Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues: Twenty Years of Writing About Film, Music and Books

by Nick Hornby

  This approach can throw up minor gems of arcane information. John Lennon and George Harrison chant ‘Frère Jacques’ through the second verse/chorus of ‘Paperback Writer’. ‘I Am the Walrus’ contains, in its final version, a snippet of King Lear, captured during a random radio scan. This book is a trainspotter’s paradise (it even provides accurate timings, so if you want to, you can hear ‘the guitar fluff at 1.26’ in ‘Ask Me Why’, if you have a CD player and a tragically empty life), but MacDonald’s aims are loftier than it would appear: he is hoping that a microscopic examination of the Beatles’ oeuvre will reveal greater truths about the decade as a whole.

  The book is probably a little too anchored in specifics and cluttered by detail to fulfil this kind of ambition. A couple of the longer essays come close: in his piece on ‘Revolution 9’, MacDonald (a contemporary of Nick Kent, Julie Burchill et al. on the NME in the 1970s, and the author of a book on Shostakovich) provides a breathtakingly concise history of the avant-garde; the introduction has a neat idea about how the 1960s, now blamed by the right for everything, went some way towards creating Thatcherism. But Revolution in the Head is quite brilliant on all things Beatles, and that’s more than enough.

  For a start, MacDonald puts the Beatles back into context, a useful exercise in itself. Like Shakespeare, Lennon and McCartney have come to be regarded as artists whose genius loosened their connections with time and place. This is nonsense, of course, as MacDonald makes plain: ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ was influenced strongly by the Kinks; ‘Got to Get You into My Life’ was a Motown pastiche; ‘Taxman’ was the Beatles’ version of James Brown; and so on. And his critical rigour means that the author is neither sloppy nor soppy about the later stages of the group’s career. ‘All You Need is Love’ is ‘desultory’, a product of ‘drug-sodden laziness’: ‘The Beatles were now doing wilfully substandard work … settling for lyric first thoughts on the principle that everything, however haphazard, meant something, and if it didn’t, so what?’ MacDonald is so hard to impress (‘Birthday’ is ‘soullessly synthetic’, ‘Hello, Goodbye’ is ‘blandly catchy’, ‘Helter Skelter’ simply ‘ridiculous’) that you end up trusting his judgement and his insights absolutely.

  MacDonald can tend towards the dour, but, in between the discussions of Stockhausen and Timothy Leary, and the frankly bewildering references to the Phrygian and Mixolydian Modes, a keen appreciation of the absurd shines through (as well it might: the story of the Beatles is exhilarating and remarkable and compulsive, but it is also funny. All that money, all that fame, all that cultural impact, and all so quickly … it must have made them want to giggle all the time). A story about Lennon asking George Martin for a ‘fair-ground’ production is followed by the delightful parenthesis, ‘(He once asked Martin to make one of his songs sound like an orange.)’ The Beatles’ introduction to drugs is observed with a refreshing sobriety, and another great pair of brackets: ‘McCartney declared that he was “really thinking” for the first time, and ordered road manager Mal Evans to write down everything he said. (The “meaning of life” as dutifully transcribed by Evans was, There are seven levels.)’

  In the end, though, this book is unpredictably moving, especially if you have the music to hand. A quite brilliant analysis of ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ reveals how it marks the end of the group and the psychological opening of McCartney’s solo career, and contains within it deep regret, optimism and a celebration of an extraordinary, world-changing half-decade. ‘To anyone who loves the Beatles, the bittersweet nostalgia of this music is hard to hear without a tear in the eye.’

  I have never ached to be born in a different time. I was happy enough to grow up in the 1970s, with its cheap, lurid soundtrack of Slade, Gary Glitter, Bowie and the rest; but the triumph of this book is that it does lead one to understand that the popular music made in the wake of the Beatles was, for the most part, useless, despite its charms. After finishing the book, I went out and bought a pile of Beatles CDs and listened to the songs properly, for the first time in my life, even though I had heard most of them hundreds and hundreds of times before. MacDonald’s achievement is that they now sound different to me, better and sadder – better because he has wiped them down, sadder because by placing them in their context, he has made it plain that, however much the post-1960s generations may love this music, it will never belong to us.

  Internet Music

  My first novel, High Fidelity, was published in 1995, and shortly afterwards, I embarked upon my first American book tour. I took with me a Discman, and fifteen or twenty carefully chosen CDs in a wallet, although I bought lots of others while I was there – CDs by bands I’d never heard of, and wouldn’t have been able to buy at home, recommended to me by people who came to readings, or by journalists at the end of interviews. There was always a thriving, intimidating independent music store just a short walk from my hotel, in whichever city I was visiting. At signings, people gave me lovingly made compilation tapes, occasionally demo tapes of their bands, or their friends’ bands, and sometimes bootleg tapes of shows by artists they thought I’d like. Towards the end of the tour I no longer had room for it all, and I had to leave little piles of cassette boxes next to the waste bins in my hotel rooms. (I couldn’t bear to put them in the bins. I wasn’t throwing them away; I was leaving them behind. There was a difference.)

  Back then, the future of music didn’t look particularly interesting to me. I don’t mean that music itself seemed boring, although I was thirty-eight years old, and I felt like I’d heard a lot of the mid nineties before. I mean that neither I nor anybody else I knew spent any time thinking about how our consumption of music might change. How could it? There wasn’t much to it, surely? OK, someone might come up with another format, something that might sweep away the compact disc just as the CD had replaced vinyl. But whatever it was, all you could do was buy it – which meant walking down to Our Price, or a local independent store staffed by people who looked as though they’d rather have their heads stuck inside Thurston Moore’s amp than speak to you. I certainly couldn’t have imagined writing a novel which is in part about how we relate to music in the twenty-first century. Like most of us, I believed that this relationship would be a version of the relationship we all knew and loved, with a couple of extra volume knobs on.

  In the year that High Fidelity was published, a new CD shop opened in my neighbourhood and rejuvenated my listening habits. The shop did well, initially, and I spent a lot of time in there, buying pretty much whatever the owners told me to buy; they were very clever, it seemed to me, in targeting the ageing (or perhaps, more precisely, ex-) hipsters of north London, people who were growing sick of their REM albums but didn’t know what else to buy. They sold hundreds of copies of Buena Vista Social Club, and a lot of tasteful trip-hop – which, as Simon Reynolds pointed out, was ‘merely a form of gentrification’. But then, what are you supposed to do, if you’re becoming gentrified? Pretend it isn’t happening? Yes, Portishead sold a lot of albums to people who wanted to listen to music that meant something without waking up their children, but that’s not necessarily a desire that deserves a sneer. Keeping in touch with the things that help us feel alive – music, books, movies, even the theatre if, mysteriously, you are that way inclined – becomes a battle, and one that many of us lose, as we get older; I don’t think enough of our cultural pundits, people who write about that stuff for a living, fully understand this. It’s one thing to have an opinion on Little Boots remixes if you earn your living hanging about in cyberspace; quite another if you’re a full-time teacher with three kids. My friend’s CD shop performed a valuable service to those whose shopping and browsing and listening time was rationed by circumstance, people who had the occasional five minutes on a Saturday morning to check out, and sometimes even buy, what everyone else was listening to.

  You’ll know what happened to the shop, because it happened to everyone else’s shop, too. Illegal downloading wouldn’t have been a factor here – the punters were
too old and, for the most part, too well-heeled for all that. But Amazon started selling CDs for less than my friends could buy them for, and eventually even north London’s late adaptors worked out that one-clicking didn’t take much effort. The trouble with this, of course, is that you’re shopping in a vacuum, however many times you’re told by some robot you don’t know that if you like this then you’ll love that. You’re feeding off nothing, apart from recommendations in broadsheet newspapers and magazines – and we’ve all been burned like that. After my local CD shop closed down, I was getting ready for a musical life that turned in on itself, before dying slowly from malnutrition. Any piece of music becomes drained of meaning and excitement if you listen too much to it, but a three-minute pop song isn’t going to last you a lifetime. Popular music needs to keep flowing. If the fresh supplies stop, it’s you that becomes stagnant.

  It took me longer than it should have done to work out that the internet is one giant independent record shop – thousands and thousands of cute little independent record shops, anyway – and they don’t actually charge you for the music they stock. The MP3 blogs that stretch for miles and miles, as far as the eye can see, down that stretch of the net that isn’t reserved for pornography, are staffed by enthusiastic and likeable young men and women who absolutely don’t want to rip the artists off: they are always careful to post links to iTunes and Amazon, and the songs they put on their sites are for sampling purposes only. (For the most part, they are encouraged to do so by the artists and their labels, who take out adverts on the more popular sites, and are clearly sending advance copies of albums to the bloggers.) It works for me. I listen, and then I buy what I like, because owning music is still important to me. If the music I like stays out there in cyberspace, as it does on Spotify, then somehow it cannot indicate character and taste in the same way, although I doubt that younger generations will feel like this, and good luck to them.

  But it’s easy. Look at Hype Machine (www.hypem.com) to begin with: in the top right-hand corner of the site, you’ll see a list of the top five most-blogged artists, so you will get a sense of what’s going on out there (or in there, if you are a literal-minded soul). The search engine will offer you a chance to listen to these artists and, in the process, you’ll get the chance to discover your favourite virtual record store, because every single one of those links you see will take you to a different MP3 blog. My favourites are I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, Large-Hearted Boy, Aquarium Drunkard, When You Awake and Funky 16 Corners, among scores of others. (Some of those names are indicative of a generosity of spirit that one doesn’t always associate with the internet.) And some of these post songs from new bands, and some post scratched old vinyl funk records, and if you spend an hour messing about you’ll find twenty or thirty great songs you never knew before. In other words: there’s no excuse.

  Juliet, Naked is in part about how a middle-aged man devotes a large chunk of his life to keeping alive the work of a long-forgotten eighties singer-songwriter; he runs a messageboard, posts essays online, and virtually lives in a virtual world, talking to people he wouldn’t ever have met ten years ago. Perhaps one of the paradoxes of music on the internet is that it’s perfect for the old folks. If you need to find set-lists for every show Rory Gallagher ever played, I’m sure there’s some chap with nothing better to do who is taking care of it right now. But more importantly, you need never again feel as though the pop life is drifting away from you – indeed, the anonymity and user-friendliness of the MP3 blogs mean that one feels emboldened to walk into even the scariest-looking website in the full confidence that nobody will laugh at you.

  I’ll be off on a US book tour again soon, to promote a novel that is, in part, about how the world has changed since 1995. I’ll be taking with me a small black box, no bigger than a packet of cigarettes, containing every piece of music I’ve ever loved. And a lot of that music – more than I could possibly have imagined five years ago, when I was prepared, reluctantly, to pull up the drawbridge – was made very recently. And no, I don’t know how it will all pan out, who will pay the artists to make their lovely or ugly or scary music in a world that’s increasingly beginning to expect everything for free. (My best guess is that being in a band will become a version of National Service or the Peace Corps, something you do for a couple of years before knuckling down to a proper job. And the London Symphony Orchestra won’t appear on as many rock albums as they used to.) All I know is that if you love music, and you have a curious mind, there has never been a better time to be alive.

  The Crying Game

  It is perhaps easier to list the films that haven’t made me blub, rather than run through the several thousand that have, so here goes: I didn’t cry once during Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (that’s the one where a chap sits in a wheelbarrow and reads poetry for several hours) or Kurosawa’s Ran, nor were hankies required during Dr Who and the Daleks, Jason and the Argonauts, The Incredible Journey (although my sister, who is frankly a girl, wept buckets, and had to be taken out), Sid and Nancy or Reservoir Dogs. And that’s about it.

  I cried at E. T., inevitably. I cried at Chariots of Fire, predictably. I cried at a film, the title of which I’ve forgotten, about some guy with no legs who walked across America – understandable, forgiveable even, were it not for the fact that I didn’t actually see the whole movie, just a clip they showed of it on TV-AM. I lost half my bodyweight during Field of Dreams, and had to be put on a drip – ironic, given that I seemed to have turned into one – after Splash. So I knew what was coming to me when I went to see a sneak preview screening of Sleepless in Seattle; it duly came, great steaming rivers of the stuff, and I needed a crafty trip to the Gents to recompose myself afterwards.

  I certainly didn’t cry at films when I was a kid. Boys simply cannot afford the indulgence of sentimental tears when real ones – the ones that come after a good thumping at school, or because of a broken Johnny Seven gun at home – are just sitting there in the ducts, waiting to be launched at the least convenient and most humiliating opportunity. Born Free was a rare chance to show what you were made of; it was certainly not the time to demonstrate that real eight-year-olds could let a few hot ones go in the darkness of the ABC without compromising their manhood.

  Only when men are of A Certain Age, then, is it possible for us to let ourselves down by weeping copiously at the soppy bits in films. Even then, though, it is often the case that only a certain type of film can elicit masculine tears. It is still true that many men cannot find it in themselves to cry when they are truly unhappy, despite the well-documented beneficial effects of a good blub (no heart disease, no ulcers, eternal life, etc., etc.); they are far more likely to cry at Cup Finals, Olympic medal ceremonies and the theme music from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. than they are when, say, their wife and children walk out on them.

  Women, famously, have no such problems making the moisture/misery connection, which is maybe why Now, Voyager and Brief Encounter, for example, tend to be dearer to the female psyche than to the male. ‘One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh,’ observed Oscar Wilde of the death of Dickens’s Little Nell; one fears that Oscar would have required sedation for the death of Ali MacGraw in Love Story, Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment and Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias. I know that I certainly managed a snigger or two. Happy/sad farewells – E. T. and Elliott, Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost, Tom Hanks and John Candy in Splash – are different, and much more likely to get the snot rolling and the eyes stinging. Am I really saying that I find the sight of a man saying goodbye to his brother, before leaping into the sea to live with a mermaid, more affecting than the terminal illness of a young mother? Yup.

  What really sets me off every time, though, is a beautiful couple finally getting it together, particularly when there are children involved. Sleepless in Seattle scores a ten on my blub-o-meter a) because Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are so cute, b) because their union is so agonizingly delayed, and c) because Meg Ryan will so clearly m
ake a wonderful mother for Hanks’s little boy, Jonah. This kind of mushy perfection is, regrettably, important to me, and yes, I did cry at Overboard (Goldie Hawn, spoilt rich girl, takes on Kurt Russell’s dirt-poor kids) and Irreconcilable Differences (Drew Barrymore divorces her warring Hollywood parents, Ryan O’Neal and Shelley Long, provoking a reunion). How it is possible to cry at Irreconcilable Differences and own a copy of the first Clash album must remain one of life’s impenetrable mysteries.

  What is so distressing about this Pavlovian response to happy endings is that it makes no recognition of quality. I am proud of the fact that my shoulders start to heave during The Philadelphia Story, when Cary Grant tells Katharine Hepburn what to say to her impatient wedding guests in the film’s final scene; I am not even ashamed of the fact that I am uncontrollable when Ronald Colman recovers his memory during Random Harvest, and finally recognizes that Greer Garson is the woman he has loved all along. And surely a chap who cries at an Erich Rohmer film (A Winter’s Tale, when the central characters meet again on a bus after several long years apart) cannot be irredeemably tasteless? But then I remember that I had the same reaction during John Hughes’s indescribably useless Some Kind of Wonderful (when punky tomboy Mary Stuart Masterson gets off with her teenage dreamboat), and realize that I’m just kidding myself; my weeping is indiscriminate, promiscuous, simply embarrassing. Crying, like defecation, makes no recognition of the quality of the product consumed.