BLONDIE, Brighton Centre, April 28, 2022

To Brighton for a Blondie concert and the realisation that what I’ve missed the most during the Covid-induced famine of live gigs is the feeling you get in your chest from a loud electric bass, the deep-rooted foundation of a rock band in action as they deliver their songs in the best way imaginable. To a certain extent I can recreate vocals and wailing guitars on my hi-fi system, and even the drums if I punch up the volume, but no way can I reproduce the boom of a Fender Precision plugged into a big amp and big speaker cabinet, then dispatched through a PA system into a decent-sized auditorium such as Brighton Centre. 

        It helped that the bass in question was wielded, deftly but unobtrusively, by Glen Matlock, the Sex Pistol jettisoned from the group for displaying too much in the way of musical chops yet lacking the tone-deaf nihilism of his successor. Glen went on to other bands and also became a bass man for hire amongst his peers, and a very good one too, but his arrival in Blondie – at three weeks’ notice, he tells me – came as a bit of a surprise, though it evens out the generational divide between the three younger members of the group as it is now constituted, and the two older hands, singer Debbie Harry and unrelenting drummer Clem Burke.

        With founder, principal songwriter and guitarist Chris Stein taking a sabbatical on doctors’ orders, it is left to Tommy Kessler and newcomer Andee Blacksugar – what a great rock’n’roll name – to handle the guitar duties between them, switching leads and generally adopting a sort of twin guitar duo role that reminded me a bit of the sparring that went on in Lynyrd Skynyrd. Both sing well, as does keyboard player Matt Katz-Bohen, and Glen chips in a bit too, so the vocal backdrop to their revered singer is never less than imposing. 

        But the spotlight, as ever, is on Debbie. Remarkably, this foremost New York punk siren, graduate with honours from CBGBs, turns a mature 77 in July but rather than occupy a rocking chair with a cat and bundle of knitting in her lap she prefers to rock the stage dressed in red leopard-skin tights and a black bin liner held in place with a wide red belt, her blonde hair flying wildly in all directions, her poise as energetic and turbulent as ever. Debbi’s voice remains clear and strident, though she wisely eschewed straining for some of the top notes in the group’s gold-plated catalogue of hits. Thankfully, she abandoned her sunglasses midway through the show so we could see her still-handsome features in close up on the video screens each side of the stage and, having taken the measure of the audience, she seemed sincerely delighted to be singing her songs again after the Covid postponements, grateful that Brighton’s Blondie fans turned out in such large numbers to see her band. 

        It was, by and large, a greatest hits show, accompanied by plenty of imaginative, occasionally quirky, personalised graphics on a large screen at the back. I liked how King Kong’s great paw held Debbie, the Lichtenstein comic and op-art style visuals, and the footage of the group from their Parallel Lines days. Someone had even drawn a glass heart that smashed into smithereens. 

        The concert opened with ‘X-Offender’ and closed, just over 90 minutes later, with ‘One Way Or Another’. The sound was fat and ballsy and well-mixed throughout, the band well-drilled, the set clearly and cleverly rehearsed to align with the visuals. Of the generous 21 songs delivered, 15 were from the 1970s, with the remaining six, among them ‘Maria’, including only two, ‘Long Time’ and ‘Fragments’, from their most recent album, 2017’s Pollinator which they promoted heavily on their last UK tour the same year and which I rated very highly. I wouldn’t have complained if they played two or three more from it. 

        Still, it was the hits the crowd wanted, and they weren’t disappointed. After ‘Sunday Girl’, ‘Picture This’ and ‘The Tide Is High’ there was a slight lull during ‘What I Heard’ but the concert moved up a gear during ‘Atomic’, Debbie inciting a mass singalong on that lovely ‘Oh, your hair is beautiful’ line, and thereafter she never looked back. Some songs were neatly segued together, ‘Fade Away And Radiate’ into ‘Tide’ – which featured two unexpected grungy solos - and ‘Shayla’ into a power-packed ‘Union City Blue’. The four-song pre-encore hell-for-leather ride through ‘Rapture’, ‘Maria’, ‘Dreaming’ and ‘Heart Of Glass’, heralded by jungle drums, seemed like a knockout blow, but they returned for four more, ‘No Exit’, ‘Fragments’ – an odd choice in the light of its complexity – ‘Call Me’ and ‘One Way Or Another’, another mass singalong. At this, the ninety-minute mark, I couldn’t help but be impressed by Debbie’s stamina and, of course, Clem’s unrelenting assault on his drums, a pace he sustained throughout with characteristic resilience. 

        The 2022 Blondie tour visits Hull tonight then five more UK cities before transferring to America’s west coast, Mexico and, in August, some big shows in the east, including a couple in their native New York. If what I saw in Brighton last night is anything to go by, there’s still plenty of life in Blondie, with or without founder Chris Stein.

        Finally, I should add that due to slow service in a burger joint on nearby Duke Street, we regrettably missed most of Johnny Marr’s opening set but the four songs I heard, among them ’How Soon Is Now’ and ‘There Is A Light A Light That Never Goes Out’ sounded terrific and, as ever, the former Smiths guitarist looked great too. 

THE BEATLES & EVERLY BROTHERS

Watching Fake News: A True History, an appropriately droll documentary presented by Private Eye editor Ian Hyslop on BBC4, the other night reminded me of this picture which I saw on the internet recently and was puzzled as to when and where it was taken. As far as I could establish from the many reference books on my shelves, The Beatles and The Everly Brothers never performed on the same show together, either on stage as part of the same bill, or on a TV show, either here or in America, or anywhere else for that matter.    

        Then a friend more knowledgeable than myself told me it was faked. The Beatles in this shot, he told me, were posing backstage in late 1963 at the Finsbury Park Astoria where they appeared in ‘The Beatles Christmas Show’ for 16 nights, closing on January 11, 1964. 

        He didn’t know where the picture of the Everlys came from but I discovered from my own research that it was taken in London by Harry Hammond, probably in 1960 though the two sources I found were inconsistent with the year. Hammond, who died in 2009, specialised in photographing the British pop scene from the 1950s onwards, becoming NME’s primary photographer for several years. 

        The Everlys toured the UK for the first time in April 1960, and other shots from the same session show them on a hotel balcony with the skyline of London behind them. According to Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In book, George Harrison caught them on April 25 at The Liverpool Empire when they were backed by The Crickets, sadly lacking their leader Buddy Holly, a victim of the 1959 plane crash that also claimed Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper. 

        Despite the overwhelming evidence that The Beatles, especially Paul, were heavily influenced by The Everly Brothers, there are only two recorded examples of the Fabs covering the Everlys. On the first BBC sessions album George sings ‘So How Come (No One Loves Me)’, one of Boudleaux and Felice Bryant’s lesser songs, recorded by Don and Phil for their A Date With The Everly Brothers LP in 1960, and in the recent six-hour plus Get Back movie, The Beatles jam for just over a minute on ‘Bye Bye Love’, with John taking the lead. Again thanks to Mark Lewisohn’s book, I learned that ‘Bye Bye Love’ was released in the UK on July 5, 1957, the day before John first met Paul at the church fete in Woolton. Much later, of course, Paul wrote ‘On The Wings Of A Nightingale’ especially for the Everlys, released in 1984. 

        A bit more digging divulges that the picture was probably faked for the cover of a slim paperback called The Everly Brothers & The Beatles, by Mandy Rennie which I suspect is a pseudonym. The evidence for this assumption is there for all to see on Amazon which advertises scores of slim paperback books by Ms Rennie, about celebrities from all walks of life, film, music, politics and sport. Oddly, all of them were published by Blurb Books on the same day in 2019!

JUST BACKDATED - ANOTHER ROLLING (MILE)STONE

While I was posting those memoirs last week I failed to notice that Just Backdated had notched up 1,250,000 hits, another milestone which – like other big round numbers along the way – I will comment on with a bit of analysis.

        JB reached one million hits in October 2020, at which point I’d notched up 828 posts which averaged 1,207 hits per post. There are now 908 posts which means that figure has risen to 1,377 hits per post, so it seems more people have discovered Just Backdated in the past 18 months, probably as a result of lockdown and folk spending more time surfing the internet.

        With one notable exception, the top 20 of posts with most views hasn’t changed much. The surprise is that my rejected proposal for ghost-writing the autobiography of Mandy Moon, Keith’s daughter, has leapt into second place with 20.3k hits, easily dislodging the story about Moonie with John and Paul Beatle in Santa Monica in 1974 which slips to fourth place, with the post about Jimmy Page’s houses sneaking in at number three on 14.7k. In the last survey I did the Mandy post had 6.07k kits, so over 14,000 hits in the last 18 months makes it the most popular recent post. Quite why is anybody’s guess.  

        Equally oddly, while the synopsis post has had over 20k hits now, the actual sample chapter I wrote (and posted three days later) has had only 797 hits, which implies that less than 5% of those who read the synopsis went on to read the actual chapter. Explanations on a postcard please… 

        With 6,000 fewer hits, Jimmy’s impressive real estate is unlikely to challenge Mandy, who’s obviously on a roll, for second place, let alone top spot which, as ever, is my review of the CD of The Who at the Fillmore East in 1968, with a still magnificent 49.7k hits, the same evened-up number as 18 months ago though it’s probably a bit more now, just that the computer doesn’t register increases of less than 1,000 hits at this level. Whatever… almost 50k hits is still well more than twice its nearest rival, a massive lead unlikely ever to be contested. 

        The remainder of the entries in the top ten are pretty much as before, with 16 Who related, two Led Zep, one Deep Purple and the wild card, my story about the North of England Beer Drinking Contest in 1968. I’m well pleased that this tale of gross intemperance still holds on to fifteenth spot. The top 20 now reads: 

1) The Who Live At Fillmore East CD review – 47.7k hits

2) Mandy Moon book treatment – 20.3k

3) Jimmy Page’s residences – 14.7k

4) John, Paul & Keith Moon at Santa Monica – 14k

5) Jimmy Page meeting Robert Plant – 6.6k

6) Palazzo Dario, Kit Lambert’s Venice Palace – 5.59k

7) News of Who UK tour (2014) – 5.16k

8) Keith Moon & The Pythons – 4.29k

9) Launching Dear Boy – 4.15k

10) The Who, My Hidden Gems CD – 4.15k

11) Deep Purple in Jakarta – 3.91k

12) The Who in Hyde Park, 2015 – 3.59k

13) Keith Moon’s residences – 3.01k

14) John Entwistle Tribute – 3.22k

15) The North of England Beer Drinking Contest – 3.14k

16) The Ox (John Entwistle) book review – 2.91k

17) Pretend You’re In A War (Who) book review 2.83k

18) ‘Underture’, Keith’s Great Triumph – 2.82k

19) Pete Townshend Interview (1974) – 2.75k

20) The Who at Stafford in 1975 – 2.7k

        No change in where the hits come from either, USA followed by the UK followed by Russia, and while hits from Russia (on 123k) have tailed off in the last few weeks for obvious reasons, Canada, in fourth place with 37k, has a long way to go to challenge for the bronze medal. I’m mildly suspicious about all those hits from Russia, especially as they have fluctuated wildly in the past two years, like 5,000 one week and zilch the next. 

        Anyway, thanks once again to all who visit Just Backdated and I’ll try to keep it up for as long as I can. 

ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME, 2022

As is usual around this time of the year, I have received my ballot form for nominating those from a list of names that I wish to see inducted into America’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This is not a particularly onerous chore but it becomes trickier for me each year because more and more names on the list seem to me to be less deserving of the honour as each year passes.

        This, as I have noted before, is due largely to the R&RHoF’s insistence on inducting five acts every year, year in, year out, in order to perpetuate interest in the institution itself and satisfy the commercial interests that regard the induction ceremony as a nice little earner, this due to the exorbitant cost of tickets. The downside, as I have also noted, is that this philosophy brings the eligibility of many of more recent inductees into question. 

        But enough carping and on with the show. This year we have no fewer than 17 nominees, many more than usual. They are Beck, Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Devo, Duran Duran, Eminem, Eurythmics, Judas Priest, Fela Kuti, MC5, New York Dolls, Dolly Parton, Rage Against The Machine, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon, A Tribe Called Quest and Dionne Warwick. 

        Several of the artists (Benatar, Bush, Devo, Kuti, Dolls, MC5, Rage, Warwick among them), have been nominated before but not inducted. It is unusually varied in terms of their music, but to my mind it brings into question the definition of Rock & Roll. 

        Without casting any aspersions on the quality of their art, I would question the inclusion of Kate Bush, Fela Kuti, Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon, A Tribe Called Quest and Dionne Warwick on the grounds that they are not Rock & Roll. Dolly, for example, is a great performer who brought the house down (or up) at Glastonbury in 2014 but she’s Country with a capital C, and was no doubt inducted into the Country & Western Hall of Fame eons ago. So, if she’s eligible for the R&RHoF, then The Who should be eligible for the C&WHoF – but they aren’t, of course, and neither ought they to be. Ditto Tribe Called Quest into a RAPHoF, if there is one. Similarly, I find myself wondering where the line should be drawn between Popular Music and Rock, and this is why I question the inclusion of Kate Bush, Lionel Richie and Carly Simon. Surely, if Kate Bush can be nominated then why not Tomes Jones, who although not to my taste is far rock’n’roll than her and Carly Simon? With this in mind I will therefore eliminate these seven acts, not on the grounds that they’re undeserving of recognition somewhere or other but that they don’t belong here. 

        Which leaves me with Beck, Benatar, Devo, Duran, Eminem, Eurythmics, Judas P, MC5, the Dolls, and Rage, so it now comes down to personal choice. I was never of a Heavy Metal fan so I’ll rule out Judas P, and Devo always seemed a bit too artsy-clever for me; Duran too, and a bit too clothes-horsey as well, if you get my drift, and I was never convinced by Pat Benatar. So I’m now down to Beck, Eminem, Eurythmics, MC5, the Dolls and Rage. Eminem is Rap, so my final five are the others. 

        To a certain extent I’m voting for the Dolls and MC5 (both of whom I've voted for before) on political grounds insofar as they held true to the spirit of Rock as being something rebellious, old fashioned and clichéd as that may sound in 2002. I’m voting for Eurythmics because I liked them, saw them twice and still play their music (even though Annie Lennox once tried to sue Omnibus Press on questionable grounds, but that’s another story). Tom Morello seems like a good guy and he’s a pal of Bruce, which makes him OK in my book. I’ve got a couple of Beck CDs and liked them, although I haven’t listened to them in ages. 

        As ever, I’m willing to be swayed if any Just Backdated readers can direct me to a truer path. And, by the way, when I do send in my nomination I will yet again make a plea for Richard Thompson and Slade to be on the list next year, and the next, and the next. 

GARY BROOKER RIP

Driving in my car yesterday a DJ on 6Music played Procol Harum's ‘Homburg’ as a ‘tribute’ but I didn’t know who for until this morning when I opened up my paper and discovered that their keyboard player and principal vocalist Gary Brooker had died. I saw him alighting from a train at Guildford station one evening in, I think, 2009, like me returning from Waterloo; myself from work, him no doubt after another day in court over the vexed question of who wrote ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’, a case that dragged on for several years. 

        I suspect I was the only person on the train who recognised this distinguished looking gentleman, a bit portly with thinning white hair in a smart blue suit, collar and tie, looking a bit stressed by the weight of the lawsuit. No one in a million years would have taken him for a rock star. I’d met him once or twice years ago, back in my MM days, but he was unlikely to recognise me now and bearing in mind how the case was going I wasn’t about to mutter ‘skip the light fandango’ into his ear. “Best of luck,” I said. Realising I was someone who knew who he was, he nodded and smiled at me a bit wearily.

        Brooker lost the case insofar as former Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher was deemed by the judge to have been a co-writer of ‘AWSOP’ and could therefore share in future royalties, along with PH lyricist Keith Reid who wrote the words. I suspect that defending his claim that he alone wrote the music cost Brooker a pretty penny in lawyer’s fees, and this was probably why his large detached house near Cranleigh appeared on the market not long afterwards.

        Like most music fans in my age demographic I adored ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ without having a clue what it was about. Enigmatic, catchy but weirdly profound, with a hint of JS Bach, it was the anthem of 1967, the year pop came of age, the only serious rival to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the leading record in a trio of singles that embodied the Summer of Love, the others ‘All You Need Is Love’ by the Fabs and ‘San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)’ by Scott McKenzie. I bought all three. 

        ‘Pale’ spent six weeks at number one in the UK and hit the top in a dozen other countries but like so many other records by young, credulous acts signed to management and music publishing companies whose business practices were heavily slanted towards themselves, the musicians that comprised Procol Harum at the time saw very little in the way of rewards. Abrupt personnel changes didn’t help. Many years later I was told by a friend who once worked for their publishing company that the amount AWSOP earned for the musicians who created it was simply minuscule, fractions of pennies per sale or play, especially on foreign earnings and inclusion on hits compilations by various artists, on which it appeared on too many to count. This was probably adjusted at some time in the last 20 years, which was no doubt why Matthew Fisher felt it worthwhile to bring his lawsuit. 

        Oddly, Procol Harum’s second LP Shine On Brightly was the first free record I ever received, a review copy sent to the Telegraph & Argus in Bradford where in 1968 I had a column called The Swing Scene. I can’t remember what I wrote – sorry, it was a long time ago – but I can remember my delight at getting an LP I didn’t have to pay for. 

        I saw the group twice while working for Melody Maker, once at the London Palladium when they were introduced by Vivian Stanshall. “They are the most uncompromising group in England,” he intoned in that marvellous accent of his. And once again at the Hollywood Bowl on September 21, 1973, when they performed alongside the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and a large choir. 

        I enjoyed both concerts. RIP Gary. You were to Procol what Jagger is to the Stones. 

(I found the above picture the internet, credited to the Daily Express, not a newspaper I would recommend. The pic of the older Gary looks like he did on my train.)

GIGS THAT TRANSFORMED LIVE MUSIC

Today’s Guardian lists ‘50 Gigs that Transformed Live Music Forever’. Here’s a few that they missed.

The Beatles

Litherland Town Hall, Liverpool, December 27, 1960

Newly returned from their first gruelling Hamburg stint, The Beatles capture their home town. Writes Mark Lewisohn: “As the curtains shuffled open and Paul launched himself into Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’, everyone suddenly and spontaneously crushed forward to the front of the stage, swept away by the group’s sheer magnetism. Five hundred hours on stage in Hamburg had forged a style that would conquer the world. [They] were an absolute powerhouse, creating an inexplicable and unprecedented frenzy among the spellbound teenagers… they too were bewildered by the incredible scene they were invoking. Beatlemania was enjoying its birth pangs.”

The Who

Railway Hotel, Harrow, July 14, 1964

Billed as The High Numbers, The Who are seen by future co-manager Kit Lambert for the first time. Lambert: “They were playing there in this room with just one red bulb glowing and an extraordinary audience that they had collected. They were the loudest group I'd ever heard and they gave the whole thing a satanic quality. It just seemed to me that this had to be the face of the late Sixties. There was Keith Moon, the drummer, raised on a high stool dominating the group, battering away for all his life was worth. The rest of the group was playing on a stage made out of beer crates. And the ceiling came right down on top of them so that when Pete Townshend – the lead guitarist – was playing, he’d bang his guitar against the ceiling, and one night he physically poked a hole through the ceiling because it was getting in his way. It was only made of paper and cardboard, and he went straight through. This went down tremendously with the audience. And that's how the whole thing started.” 

Led Zeppelin

Tea Party, Boston, USA, January 29, 1969

The birth of head-banging at Led Zep’s legendary four-and-a-half-hour show, probably their longest performance ever. John Paul Jones: “As far as I’m concerned, the key Led Zeppelin gig – the one that just put everything into focus – was one that we played on our first American tour at the Boston Tea Party. We’d played our usual one-hour set, using all the material from the first album and Page’s ‘White Summer’ guitar piece and, by the end, the audience just wouldn’t let us off the stage. It was in such a state that we had to start throwing ideas around – just thinking of songs that we might all know or that some of us knew a part of, and work it from there. So, we’d go back on and play things like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Please Please Me’ – old Beatles favourites. I mean, just anything that would come in our head, and the response was quite amazing. There were kids actually bashing their heads against the stage – I’ve never seen that at a gig before or since, and when we finally left the stage we’d played for four plus hours. Peter [manager Grant] was absolutely ecstatic. He was crying – if you can imagine that – and hugging us all. You know with this huge grizzly bear hug. I suppose it was then that we realised just what Led Zeppelin was going to become.” 

The Rolling Stones

Hyde Park, July 5, 1969

The Stones come of age. It was the requiem for Brian Jones and the debut of Mick Taylor, the concert where The Rolling Stones began their new life as ‘The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band In The World’, as they were introduced, for the first time, by Sam Cutler, who worked for the concert’s promoters, Blackhill Enterprises. Mick read a poem, butterflies were released and the crowd numbered over 250,000, the biggest crowd assembled in London since the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, but the Stones were not at their best. “We played pretty bad,” Keith confessed later. “We hadn’t played in years.” In Melody Maker, Chris Welch wrote:  “[It was a] a nostalgic, out-of-tune ritual that summed up a decade of pop.”

Elvis Presley

International Hotel, Las Vegas, July 31, 1969

Elvis returns from the dead(end world of crap movies), playing his first truly live show since before he went into the army. Las Vegas bows to the New World Order. Writes Peter Garulnick: “With his own handpicked band behind him, he simply rocked, and almost in that instant, the whole room exploded. … It would have been a scene of rare abandon in any setting, but for Las Vegas, the ultimate repository of blasé show business values, carrying with it an implied embrace of genuine spontaneity on the performer’s part.”

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

Harvard Square Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 9, 1974

Bruce becomes ‘the future of rock’n’roll’. Jon Landau, Springsteen’s future manager, then a writer for Boston’s Real Paper, sees his protégé for the first time, and writes: “I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes. I saw something else: I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen… There is no one I would rather watch on a stage today.”

David Bowie

O’Keefe Centre, Toronto, June 16, 1974

The birth of rock theatre. After the tour, David never repeated this kind of concert and, of course, it never reached the UK. CC wrote in Melody Maker: “A few thousand lucky Canadians witnessed a completely new concept in rock theatre last weekend … It now seems likely that Bowie WAS speaking the truth when he announced his retirement from rock on the stage at the Hammersmith Odeon last year. For the act that David presents on this tour has as much to do with rock and roll as Bob Dylan has with the gloss of Las Vegas. The one-and-a-half-hour, 20-song show is a completely rehearsed and choreographed routine where every step and nuance has been perfected down to the last detail. There isn't one iota of spontaneity about the whole show. It is straight off a musical stage – a piece of theatre complete with extravagant mechanical sets, dancers and a band that stands reservedly to stage right and never even receives so much as a cursory acknowledgement, like an orchestra in the theatre pits.”

Bruce Springsteen

Wembley Stadium, July 4, 1985

Bruce shows London that he really is The Boss. The middle concert of three at Wembley Stadium, all of which I attended. I simply enjoyed the first night so much I didn’t want to miss any of them. CC writes: “On the 4th – American Independence Day – Bruce walked out alone, armed with only an acoustic guitar and sang The River track ‘Independence Day’, a ballad, to a crowd of 80,000 or more who’d been waiting around for hours and were gagging for rock’n’roll. That takes sheer bottle, I thought. Then it was into a blistering ‘Born In The USA’. On one of the shows – I can’t remember which – Bruce played the Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’, doubtless because it refers to ‘London town’. After three hours or more, all the shows closed with gloriously delivered renderings of ‘Twist And Shout’ – lasting about 20-minutes. It wasn't the first concert at Wembley Stadium but Bruce showed how it should be done.”

NO ONE ROUND HERE READS TOLSTOY: Memoirs Of A Working-Class Reader by Mark Hodkinson

This is a book about books, acquiring them, reading them, learning from them, collecting them, reviewing them, publishing them, selling them and even loathing them when it’s necessary to recycle piles of unsold ones. Mark Hodkinson, newspaper reporter turned music writer turned football correspondent turned novelist, has written a love letter to them, for they have shaped his life, hauling him from a book-free upbringing to his present home, which he shares with no less than 3,500 of them. 

        I have known Mark since 1989, when I commissioned him to write a biography of The Wedding Present, the Yorkshire band led by David Gedge. Thank Yer, Very Glad was published a year later and I was sufficiently impressed by his work to ask Mark to write several more books for Omnibus Press. They were an eclectic bunch – Marianne Faithfull, Simply Red, Springsteen, Prince and Queen’s early days – and I soon realised that Mark was a bit different from most writers I hired. It wasn’t just his emerging literary skills or willingness to get stuck into fairly deep research, more a sense that his ambitions went quite a bit further than rock biographies or even the football reports and related features he wrote for The Times. No, Mark sought a higher calling, to become a novelist, and to write literary fiction at that, to join the club that included those writers he most admired, the ones from working-class backgrounds similar his own who brought harsh lives to the page and, through their fiction, exposed injustice brought about by systems of government that all too often rewarded those already privileged. 

        This thinking – and these kinds of books – inform No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy, its title an observation uttered to him one day by the proprietor of a second-hand book shop in his home town of Rochdale, where he still lives. Part autobiography, part idiosyncratic literary criticism, part primer to the world of book publishing, its principal message is that even if the house in which you were raised contained only one book you can rise above inbred apathy with imagination and persistence. In Mark’s case the one book his parents owned was a leather-bound volume of questionable merit called Folklore, Myths, and Legends of Britain. “Dad treated it with reverence,” writes Mark, “keeping it on top of the wardrobe with other items of great worth such as their wedding album and my Cycling Proficiency Certificate.” Mark’s book is chock-full of droll memories like that, and often had me chuckling, not least when he enters the world of local journalism, a field I know from long ago.

        Running parallel to Mark’s journey – the kind of word he despises, by the way – is the story of his grandpa, John Duffy, whose descent into dementia is movingly told, all the more so for its lack of sentimentality. We are left in no doubt, however, that in moments of clarity John, a born storyteller, influences his grandson not so much to find a life beyond the grim backstreets of fading Lancashire towns but, more importantly, to discover a better life within them. 

        The bulk of the narrative follows Mark’s progress from school, where the education system deems him suitable only for manual work, through the hurdles he leaps on the way to reporters’ offices at various northern newspapers, and to Omnibus Press, where our lives become briefly intertwined. In the meantime, he’d discovered music, fallen for The Smiths, bought a guitar and formed a band that once memorably supported The Stone Roses. All the while, though, he’s seeking out books, more and more books, mostly old, reading them and forming opinions about their authors. It comes as no real surprise that JD Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye exerts a powerful influence, along with the social realism of the ‘kitchen-sink’ writers like Barry Hines, Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney and many more.

        Neither does it come as a surprise when he forms his own book publishing company, Pomona, a risky undertaking at the best of times, and though Mark’s heart is in the right place in regard to the type of books he wants to publish, including his own, there’s an element of noble idealism about the enterprise. He reprints books by some of his favourite writers whose work has gone out of fashion – and, unfortunately for him, remains so – and comes up against harsh reality when the one book that might make his fortune – a biography of JD Salinger that, fortuitously, coincided with his death – attracts problems not unconnected with greed that oblige him to relinquish valuable US rights. His wry, often comic and always sincere observations about the authors he meets through Pomona and elsewhere are a highlight of the later chapters, along with some carefully researched facts and figures about the future of the book trade. Like me he loathes Kindle. 

        Mark is now a respected novelist himself*, with many admirers in the sphere of literature. This pleases me immensely, not just because I played a small part in it but, more importantly, because he deserves it. In No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy he has written a wonderful, beautifully sculpted, heartfelt book about climbing a ladder to that place he loves the most, a comfy armchair in which he can lose himself in the imaginary world of a printed page. 

______

*Among them The Last Mad Surge Of Youth, about a fictitious rock star, reviewed here: http://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-last-mad-surge-of-youth-by-mark.html

SEARCHING FOR JIMMY PAGE, a novel by Christy Alexander Hallberg

From the mid-sixties onwards, British groups touring America welcomed the attentions of free-spirited girls who hopped into their beds to ease the strain of being far from home in a foreign land. It was, I suppose, one of the perks of the job and it’s surely not unreasonable to suppose that during the early years of this touring era, when reliable birth control was not readily accessible to single women, such liaisons resulted in a few births to mothers who opted to keep the identity of the father to themselves. 

This is the premise on which Christy Hallberg has created her book, a coming-of-age tale about a go-getting girl from a redneck background in North Carolina called Luna. Just before she died, gratuitously violently by her own hand, Luna’s mother Claudia gave her daughter ambiguous reason to believe that her father might be Jimmy Page, a suggestion given credence by Claudia’s fondness for Led Zeppelin’s music and a photograph of Page, all in white with raven-black curls, she hung over her bed. This happened when Luna was quite young and now, having turned 18, she resolves to embark on a quest to discover the truth behind her mother’s claim, a voyage of discovery that takes her from the far-from-idyllic American home she shares with her grandparents to London, where she seeks out the former Zep guitarist – but I’ll stop there so as not to spoil the ending for anyone who might care to read the book for themselves. 

It’s very melodramatic, a rather spooky tale which, like the aura surrounding Led Zeppelin and their music, strays into areas of mysticism, tarot cards and scary things that happen at night beneath a full moon, with screeching owls and old men who stoop like the wood-gathering hermit on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV. The name Luna, of course, is a bit of a give-away. 

As you would expect, the story is liberally seasoned with references to Led Zep, carefully researched biographical details, song titles for its four parts, plus a Coda, but no lyrics, of course, lest copyrights are infringed, a bit of a sensitive issue these days what with that business over the origin of the descending arpeggios that introduce ‘Stairway To Heaven’. 

        Set in 1988, the book follows Luna from America to the UK where the story picks up pace and becomes more engrossing. She visits Page’s homes in London, hanging around outside Tower House in Holland Park, and also Windsor, where she glimpses Page’s then pregnant wife Patricia. She even takes trips to Rushock, where she nicks whiskey bottles from John Bonham’s grave, and to Headley Grange, the former workhouse in Hampshire where much of Led Zeppelin IV was written and recorded. Now a private home, she is invited inside by its owner, ‘A distinguished-looking gentleman with sprigs of grey hair around his temples… a tall, reedy man, tidy and austere, his navy cardigan buttoned to the neck, his khaki trousers smartly pressed. “You’ve come to see the stairway, haven’t you?” he asked.’

         Impressed by the detail and accurate Zep research, I felt these were the book’s strongest scenes. 

        ‘Four Sticks’, the song about owls crying in the night, is a recurring theme, along with Luna’s aspirations to become a writer, all of which suggests an element of autobiography, it being assumed that the author is a die-hard Zep fan who in researching her book has visited the locations mentioned in her story. 

It’s an intriguing scenario with intriguing characters, stylishly written. Luna’s a bit of a misfit, bullied by more conservative peers, her only friend a coloured girl called Connie, and her need to exist outside of conventional society is reflected in the Mohican hairstyle she adopts for the trip. She’s also a bit careless, which leads her into financial difficulties, but she’s rescued by a bisexual London boy who works at the hotel in which she stays and becomes her friend and guide.

Searching For Jimmy Page is not fan fiction per se – Page himself appears only briefly and doesn’t speak – and the book pays no homage to anything previously published. Instead, it uses the mythology of Led Zeppelin as the landscape for a novel about one woman’s need to discover the truth about who she is and where she came from, a not uncommon scenario in literature old and new. Not overly long, it is slightly let down by substandard production, probably for reasons of economy, but Zep fans will love it. 

THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK – THE TOURING YEARS

First released in 2016, this movie grabbed my attention last week when it was shown on Sky. Although much of the footage is familiar from other Beatles documentaries, authorised or otherwise, it was the first time I’d watched the whole 97 minutes, and what a gas it was.

        It’s incomprehensible nowadays to watch the chaos The Beatles caused across those countries in which they performed at the height of their extraordinary popularity. Through no fault of their own, other being themselves, they were responsible for massive, industrial-scale upheavals at airports, in city centres and whenever and wherever they appeared on stage (or off, if fans got to hear about where they happened to be). It was dangerous too, a miracle there wasn’t a fatality amidst the turmoil that followed The Beatles everywhere they went.   

        In the 21st century it’s no doubt possible to fake this kind of thing or, at the very least, to edit in footage from elsewhere in order to create an illusion, to manufacture the scenes so as to exaggerate the situation. But this wasn’t faked. Those scenes really happened. It was on the news and on the front pages, almost daily during 1963 and 1964. Hundreds, if not thousands, of girls from the age of 12 upwards really did become wildly hysterical if they caught a glimpse of them. The level of mayhem inspired by John, Paul, George and Ringo far and away outstrips anything that has occurred since for any other act, group, boy band or solo singer, that has followed in their wake over the past 60-70 years. Everything else, from The Monkees to One Direction, is simply tame by comparison.

        The film benefits from the presence of Larry Kane, the only broadcast journalist to travel with The Beatles on their US tours in 1964 and 1965. Kane was told by his superiors not to bother, that The Beatles would be forgotten about in six months’ time. In the film, however, he compares his experience on tour with the group to every other major world event in the second half of the 20th Century, from the assassination of JFK to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and feels uniquely privileged to have witnessed it. 

        It was nice to see the unflappable Derek Taylor telling a vast crowd of hysterical girls in some American city to calm down. “The Beatles have come a long way to play for you tonight,” he implores in his smooth British accent. “But they can’t if you don’t go back to your seats.” Others who worked with them, notably Brian Epstein and George Martin, are also featured, and there was a brief glimpse of Neil Aspinall, but I felt that their contributions, filmed long before the film was conceived, had been shoehorned in and therefore seemed slightly out of kilter with the live footage. Also, no one really thought to film The Beatles in the recording studio, not until much later in their career, which meant that when it skipped, perhaps unnecessarily, from the live footage to recording, Eight Days A Week had to rely largely on still photographs from Abbey Road, all of which had been seen many times before.

        But these are minor quibbles. The joy was seeing The Beatles performing on stage, in the UK, Europe, America, Japan and Australia, and to see the happiness they brought to the world during the three years when they were an active touring band. It all happened a long time ago now but I still find it enormously heart-warming to see John, his legs apart, his small guitar held high, singing his heart out; and Paul, shaking the long neck of that violin bass, and his hair, as he joins in on the other side of the stage; and George, dwarfed by his big Gretsch, concentrating on his lead lines then stepping forward to the microphone to join Paul; and Ringo at the back, his hair flopping about, bashing away, grinning like there’s no tomorrow.

        Because the film was authorised by them, there would have been an opportunity to improve the live sound, which was uniformly good, and I have no way of knowing whether it was enhanced or not. Either way, they sounded pretty damn good to me, especially when you consider the conditions in which they performed, the relatively inferior amplification equipment they were using compared to today and the tiny road crew that supported them. 

        And the audiences, crikey! It’s no wonder George wanted out, as did they all really. It couldn’t continue but while it did it was wonderful, as I saw for myself at Bradford 58 years ago last month. 

        The Beatles. The first. The best. Always. 

IT’S ALWAYS SUMMER SOMEWHERE: A Matter of Life & Cricket by Felix White

“When an old cricketer leaves the crease, you never know whether he’s gone

“If sometimes you’re catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly mid-on.”

The Who and others at the Oval, pictures of Jimmy Page and Elton padded up in cricket whites, a Wishbone Ash LP called There’s The Rub. Cricket and rock didn’t often collide when I was batting for Melody Maker, but the chorus of Roy Harper’s ‘When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease’ was warmly reassuring for a cricket fan like me when I first heard it in 1976. 

Nowadays, of course, The Rolling Stones have a private box at Lords where Mick and his guests can watch Test matches but he kept his fondness for the game to himself when the Stones were in the ascendant, probably because the sport then seemed deeply unfashionable in rock circles. It probably still is, as cricket-loving Felix White readily acknowledges in his entertaining, witty and deeply personal book about how the game has impacted on his life. In making me remember these odd occasions when the only sport I truly love wormed its way into music, It’s Always Summer Somewhere not only reinforced my belief about cricket’s life-affirming virtues but promotes the theory that sports teams are much like rock bands; groups of people thrown together with one common goal who must weather success and failure together, travel to distant shores, and enjoy periodic moments of triumph yet grin and bear it when things don’t go their way. 

Felix White, of course, was the lively, left-handed guitarist with The Maccabees who in 2017 disbanded by common consent at the height of their popularity, a decision initiated by singer Orlando ‘Land’ Weeks, and accepted by colleagues that included Felix’s younger brother Hugo. Since then, Felix has cemented his relationship with cricket with Tailenders, the hugely successful podcast in which he is joined by Jimmy Anderson, England’s most successful bowler ever, and Radio One DJ Greg James. It’s Always Summer Somewhere is much like Tailenders, quirky, unpredictable and funny, albeit it in a sort of bittersweet way as it lurches from his feelings about the death of his mum to the rise and fall of The Maccabees and musings on his own character and place in a world he often finds difficult to understand.

        Part autobiography, part confessional, part revelation, we learn much about the inner workings of Felix’s group, how they came together, how they survived for a dozen years and how they created the four albums they released. As a candid account of how rock groups go about their business, his behind-the-scenes, fly-on-the-wall tales take some beating. Meanwhile, from the age of about six Felix has become fascinated by cricket, which acts as a constant safety net into which he can disappear when the mood takes him. Like all English cricket fans, he anguishes over the team’s defeats, especially against Australia, and delights in their victories, occasionally with undisguised astonishment. 

        Brutally self-critical about his personal flaws, Felix escapes into cricket at every available opportunity. While well aware that his preoccupation isn’t shared by others, he becomes absurdly knowledgeable about the game and feels utmost sympathy for those players who don’t quite come up to expectations, most especially bowlers whose ranks he once aspired to join. To this end, the linear first-person chronology of the book is interrupted by shortish chapters devoted to interviews with several of his cricketing heroes – among them Phil Tufnell, Chris Lewis, Michael Atherton, Nassar Hussain, Ashley Giles and Kumar Sangakkara – in which Felix teases interesting admissions about their great moments on the field, the importance of self-confidence and reactions to failure. 

        In between times we learn about Felix’s family, his love of his grandparents – his gran was Palestinian – the heart-breaking death of his mother following a lengthy battle with MS and how he dealt with it, and the entry into his life of three significant others, among them Florence Welch whose initials he shares and who, conveniently, lived close to the Kennington Oval. Among the book’s funniest moments is a dialogue between them in which Florence – bless her for trying – attempts to analyse the game. 

        Felix’s prose is intensely moving, carefully constructed and always evocative, quite unlike any rock memoir I’ve ever read before. Favouring emotion over facts, it takes you into the heart of his world, his thoughts and his demons, and at the end – which coincides with England’s heart-stopping victory New Zealand in the 2019 World Cup Final at Lords – you feel you’ve explored his soul and, like him, come out a winner. All thanks to cricket. 

        Highly recommended.