Thursday 15th April 2010

You’ll often find me with my nose in a book – and sometimes I like to read them, too. I’ve just finished Nick Kent’s wonderful seventies memoir, Apathy for the Devil. For our younger readers, Kent was the dark prince of that decade’s rock journalism, back in the NME’s heyday: boyfriend of Chrissie Hynde, playmate of Keith Richards and Iggy Pop, confidante of Led Zeppelin, early member of what became the Sex Pistols... and eventually, and somewhat less gloriously, homeless junkie. The book’s a magnificent reminder of a pre-corporate time when pop music was in the hands – more or less equal in numbers and influence, it seems – of visionaries and barbarians, before the bean-counters and image-makers took over, and when it all seemed to matter so much more than it does now.

The events of Kent’s book intersect occasionally with those of a couple of excellent rock biographies. I can recommend Mick Wall’s When Giants Walked the Earth, about the afore-mentioned Zeppelin, despite the irritating second-person passages addressed to members of the band and their manager, attempting, I suppose, to reflect the spirit and vernacular of the times. It’s particularly good on their disastrous, drug-fuelled descent in the latter half of the seventies, and the terrible decisions it prompted, such as the hiring of a fully paid-up underworld sadist as part of their security team, and putting the organisers of the Knebworth festival out of business. It’s that visionaries and barbarians thing again... It’s fascinating, too, on the shift in power within the Zeppelin camp, away from Page and towards Plant, who’s the reason why the generally well-received O2 reunion seems to be the end of the story.

Philip Norman’s John Lennon: the Life comes from the author of Shout!, the definitive work on the Hey Jude hitmakers, so is as thorough and illuminating as you’d expect. The deleterious effects of drug consumption on Lennon are well-documented, but interestingly – going back to Apathy for the Devil for a moment – Nick Kent puts forward the theory that LSD consumption put Lennon on the path away from the often violent and vicious behaviour of his youth and young manhood, making him more reflective and inward-looking.

I’ve allowed a little light fiction to come my way recently, too. Black Swan Green is by David Mitchell – not the comedian, but an excellent young English novelist. My friend Pat recommended the book, and assures me that it paints a highly recognisable picture of life at a comprehensive school for a thirteen-year-old boy. As one of life’s non-joiners-in, I can’t quite say it resonated with me in the same way, but it’s highly amusing nonetheless. I’m going to start another of his – David Mitchell’s, that is, not Pat’s, he hasn’t written a novel yet as far as I know, but he’s a damn fine musician, and I recommend his album Gauche, available here – novels, Cloud Atlas, as soon as I can prise it away from my wife.

Failing that, I’ll start on Quicksilver, the first part of Neal Stephenson’s genre-bending Baroque Cycle sequence of novels. I’m reading it in the wrong order, having started with the second volume, The Confusion. The latter is part-historical romance, part-adventure yarn and part-learned scientific treatise; the blurb on Quicksilver mentions, among other things, sex, death (these two concepts being described by Tim on stage a while back as the subject matter of most, if not all, Sun Machine songs), piracy, alchemy and madness, so what’s not to like?

Donna Tartt was born four years later than Stephenson, but that seems a poor excuse for having produced only two novels to his nine. But what novels! The Little Friend is a southern gothic horror story whose central mystery remains unsolved. Tartt places her words with lapidary precision and draws you into an eerie, fever-dream world of ante-bellum gentility gone badly awry and inbred, drugged-up redneck brutality. Slow going at first, but it makes up for it with a climax as breathless as you could hope for.

J.G. Ballard was, of course, a writer with a unique, intense personal vision of society and mankind, and where they’re heading, which is why we have the useful adjective ‘Ballardian’. At times in Millennium People, his penultimate novel, you feel he is going through the motions a little – just being, you know, Ballardian – but it’s impossible not to love and admire the deep humanity that resides just beneath the surface of corruption and deviancy in his books.

They say that W.C. Fields kept a flask of whisky on him wherever he went in case he saw a snake, which he also kept on him. Well, whenever life gets me down I reach for P.G. Wodehouse, and also when life doesn’t get me down. I’m approaching the end (yet again; goodness knows how many times I’ve read it) of Life at Blandings, a compendium of the novels Something Fresh, Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather. They were first published, respectively, in 1915, 1929 and 1933, but of course nothing changes in Wodehouse’s universe; scarabs, pigs and manuscripts must be stolen, aunts pacified, sweethearts reconciled. If you think that sounds a trifle cloying in these days when anything that desires to be lauded must be ‘edgy’ or ‘dark’, then let me refer you to the acerbic, gimlet-eyed Evelyn Waugh, who said, ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’

Now, time to restore the tissues with a spot...

Russ