31 Songs

  Me, I need no convincing that life is scary. I’m forty-four, and it has got quite scary enough already – I don’t need anyone trying to jolt me out of my complacency. Friends have started to die of incurable diseases, leaving loved ones, in some cases young children, behind. My son has been diagnosed with a severe disability, and I don’t know what the future holds for him. And, of course, at any moment there is the possibility that some lunatic will fly a plane into my house, or a nuclear power plant, or attempt to sprinkle something into our water supply or our Underground trains that will turn us all black as our kidneys shrivel up in our bodies. So let me find complacency and safety where I can, and please forgive me if I don’t want to hear ‘Frankie Teardrop’ right now.

  ‘All these years later and Suicide still feels like a shot in the head,’ an enthusiastic reviewer remarked when their first album was re-released; a couple of decades ago, that would have been enough to make me want to buy it. (‘A shot in the head! Wow! Even The Clash only felt like a kick!’) Now, however, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t want to be shot in the head, and so I will avoid any work of art that sets out to re-create that particular experience for me. It’s a peculiarly modern phenomenon, this obsession with danger. And, in the end, it’s impossible not to conclude that it has been born out of peacetime and prosperity and over-education. Would the same critic have told someone coming back from the Somme that a piece of music ‘feels like a shot in the head’, one wonders. And if he did, would he really have expected the chap to go charging off to his local music emporium?

  It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can’t we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer? Please? Just every now and then, when we’ve had a really shitty day? I need somewhere to run to, now more than ever, and songs like ‘Ain’t That Enough’ is where I run. ‘We are all Frankies’, Suicide concluded at the end of their magnum opus, but they didn’t mean it, really, unless they were dafter than they let on. (In what sense have we killed our families and then turned the gun on ourselves, even metaphorically?) And if we were all Frankies, what would we rather listen to? Blood-curdling re-creations of our miserable and unbearable existence, or something that offered a brief but precious temporary respite? That’s the real con of shock-art: it makes out that it’s democratic, but it’s actually only for those who can afford it. And some of us, as we get older, simply find that we don’t have that much courage to spare any more. Good luck to you if you have, because it means that you have managed to avoid more or less everything that life has to throw at you, but don’t try to make me feel morally or intellectually inferior.

  I fell in love with the USA when I was very young, seven or eight. There was an American kid at my school, and not only did he have toys the likes of which we had never seen (he could make his own toy soldiers, for God’s sake, and he could just about hit Saturn with his plastic rocket-launcher), but also he could swivel his eyeballs the wrong way round by pressing hard on his eyelids. Now, the USA sometimes gets a mixed press here in Britain, and there are plenty of people who would find these twin triggers darkly significant: well of course, they’d say, if you’re going to glamorize freaks and fetishize weapons, then America is bound to exert a fascination, but for me, there was nothing sinister about either my friend’s toys or his talents. It was all about superior American technology (the eyeballs) and superior American entertainment values (the rocket-launcher), and I was left with the indelible impression that just about everything of any interest was better on the other side of the Atlantic.

  I didn’t visit the US until the mid-seventies, when my father and his family moved to Wilton, Connecticut. I was sixteen, and I lived in a country which, looking back on it now, seemed to be striving for the ambience and amenities of communist Poland rather than those of New York. A series of strikes had resulted in a series of power cuts, which meant that evenings were frequently spent eating sandwiches and reading by candlelight. We had three television channels and no TV during the day anyway, apart from the occasional educational programme about mathematics or the life cycle of the salmon. Our food was famously awful (even our junk food was bad junk food), and you couldn’t find anywhere that stayed open much later than eleven p.m. Shops were closed on Sundays. American movies took between six months and a year to crawl to British cinemas, and we had no real film industry of our own. We were working a three-day week. The war had been over for thirty years, but there seemed no real reason why we weren’t spending the night sleeping in Tube stations anyway – at least it would have given us something to look forward to.

  And in the middle of all this, I got on a plane and flew to New York. That first trip, I wanted to do very little apart from watch daytime TV and go to the shops, and my apparent indolence drove my father crazy: he wanted to take me places and show me things, but he had lived abroad for some years, and was, I think, unaware that his native country had become quite so cheerless; the last time he had lived in England, it was swinging, in the immortal words of Roger Miller, like a pendulum do, but the pendulum had now come to an abrupt and sorry stop. I suspect that any sixteen-year-old English kid who visited the States for the first time during the mid-seventies spent their entire trip watching daytime reruns of Green Acres and eating exotic-breakfast cereals; to venture any further would have resulted in instant death from over-stimulation. No one, of course, will ever die from over-stimulation in Connecticut. And yet most inhabitants of that sedate state would be surprised to learn just how many thrills it had to offer an English teenager back then. I’m not talking about the coastline or the trees, which were charming but not dissimilar to home; I’m talking about Sam Goody’s and Kmart, both of which I visited almost daily, and both of which offered unimagined and inexhaustible delights.

  My first novel, High Fidelity, was about a guy whose devotion to rock ’n’ roll has, in various ways, blighted and retarded his life, and it is probably fair to say that a lot of very important research for that book (in other words, a lot of blighting and retarding) was done during that first trip, twenty years before I started writing it. I didn’t know so much about popular music back then, but I had certainly exhausted the potential of my home-town record store. I had never seen a good three-quarters of the records in my dad’s local Sam Goody’s, however, and I came out with armfuls of improbably priced soul and blues albums. (The things that Sam Goody valued at $1.99 were worth an awful lot more to me.)

  It wasn’t just the record stores, of course. I was taken to houses which contained bumper pool tables in the basement – we didn’t have bumper pool at home. I was taken to McDonald’s, and we didn’t have that either. Nor did we have ice, on our ponds or in our drinks, or good pizzas, or eight-track stereos in our cars, or swimming pools in our back gardens, or pastrami, or sandwiches three inches thick, or shopping malls, or multiplex cinemas, or La-Z-Boys, or hot dogs in our sports stadia. And, yes, I know it was the comfortable, middle-class Connecticut suburbs I had fallen for, and that millions of Americans were poor, and endured environments that were ugly and brutal and hard. But I was a middle-class kid, and I lived in the comfortable English suburbs, and they weren’t anything like this. It wasn’t as if we had any diverting equivalents, either. We didn’t have great pasta and great ice-cream, like the Italians, or great beaches and great soccer, like the Spanish; in the 1970s we were trying to live the American life, but without any of the things that make an American life bearable. What we did have was history, and this, apparently, was enough to make us feel superior. Well, it didn’t do the trick for me. I would cheerfully have swapped England’s entire heritage – Stonehenge, Stratford, Wordsworth, Buckingham Palace, the lot – for the ability to watch quiz shows in the morning.

  My father’s friends had a son called Danny, who was older than me, maybe twenty or twenty-one, and he had long hair and a moustache; he
looked exactly like Billy Crudup in Almost Famous. Danny loved his music, and the music he was listening to when I went round to his house for the first time was the live J. Geils Band album, Full House. I’d never heard of them, and I’d never heard anything like them; in those days, before they had a big pop hit with ‘Centerfold’, they played white-boy R&B, like The Stones in 1965, but much louder and much faster, with a berserk irreverence and an occasionally terrifying intensity. On the live album, Peter Wolf, the lead singer, shouted out funny, weird or incomprehensible things in between songs: ‘On the licking stick, Mr Magic Dick!’ ‘This used to be called “Take Out Your False Teeth Mama … I Want To Sssssuck On Your Gums’ ” and something that sounds like ‘areyougonnagetitmoodoogetitgoomoogetitmoodoogoo-moodooinoogetitalldowngctitalliightgetitoutofsightand-getitdownbaby?’ The first thing you hear on the record is a solid slab of crowd noise, whistles and cheers and screams, and then a shouted and very un-English introduction from an MC: ‘Are you ready to get down? I said, are you ready for some rock and roll? Let’s hear it for the J. Geils Band!’

  And then, straight away (no tuning up or mumbled ‘How you doing’s), the band tears into ‘First I Look At The Purse’, an old Smokey Robinson song that he wrote for a Motown group called The Contours, and even old Smokey Robinson songs seemed to come from a parallel universe. The ones I knew were sweet and sad, like ‘Tracks Of My Tears’ or ‘Tears Of A Clown’, but this one was straightforwardly nasty – the message of the lyric was that any man who cared about how a woman looked or what she was like was a fool. ‘I don’t care if she waddles like a duck or talks with a lisp / I still think I’m a good lover if the dollar bills are crisp’. At the end of the song the band plays faster and faster and Wolf sings faster and faster until the whole thing blurs into a mess of noise, and then the audience roars as if greeting the winning goal in the World Cup Final. (And this was the opening number, the loosener, the warm-up – by the end of side two things start to get really rowdy.) To me back then, this, not Tamla Motown, was The Sound of Young America – loud, baffling, exotic, cool, wild. It comes from the same place as Kramer in Seinfeld, and ‘Surfin’ Bird’, and ‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow’, and James Brown being wrapped in a cape and led offstage before bounding back to the microphone, and Muhammad All’s boasts, and the insane celebrations when a contestant won a lawnmower on The Price Is Right. In our quiz shows, people smiled when they won. Not always, though.

  I eventually saw the J. Geils Band for myself, some six years later, but I saw them in Hammersmith rather than Detroit, where Full House was recorded, so the atmosphere was respectful rather than insane, and, though they were soon to become much more successful, they were past their peak. And I saw them on 12 May 1979, the night that Mrs Thatcher was elected Prime Minister for the first time. We drove back to college just as old Britain was turning into modern Britain – ironically, a dour and tacky version of America, with the McDonald’s and the shopping malls, but without the volume or the delirium or the showmanship. ‘I’m so bored with the USA’, The Clash were singing on stage every night around that time, and, though we all sang along with them, it wasn’t true, not really. We were only bored with our obsession, and that’s a different thing entirely.

  We’re sitting in my back garden on a hot summer night, eating barbecued chicken and listening to Todd Rundgren, when a friend suddenly explodes into a rant about pop music. His argument, as far as I could follow it, went as follows: it’s crap because the words are crap, pathetic adolescent poetry rather than lyrics, and so if it’s all crap then you might as well listen to music that performs a function and has no pretensions whatsoever … Which is why he only bothers with house music. House music doesn’t bother with words very much, and has an express goal, namely making you dance when you’re off your face.

  This, it seems to me, is like saying that because most restaurants are very bad, one should play the percentage game, forget about trying to find the good ones, and eat at McDonald’s every meal. There is no doubt, though, that lyrics are the literate pop fan’s Achilles heel. We have all lived through the shrivelling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. ‘What does that mean, then?’ my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. ‘ “Get it on / Bang a gong”? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?’ And the correct answer – ‘Two seconds, and it doesn’t matter’ – is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you’re hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs. (I suspect that this humiliation continues, and that it makes no difference whether the parent doing the humiliating was brought up on a diet of T. Rex, or Spandau Ballet, or Sham 69, and therefore should really avoid the literary high ground altogether. My mother, after all, belonged to a generation that danced – danced and smooched- to ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?’ and if she felt able to be snooty about ‘Get It On’, then surely snootiness is a weapon available to all. Rubbishing our children’s tastes is one of the few pleasures remaining to us as we become old, redundant and culturally marginalized.) I do not, despite (or possibly because of) my day job, pay that much attention to the lyrics of my favourite songs. ‘Call Me’ by Aretha Franklin, pretty much the entire lyric of which runs ‘I love you / So call me the moment you get there’, is the last word in any argument about whether greatness in a song is attainable without lyrical ambition or complexity. (The last word, that is, unless someone wishes to point out that a great song must by definition offer a little more than a line or two of what sounds like a particularly uninspired telephone conversation. Well OK, but ‘Call Me’ still gets further down the road towards something wonderful than is easily explicable.) Half-heard phrases don’t worry me, and I am happy to let anything pass which does not actually make me blush.

  The more forgiving one is of one’s favourite artist’s literary pretensions or inadequacies, however, the easier it is to forget that songwriting is an art distinct from poetry. You don’t have to be Bob Dylan, and you don’t have to be whoever writes the songs for Celine Dion (in other words, you don’t have to use the words and phrases ‘dreams’, ‘hero’, ‘survive’, or ‘inside my/yourself’, because life isn’t an ad for a new type of Ford); you can, if you’re brave, have a go at being Cole Porter, and aim for texture, detail, wit and truth. Ben Folds is, I think, a proper songwriter, although he doesn’t seem to get much credit for it, possibly because rock critics are less impressed by sophisticated simplicity than by sub-Dylanesque obfuscation: his words wouldn’t look so good written down, but he has range (on his second album there are songs about apathy masquerading as cool, an unwelcome guest, and the ugly triumphalism of a bullied nerd made good), an amused eye for lovestruck detail (‘Words fail when she speaks / Her mix tape’s a masterpiece’, he sings on the ecstatic ‘Kate’) and he makes jokes – but not in the choruses, crucially, because he knows that the best way to wreck a joke is to repeat it seven times in three minutes.

  ‘Smoke’ is one of the cleverest, wisest songs about the slow death of a relationship that I know. Lots of people have assailed the thorny romantic topic of starting all over again (for example, off the top of my head, ‘Starting All Over Again’, by Mel & Tim), and the conclusion they usually come to is that it’s going to be tough, but both practicable and desirable; the heartbreaking thing about Folds’s song is that it manages simultaneously to convey both the narrator’s desperation and the impossibility of a happy outcome. He doesn’t know about the latter, though – only Folds the songwriter, who has the benefit of both music and a vantage point, can see that the relationship is doomed.

  In ‘Smoke’, the central conceit is that the relationship is a book, and so its unhappy recent history, the narrator wants to believe, can be destroyed by burning it page by page, until ‘all the things we’ve written in it never really happened’. ‘Here’s an evening dark with shame’, he sings. ‘Throw it on the fire!’ the
backing vocalists tell him. ‘Here’s the time I took the blame. (Throw it on the fire!) Here’s the time we didn’t speak, it seemed, for years and years …’ Wiping the slate clean is the fantasy of anyone who has ever got into a mess with a partner, and the metaphor is witty enough and rich enough to seduce us into thinking just for a moment that in this case it might be possible, but the music here, a mournful waltz, tells a different story. It doesn’t sound as if the narrator’s lover is terribly convinced, either: ‘You keep saying the past’s not dead’, he tells her, ‘Well, slop and smell the smoke’. But the smoke, of course, contains precisely the opposite meaning: it’s everywhere, choking them. ‘You keep saying … we’re smoke’, he concludes sadly, and we can tell that he’s beginning to believe it, finally; the smell of smoke, it turns out, does not symbolize hope but its opposite.

  ‘Smoke’ is, I think, lyrically perfect, clever and sad and neat, in a way that my friend would not credit; it’s also one of the very few songs that is thoughtful about the process of love, rather than the object or the subject. And it was a constant companion during the end (the long, drawn-out end) of my marriage, and it made sense then, and it still makes sense now. You can’t ask much more of a song than that.

  It’s possible that this sort of craft goes unnoticed because ‘Smoke’ is ‘just’ a song, in the way that ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Something’ weren’t ‘just’ songs. The young men who wrote them were also, unwittingly or not, in the process of changing the world (or – to attempt to cover all the arguments in one clumsy parenthesis – in the process of being given credit for changing the world, unwittingly or not). This inevitably means that an awful lot of attention was focused on their talent – which, after all, was ostensibly the only world-changing tool at their disposal. If you’re singers, and you’re changing the world, then people are bound to look pretty closely at what you’re singing – because how else are you doing it? As a consequence, some very good, very pretty, very sharply written, brilliantly produced and undeniably memorable songs have been credited with an almost supernatural power. It’s what happens when people are deified. The eighteenth-century British scholar Edmond Malone calculated that Shakespeare ‘borrowed’ two-thirds – 4,144 out of 6,033 lines – from other sources for Henry VI, Parts I, II and III. And, though Henry VI is a minor play, the point is that this stuff was out there, in the world, and Shakespeare inhaled it. What he exhaled was mostly genius, of course, but it was not genius that came out of the blue; it had a context.