The latest episode of my podcast The Allender Calendar is a two-parter in which I talk to musician and all-round good egg William Doyle about Wit’s End by Cass McCombs. Listen here:

• Part 1

• Part 2

When William guested on Your Own Personal Beatles, the podcast I co-host with Jack Pelling, we bonded over our mutual admiration for this fabulously baroque album, which we both firmly believe to be McCombs’s masterpiece.

Wit’s End is ornate, funereal, blackly funny, incredibly moving, and almost entirely inscrutable. McCombs hasn’t really made another record like it, and I can’t think of another album to compare it with, although Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s stately I See a Darkness, with its gloom, grandeur and laughter in the dark, isn’t a million miles away.

A particular highlight on Wit’s End is ‘The Lonely Doll’ (presumably inspired by the Dare Wright children’s book of the same name). It’s a remarkably engrossing song considering it’s only made up of two chords, the second of which, as William points out on the podcast, differs from the first by only one note. (For the guitarists out there, the song seesaws between C major and C major add 11. Play a C chord and then place your little finger on the third fret of the D string. Repeat for five and a half minutes.) It’s such a significant song to William that his tune ‘Soft to the Touch’ is a form of homage to it.

In our conversation I mention how ‘The Lonely Doll’ reminds me of the folk tale ‘Tam Lin’. I think that’s a bit wide of the mark – but there is certainly an air of enchantment about it, notably in a couplet which, I was delighted to discover, William is as fond of as I am:

Though I was too drunk to make sense
I felt her Essence

I don’t really know what’s happening in these words (or in the song in general). Why ‘Essence’ (which is inexplicably capitalised in the lyric sheet)? What does it mean to feel someone’s ‘Essence’?

In the song, the narrator is stumbling home from a saloon1 when he hears a ‘distant, mournful tune’. He follows the music and finds a ‘cardboard house’. Peeping through the window he sees the titular doll singing into a mirror. After watching her comb her hair (with tears in her eyes) and retire to bed, we get the sense/Essence couplet. (What is it about her Essence that he feels? Her loneliness?)

So far, so winsome. But where is the song taking place? What is real and what is fantasy? Is it all just a drunken dream? If it’s symbolic, what does it all stand for? The song seems to exist in a vague space between fairy tale poesy, irony, and something… sincere?2 Because, for me, that couplet taken in isolation, away from its self-consciously saccharine setting, seems to say so much about loss – loss of self, loss of sense, loss of love. One reading of it is, ‘Despite being too drunk to make sense, I felt her Essence’, but another way of looking at this particular blackbird could be that it’s the state of drunkenness itself that’s allowing the narrator to feel the Doll’s Essence. The idea that, somehow, in losing something, you might get closer to something else. In that sense (!), I don’t think there’s a better description anywhere of the sentimentality and spirituality of inebriation.

It’s this quality of ambiguity and uncertainty – layered meanings and obscure intentions – that makes Wit’s End, and Cass’s songs in general, so beguiling. It’s never really clear where we’re standing. In this song, and its parent album, we’re poised between grief and mirth. And, if you’re too drunk to make sense of the words, you can just enjoy their musicality; the gorgeously intoxicated nightfeel3 of their chiming sibilance.

A Better Life (The Weather Man Knows) – The Idle Race

Sticking with all things baroque, I came across this beautiful lost classic by the Idle Race on a playlist compiled by the writer Ray Newman (you can find it on Tidal and Spotify). There are so many amazing tunes on here: John Barry’s sumptuous ‘Follow Follow’, the Hollies paddling in lemonade lakes, and a band called Grapefruit sounding remarkably like the Clientele. All the songs seem to be rooted in a very specific post-Pepper, pre-Abbey Road period of fey introspection. A sliver of 60s time that contains multitudes (as most slivers of 60s time seem too – a particularly scholarly Beatles fan should be able to tell you what was happening on each day of January 1969, right down to what colour shirt John Lennon was wearing).

If psychedelia was part Wordsworthian childhood wonder and part Coleridgean drug-addled dreamscape (a kind of ‘see Emily play the game existence to the end’) then this playlist is at the more whimsical end of the spectrum. Psychedelia at the gates of the boarding school rather than the cosmic gates of dawn. I mean, there’s a song by Gary Aston which is a lament about being posh for God’s sake.

On Bluesky, Newman described the perfect setting for the playlist: ‘It is a warm day in London in the middle of the 20th century and you have nothing to do but sit in the park.’ Early 21st century in London and it’s too hot to sit in the park – next best thing is to stand in a Tesco Express, press play, and let the harpsichords and mellotrons guide you towards a Solero.

Snatched – Ralph Hill

Ralph Hill is a thirteen-year-old preacher from Detroit whose sermons were recently packaged as Live at Lavender Country, a collaboration with musician and artist Jonny Campolo. Hill’s sermons are accompanied not by traditional Hammond organ, but by Campolo’s ambient synth playing, all new age pads, spacious chords and glassy tones smothered in reverb. It’s an inspired and genuinely spiritual mixture. But I feel it’s important to resist the temptation to exoticise or ‘other’ this music – even though its strangeness is indeed a part of what makes it so hypnotic. But would it sound strange to someone deeply embedded in Black church traditions? Is the combination of a preacher’s voice and an 80s synth unusual or unexpected to all audiences? And is it right that this music was designed for a sincere spiritual purpose, and I’m consuming it, not ironically exactly, but as a kind of esoteria? Difficult things to wrestle with and yet I have to admit that my unfamiliarity with the form, and the record’s unexpected juxtapositions, are what make it some of the most compelling music I’ve heard all year.

Preachers’ voices have been released as music before: ‘Help Me Somebody’ from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts sets a sermon by Reverend Paul Morton to a frenetic and thrilling Afrobeat backdrop. It’s a groundbreaking album, but it also contains what the music journalist Kate Hutchinson brilliantly calls a ‘complex subplot of appropriation’. The difference with Live at Lavender Country is the fact that the arrangements are authored – Hill’s voice isn’t being taken out of context; it was recorded with Campolo’s accompaniment. However, the fact that I found out about the album via Pitchfork, and that it’s been released on a trendy cassette label, means that it has been taken out of a kind of cultural context. A hipster audience (of which I am unfortunately a member) has been drawn to it for its very strangeness – the thing I'm trying (and failing) to resist celebrating. Because there are moments in ‘Snatched’ that do feel strange – intoxicatingly strange: the way Hill whoops and gasps for air, and bursts into fragments of theatrical melody. He reminds me of the ways in which Van Morrison at his most unrestrained can sound absolutely hysterical (in both senses of the word); if you’ve never heard his extraordinary version of ‘My Lagan Love’, give it a spin now. This is not to criticise Ralph Hill or Van Morrison in any way. If you completely expose your spirit, or, more precisely, let the spirit speak through you, you might end up sounding outlandish, outrageous, comic even – but, as I’ve talked about before in relation to Kate Bush’s ‘Big Sky’, it’s in that fearlessness that this music gains its power. ‘Snatched’ is the sound of someone in an instinctive flow state, totally unfettered by expectations and judgment.

Lily Goldberg, in her excellent Pitchfork review, describes how Hill ‘delivers his sermons as fervent filibusters’, and I’m fascinated by the way Hill doesn’t let up or lose focus for a moment. In his richly melodic voice he invents instant proverbs and contorts grammar with spontaneous wisdom: ‘God is a napkin in the middle of a weeping time’; ‘I was once wasn’t the brightest colour in the crayon box’.

Hill uses the word ‘snatched’ in his sermon to refer to the idea of being ‘snatched’ by God’s grace. The word is repeated until it spirals into non-meaning (recalling Van again: ‘the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves’). Or maybe that’s not quite right. The word ‘snatched’ does feel like it loses its semantic meaning as it transforms into pure sound and rhythm – but something else is happening too. Paradoxically, the word seems to gain new layers of meaning through repetition. By becoming incantatory, like a prayer or a mantra, the word’s meaning changes into something you don’t understand intellectually but physically. It’s less about the dictionary definition of the word and more about the experience of being snatched by grace. You might ask yourself, did you really know what the word snatched meant… feel what it really meant before you heard Hill preach about it?

Block of Flats – Loathe

I am continually amazed by how heavy music keeps getting heavier. It’s heaviness all the way down. It’s hard to even hear guitars in the maelstrom of ‘Block of Flats’; it sounds less like a riff and more like being pummeled in the face by a slab of obsidian. If someone tried to notate the tab for it the only instruction would be: become entombed in a quarry.

friends – unpeople

Keeping it heavy, I’m really enjoying the music of unpeople. They don’t dress like a metal band. In their videos they appear to be having a high old time. They have incredible pop hooks. They remind me of the first time I saw Metronomy in that they look like a gang. I’m hoping to chat to the singer Jake on The Allender Calendar sometime soon!

Speaking of the podcast, I have one more episode of the current series ‘dropping’ in the middle of August, and it’s a chat with the music journalist Simon Reynolds about his brilliant new book Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984–1994. After that, I’m going to take a break (although I’ll be back with a Christmas special) before returning next year with a new series. Thanks for listening so far to two full Allender years!

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My new EP, Fragment Hill, is out today. It’s available as a digital download from my Bandcamp page for a mere £5, and it’s also on all the streamers.

Apple Music
Tidal
Spotify

The EP came about when I was chatting to my good friend Alex Wilkins about the frustrations of recording everything on my own at home. He suggested we get together for a few days and work collaboratively on a few songs, playing about with mic placements, different guitars, arrangements. Basically, it gave me a bit more time and space to work on a project, rather than trying to write, track and mix everything in a spare evening or weekend… I decided to record one new song, ‘Fragment Hill’, and three older ones (‘Hawaii’ was originally released on the Becoming Ungoing EP, and ‘Moon’ and ‘Hand on the Horizon’ were on an album I put out back in 2010 called Three-Cornered Moon). I think we managed to capture a really nice spacious sort of sound. My friend Huw V. Williams, who I’m playing in a trio with at the moment, overdubbed some double bass on ‘Fragment Hill’ and ‘Hand on the Horizon’. I mixed it with Alex, and it was mastered by Stephen Kerrison. Alex also took the delightful cover photo.

I hope you enjoy it!

Here’s some music I’ve been enjoying recently:

Geogaddi there

I’d like to write something a bit longer about Inferno, the new Boards of Canada album – and maybe I will do for next month’s post. But for now, I want to focus on a single transformative moment in the 70-minute long record: around 1:22 on ‘Age of Capricorn’.

The song starts with a simple three-note melody which the listener ‘hears’ as being in one key; when the bassline comes in at 1:22, it reharmonises the first note of the melody – which then goes onto change almost imperceptibly – and the ground shifts beneath our feet as we realise we’re in a different tonal framework. The note from the melody is a ‘common tone’ existing in both keys – the bass line is the subtle knife cutting between the two harmonic worlds.

Boards of Canada certainly aren’t the first people to play with listeners’ harmonic expectations in this way, but, when I first heard it, I was struck by how representative it was of their sound. It felt like, in that single bass note, you could hear some essential element of the band’s music – which, to me, has always been about shifting perspectives. Something eerie transforming into something beautiful and vice versa. In the sonic world of Boards of Canada there are found sounds, snippets of library music, voices from religious cults and nature documentaries, broadcasts from the atomic era – the flotsam of lost and degraded audio fragments that seem to have come from the brink of social or environmental collapse. All of this is accompanied by burbling vintage synths and artefacts of tape decay – sounds which feel pre-loaded with collective nostalgia. These heady ingredients are repurposed, alchemised, and turned into music that is as gorgeous as it is terrifying. Their goal above all others appears to me to be transformation itself. How can these sounds be made to speak in new ways? How can a single bass note transport you from one place to somewhere else entirely?

One very important thought: Boards of Canada are brilliant songwriters. The eeriness inherent in their music is as much to do with their harmonic choices as it is to do with their apocalyptic samples. I’m convinced that you could play ‘Age of Capricorn’ on an acoustic guitar and it would still sound like Boards of Canada.

Barricades (mysterious or otherwise)

A piece of music that I’ve recently become completely obsessed with is François Couperin’s ‘Les Barricades Mystérieuses’ (The Mysterious Barricades). A beautifully bittersweet burst of baroque and roll, composed on harpsichord, but usually heard on the piano. It’s probably extremely famous in the classical world, but in that slightly ‘fuzzy logic’ way, where nine out of ten people will never have heard of it, but if you asked a buff whether they knew it, they would probably look down at you as if you’d questioned whether they were familiar with Beethoven’s 5th.

This is my favourite version of ‘The Mysterious Barricades’ (why are the covers of classical music albums so bad?):

This is a nice version too, but it’s too fast for me. Thomas Adès did this lovely arrangement for strings and woodwind. I’m quite partial to this rendition, which has more of a rubato feel (posh for slowing down and speeding up). Vampire Weekend’s ‘Bambina’ bears more than a passing resemblance to it. This guitar arrangement is also worth listening to.

What I love about ‘The Mysterious Barricades’ is that it’s based around such a simple, and contemporary sounding, chord progression. It’s essentially a distant cousin of the I-vi-IV-V 50’s chord progression. And yet something about it remains indefinable and inscrutable. It’s sprightly and joyous; it’s maybe even a bit silly – but it’s also really sad! What a combo! I’ve been trying to work it out on the guitar, but whenever I listen to it to try and work out the structure, I drift off and just get immersed in it. It’s a bit like what I was writing about in last month’s post – what are we doing when we listen to music? To what extent are we paying attention? To what extent are we… somewhere else?

Have a listen yourself, and see if you can break through those mysterious barricades.

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Playing in Gravenhurst in the late 2000s was an incredible musical education. Learning Nick Talbot’s beautiful songs and playing alongside him was an inspiration in itself – but he also introduced me to music that, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen’s line about hearing ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ for the first time, kicked open the door to my mind.

I already listened to what I thought was a fairly wide range of music, but some of the things Nick played me didn’t seem to fit into the categories I knew. I remember listening to one of Nick’s mix CDs in the van and asking, ‘What genre is all this?’ The music wasn't obscure, exactly, but under Nick’s curation, disparate songs seemed to share the same mysterious aesthetic. It was like an underground river flowing beneath whatever music was trendy or popular at the time. Nick’s answer was ‘psycho-tropicália’, and that’s as good a description as any. There were things that had fallen out of fashion, like shoegaze (Slowdive’s long-delayed reappraisal was still a long way off), but there was also dance music, post-punk, and unlikely singer-songwriters. I guess you might not expect Nick Talbot to have been a big fan of Suzanne Vega, but he definitely was. He often quoted something she said about songwriting (which I’m struggling to find online, so maybe we should just start attributing it to Nick): resist the temptation to use too many chords because all the world’s mystery is contained in E minor. Which reminds me, there’s a great Magritte quote which Nick was also fond of: ‘People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image.’ I can hear Nick saying that, valuing mystery for its own sake. And I can still hear him singing along in the van to ‘Who Loves the Sun’ by the Velvet Underground, or ‘Dead Set on Destruction’ by Hüsker Dü, the latter rendered strange and eerie by the choirboy clarity of his voice.

In an interview Nick once said of Ian Curtis, ‘he didn’t seem to be talking about this world, but one that existed alongside it’. Whether it was Future Sounds of London’s ‘Papua New Guinea’ or a track off Fugazi’s Steady Diet of Nothing, it felt like all the music on Nick’s mix CDs came from this parallel dimension.

But it was when Nick played me Scott Walker and Talk Talk that the door to my mind was kicked wide open. For a time, my friends – and the bands we played in and played with – all seemed to be listening to Scott 4 and Laughing Stock. Alex, the guitarist in Gravenhurst, and I would write daft texts to each other referencing ‘The Seventh Seal’ (‘Are you still mates with the minstrel filled with visions’ and so on).

I can remember sharing a hotel room with Nick, the only light the eerie green glow from his laptop, listening to ‘After the Flood’ by Talk Talk in silence, totally transported. To this day, if I ever have to wait ten minutes for a bus or a train, or I just want to take a little break away from work – or, better put, from reality – I listen to ‘After the Flood’. Ten minutes of transcendence.

Mark Hollis, the singer and co-founder of Talk Talk, died in February 2019, the day before my father. I remember taking a walk the day of Dad’s death and hearing a builder’s radio play ‘Life’s What You Make It’; a tribute to Hollis, that I felt as a tribute to my Dad. It was a strange moment, one that felt numinous and rich with meaning. If you’re grieving there’s a period where everything seems resonant – ‘the night alive with stars and signs I can’t explain’, as Nick once sang (borrowing from Camus). I was struck, hearing it then, by how different Hollis’s voice sounds from other pop singers. There’s a keening quality to those beautifully wavering toplines – something yearning and inscrutable. Even on ‘Life’s What You Make It’ or ‘It’s My Life’ you can hear the seeds of the extraordinary left turn Talk Talk would take later in their career (a dramatic progression from pop to experimentalism that was matched only by Scott Walker himself). Hearing that voice so incongruously in the street on that day was a moment that took me out of reality; a little message or token not from this world, but from one that exists alongside it.

Nowhere is Mark Hollis’s voice more beautiful and more devastating than on ‘After the Flood’. He sounds like Lear raging on the heath, his voice filled with pain and rapture. There’s a superb passage about the song in Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music:

Laughing Stock is a brilliant achievement, building on the discoveries of Spirit of Eden but pushing towards hitherto unknown regions of fluidity, abstraction and hushed, tensed power. ‘After the Flood’ contains the masterstroke: with Lee Harris recreating the drum pattern of Can’s ‘Halleluwah’, Hollis torched the centre of the track with a one-note, overtone-heavy Variophon solo. This was a German invention, a synthesized wind instrument shaped like a clarinet, with a blow control designed to allow greater expressive possibilities. Hollis’s model was malfunctioning, and the deluge of noise he emits, lasting all of one minute fifteen seconds, jerks caustically between octaves, like a breaking voice bellowing in anguish. It is literally a purging flood of sound. Hollis stated that he visualised the jazz reeds player Roland Kirk, who was able to play two or three instruments at once in his mouth. ‘It’s one note, but you feel the note.’

When I read this I had a bizarre realisation. I had listened to ‘After the Flood’ hundreds of times but never noticed that ‘deluge of sound’. Listening to it now, it’s extremely hard to miss. It’s not like something you become aware of once you’re told about it – like the cut between two takes on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ – it’s an incredibly clear minute-long stretch of screaming noise. Why hadn’t I ‘heard’ it?

Well, the answer is that I had, but unconsciously. I knew it as part of the fabric of the song. But the mood of that piece of music, its sonic universe, was so immersive, so self-contained, that I hadn’t really stopped to think about its different elements, its structure – verse, chorus… purging flood of sound. It was all just part of something I experienced in those ten minutes of transcendence.

And it made me think, what are we doing when we listen to music? We’re not concentrating with laser focus on every aspect of production or song structure while the song plays – we’re somewhere else. Where am I when I’m listening to ‘After the Flood’? Maybe I’m back in that hotel room with Nick, or maybe Hollis’s voice is taking me to that resonant street in Bristol with the builder’s radio.

The more I listen to ‘After the Flood’, and the more I try to pay attention to the song rather than ‘experience’ it, the more amazed I am by its profundity and its spiritual depth. Thankfully, further analysis doesn’t diminish the song’s mystery – it deepens it.

Lyrically, the song is difficult to decipher (mystery for mystery’s sake perhaps), although people have made valiant attempts to decode it online. There are clear Biblical allusions (the flood, the reference to Cain) – and the phrase ‘lest we forget’ is obviously freighted with meaning. Is it an apocalyptic vision of the atrocities of the 20th century? Perhaps, but the words resist easy interpretation – even the syntax is strangely warped. Does ‘dead to respect’ mean impervious to respect (as in ‘you’re dead to me’), or is it a distorted rephrasing of an instruction to ‘respect the dead’ (something like ‘there are the dead to respect’)? The song contains fragmentary lines that you can hear thousands of times and still be none the wiser: ‘spurning step by state’, ‘Cain in number’, ‘sleight of reason’ – add to this the near unintelligibility of Hollis’s delivery and it’s clear that conveying a direct meaning was never the intention.

Lyrically it may be unclear (and beautifully so), but musically ‘After the Flood’ makes a kind of sense, to me at least. Whenever I hear it, it sounds like the song is ‘about’ the juxtaposition between the everyday and the divine, the earthly and the spiritual.

The verse section is rooted around an unresolved, very open-ended F dominant 7th. Someone has done a good job of transcribing the song for guitar here, and you can see how harmonically dense those verses are; the transcriber has added F6s, Bbmaj7s, Bbmaj11s. The organ carries these chords, pedalling on that droning F, but the extensions are also accented with strange backwards-sounding loops and hints of guitar. The dubby bassline holds everything together, grounding the other instruments, but only loosely. The whole feel of the verse is of something inchoate, a wave waiting to break.

It’s in the chorus when Hollis sings ‘Shake my head’ that the floodgates open. Suddenly the song comes into focus. There are beautiful minor sevenths, and a three-chord pattern on the guitar (Gm7-Dm-F) that sounds like sunlight shining through stained glass.

The contrast between these two sections seems to me to be what the song is ‘about’ (if music itself can be said to be about anything). The verses are reality: unresolved, searching for meaning, grounded by the quotidian; the choruses are spirituality: the sense that there is something beyond what can be understood and described. And, naturally, that wild Variophon solo lasts for the duration of an entire verse section – the wild yearning, the ‘breaking voice bellowing in anguish’ – and fades out just as the chorus begins, signalling that we have left one state and entered another.

It’s a reminder of the possibility of transcendence, a glimpse of the spiritual dimension to our everyday lives. Sometimes a street is just a street and sometimes it’s a place of reverie, of meaning. Sometimes a bus stop is just somewhere where you wait for a bus, sometimes it’s a place to experience rapture. The broken Variophon solo of life fades out and we go somewhere else – back into the past, back into contact with the people we’ve lost.

While we’re on the subject of Talk Talk, this post from my friend James about the B-side to ‘Life’s What You Make It’ is really worth reading:

Methods of Dreaming

It’s Getting Late in The Evening

Such a beautiful piece of music. Originally tucked away as the B-side of ‘Life’s What You Make It’, I bought the Asides and besides compilation almost entirely just to own this sublime work. (OK, so some of the 12” mixes of the tracks are worth having too). The title encapsulates a subdued, introspective Autumnal feeling - evocative of eavesdropping out…

Read more

3 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · James McKeown

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A new Gwendoline Riley novel is always a cause for celebration. Or perhaps it’s better to say: the latest instalment of the Gwendoline Riley novel is always a cause for celebration. It’s no criticism of her work at all to say that her seven novels are, in many ways, reiterations of the same story, or chapters from the same life. A young female narrator wrestling with doomed relationships, difficult mothers and absent fathers. Alcohol, music, literature. The earlier novels are perhaps more windswept, but with any capital-R Romanticism undercut by sardonic Northern humour. Think Jean Rhys singing a Smiths lyric. More recently, as with her latest novel The Palm House, the setting has been a version of literary London, with narrators who are part of (and apart from) an arty set. There have been other developments: a husband in First Love, and the spectacular My Phantoms was a departure because it focused almost exclusively on the narrator’s parents. Noticeably, and perhaps unusually for contemporary fiction, her novels rarely deal with the internet, or the pervasiveness of social media (Riley is very much not on social media).

I can’t be alone in thinking that Riley’s novels are autobiographical. Is each book a thinly veiled fictionalisation of what she’s been up to since the last one? Riley’s characters feel so true to life, particularly in the way they talk to each other, that I sometimes wonder if she hasn’t just set her phone recording while chatting to an especially self-obsessed friend or family member. And much has been made about whether Simon ‘Shove’ Halfpenny in The Palm House, who takes over as editor of the literary magazine Sequence with plans to turn it into London’s answer to the New Yorker, is based on Stephen ‘Stig’ Abell, who took over as editor of the Times Literary Supplement with plans to turn it into London’s answer to the New Yorker. But – these books are presented as works of fiction and we should read them as such. Looking for real-life parallels isn’t what makes her fiction so captivating; they’re not puzzles to be solved. What is captivating is the fact that Riley is one of the great noticers. In that pitch-perfect dialogue she captures something of the way that speech reveals and conceals the truth of who we are. It’s the mini-tragedy contained in an offhand exclamation (‘I’m an expert now! At divorce!’) or a failed attempt at humour (‘“I’ve started so I’ll finish,” she said in her Magnus Magnusson voice’). With just a few lines of speech – which Riley’s narrators often dissect themselves – we can glimpse a character’s entire life story: their monomania, their loss of status, their myth-making – and what Mark Bowles calls in his novel All My Precious Madness, ‘the fragile fictions people spin around themselves to make their lives tolerable’.

Charlie Brooker once wrote that the handiest screenwriting tip he ever encountered came from Russell T. Davies: ‘Dialogue is just two monologues clashing. […] That’s my Big Theory. It’s true in life – never mind drama. Everyone is always, always thinking about themselves. It’s kind of impossible to do otherwise’. Riley is profoundly attuned to this. Her most memorable, and tragic, characters – like Hen (short for Helen) in My Phantoms – are people for whom a conversation isn’t a collaboration, but an opportunity to soliloquise, or to grouse about how life hasn’t quite met up to their expectations (although, for Hen, it’s never quite clear what those expectations are). Mark Bowles again: ‘Many of our ways of speaking are in fact ways of crying, of scratching, of nuzzling or hissing.’

For Bridget, Hen’s daughter and the narrator of My Phantoms, the role in these conversations is to play a complex game – feeding the right tidbits for the best reactions, desperately playing keepy-ups with an elusive good mood, mirroring Hen’s cliché-ridden idiolect; ‘It’s take the money and run, isn’t it’, she says, empathising with her mother’s miserable experience with an estate agent.

In The Palm House we meet Putnam, recently resigned from Sequence and spiralling into self-pity. He’s another of Riley’s great solipsists:

‘I’m a nobody,’ he said. ‘I am. Why are you upset?’

‘No one’s talking about you,’ he said. ‘Does everything have to be about you?’

‘Apparently it does,’ he said.

‘Huh,’ he said, mildly, sighingly.

I love how Riley records Putnam’s speech here. Usually, if the same person continues speaking across multiple paragraphs, you wouldn’t add a closing quotation mark to a paragraph until they’d finished speaking entirely. Riley deliberately breaks this rule by closing the quotation marks at the end of each paragraph even though it’s the same person speaking. It reinforces the idea that Putnam is relentlessly monologuing, not conversing; that his interlocutor has been cowed into silence. Each dejected paragraph is a little set-piece that the listener (who barely needs to be there) must endure.

Something similar happens with Bridget’s awful father in My Phantoms. Bridget remembers reading Wuthering Heights as a child, prompting her father to descend into one of his bitter reveries (watch the quotation marks):

‘Your mother’s one obsession!’ he said. ‘I never knew what she was talking about! I learnt something about it when the BBC did an adaptation. I only watched from pure curiosity. […] It was probably up to the usual standards of an adaptation! But the impression it conveyed… It’s really ghastly. Really creepy.’

‘It explained a lot,’ he said. ‘About your mother.’

‘Is that her book?’ he said.

Bridget’s father is a truly monstrous creation – someone for whom everything must connect back to him. He reminds me of something a friend once told me about a housemate who was so self-absorbed that if you crawled home with a broken leg they would probably say, ‘Oh, I broke my leg once too!’

Apropos London, for instance. Michelle [Bridget’s sister] had been on a school trip there with her history class. They’d been to the Tower and the Globe. This information our father attended to as one might a dog’s distant barking, before telling us that when he first moved down there, he used to spend every weekday evening in an Earl’s Court pub called the Coopers, which was a ‘den of iniquity’, but which he also called his ‘office’. People used to telephone there when they were looking for him, he said, or call in when they needed to see him. The landlady was ‘a real old boiler!’ he said. But she used to make him chips and egg, which she wouldn’t do for anyone else.

This kind of (highly improbable) myth-making is a particular trait of the egotist. As is the need to always be right. Witness his response to Bridget’s teenage love of reading (which he cruelly lambasts as ‘posing’):

If the name was new to him, then he handled the book suspiciously. ‘Never heard of them!’ he’d say. (His verdict.)

That word ‘verdict’ is perfect – as if having not heard of a book was an opinion! ‘Never heard of them!’ here means something like, ‘Well, if they haven’t registered with me then they’re obviously not worthy of attention!’

Like Bridget’s father, Hen has what people younger than me would no doubt call ‘main character energy’ (Bridget herself refers to this as her ‘announcing-ness’.) Hen, and the similar mothers in First Love and The Palm House, are playing the lead in the tragicomedy of their own lives – it’s ‘as if she believed she had an audience somewhere’. Hen’s ‘announcing-ness’ is brilliantly illustrated by Riley’s use of exclamation marks, which are the equivalent of mugging to that imaginary audience. ‘I never stop!’ ‘That was the style!’ ‘You’ve got to be in it to win it!’ ‘Once more unto the breach!’ ‘I’ve got the world’s biggest collection of tote bags!’ There’s something so tragic about them. Exclamation marks can be used to indicate many things: a punchline, laughter, joy – something shared. In Riley’s novels they are a way of keeping the world out, a coping mechanism, something to preserve those ‘fragile fictions’ that make life tolerable. They are also linked to Hen’s self-definition; a way of saying this is type of person I am. ‘He was this way. She was that way’, Bridget observes about her friendship with an old work colleague Griff (who Hen doesn’t even seem to like). It’s a form of roleplay: I’m ready for whatever the world might throw at me! I laugh in the face of setbacks! The persona of a seen-it-all stand-up comic (playing to an empty room). But to acknowledge that roleplay, to drop the mask, would be to admit to some deeper deprivation. The exclamation marks are a defence against a Comic Book Guy-style revelation: ‘I’ve wasted my life!’

Other elements of Hen’s roleplay are her faded impressions (Magnus Magnusson!) and half-remembered references – the flotsam of pop culture. She quotes the Jazz Club MC from The Fast Show (‘Nice!’), and, of her new flat, she says, ‘I mean, you picture it being a bit more, you know… going to the deli and buying a “double flat no-fat extra hot frappi-mochaccino to go! Hold the mustard!” kind of thing’. These character bits are a way of showing that she’s ‘in the swim’, experiencing ‘the comfort of the crowd, and of joining in. Of not feeling alone and in the wrong’. There’s something of the desperation of David Brent doing a Bo’ Selecta! impression in The Office. Hen, like Brent, ‘behave[s] as if things are other than they are’. She goes with Griff to galleries, concerts, exhibitions (‘I’m putting myself out there’) – but she never really enjoys them. Again, it’s like she’s playing a version of someone she wants to be: ‘The situations she contrived for herself seemed always to chafe and pinch sooner or later. They were never quite it.’ She falls short of the bookish, cosmopolitan archetype she aspires to. She can’t keep up with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (‘Is Lenu Lina or is Lena Lulu? Argh!’) and she only seems to take pleasure in her outings if something goes wrong (‘I think she liked finding life a little bit crap’). Culture is a kind of box-ticking exercise. In one of my favourite exchanges, Hen tells Bridget about a coach trip to Hebdon Bridge, which included a visit to Sylvia Plath’s grave:

‘Were there a lot of disciples?’ I said. ‘Plath obsessives?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why?’

When I read that I can’t work out if I want to laugh or bang my head against a brick wall.

~

I meant to write more about The Palm House but, after rereading it, My Phantoms seems to have stuck in my head a lot more. And it’s different to the way I remember it. There’s something pitiless (a word that has been used to describe Riley’s fiction before) about those exclamation marks. I had forgotten Bridget’s cruelty, her meanness. She rarely visits her mother and isn’t exactly welcoming to her on her annual visits to London; on one such trip Bridget takes Hen to a vegan restaurant which she obviously won’t enjoy. There’s also a strong suggestion that there may be a medical reason for Hen’s behaviour and the way she communicates. And, obviously, with an ex-husband like Bridget’s father, is it any wonder that Hen is difficult to bond with and emotionally closed off? Finishing the novel leaves you with a complex feeling of not quite knowing where your sympathies lie.

~

Riley’s novels are brief (they are all under 250 pages) and light on plot (just for clarity, in case you think I’m being pejorative: this is my favourite kind of novel). They can often feel anecdotal. A series of seemingly unrelated incidents gathered together like songs on an album. One such incident occurs in The Palm House, when narrator Laura remembers a childhood holiday to Dubrovnik with her mother and grandmother. Laura’s mother notices that a lot of the locals are wearing a certain kind of shoe: ‘lace-up fabric boots, with a low wedge heel and an open toe’. They find a shop and kit themselves out with a few pairs for themselves. Walking back to the hotel in their new shoes, a group of men on scooters watch them pass. One of them shouts, ‘Your shoes they are shit’. This is the quintessential Riley story. Painful, humiliating, bitterly comic – and yet somehow inscrutable. It’s hard to pin down what it means. Amidst the bathos and cruelty there is a story about trying to fit in or adopt a role (like Hen putting herself out there) – undertaking a small act of aspiration that’s doomed to fail; realising that you or your family have got something slightly wrong. The shoe incident isn’t referred to again in the novel. So why is it mentioned at all? The simple answer is because memories like these have extraordinary power. They are little parables; origin stories of inadequacy and pain. They are what Mark Bowles calls the ‘seemingly innocuous incidents [that] can in fact alter the course of a child’s life’. They linger long in the memory of the reader; they are the phantoms that haunt the lives of Riley’s wounded narrators.

~

What next for Gwendoline Riley? I was delighted to see she’s been awarded the Windham‑Campbell prize for a body of work. And I’m curious to see novel number eight. Maybe it will be a departure – a multi-generational space opera set across multiple timelines. I hope it isn’t, to be honest. But, as Hen might say, I’ll be first in the queue at the bookshop to find out! Try and keep me away! In for a penny!

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I really enjoyed Simon Critchley’s book on mysticism, although I found it a bit academic in places. He also has a habit of constantly talking about what he’s going to do next but never quite getting there: ‘My wish in this book…’, ‘I will try and show in this book…’, ‘Decreation is a beautiful and delicate concept that we will come back to, and which constitutes a major framing theme in this book.’ But I wonder if that goes with the territory when you’re attempting to write about something that can’t really be defined. As Garth Greenwell has asked: ‘how can a finite medium (language) be used to think about something infinite (God)?’ I love how Critchley connects the dots between Julian of Norwich, T. S. Eliot and the music of Neu! But I suppose I approached the book thinking that I would like to read more about what ‘varieties of religious experience’ actually feel like; or, I’d like to see if any of those descriptions chimed with anything I have experienced. I loved the chapter on Julian of Norwich, but I also wanted to know: what did her visions actually feel like? What was happening to her? Was it something we could recognise, like a fever dream or a hallucination? Or was she experiencing something that was totally beyond what anyone else could ever understand, let alone translate into language? Unanswerable questions, of course! But I wonder if what I was expecting was maybe a slightly different book, one which was perhaps more in the realm of fiction, which imagined the states of ecstasy experienced by the book’s subjects. I enjoyed Patricia Lockwood’s review of On Mysticism which somehow manages to be completely impenetrable and hilariously funny. Maybe that’s something like the approach I was looking for.

Having said that, I loved Critchley’s description of writing, and the need to escape what Malcolm Lowry called the ‘dreadful tyranny of self’:

To write is to aspire towards, even to hope for, the mystery of a clearing that is other than the self, the vast windowless sunlit room of living experience. To write is to participate in the struggle to efface oneself. The problem is that the self keeps getting in the way. We look for a clearing, but as we go through dense woods and undergrowth, we keep getting snagged in branches, smeared with dirt, and dragged back into the darkening landscape of doubt, the self-doubt that haunts and hunts the writer at every step.

Another book I enjoyed recently was Margaret Drabble’s first novel A Summer Bird-Cage. Published in 1963 when Drabble was in her early twenties, it’s a novel of youthful precocity, with pin-sharp observations about relationships and class. It’s a simple enough story about two sisters – the narrator Sarah, just ‘down’ from Oxford and unsure what to do with herself, and Louise who has decided to marry for money. But it’s hard to get across just how full of life the prose is. Sarah is bursting with ideas – she’s so funny and observant: ‘Everything he did seemed to make a noise: all his actions were larger and more physical than other men’s. I wondered if that was because he was an actor, or whether he was an actor because of that.’ Sarah feels like a thinly veiled portrait of the author herself (which would make Sarah’s sister Louise a version of A. S. Byatt – intriguing).

To a modern reader (well, to me at least) the book feels noticeably unfiltered and uninhibited. I’m not saying that modern novels are inhibited (I’ve just finished Rob Doyle’s Cameo, one of the funniest and most outrageous novels I’ve ever read). I just mean that there is a detectable tone to a lot of what you might call pre-internet literary fiction; it feels less afraid of judgment somehow. I’m sure A Summer Bird-Cage wasn’t intended to be a groundbreaking, taboo-busting novel, and yet I’m struck by its unguardedness, its fearlessness. Sarah can be cruel and unbelievably snobby, but she’s also self-reflexive, aware of her faults – and there’s a refreshing lack of shame in the way she interrogates her own snobbery.

I loved this passage towards the end of the novel where Sarah realises that she and her sister share a flaw common to bookish twenty-somethings. It’s the tendency to novelise one’s life, to treat every situation as representative of your essential character.

I saw for her what I could never see for myself – that this impulse to seize on one moment as the whole, one aspect of the total view, one attitude as a revelation, is the impulse that confounds both her and me, that compounds and impels us. To force a unity from a quarrel, a high continuum from a sequence of defeats and petty disasters, to live on the level of the heart rather than the level of the slipping petticoat, this is what we spend our life on, and this is what wears us out. My attitude to the petticoat is firmer than hers, but I am exhausted nevertheless.

Also, this is worth checking out – Margaret Drabble’s own annotations to her copy of A Summer Bird-Cage:

Drink-driving acceptable
Smoking acceptable
Hair pins – why so many?

Hoping I’m the first person to go from Margaret Drabble to the comedian Connor O’Malley, but I loved his latest utterly unhinged video. And actually it made me feel like I’d got it totally wrong with A Summer Bird-Cage – of course there’s still completely uninhibited art being created! I love it when you’re reminded that comedy can be so unexpected, so full of ideas and details, like it’s opening a door in your head. Maybe that’s a real glimpse of mysticism right there. The path to transcendence is via a blanket puller on Hollywood Boulevard.

I’m really enjoying Ben Lerner’s latest novel Transcription. What I particularly like is something akin to what I’m talking about with the unexpectedness in Connor O’Malley’s video. The novel starts straightforwardly enough – the narrator travels to his old university town in Providence, Rhode Island to interview his 90-year-old mentor. But he drops his phone so can’t record the interview. What seems like a fairly straightforward satire on modern life and our dependence on technology really changes gear during the interview. The dialogue becomes hard to follow. The mentor, Thomas, is cryptic and elusive. When the narrator tells him about a dream he had, Thomas responds, ‘It is my dream, I believe.’ The reader starts to question: is the dialogue actually ‘happening’ in the world of the novel? Or are we reading the narrator’s written transcript after the event? (I haven’t finished yet, so no spoilers.)

I love it when books, music, films drift from meaning to non-meaning, or start from one point and end up in a completely different universe. It’s like the second side of David Bowie’s Low, or the fact that Tarkovsky’s Stalker switches from black and white to colour – from the dismal bar of the opening scene to the alien landscape of the Zone. The contrast isn’t as extreme in Transcription, but that faint feeling of the narrative rug being pulled from under you is what keeps me reading.

This is a lovely passage in which the narrator remembers visiting an exhibition of glass flowers at the Natural History Museum with a friend; it speaks to this idea of the strange zone (!) where reality and fiction cross over.

I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn’t quite believe that this moth orchid was glass, that this pear blossom was lampwork, that these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand. […] I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass – they probably replaced them each night – but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by ‘unspoiled’ mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as pencilled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I’d call this ‘fiction.’

This makes a nice comparison with Sarah in A Summer Bird-Cage; both she and the Transcription narrator are novelising, fictionalising, their lives in different ways. I could go into this in more detail, but I’m a bit tired. It’s nice though, innit.

I’m very late to the party with this, but I really love Blood Orange’s 2025 album Essex Honey. Since I first heard it I’ve wanted to ration it, not overplay it; I wanted to preserve something of the evocativeness of the first listen. I like it feeling nebulous and unformed in my mind, not diminished by familiarity.

It’s a really beautiful album about grief. Dev Hynes, having lived in New York for much of his adult life, returned to his childhood home in Ilford to be with his dying mother. As such, it also feels like an album of exile – that old Tom Waits line: ‘I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long’.

And that evocativeness I mentioned. Maybe it’s just me but Essex Honey is such a nostalgic sounding record. It seems to summon a specific feeling of British ennui. Why does it sound to me like winter dark at 4pm? Like playing computer games after school, not bothering to change out of your uniform, the cold house, waiting for the central heating to come on? Where did that image, that feeling, that memory come from? And why was it evoked by music? Maybe I’ll leave that to Simon Critchley: ‘The only proof of animism I know is music. When we listen, it is as if the world falls under the spell of a kind of natural magic. In music, the cosmos feels divinely infused.’

Speaking of music, I’m back here again – stuck in the mixing process as I try to finish an EP I recorded a while back. One thing I’ve noticed with mixing this time is how often Zen-like aphorisms appear to help. Or how very basic common sense advice somehow takes on hidden depths. The vocal is too quiet. Turn it up. This frequency is too loud. Turn it down. It sounds like very obvious stuff, but I’m reminded of the fact that I didn’t work out what size trousers I wore until I was 29 years old. I would buy 32-inch length jeans and wonder why I had to turn them up. Can you imagine the revelatory experience of realising I could buy 30-inch length jeans? I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that humans are extremely gifted normalisers. We can get used to almost any situation. Sometimes all it takes to break the deadlock is a simple question that requires a simple answer. Is the guitar too loud? Turn it down. Are my trousers too long? Shorter pairs are available.

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Buy me a coffee!

‘This is the best bit, isn’t it? The anticipation.’

‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘I mean, I always find with rugby that people get super excited about it before, but then the game itself is always so boring.’ Dan frowned at me the way you do when you’re struggling to read a road sign. ‘I just mean, when I watch it, it doesn’t seem to make sense,’ I flailed. ‘Like, what’s the scrum for? They roll the ball underneath and then everyone just collapses.’

‘Yeah, but that’s because the game has changed over the years, and rugby players’ builds are so different now from how they were thirty years ago. Players are almost too big for scrums now.’

‘So why don’t they get rid of scrums?’

‘Nah.’

The players were emerging from the tunnel.

‘Do you want a beer before kick-off?’

I looked down at my almost completely full can. ‘Er, sure yeah.’

He got up from his reclining chair and walked across the immense open plan living room to the kitchen island, where Beth and Gemma were sitting. I eyed them jealously. They were giggling, confiding; at ease in each other’s company. ‘You’ll be alright with Dan, won’t you?’ Beth had asked me that morning. ‘Yeah, sure.’ I’d said, ‘I just don’t really fancy watching rugby.’ ‘Oh God, I hate rugby,’ she’d said. I mean, so do I, I’d said in my head. ‘Can’t I just come and hang out with you two?’ ‘No! You need to bond with Dan!’

‘Here you go.’ Dan had returned with a frothing can.

‘Thanks. How are the girls doing over there?’

‘The thing with rugby is that you need to see it from the stands, it’s like watching a battle, it’s about territory, making small gains – it all makes sense with the bigger picture.’ On the TV was a close up of a rugby player’s thigh, like a shoulder of Iberico ham.

‘I think I find football easier on the eye, it kind of makes more aesthetic sense to me,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Dan.

He started telling a story about a stag do he had been on recently with his rugby club. He had a slow, unenthusiastic kind of delivery as if he was a talking head on a documentary about depressed people. The story seemed to drift in and out of focus, but it involved Jägerbombs and criminal damage. It was difficult to tell whether or not Dan approved of this behaviour. It was more like he was relating it because the memory happened to be running through his mind at the time.

I responded by talking about the last stag do I’d been on, but I realised I couldn’t recall a single notable anecdote about the whole weekend. I ended by saying that the old town of Tallinn was ‘actually really beautiful’, and the word ‘beautiful’ sounded unfathomably posh coming out of my mouth. I gasped for breath when I finished. He said absolutely nothing.

The players were lined up, singing the national anthems. I looked down at the floor. Dan kept a shoeless house so we were both in our socks, which felt like a kind of terrible intimacy.

‘How’s work?’ I asked, then panicked – ‘What is it you do again?’ He winced.

‘It was that memorable, was it? Yeah, same old same old.’

Extremely long pause. I felt like I had to pretend that he’d asked me a question. ‘I’m working on music at the moment. Just stuff for ads.’

‘I used to do a bit of music myself.’

‘Oh really? What kind of thing?’

‘Ambient mainly.’

‘Wow, that seems surprising.’

‘People can like rugby and ambient music, you know.’ Sipping his beer. ‘The two aren’t mutually exclusive.’

‘No I didn’t mean that. I just… Tell me about it.’

‘Well… It was a long time ago really. I haven’t done any of that stuff for years. But I was working in Alaska. I had a job in Petersburg in a cannery. I have dual citizenship, you see.’

The game had started but Dan had found a new rhythm. His eyes were fixed on the screen but he continued to speak – mumbling sometimes, like someone talking in their sleep.

‘After university I took a year off before looking for work. My last year of university hadn’t gone well. It sounds trivial, but it was to do with, well, love. She was called Imogen. I fell in love and it was like nothing I had ever experienced, before or since. Anyway, long story short, it was unreciprocated. I thought at one time that something was going to happen but it didn’t. It’s all a blur but I remember coming out of a party and thinking I was going to scream or shout, but I just burst into tears instead. And of course I then fucked up my finals. I nearly left. I should have left. It felt like all around me were versions of this fairy tale relationship that I had thought would be happening to me. Other versions of me, of us, wandering around the campus. And I was inside my room, not living the life that I thought I would be. I actually think, looking back, that it was some kind of breakdown. The fantasy of the other life I was meant to be living was so alluring that I guess I ended up spending more time on the wrong side of the mirror, if that makes sense. What would we be doing tonight if things had worked out? Perhaps the college bar, then a film, or back to a party at Will’s. All imagined from my darkened room. Curtains drawn against the summer sun. Unwashed mugs and dishes everywhere. Dirty laundry. My computer with its great big monitor, switched off and gathering dust.

‘Anyway, like I say, I have dual citizenship and I had just come into a bit of money from an inheritance so I decided to take myself off to America for a while after university. I wanted to cross the country but I ended up spending an evening in a town called Laromie in Wyoming and staying there for a couple of months. It’s a place that people normally go through on their way to somewhere else. I met a girl, Kim, who worked in a bar. I loved saying bar instead of pub. The relationship, if you can call it that, felt like a cheap imitation of the relationship I should have had at uni. I think we both felt we needed an excuse not to drink alone. There was a park that we used to go to, Undine Park, with “40s”, and cheap “liquor” in brown bags – and it felt like a version of the quad at college. Like a mirror image of it. I’d see a group of office workers having lunch and they’d look like Nicole and Rich from college, like their alter-egos or something. Out of the corner of my eye they were me and my friends in our first year – freshers getting drunk at a picnic. I told Kim stories about myself that didn’t quite land – a story about something pretty traumatic that happened to me as a teenager that I realised I was only telling as a way to alleviate some failure to commit to something; just a cheap means to make someone feel sorry for me. And I remembered as I was telling it that I’d told the same story to Imogen but it had had more meaning then. Like if they made a film of my life that bit would have been in the trailer. But I told Kim this story as if I were rehearsing lines. I don’t know why I told her about it.

‘Anyway, Kim had family up in Alaska and kept saying that we should visit. It was beautiful up there, she said. It didn’t even feel like America. The light was different. Before I really knew what I was doing we were on a flight. I had all this money so paid for us both to fly up there. We drank neat vodka in the departure lounge.

‘We were hungover by the time we arrived at Kim’s aunt and uncle’s house even though it was about 3 in the afternoon. She was right about the light. There was a blinding purity to it. Kim’s aunt and uncle were bemused by me and started asking me all these questions about British culture and politics. Her aunt asked me what parliamentary constituency I lived in. I rambled a bit because I didn’t actually know, and I was aware I was sort of slurring my words. Kim patted but actually slapped my arm. We took a nap and reconvened for dinner – which was meatloaf, it tasted pretty good actually. Her uncle was silent, but her aunt kept firing questions at me. She asked me if I’d seen a film that she’d watched on TV last night. It was something fairly arthouse about Irish nuns or something. And I said, “Yeah I think it was on at a party I was at,” which was basically my line whenever someone asked me if I’d seen a film that I’d never heard of. I couldn’t admit to not knowing about stuff back then. I seemed to be inventing my personality as I went along. And she was like, “That sounds like a very strange party.” I don’t think she believed me. She eyed Kim over the meatloaf as if to say, “Who is this strange man?”

‘In her hometown, Kim took me to the places she remembered from childhood. Places that seemed almost comically mundane to me. This is the carpark where we used to hang out. The park where we first got drunk. The abandoned house at the edge of a scrap of common land where I lost my virginity. I suppose the places were reflections of the similarly sacred spots of my teenage years. The weird consecrated ground of benches in the park, the strange prefab terrapins on the edge of the rec. I started telling her about the terrapins actually. I was saying that my Dad used to have meetings in this one terrapin. But whenever I was playing football on the rec it felt like the terrapin was different from the one Dad worked in. Even though it was the same it felt like they existed in different realities. It was a kind of primal place, that field with the terrapins. There was another place like that, I said. There was the phonebox near a lane that intersected two leaf-strewn streets where me and my friends always used to meet. I don’t know why. It was just an ordinary phonebox. And one afternoon we met there and played knock-knock ginger, or ding-dong dash, or knock-a-door run, or whatever you call it. A game now made impossible by Ring Doorbells, by the way. Something else we’ve lost. Anyway, whenever I think of that afternoon… it’s like it’s bathed in golden light. I’d never known happiness like the afternoon when we played knock-knock ginger. Golden light. The light pouring down like gold. There was the phonebox and there was the weird terrapin, or maybe it was a scout hut – but it existed in two realities. Mine when I was playing football, and my Dad’s when he was having meetings. Those were my two places. She said I can barely follow what you’re talking about sometimes.

‘I remember saying, “Sometimes I just want to go outside and walk and walk until I reach the horizon.” She said, “You can’t just walk out here, you know. This place is bigger than Shitfield or wherever you come from. You can walk for days and see no one, did you know that? You’ll fucking freeze to death.”

‘Well, I obviously wasn’t going to actually do that. But I knew it was over. She did too. I think she was relieved to see the back of me. “You never got over Imogen, did you?” She said that to me when we were nestled in her childhood bedroom. “You can’t stop talking about her.” Whispering so as not to wake her aunt. There were posters of Courtney Love on the wall. Stacks of CDs. I said, “Maybe, but what is this, anyway? It’s all so new, we’ve only known each other for a couple of weeks. What am I even doing meeting your family?” “Oh they didn’t give a shit,” she said. “About me?” I said. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

‘I couldn’t sleep most nights so would go downstairs. Her aunt and uncle had a rice cooker (which I’d never seen before) and one of those stove top coffee pots. Kim’s uncle couldn’t sleep either. And we’d stay up talking about films and music. He was a bit shy at first. He played me a lot of the Eno albums then. Quite a strange image, isn’t it? Two blokes who barely know each other sharing a coffee in the middle of the night to the strains of The Plateaux of Mirror. Looking out across the snowy scrubland at the back of the house.

‘But I did leave one morning, eyes scratchy with tiredness. “Where are you going to go?” Kim asked. I said, “I’ll get a bus. I’m not actually going to walk until I reach the horizon.” I think she was glad to see me go anyway. I walked in the grey light. The real cold hadn’t come on yet. But it was still bloody cold. I felt the snot freeze in my nose. And I seemed to lose strength with every step, like I was a character in a computer game, flickering when they receive an injury, the energy bar gradually decreasing

‘I got to the bus depot and bought a ticket to Petersburg. I remember that we were stuck in the depot for a really long time before we got moving. It felt like a version of infinity. Like that would actually be what infinity felt like. In a way I think I’m still there. I managed to sleep by using a scarf as a pillow against the window. A couple murmured behind me. We drove through the awakening town and out into the real snowlands. I woke once or twice. I had a CD walkman. The music I was listening to gave me these dreadful nightmares. I remember I had this dream about a MASK toy I’d had as a kid. MASK was a cartoon that was essentially a big advertising campaign for toys. The toys were a bit like Transformers I guess. Except there were these characters who drove the cars and lorries which then transformed into tanks or “mobile armoured vehicles” or whatever. There were goodies and baddies. I preferred it to Transformers, it made more sense than Transformers. In Transformers the cars themselves are sentient. Anyway one of the toys was just a fucking billboard that opened up and transformed into some kind of rocket launching base. It was so boring. A billboard. Not a car or a motorbike or something exciting that you could actually play with – a billboard. The character’s name was Dusty Hayes. You can look it up. And the guy was just stuck in the billboard. And it was impossible not to think – what’s he thinking in there when the billboard is closed? And I dreamt that I was trapped in the billboard, trapped in the box of toys under my childhood bed.

‘Anyway, when I got to Petersburg I rented a room in a block above a computer repair shop. I knew no one there and no one knew me. It felt like I was living deep in a kind of fantasy role-playing game that all the other participants had forgotten they were playing. What happens if I choose my own adventure and I end up on a completely blank page? I would look out of the window at the gritted street, and the snow blowing sideways. All I had was my bed and my desk. And there was a shared bathroom in the hall, dismal with black mould. I got a job at the cannery and would come home stinking of fish. On days off I would sleep through the ultramarine afternoons. Or I would mooch around the harbour watching the marbled murrelets. The blinding light. The saline air. I saved up my wages and bought a second hand laptop from downstairs. It was an Acer. I downloaded a cracked version of Cubase. I’d been reading about home recording. I found some good soft synth plug-ins. I’d play a chord sequence, smother it in reverb and loop it around and around until it seemed to be part of the snow blowing sideways outside. The sounds all felt too clean so I bought a tape deck on eBay and started recording to cassette and back to digital. The tape hiss filled the room the way silence fills a cathedral. I would spend whole evenings listening to a blank tape with the volume all the way up until I could hear symphonies deep in the texture of the hiss. In the strange half-light of long winter days, the synth pads and the languorous chords, the tape hiss… I lay on my bed as if I was in the womb.

‘After working at the cannery I’d walk maybe 30 minutes to a bar called Richard’s. God, I knew every crack in the pavement on the walk to that bar. Sometimes, to get myself to sleep, I would recreate the walk in my mind – here’s the petrol, sorry gas station, the Salty Pantry bakery, the grill house, the cafe with the stale cannoli, the abandoned lots, the parks. I wondered which sites were consecrated ground for teenagers here. Sometimes when I was walking to Richard’s I couldn’t tell if I was really walking there or if I was lying in my bed and just imagining it. At Richard’s time would stop. I would sit in a booth, or I would sit at the wide, deep bar, staring at the stupid bastard in the mirror. I would try to read but I’d become overcome by beer. Four, five, six pints – and I’d continue to read but nothing would sink it, but I just desperately, desperately didn’t want the moment to end. That’s where I got into sports actually. They’d always show rugby in Richard’s to the miserable expats. And then I’d stumble home and I’d lie awake in the night, half-drunk, half-hungover, feeling the alcohol coursing through me – and I’d listen to the foxes (or maybe they were wolves) shrieking in the night, imagining them out there in the dark street and the dank wood, and eventually dying and decomposing in the snow water and the leaves and the vivid green moss, becoming one with the earth. All those night sounds outside – I started to think that if I could hear all of those noises – the animals, the occasional car, the rain in the distance – then I must be somehow out there too, reaching out from the room into the night. I had this recurring dream to do with affixing a lid on something that couldn’t be contained. And again and again I thought of the computer game character – that I’d depleted my energy bar and it would never get topped up again.’

When he’d finished we sat in silence and watched the TV. It was halftime and the score was 0-0 which was unusual for rugby.

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Those albums that you heard on long car journeys as a child are their own genre in a way. You end up knowing them intimately, better than many favourite albums from adult life. They seem to exist outside of trends and, even at the time, they often felt weirdly like relics from a different age – they may have only been released a few years ago, but that’s an aeon in childhood time.

My favourite glovebox album was Chris Rea’s New Light Through Old Windows. We had it on tape and it soundtracked countless journeys to Wales and the North East when I was young. It’s a best of compilation with a couple of re-recorded tracks, most notably ‘Driving Home for Christmas’, which was released as a B-side originally; its inclusion on the album led to it becoming a seasonal staple.

Chris Rea sadly died last month, so I thought I’d listen to the album again for the first time in maybe 30 years. I’m amazed by how well I remember it. Every nuance of production and vocal inflection is as familiar as a house key. In the silence after one song I can anticipate the intro of the next. The craftsmanship of Rea’s songwriting and the precision and expressiveness of his bluesy slide guitar playing are exceptional. I also love how the album sounds so gloriously of its era, but, clearly, it’s not the 80s of Pixies or the Cure. It belongs more to the 80s that were filled with often brilliant (and sometimes terrible) pop music which was marked by uncomplicated messaging: we will rock you, you’re simply the best. [Edit: Since posting this I’ve realised that ‘We Will Rock You’ was released in 1977.] Songs that were uncool and critically unappreciated perhaps, but were wildly popular. To Morrissey, the sincerity and directness of Chris Rea’s love songs might have said nothing to him about his life. Too smooth. Too cheesy. But maybe Chris Rea just wasn’t made for those times (and, besides, sod Morrissey). After all, in the 1960s, a sincere love song could sell by the bucketload and still be cool. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘My Girl’, ‘Stand By Me’ – if they’d been released in the 1980s (accompanied by a Yamaha DX7 and a gated snare drum) perhaps they’d be viewed differently. The default journalistic position on punk and post-punk is that people had had enough of cerebral prog rock and silly love songs by the late 70s (as a Twitter account I set up ten years ago is keen to emphasise). A Friday night BBC 4 documentary about the 80s (complete with a montage of dole queues and the miners’ strike) is unlikely to feature ‘On the Beach’ on the soundtrack.

Listening to New Light Through Old Windows now, I’m struck by how similar it is to 1980s Van Morrison – indeed, ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ was originally written with Van in mind. Van could get pretty cheesy in the 80s, but there was always an edge to him, as this excellent piece by W. B. Gooderham in The Quietus attests. And if Van ever got a critical drubbing he always had Astral Weeks to back up his credentials as a ‘real artist’ (although I’d be interested to know what the reputation of Astral Weeks was in the 80s). If Chris Rea had made a spiritual masterpiece as a young man (something that I firmly believe he could have done) then his critical standing would be different. But Rea first started releasing music in the 70s, a very different decade to the 60s. A case in point – both musicians were influenced by jazz, but Van channeled this into a very late 60s melting pot of cosmic folkie grooves (hip); the jazz strain in Rea shows more of the influence of fusion and Steely Dan (less hip). One of Rea’s early albums is called Tennis (not a good name for a spiritual masterpiece).

It feels like some artists and songs date more noticeably than others. It’s often to do with production or instrumentation; it’s like there are certain sounds that have a kind of collective cultural cringe baked into them. Daniel Lopatin has trollingly called the snobbery around this ‘timbral fascism’ – a term best defined by critic Jeremy D. Larson as, ‘the idea that some vintage sounds, like chintzy new age synths, proggy rototoms, or nu-metal seven-string guitars, are forever doomed to connote some historically uncool context’. You can add raunchy slide guitar solos to that list sadly.

But of course Chris Rea played raunchy slide guitar solos. Despite being six years younger than Van, he was still very much a child of the 60s – part of the generation born in the 40s and early 50s who formed, what David Hepworth calls in Hope I Get Old Before I Die, a ‘massive army of would-be rock stars’; an army immersed in the blues and rock and roll. For these kids, blues licks weren’t clichés. The blues was part of their musical vocabulary. I’m reminded of this (often very moving) Michael Hann interview with Francis Rossi of Status Quo:

For Rossi, the boogie style – the tough, hard rock version of the 12-bar blues, exemplified by songs such as ‘Whatever You Want’ or ‘Roll Over Lay Down’ – also tied in with the shuffling Italian music he grew up with in south London. ‘There are so many things in our lives that are shuffles, even nursery rhymes – Nellie the Elephant. Our marches do that. It appealed to me and it still does.’ That was crossed with what he was hearing on the university circuit Quo were playing. ‘We used to work with Fleetwood Mac a lot on the uni circuit,’ Rossi says. ‘You could sit down beside the stage and they’d start playing – der-der, der-der – for an hour and a half. We wanted to do that, to be that.’

But then, to use the language of a BBC 4 documentary again, punk came along. And even though the musicians of the late 1970s were only a few years younger than the Beatles and the Stones, they distanced themselves from their predecessors by rejecting blues playing (feel free to sound the enormous generalisation klaxon now). No solos, no sultry, ambiguous blue notes. Guitarists instead were empowered by the power chord (empowerchorded?) – a simple shape based on only the root and fifth notes of a triad, that, once learned, allows you to play in any key without having to worry about minors and majors, let alone bluesy dominant sevenths. It’s a much simpler approach, making it possible to bash out a rudimentary version of virtually every song ever written; but, as Tony Wilson mentions in the DVD commentary for 24 Hour Party People in relation to Bernard Sumner, it also gave the guitar a new language. The power chord allowed guitarists to explore chromaticism, dissonance and riffs in a way that would be virtually impossible with full chords.

Punk – or, more accurately, post-punk – also took its non-blues cues from somewhere where there was a more pronounced generational difference, as David Stubbs writes in Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany:

Krautrock was paradoxical. It loathed the prevailing German pop culture of Schlager, banal drinking-to-forget songs dripping with nostalgia but in which the horrors of the Third Reich were conveniently airbrushed away. Yet it wanted to create something German in origin that was not beholden to the Anglo-American beat music or jazz traditions, so strong in West Germany after the Marshall Plan, thanks to the number of British and American troops still stationed in the country and the unrivalled potency and attraction of the Beatles, the Who, Dylan, Hendrix. These groups were adored and initially imitated by most of the Krautrock musicians themselves, as they earned their spurs in clubs and concert halls in Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Cologne. However, a broader disaffection with America’s imperial misadventures in Vietnam, which prompted a wave of student demonstrations in the late 60s, making many think again about what amounted to an Anglo-American cultural occupying force. What had once been the soundtrack of young rebellion now itself needed to be rebelled against.

What Michael Rother from Neu! called ‘the non blues, non rock-cliché new approach’ was hugely influential on music – and music criticism (and therefore what was considered cool and uncool). From German ‘kosmische musik’ to Bowie and Eno, and from Bowie and Eno to goths and New Romantics, synth- and sophisti-pop, new wave and indie.

In Rip it Up, Simon Reynolds’s fittingly named book about post-punk, there are countless references to artists wanting to distance themselves from the ‘rock and roll tradition’, as the Raincoats put it. Throbbing Gristle ‘moved beyond the agrarian blues roots of rock and created a new kind of music (or anti-music) appropriate to post-industrial society’; Television ‘created a blues-less blueprint for a cleansed, reborn rock’; Ultravox’s style was ‘based on rejecting rock’s standard “Americanisms”; Billy Currie, their keyboardist, was a classically trained viola player and determinedly avoided blues scales’. In the most extreme example, Reynolds describes No Wave music as ‘defiling rock’s corpse’, and, similarly to Tony Wilson, he talks about how more primitive approaches to guitar playing enabled musicians to escape the clichés of rock and blues music:

Ironically, a traditional blues and country technique, slide guitar, provided No Wave with some of its most disconcertingly novel noises. As used by three female guitarists – Conny Burg from Mars, Lydia Lunch in Teenage Jesus, Pat Place in Contortions – slide offered musical novices the quickest way to generate startling sounds. You didn’t even need to learn how to hold down chord shapes on the guitar strings. ‘Who wanted chords, all these progressions that have been used to death in rock?’ jeers Lunch. ‘I’d use a knife, a beer bottle… Glass gave the best sound. To this day, I still don’t know a single chord on the guitar.’

We’re a long way from Chris Rea’s slide guitar technique…

It followed that the most innovative guitarists of the 80s and 90s – Kevin Shields, Lee Ranaldo, Jonny Greenwood – also eschewed blues playing, focussing instead on dissonance, or pure texture. (The constantly shredding J. Mascis is an interesting outlier here.)

With Britpop, guitar music’s progression forward ground to a halt (although, don’t get me wrong, it also produced some great records). It was a sound mired in nostalgia: glam and new wave, with a dash of inspiration from one-offs like Squeeze and XTC. It was also a deliberate riposte to two of the most innovative recent genres of alternative music: grunge and shoegaze (both of which have aged a lot more gracefully). And, of course, Britpop harked back to the 60s – but it was more the 60s of ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ than ‘You Really Got Me’; it was more Beatley than Stonesy. And while there were bluesy elements to some Britpop bands, this strand tended to get derided. Consider the (largely unfair) criticism levelled at the proficient bluesmanship of Ocean Colour Scene, or the cool response that greeted the Stone Roses’ Led Zeppelin-indebted Second Coming (I like it!). And, let’s face facts, the weakest link in the golden run of Oasis’s early singles is ‘Shakermaker’, a stodgy 12-bar blues rip off of ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’.

But even during the height of Britpop, Hepworth’s army of elder statesmen just couldn’t shake those blues. As Alexis Petridis noted about the Kinks’ 1994 album To the Bone, ‘while young bands were knocking themselves out trying to sound like the Kinks, the Kinks were knocking themselves out trying to sound like Dire Straits’.

All of the above is a very easy story to sell because it’s so neat: each generation of bands either builds on or reacts against what has come before. It doesn’t allow room for slide guitarists from Middlesborough who sing songs about cars and dancing. These received narratives feel hardwired into music criticism of a certain era, and, after an adolescence of obsessively reading the NME, it took me a while to challenge some of those assumptions. Why should it matter if something is cool or not? Is Chris Rea cool? Am I cool? Can a good album exist in a vacuum, or is an album only worthy of praise if it somehow reflects its times, or speaks to contemporary trends?

Some critical perspectives barely stand up to scrutiny. Did the blues really go out of fashion in the late 70s? What about Dr. Feelgood’s down and dirty rhythm and blues (a key touchstone for punk)? What about soul and funk? What about the rockabilly revival? What about Black Sabbath’s monolithic blues riffs and the influence they had on metal and grunge?

In today’s world, music journalism doesn’t have as much influence. There’s less gatekeeping, and, for all its many flaws, streaming has allowed a certain democratisation of listening habits, free from critical curation. Consequently, attitudes around coolness and credibility have shifted. There’s less anxiety about musicians inhabiting a genre and embracing its clichés (compare this with the Beatles’ obsessive avoidance of sounding ‘corny’). Acts like Måneskin and Yungblud have found huge audiences for their theatrical takes on classic rock, and the fact that they get bad reviews doesn’t really seem to matter. Music isn’t in dialogue with music journalism the way it was in the era of the inkies.

All of this is an extremely longwinded way of saying that New Light Through Old Windows is really, really good. Part of what makes the album so evocative for me is how vividly each track seems to conjure a particular world – always recognisably the 1980s, but never the 1980s you’d see in a music documentary:

• ‘Candles’: A man who works in telecommunications drives the woman he’s having an affair with to a Toby Carvery in a Champagne-coloured Vauxhall Omega.

• ‘Working on It’: A character in EastEnders has a mild breakdown (and grabs a bottle of whisky from the cupboard!).

• ‘Let’s Dance: A French exchange student tirelessly demonstrates his blues scales to you on a Strat copy.

• ‘I Can Hear Your Heartbeat’: The trucker on the highway presses through the night.

• ‘Steel River’: The credits roll on a Midnight Run-style crime caper.

• ‘Ace of Hearts’: Music to smooch too.

The last one is particularly important. This is smooching music. Do people still smooch? In wine bars, do they smooch?

But bizarre 80s vignettes from the editing suite of my mind aside, there is a palpable Van-like edge to many of Rea’s songs. Take these brilliantly evocative lines from ‘Shamrock Diaries’, which wouldn’t be out of place in a Clientele song:

And all the reasons why it started out
Hit you hard with every bell
The choir practice in the empty hall
Is a sound you know so well
Like something lost inside your overcoat
You find it later, by mistake
You lost it all a thousand years ago
And you pray it’s not too late

It’s wonderful to discover lyrics like this in slick 80s rock. I’m reminded of the positively Larkin-esque lines from ‘Fatal Hesitation’ by the terminally uncool Chris de Burgh: ‘The cafés are all deserted, the streets are wet again / There’s nothing quite like an out of season holiday town in the rain’.

There are exceptional lyrics throughout New Light Through Old Windows. Rea’s love songs are genuinely romantic, not schmaltzy. ‘I held your face as you shivered in the rain’ is a beautiful line from ‘Windy Town’. From the same song, ‘east coast cross winds on the cold wet stone’ crackles with alliteration. In ‘Candles’, Rea references Dickens: ‘Faith for reasons still unknown / Like Bleak House, fog seems everywhere’. ‘Faith for reasons still unknown’ is a fabulous multi-faceted lyric. Isn’t faith always based on unknown reasons? If you knew the reasons then it wouldn’t be faith, which is as elusive and concealing as the fog.

Rea’s songwriting is also sophisticated and ingenious. He’s well-versed in classic songwriting moves – check out the perfectly balanced question-and-answer melody in ‘Candles’ (‘Though dark our days may seem / This is a different dream’), or the undeniably uplifting shift to the relative major for the pre-chorus of ‘I Can Hear Your Heartbeat’. But the album is also full of unexpected harmonic left turns and goosebump-inducing borrowed chords. Listen to the artful move from Gm to G7 in the pre-chorus of ‘Josephine’, or the circle of fifths variation in the third verse of ‘On the Beach’.

In his later career, Chris Rea’s music leaned more heavily into his beloved blues, and he seemed to distance himself from the music he made at his commercial peak. As Alexis Petridis wrote in his excellent obituary, ‘he could be sniffy, even dismissive about the music that had made him famous, which didn’t seem entirely fair’. I don’t think it seems fair either. The songs on New Light Through Old Windows are perfectly crafted and have transcended the confines of their AOR origins. And they have seeped into my musical life in ways I hadn’t anticipated. When I heard the lines, ‘We sit up front and share a cigarette / And try to remember what we tried to forget’ in ‘Windy Town’ I realised I’d half-quoted the same lyric in one of my own songs. Don’t underestimate the power of the glovebox album to fire up your imagination.

RIP Chris Rea.

Before I go, I can’t talk about Chris Rea without mentioning Bob Mortimer’s classic tall tale about him cracking eggs in the bath on Would I Like to You?

And because Chris Rea was such a good egg(!), he took the below photo of himself for Bob Mortimer’s autobiography And Away…

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Here are another ten albums (in no particular order) that I’ve loved in 2025. A great year for music – and Cameron Winter makes an appearance with Geese, of course. Deftones making my top ten was not on my 2025 bingo card, 16-year-old me would be thrilled.

Gift Songs – Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
The Making – Lavinia Blackwall
Interior Live Oak – Cass McCombs
Blurr – Joanne Robertson
Like a Ribbon – John Glacier
Night Fishing on a Calm Lake – Jerkcurb
Big city life – Smerz
Salt River – Sam Amidon
Getting Killed – Geese
private music – Deftones

Run yourself a deep bath and listen to this:

I really enjoyed Lucy Harbron’s Far Out review of the Cameron Winter show. An interesting take, for sure, although I wonder if the central argument is a bit of a straw man:

He’s been granted that lofty and mythical status in which Cameron Winter is a good musician, positioned specifically as a clever artist who is doing structurally advanced and interesting things, pushing the limits of genre and pushing his own poetry. So to say you don’t like it is kind of like saying you don’t like jazz – some people will look at you like you’re dumb.

Is this true? I know a number of music fans for whom Heavy Metal hasn’t clicked at all. I wonder if, to adopt a modern term that someone in their mid-40s really shouldn’t be using, it’s not that deep. Isn’t it just that we’ve been starved of a charismatic Dylan-esque figure whose songs are puzzles that can’t be solved? These kinds of artists don’t come along very often, so, when they do, people naturally become very invested in them. Is there a cult of Cameron Winter, or do people just really like his music? If there’s a cult around him, then there’s also a cult around Joanna Newsom, Kendrick Lamar, Kate Bush, the Beatles, Miles Davis – any musician whose every utterance is pored over in an attempt to parse its genius. Isn’t that just what happens with very good artists?

I didn’t spot anyone at the Roundhouse having a variety of religious experience. A few people fainted, but that was due to the heat. Winter’s youthful fans certainly seemed devoted (not least in their attempts at copying his hairstyle). But I didn’t get a sense that their devotion was anything beyond fandom and delight at seeing a very special artist turn in a beautiful and inscrutable performance, full of drama and comedy. But then again I was up in the gods, among the 6 Music Dads (some of whom, bizarrely, left after a few songs). Perhaps it would have been different if I’d have been in the front row, losing myself in the congregation’s shared rapture.

I’m also not sure if the Roundhouse performance saw Cameron Winter break free from what Habron calls the ‘rigid structure’ of his recorded music. For me, Heavy Metal is an album that is so captivating because it feels so loose and free-flowing. I agree though that it was brilliant to see him reinvent the songs live (shades of Dylan again), effortlessly improvising new Randy Newman-esque chord progressions and Jarretty interpolations; a whole world of song at his fingertips.

I realise that writing a hefty response to a review of a concert that was published yesterday is pretty much what someone in a Cameron Winter cult would do. Oh well. Guilty as charged. Throw away the key. God is real!

More music I’ve enjoy this year:

I wrote about Cass McCombs’s brilliantly self-deceiving song ‘I Never Dream About Trains’ earlier this year. In the same post I also talk about this heartbreaking tune from Poor Creature’s excellent album All Smiles Tonight:

One of the many Beatley highlights from 2025 was the superb One to One film, centred around John and Yoko’s 1972 benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, which captured Lennon at an inspired and inspiring creative and political high. The barnstorming evening performance of ‘Come Together’ is on the Power to the People boxset:

Danny Brown’s Stardust is a great record, particularly the first track – a brilliant meditation on the rapper’s new-found sobriety.

I loved In the Earth Again, an unexpected collaboration between sludge rockers Chat Pile and American primitive guitarist Hayden Pedigo.

One of my favourite gigs of the year was the thrillingly unhinged YHWH Nailgun at the Scala. Their album 45 Pounds is a visceral twenty-minute treat.

I wrote about Joanne Robertson’s beautiful album Blurr back in October. ‘Gown’, with string arrangements by Oliver Coates, is a highlight:

Finally, a record that only came out last week but has been on repeat ever since: Jerkcurb’s dreamlike Lynchian Night Fishing on a Calm Lake.

And, why not, here are the books I read this year. I was lucky enough to interview a number of these authors, so if you fancy listening to me chatting to Josie Long, Evie King, Rose Ruane, Rebecca Watson and David Collard, check out The Allender Calendar wherever you get your pods.

Because I Don’t Know What You Mean and What You Don’t – Josie Long
Lost in the Garden – Adam S. Leslie (eerie folk horror, recommended)
Orbital – Samantha Harvey
Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte (outrageously funny)
The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2 1974–80 – Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair
Ashes to Admin: Tales from the Caseload of a Council Funeral Officer – Evie King
Birding – Rose Ruane
This is Yesterday – Rose Ruane
Little Scratch – Rebecca Watson
I Will Crash – Rebecca Watson
Multiple Joyce: 100 Short Essays About James Joyce’s Cultural Legacy – David Collard
Off the Ground: Paul McCartney in the 1990s – J. R. Moores
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing – Matthew Perry
Perfection – Vincenzo Latronico (the narcissism of small differences novel of our times)
John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs – Ian Leslie
Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things? A Comedian’s Guide to Autism – Pierre Novellie (podcast forthcoming!)
The Bookshop – Penelope Fitzgerald
The Benefactors – Wendy Erskine (podcast forthcoming!)
Homework: A Memoir – Geoff Dyer
Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure – Lias Saoudi
Thirst: Twelve Drinks that Changed My Life – John Robins (read an early draft of this, it’s brilliant – I think it will help a lot of people)
Every One Still Here – Liadan Ní Chuinn
Chasing the Dark: Encounters with the Supernatural – Ben Machell (fantastic if you’re a fan of Uncanny)
Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood – Lucy Jones
Cold Hand in Mine – Robert Aickman
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading – Sam Leith
Will There Ever Be Another You – Patricia Lockwood (I loved this but found it quite hard going)
The Expansion Project – Ben Pester (podcast forthcoming!)
Am I in the Right Place? – Ben Pester
A Whole Life – Robert Seethaler

2025 was the year when I finally had the courage to give up on a book I wasn’t enjoying. I thought I would really love Little, Big by John Crowley after listening to an excellent Weird Studies podcast about it, but I couldn’t find a way into it. Maybe next year!

I’m also currently in the middle of Ian McEwan’s brilliant but thoroughly depressing What We Can Know. And this is the year that I finally got stuck into Tune In, the first volume of All These Years, Mark Lewisohn’s unparalleled biography of the Beatles. That should keep me going over Christmas.

Have a good festive season and I’ll see you on the other side.

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I’ve had two albums on constant rotation over the last few weeks: Joanne Robertson’s Blurr, which was released in September, and The Violet Hour by the Clientele, originally released in 2003, but due to be reissued on vinyl in November.

The suitably named Blurr is a collection of some of the most brilliantly vague music I’ve ever heard. When the song ‘Gown’ came out as a lead single I mistakenly thought that the entire album was available and I pressed play on Tidal (I’ve left Spotify at long last) while I went about my day. It took me about half an hour to realise that I’d been listening to ‘Gown’ on a loop. The song is so gentle, so close to barely existing at all, that it registers more as a mood than as a piece of music with a melody and words.

Now the album is actually out I’m amazed by how it feels different every time I listen to it. It’s like the songs have changed, or new ones have appeared in the darkness since last time; or is it that they feel so ghostly that they seem to slip beyond definition, beyond what memory can preserve? It gives the impression of an album that is constantly dreaming itself into existence.

I love the Pitchfork review of Blurr in which Emma Madden writes:

It is scarcely conceivable that Robertson recorded the album within the confines of a room, constructed from earthly material, somewhere inside a city.

I think of Loveless in a similar way. Whenever I listen to it, and imagine My Bloody Valentine recording it, it’s like everything is out of focus. It feels hard to imagine that anything was sharp, definite, real during its creation.

The more I listen to Blurr the more I pick out familiar landmarks in the songs – the lilting melodies, the gorgeous addition of Oliver Coates’s strings, which are remarkably at one with the reverb-heavy guitar and voice. Indeed, despite Robertson’s words and music and Coates’s arrangements seeming to come from different sound worlds – and, I’m guessing, having been recorded in different places – there’s a homogeneousness to the whole. To put it another way, you might not expect a chamber orchestra to sit so well with the almost-not-there sound of Robertson playing and singing to herself, but it does; the combination creates a new sonic environment, one which, as Madden notes, sounds like it exists beyond the veil of the everyday.

The fret squeaks of Robertson’s guitar and the rough-around-the edges playing and recording of her songs (at one point you can hear what sounds like a mic or a guitar being unplugged) are exaggerated and elongated with copious reverb. Those kind of imperfections could sound wrong in a less controlled environment – they could take you out of the hypnotic state that Blurr induces in the listener – but, strangely, they only seem to reinforce the hermetic atmosphere of the album. Those noises become something like artefacts of ambience – lens flare, a voice heard in a dream. The mood is never broken.

I first got into the Clientele in 2018 (which was rather late for me), but it felt like I’d known them all my life. Their music felt immediately familiar, not least because singer and guitarist Alasdair MacLean has the knack for writing songs that sound like you’ve heard them before; songs that, because of their inscrutability (which is sometimes due to the lo-fi way in which they were recorded, and sometimes due to… something entirely ineffable), actually sound like the process of trying to remember them. Like Cameron Winter or Cindy Lee, MacLean writes boldly sincere melodies that feel uninhibited by the anxiety of influence of 70 years of rock music. They are songs that have something of the naivety of an art form in its first flush of youth.

The Violet Hour is a record that sounds almost transparent. The vocals are so quiet it’s like they’re about to disappear completely. As ever with the Clientele, the effect is not dissimilar to ambient music. It’s not so much about the individual songs as the overall mood – a feeling of something like disintegration. The songs sometimes seem to blur(r) into one another, and the production is so swathed in reverb that you can lose your bearings. Suitably, the album ends with a song called ‘Policeman Getting Lost’, and you can picture the titular officer stumbling through the fog like a character in one of Robert Aickman’s ‘strange stories’. With songs called ‘Missing’ and ‘Everybody’s Gone’, it’s an album that’s haunted by absence, and I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s definition of ‘the eerie’ in his excellent book The Weird and the Eerie: something where there should be nothing, and nothing where there should be something.

There are all the usual things one could write about the Clientele. When I worked on a podcast with the band, I made a list with my friend Kate (who guested on an episode) of words to avoid: liminal, hauntological, crepuscular etc. But it’s hard not to think of adjectives like that when you listen to a Clientele album. Their songs seem to evoke a mood, a setting, that, despite the gauziness of the music, is so vivid you can see it. The autumn leaves and dimly-lit streets, the parks of London, the sighing motorway, the rain (the endless rain) – all done out in nicotine-tinged John Atkinson Grimshaw colours (indeed, the eerie green cover of The Violet Hour seems to come directly from his palette).

I was delighted when I read this review of the Clientele’s mini album Minotaur, because it captures the evocative scene setting of the band’s music brilliantly:

It’s the same gorgeous, heartsick-sounding, consciously nostalgic, folk-ish rock you can imagine jangling from some shy bookworm’s transistor radio in the brief period between Rubber Soul and the Summer of Love.

Rather like the way in which different people claim that they have seen the same hallucinatory figures after taking some profoundly mind-altering drug (Terence McKenna said that after ingesting DMT you’re more than likely to be greeted by ‘self-transforming elf machines’), I read that Minotaur review and thought, yes, I saw the shy bookworm too! I smelt the fug of smoke in his student digs and looked out at the same wind-picked sky!

Listening to The Violet Hour now, I find it almost impossible to believe that it came out in 2003. Like Loveless and Blurr, it’s a record that feels like it is not ‘constructed from earthly material’ – and not tied to a particular point in time either. With its tape hiss and buried vocals, it’s noticeably out of joint with the prevailing trends of the early 00s. Weren’t we all listening to Permission to Land by the Darkness and boogieing to ‘Hey Ya!’ in 2003? It feels like it should have come out in the dimly-lit 80s or early 90s, a time I can barely remember because I was only a child. 2003, on the other hand, is pin sharp in my memory. I can vividly recall the texture of my life back then – out of university and about to start an MA (on Shakespeare – watch out job market!). Train journeys, gigs, jobs, friends, evenings in the pub, the unusually hot summer… These memories are so crystal clear that I feel like I could walk back into the Highbury Vaults now and continue a conversation I was having back then as if I’d just popped to the bar (and as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet).

Or is that just an illusion? How well do I really remember 2003? When I go through my photographs from that period they look like relics from a distant age. Before the advances in readily available digital photography, cheap disposable film cameras had their own in-built nostalgia, colouring everything like a half-forgotten dream.

As I write this, memories from that time drift to the surface. I remember walking through an unfamiliar part of Jericho in Oxford. I didn’t really know where I was going, I was just following my nose, walking to get lost. There’s a kind of wild magic about Jericho: the canal, the hidden pubs, the tower of St Barnabas church, which feels like it’s been transplanted from Renaissance Florence. No wonder it’s a key location in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials multiverse. I had absolutely no idea where I was – it felt like I was deep in terra incognita – but I couldn’t have gone far because when I happened to look left up the street I was crossing I saw shops and cafes that I recognised on Walton Street (very much home turf). It sounds like an insignificant thing, but it felt magical, like I’d found a portal between worlds. It was an eerie moment. Something where there should have been nothing – familiarity when I expected unfamiliarity. That’s a very Violet Hour kind of memory, isn’t it?

Also around this period, I remember spending an evening with a friend who introduced me to Gravenhurst, the musical project of Nick Talbot. Much later on I would end up playing bass in Gravenhurst, and Nick would become a dear friend. I remember listening to Flashlight Seasons one afternoon as I walked around Bristol in suitably gloomy winter weather, bare trees black against the white sky. The lyric, ‘I have the ghosts of autumn murders walk me home’, struck me as impossibly vivid and evocative; a short story in a single line, with a hero who is, perhaps, a slightly more macabre incarnation of the shy bookworm from Minotaur. Another Violet Hour moment in short.

One more 2003 memory. I had a job interview at a bookshop one afternoon and afterwards I had to get to my evening shift doing data entry in an office on an industrial estate in an area of Bristol called St Philip’s Marsh. I decided to walk it. I’m absolutely abysmal with directions and this was long before smartphones, and so, like the policeman in the Clientele song, I got completely lost. I remember walking past the magnificent houses on Clifton Down and thinking, how on earth did I get here? Google Maps tells me that the walk should have taken around 45 minutes. Looking at the route I probably did take (including the completely unnecessary diversion into Clifton) I can see that I walked roughly six miles and it would have taken me over two hours. I remember feeling helplessly dislocated from the city that I called home. And, again, there was that curious mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity as I struggled to make sense of my surroundings. I don’t remember what music I was listening to while I went about my accidental urban exploration, but, by now, you can probably guess what would have been appropriate…

Let’s skip ahead to the present day. Recently I was listening to The Violet Hour while I walked around a very familiar part of Elephant and Castle. I feel like I know this area so well that I can recognise certain cracks in the paving stones. I was walking for its own sake, as I had been in Jericho all those years ago, when I decided to turn down a street I’d never really noticed before. After a few minutes, I came across a beautiful community-run garden. It felt like I’d stumbled upon Frances Hodgson Burnett’s secret garden, or that I’d found the elusive door in the wall from the H. G. Wells short story. There was even a geodesic dome of which Paul McCartney would have been proud. For a moment it felt like the city was inventing itself just for me. As if, solipsistically speaking, the garden didn’t exist until I came across it.

I started to daydream about how real our sense of time and space actually is (what else are you meant to do on your lunch break?). What if, as Elliott Smith once sang, your memory works in reverse? What if, in 2003 while I was getting lost in Oxford and Bristol, and listening to Nick’s beautiful and eerie music, I was somehow remembering listening to The Violet Hour in Walworth Garden in 2025?

I enjoy entertaining this fantasy and the way it makes sense of The Violet Hour time-slipping out in 2003. The illusion is that a form of magic is possible. I know that Walworth Garden didn’t materialise when I happened to walk past it. I know the Joanne Robertson album doesn’t change every time I listen to it. I know it’s impossible that in 2003 I could remember listening to The Violet Hour in 2025. But in that in-between zone, where music takes on a strange power, it feels like I can glimpse a version of reality where that magic is real.

This is getting long, so I will continue it in next month’s post.

Incidentally (and if you’ve got this far, fair play), I really ummed and ahhed about whether to refer to the ‘the’ in the Clientele with a capital or lowercase ‘t’. I opted for lowercase, based on the fact that, after much debate, it was decided by a majority of Wikipedia editors that the ‘the’ in the Beatles should be lower case. The internet used to be quite a nice place, didn’t it?

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I was in my Tuesday morning class, preparing tape loops to celebrate our transport network, when Dr Abbot sent me out to get more reels. I left the classroom and turned right towards the staircase. I loved the eeriness of the corridors while everyone else was in a lesson.

The worn tessellating tiles of the wooden floors needed sweeping and there was a homely, familiar smell: something like dust on a valve amp crossed with the rich fruitcakey smell you get from the inside of a piano. The central heating creaked.

I walked past a classroom – Year 7s learning the basics of serialism, their sweet, unbroken voices rising atonally. I climbed the stairs to the third floor and paused at the window to see a rugby match in full flow. A small but eager crowd were gathered at the touchline singing the school song, its phasing rhythms intertwining.

The storage room was lit by a single bulb. Its shelves were piled high with instruments and equipment. I thought about how nice it would be to stay here for a while. I suppose I always relished the opportunity to be on my own at school. The chances were so rare. I remembered as a young child hiding away at lunchtime in the changing rooms, burying myself beneath piles of coats. Lying totally still. The musty smell of jumble sales.

I looked out of the room’s only window. It was grimy on the outside. I couldn’t see much. The high street, a world away, in the morning rain. Beyond the row of houses was the motorway flyover. I put my ear to the glass and could feel the slight vibration of the sighing traffic.

I hadn’t been feeling too happy with my tape loop. I’d incorporated some field recording of buskers performing mechanical techno and a high, mournful violin sample that I’d found in the basement archives. It was always so nice to go down to the library of sounds; the kind-faced curators in their blue overalls were a welcome relief from the abrasive teachers. Plus the library had the best canteen, serving exquisite onion soup every Friday lunchtime.

The violin line had a singular quality to it but it felt too specific and, as Dr Abbot had drilled into us, I needed to make it ineffable. Keep it vague. It was a hard lesson to learn in the tape loop class. To constantly aim for otherness. If we needed to celebrate something –  a royal wedding, the opening of a performance space in Berwick, the anniversary of the Dimly Lit Revolution – it had to be done with sincere vagueness. ‘There is meaning in the anti-meaning!’ Another of Dr Abbot’s maxims.

The room was stuffy so I opened the window and put my head out into the rain. It felt clean and fresh. Looking down I realised that there was a kind of ladder below me. Iron rungs cemented into the brickwork that led down to a narrow path in the valley between two steepling roofs. Strange, I thought. I kept my head peeping out of the window, grateful for the fresh air.

What would I do next year? It was to be the year of my graduation and my parents were pressing various career options on me. To be a Foley artist like my father, or to follow in the long line of mastering engineers on my mother’s side? Neither grabbed me. I had been handed prospectuses for Outsider Art at Exeter and ‘Ambience’, a five-year long intensive course at Warwick. But I sometimes felt I was more scientifically minded, which is why a course on time signatures in industrial settings at Birmingham felt more suitable. The problem with the school was that the application process was so arduous: endless forms and personal statements. And university courses were so career-driven. You couldn’t study noise for noise’s sake – you had to stress its practical application. I needed to have more experience of sound installations for example, but in order to create a state-approved installation you needed to fill in an impossibly detailed form, a mandatory part of which was to list your previous installations! Blackshaw in my class had just finished a piece for the city’s bakery which had involved attaching contact microphones to dough during the fermentation process. But how had he got that gig? Nepotism, surely.

Whatever happened I’d be glad to move on from the school, with its covert allegiances and suppressed hostility. This term had seen significant disruptions by a small minority of melodicists, one of whom, Dr Hayward, had even heckled a school assembly: ‘What experiments are you actually performing with all this experimental music? I’d love to see the results!’ He was forcibly retired soon after.

Melody was a dying language, we were told. Noise offered up so much more purpose, it was so much more expansive! It was used to raise workers from their beds, to soundtrack government broadcasts, and to honour the fallen! ‘Melody is a solar system, noise is a universe!’ as Dr Abbot was fond of saying.

The poor melodicists with their crumbling rooms and sparsely attended lectures. Since music had become largely instrumental, in order for meanings to be conveyed more clearly, the lyricists were under threat too – the Metaphor Department would be closing next term. I was sympathetic to these mavericks, but I was more strongly in favour of traditional noise. It was hard to imagine our football team singing a national anthem with a recognisable melody! Much more comforting was the incantatory chant and pummelling drone which made the crowd go wild.

The fresh air was intoxicating. I knew it was the wrong thing to do, and that Dr Abbot would probably already be wondering where I was with the reels, but I seemed to be moving before I had thought it through.

I clambered out of the window and down the ladder onto the path. The rain was steady and the ground was mossy and scattered with puddles. I skipped over them and carried on through the valley between the roofs. It felt like the further I moved away the more reckless my behaviour was. But I pushed on, aware of the thread holding me back to the school that I was stretching to its limit.

The path opened up into a square, bordered by high brick walls. A rooftop square! How come I hadn’t known about this before? There were tables and chairs, cheap white plastic beer garden furniture. But they hadn’t been used in a long time – black moss stained the plastic, and seats and tables and parasols had been thrown about in the wind. What was all this for? Was it a forgotten place that had been used for graduation ceremonies or concerts?

At the far end of the square was a squat brick building. It looked like a little outhouse, or a kind of bunker. I walked the length of the square towards it. I noticed broken glass and overturned ashtrays on the floor. Through the ashen windows I saw a desk with an old cassette four-track on it. Filthy with dust. And beyond that, ancient bass guitars, warped with age.

I walked around the building and saw that there was a narrow gap between it and the wall. In the shadows I could see a large indentation in the wall where the bricks seemed to curve smoothly inwards. I squeezed myself into the gap and looked at the strange concavity. I pressed my hand to the brickwork at the deepest point of the curve and felt a vague thrumming. An impulse made me step back and manoeuvre myself onwards through the narrow gap and back out onto the square. I walked around the building and looked at the gap again, and I knew before I got there that the indentation would be different this time. I sang a line from the school song to myself: ‘The only way to get there is by going round in circles.’ This time, the indentation had opened, creating a jagged passageway in the brickwork. I knew that it would only sometimes be there; that if I tilted my head or blinked my eyes it would disappear. I felt a blurring in my head, like the prelude to a migraine, or like waking up from a nap where you’ve fallen too deeply asleep.

I crouched down and walked through the opening in the brickwork, an earthy, mossy corridor. I came out into a room, an almost mirror of the storage space I had started out in. The same rows of dusty equipment. A door at the far end of the room led out into a corridor. What part of the school was I in? I didn’t recognise it. And looking down at the floor something seemed different. The wooden tiles. They didn’t tessellate in the familiar chevrons of my school. These were arranged side by side like brickwork.

Walking onwards I started to hear something. An enchanting noise. A drone, but filled with a kind of alien sadness, like nostalgia for something that wasn’t mine to remember. But it contained multitudes – the violin, the sighing motorway, the morning rain. I got closer to the classroom from which the noise appeared to be emanating and looked through the window in the door. I saw a teacher before a mixing desk, his fingers skilfully playing the faders, adding textures to the luminous drone, as a class of teenagers looked on in awe.

There was something not quite right about what I was seeing. It wasn’t just that I didn’t recognise any of the children. I looked closer and then it struck me: the school children were not wearing the right uniform. My uniform had the floral crest of a modular synthesizer on the lapel of the blazer whereas these students had an emblem of what looked like a microphone in front of a waterfall – an allusion to field recordings presumably. I started to panic. Dr Abbot would surely be wondering where I was by now.

I stumbled back the way I had come, the richness of the alien drone filling my head. I found the mirror storage room and gazed around me at the equipment. Why did I not recognise any of the brands or even the instruments on the shelves? I looked more closely at what appeared to be a synthesiser, made by a company I had never heard of called Sattler. The output socket on the Sattler seemed strange, certainly not compatible with a standard quarter-inch jack. It was a triangular recess with numerous fragile looking pins. What instrument was this? Where had it come from?

A triangular output? My North Star was off its axis.

I felt like that poet we had memorialised during the celebration of the Unenclosure Act last year. My class had taken the coach to Northampton where a fellow sixth-former had lain under a piano in the woods, reciting poems which had gently resonated the strings. During the build up to the ceremony I had read that the poet once walked so far away from his home that he said he felt out of my knowledge, and that he couldn’t even recognise the wild flowers in the hedgerows any more. I looked at the controls of the Sattler in puzzlement and gently pushed one of the unfamiliar parameters.

Hope you enjoyed that. Reading it back, I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going with it. Which made an interesting for me, at least. The past is a mystery!

For my next post I’m going to attempt to write a ghost story for Halloween. So hold on to your hats.

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At the time, I wondered what it was that Dad could hear in the music. When I was older, I wondered if Dad wasn’t in fact projecting something of himself into the song. Now I’m even older, I think I can hear what it was that Dad could hear. At least I think I can.

Metheny’s guitar synthesiser solo on the live version of ‘Are You Going With Me?’ on the Travels album is astonishing, and it’s so moving because it sounds so expressively vocal and nakedly human; to the extent that his phrasing actually sounds to me like a person pleading. The way Metheny worries at certain melodic lines, stressing them over and over again – it’s like someone saying, ‘I tried and I tried and I tried,’ or, ‘again and again and again.’ There is a desperation to the playing – to be forgiven, or not to be abandoned.

The solo builds and rages (‘You cataracts and hurricanoes’) to a point of ecstatic release – a high G that rings with crystalline purity. Words fail me in trying to describe that moment, but it sounds to me like transcendence (and it always gives me goosebumps).

In an interview with Rick Beato, the pianist Brad Mehldau talks about the epiphanic moment of hearing this solo for the first time when he was 13. It was an overwhelmingly intense experience (which was probably aided by the fact that an older friend had given him a hit of mescaline before putting the record on), and what particularly struck him was how the solo represented ‘the value of telling a story’ with music. Mehldau compares Pat Metheny to Miles Davis, mentioning how both musicians fill their solos with ‘sentences and phrases’.

I recently came across this interview with Pat himself on Instagram where he reiterates this idea:

I started on trumpet, very young, I was terrible, but one thing that is true is that even as I got into playing guitar, I breathe as if I’m playing the trumpet, meaning if I’m doing to play a phrase I go [inhales] and then I play what I’m going to play. We need those breaths because it’s just like in conversation, if somebody just talks all the time you tune out after a minute, and music is a representation of the way we talk and the way we communicate.

So, I don’t know exactly what Dad could hear when he listened to ‘Are You Going With Me?’, and I wonder if I can hear the same thing. But I do know that, when I listen to it, I can hear something akin to what Metheny is talking about: a representation of human communication itself – what Kazuo Ishiguro described in his Nobel acceptance speech as the power of art to say, ‘This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?’ There is pain in that solo, but there is also joy at overcoming pain. And, as well as that, I can hear something else, an intimation of something beyond understanding; a mystery, a kind of divinity, that words cannot get close to, but – somehow, magically – music can.

Listening to ‘Are You Going With Me?’ made me think that maybe music is better suited than other mediums at representing a fundamental element of consciousness and human interaction: repetition.

To compare with an example from fiction, it’s often said that we know more about Leopold Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses than we do about most real people in our lives. He is remarkably fully formed and we are lucky enough to be able to spend hundreds of pages in the company of his (mental and physical) perambulations. However, I do sometimes wonder whether the ‘feel’ of Bloom’s consciousness is truly realistic. Because the truth is that, throughout the day, we don’t just think a thought once, we think it multiple times. Repetition is part of the way we experience life and the way we communicate. When we meet friends we tell the same comforting stories we’ve heard a hundred times before. If we’re upset or emotional we’ll repeat the same statements and questions again and again. I just can’t believe it. Talk me through it again. How did this happen? I just can’t believe it.

There is repetition in Bloom’s thoughts of course. For example, his mind keeps returning to his wife’s afternoon delight liaison with Blazes Boylan (although these thoughts are often curtailed, quashed, suppressed), and he repeatedly ponders who the man in the brown mackintosh was at Paddy Dignam’s funeral. There are also fragments of songs and conversations that regularly come back to him. But, in my experience at least, a thought can nag at you in the same form for a whole day, unvarying and unchanging, just repeating itself over and over again like a mantra. What was I going on about in the pub last night? Why did I say that? Why aren’t they texting back? I might have fajitas for tea tonight. Why did I say that? Do we have any sour cream in the fridge? Why did I say that? I need to buy a printer, which one should I get? Why did I say that? Why aren’t they texting back? Worries can circle around your brain unceasingly. Why did I say that? But Ulysses would be an infinitely less enjoyable book if it was just page after page of Bloom worrying about whether or not to have fajitas for tea (and, let’s face facts, fajitas probably weren’t on the menu at Davy Byrne’s in 1904).

But this is why I think that music, which is rooted in repetition, is much better at conveying this defining feature of the human experience.

I recently heard Julia Jacklin’s album Crushing for the first time and was blown away. In ‘Body’, the first song on the album, the narrator remembers an intimate photograph that an ex-partner took of her:

I remembered early days
When you took my camera
Turned to me, twenty-three
Naked on your bed
Looking straight at you
Do you still have that photograph?
Would you use it to hurt me?

Slow-burning and never releasing its coiled tension, ‘Body’ ends with Jacklin repeating the lines, ‘I guess it’s just my life / And it’s just my body’ over and over again. There is a cold fury to it, and a dark sarcasm – something of the, ‘Why would I care, it’s nothing important, it’s only my life we’re talking about.’ But something changes as the words are repeated. At first the lines are like one of those inescapable thoughts that your brain can’t stop thinking; but, in the same way that the chord progression changes the emotional quality of the melody, so the words seem to take on an incantatory power the more they are repeated. The song is resigned, and that tension is never released, but there is a sense of emancipation in that repetition; the narrator has escaped a toxic relationship, and, as she sings in an earlier line of the song, she is taking back control: ‘Heading to the city to get my body back’. As a contributor to an online discussion of ‘Body’ puts it: ‘Now that she’s ended her relationship, she is once again in control of her body and her life, she needs to remind herself that they belong to her.’

There’s a fantastic blogpost about ‘Body’ here, which also digs into the musicology of the song. The post references an interview with Jacklin where she described ‘Body’ as, ‘a long and exaggerated sigh’, another example of music being a mirror of human behaviours and interactions.

For me, the coda is the sound of the song’s narrator wresting power back from the man who photographed her. It’s devastatingly effective, and I can’t think of another medium where repetition like this would work so well.

Another song I heard recently which, to quote Yeats on reading Tagore, stirred my blood as nothing has for years, is ‘Lorene’ by Poor Creature, an Irish folk group featuring members of Lankum and Landless.

‘Lorene’ is a Louvin Brothers song about lost love. The narrator has written a letter to Lorene and she hasn’t replied. The song exists in a frozen spot of time, between the letter the narrator sent and the letter he’s waiting to receive. Will she ever reply? The Poor Creature version sounds so utterly bereft that it answers this question for you. The more Cormac MacDiarmada pleads for Lorene to write back, the more plaintive the song becomes, and the more the listener understands that the letter is never going to arrive. The repetition is a form of howling at the moon (like Pat Metheny’s solo perhaps), an act of trying to cling on to a last vestige of hope; but the more the narrator clings on, the more it sounds like that hope is being extinguished.

Lorene write me a letter
Answer the last one that I wrote to you
Lorene I hope you’re still waiting
But your last letter is way overdue

I know many times you have started to write
Darling I wonder what’s taking your time
Lorene I hope you’re still waiting
But your last letter is way overdue

Lorene stop me from hurting
All it would take was a letter from you
Lorene you seem to be near me
But your last letter is way overdue

If you’ve found another since I’ve been away
Don’t let me return for it’s best that I stay
Lorene I feel I have lost you
For your last letter is way overdue

I love the peculiar phrasing of that line: ‘your last letter is way overdue’. Shouldn’t it be your next letter is overdue? There’s a strange kernel of ambiguity there. If it’s Lorene’s last letter and the narrator hasn’t received it yet, does that mean that he’s expecting it to be her last letter (in other words, he knows she’s going to finish things)? The song ends with what the listener has understood all along: ‘I feel I have lost you’.

‘You seem to be near me’ is a remarkable line too. Lorene is a ghostly presence in the narrator’s mind, and that ghostliness is there in the Poor Creature version; listen to the way the vowel sounds in the word Lorene evaporate eerily into reverb.

And another recent song about lost love, which also feels like an exercise in self-deception, is ‘I Never Dream About Trains’ from Cass McCombs’s new album Interior Live Oak. When I listen to it I think: Cass doth protest too much. Despite his repeated assertions to the contrary (and his claim that he never lies in his songs), I’m certain that Cass in fact does, like Robyn Hitchcock, often dream of trains.

I never dream about trains
I never dream about the open range
Riding and roping
Wind flowing through my pony’s mane
I never dream about holding you
On the sand in Pescadero
While the herons dive into the waves
You know I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about trains
I never dream about the open range
Riding and roping
And all them old cowboy clichés
I never dream about holding you tight
On the sand in Pescadero
Knowing I’d never hold you again
You know I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about trains
I never dream about the open range
Just drifting like pollen
Blowing around any which way
I never dream about you curled up
In that old Army jacket
On the sand in Pescadero
I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about trains
Dreams are nothing but a waste
Having cooled all desire
I don’t require a thing from the Fates
I never dream about you or any sand
In any town in San Mateo County
You know I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about trains
I never dream about riding the rails
Busting out of jail
Escaping across unknown terrain
I never dream about looking into your eyes
On the sand in Pescadero
And the vow we made
I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

I never dream about Mexico
Going south with no particular place to go
When I’ve killed enough time
Head north on the line to where the big trees grow
I never dream about walking with you
On the sand in Pescadero
While the pregnant moon wanes
You know I never lie in my songs
And I never dream about trains

The narrator never dreams about trains, and he never dreams about a former lover (or ex-wife, depending on what kind of vows they did or didn’t make). The whole song is a series of denials – and the denials are so detailed (the old Army jacket!), and are repeated so often, that the listener can’t help but question the trustworthiness of the narrator. He never lies in his songs, except maybe he does dream about trains, and he does still think of Pescadaro – otherwise why would he keep mentioning it? (Elsewhere on Interior Live Oak, Cass sings, ‘And I mean everything I say / Or something not unlike it’.)

If the song wasn’t so desperately sad it would make a fantastic comedy routine. It’s like a version of the joke that is used brilliantly in the Alan Partridge radio series Knowing Me, Knowing You. Alan’s guest Nick Ford, a lawyer played by Patrick Marber, suggests that Partridge could be sent to prison for his treatment of an earlier guest, the child prodigy Simon Fisher (Alan thumped him). Nick, having been interrogated by Alan about his bisexuality (‘the point is, there are blokes involved’), says, ‘I don’t think you’d like it in prison, all those men.’ Partridge replies:

What are you insinuating? What are you saying? Are you saying that I, Alan Partridge, would end up in prison and maybe get friendly with some bloke and, maybe, I’d be in the shower with him and maybe, we’d just start wrestling and mucking about, and then he’d probably start soaping my back down, and then, you know, we’d kiss each other tenderly. Is that what you’re saying? Because that is untrue!

The absurd vividness of Alan’s fantasy makes a mockery of his denial of Nick’s insinuation. (A side point, and it’s been remarked upon before, but the note of repressed homosexuality is a recurrent feature of Partridge’s character.)

Speaking of repression, there’s something of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Mr Bleaney’ in the Cass McCombs song too. ‘I Never Dream About Trains’ and ‘Mr Bleaney’ both feature a narrator who is perhaps telling a different story to the one they are purporting to be telling, and, like Alan, revealing something of themselves in the process.

Cass’s song defines itself by what it is not. I never dream about trains, I never dream about the freedom of the open range, I never dream about you. ‘Mr Bleaney’ concludes, brilliantly, with a comparable lack of assertion: ‘I don’t know’. In Larkin’s poem the narrator imagines what life was like for the previous inhabitant of his barren rented digs. But this shadow roommate is surely a version of the narrator, or, let’s be real, Larkin himself.

These are the last two stanzas:

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.

By the time the absurdly elongated subordinate clause in ‘Mr Bleaney’ is resolved with ‘I don’t know’, we can barely remember how the sentence began. Larkin could have started the penultimate stanza with the more grammatically straightforward, ‘But I don’t know if he stood…’ but that would have been a lot less interesting. The surplus of detail before the delayed ‘I don’t know’ shows us how fully realised the imagined life of Mr Bleaney is in the narrator’s mind; complete, and exact in its definition of what the rented room means (if we don’t have much to show for our lives, maybe that’s what we deserve).

Like Cass (and Alan), the narrator of ‘Mr Bleaney’ protests too much. If he doesn’t know, why does it take him two stanzas to say so? There’s a lovely equivocation to those words, ‘I don’t know’. Of course, it’s true (and Larkin wouldn’t lie in his poems, would he?) – he doesn’t know the literal truth of what Mr Bleaney felt and experienced in his room. But, by the time we have got through those two stanzas, we have gone beyond simply wanting to know whether or not Mr Bleaney had those exact thoughts. We have realised that, while Mr Bleaney may or may not have understood that he ‘warranted no better’, the narrator has shown us, with that accumulation of existential detail, that he knows that to be true of himself.

Another reading of ‘I Never Dream About Trains’ is that Cass is telling the truth and he really does never lie in his songs. In other words, he’s over it – over the relationship, over everything. From this perspective the song reminds me of the tense interaction in Get Back when George Harrison says to Paul McCartney, ‘you don’t annoy me anymore’. George somehow manages to make those words sound simultaneously like a simple statement (‘I no longer find you annoying because I have mentally checked out of this band’) and a Zen-like aphorism (‘I have transcended beyond earthly irritations’). Maybe there’s something of that desire for transcendence in the Cass song too:

Dreams are nothing but a waste
Having cooled all desire
I don’t require a thing from the Fates

Nothing is ever straightforward in a Cass McCombs song. There’s that great thing he once said in an interview that I’ve quoted before: ‘the divine is always in a constant state of revealing and concealing’. Maybe there’s something of the divine unknowability of Pat Metheny’s guitar solo in the song too; the freedom he does or doesn’t dream about is a kind of spiritual freedom. He’s ‘cooled all desire’, left behind earthly infatuation and love, and is yearning for something greater, holier, beyond description.

Or is it just a sad song about missing someone?

I don’t know.

Well, I’m not quite sure how I started with my Dad playing me a Pat Metheny song and ended up with Mr Bleaney and Alan Partridge, but here we are. I hope you enjoyed it, and followed along with my unreliable narration.

Before I go I did just want to recommend this interview with Cass McCombs on the Never Ending Stories podcast:

I love how he discusses the idea of ‘exile’, of only being able to really know a place (like Pescadero) when you leave it, and how he references the importance of this to James Joyce. It made me think about other references to Joyce in Cass McCombs songs, and I realised that the title of his collection of previously unreleased material that came out in 2024, Seed Cake on Leap Year, comes from Molly’s monologue at the very end of Ulysses. It feels like we’re nicely full circle now, so I’ll leave you with that:

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes

If you fancy supporting this monthly Substack, or my music, or my podcast The Allender Calendar, please feel free to donate here:

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Professor Gillespie was a wonderfully generous and supportive presence for me during my time at Oxford, and I have very many fond memories of him.

University is a strange environment for a teenager. You’re not fully formed at that age, and you’re trying out new ideas and ways of thinking, the way you might try on a new outfit. As such, some memories of my time at uni can make me cringe; I might suddenly remember something pretentious or naïve I said in a tutorial or an essay, the way I might regret some of the fashion decisions I made. And there were occasions where that naivety was painfully exposed.

But when I think of Vince, I have none of those feelings or memories. Because I think he understood how to talk to young people. He was extraordinarily knowledgeable and was able to impart that knowledge in such an easily understandable way, but he also knew that we were young, that we got things wrong, and that we were still finding our feet.

In my first year I really struggled with Old English, but I’m endlessly grateful for the way in which it felt like he saw something in me. So I never felt like I was being told off, or like I had failed – just that I was being allowed time and space to improve. Thanks to Vince’s encouragement, I really grew in confidence in my second and third years. I'm trying to think of a better word to describe this, but the tutorials I had with him on Middle English were truly mind-expanding. I remember leaving a session with him feeling that some chemical element of my brain had actually changed, that my perspective had shifted and made the world seem more expansive, interesting and alive. What more can you ask from a tutorial about The Canterbury Tales?

He had a way of making the ancient past come alive before your eyes. Whether it would be the beautiful, and very relaxing, way in which he read Old English aloud (often while smoking a pipe) – or the way in which he encouraged you to emotionally engage with the text. I remember him talking about the cries of seabirds in the poem ‘The Seafarer’ – the gulls, curlews and gannets. He asked us what all those sounds had in common. We racked our brains, trying to think of some clever symbolism or allusion that we might have missed, and he answered simply, ‘They all sound sad.’

As encouraging as he was, you had to meet him halfway. I never witnessed the legendary incident in first year where he dismissed an entire class for not having done the reading. And there were occasions where I sensed his disappointment. After reading one very rushed essay on the York Mystery Plays he said, ‘Perhaps it’s best that we draw a veil over this essay.’ But when he corrected you he would often do it in a kind and humorous way. When I mistakenly referred to Boethius as ‘she’, Vince interjected – ‘No… Boethius was all man.’ Also, and this is something that really stayed with me, I loved the way that he would often refer to or quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. To him, this was as valuable a contribution to the modern understanding of the medieval era as any academic text. There was no high and low culture, and this wasn’t a dry subject – this was living, breathing human literature.

After the York Mystery Plays incident, I worked extra hard on an essay on Chaucer. I felt that Vince sensed that I had something to prove and, thankfully, his hugely encouraging comments implied that I had more than made up for my previous misfire. His response to the essay was so kind, in a way that he really didn’t have to be, and it left a huge impression on me. I still have the printed out essay with his handwritten notes, and I think of it often.

The last time I was in touch with Vince was during lockdown. My friend John Robins, a comedian and broadcaster who was at St Anne’s at the same time as me, was putting together an online stand-up show. One of the producers tasked me with contacting John’s former tutors to get some ‘testimonials’ about John to read out on air. I immediately thought of Vince. I wrote to him (and I don’t think I’ve ever spent so long checking the spelling of an email) and he replied with a very generous, insightful and funny summary of John:

My abiding memory of John Robins is a long, lean streak of cheerfully sardonic and intellectual self defence, part of a group of whip-smart and challengingly sceptical undergraduates. Habitually wearing a teeshirt and jeans, he would arrive for tutorials or seminars wrapped in a superhero’s cape of mildly sarcastic self-effacement. But underneath it, he was a sensitive, perceptive and very acute reader. He was an intriguing blend of an outer shell of amused disdain and and inner core of profound emotional and intellectual engagement with texts across times and periods. One of the great indicators of a good literary critic is their capacity to really, passionately dislike some kinds of writing – sometimes to dislike whole centuries of writing – and to be able to explain why with insight and passion, often doing so with humour and polemical ridicule. John was unusually good at listening to the voices of the pages, even when he didn't like what he was hearing, and then being very funny about what was wrong with them. In essays John could patiently build exasperation and irritation over several pages. He was already learning how to shape sentences and paragraphs to sardonic effect. As his success in comedy has shown, he has an innately good ear for the rhythms of language and for the cumulative play of words. Who says the humanities have no future?

We ended that brief correspondence by suggesting we all meet up in Oxford once the lockdown was over. I really regret that we never followed up on those plans.

Professor Gillespie leaves behind an extraordinary legacy, not just of scholarship, but of countless young lives that have been immeasurably improved by his guidance and support. I feel lucky to have known him.

I’m struck by that line in Vince’s email: ‘Who says the humanities have no future?’ In a country where arts funding has been slashed and English literature courses have been dropped from universities, it makes me wonder (and fear) if we’ll ever see the likes of Vince again; academics who are able to devote their lives to a subject, no matter how niche or how distant from the modern world. The fruits of Vince’s devotion are evident in the generations of students he taught. Yes, we learnt how to parse lines of Old English and analyse the rhyme scheme of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (skills which sadly do not exactly set your CV alight), but by doing that we became better at writing, better at communicating, better at thinking. And that led us to learn about something deeper and harder to define: empathy and humanity (they’re called the humanities for a reason).

There are some much better written obituaries here and here, both of which rightly portray Vince as both a towering presence in medieval literature and as a warm, funny and kind man.

Something else I remembered since writing this… There’s a beautiful image that Vince once referred to in a tutorial which I often think of. I assume it’s from a medieval poem, or maybe it came from an earlier era. I could look it up but I quite like the half-remembered quality it has for me in my imagination. It went something like this: Life is like a hawk in a hall. I love it so much. The idea of a magnificent bird sailing out of the night, briefly gliding through the bright, clamorous hall before disappearing back into the unknowable dark is so vivid and profound. I love the way that not only does it communicate an idea so beautifully (the painful transience of life), but it also gives us a glimpse into the past; for a second we can imagine how other minds saw the world.

Strangely enough, a few days after drafting this post I was reading Wendy Erskine’s excellent new novel The Benefactors and I came across this line: ‘Who said that about life being like the flight of a sparrow through the baronial hall? She doesn’t know. It’s brief, though, that’s for sure.’ So I did end up Googling it, and discovered that it’s from who else but the Venerable Bede:

The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.

It’s strange how things change in your memory, isn’t it? I’ve always liked the alliteration of a hawk in a hall, maybe that’s why I misremembered it. But do you see how beautiful and profound old Bede was being here?

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a mesmerising piece of music, named after a work of 14th century Christian mysticism, an area in which Vince was an expert. I reckon he’d have loved it.

I’m going to be playing at the Green Note in Camden on Sunday 20 July. I’ll be performing as part of a trio with Huw V. Williams on bass and Joe Ryan on drums. Both great musicians – Huw plays with Gruff Rhys, and Joe plays with DAAY and has his own project under the name The Language of Love. We’ll be playing my tunes but in a more jazzy/jammy (jazmy?) sort of way. The rehearsals so far have been great – they’re such fantastic musicians to play with. If you want a little taster, here is a video of me playing with just Huw earlier in the year.

The excellent Antony Hurley will be supporting. You can buy tickets from the venue website.

I wish myself luck!

Also, thanks to Sam Wisternoff for designing the fabulous poster. Sam is an amazing video director/artist/musician. Check out his show reel here:

And a v. funny message from the man himself:

And another quick thing! I’ve been busy in podcast land recently. We launched a new series of Your Own Personal Beatles in May and guests so far have included Ollie from Squid, David Bazan from Pedro the Lion, and the comedian Amy Matthews, who joined us for a deep dive into the ‘historically interesting’ Bee Gees Sgt. Pepper film. Upcoming guests include the author and music journalist Jude Rogers and the comedian Ruth Husko.

And there have been some fun recent episodes of my monthly podcast The Allender Calendar, not least the Bloomsday Special I released on 16 June where I had a good chat with the author David Collard about his book Multiple Joyce. The next one will be an episode where I talk to Elis James about Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci! It may end up being a two-parter because we spoke for about two hours. We realised after 45 minutes that we’d only covered the first album. So that should be with you early July… let’s say mid-July to be on the safe side.

I’ve also guested on a couple of podcasts recently. I was on This Album with William Hann talking about Soundgarden’s Superunknown, and the Soul Music Pod talking about Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert.

Think that’s it for now. Here’s a song. Digging the new Water From Your Eyes stuff. Heavy. Great chorus.

Bye now!

Back in January, a nice guy called Alex messaged me on Instagram to say I might enjoy an album which had been released the previous month called Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter. I played the first song and thought it was unlistenably bad. It felt loose and unstructured (not in a good way), and Winter’s voice seemed affected (not in a good way), like he was channelling Vic Reeves’s club singer (not in a good way). It just sounded wrong (not in a good way).

Every few weeks, someone else would recommend the album to me and each time I would give it another go, but I could never get past that first song. This is just silly music, I thought. It’s a man doing a silly voice and somehow people have convinced themselves that he’s the saviour of modern music.

Then I read this interview with Cameron Winter in the Guardian and a couple of things really intrigued me. First off, there was the comparison with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (my favourite album), and then there was the fact that Winter seemed to be so strange and enigmatic. Also, I wasn’t really sure if he was always telling the truth (but what is the truth? – we’ll come to that later); at one point in the interview he claimed that a five-year old played bass guitar on the album. I admired how unfettered he appeared to be: ‘I don’t even really go on stage with a setlist. I’m free as a bird.’ I decided to give Heavy Metal one more try.

This time the album clicked. (This is a horrifying realisation, but do I really need the Guardian’s approval before I can enjoy anything?) I got past the sticking point of that first song, and the record seemed to open up for me. In fact, I know the exact moment when something changed. It was in the second song, with its call and response chorus, where, at one point, the line ‘love will be revealed’ is answered with ‘walking really slow’. For some reason it made me laugh out loud. Walking really slow. How do you walk really slow? Why would you want to walk really slow? It reminded me of the absurd texts that my friend and I sometimes send each other – things like ‘Do you want a signed picture of me running about?’ or ‘Are you still mates with that skeleton?’ I can imagine texting him, ‘Are you walking really slow at the moment?’

So, my way into the album was through laughter. And yet that song, ‘Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)’, is serious, I think. (‘It’s serious and it’s not serious’ – George Harrison on ‘I Am the Walrus’.) ‘Love will be revealed’ is, after all, a wonderful, mystical line. It reminded me of something Cass McCombs once said in an interview: ‘the divine is always in a constant state of revealing and concealing’. And what’s Nausicaä doing in the song? The princess who discovers a naked and shipwrecked Odysseus on the shore. Is she a figure of unrequited love? Is she Gerty MacDowell, the object of Leopold Bloom’s lust in Ulysses? Is it a sincere love song if it contains wisecracks like ‘I am blind and you are ugly’?

It was clear to me at this point that this was much more than a silly album by a man with a silly voice. Maybe what I was listening to was actually pure expression – which doesn’t always sound pretty. Maybe what I was listening to was something like truth. It made me think, what if you found a way to truly express who you are? A way to express the fundamental truth of who you are, completely unfiltered by inhibitions? What if you did all that but it came out in a silly voice?

When I got to Winter’s extraordinary vocalisations in the song ‘Drinking Age’, I was reminded of ‘The Big Sky’ by Kate Bush, a song I’ve always loved because of Bush’s completely fearless performance. In the coda she’s gibbering, talking in tongues. I find it powerful even though it’s ridiculous. I find it powerful because it’s ridiculous. I find it powerful because she doesn’t care that it sounds ridiculous. Joanna Newsom too. ‘Only Skin’ begins with a high-pitched crack in her voice that is almost painful to listen to; a sound that is, to quote one of her own lyrics, ‘like a table ceaselessly being set’. I also thought of the author John Burnside, who writes brilliantly about being enraptured by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s truly untamed delivery of ‘I Put a Spell on You’ in his book of the same name:

This crazed grace can lead to moments of extraordinary and recognisable beauty; it can also run into madness, perversity and holy terror – but it is essential to the life of the community. We need the glamourie these creatures offer in order to approximate wholeness; the stories they enact are more vital than logic or money. In the day-to-day world we allow ourselves to be taken in by cheats and thieves; we are beguiled by money and status; we consume products and celebrities whose only value is assigned to them by advertising and public relations. The beglamoured exist as the antithesis of that world: they give off an other-worldly light that cannot be faked and their visions, no matter how insane or comical, give the lie to the Authorised Version of existence.

I started to think of Cameron Winter as just such a beglamoured creature, someone whose songs give off an other-worldly light. Take ‘Drinking Age’ for example, a tune that made me understand the Astral Weeks comparison. I remember reading in No Surrender, Johnny Rogan’s book about Van Morrison, that, as a young man, Van would record himself singing at home. But he wouldn’t really be singing, he’d be making his voice do weird things: shrieking, gurgling, babbling, putting his fingers in his mouth. Being completely ridiculous, or finding a new way to express himself? Both probably. And you can hear that on Astral Weeks – it’s as if Van is ‘singing like no one is listening’, to quote a nugget of fridge magnet wisdom. Play ‘Beside You’, with its incantatory repetition of ‘you breath in, you breath out’, and you’ll understand why that song is such a stumbling block for new listeners.

There’s gurgling, babbling and what sounds like fingers in mouths (or madness, perversity and holy terror) on ‘Drinking Age’ too. I don’t really know the technical definition of what Cameron Winter is doing at around two minutes and fifty seconds into the song. Googling it led me to Reddit where someone posed this question for the ages: ‘What’s the word for when you take your pointer finger, place it between your lips and wiggle it, making a “Beeblbweeblbeeblbeebl” sound?’ Another search led me to the term ‘whuffling’. Walden Green did a good job of describing it in his Pitchfork review:

That song has Winter breaking out his signature batty lip burble – think when a baby sticks out their lips like a fish and runs their finger over them – as though he’s regressing to a truer, more infantile state.

Note the word ‘truer’. Something that ‘cannot be faked’. Pure expression. A moment of extraordinary and recognisable beauty that also sounds insane and comical. And what’s beautiful and what’s comical cannot be untangled.

An aside: What would happen if Pinocchio, whose nose grows when he lies, said, ‘My nose grows when I tell the truth’? His nose would grow because he would be lying, but, as soon as it would start to grow, it wouldn’t be a lie any more. What would happen to his nose? And what would happen to Pinocchio’s universe? Would some immutable physical law that prevents two contradictory things from happening at the same time kick in? Would Pinocchio’s nose be stuck simultaneously growing and shrinking (or revealing and concealing) forever? That’s the end of the aside, but it’s quite a funny image, isn’t it?

In ‘Truth Serum’ by Smog, the song’s narrator describes staying up all night with his buddies taking the titular drug. There are some wonderful lines in the song, not least: ‘Big Bruiser Ken walks in, says, “I like men”’. At one point an unanswerable question is asked: ‘What is love?’ The narrator’s ‘truth’ is brilliantly Zen: ‘Love is an object kept in an empty box’. (Which reminds me of Salinger’s ‘blank sheet of paper […] by way of explanation’ from Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.) ‘Truth Serum’ ends with these lines:

People people, there’s a lesson here plain to see
There’s no truth in you
There’s no truth in me
The truth is between
The truth is between

It feels like Cameron Winter’s lyrics have the ring of ‘truth’ because they exist somewhere ‘in between’. As with Van Morrison on Astral Weeks, Winter seems to be singing in a dream language, channelled directly from an unconscious place, unconditioned by meaning and expectations, and decorousness too: ‘like Brian Jones I was born to swim’. His words often have the uncensored quality of a somniloquist; in one song he sings about ‘cancer of the fingers’ and ‘cancer of the 80s’, grotesque, nightmarish images.

I read an interview with Van Morrison years ago where he was asked about the inspiration for the song ‘Astral Weeks’. His answer was that the song didn’t mean anything in the traditional sense; all he was trying to do was evoke the sense, the memory, the feeling of a specific place, a specific room. (It seems likely that I am half-remembering Van talking about visiting the studio of the artist Cecil McCartney and seeing a painting that was some kind of representation of astral projection.) The song captures a feeling of fleetingness and mystery, and Van sings it as if he is trying to articulate something preverbal.

Showin’ pictures on the wall
Whisperin’ in the hall
And pointin’ a finger at me
There you go, there you go
Standin’ in the sun, darlin’
With your arms behind you
And your eyes before

I’ve always loved how undefined this all is as an inspiration for a song: a feeling, a memory, an atmosphere. Hard things to translate into words, let alone write a song about. So how do you begin? Well, you could stop using language altogether – you could scream and babble (‘beeblbweeblbeeblbeebl’), or repeat a word over and over and over again until it loses its meaning, as Van does on ‘Madame George’ (‘the love that loves to love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves’). Or you could follow the great advice of Talking Heads and stop making sense.

The collision of words in nonsensical phrases can create new avenues of association and sensation. When language loosens its grip on sense, on meaning, it can feel like we’re getting closer to what Alan Moore described as the ‘probably psychedelic preverbal reality that we enjoyed as infants’; like we’re regressing – to paraphrase Walden Green’s review – to a more primal state.

After all, is nonsense ever just nonsense? Is it possible to stop making sense? Somehow, when I hear Aldous Harding sing, ‘Looks like a date is set / Show the ferret to the egg’, there’s a hinterland somewhere in those insane and comical words. Equally, when Cameron Winter sings about ‘great carnivals of pain’, or ‘backpacking upon the fingers of the real’, or trying to ‘seduce the wall’, it creates a kind of shadow meaning, an echo of a memory or a dream I might have had that is somewhere just below the surface. It’s like a string on a guitar has been plucked and an adjacent string has started to vibrate with sympathetic resonance.

The line that really knocked me out when I first heard it is from ‘Love Takes Miles’: ‘Open the moon, flatten her down and sit her on the stairs all day’. I could get lost in the dream logic of those words. As if the moon could be opened like a book, as if the moon could sit on the stairs (the same stairs that lead down to the hall in ‘Astral Weeks’?). It’s a line that makes me think of a lost classic of children’s literature. It somehow opens up a whole fantasy world of nostalgia and longing. There’s something naked and unashamed about this kind of image making, as if the author is not quite in control of his own imagination – like Saul Bellow during the creation of The Adventures of Augie March: ‘The great pleasure of the book was that it came so easily. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.’

Creation came easily to André Breton too – all he had to do was listen to Léona Camille Ghislaine Delacourt. In his iconic surrealist novel Nadja the titular character is based on Delacourt, a woman with whom Breton was infatuated. Delacourt gave off an ‘other-worldly light’ to Breton, and her strange vision of the world, caused in no small part by a mental breakdown, captivated him. To paraphrase Burnside again, Delacourt, as she appears in Nadja, is someone who gives the lie to the Authorised Version of existence. The following passage was translated by Richard Howard:

Toward midnight we reach the Tuileries, where she wants to sit down for a moment. We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. ‘Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it’s still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there’s that broken spurt again, that fall… and so on indefinitely.’

‘The fountain is our thoughts’ could be a lyric on Heavy Metal, maybe nestled somewhere in the same verse as, ‘You were born to hold my cannonball brain like the Lord holds the moon’. I love the collision of associations in the language of Delacourt/Nadja; that connection between disparate things which is so clearly the product of intense subjectivity. It’s a glimpse into the intimate workings of her mind. We can’t see the connection between water and thoughts ourselves – indeed, it might seem like nonsense to us – but her words are an artefact of the way in which she recognises patterns and experiences the world, and it’s this that makes them beautiful – a form of pure, automatic poetry.

When I read Nadja I was reminded of another other-worldly figure: Limmy’s perpetually baked character Dee Dee. In a much-loved sketch Dee Dee spontaneously decides to hop on a bus to Yoker. For Dee Dee, Yoker is uncharted territory and much of the comedy of the sketch derives from him finding the utterly unremarkable neighbourhood of Glasgow strange and alien. As the bus gets closer to its destination, Dee Dee notices the Yoker Newsagents, Yoker Post Office, and a barber with the sign ‘Hair by Les Porter’, a surname which (to Dee Dee at least) rhymes with Yoker. Dee Dee nudges a fellow passenger and asks her if she thinks Les Porter’s name was originally Smith and ‘he changed it to fit in’. Her baffled response (‘whit?’) is hilarious because she obviously hasn’t been party to Dee Dee’s train of thought, his question just seemed like the solipsistic ramblings of a fractured mind.

But I love that moment because isn’t that what all artists are trying to do in a way – to make people see and understand what they’re experiencing? We may not always be able to follow or understand them, but the work they create can be beautiful and thrilling, especially when it palpably has come from a truly authentic place. Maybe Cameron Winter is like Dee Dee, sitting on the bus, asking whoever will listen to open the moon, flatten her down and sit her on the stairs all day. Maybe my initial reaction (‘whit?’) was totally valid. But now I’d gladly sit with him all the way to Yoker and beyond.

If all this sounds like I’m over-egging the pudding for an album that contains the lyric ‘I’m gonna eat my keys’, then so be it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s all just a grand illusion, and Cameron Winter has found a way of imitating the electric language of Delacourt/Nadja and the untrammelled vocalising of Kate Bush. Maybe he’s found a way to make it seem like his imagination is pouring like rain and all he’s doing is standing outside with a bucket. Perhaps it’s all just a pose. Well, does it matter? I like the pose.

The first thing you hear on Heavy Metal is a descending guitar figure that doesn’t seem to quite fit into a bar properly. This sets the tone for an album in which the songs feel fluid and unmoored. Instruments come and go, played in unusual rhythms, accenting offbeats where we wouldn’t normally expect them. In ‘Love Takes Miles’ the bass and drums only really kick in halfway through the first chorus (it’s unclear if this is because the bass player is five years old). Chord progressions and melodies push against the grid of their underlying bars.

There’s a chord change that’s used almost obsessively throughout the album. A plagal cadence, the satisfying movement of a IV chord resolving to the I, the tonic or home chord. In the key of E major (where the tonic chord is, you guessed it, E major) this would be an A major chord easing comfortably down like the perfect Tetris shape to the home chord. To me, it’s a change that makes me think of folk or country songs which take an unashamed delight in taking the obvious, most satisfying route home. It’s also used in religious music and is sometimes called ‘the Amen cadence’ – it’s what gives ‘Let it Be’ its hymn-like sound. This cadence is used on virtually every song on Heavy Metal, with Winter’s melodies snaking around each resolution. It feels like a kind of emotional shorthand, comparable to the way John Lennon so often used a romantic, yearning minor iv chord in his songs (an A minor in the key of E major, for example); it’s in ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘Across the Universe’, ‘In My Life’ and many more.

In the Heavy Metal highlight ‘Try as I May’ the whole song seems to be ‘about’ that cadence. It’s built around an endlessly deferred resolution, as if that plagal cadence is being unpacked, deconstructed, repeated and rephrased in different settings, looked at from different angles – about to happen, happening, never happening, concealing and revealing.

‘Try as I May’ is a sort of uneven waltz. With each repetition of the verse there are subtle differences – a bar with five beats in the first verse has four beats in the second, and three in the third. There doesn’t seem to be an overall pattern to this. (Is there to anything? A question to answer after imbibing some truth serum perhaps.) The chord progression frequently incorporates the plagal cadence, moving from C major (IV) to the home chord of G major (I), but then it keeps going back to D major (the dominant V chord), adding more tension just when you think it has been released. This, along with the unsettled pulse of the song, creates a sense of something never quite resolving, or more accurately, of being perpetually sustained in a Zen-like state of resolving and unresolving.

The arrangement of ‘Drinking Age’ too is vivid and hypnotic. At one point the song comes to a rest; there’s a silence, Winter mumbles, ‘Table by the door’, and there’s a high-pitched chime as if an announcement is about to be made at an airport. A lush sustained chord is played by a previously unheard brass and woodwind section. Winter mutters the line again, almost inaudibly, beneath the chord. And we realise, as more notes emerge, that that high-pitched chime was a vibraphone. The lyrics continue: ‘Wallet on the ground / Bag of rubber bands’. The atmosphere is gorgeous, gauzy and utterly mysterious – all the more so because of those absurdist snapshot lyrics. Has a bag of rubber bands ever been elevated to such mythic, mystic status? (I’m running out of space to go into the key line of ‘Drinking Age’, and maybe the whole album: ‘everything is lying’.)

The song ‘$0’ starts with what sounds like Winter turning the vibrato up to 11 on his voice; it wavers almost uncontrollably, like he’s challenging you to point out how ridiculous it sounds. The song feels like another lopsided waltz. You can count along to the luminous piano line as a bar of three, a bar of five and then a bar of six – the metre expands as if the phrase can’t be contained. The song builds to the album’s most extraordinary revelation:

God is real
God is real
I’m not kidding
God is actually real
I’m not kidding this time
I think God is actually for real
God is real
God is actually real
God is real
I wouldn’t joke about this
I’m not kidding this time

It’s maybe the most radical declaration of faith in indie rock since Jeff Mangum sang ‘I love you, Jesus Christ’. Winter did a Reddit AMA when Heavy Metal was released, and, as well as taking the time to praise Astral Weeks (naturally), he gave a brilliant response to someone who asked him to ‘clarify his stance’ on religion. With a wisdom beyond his 22 years (which, incidentally, is the age Van Morrison was when he recorded Astral Weeks) he replied:

You ask a good question, I will say however that I think clarifying one’s stance on religion is where religion’s problems begin. I’d add that I’ve come to mistrust anything that seems completely atheistic

God is real <3

His answer reminds me of the episode of In Our Time about Zen in which Melvyn Bragg kept trying to get his guests to be more specific but they kept being more vague (very Zen). But it’s a beautiful answer in many ways. It’s a kind of faith in something because it can’t be defined. God is an object kept in an empty box. It’s perhaps a belief in mystery itself; to define it is to lose its essence.

In a recent piece on the second series of Nathan Fielder’s mind-bending TV show The Rehearsal, Rhik Samadder invoked Schopenhauer’s definition of a genius as, ‘someone who aims at a target the rest of us can’t see’. Perhaps there’s something similar going on with Cameron Winter. The reason that Heavy Metal is so enchanting, and (for me) so deserving of its place alongside Astral Weeks or Ys, is because it appears to be an authentic representation of a true artist’s vision, even if we don’t fully understand what that vision is (as Kate Bush sang, ‘I’m looking at the big sky / You never understood me’). Perhaps it’s a vision that will continue to reveal and conceal itself until the universe implodes along with Pinocchio’s nose, and all we can really do is marvel at its mystery, walking really slow in the process.

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Buy me a coffee!

Buy me a coffee!

Franz heard the gas boiler ticking on and pulled the candlewick bedspread up to his chin. Just a few more minutes in bed. He looked at the condensation on the window, the spots of black mould on the grouting. Still so chilly. He turned over and bent to the floor to turn the little orange Electra heater on. He aimed it at his slippers. He lay down again under the covers. His breath made mist in the air.

The house seemed to settle around him. The bedside cabinet clicked and clacked as the room warmed up. He heard movements next door as his neighbours pottered around making breakfast. A car idled past outside, and silence resumed, no – wait – there was the soft patter of gentle rain.

Franz checked his phone. A text from Mr P. OK to pick you up outside News and Booze at 11pm? This was a recent development. His driver used to pick him up from his house to drive him into London, but after much discussion, Mr P had finally convinced Franz that they would save time if he met him on Arundel Street – which necessitated Franz taking a short walk through the recreation ground to meet him. It was apparently much easier to get onto the motorway from there and they would cut as much as twenty minutes off their journey time.

Franz had agreed. After all, on Saturdays, the walk across the rec was pleasant. People were playing football. Couples were out walking. On warmer early autumn days there had even been the odd picnic. However, on Sundays Franz hated that walk. It wasn’t anything to do with the rec per se. It was just the fact that it felt so much like Sunday. It was as if the rec exuded a kind of undiluted Sundayness. The houses that backed onto the grass were all shut up – closed and sad. And, Franz knew of course that this couldn’t be true, but he was sure it was never sunny on a Sunday. The sky was always grey when he walked across the rec on Sunday. It was like Sunday actually existed, not just as an abstract concept by which humans measured time, but as a physical entity. Something objective. And it manifested itself in the rec.

Franz sighed. It was a Sunday. The results show. He cast his mind back to the night before. The aftershow drinks in the King’s Head in Marylebone. The smoke-filled subterranean bar, the drinkers on the pavement outside. The hosts ordering a round of Amstels. A cameraman nursing a half of John Smith’s. One of Franz’s fellow judges holding court at the bar with a large G&T, and another chatting to a group of medical students on a table strewn with packets of Scampi and Bacon Fries. The pub was the very hub of drunkenness and jollity. On nights like these Franz liked to sit with his drink – in the crowd but apart from it somehow – close his eyes and just take it all in. The best moment of the week. Not just the week, but the best moment of life itself. Just to be here. To be existing right now, in a moment that can’t be manufactured by design. A moment you have to wait for. A moment you savour.

And then there had been the usual emotional goodbyes. Mike the barman waving them off – See you next week! – the spilling out into the street, seeing the stars spilling themselves out across the frosty sky. And then the hailing of cabs and Ubers – although Franz had Mr P of course, who had flashed his lights at him from across the road. Franz had collapsed in the back of the car. Fug of smoke and booze. Effervescent with cheer. Mr P, full of jokes and gentle banter, had saved him an onion bhaji from Tandoori Nights. Franz had ripped open the greasy bag and they had driven home through the night.

Franz, lying in bed, grinned to remember it all. Saturdays were always so special. Why did Sundays feel so drab? They had tried going to the King’s Head after the results show on Sunday once, but it just wasn’t the same. Franz had tried to rouse the usual Saturday night cheer, but the others could tell that his heart wasn’t really in it. They had all yawned and talked about early starts and busy weeks. As they had left, one of the hosts had taken Franz aside and said, ‘You can have too much of a good thing, you know. Let’s just keep it to Saturdays.’

And then, after the weekend, there was the long stretch of the week – the desultory trips to the rugby club to watch the regulars drink themselves silly on Theakston’s, the strange stream of commuters on Gloucester Road as he walked to Londis on weekday mornings, the lunches of toast and pâté, darkness at 4pm, tea in the old refectory, the mid-afternoon trips to Auntie Paula’s to watch Blockbusters, the jaunts to Ikea for a lunch of meatballs and chips with a Daim cake for pudding, the endless bloody grey skies.

Sometimes when he was giving his feedback to the dancers on Saturday evening, the lights bright and hot on his face, the smell of sweat and aftershave drifting over from the dance floor, his mind would cast back to those lonely pâté lunches and he’d struggle to reconcile the two experiences; for a second he would lose his thread… but he always managed to cast the pâté aside in his mind and focus on the job in hand.

What did the other judges do in the week? One of them was constantly flying back and forth to Germany for another television show. Franz imagined the airport lounges, the first class seats on the plane, the plush hotels. Others had various fairly hands-off supervisor roles on West End plays. He thought of the delightfully shabby dressing rooms and stairwells of those gorgeous theatres, the faded glamour behind the glitzy showtime façade. Old Soho. The muffled roars of laughter from the audience. The fallings-out and makings-up between cast members. Actors and crew slipping out of the stage door for a quick half in the Coach and Horses.

Franz showered, dressed and had a breakfast of toast with Primula cheese spread. He steeled himself before he left the house, and walked out into the drizzle.

‘Why am I always here?’ Franz thought as he walked across the rec. ‘Why aren’t I in the King’s Head now?’ True to form the rec was grey and drab, the ashen clouds threatening rain. Sunday, Sunday here again. And again and again and again. ‘Well, next week I’m going to do things differently,’ he thought. ‘I’m going to stay up in London on Saturday night and have a lovely walk around St James’s Park before the results show. That way I can avoid the rec on Sunday. Then I could get the coach back home on Monday morning and start the week feeling as fresh as a daisy.’

Franz loved getting the coach. As long as no one was playing music on their phone of course! It could be wonderfully cosy at night when the driver turned the overhead lights off. Drifting in and out of sleep in a state of something like sensory deprivation, he would put his headphones on and his favourite albums would become like films in his mind. He would slowly open his eyes and see the darkness itself take on a vivid, unreal quality. Floating over the Hammersmith flyover and seeing the little streets, corner pubs and houses, and all the brightly lit lives below him. On those late night National Express journeys, he was often reminded of that Elizabeth Bishop poem about an overnight bus ride in the States; the sleepy passengers, the overheard conversations…

A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination…

Well, he’d be travelling in the day so it wouldn’t be quite the same. But it would be a welcome change from his usual routine.

He picked up speed as he walked across the patchy grass. He could stay with Richard, his friend from uni, at his flat in Surrey Quays. What a weekend it would be! His mood had lifted as he left the rec, and he skipped along the lane behind the allotments that took him out to the main road and to Mr P’s Peugeot, pulled up on the curb, blinking its lights at him.

That evening, the results show went smoothly and everyone noticed how Franz seemed to be in good spirits. ‘You’re full of beans today!’ said the makeup artist as she ‘powdered him off for the shine’ while they cut to a VT – ‘Yes, no more traipsing across that ghastly field on a Sunday!’ he said.

The following week was a happy blur of visits to Auntie Paula’s, a meal of hunter’s chicken at the Wheatsheaf, trips to Tesco Golden Hill – the big winter skies above the car park, so expansive they made him breathless, dusk fading greenly from lithium yellow to violet – and the meditative rhythm of a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle (Parisian street scene), accompanied by Górecki’s third symphony on his cassette player. Some afternoons he stayed in and watched Play for Today with the Electra heater at his feet. Other days he went out for long walks, enjoying the moments when the city seemed curiously at peace, the roads suddenly quiet, the blue sky empty and serene. The whole mood of the week had shifted now that he had changed his plans for the weekend.

The following Saturday saw Franz take a delightfully optimistic stroll across the rec, with everything seeming sharp and clearly defined in the crisp late November morning air. Joggers, couples munching on pastries, a children’s football match – the players’ beautifully sincere cries ringing bell-like across the field. Then the peaceful drive to London with Mr P. Getting dropped off at the studio.

‘Now, you remember I’m staying in London tonight, Mr P?’

‘Of course, Franz – I hope you have a lovely weekend! See you next week at News and Booze at the usual time!’

The post-show drinks in the King’s Head were even more joyful than the previous Saturday. The night took on the quality of a montage – the laughing eyes of his friends glittering like frost, everyone in hysterics at one of the judges doing an impression of the floor manager (‘Health and safety reports are saved in the health and safety folder!’); it was as if the evening was already a memory, something to be nostalgic about even as it was happening. And then the Jubilee Line from Bond Street to Richard’s flat, Franz’s fellow travellers tipsy and full of pre-Christmas bonhomie.

Franz took the key from under the mat outside Richard’s flat, as he had been instructed, and made his way upstairs. Richard was in his dressing gown watching TV. He didn’t get up to shake Franz’s hand. Richard was one of those friends who showed affection by not being affectionate. The flat was like a student bedsit, with scattered books and records and plates with half-eaten meals littering the threadbare carpet. Franz eyed a pair of weathered underpants drying on the radiator.

‘Hi Franz. Have you eaten? I’ve got half an oven pizza in the kitchen… It’s stuffed crust.’

‘Oh Richard, that would be wonderful. Thank you.’

‘How was the show? Sorry I missed it, the snooker was on. And now they’re showing this, haven’t seen it in years.’

Franz looked at the TV. The Legend of Bagger Vance. Franz walked to the kitchen to fetch the remains of the pizza.

The two friends caught up over a bottle of Purdey’s. Richard was still working as a switchboard operator, but was making ambient music in his spare time. He said he’d play some stuff to Franz in the morning if he wanted to hear it. Franz talked a bit about the show, and about the rec, and his plans for Sunday, but he was starting to feel sleepy. They watched the rest of the film, laughing at the scene where Christian Slater walks into a bar and slips onto his back because he’s wearing bowling shoes.

The credits rolled and Richard yawned.

‘Yes, I think it might be bedtime!’ said Franz.

Richard made up a bed for him on the sofa and got him a pint glass of water for the night.

‘Thanks so much, Richard,’ said Franz. ‘Sleep well!’

‘You too,’ said Richard. ‘Help yourself to anything.’

Richard went to his bedroom and closed the door. Franz changed into his pyjamas and got into the sleeping bag on the sofa. He turned off the lamp beside him and stretched out. In the darkness the unfamiliar city sounds outside seemed to amplify. He heard people walking home from the pub, foxes copulating, speeding cars, sirens. And then a slow expansive silence.

He felt a wonderful sense of calm. He ran a few things through his mind that always helped him drift off to a peaceful sleep. Often he imagined he was all snug in a bunk bed on an oil rig somewhere, the wind raging outside and the ocean tempestuous. Or sometimes he recalled the time he had driven through Ireland, all the way down to Dingle, and had slept in the car with the seat reclined. The impossible verdancy of the hills. The black presence of the Slieve Mish Mountains blocking out the rampant stars.

It was with these scenarios that he occupied his mind before he finally drifted off to sleep.

After a restless night Franz woke up early on Sunday morning and scanned his surroundings. Where was he? He didn’t recognise that exercise bike. Ah yes, of course. He was at Richard’s flat. He stretched himself out on the sofa and shifted the zip of the sleeping bag out from underneath him. He stared up at the textured ceiling, patterned with thick swirls of paint.

He heard soothing music and could smell coffee. Richard was clearly working on a new tune. Gorgeous runs of piano and washes of static merged with a hypnotic, slightly off-kilter drumbeat. Above it all there was a beautiful, dreamlike melody.

‘Sounds lovely, Richard!’ Franz shouted.

‘Oh you’re up then!’ Richard replied from his room. ‘What are your plans for today?’

‘Just going to get some breakfast then go for a little stroll, I think!’

‘Might rain later!’

‘No, do you think so?’

The music continued.

‘Richard?’

‘Franz!’

‘Could I grab a coffee?’

‘Help yourself, mate!’

Typical Richard, getting immersed in a project like that and not even bothering to come out and say good morning to him properly. The music did sound good though. But there was a sadness to it. It sounded nostalgic, like a song you might have heard in childhood that had been long forgotten.

Franz went to the kitchen and made himself a coffee. He had a shower and got dressed. He left the flat without even seeing Richard.

Franz sat at a table by the window in a greasy spoon and ordered a full English with a frothy coffee. He listened to the chatter around him and read a copy of Poetry Review that someone had left behind as he waited for his food to arrive.

When it came he couldn’t conceal his disappointment. The slimy looking fried eggs. The undercooked fatty bacon, sitting in a pool of grease.

He chewed the soft, pâté-like sausages and tepid beans and felt a bad mood descending on him like rain. No, don’t get down in the dumps because of this breakfast. Don’t let it ruin your day. Remember you’re not crossing the rec today. This Sunday is all about you. He forced himself to eat and thought about the journey to St. James’s Park. He’d get the 47 bus to Monument and then jump on the Circle or District Line. He imagined sitting on the upper deck of the bus as it crossed the Thames. He frowned. What if someone was watching videos or playing music out loud on their phone? Excuse me, Franz imagined saying. Sorry – can you turn the sound off on your phone, or wear headphones? ‘Why?’ they would say. What do you mean why? he would reply. Because we live in a society. Because other people exist. Franz would tut and clamber downstairs to find another seat.

Wait, what was he doing? He wasn’t even on the bus yet. His day hadn’t even begun and already he was ruining it for himself. Don’t let the Sunday feeling bring you down, Franz said to himself, and nibbled at his cardboardy toast.

He considered the fact that if you told everyone off for playing music on their phones on the bus you’d never be happy – never ever ever. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t stop even half of the people in the world from playing music out loud on their phones on buses. It’s impossible. And you just know that as soon as you told off one person for playing music on their phone then someone else would get on the bus and start playing music on their phone. And the first person would look at you as if to say, well aren’t you going to tell them off too? And so you would tell the second person off – but then a third person would come aboard playing music on their phone and it would happen again and again and again. And the only solution would be to stand in front of everyone like a teacher on the top deck and say, ‘Please can we all agree to just sit quietly and, if you want to listen to music, please use your headphones.’ Or maybe he could stand by the driver, instructing people not to play music on their phones as people boarded the bus. Or he could be like an old-fashioned conductor, but instead of checking tickets, he’d go up to every passenger and either congratulate them for not playing music on their phone (and feel a warm sense of kinship towards them as a result) or sternly tell them not to play music on their phone. But then you would be that person on the bus. Like that man he saw on the 75 the other day who was shaking his head and muttering and drawing arcane symbols on the window with a marker pen. But then, how do you cope? What do you do if you can’t stand people playing music on their phones on the bus but the only option to deal with people playing music on their phones on the bus is to have some kind of breakdown? Sometimes it felt like that was the only route available to you – the only way to exist in the mad world was to be mad yourself.

Franz grumpily paid the bill. The bad mood was here to stay. But why? Why should he be feeling down in the dumps today? He’d been looking forward to this moment all week.

He left the café and walked towards the bus stop.

After a mercifully quiet and phone-free bus journey Franz arrived at St James’s Park. He walked around aimlessly. It was as if he was waiting for the moment when he would start to enjoy himself. He wanted to feel a sense of the momentousness of being here. To create a memory. To live in a memory, like last night in the King’s Head. He wanted to feel that being here meant something… He wanted to lose himself among the trees. He wanted to watch himself walk down those unknown pathways. Look, what a tempting thicket! But no matter where you go, you can’t escape yourself, thought Franz. The dreadful tyranny of self. He needed a holiday, but a holiday from himself. Why this moment now?

He felt tired. His eyes were scratchy. And his skin was dry. And he felt bloated after his breakfast. He looked up at the London plane trees, barren and black against the sky. The sky. Grey. Grey as grey could be. Why was he haunted by grey skies? The grass didn’t seem lush, but pallid and patchy. And Richard was right, it was starting to spot with rain.

Oh God, Franz thought to himself. This is just like… No, no, don't say it. But yes, he had to say it. St James’s Park was just like the rec. The awful Sundayness had infected everything, even the royal parks of London.

He drifted moodily beneath the trees and then decided that he may as well just cut his losses and make his way to the studio. He got there far too early and sat in his dressing room. He grabbed the paperback that he had hurriedly stuffed in his rucksack the day before. He hadn’t really noticed the title at the time. I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson. Well, that wasn’t going to help his mood.

After the results show, Franz made his way back to Surrey Quays. He felt like he was watching a film of his own life. Like he was just passively playing a part. He wanted to be back home with his Electra heater.

At the flat, Richard was asleep in his room, snoring. Franz tucked himself into the sleeping bag on the sofa and looked sadly at the silver sliver of moon outside the window.

On Monday morning Franz caught the C10 to Victoria Coach Station. When he arrived he joined the throng at the gate for his bus. Standing there, waiting for the doors to open, always felt like a vision of eternity. He had a very strong sense that, somehow, he would never get on the bus and it would never depart and he would be stuck here forever.

Eventually they were allowed onto the concourse and the passengers ahead of Franz began to board the bus – but it was an oversubscribed service. With about ten people to go in front of Franz, and about twenty behind him, the harassed-looking driver shook his head and told them that they would have to wait for another bus to take the remaining passengers. He instructed the queuers to go back into the station until the second bus arrived. Franz sighed. Everyone turned around and drifted back. Franz followed the person who had been behind him in the queue, a middle-aged man with a scraggly grey beard and a travel pillow around his neck. The man entered the station, but, instead of moving further back into the terminal, lingered by the doorway. Franz, confused, walked past him – and then realised what was happening. The man wanted to jump the queue, or more accurately, he wanted to form a new queue, a queue of which he was at the head. Franz had optimistically assumed that there wouldn’t be a new queue, that there would be the same queue, that the queue would maintain its essential essence upon re-entry to the station. But apparently not. He looked on despairingly as the once orderly queue disintegrated and people joined the man with the travel pillow, forming a chaotic group at the threshold of the concourse.

Is it any wonder that society is doomed to fall apart, thought Franz. As soon as you put a crowd of people together you don’t get collaboration and cooperation, you get a loose collective of self-interested individuals, all vying for superiority. Franz wanted to go up to the man with the travel pillow and say, ‘We are a queue. There is no you, and there is no me – there is only us.’ But he lingered behind on the outskirts of the nebulous crowd.

After a yawning chasm of abeyance (around six minutes) another bus arrived and they were allowed back onto the concourse. In their new, disordered formation they filtered onto the bus. Franz spotted the man with the travel pillow get onboard first and grab himself the best seat – the single seat behind and to the left of the driver. Tons of legroom. Well, I guess being a selfish bastard pays off.

They were finally all aboard but still the bus did not move. It was meant to leave at 10am. It was now twelve minutes past. How many more minutes would pass before they did move? Would they ever move? Would the minutes just continue to pass forever while the bus stayed on the concourse? Endlessly on the concourse. The concourse. The concourse. The universe, time itself, all spinning away fruitlessly as the bus idled on the concourse. Again Franz had the profound sense that this was a glimpse of infinity. Waiting for the National Express coach to leave forever and ever and ever.

Sixteen minutes past and, lovely touch this, the driver started the ignition, moved forward an inch and then came to a standstill again.

At twenty-three minutes past, against the odds, they really did start to move – and, if they were in eternal limbo before, where were they now? The afterlife? The bus twisted around Elizabeth Street, and turned right onto Grosvenor Road – and Franz felt a wave of tremendous lightness. The relief to be on the move was overwhelming. He stretched out in his seat and laughed out loud. He didn’t even care if people played music on their phones. He looked at the man with the travel pillow and smiled. The Thames sparkled with gold and silver light, like a tribute to a god of the present moment.

Buy me a coffee!

I wrote a post about Vladimir Nabokov back in 2007 on a WordPress blog (since archived, but I might dig it out in case anyone, bafflingly, would be interested in reading my top ten albums of the 00s). I was reminded of it because I recently revisited the brilliant passage in Speak, Memory where Nabokov describes hypnagogic hallucinations. These kinds of visions, experienced as you fall asleep (as opposed to hypnopompic, which are experienced as you wake up), are sometimes used to explain ghost sightings, alien abductions and other, similarly eerie, occurrences. The passage (which is quoted below) is so poetic, precise and vivid, and it made me think about just how good Nabokov is at describing a kind of ‘behind the eyelids’ reality. There is an intense internality to his prose; he is so observant of the ways in which the body processes experience.

Which reminds me – the terrific ambient group Stars of the Lid were named after what co-founder Brian McBride (RIP) described as ‘your own personal cinema, located between your eye and eyelid’; the phosphenes, closed-eye hallucinations and other patterns and colours one can occasionally glimpse through your eyelashes. Living is easy with eyes closed, after all.

Anyway, I dug out the old blogpost and the thing that I was most struck by was the fact that I couldn’t remember a single thing about it. Have I really read Bend Sinister? I have no recollection of doing so. But I’m tempted to give it another go now. After all, one of the great joys of reading is rereading. Sometimes, when you come back to a book, it can seem – intoxicatingly – both familiar and strange. Passages which have been long forgotten and have sat dormant in your memory are suddenly vividly recalled – Oh yes, I remember this bit!

Someone once told me about an experiment where volunteers were shown hundreds of random images, one after another. Like a scientific version of The Generation Game, they were then asked to write down how many they could remember. Most people struggled and could only recall a very small number (a cuddly toy?). They were then shown the images again and asked to record how many they remembered from the first time. This was a much easier task; almost everyone could easily recall having seen an image when they were exposed to it again. In other words, it is often only when we re-encounter something that we remember it. Which is why it feels like rereading unlocks the memory of the original reading.

But this doesn’t mean that we remember every single detail of a book when we reread it (that would be no fun). And so this mixture of forgetting and remembering can sometimes create an illusion akin to the Mandela effect where it feels like the book has changed since you last read it – as if it were alive somehow. Whenever I reread The Catcher in the Rye, I’m always amazed by just how present Holden Caulfield is. I find myself thinking, ‘I’m sure you didn’t say that last time.’ It feels like he’s a real person and I’m just checking in on him.

Which makes me think, there’s a reason why, when we talk about books, we do so in the present tense (‘In this chapter, Holden catches the train to New York…’). It’s because books contain their own ongoing moments – they come alive when we read them and, thanks to our fallible memories, they become protean, endlessly renewing, when we reread them.

Anyway, I’ll let my 2007 self take over now. (I have made some minor edits – one or two references to MySpace etc. – the equivalent of taking off a pair of bootcut jeans and slipping into a relaxed pair of ankle-length cords.)

Vladimir Nabakov, as someone once said of Clive James, is a brilliant bunch of guys. At least, he is if his books are anything to go by. Riddling and narratorially unreliable (Pale Fire), farcical and blackly funny (Laughter in the Dark, Despair), dystopic (Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister – novels which Nabokov claimed, in a fit of modesty, pre-empted Orwell and surpassed Kafka), and preternaturally obsessed with butterflies, Nabokov’s output was as varied as it was brilliant and complex.

Nabokov filled his novels and stories with his own private codes, image schemes and thematic strands, as you may see this from this, the introduction to Bend Sinister:

The plot starts to breed in the bright broth of a rain puddle. The puddle is observed by Krug from a window of the hospital where his wife is dying. The oblong pool, shaped like a cell that is about to divide, reappears subthematically throughout the novel, as an ink blot in Chapter Four, an inkstain in Chapter Five, spilled milk in Chapter Eleven, the infusoria-like image of ciliated thought in Chapter Twelve, the phosphorescent islander in Chapter Eighteen, and the imprint a soul leaves in the intimate texture of space in the closing paragraph. The puddle thus kindled and rekindled in Krug’s mind remains linked up with the image of his wife not only because he had contemplated the inset sunset from her death-bedside, but also because this little puddle vaguely evokes in him my link with him: a rent in his world leading to another world of tenderness, brightness and beauty.

(Don’t worry, this makes about as much sense to 2025 me as it did to 2007 me.)

And consider this trick from his short story, ‘The Vane Sisters’ (thanks to Wikipedia for the following):

The story involves a professor and his scandalous past with the two Vane sisters, Cynthia and Sybil. Early in the story, the author ridicules the misguided searches for acrostics by the paranoid, and refers to a ‘novel or short story (by some contemporary writer, I believe) in which, unknown to the author, the first letters of the words in its last paragraph formed, as deciphered by Cynthia, a message from his dead mother’. The final paragraph of the story is as follows: ‘I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies – every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.’ When the final paragraph of the story is subjected to this technique, the result is as follows: ‘Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me Sybil.’ So, in other words, at the end of the story the reader learns that the author is not actually the author of the piece, but rather his words are being influenced without his knowledge by the dead sisters. The very name of Sybil hints at the trick of the final paragraph, as the word acrostic was first applied to the prophecies of the Erythraean Sibyl, which were written on leaves and arranged so that the initial letters of the leaves always formed a word.

(The Wikipedia entry has been updated since 2007.)

The fact that every one of Nabokov’s books and stories might be filled with such hidden messages puts Joyce’s boast (that he would be giving academics something to puzzle over for generations to come) in the shade somewhat.

(See also John Lennon on ‘I Am the Walrus’: ‘Let the fuckers work that one out.’)

Aside from this jiggery-pokery, for me, what unites Nabokov’s novelistic concerns is his desire to write about consciousness and interiority. Indeed, his greatest books, (in my opinion, the memoir Speak, Memory and the discursive, semi-autobiographical novel Glory) are the ones in which Nabokov writes not just of experience, but of the ways in which experience is processed.

Nabokov had synesthesia, a condition in which the senses are confused (from Speak, Memory: ‘I present a fine case of coloured hearing’). It is my feeling that, by their very nature, synesthesiacs are that much more aware of the ways in which they process sensory information – and to me this goes some way to explaining why Nabokov was such a brilliant observer of sensory experience.

Take this incredible passage from Speak, Memory in which Nabokov describes the mild hallucinations he would experience before sleep. He calls these hallucinations ‘praedormitary visions’, and they are of a kind that certainly seem familiar to me, but nowhere else have I seen this hypnogogia described with such precision. These ‘visions’ are not easy to remember or observe, let alone to write about so beautifully:

What I mean is not the bright mental image (as, for instance, the face of a beloved parent long dead) conjured up by a wing-stroke of the will; that is one of the bravest movements a human spirit can make. Nor am I alluding to the so-called muscae volitantes – shadows cast upon the retinal rods by motes in the vitreous humour, which are seen as transparent threads drifting across the visual field. Perhaps nearer to the hypnagogic mirages I am thinking of is the coloured spot, the stab of an afterimage, with which the lamp one has just turned off wounds the palpebral night. However, a shock of this sort is not really a necessary starting point for the slow, steady development of the visions that pass before my closed eyes. They come and go, without the drowsy observer’s participation, but are essentially different from dream pictures for he is still master of his senses. They are often grotesque. I am pestered by roguish profiles, by some coarse-feathered and florid dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear. At times, however, my photisms take on a rather soothing flou quality, and then I see – projected, as it were, upon the inside of the eyelid – grey figures walking between beehives, or small black parrots gradually vanishing among mountain snows, or a mauve remoteness melting beyond moving masts.

Nabokov’s synesthesia also goes some way to explaining why his novels have a such a unique strangeness to them: it’s the strangeness of a consciousness fully and truthfully represented on the page, the strangeness that can only come from real experience. The effect this has for the reader is to get a vivid glimpse into the workings of another mind, its unique preoccupations and associations. I can’t think of a single other author who could have one of his characters (in Bend Sinister) mention that, ‘the word “loyalty” phonetically and visually reminded him of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk’.

One gets the impression that Nabokov wrote for himself as much as for anyone else, and if no one got his own secret allusions, well that was just too bad. Of the ‘hidden’ strand of water imagery in Bend Sinister discussed above he writes,

Most people will not even mind having missed all this; well-wishers will bring their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to my little party; ironists will point out the fatal fatuity of my explications in this foreword and advise me to have footnotes next time (footnotes always seem comic to a certain type of mind). In the long run, however, it is only the author’s private satisfaction that counts. I reread my books rarely, and then only for the utilitarian purpose of controlling a translation or checking a new edition; but when I do go through them again, what pleases me most is the wayside murmur of this or that hidden theme.

For me, this is what is so great about Nabokov: he obeys his own logic and takes whatever bizarre flights of fancy happen to appeal to him. Take, for example, the tangential narrative of Rex, the affectless rogue of Laughter in the Dark, as he considers the fate of his love-rival Albinus:

He watched with interest the sufferings of Albinus (in his opinion an oaf with simple passions and a solid, too solid, knowledge of painting), who thought, poor man, that he had touched the very depths of human distress; whereas Rex reflected – with a sense of pleasant anticipation – that, far from being the limit, it was merely the first item in the programme of a roaring comedy at which he, Rex, had been reserved a place in the stage manager’s private box. The stage manager of this performance was neither God nor the devil. The former was far too grey, and venerable, and old-fashioned; and the latter, surfeited with other people’s sins, was a bore to himself and to others as dull as rain… in fact, rain at dawn in the prison-court, where some poor imbecile, yawning nervously, is being quietly put to death for the murder of his grandmother. The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom, the shadow of many-coloured glass balls flying in a curve, the ghost of a juggler on a shimmering curtain… This, at any rate, was what Rex surmised in his rare moments of philosophic meditation.

Nabokov’s books are full of such brilliant non sequiturs and mysterious narratorial red herrings and dead ends. Another example is this baffling passage from Invitation to a Beheading in which the imprisoned Cincinnatus is introduced to his bizarre cell mate M’sieur Pierre who tells the following ‘joke’:

making an imperturbable face, M’sieur Pierre said: ‘This little old woman comes to the doctor and says, “I have a terrible malady, Mr Doctor,” she says, “I’ve an awful fright I’ll die of it…” “And what are the symptoms?” “My head shakes, Mr Doctor,”’ and M’siuer Pierre, mumbling and shaking, imitated the little old woman.

Oddly, this causes the prison director to burst into ‘riotous mirth’.

For Nabokov it is as if every impulse and chance fancy is worthy of being recorded – every detail, no matter how inconsequential or apparently irrelevant, only goes to more fully flesh out on the page the inner workings of a free-associating mind; to use a Nicholson Baker allusion, every thought, no matter how small, is worth preserving. From Baker’s brilliant homage to minutiae, The Mezzanine:

I remembered that when I was little I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth, or any kind of clean background.

The Mezzanine, which is made up of beautifully written eulogies to, among other things, sugar sachets and drinking straws, is indebted to Nabokov’s endlessly self-reflexive, obsessively detailed narratives (Speak, Memory: ‘all the while I was richly, serenely aware of my own manifold awareness’). In Glory, the narrator, Martin, discusses ‘a writer’s covetousness […] that constant state of anxiety compelling one to fix indelibly this or that evanescent trifle’.

While reading Glory, I was reminded of Baker in the following passage in which Martin discovers that his fellow student, Darwin, is a published author:

The book proved to be remarkable. The pieces were not really short stories – no, they were rather more like tractates, twenty tractates of equal length. The first was called ‘Corkscrews,’ and contained a thousand interesting things about corkscrews, their history, beauty, and virtues. Another was on parrots, a third on playing cards, a fourth on infernal machines, a fifth on reflections in water. And there was one on trains, and in it Martin found everything he loved: the telegraph poles, cutting short the wires’ upward sweep, the dining car with those bottles of Vichy or Evian that seemed to scan through the window the trees flying past; and those crazy-eyed waiters, and that minuscule kitchen, where swaying and sweating a white-capped man cook could be seen crumbing a fish.

Aside, from this premonition of The Mezzanine (a novel which is, in essence, a thousand interesting things about corkscrews), this passage is interesting because it contains another of Nabokov’s preoccupations: train journeys, or more particularly, the view from a moving train. Consider this passage from Speak, Memory:

The door of the compartment was open and I could see the corridor window, where the wires – six thin black wires – were doing their best to slant up, to ascend skywards, despite the lightning blows dealt them by one telegraph pole after another; but just as all six, in a triumphant swoop of pathetic elation, were about to reach the top of the window, a particularly vicious blow would bring them down, as low as they had ever been, and they would have to start all over again.

The world outside the window is not a passive landscape but a moving panorama which is dependent upon the way in which the observer views it. Such journeys enhance the illusion of solipsism; to the observer, it is not the train that is moving but the wires themselves. It is from this first person solipsistic perspective that Nabokov often writes; the observed reality being shaped by the process of observing it.

I'll end this rambling post with this, the most vivid and beautiful of Nabokov’s train journeys, from the short story, ‘Cloud, Castle Lake’:

The locomotive, working rapidly with its elbows, hurried through a pine forest, then – with relief – among fields. […] And indeed, how enticing it all is, what charm the world acquires when it is wound up and moving like a merry-go-round! The sun crept toward a corner of the window and suddenly spilled over the yellow bench. The badly pressed shadow of the car sped madly along the grassy bank, where flowers blended into coloured streaks. A crossing: a cyclist was waiting, one foot resting on the ground. Trees appeared in groups and singly, revolving coolly and blandly, displaying the latest fashions. The blue dampness of a ravine. A memory of love, disguised as a meadow. Wispy clouds – greyhounds of heaven.

We both, Vasily Ivanovich and I, have always been impressed by the anonymity of all the parts of a landscape, so dangerous for the soul, the impossibility of ever finding out where that path you see leads – and look, what a tempting thicket! It happened that on a distant slope or in a gap in the trees there would appear and, as it were, stop for an instant, like air retained in the lungs, a spot so enchanting – a lawn, a terrace – such perfect expression of tender well-meaning beauty – that it seemed that if one could stop the train and go thither, forever, to you, my love... But a thousand beech trunks were already madly leaping by, whirling in a sizzling sun pool, and again the chance for happiness was gone.

So, there we go. If I got anything wrong, please blame my 2007 self.

See you next month!

Hello everyone. A few things I wanted to write about, but first off I’m doing a (music) gig on 26 February at the Harrison in King’s Cross. I’ll be supporting Mirrored Daughters, a new band which features members of Firestations and The Leaf Library, for their album launch. Watch Paint Dry will also be playing. I’m going to performing with Huw Williams on double bass. Tickets here!

Neko Case

Little shout out to the most recent episode of my monthly podcast The Allender Calendar which features the brilliant writer/comedian/activist Josie Long. We had a good chat about her outstanding collection of short stories Because I Don’t Know What You Mean and What You Don’t.

At the end of the podcast I do a regular feature about music and books that I happen to be enjoying at the moment – and for this month’s episode I chatted about Neko Case, who has just published a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You. I got it signed at the book launch at Rough Trade the other day:

Since the reading I’ve been listening to Neko Case’s music non-stop – and I’ve been reminded of just how astonishing it was to hear her voice for the first time over twenty years ago. I mention this on the podcast but I had a really amazing experience recently where I listened to the 2002 album Blacklisted while I drifted off to sleep on a National Express coach from London to Bristol. I find that a dimly lit bus journey can often induce a state of sensory deprivation that makes music feel much more immersive and heightened, and, floating over Hammersmith, Blacklisted took on a dreamlike, Lynchian quality. I was particularly struck by how the album’s ‘big hitters’ (‘Deep Red Bells’, ‘Tightly’, ‘I Wish I Was the Moon’) are interspersed with less dramatic or more inscrutable tunes, giving the listening experience a kind of cinematic quality with narrative ebbs and flows. Also, because I know it so well, the record transformed into something akin to ambient music – I drifted through its familiar soundworld until I woke up in Bristol Bus Station.

I’m looking forward to reading Neko Case’s book because I think she is a brilliant and underrated lyricist. She is able to summon up whole worlds with just a handful of words. The song ‘Margaret vs. Pauline’ from the 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood has the extraordinarily evocative line ‘girl with the parking lot eyes’, an image which seems to me to contain an entire novel of lost innocence, urban deprivation, romance.

A Real Pain

I loved Jesse Eisenberg’s latest film A Real Pain, which, unlikely as it seems, is a buddy comedy about the holocaust. Eisenberg plays David Kaplan who, with his cousin Benji (Keiran Culkin), travels to Poland for a Jewish heritage tour in order to honour their much-loved late grandmother, a holocaust survivor who appears to have had a totemic presence in Benji’s life.

[Spoilers below (if a film like this can be said to have spoilers).]

There is much to say about A Real Pain in terms of the way it tackles such a terrible chapter of human history – but for now, and while I’m still processing it, I wanted to talk about one or two scenes that really stayed with me.

When the film starts we think that Culkin is essentially reprising his role from Succession. Benji is boorish and rude – he takes David’s window seat on the plane; when they arrive at the hotel he imposingly asks to borrow David’s phone to listen to music in the shower (?) because his own phone ‘doesn’t play music’ (?). He belches, he swears, he has absolutely no filter. The guy is an asshole. He is a real pain.

But then halfway through the film we discover that Benji is a damaged person, someone who has experienced his own share of ‘real pain’; he has recently attempted to end his own life. Roman Roy is a damaged person too of course, but the crucial distinction, and what stops Benji from just being a reiteration of that character, is that there is a spiritual dimension to him (something that is noticeably absent from Roman). Like Salinger’s Seymour Glass, Benji is a kind of holy fool. He doesn’t wake David up on the train, which makes them miss their stop, because he feels an overwhelming sense of protectiveness towards his sleeping cousin (Seymour Glass misses his own wedding because he’s ‘too happy’). The film ends with Benji choosing to stay at the airport back in the US rather than go home or stay with David. He sits in the busy terminal observing the crowds, smiling beatifically at something we can’t see, seeming to find wonder in the stream of humanity. (The fact that he is able to experience a sense of wonder in an airport tells you something about just how out of kilter with the world he really is.)

Benji is someone who was born with a skin too few. It’s not necessarily that he feels emotions more deeply than anyone else, it’s more that he isn’t in control of the way that emotions affect him; he’s a kind of living embodiment of the Eliot line that ‘human kind / Cannot bear very much reality’. The more we understand Benji, and the pain at his core, the more his ‘difficult’ behaviour starts to make sense. It’s a lesson in empathy for the audience, a reminder that ‘difficult’ behaviours are often (usually) symptoms of a deeper malaise. Much of the comedy that follows comes from Benji’s fellow tourists, and the tour guide himself (perfectly played by Will Sharpe), warming to him more than they do to his uptight cousin, precisely because of his ‘difficult’ qualities, of how uninhibitedly himself he is, and of how incapable he is of being anything else.

The film touches on how we have become adept at scrolling past unimaginable horrors, and how impossible it is to care deeply, fully, about every atrocity and injustice (David: ‘Who the fuck wants to cry about everything?’). Benji’s raw sensitivity makes us question what would happen if we weren’t required to dull our sense of empathy just to be able to get through the day. What if we were able to confront real pain and comprehend something truly incomprehensible? The answer is that we wouldn’t be able to cope. On the coach back from the Majdenek death camp, while everyone else sits in sombre reflection, Benji is utterly broken and sobs uncontrollably. He is completely unable to suppress how much the experience has affected him.

Earlier in the film, Benji feels a deep sense of unease about the unpleasant irony of travelling in the first class carriage of a train through Poland ‘when eighty years ago we would have been herded into the backs of these things like cattle’. The scene called to mind another Salinger character who just wasn’t made for these times – Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye himself. Benji’s guilt reminded me of Holden talking about how he can’t bear to visit his little brother’s grave because it always seems to rain when his family go there (and how apt that the novel should end with Holden watching his sister Phoebe on the carousel in the pouring rain).

When the weather’s nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie’s grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I certainly don’t enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn’t too bad when the sun was out, but twice – twice – we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That’s what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner – everybody except Allie. I couldn’t stand it. I know it’s only his body and all that’s in the cemetery, and his soul’s in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wish he wasn’t there. You didn’t know him. If you’d known him, you’d know what I mean. It’s not too bad when the sun’s out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.

Holden’s discomfort about death, like Benji’s, is somewhat irrational, but it is deeply felt.

Neither of them can tolerate a situation that is incompatible with their own fiercely held sense of what is right, even if that incompatibility is subjective or purely symbolic. It’s as if they both have a code of unattainable standards by which they believe that the dead should be honoured, which, of course, reality can never live up to – and that’s what nearly drives them crazy.

Benji and Holden are people whose way of processing the world is to ‘see it feelingly’, even if that makes the world a pretty unbearable place to live sometimes. They’re tricky customers for sure, and I imagine they’d be exhausting company. But I like spending time with them. Their sensitivities (not weaknesses) are ways of interrogating and understanding our own capacity for empathy and compassion.

One more thing

I released a new ambient song called ‘Unlit Until’ on the 14th. Check it out on Bandcamp (or on the streamers).

Box for Buddy, Box for Star – This is Lorelei
Cool World – Chat Pile
Moves in the Field – Kelly Moran
You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To – Knocked Loose
Circus of Desire – Olivia Chaney
Diamond Jubilee – Cindy Lee
Night Reign – Arooj Aftab
World of Work – Clarissa Connelly
Evil Does Not Exist (OST) – Eiko Ishibashi
If I don’t make it, I love u – Still House Plants

Of these, it’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star that is the pick of the bunch. I remember idly reading a review of the album when it was released – it sounded interesting, and I really like Water From Your Eyes (This is Lorelei being the side project of Nate Amos from that band), so I thought I’d take a punt on it. I’m so glad I did because I can’t remember the last time that I have connected so immediately and so deeply with an album. Amos’s songs are simultaneously funny and serious, traditional and experimental, ironic and intensely vulnerable. Like all great pop music it treads the line between seriousness and non-seriousness brilliantly. Take the standout track, ‘Dancing in the Club’:

It’s a song that starts with the totally sincere line, ‘I lost your love today’, but whose chorus is almost throwaway – some silly (but great!) wordplay to do with playing cards: ‘I feel your heart in spades / While you were dancing in the club / I gave my diamonds all away’. And yet I find it almost overwhelmingly moving. Even that post-chorus piano hook (which Amos hilariously described as ‘Bruce Hornsby-ass piano’) could be cheesy, or it could almost become parodic, but it feels like such a genuine expression of emotion.

Despite the joy and the humour on Box for Buddy, Box for Star, it felt to me on first listen that it was a record that was possibly about trauma, or, more specifically, about overcoming trauma. Interviews with Amos seemed to confirm this; he talked about how the songs were written during a period in which he was dealing with depression and addiction:

Initially, this album was just a challenge to make music without getting high, and I was worried I wouldn’t come up with anything at all. I isolated myself from pretty much everyone and wrote songs all summer. I was pretty broke and significantly depressed, but also in a sort of healthy mental demolition mode, trying to reimagine how I wanted to move forward with my life. For better or worse, what I made ended up being a delayed recovery album, largely dealing with more significant addictions that I kicked a year earlier.

I think I’m always drawn to songs, or books, that are somehow about that process of overcoming or recovery. I’m reminded of the brilliant Larkin line about ‘the strength and pain / Of being young’, and that growing up is as much about experiencing unprecedented joy as it is about processing pain. And I think that works of art that deal with this subject well often sublimate that pain, and focus on the ways in which buried trauma presents itself in our everyday lives. I know this is a monumentally clichéd thing to bring up (but I’m also sort of interested in why it is such a cliché), but the book that I have come back to again and again throughout my life is The Catcher in the Rye. I read it every year, and whenever I do I am always completely amazed by how vivid the reality of the novel feels, and also how its true subject is beneath the surface – it’s a book about grief and the experience of processing grief. It’s (another) cliché to compare a work of art which happens to be about the strength and pain of being young with The Catcher in the Rye, and I’m not really doing that here. I think all I’m trying to say is that when I listen to Box for Buddy, Box for Star something about it connects with me in the same way that Salinger does, and I don’t really know why. I’d like to try and unpick it somehow. Which leads me on to my (sort of) new year’s resolution, which is that I want to write something fairly longish about The Catcher in the Rye and what it means to me on Substack throughout 2025. Maybe I’ll do one post and give up, but that’s the plan anyway.

But hey, enough of my yakkin’, whaddaya say? Let’s boogie!

‘Suffocate’ – Knocked Loose ft. Poppy

I’m constantly amazed by how heavy music keeps getting heavier. How is that possible? ‘Suffocate’ has got one of the heaviest ‘drops’ I’ve ever heard. And it’s somewhat comforting to know that metal/hardcore still has the power to shock, at least judging by the reaction to this appearance on Jimmy Kimmel. I’m sure this performance will have inspired a whole generation of kids to make music that their parents absolutely hate. Hooray!

‘Na Gul’ – Aroof Aftab

Arooj Aftab’s voice is the most beautiful instrument on earth.

‘M M M’ – Still House Plants

I was pretty late to this album (I only came across it by checking out some end of year polls), but I was immediately struck by how completely new it sounded. Fantastic to hear the influence of This Heat. And that voice is something else. Someone compared it to a CD of Jeff Buckley’s Grace skipping. I like that. Fascinating band, can’t wait to see them live.

‘All I Want is You’ – Cindy Lee

A song that just feels like it’s always existed. I love how the release of this album (on YouTube and via a GeoCities website) added to its mystique and otherworldliness.

‘Lady with the Braid’ – Olivia Chaney

I love Olivia Chaney’s beautiful, poised arrangement of Dory Previn’s song ‘Lady with the Braid’. I had a good chat with Olivia (and discussed this song) on my podcast earlier this year.

‘When You Needed My Help’ – Jerry David DeCicca

This is from a record that came out in 2023. I just can’t stop listening to it. I find it so moving. I guess it’s a kind of love song, but it’s from the perspective of someone who feels intense remorse because they have let someone down when they needed them. I’m sure there are other songs that deal with this, but I don’t know if anyone has done it so melodically and so mournfully!

Other bits and bobs

Saw some great gigs in 2024 (and I’m going to see Paul McCartney tomorrow!). Particular highlights were Euros Childs at the Lexington, one of my absolute heroes:

And I absolutely loved finally seeing Fat White Family at the Colour Factory. A hugely entertaining, hilarious and energising rock and roll show. I even got in the mosh pit (for the first time since 1998).

Books I read in 2024

Didn’t read as many books as I’d have liked this year, possibly because I thought it would be a good idea to read Our Mutual Friend twice (it does actually improve with every read). Highlight for me were Claire Kilroy, Geoff Dyer and Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes was a total revelation).

We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner
Bournville – Jonathan Coe
A Dream of Wessex – Christopher Priest
Soldier Sailor – Claire Kilroy
The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings – Geoff Dyer
Trespasses – Louise Kennedy
Old School – Tobias Wolff (again)
Invitation to the Waltz – Rosamond Lehmann
The Late Americans – Brandon Taylor
You Are Here – David Nicholls
The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives – Jude Rogers (again)
Listen: On Music, Sound and Us – Michel Faber
Stay True – Hua Hsu
The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story – Kate Summerscale
Living the Beatles Legend: On the Road with the Fab Four – The Mal Evans Story – Kenneth Womack
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
Be Funny or Die: How Comedy Works and Why it Matters – Joel Morris
Ghosts and Journeys – Robert Westall (again)
And in the End: The Last Days of the Beatles – Ken McNab
All Fours – Miranda July
Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles – Kenneth Womack
You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] – Andrew Hankinson
The Vet’s Daughter – Barbara Comyns
The Voice in My Ear – Frances Leviston (again)
Old God’s Time – Sebastian Barry
Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why Rock Stars Never Retire – David Hepworth
Intermezzo – Sally Rooney
Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World – Dan Hancox
Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger – Nigel Slater
The Hotel – Daisy Johnson
Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939–1945 – Luke Turner
The Proof of My Innocence – Jonathan Coe
Small Rain – Garth Greenwell
The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger

OK, Merry Christmas and all that. Thanks for listening and reading. See you next year!

I love the chord progression in the verses of ‘Theresa’s Sound-World’ by Sonic Youth, particularly the way it underpins the vivid opening line: ‘Like girl come walkin’ through the cornfield’; it feels somehow reflective of the beautiful, expansive image that is conjured by those words.

I noticed recently that this moment feels like an echo of something similar that happens in the coda of ‘Cabin Essence’ by the Beach Boys:

Over and over, the crow cries uncover the cornfield
Over and over, the thresher and hover the wheat field

Another cornfield! And the chords in this section are similarly expansive; or somehow perfectly descriptive of an open vista – a view across a cornfield – suddenly revealing itself.

(Incidentally, I first heard Smile as a bootlegged cassette with no track listing, so I had no idea what was going on, I just had to let the music wash over me like a weird radio broadcast from another time and space. I’m still convinced that this is the best way to consume that album.)

Anyway, the Sonic Youth/Beach Boys echo made me think about how some chord progressions feel almost tailormade for certain kinds of lyrical imagery. For instance, ‘Panic On’ by Madder Rose:

This song gently seesaws between two chords like a kind of indie rock gymnopédie, and the lush major seventh feel lends itself to lyrics about drifting up in the air, or seeing the trees, or being way up in the sky.

More Madder Rose

On the subject of Madder Rose (hugely underrated in my opinion), my brother and I had a recorded-off-the-telly VHS of Glastonbury 94 highlights. Back then there was a mere hour on TV – a world away from the round-the-clock coverage provided by the BBC today. In amongst the other bands (and I can only remember James and Blur), Madder Rose really stood out for me. They were playing a strange but very catchy song called ‘Margaret’:

It felt like the band represented an idea of a kind of mythical America that I had, as if the musicians were versions of archetypes from films and books.

The singer Mary Lorson looked like Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs – and, maybe it was just the resemblance, but the song also seemed to have something gothic or macabre going on somewhere beneath the surface. The drummer was a Kerouacian drifter, akin to how the journalist Matt LeMay once described Isaac Brock from Modest Mouse: a ‘well-cultivated gas station savant’. I’d never been to a ‘dive bar’, but I imagined you might meet someone like the drummer from Madder Rose there. The lead guitarist was an introvert with a haunted hinterland, like a student from a Donna Tartt novel. And the bass player! Never in shot – well that certainly made him more mysterious. The song contained multitudes for me; I suppose it reflects just how magnetic America and all its mysteries were to a teenager growing up in the UK.

Radio 3

Two recent things I heard on Radio 3. The first is ‘La nuict froide et sombre, LV 578’ by Orlando di Lasso performed by La Tempête, conducted by Simon-Pierre Bestion:

Why are the covers of classical music albums so bad? Anyway, I really love the arrangement of this, particularly the anachronistic synthisiser. There’s something of These New Puritans about it (especially the incredibly deep voice, used to great effect on Field of Reeds). I sent it to my friend and he replied, ‘Nice! Monkcore.’

I also recently heard Billie Holiday’s utterly gorgeous version of ‘Autumn in New York’. It’s so tender, but it’s also so sad!

Music for sleep paralysis demons

Fascinated with how unbelievably eerie this tune is. Is it dark ambient? Is that a thing? It sounds like the the kind of music sleep paralysis demons listen to when they want to relax.

Bubblegum-pink Ferrari

I’m 43 years old. Of course I didn’t have a ‘brat summer’, I have a bad knee. But listening to 2024’s most ubiquitous album made me go back through some of Charli XCX’s earlier bangers. I became particularly enamored with the madcap brutalism of SOPHIE’s production on the utterly ridiculous ‘Vroom Vroom’. To me it sounds like a parody that Chris Morris might have made in the 90s in which he imagined how pop music would sound in 2016 – grating, deranged, maddening, captivated with its own superficiality, and melodically as sophisticated as a playground taunt. But, of course, all of these things are what make ‘Vroom Vroom’ brilliant. It’s a song that plays on its own irritatingness like a jingle. There was a lovely interview with Olivia Chaney on Radio 3 recently (sadly no longer online), where she talked about Miles Davis’s arresting use of deliberately ‘ugly’ sounds – and there’s something of that here. There can be no doubt that Charli is trying to sound as annoying – and, yes, brattish – as possible when she sings ‘let’s ride’, and (once again) it’s exactly that which somehow makes the song irresistible. Especially when it’s contrasted with the suddenly vulnerable nursery rhyme-like chorus (‘all my life, I’ve been waitin’ for a good time’), one of the songs many handbrake turns. Like all great pop songs it’s something I want to listen to over and over again, gorging myself on it as if it were a big bag of sweets.

Are you paying attention?

Kirk Barley was mentioned in the Norman Records mailing list (or perhaps it was Bleep) and I added some of their stuff to an ongoing playlist I have because it sounded up my street. When I first listened to ‘Évier’ it didn’t do a great deal for me. But it seemed to keep coming up on shuffle and I found myself becoming more and more engrossed in its sound-world (Theresa’s sound-world?) every time I heard it.

My friend Kate Connolly said something really interesting on The Clientele Podcast which I worked on last year: ‘the stuff that you really love is just the stuff that you pay the most attention to, the stuff that you give the most time to’. I really like that idea, that maybe you’re a hundred listens away from uncovering what your favourite piece of music actually is!

‘Évier’ is made up of only a few elements: the bell-like sound of what I’m guessing is a ring-modulated piano, burbling that could be running water, ticking percussion, a fast-then-slow keyboard arpeggio, bass, a slightly detuned synth, a kind of halting flute effect; and yet put all these parts together and it creates an incredibly vivid and evocative whole. It’s a song which has a luminous texture that only comes into focus when you start to notice it.

Memories are waking dreams and dreams are sleeping memories

‘Come Back to Me’ is one of the most striking songs on Distant Call, a collection of early demos by the much-missed Broadcast. When Trish Keenan sings, ‘I’m sinking upside in my nighty and wavery feet’, it seems to contain a whole world of magic and strangeness. And has anyone ever used the word ‘nighty’ in a song before? It feels to me like a creepy take on Goodnight Moon, or a version of The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns, a novel in which the titular character discovers she can levitate.

I’m a huge fan of this 2009 feature on Broadcast in The Wire. The interview was to promote Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age and Keenan describes this wonderful album as follows:

I’d like people to enjoy the album as a Hammer horror dream collage where Broadcast play the role of the guest band at the mansion drug party by night, and a science worshipping Eloi possessed by 3/4 rhythms by day, all headed by the Focus Group leader who lays down sonic laws that break through the corrective systems of timing and keys.

It’s such a vivid and hilarious summary and I often think of it when I listen to that unnerving – and incredibly beautiful – collection of songs.

In the interview Keenan was also asked about the paranormal and she gave this memorable response:

For me the paranormal is most powerful when it’s unassuming, not obviously spooky or dark and I do feel synchrony and coincidence all the time. For example, when we first moved from Birmingham to Hungerford I noticed these odd reminders of people and things from the last place, object names and people names were crossing over, swapping. For instance we shared a house in Birmingham with a man called Jerome and when we moved to Hungerford he was suddenly replaced by a boat. The lady who occupies the downstairs flat was his girlfriend’s doppelganger. Even my mom was replaced by an old toothless poodle!

Mahler again

I posted about Mahler's ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ earlier this year and, since then, it feels like the song has been following me around. I've heard it on the radio, it keeps popping up on shuffle, I found a version of it sung by Janet Baker among my Dad’s LPs, and the American writer Garth Greenwell chose Kathleen Ferrier’s performance of it when he guested on Private Passions – he also writes about it in his new novel Small Rain.

I love the way Greenwell talks about writing on Private Passions, and how often he talks about it in terms of individual sentences, as if he were composing musical phrases – the shape of them, the feeling of them. I think that this is something you can hear in the way he talks in general; he speaks in such beautiful sentences. He describes attending the Eastman School of Music in New York as being revelatory because he was ‘in a place where everyone’s life was oriented to art’. Later on, he mentions how listening to Jessye Norman singing Strauss’s Four Last Songs was one of his ‘earliest experiences of rapture’. I find these to be such beautiful turns of phrase.

In Small Rain, the hospitalised and gravely ill narrator contrasts the indignities of his bodily reality with descriptions of the transcendent qualities of art. Of ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ he says:

The song articulated something that had been inarticulate before, but it did more than that, too, it created something; it didn't just light some chamber of myself, somehow, it made me capable of some feeling I couldn't have felt before.

The narrator dwells on an almost cosmic moment of dissonance in the song: an A-flat against a C-minor chord on the word ‘ruh’ in the the line, ‘Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel, / Und ruh’ in einem still Gebiet’ (‘I am dead to the world's tumult, / And rest in a quiet realm’).

Ferrier leans into the word Ruh, rest, not dramatically but her voice becomes electric with longing and resignation; there’s such intensity and restraint that the notes asserts itself, so that as Mahler extends the dissonance your sense of harmony is unsettled, or mine is anyway: the A-flat creates an alternative harmony, just for a moment one can hear a major chord against the minor. I didn’t understand this when I first heard the song, I would study the score later, in music school, and really it didn’t help me understand what I had felt when I first heard it. How can I say what it did to me, it unmade me, unmade and remade me around itself somehow. I could never capture that feeling when I sang the song myself, which was one of the things that made me hate my voice eventually, that I could never sing this song in a way that felt adequate to what she made me feel, what I still feel when I listen to her sing the song, no other recording comes close.

That fragile and extraordinarily moving moment of dissonance stood out to me when I first heard the song as well, so I got a shiver of recognition when I read that passage. Greenwell is so good at capturing how musical moments like this cannot be captured. It’s a brilliant piece of writing.

To end with, I also want to mention how much I love the way Greenwell writes about social media in Small Rain:

that weird intellectual weather we had taken to calling the Discourse, the amorphous impersonal sense of things that came from scrolling through social media, from watching fifteen-second video clips on YouTube. It was like we had outsourced consciousness, turned inwardness inside out, we thought not in other peoples’ memes.

And:

That was another thing that had changed over the past decade, the quality of mindlessness, which now was populated by the endless feeds of social media, which didn't eradicate boredom but changed the texture of it, made it less restorative, less accommodating of creative possibility, I feared; I tried to set aside my phone but mostly I scrolled like everybody else.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed scrolling through this. See you next time.