Fingers Crossed : How Music Saved Me from Success by Miki Berenyi (Nine Eight Books 2022)

 

At one of the Soho House soirĂ©es, while I order drinks from the bar, a drunk comedian slurs at me to either suck his cock or fuck off. As I stand chatting to friends, Alex from Blur is sprawled on the floor making ‘phwoarr’ noises and sinks his teeth into my arse. The Carry-On Sid James impersonations are a common theme. I fall into conversation with Keith Allen and try to ignore him sweeping his eyes around my body, twitching with overheating gestures and tugging at his collar to show he’s letting off steam. Another comedian sharing a cab ride for convenience suggests he come in for a bunk-up, despite having spent the entire night excitedly chatting about his imminent fatherhood. Liam Gallagher circles me, wondering aloud when I’ll be ready to fuck him in the toilets. Look, I know I’m hardly Mary Poppins, but this isn’t flirting, it’s harassment. It’s constant, relentless sexualisation. And there’s a nasty edge to it, implying that it’s me, not them, who is asking for it.

I recall Suzanne Vega once pointing out that Madonna may be breaking boundaries, but every teenage girl who dresses like her is still treated like a slut. I’m experiencing a similar uncomfortable side effect with the supposed androgyny of Britpop. While Justine from Elastica and Sonia from Echobelly and Louise from Sleeper, wearing ungendered suits or jeans and T-shirts, get treated as one of the boys, my long hair and short dresses are now a signal that I’m absolutely gagging for it. Sure, I could get a crop and stop wearing a skirt, but that’s no different to saying, ‘If you don’t want the grief, dress like a nun.’ I’ve been doing what I do for years and now I’m being reframed as happy to be objectified.

I’ve been reading feminist texts since college, however unfashionable that might be right now (and, to be fair, Chris has always found it a bit tiresome). My education, both at PNL and from the politicised bands I’ve followed, has taught me precisely to see through the ‘harmless fun’ to the misogyny that drives it. I’m not militant about it. I don’t crucify people for crossing a line, I just recognise there is one. And I need to know someone well enough to accept that they’re ‘just joking’; I’m not going to swallow it as a lame excuse from a bloke I’ve just met.

Kill Your Friends by John Niven (Harper Perennial 2008)

What do I think? Honestly? I think I would like to see you and the rest of your band die screaming in agony from something like testicular cancer. I think that last week I spent a hundred and eighty pounds on a necktie and lost it a few hours later, drunk in Soho. I think about telling these hopeless, penniless cunts this. But instead, pointlessly, I say, 'Great guitar sound.'

'Yeah,' the manager says, and he starts crapping on about how Doug - or whoever - has been playing guitar since he was a fucking foetus or something. Doug looks up from the floor and smiles bashfully. It's about all I can do not to punch his stupid, talentless face in. To stand up, run the length of the room, and boot him full-force in his pasty, pimply, stinking indie chops. But - ever reasonable - I just nod and listen and say things like 'yeah?' and 'yeah' and 'great' and 'really?' for a long time.

I hate indie music. Until a couple of years ago you didn't really have to think about it. It was just a couple of hundred losers fucking around in Camden. Then a pair of Mancunian losers rock up clutching a Beatles songbook and suddenly you've got to listen to all this shite and take all these meetings in case you miss the next one. It's a fucking nightmare.

The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock by John Harris (Harper Perennial 2003)

Noel Gallagher had turned up at his local polling station to find that he was required to produce one more item of identification than he was carrying. 'Do you want me to sing you a fucking song?' he protested, before celebrity eventually got the better of bureaucracy. That night, though the South Bank beckoned, he remained on the sofa. 'I had a ticket for the Labour Party party, but I had that much fun watching Portillo and the others get done over I stayed at home in front of the TV. It was all champagne and cigars round our house. Meg and me got pissed and went out into the garden and played ['The Beatles'] Revolution dead loud with the neighbours banging on the walls.'

Newton Grief

One of those throwaway quotes from a 'here today gone 15 minutes from now' Q & A pieces in a newspaper, where you think, 'Mmm, never thought of that but now that you've said it, you're right:

You'll never find a Manchester band slagging off another Manchester band, but within each Manchester band, people will rip each other apart; Mondays, Smiths, New Order, Roses, Oasis. No one will slag each other off, but inside the band, they'll rip each other to death. [Ian Brown interviewed in today's Guardian.]

Having a (Brit) Pop

I'm trying to read five or six books at the moment, which is always a mistake with me because I end up just letting matters drift and invariably a few books fall by the wayside never to be picked up again. Those books I am reading include this,* this, this and this** (sneaky of me not to mention them by name, which means that people will have to click on the links and give me more page views ;-)

Another book that I am also currently reading at the moment is John Harris's The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock. Yeah I know it was published a few years back and I missed the zeitgeist and all that palaver from when it was originally published (which roughly translates as the fact that it is only now that I have been able to afford to buy it and only 'cos it was being sold for a couple of quid in a record shop in Edinburgh) but from the hundred or so pages I have read of it so far, it is an intriguing enough account of that period in the early nineties when groups such as Blur, Suede and Pulp kicked back against what they considered the drugged out apathy and drone of grunge.

I never made it to the Good Mixer but I do remember reading what Harris in his book now views as the seminal issue of Select magazine, which had Brett Anderson on the front cover wrapped in the union jack, and the provocative headline emblazoned across its cover of 'Yanks Go Home'. It's strange now to think how important Suede were in the great scheme of britpop things - what with the Art School versus the Arseholes rivalry of Blur and Oasis that followed - but they were a brilliant band in their day, and seeing them perform the incendiary Animal Nitrate live on the Brits on the TV all those years ago was definitely one of those hairs rising on the back of the neck moments in life.

It's funny to read in the book that by all accounts Brett Anderson was a sweet guy who only adopted the cool and distant persona that he was notorious for in his heyday after getting his ego bruised when Justiine Frischmann went off with Damon Albarn, and that Alex James initial impression of Albarn when he first met him was of someone who was: "A pompous big-headed fucking moron with a shit band . . . He can come across as a total cunt."

But my reason for blogging on the book is for a couple of choice quotes that made me laugh out loud, that I thought I would share with my three readers - hello Mo, Curly and Reidski - and, though I don't have any particular antipathy against Suede it is the case that they are aimed against Brett and the other three haircuts in the band:

Alex James again, from when Blur returned from a disastrous tour in America, when they thought that there time had been and gone, and revealing that before the Damon vs Liam homo-erotic bunfight, there was the Goldsmith versus UCL London University inter-college dust up:

'When we got back, Suede were on all the front covers,' says Alex James. 'Those little pricks from fucking UCL.'

The second quote is from Morrissey, who Brett Anderson made the mistake of verbally sparring with in the music press. There was only ever going to be one faux English Fop left standing in the ring after that particular mismatch:

'Suede are . . . a group with all reference points so tightly packed that it consequently leaves no room whatsoever for originality, should any be lurking,' he wrote. 'Despite his claims to the contrary, I have never met Brett and wouldn't wish to; he seems like a deeply boring man with Mr Kipling crumbs in his bed. He'll never forgive God for not making him Angie Bowie.'

Absolute classic! Ten years later, and Mozzer last album is a corker and it has all ended in tears for Brett. Last time I think I spotted him was when he was fronting this video.

* The book on Orwell edited by Paul Flewers.

** The one on the Russian Communist Left. Anybody who wants to buy me the British Communist Left one for my birthday, feel free. My birthday is next week, btw ;-)