyrics.

"If you gave me a pound for the moments I've missed,
And I got dancing lessons for the lips I should-a kissed,
I'd be a millionaire, I'd be a Fred Astaire".

Genius. Camp, tongue-in-cheek, and lavishly sentimental, yet still heartfelt. The absurd hyperbole of the extended conceit, and the fact that it only just scans gives it a certain sincerity that implies Mr Fry might just believe his own paper moon-shine. The 80s were obsessed with 'cool', and many pretended to like jazz, some bands even attempted to play it. Nina Simone was idolised, people actually wore berets, beards and stripped shirts without an eyebrow raised. Roxy Music had hymned Bogart. But Bogey is cool, he defined cool. Astaire was not cool. He was bald, and wore tails way beyond their sartorial date stamp. To evoke him in 1982, not so long after everyone had been in either donkey jackets and denim, or bin liners and bondage pants, to swathe your white-funk in sugary symphonic chiffon takes balls (albeit glitter ones). This was pop music evoking the past, its style and its sentiments without pretence to poetry, or taking itself seriously. And that's why I for one, wholly believe in it.

I believe it when Martin Fry sighs when he contemplates the suggestions from friends that, Martin, one day you might find true love. 'I say, '"Maybe, but there must be a solution to / The one thing, the one thing we can't find"'. A search for the one thing we can't find? Arise Lord Fry of Sheffield, gold-suited seeker of the Impossible, and the truest, Newest Romantic of that absurd and really rather dreary decade.

Women Lost

A former lover, who stumbled across this, my new venture, questioned my credentials for pontificating on the subject of 'romance'. There was precious little of that when we were together, she wryly noted.

Maybe I need to set the record straight, and define more clearly what I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about 'love' in itself (whatever that might be), so much as those rarefied relics that beguile us into believing it might just be possible. Most of these things make little sense in the real world, and many of them are impossible. Hence their enduring potency and allure. I'm quite certain that she would have given me short shrift had I showered her in red roses and other cliches of commodified desire at the time. Chocolates maybe, but chocolate boxes are not her style. Yet I gave her something more enduringly romantic - I said goodbye.

Does imagination dwell the most on a woman won or woman lost?

Silly question Billy. By ending the relationship I bestowed upon it what she claims it lacked - romance. What Might Have Been and the Impossible are the cornerstones of this concept. And the so relationship, alchemised by regret and the passing years, now glows in the imagination. More enduringly than faded roses, or snuffed candlelight. We should not, when talsking of romance (to quote Billy Boy Yeats again), 'mistake the brightness of the moon for the prosaic light of day'.

I dedicated my last book - Sunshine - to 'lost love'. It had been dedicated 'to _______', but _______ and I finished the day before the book went to press. I feel the loss of the relationship terribly, but am rather pleased with the dedication. I once heard of an author dedicating a book 'To whoever I'm with now' (nicer than the other one I heard about, 'To Bitch', but formed from the same logic). 'To lost love' means mine is perennially dedicated to Whoever I'm no longer with now. Given I appear to have a season ticket on the whirligig of love, that was a shrewd investment on my part. I just hope it stays in print long enough...

These Foolish Things

Sigh. And for my first posting on his project I start with a song that is both exemplar and key to what I'm trying to capture here. Indeed, I very nearly named my project after it. For it is the foolish things that touch us, that I plan to catalogue and anatomise in this blog.

Doesn't the song do the same? A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces, an airline ticket to romantic places ... Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations? Foolish things. Why foolish? Because not necessarily bearing intrinsic meaning, but enriched with romance through association. And so the song compiles a potpourri of mournful recollection, redolent of romance because riddled with regret. And how the ghost of you clings.

And this, I think, helps us understand the link between what we term ‘romance’ and love. The romance of things, evoking lost love. As the song regrets a lost lover through the associative triggers of bitter-sweet recollection, so we regret the beauty that we imagine has somehow passed from the world. Imagination dwells the most on love that is lost. Romance is remembering forgotten beauty. Whether this resides in the peerless eyes of the beloved or in an epoch saturated in style, and tinged with sentimental regret.

But why things? Things, objects, are the stuff of romance. They absorb it. Look at these lines from Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes' (1820):

Stol’n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gaz’d upon her empty dress,
And listen’d to her breathing, if it chanced
To wake into a slumberous tenderness;
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
And breath’d himself: then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,
And over the hush’d carpet, silent, stept,
And ‘tween the curtains peep’d, where, lo!—how fast she slept.

Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguish’d, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:—
...

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

These delicates he heap’d with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.—
“And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache.”

How could she resist? Porphyro sure knows the way to a girl's heart, and goes to town with the delicacies as a seductive prelude to melting into Madeline's dream. It is a fetishistic tableau of aching desire. Not just for sex, but for the relics and rituals that are the handmaidens of what populates the planet.

Or Daisy Fey swooning over Gatsby's shirts. What lovely, lovely shirts. And so he breaks her heart with his impossible love (and fine tailoring) once more...

So, what are these things, these foolish things?

Welcome to the fair rag and bone shop of the heart

Announcing a new project, in which a sentimental cynic sifts through the rituals and relics of ‘romance’. The term (safely nested between inverted commas), might at first make us cringe, sneer or feel slightly queasy; and yet there is still a small place reserved in all our hearts for this ideal. Why? In a culture founded on cynicism and self-interest, without faith, political will or cohesive values, some foolish things - songs, films, books, poems, objects and experiences - still manage to beguile us. Still slip through the firewalls of our unbelief.

It is precisely because we are in the gutter that we need the stars. But what stars? What makes them still shine? And how do we know a real star from a Sarowoski bling bauble?

I propose to strip away the neon vulgarity and greetings card clichés to find an authentic, vital heart beating still. To identify, anatomise and preserve these romantic fragments against the ruins of our times....