Dress sexy at my funeral

I went into the studio today. Andrew and Lynette hadn't looked at my blog - probably just as well - so I didn't get attacked for my gratuitous attack on their musical choices as I walked through the door.

Andrew did try to counter by suggesting that the music I had played in the studio was 'dismal'. This cut me to the quick a little. I think this is probably a bit of projection. Because I'm a bit of a miserable, cantankerous character, it stands to reason I would like miserable music. Andrew assumed I would be a Morrissey fan for the same reason. I can't say I am or ever have been. I liked the Smiths but was never a fan. Panic might be on the list below if I had it on my iPod. A chorus of 'Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ' is a lovely thing.

I do have some music others might find dismal. Tom Waits is a bit of an acquired taste. But often I think that is again an assumption about the limitations of popular music. People who don't really see it as a valid art form think that it has to be either feel good music or background music. They hear a slow tune and a sombre voice and assume that the song must be 'dismal'. Leonard Cohen suffers from this. He can be very, very (albeit darkly) funny, but is rarely thought of in that way.

But in any case, the last thing Andrew asked me to turn off was Funkadelic's One Nation Under a Groove. Maybe not conducive to work - but dismal? I think not. Anyway - in a shared space you have to respect other people's needs. Lynette prefers total silence, so I actually haven't played any music (out loud) in the studio for about six months. Which is fine.

But it made me think that I ought to do a list of - well, not necessarily 'happy' tunes, but ones that lift the spirit, just in case anyone looking at the blog thought I listened to nothing but tearjerkers.

Well, they lift my spirit anyway. It may seem odd for instance to have a song called Dress Sexy At My Funeral, but I defy anyone to listen to that and not smile. Fairy Tale of New York City may also seem an odd choice - but it contains one of my favourtite piece of lyrics: the interchange between Shane MacGowan - 'I could have been someone' and Kirsty McCall - 'Well so could anyone'. Mind you, Prince's 'Shake your body like a horny pony would' from Alphabet St is also pretty good. For You by Springsteen is one of my son's favourite songs - and he's only 11. Starman takes me back to me bedroom on the Kenton Bar Estate in Newcastle and dreams of escape. Here he is, landing like a parrot in my front room in the early seventies. Oh how my dad hated him.



I Know There's An Answer - The Beach Boys
Nantes - Beirut
I Feel Good - James Brown
For You - Bruce Springsteen
Bankrobber - The Clash
Brimful of Asha - Cornershop
Close To You (Remix) - The Cure
Starman - David Bowie
Groove Is In The Heart - Deee-Lite
I Feel Just Like a Child - Devendra Banhart
Sunshine Superman - Donovan
Touch Me - The Doors
Crystal Days - Echo & The Bunnyman
Girl Like You - Edwin Collins
Station Approach - Elbow
I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down - Elvis Costello
One Nation Under a Groove - Funkadelic
Crazy - Gnarls Barkley
Dare - Gorillaz
Now It's On - Grandaddy
Made Up Love Song #43 - The Guillemots
Ready For the Floor - Hot Chip
The Farm - Howe Gelb
I'm Bored - Iggy Pop
Dignified & Old - Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers
Cloudbusting - Kate Bush
Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks
Can't Get You Out Of My Head - Kylie Minogue
Up With The People - Lambchop
Wild Child - Lou Reed
Family Affair - Mary J Blige
Three Little Birds - Bob Marley & The Wailers
Regret - New Order
Mausam - Nitan Sawnhey
Hey Ya! - Outkast
Life's A Gamble - Penetration
Young Folks - Peter, Bjorn & John
Papas Got A Brand New Pigbag - Pigbag
Fairy Tale of New York - The Pogues & Kirsty McCall
Movin' On Up - Primal Scream
Alphabet St - Prince
Rockaway Beach - The Ramones
When I Get To The Border - Richard & Linda Thompson
Let's Spend The Night Together - The Rolling Stones
Pyjamarama - Roxy Music
Dress Sexy At My Funeral - Smog
Go Amanda - Steve Earle
Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing - Stevie Wonder
Someday - The Strokes
Jeepster - T Rex
American Girl - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Sweet Jane - The Velvet Underground

And if I could just have one, it would probably be Sweet Jane. Goodness knows how many times I've heard it, but from the opening, 'Standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand' I'm always hooked.

Here's Peter, Bjorn and John with Young Folks. . .

Time has told me

Here is the wonderful Nick Drake. Sad song - made even sadder by the singer's story.

Don't give up

This could be my theme tune at the moment - book award-wise. This is perhaps the saddest song I know. In fact it's beyond sad. It has moved into an area of remorselessness that few pop songs dare to enter. Because of that it has come right round to occupy an area of borderline cheesiness, saved only by that fantastic bass line and the seriousness with which both singers go about their job. It had a horrible resonance with me at the time it came out and I still have a soft spot for it (though it is hard to listen to). If you think the Carpenters are sad, check this out.

But how bad can things really be for Peter Gabriel - he is being cuddled by Kate Bush after all.

People ain't no good

OK - so here is my alternative list of sad songs. It is by no means exhaustive and clearly I could have filled the entire thing with Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen songs. I have restricted it to some of the things I happen to have on my iPod. Otherwise I will spend the next few days hunting through CDs instead of doing any work. It's a eclectic mix and I have realised I do not have enough soul music on my iPod. I've even included a Carpenters cover - Superstar by Sonic Youth:

Hope There's Someone - Antony & the Johnsons
In Spite of All The Damage - The Be Good Tanyas
I Just Wasn't Made For These Times - The Beach Boys
Racing in the Street - Bruce Springsteen
Be My Wife - David Bowie
Otis - Durutti Column
My Very Best - Elbow
Can't Make a Sound - Elliot Smith
Walking Wounded - Everything But The Girl
Fotheringay - Fairport Convention
Red, Red, Red - Fiona Apple
Man of the World - Fleetwood Mac
You're With The Wrong One - Fried
April 14th (Part 1) - Gillian Welch
When Mac Was Swimming - The Innocence Mission
Fever Dream - Iron & Wine
Hurt - Johnny Cash
Something On Your Mind - Karen Dalton
This Woman's Work - Kate Bush
Outclassed - Kathryn Tickell
Winning a Battle, Losing The War - King's of Convenience
Steve McQueen - Lambchop
Take This Longing - Leonard Cohen
Sweet Old World - Lucinda Williams
You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go - Madeleine Peyroux
Far Away - Martha Wainwright
I'm Goin' Down - Mary J Blige
Better Things - Massive Attack
Chasing After Deer - Midlake
Don't Let it Bring You Down - Neil Young
People Ain't No Good - Nick Cave
Time Has Told Me - Nick Drake
Birdland - Patti Smith
Sour Times - Portishead
Sad Professor - R.E.M.
Nude - Radiohead
Beat the Retreat - Richard & Linda Thompson
Shipbuilding - Robert Wyatt
Jealous Guy - Roxy Music
Teardrops Will Fall - Ry Cooder
Farewell, Farewell - Sandy Denny
The Only Living Boy In New York - Simon & Garfunkle
In The Arms of Sleep - Smashing Pumpkins
Orion Obscured by Stars - Smog
Superstar - Sonic Youth
It's A Sad & Beautiful World - Sparklehorse
Tonight I Feel So Far Away From Home - Steve Forbert
Romulus - Sufjan Stevens
Heaven - Talking Heads
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - Them
Song To The Siren - This Mortal Coil
Song To The Siren - Tim Buckley
Patchwork - Tindersticks
Pale Blue Eyes - Velvet Underground
Mary Of The Angels - Willard Grant Conspirarcy
Confusion - The Zutons

There are some great songs in there - but I'm not sure I'd want to hear them all one after the other! I have particularly fond memories of Nick Cave's People Ain't No Good - my son and I used to sing that on the way to primary school in the mornings.

Ah - happy days.

Here's This Mortal Coil with Tim Buckley's Song To The Siren. . .

Be a happy, prosperous grit salesman

I dropped my son off at Will and Jane's so that he could play with their son as it is Bank Holiday Monday today. Will lent me a book called Big Morning Blues by Gordon Williams which uses the Jack Sheppard story as a linking device. It looks interesting - more of that later.

The advert above is from one of the Thor comics I picked up in Newcastle. The ads in these comics were both baffling and fascinating to me as a child. How I wished I could have sent away for the stuff they featured, but it was priced in dollars and had addresses in far away places. Though I was never tempted to be a Grit salesman. (Grit is a newspaper by the way - in case you were wondering).

It is hard to remember how unreachable America seemed in those days and how dull - crushingly dull - 1970s Britain felt. Comics were an escape for me. Opening those pages in my bedroom was like pulling open a raincloud and bathing in sunshine.


They clearly saw straight through their readership because so many of the ads were targeted at boys like me who fantasised about being more than we were. There are ads for getting taller, more muscular, learning karate and judo - even this one for a fake beard for all occasions. . .

Musical cheese

We went round to Andrew and Lynette's last night for a meal with them and their friends Barbara and Mark, and our friend Anne Cunningham. My son sat in the lounge watching Young Frankenstein and rolling around in hysterics. It is always a pleasure to see Anne and it was great to meet Mark and Barbara. Nice food, good company - what more could you want?

Well. . .It is very bad form to criticise your host's musical tastes. Very bad. Very bad indeed. Ah, but what the hell. . .

I think I may have disgraced myself by making my horror at the musical choices too obvious. But they crossed some kind of line, so I feel released from the normal bonds of good manners. Besides Andrew once asked me to turn Midlake off when I was playing them in the studio. Midlake. Outrageous.

Musical taste is obviously a very personal thing - some people have it and some people don't. I have very catholic tastes. I can find something in most genres of music. Except for opera and heavy metal. And for similar reasons: the silly clothes, the inanity of the lyrics, the falsetto voices.

But I would never inflict Sonic Youth, say, on guests at a dinner party just because they couldn't escape. Lynette (who I hasten to add is, in every way, a wonderfully cultured, warm and witty studio-mate) had warned me that she had bought a CD called Sad Songs (why?) in a charity shop but, oh my, nothing quite prepared me for what was actually on it. My ears; my poor, poor ears. If I say that Janis Ian was probably a high point, you will get the picture.

Look at that cover. She looks as if she is staring into a shower cubicle. And that drip coming from the 'A'. It's supposed to be a teardrop, I guess. All I'll say is that it doesn't look like a eye it's dripping from.

I do understand that some people aren't really into music. Well, actually I don't really understand it - but I accept it. I love music - most kinds of music anyway. It's important to me. I like pop music. I just believe there is good and bad - often very, very bad - pop music. I have certainly enjoyed pop music of questionable quality and sometimes even trash can be amazingly evocative of a particular place and time. But there is a limit. As I may have said more than once: nostalgia is not my thing. I can't listen to things ironically.

Not that I haven't got vivid memories of watching Top of the Pops with my mum saying, 'Hasn't he got lovely hair - for a girl', and buying singles and stacking them up on my parent's Dansette record player. But when I was a teenager there was Roxy Music and Bowie and T Rex, but there was also the Wombles, Mud, Pickety Witch, Paper Lace, Middle of the Road, Leo Sayer and Gilbert O'Sullivan. I'm proud to say I was on the side of Roxy Music, Bowie and Bolan. My mum liked Gilbert O'Sullivan. And I may be the age my mum was at when I was listening to that stuff, but that doesn't mean anyone is going to persuade me it's any good. Gilbert O'Sullivan was a featured artist on Sad Songs. As was Leo Sayer.

This just marks me out as a snob of course. But everyone is a snob of some kind. No one likes everything and I certainly don't come at this from a muso position. I'm as happy to hear a three chord (or two if it's Lou Reed) pop song as the next person. I grew up listening to my sister's Mowtown singles. I just need to believe its real. It doesn't have to be real - it just needs to convince me while I'm listening.

Anyway the very same people who would never dream of reading a Jackie Collins book or looking at a Jack Vettriano painting, who are happy to be snobs when it comes to classical music and would stab themselves in the ears before they would listen to Richard Clayderman or Il Divo, are happy to listen to absolute drivel when it comes to pop. When it comes to pop they have a taste bypass. It baffles me a little. I suppose it's because they are unable to take pop seriously. I am a pop snob and proud of it.

And come to think of it, most of these songs weren't even sad - they were just mawkish or drippy. An equivalent Love Songs CD would not have any of the great love songs on it - it would be full of the greetings-card-sentiment nonsense that pads out the charts most weeks. Celine Dion would almost certainly be on it.

The compilers seemed to confuse sadness with limpness. Sadness is a perfectly laudable emotion to strive for in a pop song. We all have songs that made us feel like someone knew what we were feeling at a time when we were broken-hearted. There are some great sad songs in pop music. None of them - with maybe the exception of Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U - was on this CD.

Hank Williams sings sad songs. Nick Drake. Leonard Cohen. Dusty Springfield. Peter Green. Lucinda Williams. Tom Waits. Billie Holiday. Bruce Springsteen has written some great sad songs. So has Lou Reed. A lot of Motown songs are heartbreaking. And what about Antony Hegarty? There's Tim Buckley. Smoky Robinson. Aretha Franklin. Sufjan Stevens, Sparklehorse. Sandy Denny. Not Air Supply.

Never, never, never Air Supply.

I rebel against the idea of nostalgia because so often it involves a fondness for the frankly godawful. That's not to say that I don't regularly reminisce and rewind the tape of my life, replaying various bits (editing them too, of course). But my memories of teenage parties and discos and the like are mixed, and rarely sugar-coated. I was shy and a bit awkward. There is as much pain as there is warmth in looking back and I like songs that reflect that. That's the mark of a great pop song - it can be simple and complex at the same time.

There was some truly dreadful music providing the soundtrack to my teens, but I never much liked it then and I never want to hear it again. I did have the odd Slade single and I have a feeling I may have bought Tiger Feet by Mud in a weaker moment, but I'm happy to confess that I was - and I pray I always will be - totally immune to the soft-rock ballad. Besides there are just too many good bands around today to ever want to hear Chicago again.

They are never going to invite me back are they? And anyone who was about to invite me round to dinner is probably having second thoughts. Hey - but someone has to stand up for decent music. It's a tough job, but I'm willing to take it on.

And if they hadn't followed Sad Songs with a Carpenters compilation I might have let them off (and I know Karen Carpenter had a very pure voice and died terribly young, but the music is still - with perhaps the exception of Goodbye to Love with its oddly over-the-top guitar solo - like being drowned in luke warm honey). But as I said - they crossed a line. And playing Rufus Wainwright at the end didn't compensate. The damage was done.

Maybe I ought to make them a CD of really sad songs. That'll show 'em. Now where's my copy of Berlin? (I'm cackling maniacally at this point, by the way.)

I took my son to football this morning. We also took Ian Farnan and his son - Ian having broken a metatarsal in a football match the other day. Their team was beaten 6-0 but oddly my son played really well and was praised by the coach. Maybe the fact that they were so far behind made the boys relax and enjoy their game.

I thought my days of standing in a bitterly cold wind were over, but it was freezing on the touchline. My back was killing me by the time I was got home. A cup of tea and a blast of Neil Young and I was much better.

Loser (continued)

Well I'm back from Newcastle, head held low. . .

So another week, another failed attempt at a book award. I did at least have a good time in Newcastle and Bloomsbury had booked me into a very nice hotel - the Malmaison on the Quayside.

Well done to Sally Nicholls for winning with Ways To Live Forever. What a nice person. And she did a very good job of selling her book to me. We are hopefully going to do a book-swap.

Before the event Sally and I were talking and joking about falling off the Carnegie Longlist. It wasn't until the introductions that I discovered that the other shortlisted author present - Berlie Doherty - has won the Carnegie Medal twice!

Thanks to Alec for hosting the event and for Eileen for organising it so well and to both of them for being so friendly and supportive. Thanks to everyone who voted for me and especially all those who came and talked to me before and after the event (including the girl who took the trouble to explain why the other stories in Uncle Montague weren't as good as Climb Not!). It was great to meet you all and maybe sometime I can come and visit your schools. It was fantastic to see a hall packed with so many enthusiastic and thoughtful readers.


Whilst I was visiting my dad I picked up a handful of Thor comics from a great store I still have from the 1970s. John Buscema was doing the pencils at this stage. He was a real workhorse of Marvel and goodness knows how he managed to do so many comics at the same time. I always admired his ability to draw the human figure in any position he chose and with such energy. This drawing of two running children is an example of Buscema at his best. . .