Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues

Twenty Years of Writing About Film, Music and Books

Nick Hornby

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

A member of Penguin Group (USA)

2013

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

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Copyright © 2013 by Nick Hornby

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Contents

Introduction

My Patron

Abbey Road

Pain in My Heart

‘You Send Me’

A Fan’s Notes

Revolution in the Head

Internet Music

The Crying Game

Marah

A Stranger in a Strange Land

The West Wing

An Education

A Sundance Diary (2009)

Kidding Around

The Goons

Wodehouse

Scenes from Provincial Life

Ideas for Books

Life Goes On: Richard Billingham

Humphrey Ocean

London

Sources

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nick Hornby is the author of six internationally bestselling novels (High Fidelity, About a Boy, How to be Good, A Long Way Down, Slam and Juliet, Naked) and a number of works of acclaimed non-fiction: Fever Pitch, 31 Songs, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree and Stuff I’ve Been Reading, as well as two other Penguin Special ebooks: Pray and Fan Mail. He lives in Highbury, north London.

Introduction

For the first five years or so of my writing career, I reviewed books, hundreds of them. Mostly, the books weren’t great, because writers in the first five years of their career aren’t often given great books to review, and many of them are now out of print. You really wouldn’t want to read these reviews now. A couple of non-fiction reviews are included in this collection because you might be interested in the subject matter – the Beatles, Jerry Wexler, children’s games – but most of the writing I did back then could only really be of interest to somebody writing a thesis on British and American first and second novels of the 1990s. Later, when my books and films came out, I wrote pieces to support their release, but most of those aren’t worth reprinting here, either. Their main purpose, of course, was to drive people towards bookshops and cinemas, and it would seem a bit of a cheek to present them to you now as journalism that has survived the test of time. It is, in fact, dispiriting to realize, when trawling through cuttings, just how many words and how much of one’s time has been spent trying to flog something, or to get people to contribute to one of the charities one is involved with. I’m hoping this is true for a lot of writers, hence the impersonal pronoun, and not just a complaint by someone who has been too easily manipulated by publicists.

Anyway, this collection represents the best of what’s left, pieces written for fun, or because I felt I had things to say and time to say them in, or because the commissions were unusual and imaginative, or because (in the case of the piece written about the Oscars for Empire magazine) I was being asked to go somewhere I’d never been. One or two of the pieces I’m proudest of have never been published before, or at least published in places you might not know about. The piece about the Goons was written for Steve van Zandt’s terrific-sounding forty-chapter history of rock ’n’ roll, which he wanted to use as a basis for a high-school curriculum; at the time of writing, I don’t know what’s happened to it, or whether the Goons will make the cut. I was asked to write about Abbey Road for a brochure published by the studio to commemorate some anniversary or another. The piece about London was written relatively recently, for the beautiful and smart Boat magazine. Other pieces were for magazines that people don’t see in the UK (Believer, for example), or for books that weren’t published here. I only wish there were more of them.

NH, London, June 2013

My Patron

In 1988, I was thirty-one years old. I was a writer in all the senses that count, apart from one: I hadn’t sold a thing, and there seemed to be no real prospect of me selling anything, either. I was working as a teacher in a language school in Soho, London; it was, I feared, exactly the sort of job you drifted into at that age, when you had no real chance of doing the work you really wanted to do. I was afraid of the future – of telling younger colleagues in the year 1999 or 2009, aged forty-two or fifty-two, that I was a writer, but a writer whose stuff never got made or published. In the kinds of jobs I had been doing, I met people like that all the time: writers, actors, the occasional ancient musician. They scared me. Meanwhile, the friends I had made at university were all on a career ladder. They were academics or diplomats or journalists or accountants, and they were starting to make money. When I arranged to meet them, I was embarrassed by my own lack of advancement – embarrassed, too, that evenings out couldn’t involve food, because restaurants were too expensive.

If someone had told me that I was a couple of years away from being given a book contract that would change my life, then of course I’d have been happy enough to sit and wait it out. (And I’d have been amazed, too. I’d hardly written a paragraph of prose – all my efforts hitherto had gone into scripts, terrible things intended for the movies but which could just as easily have been performed on the radio, consisting as they did of a handful of conversations between two people.) But I didn’t know that. My suspicion was that I was kidding myself, and that the smart thing to do would be to give up the writing and find myself a proper teaching job, if only so that I could pay for my own pizza sometimes.

The principal of the language school was a few years older than me, a smart, dry, interesting man who, years later, for reasons too involved to explain here, became my psychoanalyst, a job he has held down to this day. He was still training for the shrinkhood back then, although it seemed entirely indicative of our respective prospects that his make-do, pay-the-way job was as a principal of a school, and mine was part-time, non-contract teacher. One day he offered me a little bit of extra work at the offices of a large Asian trading company that had just set up in London. ‘They’ll pay well,’ he told me, and he was right: they offered me forty pounds for two hours’ teaching a week, an amount that probably amounted to about a quarter of my weekly wage.

I nearly didn’t take the job. They wanted me to work on Saturday mornings, and I couldn’t think of anything worse. (That is almost certainly true, I now realize. I’ve learned very little over the last couple of decades, but I do now know, regrettably, that there are worse things than setting an alarm clock on a weekend.) I played five-a-side football on Saturday mornings, I explained. They asked me what time the game took place, and I told them eleven o’clock, and they laughed – there was no scheduling clash as far as they were concerned. They wanted me in at eight, before their day’s work started. (This was the first thing I learned about them: they worked extraordinarily hard, these young Korean sales executives, much harder than anyone in England. Their contracted hours were 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., Monday to Friday, and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday. When the recession kicked in, a couple of years later, they were told to combat it by working Sundays, too. But those were just the contracted hours. Anyone with any ambition couldn’t be seen knocking off at eight, just as my friends with proper jobs couldn’t leave the office at five.)

I really, really didn’t want to work at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. Friday nights were always late – my friends and I would often go to a cheap but utterly great nightclub in Kentish Town, the Locomotion, until two or three in the morning. (The music they played at the Locomotion I borrowed wholesale for the club that my narrator Rob ran in my first novel, High Fidelity.) And then there was the five-a-side, and then, every other Saturday, my team Arsenal played at home, and even watching football was tiring in those days: you stood, for two and a half hours, on concrete terraces, buffeted by fellow fans. But forty quid …

So I took it, and walked into their offices in Holborn still blinded by sleep and sometimes reeking of booze. I used to prepare a little bit, but mostly, I was told, they wanted conversation, so I would take in photocopied articles from the Guardian and the Economist, and sometimes we would get around to reading them, studying the vocabulary, talking about the pieces and the week’s news. More often than not, though, the lessons didn’t happen in the way I planned them, and sometimes they didn’t happen at all. Most of them were too busy, at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning, to learn English, and the ones that did turn up needed urgent help with something practical – a letter to a solicitor about a patent or a terminated contract or something else I didn’t really understand. I presumed that they needed my help because the local staff didn’t and wouldn’t work on a Saturday morning, but later on I discovered that there wasn’t really a local staff. The company had so recently arrived it hadn’t yet really got around to employing local staff.

After a few weeks of being asked about planning permission and the local council and the prevailing economic weather, an idea began to form. What if I offered my services on a regular part-time basis? Like, what if I came in every afternoon and helped them with anything that was going on, anything where it was easier to be English than Korean? My nationality was my main talent, as far as they were concerned, and I could see that, in this place, at that time in the company’s history, my main talent had an economic value. I went to see one of the managers, gave an oral version of the job description, and got offered a job on the spot.

They asked me how much money I would want. I’d actually thought about this. My room-mate was a management accountant, and he was paid what seemed to me to be a preposterous amount of money. I told them that I’d work every afternoon for half the salary he earned. They didn’t even blink. And if I had to isolate the single most important moment in my writing career, then that would have to rank in the top two or three. The eternal, morale-sapping question of how to earn money while writing had been answered, without any apparent thought on the part of the party who had the money. And I did write, too: I was disciplined about it. The first story I ever sold was written in the mornings I had available, and the first chapters of my first book, and a lot of book reviews in newspapers … I had a patron, and my patron paid for all that. But between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., I was an Asian yuppie. On the tube home, I could feel the ulcers developing, and I know that if I’d been asked to work in the mornings, leaving the afternoons free for writing, I’d just have put a cold flannel over my face and lain down on the floor of a darkened room. No stories or reviews or early chapters would ever have been written.

On the first afternoon, I sat down at the desk that had been found for me, and started to go through the day’s newspapers. I was told to photocopy anything that might be of professional interest and fax it to Head Office. I was happy. This seemed like the sort of job an English graduate who wanted to write should be doing – something that involved literacy, nothing too stressful, an entirely appropriate job for a would-be man of letters who needed money but didn’t want to break sweat getting hold of it. After a pleasant hour or so reading the sports pages and idly circling an article about inflation, the company secretary called me in to his office.

‘Mr Nick.’ (They never did drop the mister, in the three years I was there.) ‘We need the plans for the gardens of Hampton Court Palace. Urgently.’

I gaped at him.

‘Why?’

This was an inappropriate question, one that I would eventually learn not to ask. Curiosity was permissible, at some point in the job, but my immediate, knee-jerk ‘Why?’ was a snotty ‘why’: it implied, as I meant it to, that I’d only do the job if someone could provide me with a good reason. It was the ‘why’ of a free-spirited arts graduate, not a company man, and if I was going to do this job I had to be a company man.

I was new, so he answered me anyway.

‘The chairman is building a replica in Seoul.’

This was my introduction to the character and interests of the chairman, a man who I would come to hear a lot about over the next couple of years. As far as I could work out, he owned the company, one of the biggest trading companies in the world. When he spoke, he was heard in a thousand different cities. Sometimes I felt sorry for him, because his whims and musings, it seemed to me, became solidified and real and troublesome when perhaps he didn’t mean them to be. Had he really said ‘I want to build a replica of Hampton Court’? Or had he said, ‘Hey, it would be cool if we had a replica of Hampton Court here,’ and then chuckled, the way that you or I might have done. It never would have occurred to him that he would thus be causing trouble and stress for somebody half a world away.

I took a train down to Hampton Court, which is in the south-west suburbs of London. It was Henry VIII’s favourite palace. Its gardens are famous, a tourist attraction; there’s a maze that has been there for hundreds of years. When I got there, I wandered around aimlessly, asked the person in the gift shop if the plans were for sale, bought a guidebook and went back to the office.

‘I couldn’t find them,’ I said cheerfully. Job done. Well, undone, anyway. But, you know, done as far as I was concerned. Done because it couldn’t be done, so it was now someone else’s problem.

‘Tomorrow, please,’ said the company secretary, with an awful finality.

I should mention at this point that there was no internet back then. There were faxes and telephones, although nobody had a mobile phone. Research was laborious, and invariably involved going somewhere. I should also point out that I am a can’t-do person. If a job is hard, then my philosophy is that it’s best to give up on it straight away, especially if it contains the potential for embarrassment. Writing was fine; you just had to write. Selling the work to anyone – an agent or publisher or producer – was impossible, though, because that might at some point involve a phone call that only a big-head or a show-off or someone with some sense of his own self-worth would make. (I may well have taken the afternoon job because it would allow me to write for ever: I could stick my work in a brown envelope, send it to some people who would never read it and then start on something else without ever having to speak to anyone.) I suddenly saw that this job might have the potential for endless, permanent, excruciating embarrassment. It might involve pestering people, for example – soon enough I would find out that it would involve phoning people who’d hung up on you ten minutes previously – and I could always see the reasons why they wouldn’t want to give me something I was asking for. Maybe this sympathy would be useful in my morning job, but it wasn’t much use to me here. When you’re an Asian company man, the ability to see another person’s point of view was a disadvantage.

In the year or so that had elapsed between my starting the Saturday morning teaching job and the part-time office job, my weekly football had moved to a Monday night slot. People had started having kids, and their weekend time was more precious. Coming out of the underground station, I bumped into one of my teammates, a guy I didn’t know that well. On the walk to the sports hall, I started telling him about my new job. He was mystified by it, probably because I couldn’t really understand it myself.

‘Like, what sort of thing?’

‘Today they asked me to find the plans for the grounds at Hampton Court. I mean …’

‘Oh, we’ve got them,’ he said.

I looked at him. He was serious.

‘I’m a landscape architect,’ he said. ‘We’ve got all that stuff.’

I called into his office on my way to work the following day, and then marched into my office brandishing the photocopies they needed. I was gleeful and somewhat amazed: I’d actually achieved the hard-looking thing they had asked me to achieve. They were politely grateful, but not amazed in the least. This was what they had paid me to do, and I had done it. It was no big deal.

At the beginning of the following week, they asked me to buy an equestrian centre. There was a note on my desk, waiting for me. PLEASE BUY EQUESTRIAN CENTRE, it said. (Why? Because the company was going to be sponsoring their country’s equestrian team at the next Olympics, and England, it had been decided, was the best place for training.)

When you’re a can’t-do kind of a guy, this isn’t a message you want to read. And, as luck would have it, they’d picked another area of life about which I knew literally nothing. I thought of a couple of counties in the southern half of England where, it seemed to me, equestrianism might be going on, phoned a couple of estate agents, asked if they had any equestrian centres for sale. They didn’t. I went back to reading the sports pages and circling the inflation articles.

Two hours later, my boss called me in.

‘Have you found an equestrian centre?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But, you know. Early days.’

This was supposed to be a piece of comical understatement, a joke about how he was expecting an equestrian centre less than one hundred and twenty minutes after asking for one, but it was a joke that could only work if my boss and I shared the same sense of time passing. We didn’t. These were not early days to him. These were late days. I, meanwhile, had privately estimated that this job would take between six months and for ever. My plan was to leave messages with a couple of estate agents every week for a while or as long as I could be bothered, and the word would get out that, in the unlikely event of an equestrian centre coming on the market, we would snap it up. What more could be done?

‘So what will I say to Head Office tonight?’

‘Tonight?’

‘I must give a report tonight.’

This was now officially hilarious. I was working for people who saw no reason why an equestrian centre couldn’t be located and bought in a day. And they had employed me, a man who could only just manage to locate and buy a packet of cigarettes in a day.

‘Tell them we’re scouring the country.’ My boss didn’t know the word ‘scouring’. He was pleased to make its acquaintance, and I went home feeling as though I’d achieved something.

I was learning quite a lot about the company quite quickly, if only because I had to recruit local secretarial staff for the Asian sales managers. Quite often, I had conversations like this:

‘So … you need an assistant?’

‘Yes.’

‘What shall I say you do?’

There would be a long sigh and a shake of the head.

‘Ah, very bad job. Sports shoes and pianos.’

I stared at him, to see if he was pulling my leg, but it wasn’t a leg-pulling kind of place. He really was supposed to sell sports shoes and pianos. His competitors were Nike and Steinway, both at the same time, and he was entirely on his own, although I was about to provide him with a seventeen-year-old assistant. Once I spoke to a man who was running the company advertising agency. He was on his own, too. No creatives, no account directors, no basketball hoops, nothing, apart from a smallish desk in an open-plan office. Head Office was expecting him to poach business from Saatchi, Saatchi, Ogilvy and Mather. Back home, the company sold everything there was to sell, and it had its own chain of department stores to sell it in. The London office was beginning to make me sad: it reminded me of King Lear, robbed of his power, unable to understand quite why the entire country wouldn’t jump to attention when told to. In a way, it was good that they’d employed a can’t-do guy, because it seemed to me that they had to learn that some things can’t be done. The manager running the ad agency was as can-do as you can get, but it wasn’t going to help him.

I phoned my half-brother, who had grown up in a different place to me, and went riding a lot when he was a kid.

‘I have to buy an equestrian centre,’ I told him.

He laughed for a long time. He knew I had no interest in horses, and he also knew that I had absolutely no ability to accomplish anything that men in suits accomplished during their working days. (I wore a cheap suit to work, by the way. A cheap suit, a cheap tie and a cheap shirt.)

‘So what should I do?’ I asked when he had stopped laughing.

‘I don’t know. Phone the guy at the place where I used to ride. He probably knows about other equestrian centres.’

So I phoned him, and he laughed too. But he was laughing, it turned out, because he’d been dreaming for years of receiving a phone call like this one. He was desperate to get rid of his establishment. By the end of the week, my employers had visited him and had an offer accepted. (A few months later, it turned out that they had bought the wrong size of equestrian centre, and they had to sell up and buy another one.)

Once Head Office found out that I was working there, I began to receive faxes addressed to me personally. These faxes were always marked TOP URGENT, and would frequently contain a request that seemed so extraordinarily eccentric that on occasions I began to feel like a Candid Camera victim. WHAT IS DEFINITION OF DRINKING WATER IN UK? WHAT WAS SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND OF WRITER JONATHAN SWIFT? WHAT IS A GOOD SPACE IN A MUSEUM? HOW MUCH DOES AN ORPHANAGE COST? And invariably it turned out that I knew someone who knew something, just as I had done in the Hampton Court case and the equestrian centre panic. Who knew that my friend Sarah was friends with a museum consultant? Who even knew there was such a job? But we employed him, and he wrote us a report on the space that was being offered for sponsorship in a prestigious London museum. (They never read it. They looked at its thirty or forty pages with some alarm, and said to him, ‘Good space? Or bad space?’ There was never time for nuance.)

It was all weird, and stressful, and sort of satisfying, and then, one day, there was a message on my desk that changed everything. PLEASE BUY PEDIGREE DOGS, it said. CRUFTS WINNERS ONLY. Our chairman, I discovered, was one of the most avid dog breeders in South Korea. He loved his pedigree dogs, and he wanted to buy the best. Crufts is our big dog show. In the UK, it’s proverbial. Owners groom their dogs and train them and send them to the hairdressers and put little cardigans on them and teach them to talk and the BBC puts the whole thing on TV, or used to, anyway. Now it probably has its own cable channel.

I am not a big fan of the dog, but then, I hadn’t been a big fan of Jonathan Swift or horses or water or any of the other things I’d been doing. It didn’t matter. It was just another job. I went to the newsagent, bought a magazine about dogs, turned to the classified ads at the back and started ringing around.

This was probably some time in 1990, a couple of years after the Seoul Olympics, and it seemed that people had retained two facts from the entire event. The first was that Ben Johnson took drugs to make him run faster; the other was that Koreans ate dogs. My conversations with owners of Crufts-pedigree puppies went like this:

‘Oh, hi. I’m ringing on behalf of a Korean multinational company, and we’re interested in …’

Click.

‘Oh, hi, I’m ringing on behalf of a multinational company, and we’re interested in buying any puppies you might have for sale.’

‘What’s the name of the company?’

(I told them the name of the company.)

‘Where are they from?’

‘South Korea.’

Click.

These puppies would have cost tens of thousands of pounds. And though the chairman of our company was rich, even he wasn’t going to spend that kind of money on a meal. It never did any good, though, when I tried to explain that. The dog owners were not about to let their teased and blow-dried babies go off to make soup on the other side of the world.

Eventually, after weeks of embarrassment and pestering and calling back people who had just hung up on me, I opened a dialogue with a pedigree dog owner. He wouldn’t sell us a dog; he would, however, be interested in talking to us about what we were prepared to do to outlaw Korean dog-eating. We opened a dialogue with an animal rights organization. The animal rights organization opened a dialogue with our Head Office. Two of my superiors flew over the Arctic in a helicopter to see the work that the animal rights organization was doing in the field of seal-clubbing. (They wanted me to go with them, but I couldn’t see how a trip to the Arctic was going to fit in with my afternoon hours.) Within a few weeks of receiving the initial fax, I was overseeing an intricate web of discourse involving literally hundreds of people, animals and welfare groups. Even my can-do Koreans were daunted, seeing as they all had day jobs as well, selling microchips and sports shoes and pianos.

Finally, after many, many hours of dinners and visits and top-urgent negotiations, we had done enough: we were allowed to buy a puppy. We collected it, put it in a little cage and sent it to Seoul. And the chairman ate it! Just kidding. But the puppy we sent did provoke in him a huge hunger for more and more and more puppies. I was no longer an all-rounder, the guy who took care of the letters and the recruitment and the museum sponsorship; I was the full-time dog purchaser. My despair was real and profound, and ended only by an advance for my first book.

Soon after I’d left, the company stopped trying to sell everything and concentrated on selling electronic goods; within a few years, it had earned itself a household name. It was hard to see that happening while I was there, but then, I missed all the signs: the dedication to somebody else’s cause, the hard work and discipline, the willingness to bury irritation and dissent. I just thought that everyone except me was nuts. In the meantime, my can’t-do spirit remains undimmed, although luckily I work for myself, in the field of the arts, so any tantrums I throw have to be understood, tolerated, indulged.

And, like the business I worked for, South Korea’s economy continues to grow. It grew six per cent last year; it grew even during the global financial crisis. I’m sure there are many reasons why this should be so – most of them beyond the scope of this essay and the comprehension of the person writing it – while economies in the West lurch from crisis to crisis; I’m just as sure that one of the reasons is the recognition that, for a country to do well, its people, even those with education and ambition, have to do stuff they don’t want to do. Meanwhile, my patron paid my rent, while I trained to be someone who could do what he wanted for the rest of his life. For a couple of years back there, afternoons only, I was somebody else.

Abbey Road

Think of Abbey Road, and the first thing that comes to mind is … Actually, even the laziest writer in the world could not hope to complete that sentence and get away with it. Just about everyone of a certain age has one – and only one – association with Abbey Road; even the people that live there probably think of two bare feet, a blue sky and a zebra crossing before they think of their own homes, and to try and draw your attention elsewhere is probably a little like asking you to discuss the books in the Dallas Book Depository. And yet, as this exhibition shows, there is an awful lot of elsewhere to look at. Dirk Bogarde on his own cannot pull you away from the magnetism of Paul’s bare feet, perhaps. But team Bogarde up with Morecambe and Wise, Ella Fitzgerald, Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, Dudley Moore, Richard Burton, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and all the other cultural icons on display here and it’s game on, as the sports commentators say.

The story of a recording studio, you realize when you look at these photographs, must also be the story of twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture, pretty much all of which is dependent on recorded sound. That, after all, is why Sir George Martin, who had an extraordinary talent for realizing the potential of the music that other people wanted to make, became a star in his own right. Even Sir George’s changing appearance tells a pretty interesting story. The young man in the white shirt and tie talking to the comic actor Leslie Phillips has become, by the 1970s, a rock star – handsome, long-haired, wearing a T-shirt, separate (he no longer needs a comedian or a band in the frame to justify a showbiz snapshot); he has the confident cool of a man who knows that his place in the world is now secure. Martin began his career in the BBC’s music library before becoming responsible for EMI’s classical recordings; the Beatles were interested in him partly because he’d spent much of the 1950s producing comedy records for the Goons and Peter Ustinov. Less than ten years later, he was putting vocals on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ through a rotating Leslie speaker, trying to fulfil John Lennon’s wish to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop with four thousand monks chanting in the background. The classical music and the shirt and tie, then the novelty records, then the Beatles, the Dalai Lama and the T-shirt: that’s not just George Martin’s biography. It’s a potted cultural history of post-war England, too.

Students of British entertainment might be forgiven for wondering whether a couple of these shots have been elaborately staged simply for our benefit. Karen Dotrice, whose face is so instantly and eerily familiar from Mary Poppins, sitting next to Frankie Howerd and Harry H. Corbett of Steptoe and Son … I mean, why, other than that they sit together in the brains of those who grew up in the sixties and seventies? (That couldn’t be David Hemmings on the right, there, could it? Or would that be too much?) And of course Paul McCartney would queue up in the canteen with everyone else, looking cheerful and friendly and handsome – and of course he’d be trying to pay for his 16p lunch with a note. (It’s hard to see the denomination. I hope it’s a tenner. Or a fifty, if they had them then! A Beatle should be paying for a 16p lunch with a fifty-pound note!) A few sixties icons couldn’t be here with us today, but sent people along on their behalf. James Bond is represented by John Barry and Shirley Bassey, Taylor by Burton, Pete by Dud, Audrey Hepburn by Stanley Holloway … Only the Stones branch of the family is missing, and that’s probably as it should be. The Stones at Abbey Road wouldn’t have seemed right, and in any case, you really can’t hear Eric and Ernie anywhere in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.

For those who still insist on thinking of Abbey Road as an album rather than a studio, it might be instructive to see that some of the Beatles’ English influences – the Goons, whose surrealism had such an impact on John Lennon, and Noël Coward, an echo of whom can be heard in McCartney’s ditties ‘Her Majesty’ and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ – recorded here, too. The Beatles grafted the Goons and Coward on to Elvis and R&B, and this also is the story of British popular culture in the twentieth century. The very first recording at Abbey Road was of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, played by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Sir Edward Elgar, and just about every session since then has complicated that very straightforward definition of Englishness. Our passion for America, for American movies and for black American music (and without black American music there would have been no white English music worth listening to these last fifty years) has changed everything about us, and it seems entirely appropriate that Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire should have come to NW6. True, they were all here at an advanced stage in their careers, but these were effectively royal visitors, emissaries sent from Hollywood and Harlem to bestow approval on our attempts to create entertainment that was beginning to match the quality of their own.

For the last twenty-five years, Abbey Road has been used for the recording of film scores, and the studio’s technological excellence has marginalized all debate about what flavours a culture; as we have learned, contemporary technology has no real interest in national boundaries. The score for Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first in a long and spectacular list of Abbey Road productions, but we would be hard-pushed to claim that Spielberg’s blockbuster had any kind of a local accent. The most recent photograph here shows a New Zealander enthusiastically drumming on the head of an American composer; the two of them were working in Abbey Road on an adaptation of an English fictional trilogy set in an imaginary world. It was much easier to hear where Ken Dodd came from – but then, most of us would rather watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy twice over, without a toilet break, than listen to Ken Dodd singing ‘Happiness’.

Two of the films being shown during Abbey Road’s festival season, A Hard Day’s Night and Backbeat, will not help to banish the zebra crossing from our collective memory. The second, made exactly thirty years after the first, is about the lives that the four stars of A Hard Day’s Night had been living only a couple of years previously – when they had never heard of Abbey Road, and certainly could never have dreamed that they would be recording a movie soundtrack there. And though in 1964 the Beatles were already staggering under the weight of unprecedented attention, they would surely have been astounded to learn that their spell as a house band in a dingy Hamburg club would one day be fictionalized.

But then, none of this stuff was supposed to have lasted. The three-minute pop songs and the one-line jokes were intended for immediate consumption, but it didn’t happen like that. As it turned out, even the man who supervised the recordings of the pop singers and the comedians would find a permanent place in the story of the foundation of modern Britain. Whoever had the idea of inviting Sir Edward Elgar to launch Abbey Road would have bet any money that it would be the one day, at least, that no one would ever forget; from where a lot of us are standing, that day in the life of the studio now looks like the dustiest and the least interesting of the lot. Very few of us who have a fascination with this place care whether we ever hear ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ again in our lives; the country I’m proudest of wasn’t even a twinkle in Elgar’s eye yet.

Pain in My Heart

There is an old R&B song that goes ‘I’d rather be blind, crippled, and crazy / Somewhere pushing up a daisy / Than to let you break my heart all over again.’ I used to love this song. I would listen to it uncritically, admiring the singer – the late, great and unjustly obscure O. V. Wright, who often seemed to have left his false teeth behind on recording days but who could build up a pretty terrifying head of steam despite the whistling noise – and the arrangement and all the other things that pious white twentysomethings are supposed to admire when they listen to R&B songs. But then an overanalytical and less impressionable friend killed it for me.

‘Why does he have to be blind, crippled, crazy and dead?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, surely just being dead would get the job done. Blind, crippled and crazy? I don’t know. It just seems a bit … de trop.’

I couldn’t believe it. He was poking fun at a soul singer! These guys had more or less invented pain and suffering, and if O. V. Wright claimed that he needed to be a corpse with three handicaps I was willing to take his word for it. Had I been duped? Was it really possible that R&B could be funny – and, what’s more, inadvertently funny?

I dismissed the notion from my mind. R&B was always much too important to me to be funny in that way. (It was allowed to be fun, of course, but fun is different. With fun, you laugh when you’re told to, and not before.) When you are younger, and you have no taste, you are vaguely aware that a lot of the rock music you cherish with a po-faced devotion is going to turn out to be utterly ludicrous one day. But R&B deals with sex, pain, loss, love – things that should remain serious well into your thirties, maybe even beyond.

But then, sometime later, I was listening to Wright singing ‘That’s How Strong My Love Is’ and I experienced a similar sensation. You might not recall Otis Redding’s better-known cover of the song as being particularly hilarious, but in Wright’s hands it became something of a comic tour de force. ‘If I were a fish that had been cast upon the land,’ he laments, ‘I would stay there if you would let me hold your hand.’

Now, even I had to admit that this couplet doesn’t work. The whole fish/hand thing is a real problem – the only mental picture one can paint is desperately surreal, not desperately romantic – and one would have thought that the best way to deal with the line was to get the hell out of it as quickly as possible. But Wright doesn’t see it that way. He compounds the problem by ad-libbing after the first ‘if’ clause (why does he always come unstuck on the conditionals?), so that his version goes like this: ‘If I were a fish – and this is a bad situation to be in – that had been cast upon the land …’ Pointing out the discomfort of being a fish out of water adds little to Wright’s rendition; in fact, this time there is no way around it. Snorting, derisive laughter is the only proper response.

Once I’d recognized the absurdity of this fish lyric, the scales began to fall from my eyes. James Brown’s ‘Good God’s started to get a little grating. Otis Redding’s insistence on slipping the word ‘good’ into Sam Cooke’s gentle, cute ‘Wonderful World’ – ‘Don’t know what a good slide rule is for’, ‘Don’t know much about the good French I took’ – only proved to me that testifying isn’t appropriate to every circumstance. Al Green’s ‘Let’s Get Married’ is a beautiful song that hits all the buttons the title demands – until, that is, the little passage right near the end, when the band gets into a groove and Green starts noodling around. ‘Let’s get married today,’ he pleads. ‘Might as well.’ Might as well? Is that really the best that the No. 1 Lurve Man of the seventies can do? I spent years labouring under the delusion that copying Al Green’s every move would be my passport to sexual Nirvana, but ‘Might as well’ isn’t going to get anyone very far, especially if you don’t much look or sound like Al Green in the first place.

What worried me most about O. V. Wright and his fish, though, was that it could set me on a terrible, dark, gloomy road leading all the way to classical music – which, famously, isn’t funny at all, ever. I’ve still got just about enough joke-free music to keep me going, but if anyone happens to find something funny in any songs by the blues singer Robert Johnson (‘Hellhound on My Trail’, or ‘Stones in My Passway’, which Greil Marcus described as ‘a two-minute image of doom’), please, could you keep it to yourself? I don’t want to hear about it.

‘You Send Me’

Sam Cooke may or may not have been the first soul singer, just as Iggy Pop may or may not have been the first punk, and Joe Turner the first rock ’n’ roll singer, and ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ by Lieutenant Pigeon the first ambient house record. It doesn’t really matter much either way. But Cooke is certainly the first and most uncomplicated example of a gospel singer who went secular to make hits.

This journey from church to chart came to characterize soul music, and several other singers (notably Aretha Franklin) followed Cooke’s trail; but Cooke snubbed the Lord in 1957, before any of them. ‘You Send Me’, released that autumn, was his first commercially successful post-gospel record. (It reached No. 1 in the US chart, and No. 29 here.) If anyone wanted to make a case for ‘You Send Me’ as the first popular soul 45 – and these things are important to some people – you would have to have something pretty recherché up your sleeve to rebut the argument.

The original version of ‘You Send Me’ does not sound much like a soul 45 now. It has a sugary (white) girl chorus, a hopelessly dated MOR quickstep beat, and it ends with a corny, horrible and hilariously bathetic twangy guitar chord. Pat Boone could have used exactly the same arrangement, and nobody would have accused him of coming over all funky. Art Rupe, owner of the R&B-and-gospel label Specialty, was so appalled by the girly chorus that he refused to put the recording out on his label, and the producer, Bumps Blackwell, had to take it elsewhere. ‘You Send Me’ does have charm, and not all of the period variety: its chaste, dreamy sentiment can transport even the most cynical to a place where heartfelt romantic gesture has meaning. Nobody wants to be grown-up and complicated all the time.

In fact, ‘You Send Me’, a Sam Cooke composition, isn’t much of a song at all. Its lyrics consist of just one verse (‘At first I thought it was infatuation / But it’s lasted so very long / And now I find myself wanting / To marry you and take you home’); the rest is an endless repetition of the phrases ‘You send me’, ‘You thrill me’ and ‘Honest you do’. Cooke may have had the original soul voice (only he has managed to combine the sweetness and the grain simultaneously), but he didn’t give himself much to sing with it.

Yet ‘You Send Me’, like ‘Cupid’, ‘Only Sixteen’, ‘Wonderful World’ and so many other Sam Cooke songs, has enjoyed an extraordinary longevity. After he was shot dead in a Los Angeles motel in 1964, Cooke seemed to acquire a whole new set of meanings for the nascent soul-music community, and it was de rigueur for singers to cover at least one Cooke song. (Otis Redding, never a man to do things by halves, had a bash at five.) Cooke assumed an equal, if not identical, importance for those singers who were not black but wished they were: Rod Stewart, Eric Burdon of the Animals and Van Morrison have all shown off their croaks on ‘Bring It On Home’, and Mick Jagger gave ‘Good Times’ a good seeing-to.

It hardly mattered, then, that ‘You Send Me’ was a bit of pop fluff. Aretha Franklin, Mavis Staples and Otis Redding were determined to turn it into a great song even if it killed them, even if they had to rearrange it and rewrite it and slow it down and add lyrics and give it more gravitas than it really deserved.

Redding was the first of this illustrious trio to try his hand, on Pain in My Heart, his first album. His version is a tantalizing hint of what might have been if Bumps Blackwell had taken Cooke to see Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records. (‘He only had to pick up the phone,’ Wexler said years later. ‘Sam Cooke was our kind of singer.’) Redding was backed, not by strings or girly choirs, but by Booker T and the MGs, Atlantic’s brilliant house band; what could they have done with Cooke, one wonders? This is ‘You Send Me’ as straight R&B, and only the horn charts have survived from the original. Unsurprisingly, they no longer fit properly.

When Aretha Franklin recorded ‘You Send Me’ in 1968, she was near the beginning of the longest hot streak in the entire history of pop: between 1967 and 1972 she recorded eleven almost flawless albums for Atlantic on the trot. Her version of the song closes the first side of the album Aretha Now, and has to follow both ‘Think’ and ‘I Say a Little Prayer’; that it holds its own in this sort of company is a measure of its success.

Aretha’s own, piercingly beautiful solo piano intro changes everything: ironically, given the genesis of the song (Cooke was, after all, trying to dump God and make himself a few quid when he wrote it), this is ‘You Send Me’ as straight gospel. The Franklin voice swoops over and under Cooke’s melody line, she double-tracks herself to thrilling effect, and the chorus is provided by the Sweet Inspirations, who feature on all Aretha’s Atlantic work, rather than the wannabe Beverley Sisters who ruined the original; at this point ‘You Send Me’ becomes a great song in spite of itself. Disappointingly, Aretha finds it necessary to tinker with the words: ‘I want you to marry me / Please take me home’, she begs. And this from the woman with the most intimidating voice in soul history, the woman who sang ‘Respect’.

Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers was not quite in Aretha’s league – her deep, rich, treacley voice never allowed her to soar over her material in the same way. But for a while she was the next best thing, and she was lucky enough to record two solo albums for Stax at the end of the sixties, soul’s golden age. (She was also lucky enough to be produced by Steve Cropper, Booker T and the MGs’s guitarist, and by now something of an authority on Sam Cooke cover versions; by 1969 he must have recorded more Sam Cooke songs than Sam Cooke ever did. He almost certainly would have played on the other two Stax/Atlantic versions of ‘You Send Me’, by Percy Sledge and Solomon Burke.) Staples has ‘You Send Me’ down as an agonized, torchy and unfeasibly sexy ballad; she slows it down, and finds all sorts of things hidden in its nooks and crannies.

Fairground Attraction covered it, prettily but unremarkably, on their record Ay Fond Kiss; it also pops up on Steve Miller’s Fly Like an Eagle as an acoustic throwaway, although regrettably we are not allowed to throw it away until Miller has shown us some pretty fancy vocal trills. In the late seventies, Roy Ayers recorded a seven-minute jazz-funk interpretation. Everybody, especially vocalist Carla Vaughan, gets to show off, and the result is as pleasant and unaffecting as all the other seven-minute late seventies jazz-funk ballads.

Only two acts have really had anything new to add. The Everly Brothers recorded the song during one of their frequent, brief and usually disastrous reunions in the eighties. They see the song as a mournful, wistful hymn – not unlike ‘All I Have to Do is Dream’, funnily enough – which doesn’t make much sense, given the explicit celebration of the song, but sounds terrific anyway. On his 1974 album Smiler, Rod Stewart squashed ‘You Send Me’ on to the end of ‘Bring It On Home’, dispensed with its verse, and contented himself with chuckling a lot over a sweeping string arrangement. It works brilliantly; by now, one is used to the idea that this flimsiest of songs, this piece of dated teen-pop corn, can become a raucous, riotous, laddish show-stopper should anyone wish it to be so.

A Fan’s Notes

A thrilling thought struck me as I was reading this book [Rhythm and the Blues by Jerry Wexler and David Ritz]. Jerry Wexler’s publishers might send him a copy of my review, and he might even look at it. Wexler, a white Jew from New York who produced some of the best R&B of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, is one of the most important figures in black music history; there is a remote possibility, then, that I might communicate with someone who has communicated with Otis Redding, Leiber and Stoller, Ray Charles, Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett. It could well be that I will be read by someone who has Aretha Franklin’s telephone number in his Filofax. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that Aretha and I will become pals, but stranger things have happened, and anyway, the Wexler route is the most direct I have ever managed to find … And you think I’m going to block it off by giving him a bad review? Ha!

Wexler would probably understand this kind of perversity – not only because he has been in the music business for more than forty years (he wrote for Billboard before he joined Atlantic Records as a partner in the early 1950s), but because he is, above all, a fan. At the beginning of this book he describes, with an excitement that is obviously difficult to contain even half a century after the event, stumbling upon a cache of mint vintage jazz records in a rummage shop: ‘The more I scrutinized the find, the harder my heart started hammering. Original King Olivers on Vocalion. New Orleans Rhythm Kings on Gennett. The Chocolate Dandies on Okeh. Bennie Moten on Victor. Don Redman on Brunswick. The Rhythmakers on Melotone.’

Pop fans may not recognize the names here – my record collection and the Chocolate Dandies are strangers to each other, although I am sure this is my loss. But they will certainly recognize the racing pulse, the relish for detail (that conjunction of artist and label is vital to the mental health of a pop-music obsessive), and the lascivious exclamation with which Wexler ends his litany: ‘Pay dirt!’ The difference between Wexler and the ordinary fan is that while the latter would have used the value of the find as a conscience-salving justification for spending huge amounts – we know full well that the records will never leave our shelves – Wexler came to an arrangement with a local jazz-store owner and cashed in.

Very few fans can ever claim to have achieved as much as Wexler. Occasionally, somebody like Elton John buys his favourite football club, throws loads of money at it and changes its fortunes, but Wexler’s involvement was much more hands-on; effectively, he moved from the terraces to the manager’s dug-out rather than the boardroom. It was he who invented the phrase ‘rhythm and blues’; it was he who insisted that the Drifters recorded ‘Under the Boardwalk’, and took Aretha Franklin to Memphis to make her albums, thus facilitating post-war pop music’s finest oeuvre. He made Dusty Springfield sing ‘Son of a Preacher Man’; he contributed a line to Aretha’s ‘Do Right Woman’; he even suggested that Wilson Pickett sing, rather than shout, the ‘One-two-three’ count-in to ‘Land of a Thousand Dances’. There are people, and I am one of them, who would die happy if they had made just this last contribution to the world.

These and many other achievements are listed in Rhythm and the Blues; Wexler, it has to be said, is not backward in coming forward. There is no doubt that he did have as great an influence on R&B as he claims here: in Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music, the definitive history of the genre, he receives more entries in the index than anybody, including the artists. Occasionally, though, one finds oneself wondering whether some of these tales might more properly belong in a biography rather than an autobiography. This is why, presumably, David Ritz has been hired as a co-author. Wexler, an intelligent, articulate man who is as happy talking about the superiority of Ring Lardner to Damon Runyon as he is about horn charts and guitar obbligatos, has no need of a ghostwriter. It is Ritz, one imagines, who has interviewed the musicians, former colleagues and members of Wexler’s family.

This does not solve the problem, however, because even though Ritz has collected the quotes, they still protrude alarmingly from the first-person narration. ‘Jerry amazed us,’ says one contributor. ‘When Wexler said he liked my playing, well, that was a big moment in my life,’ remembers another. ‘He never acted like a record exec; he was one of the cats, one of us,’ observes a third. Few of us, I suspect, would have the nerve to include such testimonials in our own memoirs, but showbiz autobiographies are becoming so peculiar that one has long since ceased to be amazed by anything. Johnny Rotten, as D. J. Taylor pointed out, has produced what must be the world’s first ‘authorized’ autobiography; the recent Lennox Lewis autobiography was narrated in the third person by a ghostwriter. Why not, then, an exuberant Wexler hagiography written by the man himself?

To be fair, Wexler makes no attempt to deny his infamous temper tantrums, nor his philandering, nor the fact that he lost touch with pop music in the 1970s – the last third of the book, in which he attempts to explain why he became involved with hopeless, white rock stiffs such as Delaney and Bonnie, is inevitably much duller than the rest, even though he worked with Dylan and the Rolling Stones during this period. But Wexler is an accomplished raconteur, and has a fund of great stories that even the clumsiest hack could not ruin. ‘You won’t believe this, but I want to record you,’ his colleague Ahmet Ertegun told Professor Longhair, after the executive had taken a ferry to the other side of the Mississippi, trudged across an open field to a tiny village because a white taxi driver refused to take him any further, and ventured into a dimly lit shack where the pianist was playing. ‘You won’t believe this, but I just signed with Mercury,’ Longhair replied.

In the end, the main achievement of this book is that it sends you back to the music; I am sure that a significant proportion of whatever measly fee I am paid for this review will end up, via royalties, in the Wexler pocket. Moreover (and this is rare in a book of this kind), the authors manage to reassure you, without trying to do so, that it is OK, admirable even, for an adult to want to listen to pop music; Wexler’s obvious good taste, passion, erudition and grey beard eradicate any cultural insecurity of that kind. Most of all, though, Wexler has shown that fans do not have to spend their lives with their noses pressed up against the window, and we should be as grateful for that as we are for Wilson Pickett’s sung count-in. Now, Jerry, about that sing-song round your place …

Revolution in the Head

Those of us now in our mid to late thirties grew up with the Beatles playing in the background somewhere, on stereos belonging to our parents or older siblings, on television, on car radios, in shops. We experienced their music in the same way that we experienced the news of the Kennedy assassinations, or the invasion of Czechoslovakia – we were there, but we scarcely understood what we were listening to. I was more affected by the deaths of Walt Disney and a milkman who got shot in Dixon of Dock Green than I was by the murders of either Kennedy; I preferred the Monkees to the Beatles, mostly because the Monkees had a weekly television show. I have since learned that these responses were wrong-headed and inadequate, but it’s too late now.

‘Anyone unlucky enough not to have been aged between 14 and 30 during 1966–67 will never know the excitement of those years in popular culture,’ says Ian MacDonald halfway through Revolution in the Head. It is a tribute to MacDonald’s book that this sentiment (and its atypically inelegant triple-negative expression) does not alienate those of us under the age of forty; so compelling are his arguments, so seductive is his portrait of an era sadly missed even by those born after it had ended, that it merely induces in us a mood of deep regret.

Revolution in the Head is not a book for everyone. For a start, it is slightly cranky; it consists of short chronologically ordered essays on every single song that the Beatles ever recorded, extraordinarily detailed examinations of song structure, performance and recording. According to MacDonald, the arrangement of ‘This Boy’ (the B-side of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’) ‘takes its slightly unsteady 12/8 pulse from a blend of patterning hi-hat and acoustic guitar, recorded with faint repeat-echo, on the left channel. This leaves the voices crammed into the right channel, their heavy reverb leaking into the centre of the sound-picture.’ Anyone got any arguments with that? I didn’t think so.

This approach can throw up minor gems of arcane information. John Lennon and George Harrison chant ‘Frère Jacques’ through the second verse/chorus of ‘Paperback Writer’. ‘I Am the Walrus’ contains, in its final version, a snippet of King Lear, captured during a random radio scan. This book is a trainspotter’s paradise (it even provides accurate timings, so if you want to, you can hear ‘the guitar fluff at 1.26’ in ‘Ask Me Why’, if you have a CD player and a tragically empty life), but MacDonald’s aims are loftier than it would appear: he is hoping that a microscopic examination of the Beatles’ oeuvre will reveal greater truths about the decade as a whole.

The book is probably a little too anchored in specifics and cluttered by detail to fulfil this kind of ambition. A couple of the longer essays come close: in his piece on ‘Revolution 9’, MacDonald (a contemporary of Nick Kent, Julie Burchill et al. on the NME in the 1970s, and the author of a book on Shostakovich) provides a breathtakingly concise history of the avant-garde; the introduction has a neat idea about how the 1960s, now blamed by the right for everything, went some way towards creating Thatcherism. But Revolution in the Head is quite brilliant on all things Beatles, and that’s more than enough.

For a start, MacDonald puts the Beatles back into context, a useful exercise in itself. Like Shakespeare, Lennon and McCartney have come to be regarded as artists whose genius loosened their connections with time and place. This is nonsense, of course, as MacDonald makes plain: ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ was influenced strongly by the Kinks; ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ was a Motown pastiche; ‘Taxman’ was the Beatles’ version of James Brown; and so on. And his critical rigour means that the author is neither sloppy nor soppy about the later stages of the group’s career. ‘All You Need is Love’ is ‘desultory’, a product of ‘drug-sodden laziness’: ‘The Beatles were now doing wilfully substandard work … settling for lyric first thoughts on the principle that everything, however haphazard, meant something, and if it didn’t, so what?’ MacDonald is so hard to impress (‘Birthday’ is ‘soullessly synthetic’, ‘Hello, Goodbye’ is ‘blandly catchy’, ‘Helter Skelter’ simply ‘ridiculous’) that you end up trusting his judgement and his insights absolutely.

MacDonald can tend towards the dour, but, in between the discussions of Stockhausen and Timothy Leary, and the frankly bewildering references to the Phrygian and Mixolydian Modes, a keen appreciation of the absurd shines through (as well it might: the story of the Beatles is exhilarating and remarkable and compulsive, but it is also funny. All that money, all that fame, all that cultural impact, and all so quickly … it must have made them want to giggle all the time). A story about Lennon asking George Martin for a ‘fair-ground’ production is followed by the delightful parenthesis, ‘(He once asked Martin to make one of his songs sound like an orange.)’ The Beatles’ introduction to drugs is observed with a refreshing sobriety, and another great pair of brackets: ‘McCartney declared that he was “really thinking” for the first time, and ordered road manager Mal Evans to write down everything he said. (The “meaning of life” as dutifully transcribed by Evans was, There are seven levels.)’

In the end, though, this book is unpredictably moving, especially if you have the music to hand. A quite brilliant analysis of ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ reveals how it marks the end of the group and the psychological opening of McCartney’s solo career, and contains within it deep regret, optimism and a celebration of an extraordinary, world-changing half-decade. ‘To anyone who loves the Beatles, the bittersweet nostalgia of this music is hard to hear without a tear in the eye.’

I have never ached to be born in a different time. I was happy enough to grow up in the 1970s, with its cheap, lurid soundtrack of Slade, Gary Glitter, Bowie and the rest; but the triumph of this book is that it does lead one to understand that the popular music made in the wake of the Beatles was, for the most part, useless, despite its charms. After finishing the book, I went out and bought a pile of Beatles CDs and listened to the songs properly, for the first time in my life, even though I had heard most of them hundreds and hundreds of times before. MacDonald’s achievement is that they now sound different to me, better and sadder – better because he has wiped them down, sadder because by placing them in their context, he has made it plain that, however much the post-1960s generations may love this music, it will never belong to us.

Internet Music

My first novel, High Fidelity, was published in 1995, and shortly afterwards, I embarked upon my first American book tour. I took with me a Discman, and fifteen or twenty carefully chosen CDs in a wallet, although I bought lots of others while I was there – CDs by bands I’d never heard of, and wouldn’t have been able to buy at home, recommended to me by people who came to readings, or by journalists at the end of interviews. There was always a thriving, intimidating independent music store just a short walk from my hotel, in whichever city I was visiting. At signings, people gave me lovingly made compilation tapes, occasionally demo tapes of their bands, or their friends’ bands, and sometimes bootleg tapes of shows by artists they thought I’d like. Towards the end of the tour I no longer had room for it all, and I had to leave little piles of cassette boxes next to the waste bins in my hotel rooms. (I couldn’t bear to put them in the bins. I wasn’t throwing them away; I was leaving them behind. There was a difference.)

Back then, the future of music didn’t look particularly interesting to me. I don’t mean that music itself seemed boring, although I was thirty-eight years old, and I felt like I’d heard a lot of the mid nineties before. I mean that neither I nor anybody else I knew spent any time thinking about how our consumption of music might change. How could it? There wasn’t much to it, surely? OK, someone might come up with another format, something that might sweep away the compact disc just as the CD had replaced vinyl. But whatever it was, all you could do was buy it – which meant walking down to Our Price, or a local independent store staffed by people who looked as though they’d rather have their heads stuck inside Thurston Moore’s amp than speak to you. I certainly couldn’t have imagined writing a novel which is in part about how we relate to music in the twenty-first century. Like most of us, I believed that this relationship would be a version of the relationship we all knew and loved, with a couple of extra volume knobs on.

In the year that High Fidelity was published, a new CD shop opened in my neighbourhood and rejuvenated my listening habits. The shop did well, initially, and I spent a lot of time in there, buying pretty much whatever the owners told me to buy; they were very clever, it seemed to me, in targeting the ageing (or perhaps, more precisely, ex-) hipsters of north London, people who were growing sick of their REM albums but didn’t know what else to buy. They sold hundreds of copies of Buena Vista Social Club, and a lot of tasteful trip-hop – which, as Simon Reynolds pointed out, was ‘merely a form of gentrification’. But then, what are you supposed to do, if you’re becoming gentrified? Pretend it isn’t happening? Yes, Portishead sold a lot of albums to people who wanted to listen to music that meant something without waking up their children, but that’s not necessarily a desire that deserves a sneer. Keeping in touch with the things that help us feel alive – music, books, movies, even the theatre if, mysteriously, you are that way inclined – becomes a battle, and one that many of us lose, as we get older; I don’t think enough of our cultural pundits, people who write about that stuff for a living, fully understand this. It’s one thing to have an opinion on Little Boots remixes if you earn your living hanging about in cyberspace; quite another if you’re a full-time teacher with three kids. My friend’s CD shop performed a valuable service to those whose shopping and browsing and listening time was rationed by circumstance, people who had the occasional five minutes on a Saturday morning to check out, and sometimes even buy, what everyone else was listening to.

You’ll know what happened to the shop, because it happened to everyone else’s shop, too. Illegal downloading wouldn’t have been a factor here – the punters were too old and, for the most part, too well-heeled for all that. But Amazon started selling CDs for less than my friends could buy them for, and eventually even north London’s late adaptors worked out that one-clicking didn’t take much effort. The trouble with this, of course, is that you’re shopping in a vacuum, however many times you’re told by some robot you don’t know that if you like this then you’ll love that. You’re feeding off nothing, apart from recommendations in broadsheet newspapers and magazines – and we’ve all been burned like that. After my local CD shop closed down, I was getting ready for a musical life that turned in on itself, before dying slowly from malnutrition. Any piece of music becomes drained of meaning and excitement if you listen too much to it, but a three-minute pop song isn’t going to last you a lifetime. Popular music needs to keep flowing. If the fresh supplies stop, it’s you that becomes stagnant.

It took me longer than it should have done to work out that the internet is one giant independent record shop – thousands and thousands of cute little independent record shops, anyway – and they don’t actually charge you for the music they stock. The MP3 blogs that stretch for miles and miles, as far as the eye can see, down that stretch of the net that isn’t reserved for pornography, are staffed by enthusiastic and likeable young men and women who absolutely don’t want to rip the artists off: they are always careful to post links to iTunes and Amazon, and the songs they put on their sites are for sampling purposes only. (For the most part, they are encouraged to do so by the artists and their labels, who take out adverts on the more popular sites, and are clearly sending advance copies of albums to the bloggers.) It works for me. I listen, and then I buy what I like, because owning music is still important to me. If the music I like stays out there in cyberspace, as it does on Spotify, then somehow it cannot indicate character and taste in the same way, although I doubt that younger generations will feel like this, and good luck to them.

But it’s easy. Look at Hype Machine (www.hypem.com) to begin with: in the top right-hand corner of the site, you’ll see a list of the top five most-blogged artists, so you will get a sense of what’s going on out there (or in there, if you are a literal-minded soul). The search engine will offer you a chance to listen to these artists and, in the process, you’ll get the chance to discover your favourite virtual record store, because every single one of those links you see will take you to a different MP3 blog. My favourites are I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, Large-Hearted Boy, Aquarium Drunkard, When You Awake and Funky 16 Corners, among scores of others. (Some of those names are indicative of a generosity of spirit that one doesn’t always associate with the internet.) And some of these post songs from new bands, and some post scratched old vinyl funk records, and if you spend an hour messing about you’ll find twenty or thirty great songs you never knew before. In other words: there’s no excuse.

Juliet, Naked is in part about how a middle-aged man devotes a large chunk of his life to keeping alive the work of a long-forgotten eighties singer-songwriter; he runs a messageboard, posts essays online, and virtually lives in a virtual world, talking to people he wouldn’t ever have met ten years ago. Perhaps one of the paradoxes of music on the internet is that it’s perfect for the old folks. If you need to find set-lists for every show Rory Gallagher ever played, I’m sure there’s some chap with nothing better to do who is taking care of it right now. But more importantly, you need never again feel as though the pop life is drifting away from you – indeed, the anonymity and user-friendliness of the MP3 blogs mean that one feels emboldened to walk into even the scariest-looking website in the full confidence that nobody will laugh at you.

I’ll be off on a US book tour again soon, to promote a novel that is, in part, about how the world has changed since 1995. I’ll be taking with me a small black box, no bigger than a packet of cigarettes, containing every piece of music I’ve ever loved. And a lot of that music – more than I could possibly have imagined five years ago, when I was prepared, reluctantly, to pull up the drawbridge – was made very recently. And no, I don’t know how it will all pan out, who will pay the artists to make their lovely or ugly or scary music in a world that’s increasingly beginning to expect everything for free. (My best guess is that being in a band will become a version of National Service or the Peace Corps, something you do for a couple of years before knuckling down to a proper job. And the London Symphony Orchestra won’t appear on as many rock albums as they used to.) All I know is that if you love music, and you have a curious mind, there has never been a better time to be alive.

The Crying Game

It is perhaps easier to list the films that haven’t made me blub, rather than run through the several thousand that have, so here goes: I didn’t cry once during Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (that’s the one where a chap sits in a wheelbarrow and reads poetry for several hours) or Kurosawa’s Ran, nor were hankies required during Dr Who and the Daleks, Jason and the Argonauts, The Incredible Journey (although my sister, who is frankly a girl, wept buckets, and had to be taken out), Sid and Nancy or Reservoir Dogs. And that’s about it.

I cried at E. T., inevitably. I cried at Chariots of Fire, predictably. I cried at a film, the title of which I’ve forgotten, about some guy with no legs who walked across America – understandable, forgiveable even, were it not for the fact that I didn’t actually see the whole movie, just a clip they showed of it on TV-AM. I lost half my bodyweight during Field of Dreams, and had to be put on a drip – ironic, given that I seemed to have turned into one – after Splash. So I knew what was coming to me when I went to see a sneak preview screening of Sleepless in Seattle; it duly came, great steaming rivers of the stuff, and I needed a crafty trip to the Gents to recompose myself afterwards.

I certainly didn’t cry at films when I was a kid. Boys simply cannot afford the indulgence of sentimental tears when real ones – the ones that come after a good thumping at school, or because of a broken Johnny Seven gun at home – are just sitting there in the ducts, waiting to be launched at the least convenient and most humiliating opportunity. Born Free was a rare chance to show what you were made of; it was certainly not the time to demonstrate that real eight-year-olds could let a few hot ones go in the darkness of the ABC without compromising their manhood.

Only when men are of A Certain Age, then, is it possible for us to let ourselves down by weeping copiously at the soppy bits in films. Even then, though, it is often the case that only a certain type of film can elicit masculine tears. It is still true that many men cannot find it in themselves to cry when they are truly unhappy, despite the well-documented beneficial effects of a good blub (no heart disease, no ulcers, eternal life, etc., etc.); they are far more likely to cry at Cup Finals, Olympic medal ceremonies and the theme music from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. than they are when, say, their wife and children walk out on them.

Women, famously, have no such problems making the moisture/misery connection, which is maybe why Now, Voyager and Brief Encounter, for example, tend to be dearer to the female psyche than to the male. ‘One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh,’ observed Oscar Wilde of the death of Dickens’s Little Nell; one fears that Oscar would have required sedation for the death of Ali MacGraw in Love Story, Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment and Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias. I know that I certainly managed a snigger or two. Happy/sad farewells – E. T. and Elliott, Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost, Tom Hanks and John Candy in Splash – are different, and much more likely to get the snot rolling and the eyes stinging. Am I really saying that I find the sight of a man saying goodbye to his brother, before leaping into the sea to live with a mermaid, more affecting than the terminal illness of a young mother? Yup.

What really sets me off every time, though, is a beautiful couple finally getting it together, particularly when there are children involved. Sleepless in Seattle scores a ten on my blub-o-meter a) because Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are so cute, b) because their union is so agonizingly delayed, and c) because Meg Ryan will so clearly make a wonderful mother for Hanks’s little boy, Jonah. This kind of mushy perfection is, regrettably, important to me, and yes, I did cry at Overboard (Goldie Hawn, spoilt rich girl, takes on Kurt Russell’s dirt-poor kids) and Irreconcilable Differences (Drew Barrymore divorces her warring Hollywood parents, Ryan O’Neal and Shelley Long, provoking a reunion). How it is possible to cry at Irreconcilable Differences and own a copy of the first Clash album must remain one of life’s impenetrable mysteries.

What is so distressing about this Pavlovian response to happy endings is that it makes no recognition of quality. I am proud of the fact that my shoulders start to heave during The Philadelphia Story, when Cary Grant tells Katharine Hepburn what to say to her impatient wedding guests in the film’s final scene; I am not even ashamed of the fact that I am uncontrollable when Ronald Colman recovers his memory during Random Harvest, and finally recognizes that Greer Garson is the woman he has loved all along. And surely a chap who cries at an Erich Rohmer film (A Winter’s Tale, when the central characters meet again on a bus after several long years apart) cannot be irredeemably tasteless? But then I remember that I had the same reaction during John Hughes’s indescribably useless Some Kind of Wonderful (when punky tomboy Mary Stuart Masterson gets off with her teenage dreamboat), and realize that I’m just kidding myself; my weeping is indiscriminate, promiscuous, simply embarrassing. Crying, like defecation, makes no recognition of the quality of the product consumed.

It’s a Wonderful Life is different, partly because there is no climactic snogging in Capra’s soppy masterpiece. Of course, films with a Christmas setting have an unfair advantage over the opposition, and the tears I shed during the final scene are as much about my lunchtime refreshment as about Jimmy Stewart’s warm-hearted neighbours. Even so, what differentiates It’s a Wonderful Life from the drippy opposition is that it is one of the very few weepies with no real female involvement; the key players in the melodrama – Stewart, his brother, the grief stricken pharmacist, Clarence the angel – are all men. It is interesting that Field of Dreams, the nearest we have to a contemporary equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life, is similarly male-dominated. Amy Madigan, Kevin Costner’s wife in the film, is just there, watching lovingly while he turns their farm into a baseball field for ghosts. How does such an ostensibly butch film manage to turn every man I know into mush?

Field of Dreams pays due respect to the emotion inherent in sport, for a start, and thus has an advantage over any film which is merely about kissing and stuff. But both Field of Dreams and It’s a Wonderful Life tap into male feelings about wasted potential. The Costner character worries that at the age of thirty-six he has turned into his father, and has let all his ambition slip away somewhere; the Stewart character abandons his dreams of seeing the world, and stays at home to save the family business. Most of us have settled for less than we ever thought we would, and the way that these two films turn compromise into a form of heroism strikes some kind of self-aggrandizing chord.

The father/son relationship in Field of Dreams is also crucial: our problems with our dads are rarely explored with any sympathy or depth, unless one cares to argue a case for Rebel Without a Cause or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There’s almost nothing that makes any sense in Field of Dreams, either – a ghostly dad younger than his son and dressed in a baseball uniform? – but Costner is given a chance to put things right, and that seems to be enough to make a great many men weep.

‘Crying is a highly overrated activity, and let me tell you one thing: beware of men who cry.’ Who said that? Nora Ephron, that’s who, back in 1989. Hopefully the woman who wrote and directed Sleepless in Seattle, the agent of my most recent disgrace, is another Nora Ephron, one more tolerant of the sensitive and empathetic modern male. Perhaps Sleepless in Seattle was merely conceived as an elaborate exercise to flush us out, humiliate us in public.

Crying at films doesn’t worry me in the slightest; it’s just a meaningless and ungovernable knack, like double-jointedness. What bothers me more is my inability to weep at certain films. How come I sat dry-eyed through Au Revoir les Enfants, for example, which is about children being rounded up by the Gestapo, rather than offerings of mermaids or baseball? Reviews of Louis Malle’s film refer to its ‘unindulgent generosity’, its ‘avoidance of heroic cliché’, its ‘quiet integrity’. Maybe Nora Ephron is right, and men like me are to be mistrusted; maybe I’m just some kind of lachrymose vulgarian after all, and I wouldn’t recognize a really moving film if it rolled over and drew its last breath with me cradling it in my arms. Hey, but how about that bit in Cocoon when the old guy takes his grandson fishing before disappearing off with the aliens for ever? Everyone cried then, right? Oh, well …

Marah

May 1998

I’m on a book tour in the US, and after a reading in Philadelphia, I go out for a drink with a music journalist from the Inquirer whom I’ve met a couple of times before. At the end of the evening he gives me a tape. A tape! 1998 seems a long time ago now. It’s so long ago, in fact, that I was even travelling around with something to play it on. It’s a copy of the forthcoming first album by a local band called Marah, which rhymes with Hurrah! ‘Marah?’ I say. ‘What kind of name is that?’ Dan tells me that it’s from the Old Testament, and it means ‘tree of bitterness’. For some reason, this in itself is enough to convince me that the album will be great. This band has had the good sense to incorporate into their very being all the forthcoming disappointments and betrayals attendant upon a career in music.

And the album is great, too. It was recorded for no money, and it’s about to be released on a tiny indie label based in Mississippi, and it labours under the title Let’s Cut the Crap and Hook Up Later On Tonight. And yet the opening bars of the first song, where a horn section plays over an ice-cream van serendipitously parked outside the studio, tell you everything you need to know about Marah – they have pluck, ambition, tunes and talent to burn. Let’s Cut the Crap … turns out to contain what will become three or four of my favourite songs ever. It sounds as though the band has taken what they need from the Stones, Steve Earle, the E Street Band, the Faces and the Pogues, shaken it all up and drunk it down; the thing is, though, that they really didn’t need that much, because they had plenty of other things of their own already. I can’t quite believe how good it is, so I buy a couple of copies of the CD and give one to my friend Lee, who runs a music shop in Islington, and hears everything. He is immediately besotted. We could both be wrong, of course, but at least I have company. Since then we have been to see them play live whenever we can.

25 March 2006

I’m on a book tour in the US again. This week I’ve been to campuses in Indianapolis, Memphis and North Carolina, but today I’m sitting in a van with Marah, and we’re driving from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi. If you’re someone who loves both rock ’n’ roll and books, then this is a pretty rich journey. We have just been to Sun Studios, and had our photographs taken in the room where Elvis sang ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ and ‘That’s All Right’; tomorrow, in Oxford, some of us will stand in the room where William Faulkner wrote most of his novels. One of them is plotted out in pencil on his study wall.

Since that first album, the band have been picked up and put down by a major label. They have made four more albums, lost about as many drummers, played for beer money in London pubs and appeared onstage with Bruce Springsteen, a fan and champion, in a football stadium. They certainly haven’t seen the need to change their name to something more upbeat, but on the other hand, they’re still around. Last year’s terrific album If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry got great reviews, and Stephen King, of all people, picked it as his album of the year in Entertainment Weekly. He described Marah as ‘probably the best rock band in America nobody knows’. If the band is dispirited by the apparent fruitlessness of their eight-year journey, they never show it. Their live shows are invariably a joy, ferocious, funny and utterly committed, regardless of how many people show up. On a good night, when Serge Bielanko is lying on the floor in the middle of the audience blowing on his harmonica, and his brother Dave is standing on the bar playing his guitar, it’s hard to think of a better way to spend an evening.

We’ve become friends over the last few years, and a couple of years ago we invented a show that we could do together whenever our touring paths crossed, a show in which I read and they play. It’s a break in routine for all concerned. I like doing readings, but on a book tour you tend to read the same extracts in similar-looking venues, and you spend an awful lot of time on your own. When I do the events with the band, I read five unpublished essays about music I wrote specially for the show, and I read them in bars or clubs, and I have colleagues – I’m part of a team. Before tonight’s show I end up unloading equipment from the van. (To be honest, this is almost entirely because I know I’ll be writing a newspaper piece about being part of a team. I don’t usually bother.)

As any writer will tell you, what you usually get at the end of a reading is some polite applause followed by a resounding silence – a silence broken only by an audience member plucking up the courage to ask a tentative and dutiful question about one’s working process. But the first essay I read in these shows ends with the words, ‘OK, Marah, make some noise,’ and they do – they play loud, which is one of the things I love about them, and I run as fast as I can to the side of the stage. (I live in fear of being trapped onstage by equipment while the band rampage around me. It has happened once, and I was thrown a tambourine. I would like to claim that I enhanced both the look and the sound of the band, but I fear this might not have been the case.) Anyway, every writer should experience the thrill of having their words punctuated by Marah’s three-guitar attack. I know what you’re thinking, Sir Vidia, but you’d be wrong: a quick burst of ‘It’s Only Money, Tyrone’ or ‘Point Breeze’ would perk up any literary soirée.

Believe it or not, a Mississippi bar on a Saturday night turns out to be a tough gig, and quite unlike, say, Cheltenham or Hay. At a table off to the side, there’s a rowdy group which isn’t interested in listening to any of us, and though the band can drown them out, I can’t. At one point during my reading, Dave Bielanko jumps down and suggests that they might like to take their custom elsewhere, a suggestion that is rejected with some vehemence. Dave decides that, on this occasion, discretion is the better part of valour, and returns to the relative safety of the stage. We get through, and those who had come to hear us seem to enjoy it. And though I’m very much looking forward to reading on my own at the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent in a couple of weeks, it really won’t be the same.

A Stranger in a Strange Land

To me it wasn’t an aftershock. To me it was a straightforward, no-prefix shock. I was halfway through a ‘tuna melt’ when I felt the comforting, familiar rumble of a Piccadilly Line train underneath my feet; only when everyone else leaped to their feet and ran away from the restaurant did I remember that Santa Monica beach wasn’t on the Piccadilly Line, that it was off the tube map altogether, in fact. It’s hard enough having to deal with the rest of LA – the blinding light, the psychotic politeness of the shop assistants, the herbs you always seem to get on your chips – without having to handle earthquakes as well (5.3 on the Richter Scale – not a stonker, but certainly big enough to grab your attention); all I needed to complete the LA experience was to see some film stars and to be shot dead in a gang war, and I was going to see some film stars the next day. (Note to Ed: Please remove gang-war reference if I am shot dead in a gang war. Thanks – N. H.) Nobody else seemed to care, though. They all knew that if God intended for us to die in a quake, He’d have enough decency and, more importantly, enough curiosity to wait until after the Oscar ceremony, and there were still twenty-nine hours to go. Everyone else wanted to know whether Spielberg was finally going to do it; surely He was no different?

Imagine that Wembley, the suburb in north-west London, had its own multi-section daily newspaper, and a Sunday newspaper that made our Sunday Times look anorexic. Imagine that it had sixty or seventy television channels, and a couple of hundred radio stations, and that everyone who lived and worked in the area had lost every last trace of self-irony as a result of too much time spent looking up their own bottoms. Imagine all that, and then imagine the kind of mind-numbing gibberish you would hear and see and read on FA Cup Final day. Well, Los Angeles does have sixty or seventy TV channels, and its newspapers do contain more words daily than Proust could manage in a lifetime; the annual Academy Awards ceremony is LA’s cup final, and the gibberish you can see and hear and read at any given minute of a twenty-four-hour day is truly, dizzyingly awesome.

In this year’s build-up there was an Oscar Oprah (I was hoping for some tearful previous winners grabbing Oprah’s microphone and accusing the squirming, ashen-faced statuette of messing up their lives, but it turned out to be just a bunch of nobodies arguing about the merits of The Piano). There was an interview with a psychic (an impressive, if promotionally disastrous, death-or-glory performance this – she got ‘nothing coming through’ for Spielberg or his movies – whoops!). There was Whoopi Goldberg vowing in a newspaper interview that her performance as host would prove she was ‘not some fluff pig’. (The British never thought you were a fluff pig, Whoopi! We have no idea what a fluff pig is!) There was ex-Academy president Robert Wise helping us to understand Spielberg’s use of black and white and colour in Schindler’s List: ‘If he’d been actually shooting during the period, he’d have been shooting in black and white. What he was saying at the end there was, “This is the modern day.”’ Thanks, Robert! There was a nominated make-up artist explaining the difference between her work on Hook (‘That was a fairytale’) and on Schindler’s List (‘That was reality’). Thanks, make-up artist! There was the Oscar weather (‘I wouldn’t be shocked if there was some drizzle’) and Oscar fashion (pretty dull, by general consent, apart from the lady who bravely chose to wear what appeared to be a suit of armour) and there was …

The bizarre thing is that you begin to care. I cannot recall ever having cared much about the Oscars before – how thrilled were you when Driving Miss Daisy won Best Film? – but once you get to LA there isn’t much else to care about, give or take the odd earthquake. Listen to enough people telling you that something is important, and after a while it begins to rub off on you. Oscars in Hollywood, you start to feel, are like ceasefires in Sarajevo, or food supplies in Mogadishu: context is all.

And yet, this year, Hollywood’s self-importance is set on a collision course with things that really do matter: injustice, AIDS, the Holocaust. I’m a new father, and I hadn’t been to the cinema in nearly six months before Empire asked me to do this piece; night after night for a week I came home puffy-eyed and traumatized. I’d seen Tom Hanks die in the arms of his lover and Daniel Day-Lewis get fitted up and jailed for fifteen years and Pete Postlethwaite die in prison and Ralph Fiennes shoot kids in the back; in this sort of company, Sam Neill chopping off Holly Hunter’s finger with an axe has to serve as light relief. All tragedy has to have a catharsis, though, and for movie folk the catharsis comes when they slip on their Armani tuxedos (‘The maestro, Giorgio,’ replies Liam Neeson when someone asks him ‘who’ he is wearing, a reply which somehow dents my admiration of his performance as Oskar Schindler) and head off down to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the world’s biggest legal display of mutual adoration.

There is a crowd of maybe a couple of thousand outside the Pavilion; some of them have slept out overnight, all for a glimpse of a Cruise bow tie or a Kidman strap. They are, frankly, desperate, and consequently cheer anybody the rabble-rousing MC tells them to cheer: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, one of the first ladies of Hollywood, MISS DEBBIE REYNOLDS! Ladies and gentlemen, the Olympic medallist MISS NANCY KERRIGAN!’ At one point he is reduced to reciting the list of films nominated for Best Picture, and they get a cheer, too. Overhead – and if you saw this in a film you’d groan at the obviousness of the Hollywood wannabe image – an aeroplane flies past bearing a banner: ‘WORLD’S FUNNIEST MOVIE SCRIPT NEEDS A PRODUCER. CALL RUSKIN 714 538 5046.’ I don’t spot anyone jotting down the number. As far as these guys are concerned, nothing goes on above their heads.

The ceremony starts at six, and between five and five thirty I see more people I cannot recognize than I have ever seen in my life. They are all dressed for recognition, and when they have walked through the massed ranks of photographers they manage to give the impression that they are relieved that the ordeal is over, but nobody knows who they are. There’s a man with a beard, and a fat person, and another fat person and someone who looks like Daryl Hannah but isn’t, and someone else who looks like Meg Ryan’s podgy elder sister but isn’t, and a little boy who looks like the boy in Jurassic Park but isn’t, and a sign of the Hollywood times – some Japanese people; but at five thirty Anthony Hopkins walks up the red carpet and he starts something of a celebrity flood. Ken and Emma, Gabriel and Ellen, Steven and his mum and Kate, Liam and Natasha, Jeremy and Sinead … even so, the important nobodies outnumber the important somebodies by about five to one. And do the somebodies look different in Real Life? Only because they’re wearing sunglasses, although the men look more like themselves than the women: Gene Hackman in a dinner suit looks much like Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, but Holly Hunter looks a lot healthier tonight than she did in The Piano and she’s got rid of that bun, too …

The ceremony is OK. Whoopi is not as embarrassing, nor as political, as she has threatened to be, and there is no sign of fluffy piggery, or none that I am aware of. She makes a couple of self-aggrandizing jokes – ‘There haven’t been this many studio executives so nervous since the Heidi Fleiss trial!’ – but for the most part she contents herself with the usual Oscar-night gush: ‘I’m glad we do what we do,’ she declares after Tom Hanks’s emotional acceptance speech. ‘We’re amazing!’

But it isn’t her night: it’s Spielberg’s. Schindler’s List hovers over the event like an enormous, brooding cloud; I want it to win everything, not only because I thought it was a great film, but because – and I know this is dull – I really do believe that it’s worth more in the greater scheme of things than any number of flashy, enjoyable movies like The Fugitive. So when Tommy Lee Jones beats Ralph Fiennes to the night’s first big prize my heart sinks; just like the Basildon result in the ’92 General Election, it seems like a horrible harbinger of things to come. And when Jones comes to see us in the Press Room, my heart sinks even further. This is the first time I have ever been in the same room as a movie star, and it is not a pleasant experience: fifteen minutes after receiving an Oscar, Jones manages to be both graceless and surly – no mean feat.

‘You ever interviewed this guy?’ one old-hand writer asks another. ‘It’s horrendous.’

Tom Hanks, however, is a sweetie. He stops the press conference because he wants to hear Spielberg’s acceptance speech, and urges us to do the same; he manages to be dignified and funny at once.

‘Hey, was I really wearing a blue tux? Just kidding,’ he says to the Kodak executive who has just presented him with a commemorative photo.

The Schindler people could be forgiven for a show of surliness, or at least of impatience. You and I might have spotted that Schindler’s List has a slightly different moral tone from, say, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but it is a distinction that seems to have escaped a number of people in the room; the collision between reality and Hollywood is happening, and reality isn’t looking too good.

‘In your acceptance speech you said it was the most important experience of your career. Why?’ someone asks Polish-born Janusz Kaminski, who won an award for Best Cinematography. Umm …

Someone else observes to John Williams (Best Original Score) that the Schindler theme is ‘not mellow exactly, but more tender than your work on Jurassic Park and Jaws. Why the departure?’ Why indeed? Why, in fact, couldn’t he have made do with the same score for both films? Before very long, though, the journalists begin to find their moral range.

‘If you got offered an AIDS script and a comedy script at the same time,’ an earnest young man asks Hanks, ‘would the AIDS script have the edge?’ Now there’s typecasting for you …

Most of the people, I think, just want to talk to a movie star, have Hanks or Spielberg or Holly Hunter look them in the eye for twenty seconds of their lives. So do I – and this is the closest I’ll ever get – but I can’t think of anything I really want to know (Hey, Tom, which film was more important to you, Philadelphia or Turner and Hooch? Holly, did you want to throttle little Anna Paquin when she won Best Supporting Actress instead of you? Anna, where exactly is New Zealand from here?) and I just sit there staring at them …

I come from a country which is supposed to be crippled by its class system, but I have never seen anything like this. When you are near these people, these producers and stars and directors, you are secure in the knowledge that, in LA at least, you have absolutely no worth as a human being: if you had any kind of value at all, they’d know you already. If you want to feel really, truly humble, forget about going into outer space. Hollywood will do just as well. The scenes outside when it is all over – mile after mile of white stretch limos, all with darkened windows – do nothing to dispel my sense of gloom. I want to go home, before I cease to exist completely …

When I get back to the hotel, there is a message from top toffs’ magazine Vanity Fair. I had tried to wangle an invitation to their glamorous post-Oscar party (which has taken over from the now-deceased Swifty Lazar’s as the one to go to), just in the interests of Empire readers, you understand.

‘No you cannot get inside the party but you can cover the outside walk-in,’ the message said. ‘Please call if necessary.’

There’s Hollywood for you: you need to have permission even to press your nose against the window …

The West Wing

‘I’ve got a friend who works in the White House,’ a friend told me when I professed my undying love for The West Wing. ‘And he says it’s nothing like that at all.’ Well, duh. All I need now is for someone to point out that small dinosaurs were never used as telephone receivers, not even in Fred Flinstone’s day, and my viewing pleasure will have been ruined for ever. Here’s just one of the ways that Jed Bartlet’s presidency differs from its real-life counterparts: no one who works for Bartlet would be dull-witted enough to make that observation in the first place. Bartlet’s people are witty, smart, ironic and thoughtful; that’s how we know that what we’re watching is only a TV show, and that’s why we watch it. If we wanted to listen to pedants and dullards, we’d tune in to C-Span, or our national equivalents. (Listen to any kind of parliamentary or congressional debate and one is struck by the otherness of politicians: they’re like no one you’ve ever met, and no one you would wish to meet. How are these people supposed to represent us, when they are not of our species? I’d happily meet up with Josh and Toby and Sam for a drink once a week, and that’s something else that places The West Wing in the realms of fantasy.)

The West Wing contains no expletives, so they don’t have to be deleted. Bartlet is faithful to his wife, and we have not seen him lie to his nation. He is well read, and he can spell (although if you ask me, his surname could use an extra ‘t’). He is religious, but in a gentle, New Testament kind of a way, and we have seen him eviscerate religious bigots. He has knowledge of, and an interest in, countries other than his own. He seems to have no desire to appease wealthy special interest groups. He was elected fair and square, as far as we know. Oh, The West Wing is made up, all right.

And yet, of course, the series knows its onions. It has political hotshots like Peggy Noonan among its advisers, and it feels real, to this viewer at least; The West Wing is not fantastical in that sense. It doesn’t play fast and loose with the political process, and nor, at the time of writing, have we seen Jed Bartlet in hand-to-hand combat with international terrorists, or seizing the controls of the presidential jet. And the humourless, hard, cynical committee men and women who block the march of progressive democracy at every turn have the whiff of authenticity about them, too; we know these people are out there, skulking in corridors all over the world – because if they weren’t, the world would be a nicer and more tolerant place, right?

And that is what I love about The West Wing: it earns, through its brilliant attention to the details of realpolitik, the right to offer an alternative to political cynicism. In sport – in football, anyway – they talk about fighting for the room to play; in other words, it’s not possible to express yourself on the field unless you do the hard physical labour, the running and marking and covering and tackling. That is precisely what The West Wing does. The series clearly has ambitions beyond a painstaking portrayal of the political process; Aaron Sorkin, the creator and writer of the show, has stuff to say about idealism and compromise and ambition and America itself. He is smart enough to know, however, that his themes would come across as glib if they were not given their brilliantly realized context. Compare The West Wing to, say, the facile political satire Wag the Dog, which wants to be hip and cynical, but which is actually too lazy and too credulous to convey anything but its own superciliousness. The West Wing is liberal and hopeful and sweet-natured, but, extraordinarily, it’s not naive; it’s way too knowing for that.

If you don’t believe me, watch the nineteenth episode of the show, entitled ‘Let Bartlet be Bartlet’. (Indeed, those who don’t like The West Wing might argue that this is the only episode you need to watch, so neatly does it exemplify the show’s themes and modus operandi, and, finally, its flaws.) ‘Let Bartlet be Bartlet’ is about an administration bogged down in the political mud; forty-five of the show’s fifty minutes are spent depicting, extremely well, a group of individuals with an enormous amount of intellectual energy and nowhere to put it.

A dim TV series or film would have shown Bartlet attempting (and failing or succeeding, depending on the amount of shamelessness the creators felt they could get away with) to Save the World, to make some huge, unlikely – and easily comprehensible – political gesture. But The West Wing isn’t dim, and so it alights upon two much smaller and more complicated issues to illustrate the administration’s problems. Bartlet is floating the idea (‘dangling [his] feet in the water’, in his timid phrase, and the question of how and why he has become so politically cautious is one the episode attempts to address) of nominating his own choices to sit on the FEC, in an attempt to reform electoral finance. Meanwhile Sam is talking to military representatives about the law preventing gays from serving in the armed forces. Both initiatives are crushed (and Sorkin is very good at political baddies, most of whom do very little other than articulate, admittedly with an irritating smugness, the logic of the status quo, but who nevertheless make you want to form your own revolutionary movement). A writer less able than Sorkin would have found himself swamped by the information he was attempting to impart, but Sorkin finds the room to express himself: not only do the fractious arguments in committee rooms feel knotty and real, but they have an effortlessly attained subtext. I don’t know whether you have ever attempted to write a screenplay, but those page margins are wide, and a commercial TV hour is short; to sustain simultaneous arguments about electoral reform and gays in the military – informed, researched arguments – while making it clear that these arguments are actually about something else … well, you need to be pretty good at your job to pull that off.

Towards the end of the episode, Bartlet’s Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, confronts Bartlet about the way his administration seems to be pulling its punches, and at this point the show departs from political reality: Bartlet, suddenly energized, vows to do something about it. Leo writes down the title of the episode on a piece of paper (he probably saw the caption at the beginning of the show), and the president remembers why he wanted to be the president in the first place, and it all ends happily and inspirationally and, yes, let’s be honest, cornily, with his key staff, wreathed in smiles, reiterating their loyalty and desire to serve. In real life, of course, Bartlet would have looked at Leo’s piece of paper, laughed like a drain, and declared war on some small defenceless country somewhere.

But if the episode ends up soggier than one might have wished (and The West Wing is, after all, soapy in its structure and narrative manipulation), it still makes you yearn to believe in its sincerity and its optimism; very few serious television programmes – very few serious cultural artefacts of any kind – offer any kind of hope at all. It’s the curse of contemporary naturalism that prevents anyone from making the slightest suggestion of redemption; the world is not a redemptive place, and to suggest otherwise seems to connote feeble-mindedness. You can find plenty of crappy films and TV shows that cheer, but The West Wing has class and ambition, so its depiction of principled people remaining principled is especially brave. Cynicism and nihilism may have the virtue of accuracy, but, boy, it makes you tired; sometimes, we need our culture to give us the strength to get up in the morning, and if you spend too much time watching things that insist on spelling out the way things are and always will be, it saps the will to live.

The liberal agenda of the show is brave, too. Of course, it would probably be impossible to create a TV series based around a Republican administration and expect anyone – even Republican voters – to sympathize with any of the protagonists. (‘In this week’s episode: the president cuts welfare support for Latino single mothers and explains why the Kyoto Agreement will hurt some rich guys he used to go to school with.’) Even so, from this distance, on the other side of the Atlantic, it seems heartening, and vaguely mystifying, that a show which is so unambiguous in its views on gay rights, gun control, the religious right, the environment and multiculturalism, should have attracted a huge prime-time audience on a network station.

And why, you may be asking, would anyone in England care about a made-up American president? You lot wouldn’t care very much about a fictional prime minister. Well, we’re used to things only working one way; when my first book, Fever Pitch, a memoir about being a football fan, was published in the US, one reviewer quoted an admittedly arcane passage in order to demonstrate the problems an American readership was likely to encounter; meanwhile, we had sat through Bull Durham and Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams, failed to understand one line of dialogue in every three, and gamely professed to enjoy them anyway. We have long been used to the idea that we’re always going to make more of an effort than you are. (And my American friend Sarah bought me a copy of the American Constitution, which now sits right by the TV, ready and eager for West Wing duty at any moment. As a consequence, I have even found myself envying you that recently – we have no equivalent, and it seems to me that an attempt to write one now would result in a much-needed national debate about who we are and what we want.)

But in any case, our attitude to American TV has changed. Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, we were the classy ones, and you were the purveyors of enjoyable fluff – which meant, inevitably, that we watched as much of your stuff as we could tune into. Our Sunday afternoon children’s TV hour, for example (we were only ever allowed an hour by the BBC), was frequently given over to a Dickens or Walter Scott adaptation, which wasn’t even as much fun as it sounds. No surprise, then, that we lapped up I Dream of Jeanie and Bewitched. True, we were confused by rumours that in the US these were evening shows, aimed at adults; we were puzzled, too, by the apparently random laughter that appeared on the soundtrack, as if something funny was happening just out of shot. But we all got the hang of American TV: it was something you watched instead of Ivanhoe, and it was always welcome in our house.

Meanwhile, British TV was at its artistic zenith. Gifted playwrights like Alan Bennett and Dennis Potter were given hours and hours of peak time to fill in whichever way they chose (Bennett’s work was usually directed by Stephen Frears); Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and the nascent Monty Python team were doing things that had never been done before. And then there was the costume-drama thing: millions of us watched ambitious and successful adaptations of War and Peace and The Forsyte Saga. So brilliant was our output at that time, so intelligent and classy and innovative, that we gave ourselves permission to patronize American TV for the next three or four decades.

We began, grudgingly, to concede that you did the odd genre pretty well. Your cop shows (Kojak, Starsky and Hutch) were slicker and more glamorous than ours, but they were, you know, just cop shows. And when Dallas and Dynasty came along, we admired your sense of camp and your marvellous American vulgarity. But then it all started to get a little more serious; it was clear that American TV was beginning to get ideas above its station. With the advent of Hill Street Blues, we had to admit that your cop shows were not only slicker, but better-written and more innovative than ours. Cheers, and then The Simpsons and, later, Seinfeld and Larry Sanders, hit our screens just at the time when it was clear we had forgotten how to make comedy. The enormous American internal market, which pays for enormous teams of talented writers, had finally asserted itself; a typical British comedy is written in its entirety and in perpetuity by one middle-aged (and frequently suburban) man, and is thus creaking like the Little House on the Prairie in a gale halfway through its first episode.

The significance of The West Wing and, now, Six Feet Under, is that we cannot pretend they are generic: they are intelligent mainstream drama series, the sort of thing at which the BBC is supposed to excel. The success of these shows, and their obvious excellence, has prompted long, introspective, where-did-we-go-wrong articles in newspapers and magazines. ‘It is very rare for British television these days to hand its actors in a year lines as good as Bartlet, Toby and Josh get weekly in The West Wing,’ observed respected British journalist Andrew Billen in the posh current affairs magazine Prospect. ‘It was not always so.’ The general feeling in Britain now is that your flagship shows are better than our flagship shows, and your rubbish beats our rubbish hands down; to older critics and commentators, those who can remember the BBC in its pomp, it’s as if you’ve just given us a pasting at cricket.

It’s not just the technical excellence of the show, the great writing (has a drama series ever got away with the sheer volume of words that The West Wing spews out week after week?), the terrific ensemble cast and the production values. We too, those of us who voted for this Labour government, have an alternative reality that we like to imagine sometimes. In this fantasy, an uxorious liberal with New Testament values and some mild but unmistakeable socialist tendencies marches into 10 Downing Street and reinvigorates a country that has been stultifying for a couple of decades. He has energy and conviction, and he’s not scared of upsetting the right; he doesn’t waste his time on focus groups and spin doctors, and his main motivation is not re-election but the desire for change. In miserable reality, our prime minister is halfway through his second term of office and every prospect of a third, given the laughably shambolic state of the opposition: we have already let Blair be Blair, and there’s nothing there. The West Wing is just as much a reminder to us of what we haven’t got as it is to you.

We are, apparently, soon to be given the chance of watching our own version of The West Wing. My suspicion is that at best it will be smart, sharply written … and horribly realistic, in a way that would have been granted the approval of my friend’s friend, the guy who works in the White House. We can do realism. Its characters will be cynical and compromised and opportunistic, in the way that real politicians are; and it won’t do me any good at all. I don’t need to know that politicians are all shits – I need to be enabled to imagine something different. That’s what the best art is supposed to do, isn’t it?

An Education

I knew the moment I’d finished Lynn Barber’s wonderful autobiographical essay in Granta, about her affair with a shady older man at the beginning of the 1960s, that it had all the ingredients for a film. There were memorable characters, a vivid sense of time and place – an England right on the cusp of profound change – an unusual mix of high comedy and deep sadness, and interesting, fresh things to say about class, ambition and the relationship between children and parents. My wife, Amanda, is an independent film producer, so I made her read it, too, and she and her colleague Finola Dwyer went off to option it. It was only when they began to talk about possible writers for the project that I began to want to do it myself – a desire which took me by surprise, and which wasn’t entirely welcome. Like just about every novelist I know, I have a complicated, usually unsatisfactory relationship with film writing: ever since my first book, Fever Pitch, was published, I have had some kind of script on the go. I adapted Fever Pitch for the screen myself, and the film was eventually made. But since then there have been at least three other projects – a couple of originals, and an adaptation of somebody else’s work – which ended in failure or, at least, in no end product, which is the same thing.

The chief problem with scriptwriting is that, most of the time, it seems utterly pointless, especially when compared with the relatively straightforward business of book publishing: the odds against a film, any film, ever being made are simply too great. Once you have established yourself as a novelist, then people seem quite amenable to the idea of publishing your books: your editor will make suggestions as to how they can be improved, of course, but the general idea is that, sooner or later, they will be in a bookshop, available for purchase. Film, however, doesn’t work that way, not least because even the lower-budget films often cost millions of pounds to make, and as a consequence, there is no screenwriter alive, however established in the profession, who writes in the secure knowledge that his work will be filmed. Plenty of people make a decent living from writing screenplays, but that’s not quite the same thing: as a rule of thumb, I’d estimate that there is a ten per cent chance of any movie being actually put into production, especially if one is working outside the studio system, as every writer in Britain does and must. I know, through my relationship with Amanda and Finola and other friends who work in the business, that London is awash with optioned books, unmade scripts, treatments awaiting development money that will never arrive.

So why bother? Why spend three, four, five years rewriting and rewriting a script that is unlikely ever to become a film? For me, the first reason to walk back into this world of pain, rejection and disappointment was the desire to collaborate: I spend much of my working day on my own, and I’m not naturally unsociable. Signing up for An Education initially gave me the chance to sit in a room with Amanda and Finola and Lynn and talk about the project as if it might actually happen one day, and later on I had similar conversations with directors and actors and the people from BBC Films. A novelist’s life is devoid of meetings, and yet people with proper jobs get to go to them all the time. I suspect that part of the appeal of film for me is not only the opportunity for collaboration it provides, but the illusion it gives of real work, with colleagues and appointments and coffee cups with saucers and biscuits that I haven’t bought myself. And there’s one more big attraction: if it does come off, then it’s proper fun, lively and glamorous and exciting in a way that poor old books can never be, however hard they try. Even before this film’s release, we have taken it to the Sundance Festival in Utah, and Berlin. And I have befriended several of the cast, who, by definition, are better-looking than the rest of us … What has literature got, by comparison?

I wrote the first draft of An Education on spec, some time in 2004, and while doing so I began to see some of the problems that would have to be solved if the original essay were ever to make it to the screen. There were no problems with the essay itself, of course, which did everything a piece of memoir should do; but by its very nature, memoir presents a challenge, consisting as it does of an adult mustering all the wisdom he or she can manage to look back at an earlier time in life. Almost all of us become wiser as we get older, so we can see pattern and meaning in an episode of autobiography – pattern and meaning that we would not have been able to see at the time. Memoirists know it all, but the people they are writing about know next to nothing.

We become other things, too, as well as wise: more articulate, more cynical, less naive, more or less forgiving, depending on how things have turned out for us. The Lynn Barber who wrote the memoir – a celebrated journalist, known for her perspicacious, funny, occasionally devastating profiles of celebrities – shouldn’t be audible in the voice of the central character in our film, not least because, as Lynn says in her essay, it was the very experiences that she was describing that formed the woman we know. In other words, there was no ‘Lynn Barber’ until she had received the eponymous education. Oh, this sounds obvious to the point of banality: a sixteen-year-old girl should sound different from her sixty-year-old self. What is less obvious, perhaps, is the way the sixty-year-old self seeps into every brush-stroke of the self-portrait in a memoir. Sometimes even the dialogue that Lynn provided for her younger version – perfectly plausible on the page – sounded too hard-bitten, when I thought about a living, breathing young actress saying the words. I had been here before, in a way, with the adaptation of Fever Pitch. In a memoir, one tries to be as smart as one can about one’s younger self – that’s sort of what the genre is, and that’s what Lynn had done. In a screenplay, however, one has to deny the subject that insight, otherwise there’s no drama, just a character understanding herself and avoiding mistakes.

The other major problem was the ending. Lynn Barber nearly threw her life away, nearly missed out on the chance to go to university, nearly didn’t sit her exams. And though lots of movie endings derive their power from close shaves, they tend to be a little more enthralling: the bullet just misses the hero, the meteor just misses our planet. It was going to be hard to make people care about whether a young girl got a place at Oxford, no matter how clever she was. Lynn became Jenny after the first draft or two; there were practical reasons for the change, but it helped me to think about the character that I was in the process of creating, rather than the character who existed already, the person who had written the piece of memoir. I could attempt to raise the stakes for Jenny, whereas I would have felt more obliged to stick to the facts if she had remained Lynn.

Some stories mean something, some don’t. It was clear to me that this one did, but I wasn’t sure what, and the things it meant to me weren’t and couldn’t be the same as the things it meant to Lynn: she had found, in this chapter of her life, all sorts of interesting clues to her future, for example, but I couldn’t worry about my character’s future. I had to worry about her present, and how that present might feel compelling to an audience. It would take me several more drafts before I got even halfway there.

BBC Films

The first time I had a formal conversation with outsiders in the film industry about An Education, it didn’t go well. Somebody who was in a position to fund the film – because Amanda and Finola, as independent producers, do not and cannot do that – had expressed an interest, read my first draft, invited us in to a meeting. His colleague, however, clearly wasn’t convinced that there was any potential in the film at all, and that was that. This reflected a pattern repeated many times over the next few years: there was interest in the script, followed by doubts about whether any investment could ever be recouped. Sometimes it felt as though I was in the middle of writing a little literary novel, and going around town asking for a four-million-pound advance for it. Our belief in the project, our conviction that it could one day become a beautiful thing, was sweet, and the producers’ passion got us through a few doors, but it didn’t mean that we weren’t going to cost people money. Another problem with the film’s commercial appeal was beginning to become apparent, too: the lead actress would have to be an unknown – no part for Kate or Cate or Angelina here – and no conventional male lead would want to play the part of the predatory, amoral, possibly lonely David, the older man who seduces the young girl. (Peter Sarsgaard, who responded and committed to the script at an early stage, is a proper actor: he didn’t seem to worry much about whether his character would damage his chances of getting the lead in a romantic comedy.)

The good people at BBC Films, however, saw something in the script – either that, or the desperation in our eyes – and funded the development of An Education, which meant paying me to write another draft, and giving Amanda and Finola some seed money. The meeting we had with David Thompson and Tracey Scoffield went the way no conversations of this kind go, in my experience: as we talked, their professional scepticism was replaced by enthusiasm and understanding. This is supposed to be the point of meetings, from the supplicants’ point of view, anyway; but in my experience (and probably in yours too, whatever your profession), nobody who was previously doubtful is ever really open to persuasion or suggestion. The fact that the thirty minutes or so spent talking to David and Tracey wasn’t a waste of time is more remarkable than it should be.

I didn’t need money to write another draft of the script, of course; I am well paid in my other profession, and there’s very little to be earned in British film, especially at this early stage. But money has a symbolic value, too. We all needed some indication that others in the industry felt as enthusiastic about An Education as we did, otherwise we could be pretty sure that any future energy poured into the project would run right through it and down the drain. BBC Films gave us a sense of purpose. They were not in a position to fund the film, but they could help us to get the project into shape so that others might want to.

The Banana

In the original piece, and in the film itself, our heroine’s seducer produces a banana on the night he wants to take her virginity, apparently because he thought it would result in ease of access. It was a strange and revealing detail that I wanted to keep, because it indicated something of David’s gaucheness.

At a BBC script meeting, David Thompson, then head of BBC Films, started to muse aloud about this particular scene.

‘The banana,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Could it … would it work?’

He directed the question at Amanda and Finola. They shifted uncomfortably in their seats. There was a silence.

Jamie Laurenson, one of the executive producers, cleared his throat.

‘I don’t think … I don’t think it would be a peeled banana,’ he said.

‘Ah!’ said David. ‘Unpeeled! I see.’

We moved on, gratefully.

Directors

It helps to attach a director to the project, too, for exactly the same reasons. Beeban Kidron read whatever was the most recent draft, liked it, met to talk about it, and then worked with me on the script for the best part of a year. (These years slip by, so it’s a relief to remember that other things were happening while An Education wasn’t being made. I wrote my young adult novel Slam, and my third son was born; Finola was off making the HBO drama Tsunami. We have something to show for that time.) I loved working with Beeban, who lives round the corner from my office, and could therefore meet within five minutes of receiving an email, if she was around; it was through talking to her, thinking about what she needed from the script as a film-maker, that I made several important improvements to the script. Certainly Jenny’s complicity in many of David’s deceptions, her willingness to manipulate her parents, came out of my work with Beeban; we took as our cue Lynn Barber’s admission, in the original piece, that when she witnessed ‘David’ stealing the map, she didn’t do anything about it. The decision we made during that time made the script more morally complicated, and the film is the richer for it.

Beeban and I had a cloud hanging over us, however. She was attached to another movie which, like ours, had spent a long time in development. Eventually it became apparent that she couldn’t do both, that they were going to clash, and reluctantly (I think and hope) she decided to go with the project which had predated ours. We were back to square one.

We talked to several more directors after Beeban’s departure. Most wanted to develop the script further, which was fair enough; the trouble is that no two directors could agree on the route we should be taking. One young director even wondered whether the whole 1962 thing was a red herring – had we thought of setting it in the present day? No, we hadn’t. I was particularly keen to work with a woman director – yes, I had female producers to keep a watch on Jenny as she developed in the script, but the value of a woman director who could work with our young actress on set would, I felt, be incalculable – and when Lone Scherfig, the Danish director of Italian For Beginners, expressed an interest in making the film, we all wanted to listen to what she had to say. Lone turned out to be smart about the script, endlessly enthusiastic, and with an outsider’s eye for detail; after she’d taken the job, she set about immersing herself in the look of 1962 England, its clothes and its cars and its cakes. We were lucky to find her.

The Cast

So then we were four: Amanda, Finola, Lone and I. And, for some time, we’d been talking to casting director Lucy Bevan. I’m quite often asked how much input I have in the various processes of film-making – ‘Do you have a say in the casting, for example?’ And though I’d like to claim credit for just about everything, the truth is that I simply don’t know enough about actors (or directors, or editors, or designers, or composers) to contribute to these decisions in any meaningful way. How many young actresses did I know capable of playing the part of Jenny, for example? None at all. What about male actors for the part of David? Well, there was Colin Firth, of course, who I knew from Fever Pitch. And John Cusack (High Fidelity), and Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult, from About a Boy, and the guy with the haircut from No Country for Old Men, which I’d just seen, probably, right before I was asked for my opinion … OK, not one of these was right, but they were all I could think of. Lucy Bevan’s job is to read a script and come up with scores of imaginative suggestions for each part, and she’s brilliant at it. On the whole, it’s best that the casting director, rather than the writer, has a say in casting.

Every now and again I’d say, ‘Oh, God, you can’t ask him.’ Not because the actor in question was bad, or wrong for the part, but because it seemed to me insulting and embarrassing to offer it to him. Lucy, Amanda and Finola were ambitious for An Education in ways that I could never have been, which is why we ended up with Alfred Molina, Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike, rather than, say, me, my friend Harry and my next-door neighbour.

We were helped immeasurably by Emma Thompson agreeing to play the headmistress at an early stage: she gives any project an aura of authority and potential excellence. It was Lucy who knew about Carey Mulligan, of course – she’s been in Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice, and those who had worked with her all talked of her phenomenal talent. But when I was told that they were thinking of casting a twenty-two-year-old as sixteen-year-old Jenny, I was a little disappointed (my exact words, Amanda tells me gleefully, were ‘Well, that’s ruined it all’); it would, I thought, be a different kind of film with an older and as a consequence more knowing girl in the lead role. But when I saw the first shots of Carey in her school uniform, I worried that she looked too young, that we were involved in a dubious remake of Lolita. When Carey’s mother visited the set, she told us that Carey had always cursed her youthful looks, but here they worked for her: I cannot imagine any other actress who could have been so convincing as a schoolgirl and yet so dazzling after her transformation. And, of course, she can act. This was a huge part for any young actress – Jenny is in every single scene – but I don’t think one ever tires of watching her. There’s so much detail, so much intelligence in the performance that it’s impossible to get bored.

My only contribution was a small panic when I’d watched her audition on DVD – she was so clearly, uncannily right that I was concerned when I heard she hadn’t yet been offered the role. And yet this small panic, expressed after producers and director and casting agent had seen the audition, and long after she’d been cast in other high-profile productions, is easily enough for me to claim that I discovered her; so I will, for years to come.

Orlando Bloom

‘Oh, God, you can’t ask him,’ I said. Well, they’d already asked him, and he’d already said he wanted to play the part of Danny. Arrangements were made for the care of his dog.

A couple of weeks before shooting, I was asked to talk to him about a few lines in the script. He called me at my office, and told me that, much as he admired the writing, he wouldn’t be able to play the part. He hoped we’d be able to work together on something else. Confused, I called my wife and told her that, as far as I could tell, Orlando Bloom had just told me he wouldn’t, after all, be playing the part of Danny. Amanda spoke to his agent.

‘No,’ she said. ‘There has been a misunderstanding.’ (It was clear, I felt, from the tone of her voice, who had misunderstood whom.) ‘He just wanted to talk to you about the script.’

I replayed the conversation in my head. We already had a wonderful cast lined up, but Orlando Bloom’s fan club would, it was felt, help the box office of a small British film no end. How had I managed to drive him away, in under three minutes? What had I said?

‘He’s going to call you at home later,’ she said. Don’t mess it up, she didn’t say. But that’s what I heard anyway.

He called that night, and we had exactly the same conversation. I strode around our kitchen, listening to Orlando Bloom talk about his regret and sadness, while I made throat-chopping gestures at my wife. As I wasn’t doing any of the talking, she could see and hear that I wasn’t doing any of the damage, either. I have no idea what any of it was about – why he’d turned us down, why he’d said yes in the first place, whether he’d ever intended to do it, whether it really was Orlando Bloom I’d been speaking to.

Incredibly, the brilliant Dominic Cooper stepped in almost immediately.

The Read-through

In the strange world of independent cinema, everyone – director, writer, cast, producers – proceeds on the basis that the film will be made, even though there is still no money with which to make it. If it’s not make-believe (after all, we were all being paid to pretend, which children aren’t), then it’s a particularly committed form of method acting: we were inhabiting the bodies of independent film-makers, thinking their thoughts at all times in the hope of convincing someone that this was who we were. And eventually somebody believed us. The American financiers Endgame Entertainment liked the script and the cast and the director; this, together with the not insubstantial contribution of the BBC, was enough to enable the film to happen. So suddenly we were all sitting around a table, reading the script out loud to see how it sounded. (I say ‘we’ because I read too – Alfred Molina couldn’t make it, so I played the part of Jenny’s father Jack. This I did by shouting a lot.) I have been to a few read-throughs, and if they go well, as this one did, they are completely thrilling, not least because this is the only time that the script is read from beginning to end in its entirety, so it’s the only chance the writer ever gets to listen to his words in the right order, in real time. The film isn’t shot that way, and scenes get chopped, or never shot in the first place … For the writer, the read-through is the purest, most fully realized version of the script, before the actual film-making part of film-making gets in the way.

At one point in the afternoon, Matthew Beard, the brilliant young actor who plays Jenny’s first boyfriend Graham, got a laugh from the word ‘hello’; there was no such laugh in the script, and you suddenly see the point of a cast – while at the same time, of course, slightly resenting their talent.

The Shoot

I wasn’t there much, so don’t ask me. I had just started a book (Juliet, Naked, available now in all good bookshops), and wanted to make it longer; and in any case, being married to the producer of An Education played havoc with child-care arrangements. Some directors like to have the writer on set, but Lone didn’t seem to need me much, not least because she was so gratifyingly determined to be faithful to the script as it was written. And in any case, any questions she might have had could always be asked via Amanda, who could pass them on, quite often late at night or over breakfast. Lone was always perfectly warm and friendly if I did show up, and actors are always interesting people to waste time with. But that’s what filming is, time-wasting (even, most of the time, for a lot of the people directly involved); past experience has taught me that there is really no other way to characterize it. Our budget was tight, so everyone had to move fast, but this still means that several hours a day, literally, were spent moving lights around, or rearranging furniture. In the words of Homer Simpson: ‘I’ve seen plays that are more interesting. Seriously. Plays.’ All a writer can really do is marvel that an activity so solitary, so imprecise and so apparently whimsical, can result, however many years later, in the teeming humanity of a film set.

The Ending

I was struck, in Lynn’s original piece, by ‘David’ coming to find her in Oxford; it seemed like an appropriate ending for the film. And yet any event that happens after the main timeline of the script’s narrative was always going to seem more like a coda than a climax – I can see that now, but it didn’t seem so obvious during the writing nor the shooting of An Education. We shot the scene, and included it in all the early edits, but it never really worked: it didn’t give the actors enough to do, apart from restate their positions with as much vehemence and/or self-delusion as they could muster. The actors, meanwhile, had effectively found their own ending. The bravura performances of Carey and Alfred Molina during the emotional climax of the film, in which Jack talks to Jenny through her bedroom door, and reveals that he and Jenny’s mother had learned that the trip to Oxford had been a con trick, were enough, we felt; that, plus Jenny’s smile to herself when she receives the letter from Oxford (a moment that wasn’t scripted – it was something cooked up on the phone during the shoot). It all works, I think. But if you needed any further proof that film is a collaborative medium, here it is. That ending was created by Lone, Carey, Alfred and Barney Pilling, the editor. And me, I suppose, although not in the way I had intended to create it.

The Music

I think 1962 was, the last time that British youth looked across the Channel for inspiration, rather than across the Atlantic. The Beatles and the Stones existed, but hadn’t released any records when Jenny met David; and yes, we could have used music by Little Richard or Elvis, but pop had no kind of cachet among the young, clever middle classes, not yet. ‘I want to be French,’ Jenny says – because she loves French music, French films, French food. London was on the verge of swinging, but only a select few could have felt the first sensation of movement; London right at the beginning of the sixties still bore more than a passing resemblance to its wartime self. It is strange to think, for example, that Jenny would have experienced the privations of food rationing for the first half of her life. This was one reason why the UK needed interpreters of American music like Lennon and McCartney, people to transform it so that it made sense: American rock ’n’ roll, with its cars and girls imagery, was a product of American post-war affluence, but Britain had been ruined by the war. An English teenager waited in the rain for a bus. Jenny’s daddy didn’t have a T-Bird – nobody’s daddy did.

We wanted to give a sense of the uniqueness and the difference of this time aurally; that meant no electric guitars, no blue suede shoes. Jazz, chanteuses and classical music would all help place Jenny precisely in her cultural context. This didn’t, however, make the music any cheaper. Music publishers can ask £50,000 or more for well-known songs, and this sort of sum is out of the question for any independent production. We lost one Juliette Gréco song we wanted to clear because of a demand on this scale of insanity, and got clearance – at a rate we could afford – for another after Lone and I wrote to the singer herself (the difference between the two was in the songwriters, and therefore the publishing).

Mostly this was music I knew very little about – it’s salutary to be reminded that what one thinks of as personal taste, an aesthetic that has taken years to achieve, is actually little more than the inevitable product of being born in a certain place at a certain time.

The Film

So, was it worth it? Yes, as far as I’m concerned, emphatically so. I am as proud of An Education as of anything I’ve ever written – prouder, if anything, if only because it’s so much easier to take pride in other people’s work. Whatever I think of the writing, I love the work of the actors, and Lone’s direction, and Andrew McAlpine’s beautiful design, and John de Borman’s camerawork, and if nothing else, I can take enormous pleasure in helping to create a structure in which this work was possible. ‘You probably can’t wait to start another one,’ somebody said to me after the Sundance Festival, where An Education was received well, and won a couple of awards. It should work like that, of course. But the simple fact of the film’s existence, let alone any quality it might have, is miraculous, a freakish combination of the right material and the right people and an awful lot of tenacity, almost none of which was mine. And how many miracles does one have the right to expect, during the average working life?

A Sundance Diary (2009)

Saturday, 17 January

The story so far: An Education, a film with a script I adapted from a piece of Lynn Barber memoir which originally appeared in Granta, has been invited to the Sundance Film Festival. An Education, directed by Lone Scherfig, stars Peter Sarsgaard and Carey Mulligan, a brilliant young actress, and was produced by Finola Dwyer and my wife, Amanda Posey. Now read on …

Amanda, Finola and I fly from LA to Salt Lake City. Utah is, I think, the twenty-third US state I have visited, and one I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to: for some reason, they tend not to send me there on book tours. Park City, where most of Sundance happens, is up in the mountains some forty-five minutes’ drive from Salt Lake City; there is thick snow everywhere, but the sun shines bright and warm every day of our visit. The snow thus becomes something of a mystery. In London it would have turned to an unappealing grey sludge before vanishing altogether. We dump our bags in the hotel, which also doubles as the Festival’s HQ, and head straight off out to see a movie that we’ve been invited to by its screenwriters. We have two tickets between the three of us, and the screening is completely sold out, but when we get to the cinema my wife explains plaintively that Finola has dropped hers in the snow somewhere. I wince, and then remember that it’s only through desperate lies like this that An Education got made at all. The flustered usherette waves us through, and we all find seats. The film, 500 Days of Summer, is great, fresh and funny and true in a way that romantic comedies rarely are.

Afterwards, we catch a shuttle bus from the cinema to a party for the movie. The bus is packed, and everyone is talking about film; in the gangway next to us, a young cinematographer is chatting animatedly to a Canadian documentary maker. In five years’ time the two of them will probably be onstage at the Oscar ceremony, remembering this first fortuitous meeting tearfully. We’re English though (Finola is from New Zealand, but similar national stereotypes apply) so we don’t talk to anybody, apart from each other. That’s why we won’t be advancing our Hollywood careers this weekend.

At the party, we are all told several times that there is a tremendous buzz around our film. There are two sources for this: one was an enormously helpful and sincerely enthusiastic preview piece by the respected film critic Kenneth Turan in the LA Times, in which he described An Education as ‘probably the jewel of the festival’s dramatic films, and sure to be one of the best films of the year’; the other is that the film is premiering at the small Egyptian cinema, rather than the 1,400-seater where we saw 500 Days of Summer. Nobody can get tickets, and this only increases our desirability. I can now see that booking us in the smaller cinema was a stroke of PR genius. We’re the best film nobody can see.

We eat at a Thai restaurant around the corner from the party. We bump into my (English) film agent and two of her (English) colleagues; there are English film-makers on the table behind us. There are twelve English films from these islands on at the festival, a record.

Sunday, 18 January

I meet my friend Serge, of the rock band Marah, for a coffee. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, and they are expecting a baby now, this minute. I’ve got them both tickets for the screening, but they have no idea whether they’ll be able to use them. Serge tells me that, twenty years ago, Park City was a proper gold-rush ghost town; now it’s a thriving, cute, middle-class ski resort, full of smart gift shops and restaurants, like a snowy Henley-on-Thames. Those who have been before, like the actor Dominic Cooper (who, like Carey, has two films on at the festival – he is in ours and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, an adaptation of the David Foster Wallace book), tell us that this year it’s much quieter, and therefore much nicer – the state of the economy has reduced Sundance attendances by a third, some reckon. But the streets are crowded, and the movies are all selling out, so it feels like any more people than this would be unnecessary. The Puffa jackets and the ski hats flatten everybody out, turn the film stars into normal people; you can be walking behind a perfectly ordinary-looking man striding out on his own, and then watch him stop to have his photo taken by someone walking towards you, someone who has the advantage of seeing his face. (Well, that happened once. It was Robin Williams.)

Our screening is at 3 p.m. We meet up with Lone Scherfig, the director, and Carey, and people from Endgame, the US financiers, in the green room, and now I’m properly nervous. Of course, just as you have to share the credit if a film turns out OK, you can deflect the blame if it goes wrong: it was miscast, badly edited, the performances were poor, it was under-funded, and so on. And actually, if it goes right, it will be Lone who attracts most of the praise. But this is a family affair: my wife and I will both be depressed if it goes down like a lead zeppelin (and doesn’t that spelling look weird?). And we were the ones who started this whole stupid, misbegotten project in the first place. I was the one who first read Lynn’s original piece, and Amanda and Finola optioned it. We are entirely the authors of our own misfortune.

We take our seats, but there’s a long delay while people mill around looking for empty places. The tickets at Sundance aren’t numbered, and some people have passes that get them into any screening they fancy, which inevitably means that attendances can exceed capacity. Lone is standing by the side of the stage, waiting to introduce the film, so her seat is empty; three times a stressed-out official tries to fill it. I look for Serge, but can’t find him. I imagine him in a hospital in Salt Lake, urging his wife to remember her breathing. I wish we were having a baby this afternoon.

I have seen the film twice before, once in its finished version, and both times it has been difficult for me to read how it’s playing. The first two-thirds contain jokes, and on a good day people laugh at them; the last third is more serious, and intended to move an audience. In other words, the last half-hour is an agony of silence. (I often wonder whether I have always written would-be comic novels simply because it helps me ascertain whether people are awake at readings.) Three people leave in the second half of the film. Two of them come back (one of them, I realize, was Carey). I hate the third. I remember a story that a friend with a bad Sundance experience told me: he said that during a screening of one of his films a few years ago, all he could hear was the sound of slapping seats as industry professionals decided that they’d seen enough to make their minds up. We fared better than that – you could definitely hear the soundtrack – but when the credits came up, I still wasn’t at all sure how we’d done.

Lone, Carey, Dominic and I go onstage for the Q&A – the people who’ve stayed for it seem genuinely taken by the film, which is a relief. Afterwards, I go outside to smoke round the back of the cinema, and Lone, our Danish director, introduces me to a compatriot, a woman who is a juror on the awards panel.

‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I hope you enjoyed it.’

I know she’s a juror, but it wouldn’t kill her to lie politely, I think. To tell a screenwriter that you enjoyed his film is not the same thing as telling him that you will shower him with prizes.

‘I cannot tell you that,’ she says firmly.

‘Oh.’

I try to think of another pleasantry that will not compromise her obviously formidable integrity.

‘Well … Thanks for coming.’

‘I had no choice,’ she says, but she still seems to expect a chat.

I shrug helplessly. ‘I’ve got nothing left,’ I tell her. She walks away.

I check my phone to see if Serge has left a message about Monica going into labour, and it turns out that they came to the screening and couldn’t get anywhere near it. The tickets we had worked hard to get them were useless. There’s another message from Scott, one of the co-writers of 500 Days of Summer. His tickets were no good either. We only invited four friends, and none of them got inside the cinema.

One of the points – the chief point – of premiering the film at Sundance is to try and sell the film to an American distributor. An Education was made without any distribution already in place, which means that there was no guarantee that anyone would ever see it in a cinema, a fate that befalls a surprisingly large number of movies. To our delight, we had sold it for UK release shortly before the festival, but the US financiers need American distribution. It’s not our problem, but of course we all want it, too: it’s been made for people to watch, on a big screen. Everything I had read in the trade press about Sundance in the run-up to the festival contained dire warnings about the economy’s impact on sales; nobody was expecting much to happen. Our sales agents were confident that they’d get something, but they thought it would take time, that distributors would need to see all the movies before committing themselves to one or two. We were prepared not to hear anything for a week or two. But when we get to the strange and rather cheerless village hall that is our post-film party venue, we hear that an offer has already been made. We are jubilant. It turns out that it is a very bad offer – insulting, even, if you know enough to be insulted, which I don’t. So I remain jubilant, like an idiot.

At the party I am introduced to David Carr, whose brilliant memoir Night of the Gun was one of my favourite books of last year: he wants to speak to me for his New York Times blog. It doesn’t seem right. His book is so great that I feel I should be interviewing him.

He starts with an apology.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had to leave your film halfway through. I was called out to interview Robert Redford.’ The man who didn’t come back was David Carr, author of Night of the Gun! And he had a good excuse anyway! I can now account for 100 per cent of the leavers: two weak bladders (or in Carey’s case, completely understandable nerves) and a summons from a megastar.

When we get back to the hotel late that night, Amanda tells me that there is quite a lot going on: the insulting offer has been superseded by several less insulting offers. Distributors liked the film, and some of them want to buy it.

Monday, 19 January

Lone, Carey, Dominic and I have a day of publicity. It becomes apparent quite quickly that Carey’s life has changed this weekend; her other film ended up getting mixed reviews, but her performance was praised to the skies, and everybody loves her in ours, too – which is just as well, seeing as she’s in every single scene. Within twenty-four hours she’s being described as the ‘Sundance “It” Girl’ in Variety and ‘the new Audrey Hepburn’ in the New York Post. It’s exciting to watch – like something out of an earlier, more glamorous age. As we walk through the Park City streets from appointment to appointment, several people want their photographs taken with her. She remains remarkably composed throughout the weekend. She’s a very bright girl, and I am certain that she will be able to handle this year with grace and charm.

Lone and I are interviewed together by a young woman from a news agency. For some reason, the news agency has positioned itself for the duration of the festival on the second floor of a guitar shop, in what looks like a broom cupboard; underneath them, rock bands are playing short, loud sets. It’s as if they have deliberately chosen the worst spot in Utah for recorded interviews. It takes us about half an hour to push through the music fans to the cupboard, and when we get inside it, it’s obvious that the young woman hasn’t emerged to see any films.

‘Tell us about your characters,’ is her opening shot.

‘Lone’s very calm,’ I tell her. ‘But I can be moody.’

She looks confused.

‘We’re not actors,’ I confess.

Flustered, she consults her notes.

‘It must be hard, working together when you’re married. Was there any tension?’

‘We’re not married,’ says Lone. Still. Where would we be without the press?

In the evening, Carey, Amanda, Finola and I go to see another film, and then attend yet another party. I think I have been to more parties here than in the whole of 2008. By now it’s obvious that things have gone much better for us than we dared hope: the reviews we’ve seen have been unbelievable (one of the first, on the normally snarky ‘LA gossip rag’ Defamer.com, I wouldn’t have dared write myself), the film is almost certainly going to sell for a decent amount, and to cap it all, here I am giving Uma Thurman a light. I don’t have a lighter, so I hand her my cigarette. (I can only just reach – she’s about a metre taller than me.)

‘If you can live with the intimacy that implies,’ she says.

And then I woke up.

I am always on the verge of giving up smoking, but my habit has resulted in my meeting both Uma (as I now think of her) and Kurt Vonnegut. Where’s the incentive?

Amanda and Finola sign an agreement with Sony Classics in the Virgin lounge at San Francisco airport. When we get home we are told that An Education won the Audience Award, and a prize for John de Borman’s cinematography. Nothing from the Danish juror, though.

Kidding Around

Halfway through Iona Opie’s primary-school journal, The People in the Playground, she describes a couple of minutes of break time that make one wonder how the transition from childhood to adulthood – to taxi-driving and chartered accountancy and dental hygiene – is ever effected.

‘The freckle-faced horror had a different boy in tow, and said, “I want to introduce you to the Dog of Liverpool. He’s a sex maniac. He takes nude ladies to bed with him.” The Dog looked embarrassed, so I took an interest in his Deep Water Fisherman’s badge. “Did you write all that down? His name is Jonathan Price. What’s his name? What’s your name? Mary Jane. Where d’you live? Down the drain. What’s your shop? Fizzy pop. Boom, boom!” He kicks in the air and exclaims “Boom, boom” whenever he makes a joke, having picked up the habit from the television puppet Basil Brush.’

If there is a creature odder than a child, one would not want to have to meet it.

Opie’s fascinating and frequently hilarious book is full of these high-speed riffs, which can be as opaque and as allusive as an Eliot poem. What they signify is anybody’s guess, and Opie (who, with her late husband Peter, wrote the pioneering The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, as well as The Singing Game) very rarely makes any attempt to decode her raw material. The People in the Playground offers straight, minute observation of complicated, minute people: Opie watches children’s games, listens to their songs and endures their jokes, and writes absolutely everything, every bodged punchline and every raspberry, down in her little notebook. Indeed, some of the book’s charm comes from the relationship between the child and the notebook. ‘’Ave you written that down? You never!’ cries one little boy with appalled admiration, after he has entertained his public with a witticism about dog’s muck and bumholes.

‘Oh, ’eck, you’re not going to write down that I did that, are you? Bloomin’ ’eck!’ another splutters, after he has claimed, with easily deflatable braggadocio, that his hobby is flicking large elastic bands at girls. ‘If you can’t spell starkers, just put in the nude,’ suggests a third helpfully, as Opie struggles to record yet another long and frankly disappointing story about a naked lady.

If the children frequently give the impression of telling fart jokes first and regretting them later, they do turn the tables on their chronicler occasionally. One boy taunts Opie, the eternally hopeful bluestocking archivist, with his own modernity: ‘Do you know my favourite hobby? Watching TV! He he he he!!’ There is an impish and knowing point to this hilarity, as Opie ruefully observes: ‘He must have known how irritating this pronouncement would be to a devout folklorist.’

Postmodernism has not yet managed to penetrate the world of children’s folklore, however, and The People in the Playground is not, despite these incidental attractions, a book about its own creation. And nor, despite Opie’s best efforts, is it a book about games or rhymes, the sophisticated patterns of which seem to have evaded the journal format. (It is, however, nice to see that games such as British Bulldog, Stuck in the Mud et al. are still going strong, or were between 1978 and 1980, when Opie made her study.)

Most of all it is a book about jokes. Why did the orange go to the doctor? What’s green and barks? What would you give to a sick pig? Why was the policeman up a tree? What’s the highest building in town? Did you hear about the cowboy who wore paper clothes? (Because it wasn’t peeling well; a Grape Dane; oinkment; he belonged to the Special Branch; a library, because it’s got the most stories; he was arrested for rustling.)

There are jokes about every conceivable bodily function, every member of the animal kingdom, every nationality, every television programme, even every chocolate bar. Jokes positively gush from these children who beg Opie to jot down ‘just one more’, who ask her whether she ‘takes’ Irish jokes as if they were a dodgy foreign currency.

After a while, the joke-telling starts to resemble a bodily function in its own right: jokes become something that must be expelled at all costs from the infant mouth into the nearest human ear, regardless of their quality, meaning or length.

The frequency with which the tellers bungle their jokes suggests that the children do not always understand their own material. There is a long Irish story which suffers somewhat from the absence of an Irishman; the old ‘When is a car not a car?’ is ruined by the selection of the wrong verb – ‘When it goes into a lay-by’ is nowhere near as funny as ‘When it turns into a lay-by’.

And one does not wish to appear too naive, but some of the racier stuff, involving Durex and improbable masturbatory aids, is surely a little sophisticated for primary-school children. Any scatalogical content is prized, even if the sense is out of reach. (Opie, incidentally, remains touchingly and sportingly unshockable throughout; she points out that one of the fart jokes is to be found in Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a piece of information that reassures as much as it illuminates.)

It becomes clear that jokes – in essence easily, if occasionally partially, remembered short stories – have an important social function. They allow children to take the floor, develop narrative skills and hold attention in ways denied them elsewhere in life. Opie points out that the children often enter a story-telling state, a sort of comedic coma; they stare off into the middle distance and adopt a different tone of voice. Reaching the punchline without tripping up and spilling the lot is obviously of much greater importance than actually making anybody chortle.

One does not really need any stuffy pedagogical justification to read this book, however; indeed, to come at the book from this angle would be to miss its point, and its joy, entirely. Read it because it is very funny, and read it because children are intrinsically daft and invariably fascinating; read it also because Opie is a deft, engaging and dry observer of their foibles.

Last week, while in the middle of reading The People in the Playground, I went to see Arsenal play Southampton. During the second half, a young substitute named Paul Dickov came on to the field; before very long, one of the spectators behind me, a man in his thirties, was quite helpless with mirth, and remained so for the remainder of the game. ‘Dickov!’ he kept exclaiming amid snorts and splutters, headshakes and tears. ‘Dickov!’ Opie will know better than anybody that the transition from childhood to adulthood is never effected quite as thoroughly as one would wish.

The Goons

At the time of writing, my iPod contains 13,056 songs. Hundreds of them – tracks by Elvis and Little Richard, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis – were recorded in the US during the 1950s; hundreds more – and you can take an educated guess at the artists concerned – were made in the UK during the 1960s. But I do not own a single song recorded in my own country in the 1950s, the decade in which I was born. What was there to own? In 1958 an English Elvis imitator called Cliff Richard, who went on to spend more time in the UK charts than anyone else apart from Elvis himself, had a hit with a rock ’n’ roll song called ‘Move It’ – but if you’ve ever heard anything that Presley recorded in the first five years of his career, then you’re not missing much if you don’t know the song. (Indeed, it might even confirm any prejudice you might hold about Englishmen being a little uptight.) The first genuine English rock ’n’ roll classic – ‘Shakin’ All Over’, by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, later covered by the Who on Live at Leeds – didn’t arrive until 1960. There was really nothing else from around then that has any place in a history of rock ’n’ roll. The reasons for this are obvious enough: rock ’n’ roll, its fusion of black R&B and white hillbilly music, had to be American before it could be anything else, and those boats carrying the first examples of that fusion took a long time to get to Liverpool. So what was happening in the UK that got people excited? The Goons were happening, that’s what.

The Goons were a group of comedians – Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine – whose radio show, broadcast on the BBC between 1951 and 1960, was heard by seven million people every week; two of its biggest fans were the Queen’s eldest son and John Lennon. Charles is still the honorary patron of the Goon Show Preservation Society; Lennon reviewed a collection of scripts for The New York Times in 1972, and Yoko gave him forty hours of old episodes on his thirty-seventh birthday. ‘I was twelve when the Goons first hit me. Sixteen when they were finished with me,’ Lennon’s review begins, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect: when he was sixteen, he was ready for other influences, and more to the point, those other influences were ready for him.

It’s hard to think of anything else that Prince Charles and John Lennon might have had in common, but then, that’s one of the points of the Goons: that they were inclusive in a way that rock ’n’ roll, despite its obvious democracy, couldn’t be, didn’t even want to be. One of the points of Elvis and everything that came after was to create alarm and rupture; but The Goon Show couldn’t upset anyone even if it wanted to. BBC guidelines – and, by the way, there were no commercial stations back then – forbad any reference to, among other things, drunkenness, prostitution, infidelity, honeymoons, underwear or homosexuality; entertainers weren’t even allowed to impersonate Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, or two of our best-loved wartime singers, Gracie Fields and Vera Lynn, in case offence was caused. In other words, any subversion had to be done the hard way. The Goons managed to slip a few obscene references past the stern countenance of the BBC governors, through judicious use of rhyming slang and other knowing references. But mostly the Goons shook things up with a glorious, surreal gibberish, the missing link between the Marx Brothers and Monty Python.

Not everyone got it, I’m presuming, but it wasn’t just the young and the restless who did. (Prince Charles was nobody’s idea of James Dean, that’s for sure.) And I suspect that this made a difference to the history of British pop music. For starters, George Martin’s experience recording comedy albums for Sellers and Milligan impressed Lennon and McCartney – the Goons helped Martin and the Beatles bond, despite Martin being fifteen years older than Lennon. And if Martin hadn’t ended up producing the Beatles, the recent cultural history of Britain would have been subtly different.

But, less specifically, it meant that the first generation of English rockers had shared an important influence with their parents. In a way, this was unavoidable. The Second World War helped make the US rich, but it more or less bankrupted Britain. The 1950s in the UK wasn’t a time of plenty (food rationing finally ended in July 1954, ten years and a month after D-Day) and nobody was having much fun; the world depicted in American rock ’n’ roll songs was pure fantasy. English teenagers didn’t drive so, no, they couldn’t imagine how Chuck Berry felt / when he couldn’t undo her safety belt: English teenagers waited for buses in the rain. There had been no TV at all during the war, so the habit of listening to the BBC – with parents – during those dark, hungry, frightening evenings was deeply ingrained. When the dark, hungry evenings continued way into the fifties, the radio listening did, too. Whatever certain English right-wing commentators would have you believe, being bombed doesn’t mean that we’re morally superior. But it almost certainly means that the Lennon/McCartney generation in the UK was different, in profound ways, from the Dylan generation in the US. How could it not? Maybe the Beatles generation liked their parents more – maybe that’s why you can hear traces of old music hall in the songs of the Beatles and the Kinks and others.

In 1963, right at the beginning of their remarkable journey, the Beatles played for the Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Performance, a dismal show that usually consisted of impressionists, cheesy comedians and hopelessly blancmange chart singers. So the Beatles were a shock to the system … but not too much of a shock. (It was during this show that John Lennon exhorted those members of the Royal Family watching to ‘rattle their jewellery’.) How proud their parents must have been that night! And perhaps that’s part of the point. Families in the UK had all been through too much together for the kind of straightforward rebellion visible in the US, in the films of Brando and James Dean, and the music of Elvis Presley. British families had gone hungry together, got frightened together and laughed at the Goons together. The Beatles wanted to shake things up a little, but they didn’t want to piss anyone off, either.

Wodehouse

What, one wonders, would the critical reception for Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle books be like were he to publish now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century? (One has to suspend disbelief for a moment, and imagine that a beady-eyed young editor at a major publishing house would temporarily abandon his obsession with finding the next American Psycho or Trainspotting, and become besotted with the relationship between a titled chump and his prizewinning pig.) Judging by the bizarre recent reaction to another charming comic writer, Helen Fielding, Wodehouse might be in for a hard time. Someone would accuse him of setting back the cause of the landed gentry by fifty years. Someone else would point out that pigs really aren’t like that at all, and Wodehouse had got it all wrong. Yet another person would become so angered by the books’ popularity that he would threaten to hit their author. One doubts if anyone would mention, at any point, that Wodehouse was trying to make people laugh, and that he had therefore taken some liberties with the character of the Empress of Blandings (Lord Emsworth’s prize sow, for those of you unfamiliar with the Blandings dramatis personae) in the pursuit of this laudable goal. If it is hard to write comedy, it seems quite impossible to write about it, which is why some comic writers must endure the experience of being reviewed as if their characters had wandered out of a Hardy novel.

Wodehouse understood, perhaps better than any other English writer, that to dedicate one’s life to comedy meant trying to be funny all the time. This might seem an obvious thing to say, but surprisingly few people actually do it. For a start, a lot of people want their books to be real, to be happy and sad – a legitimate and noble desire, perhaps, but one which means that there will inevitably be a dullish passage where somebody goes to work and observes all the faces on the tube, say, or a sad bit where the narrator’s boyfriend dumps her. Wodehouse isn’t interested in this kind of realism, because it comes at a price – joke-free zones – that he is not willing to pay. As a consequence, he is accused by some critics (those who delight in stating the clunkingly obvious) of being a lightweight. Well, yes. That is the whole point. He was a comic writer, and had no pretensions in any other direction. No doubt the same critics would point out that there is no record of Rembrandt being much of a singer.

You can still hear echoes of that sort of peculiar nit-picking today. Sometime in the late 1990s, when the BBC broadcast – late at night, when they were sure no one was going to watch – two recent, and wonderful, American sitcoms, Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show, there were frequent debates about which was better. As far as I could tell, the general feeling was that The Larry Sanders Show had the edge; it was, people said, ‘darker’, ‘more ambitious’, ‘richer’. Seinfeld, on the other hand, was famously ‘a show about nothing’. This is undoubtedly true; but, of course, all the time that the creators of Sanders spent on being dark and ambitious and rich prohibited them from being funny. Jokes were sacrificed for character development, and for bitterness, and the programme was paced more like a drama, thus giving its people and its themes room to breathe. In a way, it’s easier to be funny when you afford yourself the luxury of darkness. Seinfeld, meanwhile, was uninterested in anything but making people laugh as frequently as possible – which was why, inevitably, it wasn’t ‘about’ very much. So, yes, The Larry Sanders Show was ‘better’ than Seinfeld, in the same way that Middlemarch is ‘better’ than Summer Lightning. Wodehouse would concede the point, but he would also suggest (modestly) that Summer Lightning has more jokes in it.

There is a moment in Summer Lightning where, just for a moment, it looks as though Wodehouse is going to allow the real world to intrude. At the beginning of Chapter 7, he points out that prosperity and tranquility have softened Lord Emsworth, and equipped him badly for traumas such as the loss of a pig. ‘When some outstanding disaster happens to the ordinary man,’ Wodehouse observes, ‘it finds him prepared.’ The subsequent list of said disasters is instructive. Bearing in mind that 1929, when Summer Lightning was published, was the year of the Wall Street Crash, and financiers were jumping to their deaths from their office windows, one wonders briefly whether the author is going to allow a rip in his comic fabric, and tell us that, outside the Blandings Castle walls, the world is reeling from one horror to the next. We needn’t have worried. Wodehouse’s summary of the horrors that befall the ordinary man is merely another example of his comic single-mindedness: ‘Years of missing the eight-forty-five, taking the dog for a run on rainy nights, endeavouring to abate smoky chimneys, and coming down to breakfast and discovering they have burned the bacon again, have given his soul a protective hardness, so that by the time his wife’s relations arrive for a long visit he is ready for them.’ Some people might become exasperated at this point by the cosiness and privilege of Wodehouse’s vision, but we would, I think, be correct in hazarding that these people would not be very funny people, and we can, in this context, safely ignore them.

Wodehouse also knew that comic material does not, on its own, suffice; he understood that on top of the comic material one has to overlay comic writing. In other words, however many amusing plot twists involving missing pigs he comes up with, it all comes to nothing if the prose is straight and plain – usually a sure sign that the author has an overwheening and misplaced confidence in the strength of his narrative. This, I’m afraid to say, is where Shakespeare went wrong with his comedies: Rowan Atkinson’s schoolmaster once brilliantly pointed out that they have ‘the joke of someone looking like someone else’, and, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had to sit through one, it’s not really enough for repeated and sustained laughter. Perhaps one of the sharpest analyses of Wodehouse’s genius came from J. B. Priestley, who once referred in a review to the ‘masterfully idiotic phrasemaking’, and this is where one draws the greatest joy from his work now. Lord Emsworth possesses ‘an intelligence about as mean as an intelligence can be without actually being placed under restraint’. A few pages later, ‘his brain, never a strong one, had tottered perceptibly on its throne’. ‘A butler,’ Lord Emsworth’s brother the Hon. Galahad Threepwood muses after he has surprised the hapless Beach, ‘is a butler, and a startled fawn is a startled fawn. He disliked the blend of the two in a single body.’

There is something of this quality in more or less every paragraph as well as the joke of someone looking like someone else. It’s why TV adaptations of Wodehouse’s writing will never work satisfactorily: without the filter of that prose, more or less the entire point is lost. A camera pointing at the antics of jovial halfwits is not the same as Wodehouse describing the antics of jovial halfwits. (This resistance to really successful adaptation, incidentally, is something that Wodehouse shares with Dickens, whose brilliant caricatures can only be diminished by flesh-and-blood actors.)

With the Jeeves and Wooster and Blandings Castle series, Wodehouse created two outstanding series of books – in fact, they are fast approaching an age where they can be described as immortal. I have always had a slight preference for the ‘Blandings’ tales, if only because the third-person voice allows for a wonderful authorial tone – a mix of affected exasperation with, and helpless adoration of, his characters – which is, in Bertie Wooster’s first-person narrative, replaced by a more straightforward buffoonery and partial comprehension. But the truth is that just about everything Wodehouse wrote (and he wrote ninety-six books and 300 short stories, as well as sixteen plays and the lyrics for a couple of dozen musicals) was of a quality unmatched by any other pretender to his throne, because he could turn his incomparable comic prose on with no discernible effort. I will not advance an argument about how he could illuminate the murkier corners of the human condition, or how this novel is a piece of invaluable social history, or how Lord Emsworth’s adoration of his pig is one of the most complex and misunderstood relationships in all of literature, because that would be doing Summer Lightning no favours whatsoever. It is, gloriously, a book about nothing, and all the better for it.

Scenes from Provincial Life

My sister gave me Scenes from Provincial Life for Christmas, possibly in ’82 or ’83. I’d never heard of either the book or its author before that. I don’t know how she came across it, or why she decided I should read it, but it was a smart and very welcome gift; ten years later, when I began to think about writing my first novel, it became clear to me that William Cooper was one of the authors (along with Anne Tyler and Roddy Doyle, among others) who had helped me to think about the kind of fiction I wanted to write. Cooper was certainly one of the authors who helped me to think about the kind of fiction I wanted to read. I was not long out of university, and – like Joe, the narrator of Scenes from Provincial Life – I was teaching in a secondary school. Unlike Joe, however, I didn’t think of myself as a writer yet. (One of the incidental pleasures of Provincial Life is its painful accuracy about a writing career in its infancy – the hope, the despair, the waiting for acceptance letters that never come, the constant vows to give up or to plough on.) I was reading very little, partly because of my workload, and partly because university had dulled my appetite for books. I didn’t want to read the novels I felt I ought to be reading, and nor did I want to give up my pretensions, so as a compromise I just gave up on literature altogether. When I started in on my sister’s Christmas present, I found I couldn’t stop: Cooper’s readability, his attractive, conversational style, helped me to remember why I had enjoyed reading so much in the first place, before lectures and essays destroyed it all.

Don’t just take my word for it, though – I’m not the only person who loves the novel. Scenes from Provincial Life seems to me so simple, lucid, attractive and funny that anyone who finds he can’t read it probably ought to ask himself: ‘Should I be trying to read books at all? Wouldn’t it be better to sit and watch television or something?’ This, I think, is as good a summary of the enduring appeal of this novel as anything I could provide. True, this summary is provided by the author himself, on what would appear to have been a particularly bullish day, but this doesn’t make it wrong. Unless you are one of those people that think a novel can’t be any good unless it makes you weep with the effort of reading it, then Cooper’s refreshingly immodest self-assessment is spot-on.

Scenes from Provincial Life was published in 1950, and served an important function in post-war English literary history: without Cooper’s novel, there may well have been no Lucky Jim, or any of the other fifties and sixties novels that deal with relatively ordinary people in relatively ordinary situations. Making a case for the influence of a particular work of art, however, is never a very persuasive or attractive argument – without Birth of a Nation there may very well have been no Pulp Fiction, but the latter is a lot more fun to watch than the former, and the joy of Cooper’s novel (which, despite bearing all the hallmarks of a debut, wasn’t his first – he’d already written three or four under his real name, Harry Hoff) lies in its readability and freshness. It’s funny and candid and, surprisingly, disorientatingly modern.

It’s impossible to read the opening chapters of this book without thinking of Philip Larkin’s line ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963’. We always presume we knew what Larkin meant – but the sexual conduct of Cooper’s characters render the observation meaningless in every way. The novel takes place in 1939, right before the outbreak of war. Joe, the schoolteacher narrator, and his friend Tom share – not altogether peaceably – a weekend cottage in the countryside outside the provincial town where they live and work. (Cooper himself lived and worked in Leicester.) Joe uses the cottage for assignations with his girlfriend Myrtle, and Tom uses it for assignations with his young boyfriend Steve. There is no archaic moral dimension to any of this, and Tom is not tortured by his sexuality. No outrage or even disapproval is expressed at any time, in the narrative or in the dialogue; it’s just how things are. Similarly, there is no sense that the sexual relationship between Joe and Myrtle is in any way illicit. What troubles the narrator is the listlessness of the relationship – should they marry, should they part? – a dilemma which one has seen in fiction before, but rarely in a novel set before the war. And Joe’s relationship with his pupils is bewilderingly contemporary, too. They call him by his first name, and encourage him to climb out of the classroom window so that he can escape the stuffy school air and clear his head. ‘At one period, the upper forms had devoted a few days of their attention to choosing theme songs for members of the staff. I was told that mine was “Anything Goes”; it seemed to me fair,’ Joe tells us, philosophically. His snobbish and unexamined dismissal of ‘the soppy, drawling, baby-talk of the slum areas’ is much more likely to jar our sensibilities than either his professional or his sexual conduct.

No novel set in 1939 could avoid a political dimension, of course, but in Scenes from Provincial Life, the threat of war is brought up organically: the torrent in Europe is funnelled and tamed, and it reaches Joe’s provincial town in much the same way as it would have reached any provincial town in the summer of ’39, as a trickle of intense personal anxiety and distraction. Throughout the book, Joe, Tom and their forbidding older friend Robert (based on the novelist C. P. Snow) talk about emigrating to America – they seem certain that Britain will lose a war, or fail even to fight one. Munich, and Chamberlain’s piece of paper, we are told, was a particularly desperate moment. ‘The essence was that life for us would be insupportable in a totalitarian state. We did not argue very much; it went without saying … We had not the slightest doubt that were some form of authoritarian regime to come to our country we should sooner or later end up in a concentration camp.’ America ends up performing the same sort of function as the farm in Of Mice and Men: it’s a dream and a promise, and the reader knows that the young men at the centre of the narrative will never get there, not least because hindsight tells us they will have to stay and help fight the war – which is, of course, what they wanted to do.

At the end of the novel, Cooper provides us with updates on his characters – the wars they had, the marriages, the careers – as the decade or so between the events the book describes and its publication logically allow him to do. The postscript comes across as a neat – and, yes, very modern – fictional device, but actually Cooper wrote autobiographically in a way that would have surprised even the most literal-minded of readers. Scenes from Metropolitan Life, the sequel to this book, remained unpublished until 1982, for legal reasons: in Metropolitan Life, Joe’s affair with Myrtle continues, but Myrtle is now a married woman, and the real-life Myrtle wasn’t happy. The third book in the series, entitled Scenes from Married Life, wasn’t published until 1961, and there is a suspicion that Cooper’s career was damaged as a result. Scenes from Provincial Life, at least, will live on, I hope. It would be nice to think that its republication could influence a whole new generation of writers. And if you find yourself unable to read it, then you should take its author’s advice, and go and look under your sofa cushions for the remote control immediately.

Ideas for Books

Recently I was talking to a musician friend about why he hadn’t released a song he’d written and recorded with his band. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s somebody’s song. But it sure doesn’t sound like ours.’ I knew exactly what he meant. Part of your job as a writer is to recognize when a story is right for you – when it allows you to explore and express the fullest version of yourself, and whatever talent you might have. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what I would like to write next, and there seems to be no shortage of ideas; unfortunately, most of them aren’t very good. (I know, I know – but you should see the ideas even I won’t go near.) Some of them – fragments of narrative, a sketchy notion of a character – don’t seem to go anywhere, or if they do, they don’t go anywhere I want to go; some of them turn out to be, on closer inspection, ideas that someone else has had ages ago. (A boy with a drum who refuses to grow up! A guy who lives the same day over and over again!) Others seem perfectly sound, but lack a door which would let me in to do what I do, whatever that is. Recently, I had an uncommonly brilliant idea for a short story which would, I later realized, necessitate my having to familiarize myself with all current theories of time. If Michael Frayn or Tom Stoppard refuse to ghost the story for me, then I’m in trouble.

The initial narrative idea for A Long Way Down – four strangers meet on the top of a tower block, just as they are about to throw themselves off – came in two stages. I live not far from Archway Bridge, in north London, which attracts jumpers with a terrible frequency, and have often thought about the people who choose to end their lives there; shortly after I’d driven under it, I heard something on Radio 4 about how suicide rates spike on certain dates of the year – Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day in particular. If you were thinking of killing yourself, could you conceivably bump into someone else thinking of doing the same thing at a well-known suicide spot on those nights? And could any such meeting alter the outcome? I started to think about this as a potential novel.

I always spend a long time thinking about the beginning of a book, because if I can see the beginning clearly, then I can trick myself into sitting down at my desk and actually writing the thing. I invented Toppers’ House, the derelict tower block where my characters meet, because a roof gave them less opportunity to escape or hide; Martin and Maureen were the first two characters that came to me, and I spent a disproportionate amount of time on ladders and railings and barbed wire. I knew that I was pushing my luck with the collision of four people, but I felt that if I worked hard to make the four credible, and accentuated the dark comedy of such a premise, then the reader might be prepared to overlook the long odds against its likelihood. None of this felt like the point, though. The point was that this was material I could inhabit and make my own; I could see that it was mine, in the same way that my friend couldn’t see that the song he’d recorded was his. It allowed me to write about things that were on my mind and, crucially, it allowed me a mix of tones – there was room for melancholy and humour, regret and anger, and endless opportunities for bad language. In short, the characters and the situation would enable the fullest possible expression of self.

The question I’ve been asked most on local radio stations over the last year is, ‘A comedy about suicide? Isn’t that a bit, you know, off?’ Well, a book in which nobody kills themselves cannot be a book about suicide, by definition. And I’m not sure the book is a comedy anyway. It contains passages intended to make a reader laugh, but it was not my intention to write a comic novel; I had too much sympathy for the predicaments of my characters to want anyone to laugh at them. I think I wanted to rescue them, to take them out of the dark and lead them towards the light in as unsentimental a fashion as I could manage. There are plenty of books which leave the reader crushed and devoid of all hope; sometimes it can seem as though that’s the whole purpose of the literary novel.

Life Goes On: Richard Billingham

However enthusiastic you feel about ‘Sensation’, much of it is unlikely to detain you for long. I don’t mean that in any pejorative sense, or at least, I don’t think I do: presumably there are critics who would argue that any successful work of art should provoke at least a break in a gallery visitor’s stride, and that therefore works such as Sarah Lucas’s Au naturel (the one with the dirty mattress, and his ’n’ hers melons, bucket, banana and oranges) are comprehensive failures. You see it coming, as it were, from the other side of the room; you snort – with existential and aesthetic despair, if you are Brian Sewell, or with amusement, if you are a normal person – and you move on. I don’t have a problem with that. For a few seconds I loved Au naturel, which means that I loved it more than I have loved other works that demanded much more of me and turned out not to repay the effort.

Even if they do nothing else – although actually they do plenty else – the photographs of Richard Billingham do detain you. You might not want to be detained; you might prefer, when you see his pictures of his battered, bewildered, distressed and alcoholic father Raymond, and of Elizabeth, his enormous, tattooed mother, to wander off and look at something funnier, or more beautiful, or less real (and despite the proliferation of blood and pudenda and intestines elsewhere in ‘Sensation’, nobody could describe the show as sober). But you can’t. Wandering off is simply not an option, not if you have any curiosity at all: there is too much to think about, too much going on, too much narrative.

The first thing to think about is the rights and wrongs of these pictures, because anyone who has ever had parents of any kind, let alone parents like Billingham’s, would wonder whether it were possible to justify snapping their moments of distress and plastering them all over the walls of the Royal Academy. You could argue that Billingham is unfortunate that he is a photographer: the immediacy of his medium seems to expose people in a way that writing never can. Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, Blake Morrison, Tim Lott and Kathryn Harrison, among many others, have all displayed and analysed their parents’ crises and failings in recent years, but prose mediates and transforms, creates a distance even while trying to tell you things about a character’s innermost soul. It’s only writing, in other words, whereas photography is real life. But of course that is one of the tricks Billingham plays on you, because part of his art is to strip distance away, to convince you that this is life unmediated – an artistic device in itself.

Spend enough time with these pictures and eventually you realize that their complexity and empathy answers any of the questions you might ask of them and their creator: there’s nothing exploitative going on here. Empathy is not to be confused with sentimentality, however: whatever else it is, Billingham’s work is not sentimental. One of the most striking photographs in the ‘Sensation’ exhibition shows Raymond sitting on the floor by the lavatory, his eyes cast down so that he seems to be in a state of philosophical and weary self-acceptance. His flies are undone, the soles of his trainers are facing the lens; the toilet seat is broken, and some indistinct bodily waste – puke? blood? – is trickling down the outside of the bowl. It was never going to be a pretty picture, but Billingham’s pitiless, neutral gaze doesn’t overweight it, and consequently it is allowed to take its place in the ongoing narrative of his parents’ life together.

It takes some talent, and some nerve, to be able to do this, and it is Billingham’s impeccable judgement that impresses one first of all. It would have been easy for the artist to let these pictures become self-pitying – what sort of childhood and young adulthood is possible in this domestic climate? – but they are not: there is too much tolerance. Nor are they angry, hectoring or loud. Even the pictures depicting violence, a violence born, presumably, out of alcohol and despair, don’t succeed in turning the collection into a campaign about this or a plea to the government for that.

It is hard to be definitive about how Billingham pulls this off, but his insistence on giving Raymond and Elizabeth, his two leads, equal attention is certainly wise, because then these pictures become the portrait of a marriage as much as an analysis of social despair or urban alienation, and the artist is at pains to show that this marriage has its moments of calm domesticity and evidently peaceable companionship, as well as all the other stuff. Elizabeth sitting over a jigsaw (a brilliantly realized shot, this, with the jigsaw pieces, Elizabeth’s floral print dress and her tattoos coming together in an orchestrated riot of synthetic colour); Raymond and Elizabeth sitting watching TV on the sofa, a roast dinner on their laps, gravy down their fronts, the family pets in between them; even the spectacular shot of Ray hurling the cat violently through the air is a strangely matter-of-fact, life-goes-on moment. Given their context, these photos are rich and strange.

But there is blood on the walls in this household, and Billingham shows it to us – quite literally, in the case of one photograph, which depicts a thin claret trickle apparently emerging from one of those cutesy mass-produced portraits of a mannequin that you used to be able to buy in Boots. There is more action here than one might expect to find in a selection of family snapshots: three of the pictures in Billingham’s ‘Sensation’ exhibits deal with violence or its immediate aftermath, and the changes of clothes alert you to the fact that this is not a sequence, but simply part of an ongoing domestic pattern. That Billingham was able to take the pictures at all is a clear indication that physical abuse is an organic part of the day; Raymond and Elizabeth would, presumably, have preferred their spats to take place away from their son’s lens, but in the end were unable to stop themselves.

There is an inherent and perverse fascination, of course, in seeing grown people knock lumps off each other, and the fascination in this case is intensified by Elizabeth’s obviously immense physical power. In one picture the couple are resting after what must have been a particularly vehement disagreement. Elizabeth has a bloody nose. Ray’s scars are around his eye, and there is a sense that this match has ended in a score draw – Elizabeth even appears to be offering Raymond a paper hankie in a gesture of concern and reconciliation. In the rest, however, there is no doubt who the victor has been or will be. Perhaps the saddest photo of the lot is of an angry Elizabeth, fist raised, threatening her utterly defeated and understandably trepidatious partner: it is the closest Billingham comes to a direct articulation of despair if only because Raymond’s expression has, for once, not been neutralized by the blank mask of drink, and we can see him clearly. Even when he is out of his head and toppling head first towards the floor, there is no indication of feeling, and maybe, you can’t help reflecting, it’s better that way.

‘This book is about my close family,’ Billingham writes on the dust jacket of his book Ray’s a Laugh. ‘My father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic … My mother Elizabeth hardly drinks but she does smoke a lot. She likes pets and things that are decorative. My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11 but is now back with Ray and Liz again.’ There is a tone to these words that could be mistaken for blankness, just as the photographs could seem blank if one couldn’t be bothered to look at them hard enough, but actually this collection is much, much warmer than that: it is clearly about love. Richard Billingham, one would hazard, loves his parents, but they are not loveable, not in the most straightforward sense of the term. Hence the careful neutrality of tone, the refusal to allow his lens to become clouded with pity or anger or disgust: he knows that enough of his audience will feel those things anyway, and that actually the truth is a lot more complicated. The last picture in the ‘Sensation’ exhibition shows Raymond and Elizabeth cuddling on the bed, and it’s a kind of optimistic ending to an unsettling, extraordinary show – until you see Raymond’s eyes, focusing somewhere in the middle distance, and you wonder what he has seen.

Humphrey Ocean

Pub quiz question: find the link between Stiff Records – the anarchic label which provided an early home for Elvis Costello, the Damned and Ian Dury, among others – and Philip Larkin, our Greatest Living Poet probably even now. (Those of you feverishly trying to remember whether Rat Scabies ever had a gig as Larkin’s editor at Faber are barking up the wrong tree entirely, I’m afraid.) The answer is artist Humphrey Ocean, who, Stiff completists may remember, recorded a single for the label before going on to paint the unanswerable portrait of Larkin that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. ‘Whoops-a-Daisy’ (b/w ‘the umpteenth and some say definitive “Battle of Davey Crockett”’) was the last Ocean single, but there are other Ocean portraits – McCartney, Tony Benn – in the NPG’s collection.

Ocean is possibly unique: he’s a former member of an art school band who went on to become an artist. The art school band was Kilburn and the High Roads, whose lead singer was Ocean’s tutor, Ian Dury; they got together at the suggestion of the art school’s social secretary, who didn’t have a support act for Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets at the Christmas party. ‘So we did it, and we got our thirty quid,’ Ocean remembers. ‘And there was only one problem: we were too good. I mean, we weren’t that good, but we were good enough, so we couldn’t put it down, and it just sort of … rambled on.’ Almost immediately, though, just as the band had started gigging outside of Canterbury, Dury fired Ocean because he still had a year of his course left to do. ‘He was very moral and responsible in that way.’ In the summer of ’73, diploma in his pocket, Ocean was rehired, and spent the next couple of years touring with a band which, Ocean says wryly, ‘were so good we couldn’t be recorded. Ian was very ambitious, you know. He wanted to get on. He was frustrated that we weren’t the Temptations.’ The Kilburns played a distinctive and very English dance music – Chuck Berry and Alma Cogan covers, some free jazz and songs ‘about things like an insurrection in a stately home’, and in their own small way probably helped, along with Dr Feelgood and a couple of other bands, to clear the apparently impenetrable path from Genesis to the Sex Pistols. ‘We thought we’d become pop stars, make a lot of money, and then retire to cottages in the country to paint.’

At the end of 1974 they supported the Who on their British tour, and even Ocean – gentle, thoughtful, unfailingly polite, Ampleforth-educated – could occasionally find himself flat on his back after one or two something-or-others too many. ‘One night on that tour, I came offstage and drank a bottle of Pernod, and when I came round it seemed to me as if the dressing-room walls were coming down. And I thought, as much as I was capable of thinking anything, that I wasn’t going to drink Pernod again. But of course the walls really were coming down. Keith Moon was next door knocking them down.’ He left the band that Christmas, scared that it would be easy to end up trundling round the pubs and clubs of Britain for the rest of a working life. ‘Ian used to say things like, “Hide his brushes,” but all that living on top of one another was driving me barmy.’ His Stiff single was a one-off: he was persuaded down to the studio by Dury, who wrote the words to ‘Whoops-a-Daisy’, and former Kilburn Russell Hardy. ‘And Chaz Jankel arranged it, and we split everything four ways. Stiff sold ten thousand copies and we each got a cheque for £12.56. I hope they had some jolly nice lunches.’

I asked how he made a living between 1974 and 1982, when he won the Imperial Tobacco (now BP) Portrait Award, and there is a long pause. It’s so easy, one thinks, for struggling artists to spend whole decades doing nothing very much. ‘Gosh. Now that’s a good question.’ He thinks. ‘My granny left me three hundred pounds, and I made that last as long as I could.’ He thinks some more. ‘Ummm … Yes, and I taught for a day a week. I drove round all the art colleges in the south of England asking for a job … Ah, and I did a couple of album covers.’ The lost Ocean years are beginning to come back to him now. ‘There was a 10cc one and a McCartney one … Oh, and because of the McCartney cover, I was asked to go to America with Wings for a year and do an artist-on-tour thing.’ There are, one suspects, very few of us who would have temporarily mislaid our time on the road with one of the biggest names in the history of popular music, and it says much for an anecdote-packed life that Ocean was able to do so.

We talk about Larkin, whom Ocean was commissioned to paint by the National Portrait Gallery; he describes the time he spent with the great man as ‘the funniest month of my life’. ‘He’d bought this house in Hull with his royalties, and it was the most anonymous, least poetic house I’d ever seen in my life. He blamed it for everything – he never wrote a word there in ten years. We walked down the path and my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth while I tried to think of something to say about it. It was like the outside of an old people’s home. Eventually I came up with “1961?” And he said [and here Ocean takes on Larkin’s famously lugubrious tone], “No, 1959. But I know what you mean.”’ Larkin wanted to know all about McCartney, and they talked about jazz. ‘I liked Roland Kirk and he liked Pee Wee Russell, but we got on. He had these Tannoy speakers … Tannoys! The south London dub speakers of choice!’ Did he like the portrait? ‘I think he did, yes. He turned to Monica and said, “And in this house, too!”’ (‘We’ve fallen on our feet with that young man,’ Monica is quoted as saying in Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin.)

For the last year, Ocean has been artist-in-residence at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the fruits of his labours can be seen in an invigorating and entirely loveable exhibition entitled ‘How’s My Driving?’ The show is so called because the artist’s route to work has provided him with much of the material (significantly, no number is provided enabling us to register a complaint): a couple of south London’s most Larkinesque houses and office blocks have experienced the Ocean breeze, and the treatment has given them a charm that will make those who live on the dreary edges of a metropolis wonder why the heart doesn’t sing every time they walk to the newsagent’s.

The show takes the form of a witty, bright conversation with Dulwich’s suprisingly classy permanent collection. There are sketches of paintings by Teniers and Brouwer, and an answer to Gainsborough’s portrait The Linley Sisters, with Ocean’s two extremely contemporary-looking daughters sitting in for the original models. And the Teniers, a winter scene, also inspired the four-painting sequence of buildings, one for each season. ‘We used to talk at art school about how you didn’t get it together as a painter until you were forty. It made us rather morose when we were nineteen. Well, I think I’ve got it together now I’m fifty. This show is my New Boots …’

It’s a very helpful description, and not only because ‘How’s My Driving?’ has the feel of an album – a couple of cover versions, some light, quick, filler interludes (a series of drawings from Ocean’s ‘dot book’), and a central sequence, the four seasonal paintings, that the record company would want to release as singles. One also gets the feeling that Ian Dury would have loved this show, and his influence is palpable. This is hardly surprising – Dury was, after all, Ocean’s tutor – but it is not Dury the teacher one can feel, but Dury the exemplar of a certain sort of late-twentieth-century-art-school Englishness. The collection demonstrates a love for the past, but it isn’t afraid of the present either; it’s allusive and accessible, and it’s got soul and a sense of humour (which is not the same as saying it’s a one-line joke).

‘There are lots of other houses in the area I could have painted,’ Ocean says of Autumn, which depicts a twilit and defiantly suburban home. ‘But none of them were as funny as this one.’ And though it’s true that there is a mournful comedy in there, the picture tugs at the heart, too. Listen to Dury’s ‘There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards’, say, and you experience the same sort of thing: the song makes you laugh, but those solos are sweet.

When I went to visit Ocean in his studio (he works at the bottom of someone else’s garden in Stockwell) I had just finished reading The Eclipse of Art, Julian Spalding’s elegant, persuasive and timely blast at all things Saatchi, and I tried to stir Ocean up into a frenzy of indignation, but it was utterly hopeless, of course: he has a nice life, his paintings are sought by collectors, and in any case he finds the current climate much more pleasant than the eighties, ‘when everything was so referential, and everyone was walking around with Gogol sticking out of their pockets. Not that there’s anything wrong with Gogol.’ But doesn’t it make him cross that Saatchi is unlikely to come stomping down the garden path into his studio? ‘Noooo,’ he says sweetly. ‘You’ve come instead.’ Yes, but … Oh, never mind. In any case, Ocean is perfectly content to let history sort it all out. ‘I mean, people don’t look at a Rembrandt and think, “Well, I don’t know what to make of that.” And they’re not interested just because he’s old, either. You look at a Rembrandt and your knees shake. That’s what it’s about.’

London

I have been doing a little literary sleuthing, and if my research is to be trusted, then I bring you big news: 2012 marks the two hundredth anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. It is probably too late to arrange a proper celebration – it would have been nice if the BBC had made a documentary or two, for example, and a ceremony somewhere grand might have shown the proper respect. Oh, well. Maybe we can push the boat out for his 250th.

We know already that Dickens is relevant to twenty-first-century London. We know because optimists are still Micawberish, interminable court cases are inevitably Jarndyce and Jarndyce, cheeky criminals (and even pop groups) are Artful Dodgers, dullard teachers are Gradgrinds, obsequious men are Uriah Heeps, bitter spinsters are Miss Havershams. No writer in history has created as many characters who have wandered out of the pages of novels and into our vocabulary, a tribute both to his incredible ability to identify and vivify types, and, more prosaically, to his sheer hard work: he is reckoned to have invented thirteen thousand characters, a figure that takes the breath away, so it’s perhaps not surprising that a few of them have lived on. And of course if he looked at London with his incredible X-ray eyes, he’d find that the skeleton of the place was pretty much identical. The City is full of the same privileged charlatans he described in Our Mutual Friend, Westminster is owned by Old Etonians. Junkies, drunks, prostitutes, chancers and the hard-working poor, the nurses and the teachers that he described with such wrenching sympathy, will always be with us. And anyway, so much of the city has survived more or less untouched. Many of us live in the houses that he would have passed on his legendarily long late-night walks. Five minutes from me, on the corner of St Paul’s Place and Northumberland Park in Islington, is Park Cottage, where Dickens’s mistress Nelly Ternan was living when he first met her. It’s not some heritage site, and there’s no plaque; it’s just somebody’s house. Dickens’s London is still our London.

And yet … By the time you read this I will have reached the exact midpoint of my fifties. I’m not quite an old man yet – I’m not two hundred, at any rate – and sometimes I look around and I don’t recognize anything. The Canary Wharf skyline wasn’t there when I was in my thirties, for example; a small American city – Cleveland, say (does anyone know if Cleveland is still there?) – has apparently been transplanted in one piece and plonked down in East London. In my teens, the two places I loved most in the world were probably Highbury Stadium, home of Arsenal FC, and the Rainbow Theatre, where just about every seventies band I ever loved played at some point in the decade. I lived thirty miles outside London then, and I was such a hick that it took me longer than it should have done to work out that these two temples (both built in the first half of the 1930s) were less than five minutes’ walk from each other. As far as I was concerned, Arsenal played at Arsenal station, on the Piccadilly Line; the Who and the Faces and Costello and the Clash played on the Victoria Line, at Finsbury Park. Whatever; they’re both gone now.

Or rather – and this is entirely typical of the complicated evolution of cities – they’re both still there, sort of, but they’re not themselves. The Rainbow is still apparently as achingly beautiful as it used to be, or as achingly beautiful as a converted cinema can ever get, with its lovely fountained foyer and its starry lights twinkling away in its Moorish-themed ceiling; it’s now owned by some kind of Brazilian Pentecostal church, so even though I see it every couple of weeks, I haven’t been inside since some time in the late seventies. Highbury Stadium, or its fantastic art-deco East Stand, anyway, the stand I sat in between 1989 and 2006, has been converted into flats, and there is a paved garden where the pitch used to be. I have stood in one of the flats and squinted down at the garden, trying to see a goal from Henry or Ian Wright or Frank Stapleton; but it’s much easier to imagine Dickens walking through the door of Park Cottage than it is to recall the night I stood in the middle of 63,000 people at Highbury, the biggest Arsenal crowd of my lifetime. The Rainbow is a church, Highbury is an apartment building, Park Cottage is just somebody’s house. Dickens’s London is still our London; my London, meanwhile, is in the middle of becoming something else.

Compendium Books, in Camden Town, where I discovered Raymond Carver and Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff: gone, years ago. Virgin Records – not the big megastore on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, but the disreputable hippy record shop above a shoe store in exactly the same place, a record shop that sold bootlegs and let drunks crash out in its listening booths: gone. Rock On in Camden, right next to the tube station, and one of the inspirations, if that’s not too overblown a word, for Championship Vinyl in my novel High Fidelity: gone. The Dr Martens shop right next door, where many Arsenal fans went for their footwear: gone. The Nashville, where one night I saw Dave Edmunds’s Rockpile play with the Asbury Jukes, on a stage so tiny that half the horn section was standing in the audience: gone. You only have to live on this planet for fifty years to realize that cities shed their skins with an ease unexpected only if you are daft enough – as all young people are, and as I certainly was – to believe that the world was invented for your benefit, and could therefore now stop changing.

The town I lived in was in the Thames Valley, and it had nothing. No bands ever came, apart from John Martyn, who once played in my school hall. There was one cinema, which showed one film, usually one year after it had opened in London. There was one chart record shop, and no bookshops, unless you counted the small branch of WHSmith, which I couldn’t, since it sold no books I wanted to buy. So London, forty minutes and less than fifty pence away by train, provided my culture. Now I think about it, the whole point of London then was that it enabled me to take pieces of it home with me, books and music and clothes. And that point has now been lost. Everything is now available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, via a laptop, an extraordinary development which is of course mostly a dream – who doesn’t want people, especially young people, to have access to all the culture in the world? – but which also has a complicated downside: how do you express who you are, how you are different, if there’s no effort or cost or choice involved?

Over the last few years, London has become less a place where you buy things and more a place where you see things. When Prince announced, a couple of years ago, that he was going to play thirty-odd nights in a 20,000-seater venue, I thought he was insane. I knew about four people, me and three others, who still bought Prince albums, so by my calculation we’d have to buy 150,000 tickets each, a hefty outlay even for the most devoted fan. But all the gigs sold out; if you book it, they will come, and seeing Prince live became the unlikely thing to do that summer. When I was in my teens and twenties, you scoured the NME for news of gigs, and the applications for tickets involved postal orders and stamped addressed envelopes; the process excluded all but the truly committed. Now news of a show will be emailed to anyone who has ever listened to a song, and you can buy tickets with a couple of mouse-clicks, and as a consequence, venues are filled by people with a mild passing interest in the act concerned, people who, you know, wouldn’t mind seeing Prince. The blockbuster art show, the kind where you literally can’t buy ten minutes of gallery time, is a comparatively new phenomenon, and the blockbuster musical, too; I don’t remember anyone in my town expressing an interest in going to see a West End show. Musicals were finished back then, and the news that one day people would pour into a venue like Wembley or the 02 to watch a stand-up comedian – one guy, on his own, telling jokes that you might have heard on his TV programmes – would have produced as much laughter as the comedian’s set. For a long time, football matches sold out maybe once a year; Arsenal’s new Emirates stadium, with its 60,000 capacity, was booked solid for the first six years of its life, however modest the opposition. It’s almost as if London looked at Amazon and iTunes and every other website, scratched her head, and said to herself, ‘Well, I’m going to find some other reason for people to want to come here.’

London is growing again; the capital was responsible for a staggering thirty-seven per cent of England’s population increase in 2009–10. The young are still coming, the old don’t want to leave, and the city still pulls in the world’s rich, and the world’s poor – and how Dickens would have wanted to write about all that. (There are many reasons to wish that he was still at work, but I would dearly love to see his portrayal – and naming – of an obscenely rich Russian oligarch.) It still teems with money, disease, filth, ambition, laughter, art, pretension and the chance to turn yourself into somebody else. That is what it has always been; that is what it always will be.

Sources

My Patron: Believer, 2002

Abbey Road: Abbey Road official exhibition catalogue

Pain in My Heart: New Yorker, 1996

‘You Send Me’: Independent on Sunday, 1993

A Fan’s Notes: Sunday Times, 1994

Revolution in the Head: Sunday Times, 1994

Internet Music: Observer, September 2009

The Crying Game: Premiere, September 1993

Marah: The Times, March 2006

A Stranger in a Strange Land: Empire, 1994

The West Wing: Prime Times, 1994

An Education: Introduction to An Education: The Screenplay (Penguin, 2009)

A Sundance Diary (2009): Penguin website

Kidding Around: Sunday Times, 1993

The Goons: Rock and Roll: An American Story

Wodehouse: Introduction to Summer Lightning (Penguin, 2002)

Scenes from Provincial Life: Introduction to Scenes from Provincial Life (Penguin, 2010)

Ideas for Books: Guardian, May 2006

Life Goes On: Modern Painters, winter 1997

Humphrey Ocean: Independent on Sunday, July 2003

London: Boat magazine, 2012