31 Songs

by Nick Hornby

  19 Caravan

  Van Morrison

  The magnificent version of ‘Caravan’ on It’s Too Late to Stop Now (Van Morrison’s most enjoyable album, unarguably, so don’t even think about arguing) sounds to me like it could be played over the closing credits of the best film you’ve ever seen; and if something sounds like that to you, then surely by extension it means that it could also be played at your own funeral. I don’t think this is over-dramatizing the importance of one’s own life. Not all films have to be like Lawrence of Arabia or Apocalypse Now, and you’d have to have been pretty unlucky, at least in our part of the world (and if you walked into a bookshop and bought this book, you live in the part I’m talking about), not to have experienced a few moments of joy or pure hope or clenched-fist triumph or simple contentment amongst all the drudgery and heartbreak and pain. To me, ‘Caravan’ recognizes and synthesizes all of it, and the fact that what it produces from the whole extraordinary mess is something that sounds cheerful doesn’t mean that the song is trite.

  ‘Caravan’ isn’t a song about life or death, as far as I can tell: it’s a song about merry gypsies and campfires and turning up your radio and stuff. But in its long, vamped passage right before the climax, when the sax weaves gently in and out of the cute, witty, neo-chamber strings, while the piano sprinkles bluesy high notes over the top, Morrison’s band seems to isolate a moment somewhere between life and its aftermath, a big, baroque entrance hall of a place where you can stop and think about everything that has gone before. (Gosh. A sudden panic: can you hear any of that, those of you who already own the album or who are interested enough in this description to check it out? Possibly not. But – panic over – this book isn’t predicated on you and me sharing the ability to hear exactly the same things; in other words, it isn’t music criticism. All I’m hoping here is that you have equivalents, that you spend a lot of time listening to music and seeing faces in its fire.) And, though it won’t be me doing the thinking, as far as we know, is it arrogant to expect a little reflection from friends and family? It’s my funeral, after all. And they don’t have to think only about me; they can think about all sorts of things, as long as they’re worthy of the occasion and the music, and don’t involve foodstuffs, emails, footwear, etc.

  The only thing that worries me about having ‘Caravan’ played at my funeral is that string section. Will people think I’m making some concession to classical music when they hear it? Will they say to themselves, ‘What a shame he lost the courage of his convictions right at the end there, just like everybody else’? I wouldn’t want them to think that. Unless something unimaginable happens to me over the next couple of decades, I will have gone through an entire life listening more or less only to popular music in one or other of its forms. (I have a few classical CDs, and sometimes I play them, too; but I never respond to Mozart or Haydn as music, merely as something that makes the room smell temporarily different, like a scented candle, and I don’t like treating art in that way, with disrespect.) And I’m unrepentant, too. ‘I’d see him banged up for having anything to do with the inanity that is pop, full stop,’ said a famously sour writer and newspaper columnist recently, while attempting to defend a well-known music-business mogul who had just been imprisoned, but you’ve heard this stuff before.

  I have no idea whether his use of the word ‘pop’ is the same as mine, whether he thinks that all of it, Dylan and Marvin Gaye and Neil Young, is inane. I suspect he does. It’s not a complaint I’ve ever understood, because music, like colour, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent – it just is. The chord, the simplest building-block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. I don’t want to read inane books, but books are built from words, our only instruments of thought; all I ask of music is that it sounds good. Despite its crudity and simplicity, ‘Twist and Shout’ sounds good – in fact, any attempt to sophisticate it would make it sound much worse – and I fundamentally, profoundly disagree with anyone who equates musical complication and intelligence with superiority. It doesn’t work like that, which is maybe why these people despise pop music, because it’s one of the very few things that doesn’t. (They often hate sports, too.) I don’t dislike classical music because of its cultivation – I’m not an inverted snob. I dislike it (or at least, I’m unaffected by it) because it sounds churchy, and because, to my ears at least, it can’t deal with the smaller feelings that constitute a day and a week and a life, and because there are no backing vocals or basslines or guitar solos, and because a lot of people who profess to like it actually don’t really like any music (or any culture) at all, and because I grew up listening to something else, and because it does not possess the ability to make me feel, and because I don’t need my music to sound any ‘better’ than it does already – a great, farting, squelching, quick-witted sax solo does the job for me. So ‘Caravan’ will be played at my funeral.

  The problem with the extended passage that I mentioned earlier, the bit that I hope will make the mourners think and reflect is that … Well, OK, here’s the thing: it’s the bit where Van Morrison introduces the band. ‘Terry Adams on cello … Nancy Ellis on viola … Bill Elwin on trumpet … David Hayes on bass …’ Is that too weird? Can people really file out of my funeral listening to a list of names of people they (and I) don’t know? I’ve started to think of this passage as a sort of metaphorical dramatis personae now: granted, I don’t know David Hayes or Nancy Ellis, but, you know … I probably knew someone like them. That’s the best I can come up with, and it’ll have to do, because I’m not changing my mind, so there.

  20 So I’ll Run

  Butch Hancock and Marce LaCouture

  Some time in the late eighties, I went to see Butch Hancock, the Texan singer-songwriter, play in a large and draughty local pub. I distinctly remember feeling underwhelmed by the prospect on the way there. It was a cold, wet London winter night, and I wasn’t in the mood, and the pub was notoriously grim and there have been times when I’ve found solo acoustic shows hard work, a little too much meat and potatoes and not enough dessert. But Butch Hancock is a legendary figure in country-folk music, and he’d come a long way, and he certainly wasn’t in Finsbury Park very often … It seemed churlish not to go.

  But Butch wasn’t playing on his own. He was accompanied that night by another singer, a woman called Marce LaCouture, and the moment the show started my mood was lifted. They sounded terrific together, this pair, and it seemed like a small miracle that two throats and one acoustic guitar could transform the draughty (and frankly three-quarters empty) pub into a place where nice things could happen.

  After a while they took a break. Marce stayed around to sell cassettes from the side of the stage, and I bought one off her, having first ascertained that it contained ‘So I’ll Run’, the song I’d liked the most in their first set. (It turned out that ‘So I’ll Run’ was just about the only song they played that wasn’t theirs – it was written by someone called Al Strehill, and I still don’t know who that is – so my enthusiasm for it was probably slightly tactless.)

  Anyway, that was it. I had a nice time, nicer than I’d expected, and then I went home. But for some reason, when I was writing High Fidelity, the evening came back to me, and I made Rob, my narrator, go to a shitty pub to see a singer-songwriter called Marie LaSalle. He likes the music, not least because it lifts, or at least alters, his mood, and he buys a cassette off her in the interval, and develops a crush on her. Later, she visits him in his record store, and they end up sleeping together. I am sure that Ms LaCouture would confirm – with hurtful alacrity – that we didn’t sleep together. And she’d also confirm, probably with similar alacrity, that she didn’t play a cover of Peter Frampton’s ‘Baby I Love Your Way’, and she certainly didn’t visit my record store, because I’ve never had one. And
even though she seemed very nice, I didn’t develop a crush on her; I don’t even think I had a passing fantasy about dating a musician and being thanked in the sleeve notes of her CDs, as Rob does while he’s watching Marie perform. And yet I know that my Marie character somehow derived from her, which is why she has a similar name and the same initials. I suspect that it wasn’t Marce LaCouture I was writing about, but the song she sang. I had retained memories of the evening because of the alchemy she wrought in turning a wet night and a crappy PA system into a few moments of magic, and I was effectively trying to do the same. Like her, I was stuck with unpromising ingredients (a morose narrator and his moronic friends, a dismal pub), and, like her, I was trying to entertain people despite the idiotic restrictions I had imposed on myself. Recently I have been attacked in newspapers by two ‘fabulist’ writers, as far as I can make out for the ordinariness of the worlds I portray. To which the most obvious reply is that it’s all very well writing about elves and dragons and goddesses rising out of the ground and the rest of it – who couldn’t do that and make it colourful? (Readable, of course, is another matter …) But writing about pubs and struggling singer-songwriters – well, that’s hard work. Nothing happens. Nothing happens, and yet, somehow, I have to persuade you that something is happening somewhere in the hearts and minds of my characters, even though they’re just standing there drinking beer and making jokes about Peter Frampton. Genius is an overused word, but … No, OK, I won’t push it. The point is that I gave my character the same initial letters as the singer I’d seen because I was hoping that something might rub off, that somehow this would make it easier for my readers to understand how my narrator’s mood might be transformed because, in similar physical circumstances, mine had been. In other words, it was pure superstition.

  I have done this before and since, presumably to similarly little purpose. The first thing I ever wrote, a TV play that I never sold, I wanted to sound like the piano part on the intro to Aretha Franklin’s ‘I Say a Little Prayer’; maybe the reason I never sold the play is that the piano part is less than thirty seconds long, which isn’t really enough to sustain a whole play. About A Boy, my second novel, was intended in some way to resemble ‘E-Bow the Letter’ by R.E.M. How? I don’t know how. I just know that there was a tone in the song that I wanted to replicate in the book, something simultaneously mysterious and wry and reflective. Generous readers might give me the wry part of it, anyway. And, though I have never managed to pull any of this off to my own satisfaction, though I have never read any of my books or scripts back and said to myself, ‘Yep, that’s it, that’s exactly what I wanted it to sound like’, I know that without the pieces of music the writing would have been so much harder. So, thank you, Marce and Butch. Without you, Rob would never have got to sleep with a singer-songwriter, and he would definitely have been the unhappier for it.

  21 Puff the Magic Dragon

  Gregory Isaacs

  I can remember the first time my son Danny was exposed to music. He’d just come back with his mum from the hospital where he was born, and I played Shara Nelson’s solo CD, which I was playing a lot that autumn, and he suddenly became very still and watchful. It’s impossible not to sentimentalize the first few days of a child’s life, but I’d have been willing to bet then that music was going to be important to my son, in some way or another – not a stupid bet, considering how important music is to his mother and me. Maybe he’d turn out to be merely a fan; maybe he’d end up playing an instrument. Didn’t – doesn’t – matter to me either way, just so long as he felt it somewhere in him.

  It was a very happy time of my life. Danny was home and safe, after a difficult birth which had endangered him and nearly killed his mother; meanwhile she and I had, we felt, put a long period of difficulty behind us shortly before his conception, and his emergence into the world was confirmation that these troubles would not be returning. Things didn’t stay good for very much longer, though. Danny’s development was a constant cause for concern (it would be some time before he was diagnosed as autistic), and, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the stress of those first few years, the Elastoplasts fell off his parents’ patched-up relationship, and the wounds underneath had gone gangrenous.

  But through it all, Danny continued to feel the music – he feels it so much, in fact, that he invented his own word for it, which is no mean feat when your inability to communicate defines your world. One of the many fascinating things about his condition (and yes, there’s fascination there too, just as there is laughter and pleasure and excitement, mixed in with the heartbreak and worry) is that, though he has very little language, he has managed to find words for things he fears he might not be given unless he asks for them. In other words, there are some things so desirable that they can burst through the blanket of silence that smothers him, and music (‘goggo’, as he calls it) ranks right up there, along with crisps, and swimming, and biscuits, which is pretty much where I’d put it, too.

  Danny’s relationship with music is an intense one. He has to listen before going to sleep at night; he sometimes wanders round with a portable cassette player, volume turned up as high as it will go, and occasionally he retreats to his bedroom, like a teenager, in order to listen with a concentration not permitted him elsewhere. I find it almost overwhelmingly moving, watching him when he does that – my little speechless boy, his head lowered on to the speaker, all the better to absorb every note (and – who knows? – maybe every word) of every song.

  And he seems to be developing tastes, too. A couple of weeks ago, in the car, he listened quite happily not to his usual nursery rhymes but to Tapestry; but when the CD-changer switched to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, an outraged cry came from the back seat: ‘Goggo! Goggo!’ Louis Armstrong, the man who single-handedly created one of the most important musical idioms of the twentieth century, did not, apparently, create music. So we moved on to Nick Lowe instead, and he was happy again. This was good news. Any sentence pertaining to Danny that incorporates the words ‘developing’ and ‘tastes’ is good news, because he tends to get stuck, to focus wholeheartedly on the tastes he already has (for salt and vinegar crisps, and Postman Pat videos, and peanut-butter sandwiches), rather than developing new ones: there was a brief open window of opportunity, somewhere between his first and third birthdays, through which he was prepared to admit new experiences and flavours and interests, but this window was shut suddenly, with a bang and with no warning, and any addition to his repertoire in the last five years has been a cause for rejoicing and baffled conversation – ‘He watched twenty minutes of Toy Story!’ ‘He ate half of a cracker!’ ‘He did a poo at school!’ This is the sort of thing that passes for radical innovation in Danny’s life; you may think of yourself as a creature of habit, but he’s gone way beyond creature. He’s the Beast, the Tyrannosaurus rex, of habit.

  So I’ve got high hopes for music. I’m trying to switch him from cassettes (which he tends to mangle) to CDs, and to move him away from nursery rhymes; I reckon he could cope with, I don’t know, Rumours, or Rubber Soul, or Catch A Fire, as long as I could get him to listen to the first few bars – usually, all foreign cultural matter (videos he has never seen, music he has never heard) is expelled via the eject button immediately. I’ve had some modest success recently with a CD called Reggae for Kids, which begins with Gregory Isaacs singing ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, and this modest success comes hot on the heels of another modest success, the introduction of a world music thing that, though he never requests or attempts to play himself, is tolerated and perhaps even quietly appreciated, and I’ve found a couple of other collections that he might get into … Who knows? Maybe soon he’ll be listening to Gregory Isaacs singing ‘Night Nurse’. And then we could maybe go to a gig, and he’ll be motivated enough to want to learn which CDs come out of which case … When you have a child with a disability, you learn to let go of the ambitions you once had for him very quickly (and you learn too that many of those ambitions were worthless anyw
ay, beside the point, precious, silly, indulgent, intimidatingly restrictive), but they get replaced by others, and ambitions involving music (the listening thereto, rather than some daft Shine-style fantasy involving the Royal Albert Hall, an extraordinary talent and a disbelieving, tearful audience) seem both harmless and achievable.

  But to begin with, listening to ‘Night Nurse’ would be enough. If it’s true that music does, as I’ve attempted to argue elsewhere, serve as a form of self-expression even to those of us who can express ourselves tolerably well in speech or in writing, how much more vital is it going to be for him, when he has so few other outlets? That’s why I love the relationship with music he has already, because it’s how I know he has something in him that he wants others to articulate. In fact, thinking about it now, it’s why I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there’s something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. It’s the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part, and Danny’s got it too, of course he has; you could argue that he’s simply dispensed with all the earthbound, rubbishy bits.

  22 Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3

  Ian Dury & the Blockheads

  23 The Calvary Cross

  Richard and Linda Thompson

  You could, if you were perverse, argue that you’ll never hear England by listening to English pop music. The Beatles and The Stones were, in their formative years, American cover bands who sang with American accents; the Sex Pistols were The Stooges with bad teeth and a canny manager, and Bowie was an art-school version of Jackson Browne until he saw the New York Dolls. But you’ll never hear England by listening to Elgar or Vaughan Williams, either: too much has happened since then. Where’s the lager-fuelled violence? Where’s the lip, or the self-deprecation, or the lethargy, or the irreverence? Where are the jokes? Where’s the curry? You may not want to think about any of that when you lie back and think of England, but it’s all undeniably there, and if you’re English, the odds are that you’ll eat a curry more often than you see an ascending lark.