Songbook (5 page)

Suicide's ‘Frankie Teardrop' is ten and a half minutes of genuinely terrifying industrial noise, a sort of aural equivalent of
Eraserhead
. Like David Lynch's film, it conveys a chilling, bleak, monochrome dystopia, full of
blood-curdling shrieks and clangs, although I seem to remember that the movie offered the odd moment of respite, an occasional touch of bizarre and malformed hope, whereas ‘Frankie Teardrop' offers none at all. Here's a cheerful, bowdlerized version of the story: Frankie works two jobs, but even then he can't make ends meet, so one night, in despair, he goes back home, murders his wife and children, shoots himself and ends up in Hell. I would, as you might suspect, be lying if I told you that the ten minutes flew by. If you haven't heard it and you still wish to, set an evening aside, make sure you're not alone in the room (experiencing the song through headphones, incidentally, will almost certainly result in hospitalization) and take the following day off work. Teenage Fanclub's ‘Ain't That Enough', on the other hand, is a three-minute blast of Byrdsian pop, packed with sunshine and hooks and harmonies and good will. I like the Teenage Fanclub song better.

Well, of course I would. It's more likeable. It's got a tune and everything, and on the whole I prefer songs with tunes. ‘Frankie Teardrop' is in all sorts of ways an extraordinary piece of work, but I have no use for it now; I listened to it once upon a time, when I was in my twenties and my life was different, but I probably haven't played it for a good
fifteen years, and I doubt whether I'll ever play it again. (I didn't even listen to it in order to write this, and didn't feel that I needed to. Believe me, the memory has remained vivid.) I don't want to be terrified by art any more.

It's a strange critical phenomenon that only works of art that are ‘edgy', or ‘scary', or ‘dangerous', are regarded as in any way noteworthy. In my newspaper today, there is an interview with the filmmaker Todd Solondz, whose film
Happiness
was about paedophilia and provided, it says here, ‘a lacerating insight into the hypocrisy of the American middle classes' – an insight I missed, I'm afraid, when I saw the film. There's an interview with a band called British Sea Power, who say that ‘there's so much more you can do than just write songs and sing them' and stare psychotically into the camera as they are being photographed. There's a piece about the Jack the Ripper film
From Hell
, which is headlined ‘Danger: menace at work'. And a rapper called Bubba Sparxxx is taken to task by a journalist because ‘talking about your rural roots isn't exactly edgy, is it?' (Well, no. But that, it seems to me, is a flaw inherent in most conversational topics, unless you are heroically single-minded about it, and wax lyrical about the Nazis or terrorist atrocities every time you go out to dinner. Talking is, by and large, one of the safer things one can do.)

There are, I suspect, two reasons why so much critical interest is excited by edginess or danger. The first is that critics have to read a lot of books, or see a lot of films, or listen to a lot of music, most of which is bland and indistinguishable, and so anyone who makes a record which features a chainsaw, or a film that runs backwards for twelve hours, is immediately and perhaps understandably praised – in most cases, as weary readers quickly learn if they attempt to share the enthusiasms of their newspaper's arts pages, overpraised. The second is that reviewing – especially music reviewing – is, for the most part, a young person's game, and young people tend not to have had a great deal of life experience. Not only have they not lived very much (which is why they tend to get very excited about anyone with a whiff of hard-drug use about them – hard-drug use is frequently misinterpreted by rock critics as a valuable life experience), but they do possibly the safest job there is to do. Indeed, as most of them get their CDs sent to them through the post, CDs they then listen to on their home stereo before filing their reviews via email – they do not even run the risk of being knocked down by a bus. Who wouldn't, in these circumstances, get wildly overstimulated by an artist who is expressly trying to liven them up a bit?

Me, I need no convincing that life is scary. I'm forty-four, and it has got quite scary enough already – I don't need anyone trying to jolt me out of my complacency. Friends have started to die of incurable diseases, leaving loved ones, in some cases young children, behind. My son has been diagnosed with a severe disability, and I don't know what the future holds for him. And, of course, at any moment there is the possibility that some lunatic will fly a plane into my house, or a nuclear power plant, or attempt to sprinkle something into our water supply or our Underground trains that will turn us all black as our kidneys shrivel up in our bodies. So let me find complacency and safety where I can, and please forgive me if I don't want to hear ‘Frankie Teardrop' right now.

‘All these years later and Suicide still feels like a shot in the head,' an enthusiastic reviewer remarked when their first album was re-released; a couple of decades ago, that would have been enough to make me want to buy it. (‘A shot in the head! Wow! Even The Clash only felt like a kick!') Now, however, I have come to the conclusion that I don't want to be shot in the head, and so I will avoid any work of art that sets to re-create that particular experience for me. It's a peculiarly modern phenomenon, this obsession with danger. And, in the end, it's impossible not to conclude that
it has been borne out of peacetime and prosperity and over-education. Would the same critic have told someone coming back from the Somme that a piece of music ‘feels like a shot in the head', one wonders? And if he did, would he really have expected the chap to go charging off to his local music emporium?

It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can't we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer? Please? Just every now and then, when we've had a really shitty day? I need somewhere to run to, now more than ever, and songs like ‘Ain't That Enough' is where I run. ‘We are all Frankies', Suicide concluded at the end of their
magnum opus
, but they didn't mean it, really, unless they were dafter than they let on. (In what sense have we killed our families and then turned the gun on ourselves, even metaphorically?) And if we were all Frankies, what would we rather listen to? Blood-curdling re-creations of our miserable and unbearable existence, or something that offered a brief but precious temporary respite? That's the real con of shock-art: it makes out that it's democratic, but it's actually only for those who can afford it. And some of us, as we get older,
simply find that we don't have that much courage to spare any more. Good luck to you if you have, because it means that you have managed to avoid more or less everything that life has to throw at you, but don't try to make me feel morally or intellectually inferior.

I fell in love with the USA when I was very young, seven or eight. There was an American kid at my school, and not only did he have toys the likes of which we had never seen (he could make his own toy soldiers, for God's sake, and he
could just about hit Saturn with his plastic rocket-launcher), but also he could swivel his eyeballs the wrong way round by pressing hard on his eyelids. Now, the USA sometimes gets a mixed press here in Britain, and there are plenty of people who would find these twin triggers darkly significant: well of course, they'd say, if you're going to glamorize freaks and fetishize weapons, then America is bound to exert a fascination, but for me, there was nothing sinister about either my friend's toys or his talents. It was all about superior American technology (the eyeballs) and superior American entertainment values (the rocket-launcher), and I was left with the indelible impression that just about everything of any interest was better on the other side of the Atlantic.

I didn't visit the US until the mid-seventies, when my father and his family moved to Wilton, Connecticut. I was sixteen, and I lived in a country which, looking back on it now, seemed to be striving for the ambience and amenities of communist Poland rather than those of New York. A series of strikes had resulted in a series of power cuts, which meant that evenings were frequently spent eating sandwiches and reading by candlelight. We had three television channels and no TV during the day anyway, apart from the occasional educational programme about
mathematics or the life cycle of the salmon. Our food was famously awful (even our junk food was bad junk food), and you couldn't find anywhere that stayed open much later than eleven p.m. Shops were closed on Sundays. American movies took between six months and a year to crawl to British cinemas, and we had no real film industry of our own. We were working a three-day week. The war had been over for thirty years, but there seemed no real reason why we weren't spending the night sleeping in Tube stations anyway – at least it would have given us something to look forward to.

And in the middle of all this, I got on a plane and flew to New York. That first trip, I wanted to do very little apart from watch daytime TV and go to the shops, and my apparent indolence drove my father crazy: he wanted to take me places and show me things, but he had lived abroad for some years, and was, I think, unaware that his native country had become quite so cheerless; the last time he had lived in England, it was swinging, in the immortal words of Roger Miller, like a pendulum do, but the pendulum had now come to an abrupt and sorry stop. I suspect that any sixteen-year-old English kid who visited the States for the first time during the mid-seventies spent their entire trip watching daytime reruns of
Green Acres
and eating exotic
breakfast cereals; to venture any further would have resulted in instant death from over-stimulation. No one, of course, will ever die from over-stimulation in Connecticut. And yet most inhabitants of that sedate state would be surprised to learn just how many thrills it had to offer an English teenager back then. I'm not talking about the coastline or the trees, which were charming but not dissimilar to home; I'm talking about Sam Goody's and Kmart, both of which I visited almost daily, and both of which offered unimagined and inexhaustible delights.

My first novel,
High Fidelity
, was about a guy whose devotion to rock 'n' roll has, in various ways, blighted and retarded his life, and it is probably fair to say that a lot of very important research for that book (in other words, a lot of blighting and retarding) was done during that first trip, twenty years before I started writing it. I didn't know so much about popular music back then, but I had certainly exhausted the potential of my home-town record store. I had never seen a good three-quarters of the records in my dad's local Sam Goody's, however, and I came out with armfuls of improbably priced soul and blues albums. (The things that Sam Goody valued at $1.99 were worth an awful lot more to me.)

It wasn't just the record stores, of course. I was taken to
houses which contained bumper pool tables in the basement – we didn't have bumper pool at home. I was taken to McDonald's, and we didn't have that either. Nor did we have ice, on our ponds or in our drinks, or good pizzas, or eight-track stereos in our cars, or swimming pools in our back gardens, or pastrami, or sandwiches three inches thick, or shopping malls, or multiplex cinemas, or La-Z-Boys, or hot dogs in our sports stadia. And, yes, I know it was the comfortable, middle-class Connecticut suburbs I had fallen for, and that millions of Americans were poor, and endured environments that were ugly and brutal and hard. But I was a middle-class kid, and I lived in the comfortable English suburbs, and they weren't anything like this. It wasn't as if we had any diverting equivalents, either. We didn't have great pasta and great ice-cream, like the Italians, or great beaches and great soccer, like the Spanish; in the 1970s we were trying to live the American life, but without any of the things that make an American life bearable. What we did have was history, and this, apparently, was enough to make us feel superior. Well, it didn't do the trick for me. I would cheerfully have swapped England's entire heritage – Stonehenge, Stratford, Wordsworth, Buckingham Palace, the lot – for the ability to watch quiz shows in the morning.

My father's friends had a son called Danny, who was older than me, maybe twenty or twenty-one, and he had long hair and a moustache; he looked exactly like Billy Crudup in
Almost Famous
. Danny loved his music, and the music he was listening to when I went round to his house for the first time was the live J. Geils Band album,
Full House
. I'd never heard of them, and I'd never heard anything like them; in those days, before they had a big pop hit with ‘Centerfold', they played white-boy R&B, like The Stones in 1965, but much louder and much faster, with a berserk irreverence and an occasionally terrifying intensity. On the live album, Peter Wolf, the lead singer, shouted out funny, weird or incomprehensible things in between songs: ‘On the licking stick, Mr Magic Dick!' ‘This used to be called “Take Out Your False Teeth Mama . . . I Want To Sssssuck On Your Gums”.' And something that sounds like ‘are yougonnagetitmoodoogetitgoomoogetitmoodoogoomoodoomoogetitalldowngetitallrightgetitoutofsightandgetit-downbaby?' The first thing you hear on the record is a solid slab of crowd noise, whistles and cheers and screams, and then a shouted and very un-English introduction from an MC: ‘Are you ready to get down? I said, are you ready for some rock and roll? Let's hear it for the J. Geils Band!'

And then, straight away (no tuning up or mumbled ‘How
you doing's), the band tears into ‘First I Look At The Purse', an old Smokey Robinson song that he wrote for a Motown group called The Contours, and even old Smokey Robinson songs seemed to come from a parallel universe. The ones I knew were sweet and sad, like ‘Tracks Of My Tears' or ‘Tears Of A Clown', but this one was straightforwardly nasty – the message of the lyric was that any man who cared about how a woman looked or what she was like was a fool. ‘I don't care if she waddles like a duck or talks with a lisp / I still think I'm a good lover if the dollar bills are crisp'. At the end of the song the band plays faster and faster and Wolf sings faster and faster until the whole thing blurs into a mess of noise, and then the audience roars as if greeting the winning goal in the World Cup Final. (And this was the opening number, the loosener, the warm-up – by the end of side two things start to get really rowdy.) To me back then, this, not Tamla Motown, was The Sound of Young America – loud, baffling, exotic, cool, wild. It comes from the same place as Kramer in
Seinfeld
, and ‘Surfin' Bird', and ‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow', and James Brown being wrapped in a cape and led off stage before bounding back to the microphone, and Mohammed Ali's boasts, and the insane celebrations when a contestant won a lawnmower on
The Price Is Right
.
In our quiz shows, people smiled when they won. Not always, though.

I eventually saw the J. Geils Band for myself, some six years later, but I saw them in Hammersmith rather than Detroit, where
Full House
was recorded, so the atmosphere was respectful rather than insane, and, though they were soon to become much more successful, they were past their peak. And I saw them on 12 May 1979, the night that Mrs Thatcher was elected Prime Minister for the first time. We drove back to college just as old Britain was turning into modern Britain – ironically, a dour and tacky version of America, with the McDonald's and the shopping malls, but without the volume or the delirium or the showmanship. ‘I'm so bored with the USA', The Clash were singing on stage every night around that time, and, though we all sang along with them, it wasn't true, not really. We were only bored with our obsession, and that's a different thing entirely.