Taking Candy From a Dog

Vic Templar Taking Candy From a Dog (2010)
I lived in the general vicinity of the Medway towns from 1984 to 1989, and the first thing which struck me about the locality was that everyone seemed to be doing something. I don't mean doing something in the sense of a couple of local bands and maybe a bloke who wrote a fanzine. There seemed to be hundreds of bands in Medway, three or four gigs in different parts of town every night - most of them decent, a few of them fucking astonishing - and a house brick randomly launched from the upper deck of a bus heading along Chatham High Street would, nine times out of ten, most likely hospitalise someone who'd written a book, or at least published a collection of poetry. None of this would be particularly significant were it not for the high quality of this creative wellspring, and how little of it seemed affected, not even the self-conscious acknowledgement of itself as a scene.

Of the bands, my favourite - favourite in so much as that I still listen to them - were probably the Dentists, and this guy was their drummer. I knew him at the time, if not well, and was vaguely aware of him having had a couple of things published through Billy Childish's Hangman imprint. I should have picked them up when I had the chance, but never mind. I had a feeling Vic would probably have something interesting to say, but I hadn't considered the possibility that it would be this good.

Taking Candy from a Dog is an autobiographical novel fondly remembering details of childhood and growing up in Kent in the seventies, but because memory cheats, because it's often difficult to get all pieces of the jigsaw puzzle back into a shape which makes sense, it's the autobiography of both the author and his sister's sock monkey, a wartime gift from an American GI whose interjections and commentary still carry a faint trace of the Sammy Davies Jr. So, in other words, there's wiggle room allowing for some things which, although true, didn't actually happen.

It could have gone horribly wrong, ending up as Peter Kay chortling over Curly Wurlies. Andrew Collins similarly wrote an autobiographical account of growing up in the seventies in what was a fairly happy home, but I found his Where Did It All Go Right? cloying and a little too pleased with itself. Templar, on the other hand, gets the balance absolutely spot on, perhaps through a focus which relishes the sheer weirdness of childhood without really trying to play it for laughs, at least not as an end in itself.

Yogurt is a game that Kes invented. The rules are very simple. You can't play it in your shoes though. The reason is you have to pull your socks so they hang off your feet like a panting dog's tongue. You then raise your toes in the air so that you're standing on your heels. You then walk around on your heels saying 'yogurt, yogurt, yogurt' in a voice from the back of your throat, like a Dalek. That's it, I told you yogurt was a simple game, didn't I?

There's also the cargo cult re-enactment of Wimbledon undertaken one summer, kicking off with someone playing the theme tune on their cassette recorder, taped off the telly - one of a whole string of sporting reconstructions with various sisters, friends, relatives competing as celebrities of the day.

'In comes John Noakes, off of his long run up, looking for his third wicket of the match. He bowls to Jean Jacques Burnell, who pulls it over mid wicket into Eric's fence for four.'

Most authors writing this sort of thing tend to spend half the time digging the reader in the ribs and grinning, but Templar's deadpan delivery combined with his attention to details - regardless of how much sense they'll make to the rest of us, results in something both profoundly moving and funny without actually cracking jokes. In short, he actually captures, right there on the page, the flavour of growing up in a certain era, and I recognise a ton of my own formative years in here despite the furniture having been completely different. Taking Candy from a Dog serves to illustrate how the most powerful, even profound statements can often be the least assuming, words softly spoken and well meant without the need for a full theatrical production.

...and extra points for remembering that the adult reaction to the music of the Sex Pistols was mostly amusement. It was about time someone actually took the trouble to point that out.

Old Records Never Die

Eric Spitznagel Old Records Never Die (2016)
I vaguely remember a point at which I made a vow to avoid the traditional mid-life crisis, mainly due to how terminally wanky it always looked on other people. That said, having recently passed the age of fifty, I'm aware of having spent a lot of time rummaging around in my youth. I've never been very good at throwing anything away, and I've always been fairly organised with a tendency to assemble the detritus of being alive according to something resembling a system, and so I've used up much of the last couple of years working on a forensic reconstruction of my own existence, something I will eventually self-publish purely for the sake of a point of focus towards which I can work. I've been transcribing material from old diaries, notebooks, correspondence, and even copies of spoken tape letters I've sent to people. I don't think of this exercise as nostalgia because frankly, most of my life has been disappointing up until recent times - not anything I'd wish to relive - and at the risk of sounding boastful, my life has been generally fucking amazing since about 2011; so it's more like a mapping project, something which answers the question, how did I get here? My past occurred so long ago in subjective terms that it may as well have happened to someone else, which is why I find it so fascinating now.

For reasons which clearly relate to the above, albeit by means I find difficult to define with any degree of clarity, I've tended to steer clear of books by Nick Hornby, notably High Fidelity, or things in that spirit: Stuart Maconie and Peter Kay chortling over Wacky Races and Curly Wurly. I may be wrong about Hornby, but it seems sappy and sentimental to me, even slightly unhealthy. The closest I came was reading Andrew Collins' excruciatingly twee Where Did It All Go Right?, one of the worst books I've ever read and yet another drearily self-deprecating account of growing up in the seventies and having an hilarious punk hairstyle for a bit and failing to shag some girl and listening to the Smiths, because it's always the fucking Smiths.

Writing about music, or specifically about one's love of music, is an inevitably subjective undertaking because it would be pointless were it otherwise; which can additionally leave the writing in question somewhat reliant on whether or not the reader shares the same musical taste as the author, at least in cases where the author isn't up to much and you probably wouldn't be reading but for the fact that he also digs St. Winifred's School Choir. I still have Smiths records, and I can appreciate them, and How Soon is Now? was wonderful; but the first music I really began to take seriously as a kid seemed a bit more wide-ranging in certain respects, beginning with Devo - working through Crass and Killing Joke, probably ending up in the general vicinity of Throbbing Gristle. For the most part it was music beginning from the point of view that all western society is fucked, that we're all living a lie, and that maybe you need to face up to it, shithead.  Doubtless it all took itself too seriously, but that was part of its job. Then the Smiths turned up, and I recall the interviews about how they only wanted handsome people at their little pop concerts, and This Charming Man sounded like the theme tune to a kid's show, and although the second single actually had a tune, everything since has been a heavy sigh of my life is shit and I feel a bit sad. I don't understand how that could really have changed anyone's world, or how anyone could be satisfied with just that, and no-one who ever wrote about it has been able to explain it to me.

Old Records Never Die is the account of one man's mission to track down all the records of his youth, not just the songs, but the actual same copies rescued from dusty boxes in basements and thrift stores. Needless to say, I approached the book with some trepidation, reading mainly on the grounds of it having been a birthday present from my brother-in-law, a man of generally sound judgement. I still don't quite understand why Eric Spitznagel really needed to reunite with the copy of Kiss' Alive II on which his brother Mark had scrawled HANDS OFF!!! across the cover in ballpoint; and I had a tough time getting through the first couple of chapters worth of references to the Travelling Wilburys, Billy Joel, and other artists I'd rather not have to think about; but as the book finds its stride, it becomes clear that this is not about the music or fat old fuckers going misty-eyed over the malts and shakes of a sunnier age, not exactly. Spitznagel's quest is a genuinely bizarre one, almost a ritual working, not really trying to bring something back so much as to understand its power; and I can identify because it seems reminiscent of what I've been doing with all my own old crap. It doesn't really matter whether or not the Smiths changed anyone's life, and in any case Spitznagel writes about the change and how we understand it rather than the source of musical revelation. If anything, the sources of musical revelation seem the least important detail of whatever the guy is going through in this book, so it's communicated as what may as well be a universal experience. More than anything it reminds me of Harvey Pekar's wistful tales of stealing jazz records from a radio station or finding a cheap pair of Stetson shoes in Goodwill. It has a certain passion, a certain affection, but there's nothing sappy or sentimental here.

I still haven't read High Fidelity, although if it's anything like the film, then Old Records Never Die really isn't a particularly close relative. It's about much more, the entire experience of memory, and while it's often very, very funny, the gags come naturally as part of the discourse - none of that gormless chuckling over old photos in which people look a little bit different to how they do now.

This one has really surprised me.