Category: Listenable stuff

Josienne Clarke

Josienne Clarke: Photo from Wikipedia

My wife and I went to see Josienne Clarke in the Junction in Cambridge a couple of months ago, when she and her band were doing a performance of the songs of Sandy Denny. I’m no folk buff and knew very little about Sandy Denny and her songs (I’ve learned a bit more since), but I first encountered Josienne Clarke some years ago, I often listen to her music – she normally sings mainly her own stuff – and always go to see her if she’s performing in this area.

I get easily bored, but I was spellbound throughout the concert, as I always am when I see her. She has a wonderful singing voice. It’s not especially powerful – she’s not a belter-out of songs – but is very precise and expressive. She seems to me someone who takes very seriously the craft of singing. When performing she has a lovely way of describing the music as she makes it with graceful twirling spirals of her hands – something I find myself doing myself when I listen to her music at home. (I think the photo above captures her right hand in mid-twirl). Hers is definitely a folk singing voice, though she is not a folk purist, and her band plays electric instruments, keyboards, drums.

After the concert I went up to the merchandise table and bought her latest album Parenthesis, I on CD. This was, strictly speaking, pointless, as I never play CDs these days, and listen to her music on Spotify. So, as I admitted to my wife I basically spent £15 just so as to be able speak to her, but when I got to the front of the queue, all I could think of to say was ‘You’re a wonderful singer, Josie.’ As my wife teasingly pointed out, I really was quite star-struck. Anyway, she needed the money so as to be able to record a Sandy Denny album.

When I first came across her she was performing as a duo with her then partner Ben Walker, who played guitar (she played guitar also, but he was the one that did most of the fancy stuff) and did the arrangements on their recordings, though she was the singer and the songwriter. It was apparently a very painful break-up and she’s since written a number of very raw break-up songs. My favourite of these is ‘Dark Cloud’, which you can hear on Spotify here – a beautiful song about living with someone who refuses to let you make them happy, and makes you feel guilty if you ever dare to be happy yourself.

She did some beautiful songs in the duo, but she really didn’t need the help. On Parenthesis, I, she did all the production and arrangements, including adding saxophone and recorder parts that she played herself. My favourite song is probably ‘Dead Woman’s Bones‘ – a song about a man appropriating the brilliance of a dead woman songwriter. I wonder if this is about Sandy Denny, who I am pretty certain is the subject of another song on the album called ‘Magic Somehow’- Denny died at 31, after deliberately throwing herself down some stairs – but I don’t know enough about her to know if there is anyone who can be accused of appropriating her work in that way. Or perhaps the song is about how Clarke’s former partner made her feel – or simply about women artists throughout history whose work has been claimed by men. Anyway, the song works on every level, including a very beautiful and complex arrangement. God knows how many times I’ve played it.

Josienne Clarke isn’t exactly a household name – household names don’t tend to sell their own merchandise – but she has loyal followers. She deserves to be better known, but then she wouldn’t play the small venues which she does so well. Not being famous but having people who really appreciate you isn’t such a bad place to be in some ways.

One thing I thought was a pity was that the average age of the audience was, like me, more than twenty years older than her. (She’s in her early forties). I hope this reflects the fact that Sandy Denny died nearly half a century ago and her fans are getting old, and isn’t a sign that this kind of music only appeals nowadays to people my age.

Josienne Clarke’s website

Risking Sentimentality

I said in my previous post that you have to risk sentimentality to be real. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of looking after children.

We have lived for so many millenia in cultures dominated by the idea of ‘masculinity’ as the supreme virtue that we have come to value ‘masculine’ qualities much more highly than ‘feminine’ ones: gentle Mother Mary is subordinate to stern God the Father, weak and emotional women who look after children are subordinate to strong and rational men who run things and make war, etc etc etc. (Even women fall into the trap of thinking this way, if they equate liberation with being more like men.) And in such a culture, it’s easy to confuse soft and gentle feelings with weakness and sentimentality for, after all, such feelings are associated with low status work.

Looking after children is for me one of life’s sweetest and most profound pleasures. (Easy to say that as a grandparent, I know, when childcare is not a constant daily task, but I would have said it as a parent too, even though it did often exhaust me). It’s also very hard and difficult work, and one of the most important things that anyone can do. But the pleasures of being with children are hard to write about because you worry about sounding sugary and sentimental.

So when I say that we need to risk sentimentality, what I mean is that we should reclaim the tender feelings we have for children (and for people generally, and for other living things), and be willing to express them even if some people do find it sentimental. Sentimentality is a real thing of course, a form of false feeling, but the fear of seeming ‘sentimental’ often has the effect of shutting down the expression of gentle feelings, so as to bring the subject back to proper important grownup things like war and money and power.

There was a time when gentlemen used to discuss these grownup matters over cigars and port, after the ladies, bless their soft little hearts, had left the room to chatter (at least in the minds of the gentlemen) about children and love and puppies. Obviously women should stay in that room and talk about money and power too (boring topics though they ultimately are, they do need to be talked about), but it would be good if the overall conversation became one in which children, love and tenderness were given the weight they merit. Money and power are, at best, necessary evils, means to an end. Love, like beauty, is an end in itself.

One person who writes very well about his feelings for his children, without a trace of sentimentality, is my own dear son Dom, who is a songwriter. Here is a lovely song of his about watching his children play – specially poignant for me of course because I know and love those children too.

Love and Mercy

Why did God make the radio? The answer, obviously, is so that we could cruise along a coastal road with the windows down and the blue sea in the distance, listening to the sweet harmonies of The Beach Boys singing the music of Brian Wilson.

Which is exactly what I did the day after he died (though it wasn’t strictly a radio). I even shed tears – and I’m the man who didn’t weep for his own mother! Insofar as you can love someone you only know through his work, I loved that guy.

So he wasn’t always very nice in his personal life? I don’t care. So his politics were conservative? I don’t give even a tiny fraction of a shit. This was a very wounded man who had a rotten, abusive childhood and who, instead of making the bitter, angry, miserable music one might expect from someone with that history, chose instead to express the love and mercy that every child from a rotten family longs for.

You might say that I’m being sentimental but I would strongly dispute that. We are so frightened of being sentimental these days that we overemphasize the hard emotions – lust, anger, the will to power – just to show how sophisticated and liberated we are. But that’s all nonsense. Being hard-boiled and cynical is just being sentimental in reverse. Sometimes you have to be prepared to risk sentimentality if you are to be to be real.

In one or other of the tributes to Wilson, someone referred to ‘Good Vibrations’ as a song about lust. But listen to it! It’s a man thinking about a woman who seems to him utterly lovely in every way. And yes, okay, it would be naive to pretend this feeling has nothing to do to do with sex, but to my mind it’s not so very different to other non-sexual kinds of tenderness, such as the way my heart melts when my 6 year old granddaughter comes running cheerfully out of school. To just call it ‘lust’ is ludicrously reductive. Gentle and tender feelings are also real, and they’re what comes pouring out in Brian Wilson’s lovely music.

Here is one more beautiful little fragment.

Interview with Stephen A. Andrews

Thanks very much to Stephen E. Andrews for this youtube interview for his Outlaw Bookseller podcast, providing an overview of all my books. Steve is based in Bath, in Somerset, and his extraordinarly encyclopaedic knowledge of books is matched by his infectious enthusiasm. I first met him when he invited me to give a talk in Bath’s Waterstones.

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Father of the Man

I proposed the song ‘5.15’ as theme music for my previous post. The Who, from my perspective now, seem to me to have represented better than anyone else what it was like being an alienated adolescent in the 1970s. And, of their many takes on this subject, ‘5.15’ (about a stoned teenager riding a commuter train out of London) is, I think, the best. So many things are captured in this song – the free-floating sexual frustration, the sense of detachment from the adult world (‘Why should I care? Why should I care?’) – but my favourite verse is: 

Magically bored
On a quiet street corner
Free frustration
In our minds and our toes
Quiet storm water
M-m-my generation
Uppers and downers
Either way blood flows

‘Magically bored’ is perfect!

See also, obviously, ‘My Generation’, its stammering refrain referenced in the above verse, and in particular ‘See me feel me’. This last (from Tommy) is more of a fragment than a song, but its eight, several times repeated, opening words can still bring tears to my eyes, so powerfully do they represent to me now the longing and fear of a 16-year-old from a somewhat dysfunctional family who has never been kissed, never even met a girl of his own age in a social situation, who has only just begun to make real, if rudimentary, friendships, but knows that in another year, he will have to go out into the world.

It’s an odd thing. To my 16-old-self, anyone over 40 was in some way emotionally already dead (‘…The things they do look awful cold/ I hope I die before I get old…’), so, if he could see me as I am now, that adolescent me would probably not recognise me as being in any way like him, but I feel an affinity with him all the same, a greater affinity, in a way, than I feel with all the other iterations of me that have existed in the years between. Why is that, I wonder?

I think partly it may be because, now, past the age of retirement, with my bus pass and my pension (yes, baby boomer, alright for some… etc etc), I have reached a kind of second adolescence, when I am no longer required to go to work every day or to have long-term plans, and when I can, if I wish, spend a Tuesday morning sitting around for several hours, listening to songs, and asking myself what they mean to me. (The magical difference is that I no longer have to cry into the void ‘see me, feel me, touch me, heal me’, because I have the things I feared I would never have.)

But it’s also partly because I have always tried in some way to be true to that 16-year-old, and not to embrace the kind of adulthood he despised. It seems odd in a way for a fully grown man, with a lifetime of experience to draw upon, to want to stay true to a clueless 16-year-old. But there it is. Foolish as he was, he saw something that I don’t want to forget. Like Wordsworth said (I’ve just looked it up! I had no idea it was him), ‘The child is father of the man.’

Cue for another song fragment from a man who burst up from a miserable childhood to explode like a firework into brilliant colours, and then crashed to the ground before he could finish writing the album this song was supposed to be part of.

Two Tribes audio drama

Here’s an audio drama put together by Chris Gregory for his Alternative Stories and Fake Realities podcast, based on an extract from Two Tribes. You’ll see the names of the actors when you click the link. What makes this a exceptional feat is that the actors were not together in the same room, each one recorded their lines separately – or rather several versions of each line- and Chris G selected the delivery he thought worked best, spliced them together, and added sound effects. It’s constructed around a central scene in the book where Harry and Michelle, meeting for the third time, go together to the Tate Modern in London, where they have their first big row.

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