by Nick Hornby
The town I lived in was in the Thames Valley, and it had nothing. No bands ever came, apart from John Martyn, who once played in my school hall. There was one cinema, which showed one film, usually one year after it had opened in London. There was one chart record shop, and no bookshops, unless you counted the small branch of WHSmith, which I couldn’t, since it sold no books I wanted to buy. So London, forty minutes and less than fifty pence away by train, provided my culture. Now I think about it, the whole point of London then was that it enabled me to take pieces of it home with me, books and music and clothes. And that point has now been lost. Everything is now available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, via a laptop, an extraordinary development which is of course mostly a dream – who doesn’t want people, especially young people, to have access to all the culture in the world? – but which also has a complicated downside: how do you express who you are, how you are different, if there’s no effort or cost or choice involved?
Over the last few years, London has become less a place where you buy things and more a place where you see things. When Prince announced, a couple of years ago, that he was going to play thirty-odd nights in a 20,000-seater venue, I thought he was insane. I knew about four people, me and three others, who still bought Prince albums, so by my calculation we’d have to buy 150,000 tickets each, a hefty outlay even for the most devoted fan. But all the gigs sold out; if you book it, they will come, and seeing Prince live became the unlikely thing to do that summer. When I was in my teens and twenties, you scoured the NME for news of gigs, and the applications for tickets involved postal orders and stamped addressed envelopes; the process excluded all but the truly committed. Now news of a show will be emailed to anyone who has ever listened to a song, and you can buy tickets with a couple of mouse-clicks, and as a consequence, venues are filled by people with a mild passing interest in the act concerned, people who, you know, wouldn’t mind seeing Prince. The blockbuster art show, the kind where you literally can’t buy ten minutes of gallery time, is a comparatively new phenomenon, and the blockbuster musical, too; I don’t remember anyone in my town expressing an interest in going to see a West End show. Musicals were finished back then, and the news that one day people would pour into a venue like Wembley or the 02 to watch a stand-up comedian – one guy, on his own, telling jokes that you might have heard on his TV programmes – would have produced as much laughter as the comedian’s set. For a long time, football matches sold out maybe once a year; Arsenal’s new Emirates stadium, with its 60,000 capacity, was booked solid for the first six years of its life, however modest the opposition. It’s almost as if London looked at Amazon and iTunes and every other website, scratched her head, and said to herself, ‘Well, I’m going to find some other reason for people to want to come here.’
London is growing again; the capital was responsible for a staggering thirty-seven per cent of England’s population increase in 2009–10. The young are still coming, the old don’t want to leave, and the city still pulls in the world’s rich, and the world’s poor – and how Dickens would have wanted to write about all that. (There are many reasons to wish that he was still at work, but I would dearly love to see his portrayal – and naming – of an obscenely rich Russian oligarch.) It still teems with money, disease, filth, ambition, laughter, art, pretension and the chance to turn yourself into somebody else. That is what it has always been; that is what it always will be.
Sources
My Patron: Believer, 2002
Abbey Road: Abbey Road official exhibition catalogue
Pain in My Heart: New Yorker, 1996
‘You Send Me’: Independent on Sunday, 1993
A Fan’s Notes: Sunday Times, 1994
Revolution in the Head: Sunday Times, 1994
Internet Music: Observer, September 2009
The Crying Game: Premiere, September 1993
Marah: The Times, March 2006
A Stranger in a Strange Land: Empire, 1994
The West Wing: Prime Times, 1994
An Education: Introduction to An Education: The Screenplay (Penguin, 2009)
A Sundance Diary (2009): Penguin website
Kidding Around: Sunday Times, 1993
The Goons: Rock and Roll: An American Story
Wodehouse: Introduction to Summer Lightning (Penguin, 2002)
Scenes from Provincial Life: Introduction to Scenes from Provincial Life (Penguin, 2010)
Ideas for Books: Guardian, May 2006
Life Goes On: Modern Painters, winter 1997
Humphrey Ocean: Independent on Sunday, July 2003
London: Boat magazine, 2012