Listenable stuff | Chris Beckett's Fiction

I wish my light could shine

My wife Maggie and I went last week to my friend Colette Paul’s launch for her new book, A Complete Success. (Check it out: Colette has a wonderful narrative voice, conversational in tone, often laugh-out-loud funny, but always wise and compassionate). Afterwards Maggie observed, ‘the thing I always want to ask is why anyone wants to write books and have them published’. Bear in mind we’ve only been together for 49 years: there’s a lot about each other we’re still getting to know!

It is a good question though. I found a succinct answer this morning, listening to a song called ‘Khanya Njalo’. It’s in the contemporary South African music genre called ‘amapiano’ and is by Zawadi Yamungu and the producer Kabza de Small. Yamungu has a exceptionally powerful and passionate voice, and I’ve listened to this song many times, but it’s in the Zulu language and I’ve only just found an English translation. The line that struck me was ‘I wish that my light could shine and reach others’.

Surely everyone wants that? Surely we all want to be seen? Surely we can only love people if we can see their light? Writing stories is only one way of shining, but it is one way.

You can hear Khanya Njalo here on Spotify, and here on Youtube. The song was written by Zawadi Yamungu (which is the stage name of Nkosingiphile Brightlady Mpanza. Her middle name seems apt.)

Another Canadian Interview

Here is another interview with Marty Kurylowicz and Holly Carson about my book America City. They are both based in Canada and the book involves a US President with hostile intentions towards Canada – a difficult topic for Canadians at the moment. I’m grateful to them for their interest.

The interview is also available on Spotify and as an Apple podcast.

See also my previous interview with them here (about Dark Eden).

Tribal

BBC Radio 4 recently broadcast a programme in the ‘Ten Years After Brexit’ series called ‘Tribal’. It was presented by James Tilley, c0-author of the book I discussed in my previous post, and with the same theme: the way that the Brexit referendum polarised the UK into two hostile ‘tribes’ around an issue which, up to that point, had not been high on most people’s agendas. I appear briefly in this programme talking about my book Two Tribes.

The programme, like Tilley’s book, doesn’t focus much on the demographic differences underlying those two camps (which I discussed in the previous post), but it is very good on the way that political tribes form and then consolidate themselves, as we bring our views into line with the views of our chosen ‘tribe’, and find ways of distancing ourselves from the rival tribe.

You can, at time of writing, listen to the programme here, if you have the BBC Sounds app:

Ten Years after Brexit: Tribal

Mo Ti Sọ Temi

I can’t resist posting a link to this song which has recently been posted on Spotify, written and performed a few years ago by my son-in-law Dupé (the singer), and my son Dom (who played most of the instruments). I’m very proud of them both!

I gather the title literally translates from Yoruba as ‘I have said my own’ – as in, ‘I’ve said my piece [so now it’s up to you.]’

Wild is the Wind

I was playing some music while I ate my breakfast. It was a playlist of the songs I’d listened to most often this year and it happened that ‘Wild is the Wind’ by David Bowie came up (here it is on Youtube, here on Spotify). It’s a lush, extravagant, love song, originally recorded by Johnny Mathis in the fifties:

…Give me more than one caress
Satisfy this hungriness
Let the wind blow through your heart
For wild is the wind
Wild is the wind

You touch me
I hear the sound of mandolins
You kiss me
With your kiss my life begins… etc etc

(I think the mandolins line is terrible by the way! It really jars.)

Many people have covered this song, including, memorably, Nina Simone, but it’s well suited to Bowie, whose powerful voice and sense of theatre seemed to enable him (often, if not always) to get away with melodrama without seeming completely tongue-in-cheek. I know the song well and was only half-listening. I left the room to do something, closing the door behind me, and forgot about the music.

A minute later, I noticed a strange muffled sound from behind the door, a kind of agonised cry or moan, which for a moment I couldn’t place. But it was the song still playing. Stripped of its words, its melody, its elegant theatricality, it sounded like an animal, far off in the distance, howling with longing into the darkness.

Writing Worlds Podcast

This podcast is a conversation between myself, Chris Gregory and the extremely funny Emily Inkpen. You can also listen to it on Spotify and lots of other places.

Theme for Dark Eden

My dear son, Dom, has written a theme for Dark Eden, such as might be used at the beginning of each episode if the book was a series. I really love it. It truly captures for me the combination of beauty, melancholy, alienness and darkness I envisaged for Eden, with that steady deep pulse running through it to evoke the most constant and characteristic sound of the luminous forests of Eden: the hmmph – hmmmph – hmmmph of geothermal ‘trees’ pumping their sap down to the hot rocks below, and pumping it back up again. To get the full effect you need to listen to it loud, with plenty of bass. I absolutely love it.

Dark Eden theme, by Dominic Beckett

Josienne Clarke

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 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 a lot of 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, a little less raw than some of the others, 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’s done 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 is a good place to be in some ways. (Speaking as a writer in that position.)

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

Dark Ecology 2

Following on from the interview with me by Marty Kurylowicz and Holly Carson in which we talked (among other things) about the sunless ecology of Eden, their ‘Science in the Fiction’ podcast has done two additional episodes about the real science of sunless ecosystems (which of course do exist on Earth – notably around thermal vents in the depths of oceans):

Ep 57: Julius Csotonyi on Dark Ecology in ‘Dark Eden’ – Part 1

Ep 58: Julius Csotonyi on Dark Ecology in ‘Dark Eden’ – Part 2

One thing I learned from these is that there are organisms that photosynthesise using infrared light alone (ie the form of light that is radiated by hot objects even when they produce no visible light, often slightly misleadingly called ‘radiant heat’). I would have used this if I’d known about it.

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.