Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent

As the snow continues to fall, and commentators start looking through the records for the last time we had a cold spell like this, I'm reminded of January thirty-one years ago, the so-called winter of discontent in 1979, when the last Labour government began its final descent. This is an extract from my book Crisis? What Crisis?:

It was, to start with, bitterly cold, the coldest January since 1963. Weeks of frost, freezing fog, hailstorms, sleet and snow were followed in early February by a combination of a sudden thaw and heavy rain that produced widespread flooding. And then came yet more blizzards. In Scotland there were reports of beer freezing in pub cellars and of frozen waves in Oban harbour as the temperature plunged to –25º Celsius, while the whole country’s transport system struggled to cope.

Ted Heath had at least been lucky with the weather in 1973–74; Jim Callaghan was not. ‘Let those who possess industrial muscle or monopoly power resolve not to abuse their great strength,’ he had pleaded in his New Year’s message. ‘Individual greed and disregard for the well-being of others can undermine and divide our society.’ His call fell on deaf ears and the New Year started instead with strikes by the drivers of oil tankers and lorries. A series of one-day stoppages by rail workers and even by short-haul British Airways pilots added to the problems.

Within days there was a fuel shortage, with just one petrol station reported open in Liverpool and with prices inflating daily from the existing 75p a gallon up to £2 and even £3 in some places. The AA warned drivers not to undertake long journeys: ‘They probably won’t be able to get back, because the situation is grim in many areas.’ Flying pickets sealed off the ports to lorries coming from abroad and fears of imminent food shortages sparked a wave of panic buying, many taking advantage of the deep-freezes that had become part of every middle-class household over the last few years. Two million workers were threatened with being laid off if the strikes continued, pigs were reported to be resorting to cannibalism as food supplies to farms ran low, supermarkets began rationing essentials such as butter and sugar, and newspapers shrank in size as supplies of newsprint dwindled.

Callaghan missed the onset of all this, being out of the country on a six-day trip to a summit meeting of Western leaders, a meeting which – to add insult to injury – was being held on the agreeably warm Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. His absence was duly noted, generally with an appropriately British reference to the weather. ‘Britain could well be on the brink of a disaster that will make Ted’s three-day week seem like a golden age,’ raged the Sun. ‘Meanwhile Jim yawns lazily on his tropic isle...’

A Prophet in His Own Land

I've had the pleasure over the last year of working on a project with Harry Goodwin, the stills photographer on Top of the Pops for the first decade of that programme's existence.

Harry's 85 years old now, and it seems as though his time is finally come round with some serious recognition of his work. This is footage of a civic reception given in his honour by the mayor of his hometown, Manchester, where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award, witnessed by an impressive guest-list that included - as you can see - Alex Ferguson and the legendary Ken Dodd:



Harry's work on Top of the Pops was extraordinary. He photographed every artist who appeared on the show between 1964 and 1973, which means that - with the exception of Elvis - he has shots of every major rock, pop and soul act during the greatest years of the music. I don't know of any other photographer whose portfolio even approaches the same breadth and scale.

In the spring, some of this work will be on show in an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, before going on tour in Britain and abroad. And to accompany the exhibition - here's that project I mentioned - there will be a book:


Time to salute the career of Harry Goodwin? Oh yes.

Rowland S. Howard

I'm saddened to hear that Rowland S. Howard, formerly guitarist with the Birthday Party, has died.

Back at the start of the 1980s, the Birthday Party were the best live act in Britain, and I particularly remember their gigs at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, when they were working up the material that would appear on the Junkyard album. They were extraordinary events, carrying a genuine sense of danger. You were never quite sure that any given song would ever reach its end without collapsing under its own chaotic structure or without members of the band becoming involved in physical confrontations with the audience. Since we had never seen the Stooges, the Birthday Party were as close as we were likely to find in our generation.

Despite everything that Nick Cave went on to do, he's never come close to recapturing that moment, or the raw, passionate brilliance of that band: Mick Harvey, Tracey Pew, Phill Calvert and Rowland S. Howard.

Howard is the second of the classic line-up to die, following the demise of Pew in 1986.

This video for Shivers dates back before their move from Australia to England, when they were still known as the Boys Next Door. The song was written by Howard and links rather well to the glam era that I've been immersing myself in recently: the band got a lot wilder later on, but here their roots in Bowie, Lou Reed and Roxy Music are much more overt:

The Prettiest Stars II

And so the question arises: were Queen a glam act?

Well, not according to the All Music Guide, which claims 'they were at once too heavy and arty to be glam', though that suggests that the (presumably American) reviewer hasn't really got a grip of glam: nothing can be too arty.

But perhaps one should look back at the time they were releasing their first albums. And back then the critics did tend to lump them in, even if only on grounds of the group's name and Freddie Mercury's performances. The great Phil Hardy and Dave Laing, in their Encyclopedia of Rock, written in 1975 just after Bohemian Rhapsody had been released, referred to the way that 'earlier doubts that Queen were simply an androgynous glam-rock spin-off were dispelled.'

So let's look at Queen. This is their closest brush with glam, their Top of the Pops performance of Killer Queen:



And there's certainly something there: a camp little number delivered by a strutting Mercury flaunting his Biba-black fingernails.

But somehow it doesn't really cut the mustard. And to illustrate why I think it fails, here's some hardcore glam - Roxy Music performing Do the Strand on The Old Whistle Test (skip the first 1'20" if you're not interested in hearing why the programme was so damn awful most of the time):



Apart from anything else (wit, irony and so on) there's a key class difference in the lyrics. Killer Queen, as far as I can tell, is about a wealthy woman indulging her fantasies of prostitution; whereas Do the Strand, for all its name-dropping, is aspirational: when Ferry sings 'If you feel blue, look through Who's Who', you know that he's not actually in the book - he's dreaming of the impossible. His escape is also into fantasy, but there's no element here of slumming, as there is in Killer Queen. Roxy's position is closer to a literal version of the Oscar Wilde quote about how 'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'

Or to put it another way, Mercury's fur-coat gives the impression that he's part of the social world he's describing, while Ferry is lost in imagined rapture: 'Dance on moonbeams ... in furs or blue jeans.' As the All Music Guide goes on to say: 'they were hardly trashy enough to be glam.'

I know it's not exactly a conclusive argument, but at root there's simply a feeling: Queen weren't really very glam at all, were they?

The Prettiest Stars I

For various reasons, I've been revisiting the glories of glam rock recently. Not that it takes much to get me listening to the Spiders From Mars, Roxy Music and Cockney Rebel. That brief moment (the period from, say, David Bowie's single Starman in June 1972 through to Mott the Hoople's swansong Saturday Gigs in December 1974) remains the highpoint of British rock and roll, as far as I'm concerned: funny, camp, theatrical, pretentious - it was wonderful.

There's some dispute, though, about who was part of glam. So - for the sake of those with whom I've been disputing - here's some clips of the kind of thing that I think counts:

First, Steve Harley with the first incarnation of Cockney Rebel performing a live version of their debut single Sebastian on German television:



Sadly, it's not the full song (I love the fact that a band considered it reasonable to release a seven-minute song as a first single), but it's magnificent even in shortened format.

Then, slightly more arguably, there's the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, who often got considered as a hard rock act, though surely there's no argument that the drama of this performance of Jacques Brel's Next makes it part of glam? Is there?



Part of what I love about glam was that it was sold records. It was genuinely popular in a way that didn't always make sense. It could be as witty, as weird, as oddball as Sparks and still attract a crowd of screaming teenyboppers. Well, here are the boys making the point in 1975 as they try to deliver a version of the great single Amateur Hour:



And one of the other things I love about glam is that it inspired others to push themselves to new levels. Take Leo Sayer, for example (yes, I know I'm on much thinner ice here). Clearly not a glam star as such, but when he first appeared, the presentation was heavily influenced by the theatricality of the time. And while I know he's never been a critically approved act, if this performance existed in isolation, without the later career, would it not be considered comparable to some of, say, Jobriath's work?



Now to me, that's much closer to the spirit of glam than the likes of the Sweet and Mud, who frequently get associated with the term. Not that I've got anything against either of those bands, mind - it's just that glam wasn't simply a question of dressing up for Top of the Pops: the obsession with style came from within the music, not as a coat of facepaint afterwards. Oh, and the subject of the song draws from the well of glam.

Sherlock Holmes

While I relax from writing for a bit, I've been indulging myself by reading (yet again) some Sherlock Holmes stories. I've been reading these for the last forty years, and they never disappoint.

On this occasion, I'm aided by a fine new book, The Sherlock Holmes Companion: An Elementary Guide, written by Daniel Smith and published by Aurum Press. It's a beautiful piece of work, with fabulous illustrations, including this film poster from 1922:

At only £20, it's a perfect gift for the Sherlockian in your life. And if you don't have a Sherlockian in your life, then maybe that means there's an opening there for you.

Brewer's - a termination

I'm still not entirely clear what's happening to the great old imprints of Chambers and Brewer's, as their parent company seeks to save money, but my brief involvement appears to be at an end. Earlier in the year I signed a contract to produce a book for Brewer's, but I have this morning received formal notification that the contract has been terminated.

It's a great shame, not merely because I thought it could have been a good book, but much more importantly because it displays little faith in the future of the imprint. Brewer's has played a central part of the literary life of the country for nearly 140 years - it would be dreadful if such a fine legacy were to be thrown away now.

Rock and Roll in South Wales

The exhibition of Harry Hammond's photographs is moving on from the O2 Centre, as it starts touring the country. And from next Saturday, it will be on view in the Millennium Centre in Cardiff.

Petitioning

Chambers are one of the great names in publishing, and they've been based in Scotland for the best part of two centuries. More recently, they took an even more cherished imprint, Brewer's, under their wing in Edinburgh.

Now their parent company, Hachette UK, wants to close down the Edinburgh office, which will see a large number of staff laid off, and the identities of Chambers and Brewer's diluted.

I have a personal interest, since I have a contract to write a book for Brewer's, but even beyond that it seems to me the move by Hachette is another symbol of the growing homogenization of the publishing industry, and it's at least worth registering one's opposition.

So do feel free to sign this petition calling on Hachette to reconsider their decision.

IMDb

I'm much amused to be told that I now have my very own page on the excellent IMBd site.

I use IMBd on an almost daily basis, since it's one of the best online reference sources, but as I don't subscribe, I've never understood the percentage figures they quote at the top of each page. However, no doubt it's very good news that I'm up 147% in popularity this week. Whatever it means.

The Summer of 2009

It’s been an awful long time since I posted anything here (though strangely the world appears to have continued turning in my absence).

The reason for the prolonged absence is that I’ve been extraordinarily busy writing a couple of books, and I find it increasingly hard to write in more than one medium at a time. I get so involved in the project I’m on – not to mention the day-job of writing games – that everything else takes back-seat. Consequently I’ve been neglecting everything else, from emails to blogs.

The first book that will emerge from this period of work is a sequel to Halfway to Paradise: The Birth of British Rock, which came out last year telling the story of rock and roll in Britain from 1954-64. The new book, due out from V&A Publishing next Spring, is My Generation: The Glory Years of British Rock, covering 1964-74. It’s centred on the photography of Harry Goodwin, the resident stills photographer on Top of the Pops for its first decade, including this shot of David Bowie and Mick Ronson miming to Starman in 1972:

Put together by the usual team – design by Isobel Gillan, editing by Clare Collinson, all under the direction of Mark Eastment – this is going to be a fine-looking book, I think. And it’ll be accompanied by an exhibition at the V&A, which will then tour around the country.

Talking of exhibitions, the photos of the great Harry Hammond are currently on show as part of the British Music Experience at the O2 Centre in London. I haven’t been to see it yet, but no doubt it’s very wonderful indeed. That exhibition will also be touring the country shortly – dates to be confirmed, but Cardiff next, I believe.

Around the same time as My Generation comes out, there will appear (I hope) my sequel to Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s. Predictably, then, it’ll be about Britain during the Thatcher years. I’ve only just submitted the first draft of the text to my editor, Graham Coster at Aurum, so there will be more work to be done before it’s all wrapped up, but it’s been a major undertaking by my standards, the longest book I’ve ever written.

And finally, to wrap up my current book production, I’m signed up to do a book with Brewer’s. But there are upheavals at the parent company that owns this venerable imprint, so I’m not sure how that’s going to work out.

Social Living

My attention has been drawn to a website I didn't previously know, called livingsocial.com, which seems to be a site for readers to talk about books. Anyway, there are some very kind reviews of my book Crisis? What Crisis?, so I thought I ought to mention these splendid people and give them every encouragement.