Gig - Simon Armitage - describing Morrissey

I have never been a Morrissey fan, but I respect people who are. I like the songs that everyone likes - This Charming Man - for example. I have never sought out more songs until last year when after listing to an edition of Desert Island Discs and listening to someone - I forget who - try to describe how wonderful he found Morrissey, I decided to give it a go. And I gave it a couple of listens and I liked it a bit, i.e. not much.

Now I am reading "Gig" by Simon Armitage, the poet. I loved Simon Armitage's book about the North. I loved the sly humour. The funny thing is, when we lived in Yorkshire I went to a Simon Armitage reading and I thought it the dullest evening I had ever had. I couldn't connect to any of his poems. I felt rather sorry for my children because his poems were on their English exam syllabus. The person who wrote the prose seemed entirely different -

Like Stuart Maconie, who has some sort of weird emotional connection with Morrissey, Simon Armitage is absolutely fascinated by him.  He does him the great service of trying to describe the emotion of what he can see - the meaning of M's stomach for example ("real, proud, serious") M. does have a fantastic voice and (I'm told) a great stage presence. It seems, from what Simon (sorry mate I am going to call you Simon) writes, that Morrissey projects a seriousness that they crave. Apart from Morrissey's sad rhetoric, people find this release into emotion only at football matches, I suppose, or in fights. In the past, men were more emotionally outspoken than women. Think of Beethoven, all those crashes and bangs, like a man losing his temper and slamming a good few doors, and the melodic passages like a man basking in the sunshine of God's approval. Women, at some point, claimed the ability to voice emotion but I sometimes wonder. When they create art it isn't emotion, it's often about sex, as though their ability to desire and be desired, or their ability to climax and produce a climax in another person, were all there was to them. And of course, that can't be true. I don't know about women who are creating art with thoughts life and death - but there must be some. This is my pre-occupation at the moment - it turned out to be the summary of the talk on films by David Thompson (previous post) and it is the theme of the book of the week, by Robert McCrum, who isn't much older than me. And I find myself glued to the series "Ambulance" which sometimes shows people near death - and even in their last moments. It shows you how marvellous things can be - like the woman giving telephone instructions that save a baby's life, and how a man can face death with equanimity knowing that he has provided for the people he loved.

My friend's husband died suddenly this summer, an acquaintance died of cancer, my parents died last winter. The entire cast of our lives will die even though we don't seem to be perceptibly aging. (See post: We are old, but we boogie)

This is what Morrissey is singing about - a doomed celebration of the fleeting emotions - a longing for salvation in Love always mixed up with the feeling of falling into a lonely grave. "Life has killed me" - that's serious. And all this in songs shorter than 4 minutes. I am trying to understand the music as I write, but I find it very busy music, difficult to like.

The Latitude Festival

This morning I washed the dust of Suffolk out of my hair and was really pleased to see the water turn brown. Often there is not much point in washing my hair but this time it was dirty enough to be quite stiff. I actually fantasised about never washing it again, thinking that the dirt would build up the volume rather nicely.

The Festival was incredibly crowded but only the Eddie Izzard show was unpleasantly crowded. Eddie didn't swear or say anything dirty, which made him a lone voice in the comedy tent, where the level of humour revolved around sex and self-abuse, er, fucking and wanking, in the common parlance. Oh God, it was so depressing. Ah, no, I am forgetting Nina Conti, who was really naughtily funny without being dirty. She had a monkey puppet and a Polish Builder puppet, and she persuaded a member of the audience to participate in the show by dressing up in the Polish builder puppet while she operated his mouth and flirted with him. She then cast another 2 members of the audience as seekers for love, and gave them half masks so that she could operate their mouths, which was incredibly funny and quite creepy. She smiles all the while like a primary school teacher whose class is lovely but getting out of hand, and you would never guess she was saying the risque things that she was saying. Very skillful and hilarious.

The Saturday night headliners were Kraftwerk, performing their seminal album, um er. It features the lovely melody, Fun on the Autobahn. We were promised 3-D graphics and excitedly donned our polarised screens in cardboard frames - err. Why? The 3-D effects didn't work unless you were straight ahead of them and the level of interest was minimal - it was like pac-man or a child's cartoon from the mid 70's when nothing moved and they showed the same pics again and again. Yes, a VW beetle. The background seems to be retreating to show that the car is moving, very clever. There was a pretense that 4 guys were needed on stage to "play" this music, but of course this is nonsense. They could have left us alone with the computers. You could say it was all retro and just displaying to the young people what a seminal work it was - electronic music! How clever! But I'm afraid it was just incredibly boring and I spent an hour and a half longing for it to end. If you want a good version of the robot genre try Flight of the Conchords, The Humans are Dead .  At least it is witty.

My second favourite was Stuart Maconie, in a somewhat tetchy mood, but we laughed heartily at his jokes, of which there were many. He read from Cider with Roadies, which I have mentioned in an earlier post, and also talked about his latest work The People's songs, which I shall buy very soon as it puts pop songs of each year since the war into their social context, and talks about various aspects of British life through the filter of the songs.

I also enjoyed Robin Ince talking about his scientific heroes, but he did shout into the microphone which I found extremely painful and I think he should have stopped doing that by now.

Bryony Kimmings is trying to create a role model for, and invented by, her niece Taylor. The resulting alter ego is called Catherine Bennett, a pop singer and dancer who wears knee length skirts and is a paleontologist. She taught us how to do an animal dance, that was really good fun even if you're rubbish at dancing, like me. The idea was that Taylor experiences "a wholesome rave" cos you can bet that Bryony has experienced a number of unwholesome ones. Here's the song and dance.

A review of Sex Idiot, a previous show is here.

The star for me was Germaine Greer. she was very delayed and the continuity entertainer had to work very hard to keep us amused, which was very good fun, and expectations were high when she finally arrived. She spoke without notes on the subject of the Disappearing Woman and was funny and informative and clever. The only thing I wanted to argue with her about - how ironic! was when she said that somebody's 14 year old daughter shouldn't be taking advice from a 74 year old woman (herself). Ageism! What does it matter how old Prof Greer is; she is still cleverer than practically everyone else so we should all be interested in what she has to say, however old we are. She is fab anyway, more like 60 than 74. Not that it matters.

I'm sure someone said that Prof Greer was delayed by nudists on the roof of her train, but when I Googled this I couldn't find anything.

P.S. Success. Prof Greer was delayed because a man had climbed onto a platform roof at Ipswich station. He climbed around in a way that endangered himself and so the overhead cables had to be turned off. He had no shirt on, and for a while took off his shorts and wore them on his head. Ah, the English summer!

Cider with Roadies - Stuart Maconie

Stuart isn't just a keen student of modern music who has become an encyclopaedia of the line-up of the Whatsit band and what their albums were called and when released and which were the best tracks, although you feel he can probably keep up conversations like that for a long, long time. No. He is also comfortably rooted in time and place and wonderful at self-irony. He also has a wider cultural knowledge (note the title), having understood how art arises out of political contexts for his English degree, he applies the same insights to the history of pop/rock. He also taught in a community college in one of the dodgy areas of Liverpool - he taught scallies and single mums English Lit and Sociology. (I'm right there with you Stuart but I bet you were brilliant at it, unlike me.) Because he has had a life outside the world of the NME (a sharply-written music paper called the New Musical Express) and the BBC (where he works now as a presenter) he has an enviable everyman quality. We know in theory that all folks are the same, be they into Wham! and McFly or Kraftwerk and Chic, or Morrissey and Bloc Party, whether gay or straight or northern or southern, but for Stuart I think folks are really pretty much folks, even though he knows exactly how crazy they can be. He is brilliant on the radio, a true enthusiast, can cheerfully talk to anyone, loves a joke and pub banter.

I would recommend this book to anyone over 35 who has ever been a music fan and queued up excitedly for a gig. I especially recommend it to anyone the age of Stuart, who must have been born in 1960. If you were born in or around that year and you spent all, most, or much of your time listening to music, grab a copy and enjoy reading the story of your own life. I haven't been listening to music for a while and I have forgotten that it adds a thoughtful quality to life. I am surprised that I can live without it but I can.

The only down side to this book is that I found it addictive. I wanted it to finish before it did because the narrative gets lost at the end (it's a memoir) and goes all generalised (hotels. planes.), but I just had to finish it. He was great company.

(I even shared the student experiences by reading it to my son, and it cheered him up a lot. Yeah, it's grim being a student and living in a squalid mess. Even Stuart felt down at times.)