Category: Listenable stuff

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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