Camp vs Cool, some idle speculations on the British pop sensibility

A propos of little, beyond, I suppose a continuation of my New Romantic thread, I thought I'd air an hypothesis that struck me recently: The British pop sensibility leans more to the camp than the cool. Discuss.

Is this really obvious? Forgive me if it is, but I do think if we audit the most characteristic icons or moments in our pop history, then there is a decided bias towards mince rather than menace, over-statement than under. I raise this because 'cool' (a pretty meaningless term if truth be told) is an attribute often used lazily in association with what we do over here - London is way cool drivels the emo from Vancouver -; is it? I wonder. Cool is more consistently a US pop cultural property, while we guys have difficulty sustaining the detachment and self-regard that this state demands.

Which is interesting, because I think we were responsible for defining a look and stance that can be seen as one of the first prototypes of what we now identify as cool. Dandyism was an English phenomenon, emerging in the regency. And dandyism in its pure form was very much about understated elegance. Nuance, nicety and nonchalence, rather than opulence and flourish. It led to black becoming the uniform of the man about town, and black, through various iterations is the sartorial staple of cool. Now, to put this immediately in perspective, look at what we do with black now. The Goths are one of the few home-grown British pop style cults, who are, of course, drenched in black, and cloaked in melancholy. Does that make them cool? It should do, but something goes awry. Apart from Pete Murphy in the BASF ad (white socks accepted), Goth is as camp as a row of black tents. Even Goth - home-grown British Goth - doesn't take itself too seriously, and camps it up with lace and red and purple and all kinds of kitchy drag, because it just can't leave it alone, just can't do the nonchalant detachment demanded of cool.

This, I think, is quite prevalent across the piece if we would but briefly survey it. Punk, cool? The Ramones maybe. But not the British version. Recklessly camp, despite a dollop of theatrical menace. Roxy? OK, maybe in the suave lounge-lizard incarnation, but, surely its only in this country that a bald, button-pushing nerd like Eno would consider pushing the eyelined envelope of camp so far with that absurd getup. Kraftwerk pushed buttons too, but never dropped their guard. Bowie essayed cool with the Thin White Duke, but that was only a phase he went through, and before you knew it he was dragged up again for Scarey Monsters and upstaging even Steve Strange in the video. Yes, there are a few counter examples. The Velvet Underground surely defined late-60s arthouse cool, but then Reed camped it up rotten with the Transformer album cover, and Walk on the Wild(e) Side, and there are many poodle-haired absurdities from 80s US rock that thought they were cool, but went where even Slade or Gary Glitter feared to tread as regards a version of camp. But on balance there appears to be something deeply lodged in the British pop psyche that prevents us doing cool with much conviction. 'Performance', a film about an East End villain, as hard as nails. Before you know it, he's riffling through Jagger's drag box and upstaging old wiggle bum himself. Clockwork Orange? Alex and his Droogs should be as cool as those glasses of milk plus, but they just can't resist mixing ultraviolence with some high theatrical camp. The single false eyelash says it all.

I've no idea what this adds up to, or from where it all comes. But here it is, and long may it continue. The day we can do cool with real conviction is the day we start to take ourselves seriously. May I never see the day.

Yet further thoughts on New Romanticism and identity

Forgive my silence. I've been, well, doing stuff. I know real bloggers do stuff, and then this stuff is grist to their blogging mills. Happy they. The stuff I do - my dear, too tedious to trouble you with - simply gets in the way of the stuff I think about and sporadically write about. Especially this stuff, which happened way back in the past. So here, belatedly, is part two of my musty musings on New Romanticism and identity.

I'd broached the, largely rhetorical, notion that style might have a bit more substance when it appears at a definitive moment in our development. Specifically in my case, where a good measure of iconoclasm and cynicism (or 'smart-ass trouble-maker' as my teachers no doubt termed it), may have been cause or effect in my adoption of a style cult allergic to acquiescence.

Regard the 'erbert in the photo, which was me in my 'Brideshead' phase of image essaying. Consider that I had not been to a public school, in fact had got through and very swiftly out of the state school I attended, largely untroubled by education, and you might wonder what confounded conceit compelled such white trash from Croydon to get up in such high-faluting drag. The look of it, merely the look of it. 'Twas all that mattered back then.

Creativity, imagination, improvisation, were all in the service of self-expression, and, while still at school, provocation. 'Boys hair must not be longer than the collar at the back', as the school rules stipulated. So my fringe brushed my collar bone, cropped up neatly at the back. 'Girls must not wear make up to school'. Of course, sir... and boys? With what glee we brought about a gender-bending codicil to their sartorial statutes. A very velvet revolution. And at 16 I was out of there, sans qualifications. Hairdressing called, eventually at Kensington Market, the very Mecca of trendydom back then.

But then a funny thing happened. Looks led me to books, and through books into forging a very different identity for myself. 'Forging' in all senses, as there was more than a measure of guileless imposture in the transformation from hairdresser to intellectual, dunce to don, over the next 10 years. My journey from high lights to high table (Merton College, Oxford if you please), all started simply because I picked up Brideshead Revisited as a style manual, and discovered I actually liked reading books when not forced to by a teacher. The next revelation was that I had a brain (up yours Mr Jenkins, BEd), and there was plenty scope for cheek and iconoclasm, by whetting its edge against the thought and expression of the past. I also learned what was new about the Romanticism I'd been flirting with, and where the roots of those stances and sentiments lie. My pretentious apprenticeship was bearing fruit as song lyrics and allusions suddenly made sense.

It is difficult for me now to separate the dancer from the dance, the dandy from the don with any precision as to cause and effect. I can just be thankful my sartorial coming of age coincided with a highly creative moment in pop culture, and not soon after, when pop lost touch with ideas and yoofs forgot how to dress. Had it been sneakers, hoodies and student loans I might never have gained a glimpse of those stars.

Love without hope,
as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Robert Graves, 1925.

Is there anything that can be added to what I think is the perfect love poem? One sentence nearly says all there is to say.

(Please forgive my apparent languor, but I can hear rustlings coming from the LoveSunshine blog cave, now that spring is here...)

Fringe benefits (further thoughts on new romanticism)

So-called New Romanticism has been much on my mind of late. (a) because I’ve just secured tickets to see ABC perform the entire Lexicon of Love with full orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in April, and I’m wondering if I still fit into my gold lame jockstrap; (b) I’ve just finished reading a fascinating book called Bonfire of the Brands by a chap called Neil Boorman. Boorman was a brand fetishist, obsessed with constructing himself and judging others according to labels. He then underwent a Damascene conversion, saw how he was being hoodwinked by the black arts of marketing, and decided to destroy his colossal cache of branded schmuter in a public conflagration. What’s really interesting about the book is Boorman’s insights into how his identity and sense of self-worth had been built up over the years through the props of apparel. Like some scarecrow constructed out of designer dreams, he was entirely what he wore. He traced this tendency back to playground peer pressure, and turning up to school in the early 90s wearing the wrong brand of sneakers. The shame, the ostracism, from that moment he would always wear the right labels, so he would always be loved.

This set me thinking. Ten years older than Boorman, I had a very different experience, and wonder how much of what I’m about emerged from the crucible of pop cultural influence. So indulge me as I sprawl on the couch for a few sessions. Romance is about to get ‘New’, and all about Me (sorry).

Let me whisk you back to Croydon 1981, and what may have been my equivalent of Boorman’s defining moment. Whilst his milieu was the trainer tribes of street style (sic.), it just so happened that when I emerged into fully-formed fashion awareness the role models flitting glamorously before me subscribed to and encouraged a very different mindset. Discerning dissent, rather than tribal conformity, was the creed I signed up to, and this may also have had far-reaching effects.

‘New Romanticism’ was my moment. A Croydon-lite version of it, adopted long after the real innovators had moved on, but still resplendent with the originary spirit, which made it different from most style cults then or since. From Teddy Boys to Hoodies, most youth style cults prescribe uniforms of identification and identity. To ‘be’ and ‘belong’ depends on adopting tribal insignia. Length of coat, cut of hair, latest label, or coat worn inside out, upside down, or with the sales tag still dangling from it (yawn), the majority of movements encouraged cults of conformity. Mod was slightly different and more sophisticated (constantly moving on, yet still a cult, albeit for the cognoscenti); Punk ripped it up and started again, but was still easily emulated. ‘New Romanticism’ took the elitism of Mod, the extravagance of Punk and made dressing up less about belonging as escaping. It was anti-tribal, defined by an urgent need to actively avoid what the twerp next to you was wearing. This meant going to extremes, but that’s what the 80s were about (and Christ knows how we got away with it). The question was not what shall I wear, but who shall I be (Cossack, lounge lizard, dandy highwayman?) If two outfits were the same that night, you’d failed.

Yes, I know it all went horribly wrong. As the 80s became the 80s proper all this inventiveness and attitude somehow came to sanction mullets, far too much hair product and the triumph of style over substance (abuse). But I do wonder, if Boorman took his identity from this playground baptism into brands, whether I became a difficult little swine, a dedicated cynic and non-conformist (I’m not sure I even want to be labeled these things), partly because of the parade of powder, pout and pose that flounced past me at that moment. Its creed: dream, but also dissent; display but also discern. Can this unstable vinaigrette of sentimental cynicism I’ve been shaking and slopping before you derive from the mere accidental epiphany of a fringe flopped tantalisingly across a suburban TV screen nearly 30 years ago? I'm not talking about dressing up (I long gave up that lark), but some deeper vestige of this attitude that remained when I wiped the blusher off for the very last time? To be explored further…

Don’t it make my Brown Eyes Blue

They say you should never meet you heroes. For the same reason you should never analyse too deeply the things you love. I made this mistake when preparing to post on another of my favourite love songs, ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ by the Pouges. I’m not a proper Pogues fan, but I have always loved that song. I respect them as genuine musicians, admire Mr McGowan’s dedication to dereliction, and thank them from the depth of my heart that there is at least one Christmas record (their ‘Fairy Tale of New York’), that doesn’t send me screaming from the shop after having heard it a zillion times that week. And yet, there was always something troubling me about the Pogues, and I’m sure the fault is mine. But, try as I might, I couldn’t help associating them with those sham(rock) Irish bars that sprung up a few years ago, and are now found a very way long way from Tipperary the length and breadth of Europe. (The fact that he attended a major English public school adds one final chip to my shoulder). ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ is, however, a beautiful song, especially when I remained in blissful ignorance of what it was quite about. The opening set the scene for me, and I didn’t think much beyond that:

One summer evening drunk to hell
I stood there nearly lifeless
An old man in the corner sang
Where the water lilies grow
And on the jukebox Johnny sang
About a thing called love.

I loved the melody, I revelled in the sweet melancholy of the sentiment, and assumed plenty. I vaguely thought it was an old Irish folk standard, that they had brought to my attention. Not fooled by ‘Molly Blooms’, Bloomsbury, I was more than ready to believe this was the real McCoy. Well, so it is, but it’s all a bit complicated, and I thought folk was simple. I had formed the idea that it was simply about a young man, who found himself blind drunk one summer evening. So drunk that he either imagines, or is unable to get to, a beautiful woman who throws him a haunting glance across the room. On sobering she is gone,

And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labelled parts one to three
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me.
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes
For a pair of brown eyes.

I imagined it a drunkard’s version of Yeats’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aegnus’, another one of those lost opportunity love lyrics so dear to my heart. Dear me no. I googled it simply to learn who wrote it, and got sucked into reading McGowan’s own semi-coherent account of what is in truth a Chinese Box of narrative complexity (drunken anecdote by an old drunk about the first or second world war, gets somehow mixed up with the singer’s own lament for lost love), and every reference tells a specific tale. This might all enrich the true fan’s enjoyment, but it’s rather throttled this fair-weather folkist’s elusive dreams. I’ll have to go rovin for another brown-eyed ballad, or refrain from killing the things I love with a little learning.

Every body's gotta learn sometime (or do they?)

“Random thoughts for Valentine's day, 2004. Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap”.

The first lines (in voice over) of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Spoken by Jim Carey’s character, and if you haven't seen the film simply because that gurning goon is in it, then relent. It is one of the most original, perceptive, and, possibly depressing films of recent years. See it with someone you love tonight.

It paints a pretty bleak picture of humanity and of love in particular, centred around Valentine’s Day. "It’s our busiest time", declares the receptionist at Lacuna Inc., explaining why a desperate patient cannot get an appointment to have all memory of an unhappy relationship removed from her mind. This is the conceit of the film, using a far-fetched idea to probe some pretty accurate truths. Starting with the hype associated with this very day.

There is nothing remotely ‘romantic’ about St Valentine’s Day. If you’re single, you’re made to feel like an even bigger loser, and modern technology simply compounds the misery. Where once there was only an empty doormat, there are now so many channels, offering myriad possibilities for self-pity on this joyous day. Or if you’re a couple, you’re coerced into dutiful observance. ‘Romance’, by edict, whether you feel romantic or not. Which means, in my limited experience, being rushed through a rota system of dining out surrounded by other happy couples feeling they have to look especially soppy at each other all night to somehow feel the magic of the day. ‘McRomance’ indeed. Do you want fries with those sentiments?

The slick, unsentimental professionalism of Lacuna Inc erasing memories of love is a fitting counterpart of those cynical swine responsible for exploiting expectations of it on that day. A perfect arrangement, and so Valentine’s Day is Lacuna's busiest season. The bleakness continues. We scarcely encounter a happy couple in the film, but instead legions of the broken, desperate to recover from their experience by erasing their pasts. Andre Gide once said ‘Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.’ Lacuna Inc is there to sort this out.

The receptionist tells another disappointed patient, "I’m afraid you can’t have the procedure more than three times in a month. Those are our rules". It suggests a relentless and inexorable gravity of unhappiness in every love. Joel (Carey), surveying the fellow diners in a restaurant, wonders: "Are we like couples you see in restaurants? Are we the dining dead?". By that stage they were. Few of the flashback memories being erased suggest a happy, fulfilling relationship. They are both annoying. He is drippy and morose (and Jim Carey). She flighty, high-maintenance, and with a puerile penchant for trashy hair dyes. I'm not sure you can really fully identify with either. Which somehow makes them more Everyman and Woman, rather than shiny plastic Hollywood Rom-Com lovers. Which pushes the point home harder and more plausibly.

And so it breaks up, just before Valentines Day, and Clementine (Kate Winslet) has the operation. "Our files are confidential Mr. Barish so we can't show you any evidence. Suffice it to say, Miss Kruczynski was not happy and she wanted to move on. We provide that possibility". In revenge, Joel follows suit. "Will it give me brain damage", he asks. "Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss". Nothing you’ll miss, and so a whole relationship, what he might ‘miss’ so painfully or desperately, is wiped away. But what’s so depressing in all this is the suggestion that love is doomed to follow a pattern, and that mistakes are destined to be repeated. The burned child is supposed to fear the fire. Not with love. The clinical procedure of erasure uses Sci-Fi ingenuity to explore a lamentable near universal truth.

This is the half empty perspective on the repetition pattern the film invokes. An optimist might look at it differently. If I could find one today (he's probably reading all his Valentine cards) he might discover more hope in the fact that, once they’ve had each other erased, Clementine and Joel meet again, and fall for each other again. This might give a more hopeful gloss to a very bleak picture. The new couple learn about what they have both done, and how they both felt about each other when they broke up and wanted to forget. They have all this information before them, and yet this is how the film ends (look away if you haven't seen it):

Joel: I can't see anything that I don't like about you.

Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me.

Joel: Okay

Clementine: [pauses] Okay.

Hope or despair? Your view may very well depend on what kind of Valentine’s Day you're having.

Truly a great love song

Buddy Holly died fifty years ago this month, so I thought I would feature one of the first love songs to touch me, and one that stands out from its times, 'True Love Ways'.

My first real enthusiasm was Rock 'n' Roll, the early stuff. Once I'd acknowledged that being a streaker wasn't a serious career option (http://helioholic.blogspot.com/search/label/vocation), I put all my energy into collecting old records, combing my hair and curling my lip. It's a good job the wind didn't turn, or I'd have been stuck like I was here, aged 9 and obsessed with the 1950s.

But I didn't go for Elvis, for the same reason I don't like the Beatles - because everyone else did and does. Buddy was the rocker for me. He was the thinking man's Rock 'n' Roller. Sensitive and bespectacled, he smiled rather than snarled, and was obviously a genuinely nice guy. He proposed marriage to his wife on their first date. Buddy was the true romantic of the Rock 'n' Roll era.

And I think this shows in his love songs, especially 'True Love Ways'. What distinguishes it mostly is something decidedly lacking from love songs from the epoch - sincerity. Maybe it's me, but I think I just bought into the whole rebel rocker image, and then was surprised to find this snarling, hip-thrusting animal suddenly getting all doe-eyed and gooey, simpering teen love platitudes according to record label diktat. Rock 'n' Roll love is either pure bubble gum, or really about sex. When Eddie Cochran sang 'Three Steps to Heaven', you knew what he was really talking about. It's almost an instruction manual into getting into a bobby soxer's silky boxers, and he even chuckles dirtily when he growls 'That sure sounds like heaven to me'. Good Golly Miss Molly sure liked to ball, and you can bet Little Richard didn't waste much time buying her flowers.

But Buddy was different. 'True Love Ways' is a grown up love song. He doesn't even call her 'baby', while acknowledging the full reality of love's wilful repertoire: 'Sometimes we'll sigh,

Sometimes we'll cry'. In short, it is true about love's little ways. The song's arrangement seems to straddle both the swing and the pop era, with Buddy crooning over harp, strings and a spine-curdling clarinet. It is goose-bumpy stuff that positively wrenches your heart-strings. You just know he was singing to his wife, soon to be widow. It was his wife's favourite song, and one of the last songs he ever recorded. All this sings out in 2.5 minutes of pure pop perfection. They sure don't make 'em like that any more.

The song of love is a sad sad song (etc.)

Given my speculations on the possible superiority of love songs over the thing itself, I feel duty bound to volunteer a few of my favourites in the genre. Love songs, that is, not loves. Although, not surprisingly, the songs that see us through assert their claims through association. Certain songs absorb as much as they impart, like sponges of sentiment. It’s time I gave them a squeeze.

Not surprisingly, most of the songs I value most are of the melancholy kind, for, as I never tire of asserting, or letting Nick Cave assert for me, “I believe the Love Song to be a sad song. It is the noise of sorrow itself”. Or, as he more melodramatically puts it, with reference to his own clutch of such, “lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man”.

And yet, not all love songs are obviously sad, and not all are ballads. A few manage to cover up the tracks of the tears with a convincing ecstatic mask. As we’re just setting out, I should fill the floor not your hankies, so let’s start with some of the very few happy, toe-tappy love songs in the Helioholic’s hit parade. In no particular order, and in sporadic instalments here’s some of my favourite love songs.

Just to spite him, I’ll start with a rare instance of up-beat love lyricism from Mr Cave himself. Now, generally, love is a fairly anguished business for our old Nick, and I’ll have a few choice examples of this more characteristic mode in good time. Love is more likely to have him reaching for a handy rock – “for all beauty must die” (‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, from Murder Ballads) – than standard sentimental endearments. Which is why ‘Breathless’ from The Lyre of Orpheus is a surprising little gem. Nick, happily married Nick, doesn’t sing about love much these days, because contentment doesn’t suit his muse. But this finds his satanic majesty full of the joys of spring, with nature chorusing his happiness.

“It's up in the morning and on the downs
Little white clouds like gambolling lambs
And I am breathless over you”.

(The heavy smoking Cave, getting up early and striding across the Sussex Downs, might have something to do with this condition, but I won’t spoil the moment for him). There’s a plaintive flute weaving in and out of the simple acoustic accompaniment, suggesting a merry troupe of minstrels prancing along behind the besotted Bad Seed whose let love in. And how.

“The happy hooded bluebells bow
And bend their heads all a-down
Heavied by the early morning dew
At the whispering stream, at the bubbling brook
The fishes leap up to take a look
For they are breathless over you”.

It’s surely the mark of genius when an artist can go so far left-field of his usual patch so convincingly. And yet, he’s changed the tempo, changed the tone, but the anguish is still just beneath the surface and between the lines. This is still a lifeline from a drowning man. The clue’s in the title.

"I listen to my juddering bones
The blood in my veins and the wind in my lungs
And I am breathless without you".

He kinda means it, somehow turning a rather sweet little ditty into a visceral immolation before the beloved. You just can’t keep a good Goth down.

And this applies equally to one of the most perfect Emo-anthems to love, ‘Just Like Heaven’ by The Cure. Big sounds, Big hair, are usually a Big turnoff for me, symbolised by one of the aural nadirs of a dodgy decade: The Alarm. But it’s difficult not to have a sneaking admiration for Robert Smith, who found a look and stuck with it, long after the backcombed bandwagon left town. Dear Robert is just a bit too cuddly to be a scary Goth, or convince us with the shadow puppet diablerie of his suburban psychodramas. Bless, this Creepy from Crawley can’t even put his lipstick on properly, and you can almost imagine a fussy aunt giving him a spit wash with a hankie to clean up the proper mess he’s made of it while he wriggles teetchily from her grasp. Michael Bracewell clinched it in his brilliant book, England is Mine, when he said in Smith’s songs “the soul is not so much bared as reduced to wandering around in its dressing gown all day”.

But that’s just why a song such as ‘Just like Heaven’ is so perfect, and speaks to tortured suburban romantics everywhere. Boys do Cry. Love is big, and its emotions are big, even when worn moochily by gauche adolescent suburbanites. It captures something of the child-like glee of love. Partly through the tumbling jangle of heart-catchy guitars (making Altered Images sound like Slipknot), and partly through the wide-eyed love-stoked wonder of Smith’s lyrics:

“Show me show me show me how you do that trick
The one that makes me scream" she said
"The one that makes me laugh" she said
And threw her arms around my neck
"Show me how you do it
And I promise you I promise that
I'll run away with you
I'll run away with you"

It should be fey, but somehow it isn’t. (A grown man with a thatched head and fright slap gushing thus). But twee soon turns Wagnerian, as Wuthering Heights comes to Worthing on Sea.

"Daylight licked me into shape
I must have been asleep for days
And moving lips to breathe her name
I opened up my eyes
And found myself alone alone
Alone above a raging sea
That stole the only girl I loved
And drowned her deep inside of me".

In other words, I woke up and it was all a dream. Too much Merrydown on a Sussex cliff and this is bound to happen. Yet it has everything in this song to delight the sensitive suburban soul. Soaring from glee to Goth gloom in 3 perfect minutes. A soaring love anthem for the eternally lost and lonely.

Finally, and this might surprise you, but what romp through the vinal vales of lyrical loves past would be complete without ‘Come on Eileen’? Yes, I know it’s been tarnished by overexposure, with faux school discos flogging the dead horse of popular nostalgia, but I still really love this song. It is a landmark for me, as one of the very rare instances when I like what everyone else likes and join in a national enthusiasm. I usually go the other way in principle, but not this time. Few people don’t like ‘Come on Eileen’, and everyone loved it when it reached no. 1 in the summer of 1982. It floated from countless open windows, capturing the youthful mood of summer. Agreed, it’s rather pompous, Rowland is a plonker, and their charity shop Romany Romanticism fooled no one. But sometimes you’ve just got to go with it. It was the year of my first proper love, and my first broken heart. But not yet, when Dexys topped the charts and stomped the boards, that love was at its height. It was the very sound of love, and I was happy to stomp along to its tune, forgetting all in adolescent abandon. An instant exit from Croydon. For that is what it is about. Escaping, the destined drudgery of background:

"These people round here wear beaten down eyes
Sunk in smoke dried faces they're so resigned to what their fate is,
But not us, no not us we are far too young and clever.
Remember Toora Loora Toora Loo-Rye-Aye
Eileen I'll hum this tune forever".

He’s right. We have. Forever 15 and in first love, restored by a record.

(I've no idea how to embed Youtube widgets like the clever blogs do, but here are the links. Enjoy.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb45RkfWjV0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ThWaMnlSZM&feature=PlayList&p=1598BC8EB2044468&playnext=1&index=57

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5StFADI9NM

Are love songs better than love?

It's a genuine question I'd like to ruminate on and, I hope, debate (as well as a pretext for some smart-assed sophistries from a sentimental cynic). Of course, it largely depends on the love song or love in question. I think I would be prepared to endure the worst parts of the worst relationships for eternity rather than hear 'Lady in Red' for a fraction of that time. But I think there is more than intrinsic 'quality' at issue here. I didn't know those relationships were going to be painful when they started out, we both of us must have had the highest hopes, the best intentions. But surely Chris De Blurgh knew what he was doing when he unleashed that abomination on the world, and for this his song must be confined for eternity on Anthrax Island* So, I think, love songs have at least the potential to eclipse that about which they purport to warble. How?

Ars longa, vita brevis (life is short, but art is long), teaches the sage, and that applies to the art of the love song. Nick Cave, who knows about these things, gave a lecture on the love song, telling how he wrote his song 'Far From Me' over 4 months, during which time the relationship he was writing about changed, in fact ended. What started out as a lament for a distant loved one became one for a lost love. As he concludes: "The peculiar magic of the love song ... is that it endures where the object of the song does not. It attracts itself to you and together you move through time". The Smiths's song 'Rubber Ring' says something similar, with that eternal malcontent Morrissey resenting the fact that his songs of loneliness might be forsaken when his public (oh, but never he), are: "dancing and laughing / And finally living / Hear my voice in your head / And think of me kindly". Songs, he claims"were the only ones who ever stood by you". And they do. But lover's don't. They always leave, as Ryan Adams sings, when you need them most. Songs are long, and life, and love, are short.

And yet, songs aren't long, and that also makes them superior to love itself. In three minutes you can have rapture, reconciliation, even rumpy pumpy when you want them. Love songs know when it's over, know when to shut up. Before the rise of the Chavson d' Amour of the Lilly Allen school started churning out love songs that make a merit of mundanity, gnawing the gristly Greggs pastie of pop), love songs offered excitement and wonder. You can have variety without promiscuity or satiety. Rapture here - 'ain't love the sweetest thing'; regret there - 'Nothing compares 2 u'; and reverie - ' Lover, you should have come over' - to complete the cycle. Neat, complete and in your control. Who would bother with the real thing when the world is full of silly love songs.

When love has let you down, they're there to comfort, console and instruct. They've been through it all before, and can help you get through it too. They can make sense of what makes no sense at all. What does love teach us? Plenty. Do we learn from it? Rarely. Love songs have clarity, coherence and completion, while love is messy, ad-hoc, mendacious, and never quite finished. It ain't over even when it's over. With love songs you can chose the mood to suit. Can love ever be like that? You know where you are with them, following a tried and trusted formula. Love so often changes its tune when least expected. You might start out walking on sunshine, but end up crying in the rain.

If I'm considering pros and cons, then love is decidedly the latter. The oldest one in the book. Whilst we retain the discernment to judge a good love song from a bad, how difficult is it to do the same with love? Yet if we are conned by love, love songs are partly to blame. Their perfection, their subtle sophistries lead us astray, teaching us to believe and to deceive in love's name. Hence the danger of love songs, both good and bad. Lady in Red drips poison in the ears of the besotted, smooching closer to the clammy chimera of 'Romance', and getting a whole breed of bastard offshoots even viler than their progenitor. 'Unchained Melody', 'I'm in the Mood For Love', 'Love is Stronger than Pride', might delight us, but they also deceive us into believing their mighty fables, and introducing the canker worms ino the bud of our poor mortal loves.

I first sketched these notes when I was on a plane. It was during takeoff, and so all electrical equipment had to be switched off, including my iPod. I looked across the aisle and saw a couple holding hands while the plane took off. I had my notes and the love songs I couldn't play, but they had each other.

*Anthrax Island Discs is a game I think I invented, which is the nightmare counterpart of the weedy luvvy fest of radio fame. You decide which records you hope to never hear again for as long as you live (I promise I thought of this before Room 101 came along, but what do you care?). For your information, along with Chris's golden classic are, of course, 'I Just Called to Say I Love you', 'Hello' by Lionel Ritche, Bohemian Rhapsody, in fact most of Queen's backlist, and if there's room Oaasis too (except 'Don't Look Back in Anger'). I'm sure I used to know precisely which songs should be suffering there, but maybe I've mellowed with age, or just stopped listening to the radio, or being invited to weddings (well. would you?). It grew out of that where's my revolver instinct triggered by the incessant drek-bath that is listening to the radio. I have long since let the poptastic wireless fall silent, and am a good deal more clement as a consequence.

Woman found, lost, then recovered – Before Sunset

I suppose I’ve strung this out long enough. It’s time to bring on the happy ending for this thread.
Sequels are generally disasters artistically, and usually obey the Hollywood principle that if you flog a winning horse long enough, at some point you’ll have to accept it’s dead. Before Sunset is not like this. To say it is as good as Before Sunrise is beside the point. It simply completes that story, and gives it another dimension, that of mature reflection and hard-won acquiescence to the demands of romance. They fully earn their happy ending.

Taken together Sunrise-Sunset let’s us have our cake and eat it too. It just takes 9 years to finish the meal. Sunrise ended with the mature artistic ambivalence about a happy ending. Did they meet up again 6 months later, was the spark still there? How bold, reckless, trusting, or perhaps cynically knowing not to exchange phone numbers or even surnames. The filmmaker was as mature and discerning as the characters were reckless. It’s a beautiful but complex gesture. And it could resonate for the duration of the 9 year hiatus, occasionally surfacing as an unresolved question. A bit like the ‘what might have been’ Jesse evokes as the argument for his impetuous suggestion. Get off the train, or you will never know…

We didn’t know for quite a while. In between life, messy, disorganised life intervened. How was it for us? How many trips on the Ferris wheel of love? How many fallings down to earth? We grow old, we grow old. All of us, viewers and characters alike. We cannot conquer Time.

Time is again the principal theme of Sunset. The ‘before’ indicates that the clock is ticking, with another plane to catch (or not). And sunset, the cinematic shorthand for a happy ending is what they are up against. Will the plane fly West from Paris in pursuit of it, or will they make their sun stand still, and redeem Time? Real time this time. From the first scene at Shakespeare & Company where Jesse is reading from his novel about that one night in Vienna, through their walk and boat trip through Paris, and the endlessly deferred deadline of making that plane, the film intensifies the tension by playing out in real time. A plane to catch, a real-life anxiety we can all share, is but another turn of the screw. This is one plane we are happy to miss.

Not quite the first scene. Cleverly, the film’s opening pays homage to its progenitor. Sunrise ended by revisiting the locations the couple had populated that evening, now empty, and forlorn without their chatter and life. Sunset starts by viewing the empty scenes that will be populated in the film that follows. It underlines the emptiness of the lives Jesse and Celine have been living. Cold, dead years, devoid of romance.

Celine visits the bookshop where Jesse is reading from his novel about that night, and the frozen time starts to melt. Slowly. They have reversed roles. She is more cynical than the dreamy girl of 9 years before. Jesse’s book is ‘very Romantic’, I don’t usually like that’. He assures her that his fictionalised account that had brought their romance up to date originally had a different ending. The couple (them) had originally met up as arranged, spent a few days together and realise there’s nothing there. ‘I prefer that. It’s much more realistic’. But his editor made him change it. ‘Everyone wants to believe in love. It sells’. How true. And so they draw us in, our desires shadowing them round Paris.

So what really happened? He turned up. she didn’t. Her grandmother died, and the funeral was that day. She had no way of contacting him. A tragic irony worthy of Hardy. But it meant Jesse wrote a book, maybe to make sense of it all. If he hadn’t Celine would never have found him again. He wrote her back into his life, and now they can re-write the past. Celine has had a string of relationships, but is happier alone. Jesse is married, with a child, yet his life is devoid of love. It’s quite clear ‘romance’ happened back then, and only then. They have never got over that what might have been.

Another walk through a European city, another re-connection. Not just any city. Paris in late summer. They go to a cafe. They take a river trip – usually for tourists – as the sun slowly sets. In other words, they take a trip on the Tunnel of clichéd Love, and yet still they resist. Or pretend too. ‘Maybe we are only good at brief encounters in European cities’. How will they ever know?

You're going to miss that plane. There’s still time he protests. Time for one last cup of tea at her place - a Boho Parisian appartment to die for - and for Celine to sing one of her own songs. Just a little waltz (which comes from Vienna, of course). ‘I just want another night, another try’, the song ends. And with it the film. "Baby, you ARE going to miss that plane".... "I know." And so the sun sets slowly, fading out to the strains of Nina Simone. He’s not going to board that plane. But the war is over now, sacrifices are no longer demanded for a greater good. They can always have their Paris. Happy ever after (we can hope). They earned it.

(Please Mr Linklater, leave it be there. Don’t revisit it, up-date it, worry over how they are doing. Please don’t feel the urge to pick the scab. It is quite, quite perfect. Let them grow old and happy together beyond the silver screen. Give hope to the hopeless.)

Up-date on Paris

I just thought I’d report back from Romance Central, and confirm whether or no it is still delivering on its brand. I was there principally on business, but had at least 24 hours to survey the territory as the roving reporter of Romance, and have this to report.

Yes. As I suspected, nothing essential has changed in the 4 years I was there last. It’s not just the skyline. That was as pristine in its preservation as I anticipated. And rightly so. There is also a preservation in the way things are done. The tempo and rituals of life that add up to a quintessentially Parisian ‘atmosphere’. A hard-to-define aura that pervades the very stones. Shops in the same places selling the same stuff at the same time of year, unchanged and unchanging since lord knows when. It somehow gives you hope. This nostalgia, heritage appeal, solidly sentimental clinging to the way things are done, gives it a big tick in the Romance box.

Yet, not everything was unchanged, and I didn’t think I’d live to see this. Paris bars are now non-smoking. Incroyable! Not that I find smoking attractive, or romantic. I’ve never smoked, not one single ciggie, and I thank the lord smoking has been banned in the UK. But somehow I don’t feel the same prejudice against it in the Parisian cafes and bars. A cigarette that bears the lipstick’s traces, waved in gesticulation by a sultry be-bobbed and bereted beauty, who looks icily at me through her cigarette smoke across a crowded bar is part of my fantasy picture of the café society I was happy to view from the sidelines. I suppose I’ll have to relegate that one to history now. There they were, mind, puffing and quaffing outside in the freezing cold under heaters like us Brits, so in some ways it’s business as usual. I must, however, put a cross in the Romance box for banning smoking (and this only applies to Paris).

Another thing that had changed, WAS THE BLOODY PRICE OF EVERYTHING. Strawberries were decidedly more than 7 Francs a Kilo. Things, essential things, like food, wine and fancy clobber, have gone up astronomically over the last 5 years as it is. Add to this the positive prostration of the pound against all world currencies (sterling having actually dipped below the euro), and my pleasure of swanning round Paris absorbing Romance was severely diminished. Part of the pleasure of Paris was the indulgence of senses severely chastened at home. The flâneur cedes to the gourmand in the happy hunting grounds of the boulevard bistros; the haunter of cafes will soak that much longer, with 2 or 3 glasses of an afternoon more than would be acceptable or affordable in London, and so experiences that exotic life to the full. No longer. More expensive than London now, I thought twice about flouncing into places I used to haunt with luxuriant impunity before, and spent ages scrutinizing menus before sheepishly melting away. Being here on my own, I just couldn’t justify the indulgence. Romance is a luxury, or at least the illusion of luxury, formally sustained by favourable exchange rates. (Having said this, I was travelling ‘Premium Business Class’ on Eurostar, which, for about £35 more one way, you can lig your way back into luxury. A fully stocked bar at my disposal, and with two hours to wait for my Champagne-soaked journey back to Blighty under the magic tunnel, I stepped back into St Pancras and all was right with the world and my wallet).

Eurostar, whilst not belonging to Paris, has become an essential part of experiencing it (I can’t imagine why anyone would fly there), and even though it is an innovation, just 15 years old, it actually speeds us smoothly back into the never never land of Romance. Eurostar transports this sea-girt culture over the frontiers of possibility into a continent, one connected at the furthest edge with Istanbul. Without the Disney-land pretension of actually taking what’s left of the Orient Express (for those without imagination who want their faux romance served on a silver-plated platter). Someone has actually had the good sense to burrow out of Blighty (without the commandants noticing), and then laid on a high-speed choo choo to take us to exciting lands beyond. Take a Eurostar and experience what is all but dead in the railway network generally, but richly evocative of a golden age of travel. There’s not a whiff of deliberate heritage about The Eurostar brand, but, for we Brits at least, it can't help making us sigh for a vanished age - of speed, luxury, courtesy, service. All that, and French ladies in uniforms serving you Champagne. Big tick in the Romance box as part of the Parisian experience.

Paris was covered in snow while I was there. Pristine, white-glittery fairy tale snow, making it all the more Romantic. Why? Because rare, and special and long-ago. Boy, that place knows how to deliver. And it covers us all the dog turds (one piece of essential Parisian street furniture we might readily relegate to the dustbin; but then the Parisian’s right to let his or her beastly little pooch poop where it likes is a small price to pay for the more favourable anachronisms elsewhere). And so how was it, wandering around Paris, the city for lovers, all on my Jacques Jones? Solitude was not the ideal situation to audit Paris’s brand, I admit. And yet, there kept coming to me unbidden, as a traversed the familiar unchanging cityscape, memories of earlier visitations. Visitations accompanied by the reality of ‘romance’. In other words, the ghosts of rows past. The last time I was in Paris I was in love, and yet it was the setting for the first serious row, or flip out of what turned out to be a very bumpy relationship. The reality is, you can bring a romance to the banks of the Seine, but you can’t make it drink. We didn’t row the whole time we were there, I’m glad to say, but madame was a world class sulker. So many of the scenes I visited were misted by melancholy recollection of this sentiment. By revisiting them I was able to restore them to their former, and future glory. I was accountable only to myself, and where my whim my take me under a perfect blue sky. Notre Dame soared above me, the Tour d’ Eiffel twinkled anew in the sunlight without a twinge of regret. They were wiped clean and ready for the next time, the marvellous maybe of many loves to come. Paris is indeed the city for lovers, even, perhaps especially, when you’re on your own.

We’ll always have Paris II

When Bogey uttered those immortal words, which sealed the doom for his immediate happiness, but ensured the eternal flame of romance’s most iconic (un)happy ever afters, the choice of location was far from arbitrary. Or rather, the fact that it was Paris and not, well… [substitute just about any location] … plays no small part in the potency of his romantic renunciation. Paris, occupied by barbarians, was a precious, fragile treasury of all that was worth fighting for, and returning to in peace time. Paris is always somewhere to return to in peace time, in spring time, in love time. Paris is always always.

This is the first major icon / cliché of romance I’ve attempted to take on, on its own right. I’m not really capable of doing justice to it, as this is a big big question, the surface of which I can only skim here (like the creamy foam on a Café au lait, grazed dreamily a a Boulevard Café). You see, it’s very difficult not to employ clichés when dealing with Paris, and especially so when tackling the whole Paris = romantic platitude. It is perhaps one of the biggest truisms in romance’s repertoire, and one of the most consistent and coherent ideas ever held about a place. Although we have pretty clear ideas about New York, Rome, Tokyo, London, only Paris has a universally agreed adjective attributed to it.

But why, and, more importantly, when? If I had time, and the British Library had been open when I was pondering this question, I might have backed up the following speculations with a bit of substance. I might just do that when I get the chance; but now I’m going to hazard a guess it was between the wars when Paris became officially ‘romantic’. This idea was obviously fully-formed by 1942, but I don’t think was there in the 19th century, and was certainly not there before that. Paris was sexy, racy, daring, naughty before ‘romantic’ became its official descriptor. This might have contributed to and evolved into the later idea, but it had a different association and value at the time. It meant licence and libertarianism to the Anglo-American imagination, stifled by puritan propriety and prohibition. And this was firmly associated with a progressiveness. Paris was a modern city. It had chopped heads off kings, planned its streets on rational lines, and was at the forefront of what we would now quaintly call ‘sexual permissiveness’. Finally, the official style of Paris’s greatest, most iconic moment was self-consciously Nouveau.

New is not romantic. Paris became romantic when the rest of the world underwent its own revolutions and cataclysms, and Paris was looked to to embody and preserve a vanishing or just vanished order. Fortunately for the rest of the world, the conservative, chauvinistic side of the French mentality came to the fore, and decided to deliver on our demands, and manage the Paris brand rigorously by allowing very little change. The periphique stops it sprawling, like London; the French mind rightly resists the incursion of Starbucks et al., and someone in the planning dept at the Hôtel de Ville, has obviously decreed that the river skyline will change over his dead body. I’m pretty much certain that I could stand on the Pont de la Tournelle and look at Notre Dame and beyond tomorrow, and find the view pretty much as I left it exactly four years ago. Which is exactly what I intend to do, as I’m going to Paris on a flying visit, and this is why I’m prompted to prematurely pontificate on this question.

Paris is romantic because it has made the preservation of an epoch, la belle epoch, part of its official identity, and sealed the idea in. And it is this we re-visit, in recollection, and reality. ‘At the age of 37, she realised she’d never ride through Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair’ ('Ballad of Lucy Jordan') - never really love, in other words. Not like Bogart and Bergman (I’m sure it’s a reference to Casablanca, and the flashbacks to Rick, actually smiley and looking soppy at Ilsa in an open top car). Last Tango in Where? Why not Buenos Aires? As it nearly all takes part in an apartment, truly it could have been anywhere. But then, truly it couldn’t.

Talking of apartments, there is a very stylish French Film called L’Appartement, which I’ve seen about 3 times now, and I still can’t work out exactly what goes on. It’s some kind of tricksy mystery about the exchange of identities between two very saucy and chic brunettes, who are chased all over Paris by a young man. The problem is, I can’t pay attention to the plot, as I’m too busy following two very saucy and chic brunettes all over Paris, and couldn’t give a stuff about the intrigue. The first time I saw it I wandered out of the cinema in a daze, and couldn’t speak for about 10 minutes. I swear, if I’d had my passport with me, I’d have caught the first Eurostar to Paris and joined in the sport. No mater how saucy the ladies, I would not have considered boarding a train so recklessly to anywhere else.*

Eurostar. Now there’s a romantic spot. Forget about that simply absurd statue they’ve erected. Sit there one afternoon in a bar; drink Champagne, and simply watch the trains depart. Sigh, dream, recollect, regret, and have another sip of Champagne, and watch another train. One day, just maybe… with the warm wind in your hair.

* A few years after watching that film, indeed a few months after my Faintheart at Holborn Tube incident nearly 8 years ago, I went to Paris, and met a young lady in a shoe shop. She was working there while a student, and the shoes were rather nice. I bought 2 pairs out of guilt for having spent so long chatting to her, and we spent the next year taking it in turns to commute by Eurostar. And then? Well, I think I have one of the shoes somewhere.