But some of us are looking at the stars

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

2009-05-04T13:59:00.005+01:00

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.

2009-04-11T20:50:00.005+01:00

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.

2009-03-14T20:58:00.004Z

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...)

2009-03-04T11:45:00.004Z

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…

2009-02-22T19:58:00.006Z

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.

2009-02-14T09:27:00.008Z

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.

2009-02-11T13:02:00.005Z

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.

2009-02-04T10:37:00.005Z

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

2009-01-29T14:14:00.011Z

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.

2009-01-20T12:17:00.007Z

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.)

2009-01-11T11:46:00.005Z

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.

2009-01-06T21:26:00.003Z

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.

2008-12-29T12:32:00.005Z

Woman recovered, then given away - We’ll always have Paris

Of course I need to delay completing my post on Before Sunrise / Sunset (after all, Linklater took 9 years to complete the romance between Jesse and Celine, so I have plenty of scope), which would take us to Paris. So I thought I’d ponder on a classic variation on this regret-renunciation-remembrance = romance thread: Casablanca.

Too obvious? Forgive me, but I’m just back from Morocco (albeit Essaouira), where I went to escape the horror of Christmas, and to restore the true meaning of the festival with a bit of sun worship. And while I was there I read Tahir Shah’s book The Caliph’s House, about his adventures living in the city where the film is supposedly set. He relates encountering a mad American who travels the world watching the film everywhere it is playing, and who declares it the greatest film ever made. Many would agree, as it still tops the favourite film ratings, suggesting it still has the power to stir us 65 years after it was made.

I think this is down to the way it combines the archetypal with the historical and topical. The classic love-triangle is as old as romance itself (as Lancelot and Guinevere at least), but is enriched by the war-time conflict between personal desire and patriotic duty. And as time goes by (sorry), that period itself, and certainly its setting in what was once the Art Deco jewel of French North Africa, have acquired their own Romantic veneer as an epoch to sigh after. Who wouldn’t wish to walk into that particular gin joint, swathed in stark film noir ambiance, and hear the tinkle of that piano, just about to play that song? Memory, melancholy, a certain melody, borders, crossroads, danger, the exotic orient - the film is a veritable tagine of Romance, spiced with all its essential ingredients. OK, on the ‘oriental’ side it may be, as Tahir Shah points out, a farrago of Hollywood fantasy of old Arabia, whereas ‘the Casablanca of the time was European from top to toe’. But I’m dealing with romance here, not reality, and exaggeration and fantasy are the life blood of this concept, and add to the film’s enduring appeal.

I’m not going to just witter on about the film, or about orientalism and Romance, as I’m qualified to do neither. I’m interested in that line, ‘We’ll always have Paris’ muttered while an engine roars in anticipation of departure. This brings us to the next leg of our journey started by faint-hearted Hardy not getting off that train. ‘We’ll always have Paris”. Always is a tricky concept in the Romance repertoire. This is what Wilde’s Lord Henry has to say about it In Dorian Gray: “Always!. That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever”. Yet we’re not talking about the happy-ever-after always of clinging anticipation, but of fond recollection. The past is redeemed by Ilsa walking into that gin joint and restoring their memories of Paris.

Here we are again, at the crossroads of Romance, and an engine is already running. Rick reasons that Ilsa should get on that plane along similar lines to Jesse suggesting Celine get off that train - the projected anticipation of regret. But with a difference here. “If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” Wise-cracking cynical Americans moulding the destinies of dreamy Europeans are evidently not all alike. There’s a war on, don’t you know, and so personal Romance is commandeered for a Greater Good. The Underground has its hero, Rick has his redemption, and they will Always have their memories. And not just of anywhere - of PARIS no less...

2008-12-15T21:20:00.013Z

Woman found then lost...

Girls on trains, radiant strangers, the romance of regret? Of course, there are exceptions, and rules (like hearts) are there to be broken.

‘Happy ever after’ is the approved romance ending, but does it spell the end of romance? This is the paradox that delightful diptych ‘Before Sunrise / Sunset’ explores so beautifully and plausibly, making them such devastatingly ‘romantic’ films, when manipulative drivel like ‘Love Actually’, actually is not*

Before Sunrise (1995), Boy meets girl on a train. She (French, shy, dreamy) is continuing on to Paris; he (American, worldly-wise, confident) must get off at Vienna to catch a morning flight back home. They chat, they connect, and as the train pulls into Vienna, he moves into familiar territory: "If I don’t ask you this, it’ll haunt me for the rest of my life". Ah, he’s read the poems, heard the songs. No faint heart in a railway station he, he asks her to leave the train with him, and walk around Vienna for the evening. His reasoning and audacity are faultless:

“Jump ahead 10-20 years from now, you’re married, but it just doesn’t have the energy it once had. … and you start to think about all those guys you've met, and start to wonder what it would’ve been like if you’d picked up with any of them. Well. I’m one of those guys. Think of it as time travel… This could be doing a gigantic favour to you and your future husband, showing you you didn’t miss out on anything. I’m just as much a loser as he is, and you’re really happy”.

This is how it starts, and goes on, somehow managing to be both romantic – impetuous, dreamy, idealistic –; and realistic - cynical, wary and knowing – at the same time. The dialogue (and the film is mostly dialogue), threads a swaying tight rope across the chasm dividing romance and realism, and they walk it engagingly together.

Defying convention, defying genre, it earns the right to romanticism, by being so very honest. One meaning of ‘Romance’, after all, when used as a verb is to fib, or at least to exaggerate. ‘Romancing’ before it was used to rhyme with ‘dancing’ in throwaway pop, meant telling porkies. "Do you know anyone in a happy relationship?" Celine asks. ""yeah, but I think they lie a lot". But, there’s none of that here. Principally because they only have that one night together. Stolen from time – “officially we shouldn’t be here”. So happy every after (the biggest fib of romance), isn’t an option, and is summarily dismissed: “Why do people believe relationships are supposed to last for ever? Yeah it’s stupid”.

And so they fall into romance by resisting it through reason. We’re rational adults, they keep assuring each other, trying to convince themselves of the logic of not attempting to stay in touch. The more honest (ie unromantic) they are, the more they earn the right to what they resist. They rub reality against the debased coinage of romance, against all its clichés and conventions, they rub it so hard it eventually shines through.

But at their back they always hear Time’s winged Chariot (the 9.30 Austria Airlines flight to America) hurrying near. And so they make love, under the stars, and finally make a pact with their cold reasoning. They will not exchange numbers or addresses (not even surnames), so none of that happy-ever-after stuff is even considered. They refused to be hoodwinked by false hope. Instead they will meet in exactly six months. Time, cheated, travelled through, deferred, will have his due. “O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time”. TBC (of course).

*Oh, that ‘actually’, the smug, so-very English embarrassed understatement, qualifying the tawdry, vulgar passionate ‘Love’ and sanitising it into Home Counties idiom: ‘I did go to a public school, quite a famous one, Actually’; ‘Actually, I was hoping to get into TV/publishing/film, and was wondering if you knew of any openings, yes my father was x, I suppose the name gives it away’; ‘I don’t Actually know anything about it, but I’m sure I’ll do a splendid job’…Actually, I am bitter, and I haven’t actually seen Love Actually, but that snivelling caval of posh luvvies is sufficient demerit in my book.

2008-12-07T21:55:00.009Z

Woman not yet found (Faintheart at a tube station)

Every time I pass by Holborn tube station I recall a (non-)incident from nearly 8 years ago. I was living in Notting Hill, and working just off High Holborn, and so took the Central Line each day. One morning I was stood next to a very cute young lady in the crowded carraige. She was stylish, quite quirky, and therefore astonishingly alluring. I tried hard to maintain the glassy composure of the commuter, focusing on a spot just past her cute ear as I spun my hopeless dreams the whole journey through.

We both got off at Holborn, and she spoke to me. This is unheard of both in London commuter etiquette, and doubly so in my experience of cute strangers. But she was an Australian, so can be forgiven such outrages. She usually took another tube line, which was down that day, and so didn't know how to get from Holborn to her work at Somerset House (the Tax Office, then). Did I know the way? There were two ways she could have got there. The first was to go down Kingsway to Aldwych, turn right onto the Strand and then cross over to Waterloo Bridge; the second was to go down Kingsway to Aldwych, turn right onto the Strand and then cross over to Waterloo Bridge, but with me walking with her to show her the way, as it’s really quite tricky, and it was a Friday, so being a little late wouldn’t hurt, especially if I got to find out more about the charming, and very cute green eyed, red (dyed) haired young lady who also lived in Notting Hill (now, there's a thing), and was on a sabbatical to the Inland Revenue. But, of course, I gave her the WRONG directions. Ie. The first version.

The second version didn’t occur to me until after she had thanked me, given me, I swear, a rather quizzical look, and set off alone down Kingsway. That look still haunts me, and is conjured up whenever I pass Holborn Tube Station. I sometimes glance to see if she is still standing there, with that look, so she can say: what took you, it’s only been 8 years? Her name I didn’t get. Can I confess, I googled Somerset + House + Australian + Sabbatical + accountant, in various combinations? I even considered phoning, if I could think up a plausible lie for needing to talk to a girl, who I could only describe as ‘cute’, with ‘lovely green eyes’. I even hung around Somerset House once or twice in my lunch hours that summer, but to no avail. She was gone.

I think I knew Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘Faintheart in a Railway Train’ (1922) then; but

it came to me fittingly late.

At nine in the morning there passed a church,

At ten there passed me by the sea,

At twelve a town of smoke and smirch,

At two a forest of oak and birch,

And then, on a platform, she:

A radiant stranger, who saw not me.

I queried, "Get out to her do I dare?"

But I kept my seat in my search for a plea,

And the wheels moved on.

O could it but be

That I had alighted there!

Yes, Thomas. You, me and no doubt countless others before and since. The Divine Comedy's 'Commuter Love' answers the plea from 1998.

Freezing Monday morning

She is waiting for her train to come

I brush past her, smell her perfume

Watch her hair move as she turns to go

She doesn't know I exist

I'm gonna keep it like this

I'm not gonna take any risks this time.

'This time', the most resonant phrase in the song, bespeaking painful experience. Between these two literary non-events are the innumerable brave hearted fools, who have rushed in, taken those ‘risks', and been rewarded with what they prayed for. Instead, I had my adventure, and like Hardy and Hannon, still have those dreams . Better to replay that green-eyed quizzical look, than the look of contempt she would no doubt have thrown me frequently later when life had intervened and frayed the fragile twine of my dream-spun desire*.

*It is an old story. As old as love itself. Petrarch, one of the inventors of poetic love, saw his beloved Laura on the steps of a church in Avignon on Good Friday, 1327. And that was it, she was married, he was smitten, and simply wrote her a lot of sonnets. Told Laura he loved her, and in so doing perfected the sonnet form. He never bedded or wedded her, but he was devastated by one look, and the love lyric would never be the same again.

2008-12-02T21:10:00.006Z

This is a weeping song(s)

I'm launching rather prematurely into a topic I'm destined to obsess over in this blog. This will be the first of many postings on the pleasure of melancholy music, or weeping songs as the gentleman to my left calls them. I pre-empt a more planned rumination on this subject because I went to see Nick Cave live a few nights ago, and he is much on my mind. I thought I'd simply get off my chest something that's been bugging me for years about Cave. How to reconcile the two sides of Nick Cave's art - the tender lyricist of some of the most heart-rending reflections on lost love, and, a barn-storming, hell-raising, fire-and-brimstone, demonic preacher of twisted despair, damnation or redemption.

Nick Cave generally rocks. He came from rock - a cauldron of punk-goth-Cramps noise making in his earliest days as The Birthday Party from down under, and he seems determined to return to hell in his latest handcart, the rather noisy Grinderman venture. His latest studio albums, and also his live performances favour the rock side of things, and are very very noisy. He shouts, he struts (he even did a crowd dive the other night, something I had never seen him do before, and which a 50 year old should think twice about), and he and the band have a wail of a time kicking up an aural rumpus, and the fans love it too. Now, that might be stating the bleeding obvious to long-standing Cave fans, or serious musos, and simply describing what he has always been about, with a possible, and in their mind, rather regrettable period around 97-01, when he did a lot of ballads and took the tempo and noise right down. The thing is, that's when I got into him, and that's the Cave I know and love and need. I'm not a big rock or noisy rumpus fan (vide my Lexicon of Love posting), and so for me this middle period was at his best, albeit unhappiest.

The Nick Cave of The Boatman's Call, and No More Shall We Part, who was getting over a very messy break up with P J Harvey, and poured a lot of his grief - both general and specific - into his piano and typewriter. In 1999, the first time I went to see him at the Royal Festival Hall, he did nearly all ballads from The Boatman's Call (with a few of the old hell-raisers for the encore just to please the crowd and give his band of hardened rockers The Bad Seeds something to justify their bus fares), and I thought I had died and gone to hell - a happy hell of melodic misery. But this seems impossible now. When he throws the occasional ballad into his live shows now, it seems out of place, and the audience doesn't know what to do with it. I do, I stand there with wet eyes wishing it was all like this, that his heart was still broken, and he would carry on penning what he once called 'lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man'. He was describing what all love songs should be, and he was talking in 1999, when his certainly were back then.

But he's happily married, living by the seaside now with wife and kids, and no longer drowning but waving. I miss the misery. Songs like 'People they ain't no good' (the title says it all); 'Brompton Oratory', and 'Love Letter'. The last I've even written about in a chapter I wrote about love and love songs in a book I wrote about sunshine (about the weather imagery in the song), but I haven't exhausted it, and I haven't stopped playing it. And I didn't stop playing these slices of eloquent anguish through a very rocky emotional patch I went through just as I discovered Mr Cave. They are so entwined with my emotional memories of a messy break up of my own back then that they now have a near Pavlovian potency, inducing a second-hand heartache when the actual wounds have healed. These songs are aural gin for me. Best mixed with tears. And that's why I needed him then, and why I bitterly resent him now howling away and waving to me from the top deck of the happy bus of rock.*

*I confess I'm guilty of absurd simplification here, as any Nick Cave fan would testify. The man released an album called Murder Ballads after all, and so the 2 sides - the howling hell-raiser and the heart-break balladeer - are of the same highly original coin. It comes down to what I would like to call 'eloquent anguish', which Mr Cave, howling or weeping, has by the bucket load. I do enjoy many of his barn-stormers (The Mercy Seat, Papa Won't Leave you Henry, Yes, We Have No Bananas), when he serves them up, but I'm just making a rather sulky point that I wish he wasn't so happy now. His gain has been music's loss in my view, and I'm still standing here needing lifelines to the galaxies.

2008-11-25T21:31:00.016Z

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.

2008-11-22T19:02:00.010Z

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...

2008-11-11T19:22:00.006Z

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?

2008-11-04T20:36:00.003Z

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....