Download: Sock It To Me – Derrek Harriott (mp3)

So if you’re as cream-crackered and stressed as I am at the moment you might need a little something to perk you up. You’d have to be dead not to get a jolt from this.

I’ll try and post some actual writing soon, I’m a bit low on energy at the moment. Maybe I need to buy more records.

What I felt even more strongly was a pang for what was missing, all the records I’d sold over the years, particularly at one point in the late-90s when I was temporarily back in London flat broke and flogged some of my most valuable ones. It was like several chapters in my life story were missing. Who, I wonder, now has the copy of “You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever” that my first serious girlfriend bought me? And what had happened to Queen’s “Sheer Heart Attack” album? Not the rarest record in the world by any means but it was the first album I ever bought. Surely I wouldn’t have sold that too? That one really bothered me, a big milestone in my life and the evidence is gone.

Records are vulnerable, fragile things, the way they can scratch and warp gives them a human quality that cold, perfect CDs lack, you can feel the patina of age on a vinyl album just as much as you can a human face. But now with even the CD becoming obsolete it seems like music formats are shrinking out of existence, from twelve inches of vinyl to little silver discs to… well, nothing really, a sequence of digital ones and zeroes downloaded off the web with all the tangible reality of a cloud. It’s like music stripped of all the lovely touchy-feely pleasures, there’s no there there and how can you be that emotionally invested in something that doesn’t exist? I have a whopping 45GB of mp3 files on my computer but if they all got deleted tomorrow it would be a pain in the arse but I wouldn’t be all that upset about it because I could just replace them with ones that were literally exactly the same. You can’t say the same about records, I’ve been slowly replacing some of the ones I either sold or lost over the years (the ones that aren’t too expensive anyway) but the “new” copy will never be that one, the one I bought when I was 16 with the scratch on the last track I sometimes still hear in my brain even when I listen to a pristine mp3 of the same song.

So in twenty or thirty years time will someone who is a teenager now relate to their mp3 collection the way I do my records even though it just a track name on a glowing screen, still exactly the same as the day they downloaded it with no physical substance or texture they can hold, feel or smell? Will they get all sentimental about their beaten-up old iPod instead? I have no idea, I’m just one of those sad old gits with an emotional attachment to objects, particularly the circular black plastic kind.

Of course, one drawback of vinyl is that you can’t download it off the internet, it’s too big to fit down the tubes. So an mp3 will have to do.

Download: Some Of Them Are Old – Brian Eno (mp3)
Buy: “Here Come The Warm Jets” (album)

Alec: We know we really love each other. That’s true. That’s all that really matters.
Laura: It isn’t all that really matters. Other things matter too. Self-respect matters, and decency.

No one has ever asked me about the picture in the banner at the top of this page so I assume everyone knows it comes from the 1945 film Brief Encounter — and those that didn’t know couldn’t care less what it was. I grew up knowing that film by heart, it was one of those old British movies full of plummy voices, stiff upper lips and dreary tea rooms which the BBC used to show all the time on Sunday afternoons (along with Genevieve, The Way To The Stars, and The Dam Busters) and it’s atmosphere of monochrome miserablism was perfectly suited to that post-lunch rainy Sunday dead zone where there was nothing better to do than sit in front of the fire and watch a great old movie.

The picture of England these films painted was of a genteel and polite country which probably only exists today in the minds of ageing Daily Mail readers. It was a place of deference and impeccable manners where the last thing anyone wants to do is cause a scene or, God forbid, get all emotional about something. It’s a cliché about us English that we’re all a bit reserved and repressed and in Brief Encounter Alec and Laura are like the poster children for stiff English formality, living in a buttoned-up world of afternoon tea and polite chat about trains and library books. When they fall in love it threatens to tear that tidy world apart and they’re thrown into a panic by it, Laura in particular is completely discombobulated by her sudden feelings — “I’ve fallen in love. I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” — and it’s heartbreaking to see them try to be sensible and frightfully British about something as irrational and powerful as love.

Before she meets Alec, Laura’s life has all the flavour and excitement of a stale British Rail ham sandwich, with a house in the suburbs and a dull husband who looks like he probably goes to bed in the pinstriped suit he wears while doing The Times’ crossword puzzle in front of the fire every night. It’s the sort of dreary suburban trap that would later be made out to be a soul-destroying hellhole to be escaped at all costs, but Laura is a sensible middle-class housewife and people like her just don’t run off with a handsome doctor. Passion and romance might be alright for the French, but she’s British! So she does the “decent” thing and gives up Alec even though it tears her apart. At the end of the film it looks like she’ll never be happy again, but you know that she’ll pull herself together, keep it all bottled up and soldier on making the best of things, hiding her misery behind a polite English exterior. Order must be preserved, emotions must be kept in check, or England and the Empire will crumble.

It’s easy to mock (and parody) their frightfully proper manners and old-fashioned English reserve in general, especially in this post-1960s era when we’re told it’s bad to bottle your feelings up and to let it all hang out, man. But really, don’t you wish more people these days would resist the urge to share the almost pornographic details of their inner selves in public and keep the lid on a bit more? And just because the “stuffy” Brit isn’t inclined to swing naked from the emotional chandelier doesn’t mean they have no feelings, we just find it a little vulgar and juvenile to advertise them to the world in great big neon letters* which is why we get embarrassed in the presence of loud Americans who will insist on talking about their bloody feelings and hugging you all the time. That’s when we start looking at our shoes and talking about the weather.

Download: Love Hurts – The Everly Brothers (mp3)
Download: I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You – Tom Waits (mp3)
Download: Show Some Emotion – Joan Armatrading (mp3)

*Or we used to, I’m sure I’m not the only one who found the national crying jag that took place after the death of Princess Diana a little unseemly at times, especially when people started demanding that the Queen open her heart and let us all cry on her shoulder too as if she was bloody Oprah Winfrey.

These days one doesn’t usually associate Fleetwood Mac with mopey existential angst but way back when they were led by troubled acid casualty/genius guitarist Peter Green they produced this achingly sad and lonely gem which it isn’t too difficult to imagine Morrissey singing (I have a lot of songs like that here), especially the line: “there’s no one I’d rather be, but I just wish that I’d never been born”

PS: Normal service will be resumed shortly.

The Clientele always remind me of London, not just because they’re from there (though curiously I think they’re more popular in the States) but their records sound drenched in fog and drizzle with a blurry, impressionistic quality which evokes those fleeting moments that are so hazy and intangible they barely qualify as memories but still give you a nostalgic ache. Listening to them makes me think of shimmering reflections in the inky black pavement after a rainstorm, the half-light inside a smoky pub during the day, steamed-up cafe windows, clouds hanging low in a slate gray sky, a beautiful girl seen for only a second on a crowded tube train who you’ll think about all day, the musty smell of a tiny second-hand bookstore, a neon sign flickering above a doorway in a dark alley, dust particles dancing in shafts of sunlight streaming through net curtains, long shadows cast by the trees in Hyde Park at the end of a languid summers day, Chelsea Bridge all lit up at night seen from inside a train crossing the Thames into Victoria Station.

The lyrics of “Bicycles” alone are enough to set me adrift on memory bliss:

Bicycles have drifted through these leaves still wet
with rain
August now has faded in the silence of the rain
I remember one Sunday, riding in through the gate
Three balloons in a white sky, 1978

Playgrounds where we spent our days
Return within our dreams
What it is, it isn’t up to me
I’ve been driving in my car
On Sunday in the rain
And my life is slipping so away

But they sound even better when they sing them…

Download: Bicycles – The Clientele (mp3)
Buy: “Suburban Light” (album)

1) I’m too busy
2) I’m too lazy
3) What I’m writing is a load of bollocks anyway
4) I’m having an existential blogging crisis and can’t see the point
5) I’ve lost my mojo

What do you think, Graham?

Download: Don’t Ask Me Questions – Graham Parker & The Rumour (mp3)

You don’t hear this track much these days, do you? Not that I listen to the radio anymore, just a feeling I have that it’s sort of slipped off the radar. Whatever, a really great single from 1978.

In the meantime I’ve done some blog housekeeping and added a whole bunch of new links at the right. I especially like Another Nickel In The Machine which is the sort of blog I’d give my left nut to be able to write if I only could find the time, wasn’t so lazy etc. etc.

“This is where England most truly excels: in all the characterful shabbiness of its drizzled parks, soiled launderettes, frayed tailors, abject chemists, sparse barbers, bare foyers, dun pubs, weary Legion halls… and cowed solitary cafes.”
Britannia Moribundia

One of my favourite Simon & Garfunkel songs is “America” especially the part where it builds up to a crescendo and they sing “Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America” which just sounds incredibly romantic and makes you want to jump into an open-top Chevy and drive off into the sunset looking for your dreams. The thing is, I’ve driven on the New Jersey Turnpike and it’s just a pot-holed, congested stretch of motorway the same as any other, the only thing I saw people looking for on it was the right exit. But even knowing that the line still sounds wonderful and makes my heart sigh.

But if the song was set in England and they sang “counting the cars on the North Circular” instead it just wouldn’t have the same effect, would it? Whatever the truth is, Americans romanticize their reality in a way that we don’t. When you think about Route 66 it isn’t just some road that goes to California, it’s a life-changing journey of freedom and discovery. But when Billy Bragg uses the same tune to take the “A13 Trunk Road To The Sea” the English locations just sound dismal and pathetic in comparison — which I guess is the point of the song, but it’s still sad that it is funny. Has anyone ever had the urge to quit their job, hit the road, and go chase their dreams in Shoeburyness? The one English “road” song I know that tries for that classic American sense of freedom is the lovely “Driving Away From Home” by It’s Immaterial which almost manages to make English motorways sound romantic, but even they can’t resist being terribly British at the end and burst their own rose-tinted bubble by singing “I mean, after all, it’s just a road.”

Download: America – Simon & Garfunkel (mp3)
Download: Driving Away From Home – It’s Immaterial (mp3)

The truth is, we (Brits, that is) don’t look at life and see endless bright horizons and dream big dreams, we’re a gloomy, glass-half-empty kind of people and who find idealistic American positivity a little embarrassing and phony. Americans, bless their hearts, do still say things like “you can be anything you want to be” and believe it (despite evidence to the contrary) because they’re happily unburdened by history while we’ve had way too much of it and frankly can’t work up the enthusiasm for anything anymore as a result. We built an empire and won a bunch of wars and now we just want to put our feet up and enjoy England’s plucky failures.

Our pop laureates prefer to pick at the scabs of England than construct some romantic fantasy, looking at the dirt under the carpet and the gloom behind the net curtains, singing about miserable people living on dead end streets waiting in the rain for a bus that never comes. So while Bruce Springsteen makes the seaside resort of Asbury Park seem like some mythological eden of golden boulevards teeming with a rich tapestry of life, the English equivalent (Southend maybe?) only makes you think of grey, rainy Bank Holidays and Morrissey’s coastal town they forgot to close down. The kids in Brucie’s Little Eden might be working class good-for-nothings but he still makes them sound movie-star glamourous compared to the feral adolescents in a song like Pulp’s “Joyriders” — if Springsteen wrote that he’d give them romantic nicknames and treat nicking cars as some metaphor for glorious youthful rebellion. In Jarvis Cocker’s hands they’re just petty nihilistic criminals “so thick we can’t think of anything but shit, sleep and drink.”

Download: 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) – Bruce Springsteen (mp3)
Download: Joyriders – Pulp (mp3)

These days the stubborn refusal to “have a nice day” feels like a defiant poke in the eye of today’s noisy, amped-up consumer culture (created by America, of course) which bangs you over the head with its global franchises, useless gadgets, trashy television, and blinged-up celebrities. In the face of that, being miserable old bastards may be the last thing we have to hold on to that’s truly ours.

Download: We’ll Let You Know – Morrissey (mp3)