OASIS: Definitely Maybe

 

(#510: 10 September 1994, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Rock ‘N’ Roll Star/Shakermaker/Live Forever/Up In The Sky/Columbia/Supersonic/Bring It On Down/Cigarettes & Alcohol/Digsy’s Dinner/Slide Away/Married With Children

 

Here’s something else you can do for me. Take off those rose-tinted sunglasses of smug hindsight. Possibly the most overvalued trope of the critic, music or otherwise, is the one which argues: no, this isn’t any good now, it is of its time, you had to be there. Balls. The reason these albums are appearing in this blog at all is because they were considered good, or even great, then, and we have to evaluate them as such. Don’t stare back at things with your quite unearned sense of superiority because you supposedly know so much better now. It is what took you, what sent you, at the time, in its time.

 

I had been wondering how to tackle this album and then found myself thinking of Raw Deal, Bothwell’s number one punk band (not that there was much, i.e. any, competition) at the time when punk was happening. This is because there is currently a wee discussion going on about them on Facebook and my old school chum Ross Phillips posted a lovingly crude video of the band standing in some allotments, miming to Sham 69’s “Borstal Breakout” (Sham 69, you chortle. How uncool! How out of keeping with 6 Music/UNCUT’s Rich Tapestry! Oh, shut up and go listen to That’s Life, their extraordinary – yes, I said extraordinary – concept album from 1978. When “Hurry Up Harry” was in the top ten, which is more than most punk singles managed, we schoolkids used to sing the chorus in French. “Nous allons á la MAISON PUBLIQUE!”).

 

Raw Deal lasted until about 1980 and two of its number, the McCluskey brothers, subsequently resurfaced in the ranks of belated number one hitmakers The Bluebells. That is substantially longer than punk, as such, lasted – was Radio Clyde’s punk show Street Sounds, presented by Brian Ford, even still on air in 1980? But other liaisons matured, and most of them came to fruition in the garage-cum-rehearsal space of Andrew “Storky” McGurk. Meanwhile, over the other side of the M8 motorway in East Kilbride, we heard tales about a guy yelling like Lydon on Metal Box and another guy banging a huge oil drum who called themselves The Primal Scream; about a couple of doss brothers who never got out of bed and had to be reminded what year it was – three years later, their malfunctioning guitar speakers started giving out uncontrollable feedback during a gig, and Alan McGee and Joe Foster yelled that’s BRILLIANT! Keep it IN! (Reader, I was there. I was that third shouter who told the Mary Chain about AMM.)

 

Then I think of “Blues From A Gun” from the never-heralded but nevertheless superb third Jesus and Mary Chain album Automatic, and how firmly it stands as a direct precursor to Oasis, he said finally linking up these inchoate reminiscences with the album under consideration. Of course it is; how could it not be? Two noisy, eternally-arguing brothers – naturally McGee would go up to Glasgow, witness Oasis and discern Mary Chain II.

 

Like the Mary Chain, Oasis did not merely know their rock history; they were pre-emptively part of it. As with Psychocandy, Definitely Maybe overthrows that other weary critical bat of “don’t tell everybody about it - DO it, and THEN tell everybody.” Sod that, we only have so much time on this planet. Oasis wasted no time telling everybody that they were the fucking best, and you believed them, don’t lie to me, smugpants. Mozart was in the habit of saying that he was the best composer alive, and was proved right. Sometimes a little modesty is the hugest arrogance.

 

This alleged bigheadedness worked because the young Oasis were so damned earnest about things. Definitely Maybe is the work of a band who, at the time of its making, essentially didn’t have a bean to rub together between them. Therefore, singing with stinging confidence about being a rock ‘n’ roll star to three winos and a dog in an indie pub is in its way the most rock ‘n’ roll gesture one could make (I remember seeing Orange Juice in some scuzzy pub on the south side of Glasgow in 1980; it must have been the Mars Bar because Edwyn had to dodge flung pints of beers and unceasing yells of “F*CK OFF YA P**FY C*NT!” Mind you, the support band were subjected to similar treatment; they were four kids from Dublin, barely out of school, calling themselves U2. I wonder what happened to them…).

 

The early sound of Oasis is the bracingly liberating sound of young people with, literally, nothing to lose. The album cover, staged in Bonehead’s front room, suggests a certain classicism – photos of Rodney Marsh and George Best, spaghetti westerns on the TV, a large portrait of Bacharach – but Oasis really are unashamed romantics posing as archivists.

 

For a long time I considered writing this entry as a double with The Holy Bible by The Manic Street Preachers, which was released on the same August Bank Holiday Monday and bought by me from Bond Street HMV on that day, but sold merely a fraction of Definitely Maybe’s double platinum (and counting). But, on listening back to the latter, I do not really feel the need to do so, and suspect that doing so might undermine a rather important commonly-held trust. The Holy Bible is an astonishing, elemental record which rubs its listeners’ faces in uncomfortable truths, ones which palpably hit home to the musicians themselves (or, at any rate, one of them). Many at the time also found it unlistenable, and it is not an album that I choose to revisit with any great frequency, even though I would never get rid of it.

 

Yet the point of Oasis was that they were speaking for, and to, their community, one which had been purposely overlooked by the music media in favour of knowledgeable student types who would have got the Manics’ Plath and Pinter references straightaway. There was a quite widespread feeling that “rock” was deliberately not talking to “us,” was going over “our” heads. The Holy Bible is a desperate, if unbearably brilliant, lecture (the lyrics of “P.C.P.” would not really be out of place on the average Jamiroquai album – and that is meant as a compliment) – but Definitely Maybe tears open the curtains of doomy reserve and allows the light to flood back into lives.

 

You might agree with those who say that “Rock ‘N’ Roll Star” was the only song Oasis ever need have done – it sums everything up; their ambitions, their hopes and their justified presumptions. It rocks, to baptise a cliché, like nothing else had done in the previous five years or so – it busts open the door on which “I Wanna Be Adored” had been patiently knocking – and by evolving into punchbag drone noise at its climax indicate how much they owed to the sonic totality of My Bloody Valentine; apart from his exceptional free guitar work on the live version of “I Am The Walrus,” which appeared as a B-side to the single of “Cigarettes & Alcohol” and can also be found on the second CD of the three-CD 2015 deluxe edition of the album (I duly upgraded), this experimental tendency is not one which Noel Gallagher has really chosen to pursue. Why, he would immediately argue, should he? Oasis’ ”Walrus,” recorded in Glasgow, is one of the best Beatles tributes there is.

 

This really is powerful music. “Shakermaker” indicates not just how much the band owed to their Manchester antecedents, but a Springsteen-style eagerness to pick and mix from the best of pop “history” (to a point; the writers of “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” subsequently sued for and won royalties). “Supersonic,” also their debut single, commences with a downward scrape of guitar plectrum like de-riveted bolts announcing its business as surely as the “1-2-3-4!” which began “I Saw Her Standing There.”

 

Laura was not impressed when the video for “Supersonic” premiered on ITV’s The Chart Show one snoozy Saturday lunchtime. “FFS, not another Charlatans ripoff,” she proclaimed. Well, as far as Mancunian influences go, Shaun Ryder permeates the body of “Supersonic” quite comprehensively – one could argue that Oasis were simply finishing the job that Happy Mondays had started but were too out of it to see through to fruition – and while there is also the hint of Tim Burgess about Liam Gallagher’s vocal style, as well as a sardonic, iron confidence which puts him in a direct line from Lennon…

 

…actually the Manchester singer whom Liam Gallagher reminds me of, above all others, is Howard Devoto. The same cigar store Indian motionlessness on stage, the subtle are-you-tough-enough stare of challenge, and the same defiant, almost sneering monotone of vocal grain – then again, Liam’s firm avoidance of the vibrato and preference for the long-held rhetorical drone is a folk trope immediately familiar to those who know their Martin Carthy (Out Of The Cut, 1982; go hunt it down). But Liam’s focus is anti-art, anti-artifice. If he regarded himself as a work of brutalist modernism, his act wouldn’t wash.

 

No, Oasis bloody well mean it, just as firmly and stubbornly as Richey’s Manics did. Consider “Live Forever.” Step over Noel’s Alan Green-esque comments on all that Kurt nonsense to find that this is a song screamingly in favour of life, a song which rages against death in all of its forms. The People didn’t want clever arty curlicues; they wanted “We see things they’ll NEVER see!,” the one line on this album which speaks to them above, and more directly than, any of the other ones. We have to try harder, are made to work harder, weren’t given it on tap at birth, and because we come from the North and have to go to the South, we therefore know twice as much as those from the South who never have to come up to the North, and we know and feel things much more vividly. It is an enormous “NO!” to those who would prematurely remove themselves.

 

Nothing in 1994 rock – the British sort, anyway (we didn’t know about Twice Removed at the time; it never got a UK release) was as explosively dynamic and euphoric as “Up In The Sky,” an unapologetic serial scraper of skies which runs out with as much cheek and joy as your average school day hundred-metre race, and is lyrically a virulent anti-Conservative diatribe. Likewise, “Columbia,” which evolved from various jams based on Acid House classics, demonstrates that a truer indie-dance fusion can be achieved by means of osmosis as opposed to sloppy cutting and pasting – the spirit is gently and gradually mutated into this escalating, circuitous vortex of partially-bemused wonderment.

 

“Bring It On Down” is so damn-you-indie-torpedoes propulsive – sorry, Dodgy and Shed Seven, but you are not even in the running here – that it is only belatedly that you realise that it is an Iggy and the Stooges tribute. Yes, “Cigarettes & Alcohol” knocks off “Get It On,” until you remember that “Get It On” is structurally a knock-off of Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie.” Moreover, it becomes clear that the aptest comparison point for Oasis is not The Beatles, or even Slade, but The Faces – there’s that same drunken camaraderie, the identical certainty that what they’re playing is greater than anything that comes before or after it, and what do they really care anyway, Sunderland 1 Leeds United 0, etc. (Rod Stewart himself covered the song in Faces style in 1998, thereby proving this point).

 

Furthermore, relish Liam’s “soon-she-IIIIEEEYNE!”s and “siit-tew-eh-SHEEEYUN!” – he doesn’t give a toss whether you like it or not, why should he care, he’s not singing for you, take it or leave it and so forth. If you can’t abide his jive there are plenty of underachieving Scott Walker wannabes with degrees available. Again, listen to him, if you can: “Is it worth the aggregation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?” That sentiment connected deeply with its intended audience, who otherwise felt that they were constantly being sneered at.

 

“Digsy’s Dinner” is a momentary stocktaking comedic breather which still manages to harbour an element of ominous doubt in its chorus (“These could be the best days of our lives/But I don't think we've been living very wise”). Yet “Slide Away” might constitute the record’s finest six-and-a-half minutes – it sums up the album’s central message that we, you and I, have to get away from, escape, this future-free dump of a place, take the risk, talk to that woman at the bus stop, go places, form a band, do anything, anything to flee the dead end that they have scheduled for you. Guitars – so many of them - have rarely sounded mightier, and its unending finale attains a catharsis which I find acutely moving. Yes, The Smiths, yes, R.E.M., yes even Suede, yes especially Neil Young and Crazy Horse (this album is not so much Tonight The Night as There Will Be No Other Fucking Night, LIVE IT), but this is an epic of self-ordained freedom. The door is there to be opened. It’s up to you and me to open it.

 

And, as for all that Kurt nonsense, Definitely Maybe has Nevermind in its bones. The closing signoff, “Married With Children,” happily rearranges the chords of “Lithium” and grins its so-what-if-I’m-insolent-WHO’S-WATCHING farewell.

 

Smug hindsight be sodden. Definitely Maybe was, and is, a phenomenal pop record, and a reminder that it is one of our core duties as human beings to carve our way out with any raw deal with which we might have been issued at our genesis. “The Roses meet the Mondays, oh ho ho,” hissed the 1993 Christmas Melody Maker. Oasis proved better and more durable than both. Admit it.

 

(To the memory of Kenneth Scott – gonna live forever.)

PRINCE: Come

 

(#509: 27 August 1994, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Come/Space/Pheromone/Loose!/Papa/Race/Dark/Solo/Letitgo/Orgasm

 

Come is one of the most avant-garde of British number one albums. It works precisely because it doesn’t know just how avant-garde it is. The sell-by dates on the minimalist cover – design-wise, it feels like an official bootleg, or a Kill Rock Stars indie drop – indicate that Prince had had it with being Prince. He owed his record company some product and barely concealed his resentment at having to do so. His suggestion was that Come and what eventually came out as The Gold Experience, material for which was recorded more or less at the same time, be released simultaneously – the former (dark and experimental) under the Prince brand, the latter (bright and commercial) under the Love Symbol/Squiggle/Squidgy alias. Warners were highly dubious about the potential effectiveness and commercial subtext of this and sat on The Gold Experience until 1995.

 

Yet Come appears here and The Gold Experience, despite including Prince’s only UK number one single as a performer (“The Most Beautiful Girl In The World”), does not (it made number four here in 1995, amid greater competition). That should signify something, even if it were Prince’s least compromising record since The Black Album.

 

The cover, which sees a marooned Prince contemplating non-existence in the cobwebs of Barcelona’s Basílica de la Sagrada Família, constitutes hospital nightmares, but the music could have been made last year, had Prince survived until 2020. The record’s centrepiece is the eleven-minute title track, which steadily builds up its funk before dismantling and reassembling it in unexpected but logical combinations – bitonality is patiently introduced into the song’s flow and the antiphonal relationship between horns and rhythm would not be out of place in the recent work of Kamasi Washington. It becomes systematically more disturbing as it proceeds.

 

This necessarily overshadows the rest of the record, or at any rate leads into it, but the diffusely tight funk matrix persists. In “Loose!,” we even glimpse some familiarity with hardcore European rave and New Beat trends. “Papa” begins as a bottom-of-a-rootless-well lament before settling back into a barbed barber’s chair of devant-funk.

 

Perhaps most extraordinary of all is “Solo,” which features Prince’s voice set against a solitary and melancholy harp. It is like hearing Billy Mackenxie singing the Cocteau Twins’ “Beatrix.” “Letitgo” is perhaps the most “commercial” thing here – with an irritatingly familiar hook (who went on to sample it?) which nevertheless keeps building up until the atonal guitar feedback and Vanity squeals of consummation conclude the record.

 

Come is a record of tremendous importance, as evinced by how D’Angelo would examine and expand its template two years hence in Brown Sugar – and quite more relentlessly in Voodoo four years thereafter – and how Frank Ocean, the true inheritor of Prince’s mantle (but count in Thundercat, Flying Lotus, Kendrick etc. etc. – why not?), magically put all of the ingredients together and made a new and momentous recipe out of them. The smug indifference lent to Prince's post-1988 work tells us more about the institutional ignorance of (chiefly white) music critics than anything in the neighbourhood of general wisdom. We will not glimpse Prince in this tale again. But in many important ways, we will be unable to stop seeing him. We remain unable to do so; consider how the opening track of the final album released in his lifetime culminates in the chant “If there ain't no justice then there ain't no peace,” consider what happened in Minneapolis the other day, and consider how painfully his time has, albeit posthumously, come.

WET WET WET: End Of Part One: Their Greatest Hits

 

(#508: 30 July 1994, 4 weeks; 3 September 1994, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Wishing I Was Lucky/Sweet Little Mystery/Angel Eyes/Temptation/With A Little Help From My Friends/Sweet Surrender/Broke Away/Hold Back The River/Stay With Me Heartache/This Time/Make It Tonight/Put The Light On/Goodnight Girl/More Than Love/Lip Service/Blue For You (Live)/Shed A Tear/Cold Cold Heart/Love Is All Around

 

I worry about Marti Pellow. There was a recent interview with the great man in The Guardian where he admitted having in the past been addicted to alcohol and heroin, in that order. In the interview he says, albeit not without qualification, that he has been sober and clean for over twenty years. A brother died of alcohol-related causes in 2000. He is frank about all of this; he became a big star with all the superficial rewards, and the bigness temporarily blinded him.

 

Yes, I am supposed to be talking about a group, not simply its lead singer. But the man born Mark McLachlan fifty-six years ago in Clydebank has been its inescapable face, even though he left the band in 2017. He is of my generation, grew up a thirty-minute train ride away from me in Uddingston. We had Raw Deal (out of which came the McCluskey brothers, later of The Bluebells), Clydebank had Vortex Motion as its resident punk band. I am unsure whether they ever played as such outside of Clydebank High School but Pellow – his mother’s maiden name; “Marti” was an adaptation of his school nickname “Smarty” – ended up joining them, and after a couple of years’ hard rehearsing the band re-emerged as Wet Wet Wet, which in the Glasgow scene of the mid-eighties was enough to mark them as Not The Jesus And Mary Chain; likewise, their manager, Elliot Davis of “The Precious Organisation,” was Not Alan McGee (let alone Alan Horne).

 

I was not a fan of the Wets. I held the far-from-unique opinion that Pellow fancied himself so much he’d make himself pregnant. Their music of the eighties proffered little of appeal or use to me. I recognised what they were attempting to do but the overall sound picture was so glutinous and headachy – much more so than the feedback of the Reid brothers – that I saw only cabaret time on a six-monthly probationary period.

 

Listening to the songs on their first best-of has given me little reason to change my mind. Significantly the standout song, by several stripes, is “This Time” from The Memphis Sessions, recorded with Willie Mitchell in 1987 before they became big; a quite magnificent study in emotional stasis, rather like Little Jimmy Scott rattling bones with The Blue Nile. Otherwise I hear intelligent, finely-wrought but inadequately-expressed songs which reminded me of how sixties Glasgow soul-pop reliable Chris McClure rebranded himself as seventies all-round entertainer, nightclub owner and pantomime stalwart Christian. Less Sam Cooke, more Sydney Devine. Likewise, “Blue For You,” from their dully-finessed second album Holding Back The River, here appears as a live performance, from the Royal Albert Hall in November 1992 (with only three days’ notice to rehearse their entire set with a hundred-piece orchestra), and it is as if compromise has been dusted down and thrown off the yuppie handcart – this is a quietly thunderous performance.

 

High On The Happy Side, here generously represented, marked the point where the band decided to fuck it and do what they wanted, and again one is witness to the sound of adults, not obedient children having their hair combed back to make the best of impressions at the end-of-term prizegiving ceremony. It didn’t last, however; the two new songs from 1993, recorded with Nile Rodgers – does Rodgers even remember recording them? His sorely candid memoir, Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny, which I read while in hospital three years ago this month (well, about a month and a half afterwards; they were too busy trying to keep me alive for me to indulge in any reading), suggests that this might not be the case – are efficiently anonymous, and it was in this form that End Of Part One was initially released, in November 1993.

 

Then came the movie, and the cover version.

 

1994 was the year in which Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity was published, and despite its very acute passages on mortality, emptiness and the aimlessness of a life spent jumping from island to island, avoiding anything approaching commitment, and despite the high probability that a peripheral character, who makes only one brief, albeit central, appearance in the novel, is based on me, it is difficult to evade the feeling that a desperately wrong turn has been taken; here we have affluent relationships, where nothing, not even parental cancer, is really ever at stake, where people do indeed jump from relationship to relationship as the whim or the desperation takes them, such that a rather unattractive crossword puzzle or abacus of needlessly interweaving connections is formed, where seriousness is invariably shaken off with a wry shoulder shrug, even when the multiple clues which Hornby provides throughout the book leave us in no doubt that Rob Fleming is at best one step away from being Patrick Bateman (and that is one of numerous reasons why American Psycho is the greater book – Ellis allows Bateman to plunge into the bloodied emptiness which Hornby, being an All-Round Good Bloke, can only imply).

 

Far, far worse, however, is an incipient reactionism which very much resembles the long-held grudge of a middle-aged man given the rejection slip by the NME at an impressionable age and duty bound to take his extended revenge. High Fidelity marks the beginning of the New Anti-Seriousness in Britain, where under a completely misguided misreading of the principles of socialism, the only music now worth considering is that purposely furnished to provide the masses with what they want. It sets its bias in favour of the mass consumers and against the creative individual (since new ideas are now considered de facto Thatcherite) with such matey virulence that any attempt at making genuinely new music – or writing about it, or because of it - will now be routinely scoffed at as elitist and pretentious, an act of treacherous individualism against The People. This way lies the Exhibition of Degenerative Art, not to mention Nuremberg.

 

At the end of High Fidelity, Sonic Death Monkey – the kind of invented group name which could only have been invented by someone who despises new music with all of his blackened heart – become Backbeat, and noisy experimentation gives way to “Twist And Shout.” This cosy scene is depicted as a happy ending, and to this day it chills my blood to the colour of lapsed vinegar.

 

The triumph of Four Weddings And A Funeral, and “Love Is All Around,” gave early warning that the Hornby side would win this argument by means of sheer demographic weight. The film is a deviously constructed snakes and ladders board of nothing very much, except finding ways to delay Hugh Grant and Andie McDowell from ending up together. Is it the act of a spoilsport to point out that there is so much more to Auden than having his words traduced to the level of Rent-An-Elegy? Or that Kenneth Griffith’s ancient madman – played by the same man who spends much of the first half of the final episode of The Prisoner delivering an extended lecture on the varying nature of revolt – provides the film’s only spark of actual life? In the end we are presented with a toytown Britain of bright bricks of placid agreeableness; like the Village it looks new and colourful and beneficent, but try straying a millimetre out of its hidden boundaries and see how quickly Rover is unleashed upon you.

 

“Love Is All Around,” as re-interpreted by Wet Wet Wet, would seem sufficient reason for any Number 6 to want to kick his radio speakers in (only to have them speedily replaced by an electrician five seconds later); as written and recorded by the Troggs in the autumn of 1967, its “feel it in my fingers” mood and dazedly floating music place it as late period pop-psychedelia. Typically for the Troggs, it was slightly out of time – the Autumn of Love was deteriorating into the Winter of Big Ballads – and their slight clunkiness when approaching a ballad was to be expected; but the stylistic conflict works (“Any Way That You Want Me” was their other slow-burning classic, and Spiritualized at least understood its greatness sufficiently to cover it) in such a way that you want to believe Reg and the boys that such peaceful disorientation and rebuilding could still happen. In other words, even with a band of blundering beefcakes like the Troggs, the original works because of its subtlety.

 

Richard Curtis, who wrote the screenplay for the film, offered the band a choice of three songs to cover; “I Will Survive,” “Can’t Smile Without You” and “Love Is All Around.” It was immediately decided that the Troggs song was the only one with which the band could really do anything.

 

Nonetheless, you know that disappointment is imminent when the bombastic drums and overwrought rockist guitar which open Wet Wet Wet’s reading give way to Pellow’s utterly shade and nuance-free delivery. Enticement and charm are replaced by robustly ruddy bellowing, everything highlighted in CAPITAL LETTERS just in case you haven’t long since got it. Pellow doesn’t waste time in adding entirely irrelevant asides (“Got to keep it moving!” – but why, if love is allegedly all around you everywhere you go?) and there is a particularly unpleasant Glasgow pub belch of a “Hey!” at 3.02.

 

Yet it gave off the correct signifiers of Soul and Passion and Et Bleeding Cetera and people were evidently happy for Pellow just to pull the approved faces. Since it became 1994’s biggest-selling single in Britain, spending fifteen very long weeks at number one, the presumption was that Pellow would turn around, give a wry shoulder shrug and genuinely wonder what was wrong; after all, wasn’t he simply giving the people what they wanted, as opposed to giving people things they didn’t know they wanted? Didn’t Reg Presley himself give it his approval? Didn’t it buy at least one band member their house (it did)? But given everything else that was available to the music lover of 1994, it would seem that the success of “Love Is All Around,” a record which appears to argue that Engelbert was the real point of 1967, looks like one of the biggest disasters in all recent music – if we’re talking long-term consequences.

 

To their credit, the band ended up holding a similar view, deleting the single after those fifteen weeks at the top on the reasonable grounds that they were sick to the back teeth of it. Jarvis Cocker appeared on Top Of The Pops during this period, producing a sign from beneath his jacket proclaiming “I HATE WET WET WET”; Pellow, again not unreasonably, wanted to punch Cocker in the gob. Perhaps he might feel the same about me in the remote chance that he reads this. It would be a shame. The guy clearly loves music. I remember a feature about him on Network 7 back in the eighties where he went through his singles and talked about how much he loved The Clash and Prince (there is a preponderance of Prince-esque vocal gulps throughout the first album). At the same time as High On The Happy Side, the band put out an album of covers entitled Cloak & Dagger, credited to “Maggie Pie & The Impostors,” which demonstrates their impeccable tastes – Todd Rundgren, Tom Waits, Carole King and Smokey Robinson are all represented, as are their Dundee antecedents The Average White Band. We could have a fine natter in the pub, if only I went to pubs any more (I have not set foot in one for over a decade). But even, or especially, then, I kept on thinking to myself; is he happy? I still worry about him.