Sex Pistols File

Ray Stevenson (editor) Sex Pistols File (1978)
I borrowed this from some kid at school and spent the next couple of weeks absorbing more or less every last detail. With hindsight, I'm not even sure I had any of their records at that point and may only have known them from Sid's versions of Something Else and C'mon Everybody. By the time I had enough of a disposable income to buy my own copy, it had vanished from the shelves and the moment had passed. Now catching up, four decades later, I'm astonished to realise that I vaguely knew the guy who put the book together. My friend Carl came to know Ray Stevenson fairly well in later years and so I met him down the pub on a couple of occasions. I knew he had one hell of a reputation as having taken many of the best known photographs of the whole punk era, and I vaguely recall he had some great stories, but somehow the penny didn't quite drop beyond something fairly basic about my probably having seen his work in Sounds.

Well, fuck me.

The book is a scrappy splatter of Ray's photographs along with articles and interviews from the papers arranged in roughly chronological order so as to provide a pleasantly impressionistic summary of the rise and fall of the Pistols, and one which - oddly enough - seems to work better than the usual biographical narratives through the image and noise being preserved without any dominant authorial voice getting in the way. So it reads now just as it did then, from my perspective, as the fortunes of a bunch of older kids who were trying to make things a bit more fun and interesting than they had been for some time. Maybe it's not so much that I lost sight of what this book did for me, but I'd forgotten how much of it came from this thing. This was where I learned that sometimes it's necessary, even positive, to point out when something is dull or stupid or needs to be replaced by something better. We seem to have forgotten this of late, at least judging by the number of times I've had some self-appointed gatekeeper set me right about adults dressed as characters from children's television shows, or insisting that I really should try with such and such a fucking Yes album because the musicianship blah blah blah...

I don't really care that Rotten sells butter and votes Donald, and I don't really care that they were a boy band. They taught me the joys of saying no, and unpopular opinions, and not turning into your parents, and never having to say you're sorry. I sort of wish I'd realised this and had been able to directly thank Ray Stevenson when I had the opportunity, but never mind. It probably would have come across as slightly weird.

This one, in all sincerity, changed my life.

1985

Anthony Burgess 1985 (1978)
Hanging out on social media as I often do, there have been a couple of occasions of right-wing shitheads proclaiming that Orwell's 1984 was a warning against the evils of socialism, an observation made with some frequency during Donald Trump's first year in the hot seat, back when his Proud Boys were regularly firing up those tiki torches in protest against political correctness and the like; and it was an observation usually made within minutes of someone else pointing out that Adolf Hitler was a socialist, so it was the rest of us who were the real Nazis. Naturally, having read both Orwell's 1984 and his collected essays, I rolled my eyes.

Anyway, while the idea of socialism being the same as national socialism is obviously bollocks - the ethnic or cultural exclusivity of nationalism being in direct contradiction of socialist ideals, it unfortunately turns out the Trumpanzees were sort of right about 1984, albeit possibly for the wrong reasons; and I'm not sure how I missed it. Orwell, like Burgess - and me too, quite frankly - considered himself a socialist who despaired at the more didactic tendencies of the left, those prioritising ideology over people and whose ruthless zealotry had ultimately led to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. So while 1984 describes an oppressive totalitarian state, it's a satire quite clearly extrapolated from everything which kept Orwell awake at night back in 1948.

Burgess' response is 1985, a book divided into two complementary parts. The first comprises essays analysing Orwell's novel in comparison with how well socialism has been coping here in the real world. Burgess concludes that 1984 was not only lousy in a predictive sense - as the majority of science-fiction tends to be - but wasn't even particularly great as satire, being riddled with contradictions and ideas which seem hysterical in relation to that which inspired them. His point is that 1984 never happened, and couldn't happen, and his argument, as set out in the first half of this book, is convincing, illuminating, and extraordinarily perceptive - possibly one of the most insightful summaries of the politics of the last century that I've read.

Unfortunately, the second part of the argument employs a fictional narrative to make its point, whatever the hell that might be. It seems to be Burgess rewriting 1984 as he believes it should have been done, but as a satire based on his own era, specifically the late seventies. The elements of parody and exaggeration are either well done, or at least make sense in the context of what 1985 is trying to do, but being as the subject is socialism pushed to a ludicrous ideological extreme by the sort of wankers who presently hang around on Twitter policing the perpetrators of wrongthink, it comes across like a fucking Two Ronnies sketch about all those unions going on strike over the spoons in the staff canteen, coupled with the usual scaremongering about Islam. Were someone to commission Richard Littlejohn to write a satirical summary of left-wing politics in Britain in the seventies, I don't actually know if it would be much different aside from the quality of the writing. 1985 is not entirely without worth, and the overeducated street gangs are sort of amusing, somewhat harking back to A Clockwork Orange, even if the impression they leave seems to rest upon the idea that everything would be better if we all just made the effort to listen to Beethoven and read a bit more Shakespeare.

Having myself been in a labour union for two decades, and having come to conclude that said labour union didn't always have the best interests of its membership at heart, I see where Burgess is coming from because no system is immune to corruption from nest-feathering infiltrators; but ramping up the satire to the point at which it begins to resemble a Franklin cartoon in The Sun doesn't seem like a great solution; unless it's actually a parody of 1984 which targets what Burgess sees as Orwell's essentially conservative rhetoric, although even in such a case, it's still barely readable. So it's a game of two halves, Brian, one of them wonderful - perhaps even essential - and the other, a waste of everyone's time and coincidentally representative of exactly the sort of hyperbole which helped get Thatcher into power.

Unfortunately, even though everything Burgess says regarding 1984 is spot on, Orwell nevertheless wrote the significantly better book.

Chapped Lips

Peter Hope Chapped Lips (2021)
You may recall Peter Hope as vocalist of the Box, or from any of his more recent expeditions on the fringes of music where jazz, noise, and blues turn out to be different expressions of more or less the same thing. Chapped Lips, which we should probably term an existential monologue for want of a better description, seems to be a variant means of communicating that which was explored on recent albums by Hope's Exploding Mind. What that might be possibly depends on what the listener can hear - or the reader discerns in this case - but it's one of those deals where there's really no reliable shorthand for what happens. Simply you have to read the thing and get through to the other side, although helpfully this edition also comes with a CDR of the author reading the text in full, which you could probably call an audiobook if you felt so inclined.

Viewed from one angle, Chapped Lips seems to be Hope's assessment of his own place within the broader span of human existence, and of his own existence, and whether any of it means or amounts to anything - narrated as a stream of consciousness illustrated with metaphors and particularly tactile images. The impression garnered from both reading and listening is deceptively surreal - possibly I mean hyperreal - and vaguely hallucinatory, despite that this train of thought follows a very specific, directed route with very little which seems random or accidental.

the fat man was back in the pool. he had an inflatable hippo penis sticking out from between his legs. he was pink and naked and chuckled loudly as he massaged and waved it around. there was a woman, two floors up, shouting, in what was probably Ukranian, with a coiled extension cable and a glowing three bar electric fire balanced on the handrail. and then the fat man and his penis floated apart.

There are other passages which better exemplify the main theme or themes of Chapped Lips, but I'm not sure they work in isolation. This territory can only be directly experienced and resists summary.

On a purely technical level, in the event of such observations being any use to anyone, being reasonable familiar with Peter Hope's recorded works, I knew this was at least going to be interesting. However, I'm genuinely astonished at the level of accomplishment here, the sophistication and subtlety of what is communicated. I'm not sure material operating by such degrees of introspection - or this structurally experimental for that matter - is particularly easy to pull off without it seeming like a random assemblage - see also the notion that Burroughs' cut-ups were simple because any kid can take a pair of scissors to a newspaper; but this is a masterpiece which communicates almost by means of its own language, hence the immersive quality by which the reader acclimates to that language.

Thirty or so pages is just about the right length for a narrative of such density, and is additionally conducive to being read again and again, as is probably necessary; but hopefully, on the strength of this, there may be more to come.

Spiral Scratch

Gary Russell Spiral Scratch (2005)
One thing I took from Harold T. Wilkins' Flying Saucers Uncensored, and probably the only thing, was that I should probably get around to reading Spiral Scratch. Wilkins' book refers to a folk tale about a couple of mysterious children who turned up in rural Suffolk back in the twelfth century. They spoke a language no-one could understand and had green skin, so the legend has it, and I recalled this particular piece of Forteana from the opening pages of Spiral Scratch, a Who novel I'd started three or four times but never actually read beyond the first chapter; and the reason I'd never got around to reading it was because it can be unfortunately difficult to get excited about anything written by Gary Russell.

As Doctor Who obsessives doubtless recall, the television show went a bit wobbly back in the second half of the eighties, resulting in Colin Baker being unceremoniously replaced by Sylvester McCoy as lead actor, meaning Baker never had a proper on-screen swan song. Unsurprisingly there have therefore been a number of fan-generated versions of Baker's final story, thus attempting to send off the sixth version of the character with a bit more dignity than Sylvester McCoy in a blonde wig. Craig Hinton and Chris McKeon took a shot at it with Time's Champion which, as I recall, was pretty bloody awful, and there's also this.

Spiral Scratch is one of those alternate realities deals. Something called the Lamprey is consuming variant universes and only Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford stand in its way, with chapters all named after songs by the Buzzcocks, which is at least less obnoxious than the usual roll call of Morrissey b-sides. It's not the greatest thing I've ever read, although it's probably amongst Russell's better efforts. His prose tends towards workmanlike descriptions of occurrences one can imagine happening on the telly without too great a stretch of the imagination. There's a little more reliance on sentiment than I generally enjoy, and too many nominal sentences as bloody usual, but Russell is far from the worst offender in such respects, and almost gets away with it here. If the story was a little more coherent he probably would have got away with it, but it's a little too easy to lose track of who is doing what and why. Oddly, the end result is vaguely reminiscent of Moorcock's occasionally free range or otherwise impressionist narratives, which is no bad thing, and the dialogue is likewise not without a certain wit.

So it's nothing amazing, but neither is it irredeemably terrible, and the main problem is that it avoids irredeemable terribility for more pages than you really need when the best that can be said is that it's approximately readable. I've read better, but I've read much, much worse, so I suppose that's a recommendation on some level.