Psychocandy by Paula Mejia (Bloomsbury Academic 2016)

 

The pink-and-black skid mark Psychocandy left on culture is partially due to how utterly extreme this pop record sounds, from how it resonates with the body (and potentially shatters eardrums), to the dualities it forged into one album. It is at once the manic and the depressive, the sun covering the shadows, the life that distracts from the inevitability of death, the noise crashed against lilting pop: In other words, the psycho and the candy. Elements that shouldn’t work together somehow do on Psychocandy. “If Nancy Sinatra had Einsturzende Neubaten as a backing band, that’s how we wanted to sound,” Jim Reid recalled thirty years later. “We wanted to fuck with the genres.”

And they did. Dense clouds of psychedelia and drone, pummeling white noise, sugar-drenched pop harmonies, skittering proto-punk, galloping percussion, and the melodrama of Motown converge in Psychocandy, a cocktail of noise that shouldn’t even be palatable to our ears. It’s more than palatable, however. It’s desirable. One might say just like honey.

Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle (Bloomsbury 2016)

 

One of the unexpected ways in which my upbringing as the son of Communists had helped prepare me for the challenges of celebrity, an advantage that my fellow comedians didn’t have, was in the matter of staying true to yourself. The idea of the traitor, the sell-out, the apostate was central to Joe and Molly’s state of mind. Even when I was quite small we would be out shopping in town and  my mother or father would gesticulate towards some harmless-looking individual and say in a whisper, ‘See him over there trying on gloves, he left the Party over Hungary in 1956 and now he’s . . .’ Here they’d pause before revealing the full horror. ‘A Labour councillor!’ Or, ‘Don’t look, but that woman by the bacon counter, she used to be in CND but now she’s . . . joined the Air Force!’ At first I couldn’t see anything different about the people my parents pointed out but over time it did seem to me that they possessed a certain haunted quality, an air of sadness, and though their mood probably wasn’t helped by being whispered about in shops by a red-haired woman and a man in a trilby hat accompanied by a silent watchful boy I sensed that the main critical voice was within their heads, that they themselves were aware on some level of the abandonment of their younger more idealistic self and it corroded them from the inside.

I did not want to end up like that. The trick it  seemed to me was to not be blind to the many faults of the left while at the same time to try and stay true to those core values of workers’ rights, social justice and equality.

Me doing fund-raising benefits for left-wing organisations was an attempt to stay connected with those ideals.

As a left-wing entertainer it was accepted that you would inevitably perform unpaid at concerts in aid of various radical causes – doing benefits had become a sort of national service for alternative comedians. There was very little pleasure in appearing at them though. I did a bit about benefit concerts in my act: how you told a joke, then there was a pause while the audience vetted the joke for its political content, possible sexism, any hints of neo-colonialism, adherence to the theory of dialectical and historical materialism, and only once it was cleared would they laugh – it was like doing your material over a faulty phone line.

I went up to Sheffield to appear in a show at the Crucible Theatre in support of Nicaragua’s revolutionary, anti-American, pro-moustache Sandinista government. Following the show the cast and their friends were introduced to the guest of honour – David Blunkett the radical left-wing leader of Sheffield City Council. After the line-up Linda said, ‘I don’t like that man, there’s something funny about his eyes.'

Substance: Inside New Order by Peter Hook (Simon and Schuster 2016)

 

There was only one thing for it.

One of us lot would have to be the singer. To work it out, Rob thought it would be a good idea to put us in the studio with Martin Hannett, with Hannett in the Simon Cowell role and the three of us auditioning like a kind of post-punk X-Factor. It was a terrible idea, though. Martin had idolised Ian. Of everybody in the Factory family he was hit the hardest, and we entered the studio to find him medicating his depression in the usual way, with dope and coke. It didn’t exactly help matters that he’d always had a fairly low opinion of me, Steve and Barney anyway: ‘One genius and three Manchester United supporters’ was what he’d called Joy Division. Even though that’s not strictly speaking true, because Steve supported Macclesfield Town, but you knew what he meant. Being Martin Hannett, he wasn’t exactly backward when it came to telling us what a poor substitute we made for Ian’s genius.

Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football by Daniel Gray (Bloomsbury 2016)

 

When I was a teenager, I startled a geography teacher. This had nothing to do with arable farming, and everything to do with European cities. During a test, it turned out that I knew the capitals of Serbia and Albania, Finland and Croatia. This was something of a surprise for me too. Behind my back, the European Cup and editions of World Soccer had sewn this knowledge into my brain.

Hinterland by Chris Mullin (Profile Books 2016)

It was some time before I had any further contact with Blair. Then, in November 1994, he invited me to his office and asked if I would be willing to go on the front bench. This was not the first time I had been asked (I was by now very respectable). As long ago as 1992 John Smith had asked me to be housing spokesman and I had declined in favour of remaining on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Blair talked of ‘pepping up’ the front bench and giving it a radical edge. ‘So many of the left are …’

‘Impossibilists,’ I said.

‘I was going to say “conservative”. Their idea of being radical is to defend the status quo.’ An astute observation and one that was hard to deny. The Labour left at this time had few new ideas beyond repealing the Tory trade union laws (some of which were sensible and popular) and reversing all changes in the management of the NHS, regardless of whether or not they made sense.

Rather the Devil by Ian Rankin (2016)

“Rebus placed his knife and fork on the empty plate, then leaned back in his chair, studying the other diners in the restaurant.

‘Someone was murdered here, you know,’ he announced.

‘And they say romance is dead.’ Deborah Quant paused over her steak. Rebus had been about to comment that she carved it with the same care she took when using her scalpel on a cadaver. But then the murder had popped into his head and he’d considered it the better conversational gambit.

‘Sorry,’ he apologised, taking a sip of red wine. They sold beer here – he had seen waiters delivering it to a few of the tables – but he was trying to cut down.

A new start – it was why they were dining out in the first place, celebrating a week without cigarettes.

Seven whole days.”

“A hundred and sixty-eight hours.

(She didn’t need to know about the one he’d begged from a smoker outside an office block three days back. It had made him feel queasy anyway.)

‘You can taste the food better, can’t you?’ she asked now, not for the first time.

‘Oh aye,’ he acknowledged, stifling a cough.

She seemed to have given up on the steak and was dabbing her mouth with her napkin. They were in the Galvin Brasserie Deluxe, which was attached to the Caledonian Hotel – though these days it was really the Waldorf Astoria Caledonian. But those who’d grown up in Edinburgh knew it as the Caledonian, or ‘the Caley’. In the bar before dinner, Rebus had reeled off a few stories – the railway station next door, dismantled in the sixties; the time Roy Rogers had steered his horse Trigger up the main staircase for a photographer. Quant had listened dutifully, before telling him he could undo the top button of his shirt. He had been running a finger around the inside of the collar, trying to stretch the material a little.

‘You notice things,’ he had commented.

‘Cutting out cigarettes can add a few pounds.”

“Really?’ he’d answered, scooping up more peanuts from the bowl.

Now she had caught a waiter’s eye and their plates were being removed. The offer of dessert menus was dismissed. ‘We’ll just have coffee – decaf if you’ve got it.’

‘Two decafs?’ The waiter was looking at Rebus for guidance.

‘Absolutely,’ Rebus confirmed.

Quant pushed a lock of red hair away from one eye and smiled across the table. ‘You’re doing fine,’ she said.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

Another smile. ‘Go on then, tell me about this murder.’

He reached for his glass but started coughing again. ‘Just need to …’ signalling towards the toilets. 

He pushed the chair back and got up, rubbing at his chest with his hand. Once inside the gents, he made for a sink, leaning over it, hacking some of the gunk up from his lungs. There were the usual flecks of blood. Nothing to panic about, he’d been assured. More coughing, more mucus. COPD, they called it. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. When told, Deborah Quant had formed her lips into a thin line.

‘Not so surprising, is it?’

And the very next day she had brought him a glass specimen jar of ”

“indeterminate age. Its contents: a section of lung, showing the bronchial tubes.

‘Just so you know,’ she’d said, pointing out what he’d already been shown on a computer screen. She had left the jar with him.

‘On loan or to keep?’

‘For as long as you need it, John.”