Guest round-up by Paul Dowswell: HIGH TIMES AND LOW CULTURE, a random selection of rock biographies

"Writers Review usually concerns itself with the classier end of the literary spectrum but on this occasion I’m going to stride manfully into the murky world of the Rock biography ..." 

Paul Dowswell writes historical fiction and is a frequent visitor to schools, both home and abroad, where he talks about his books and takes creative writing classes. His novels Eleven Eleven and Sektion 20 won the Historical Association Young Quills Award and Ausländer won the Hamelin Associazione Culturale Book Prize and the Trinity Schools Book Award. Recently he has become increasingly concerned about how deranged he looks in Zoom calls.

Writers Review usually concerns itself with the classier end of the literary spectrum but on this occasion I’m going to stride manfully into the murky world of the Rock biography. And not just any rock biography – this last month a friend passed on a random wodge of them when he was having a clear out and it’s these I’ll be writing about as well as mentioning some others by way of comparison. This latest batch have been of variable quality, but good or bad it’s still been fascinating to read them.

 

Undoubtedly, some rock biogs are terrible. Radio presenter Danny Baker once dismissed David Bowie’s ex-wife Angie’s account of their life together, Backstage Passes, by saying you could open any page and read out any sentence and it would be dreadful. I did just that and came up with ‘Trying to have a relationship with a coke freak is like trying to eat an aircraft carrier.’ But notwithstanding, some rock biogs can be hands-down magnificent. Bob Geldof’s post Live-Aid effort Is that it? brilliantly portrays his early life in the cold-water chill of post-war Ireland and remains interesting when fame kicks in. John Cooper Clarke’s biog I wanna be yours offers the reader a magical picture of childhood in post-war Manchester and only goes off the rails once he becomes famous and, simultaneously, a heroin addict. Here, his unhappy tales of chasing his next fix become dull and repetitive.

 

But for now, let’s get back to this month’s batch:

Rick Wakeman's music isn’t my thing but he seems like a genial soul so I've always warmed to him when I’ve seen him on the telly. His book generously credits his ghost writer – something that is not always the case in projects like these - and he quickly establishes his everybloke persona with chapter openers like ‘I love cars. I’ve had a few in my time…’. Alas, I found Grumpy Old Rock Star (Preface, 2009) hard work. On the printed page he comes over like a sozzled but harmless 'I'm mad, me' pub bore who might corner you at the bar. And, good God, his anecdotes are INTERMINABLE. His hearty pub-speak style does grate, and no cliché goes unused. Radio station switchboards ‘light up like a Christmas tree’ when swearing occurs on air, and Rick is living his life ‘on God’s green earth.’ Within are tales of Barry the Perv, Herr Schmitt and Tony ‘Greasy Wop’ Fernandez. Come on, Rick. It’s the 21st Century, not the ‘Hop off you Frogs’ 1980s.

 

Keith Emerson’s Pictures of an Exhibitionist (John Blake Publishing, 2004) is handicapped by the prog keyboard star’s clunky writing style. The book doesn’t credit a ghost writer but you would have thought his editor would have something to say about sentences like ‘From his casual shrug, could I be forgiven my suspicions that a game of deception was being played?’ It’s also rich in muso talk such as ‘By coincidence, Carl’s drum pattern happened to fit a left-handed ostinato figure I was working on…’ But before you know it he’s undermining his role as Prog’s own music professor by regaling us with tales of Emerson, Lake and Palmer sharing a roadside German prostitute.

For anyone who dislikes the prog-rock behemoths (as 1970s rock critics invariably described ELP) there’s plenty here to fuel their prejudice. ‘I’ve got this image of us creating a vast "sheet of sound" that defies conventional structures,’ writes Emerson. ‘There doesn’t appear to be one set time signature or a key structure but the total effect played by the three of us could be very prolific.’ Whimper fearfully and pray for the arrival of punk.

 

Lemmy’s White Line Fever (Simon and Schuster, 2002) is unexpectedly fascinating and he can certainly tell a tale. The Hawkwind and Motörhead bassist, who once said when asked for the secret of his success ‘Just keep going, like Attila the Hun’, is true to his word. Equipped with an iron constitution and an iron will, he burned through 40 years of Motörhead line-ups and died with his boots on a few short years after publication. You suspect, like The Alien, he had acid for blood. Despite his fearsome mien and even more fearsome consumption of amphetamine sulphate, he comes across as quite an old-fashioned and learned sort of chap. He even confesses that his greatest line in describing Motörhead to the world, ‘If we moved in next door your lawn would die,’ was actually nicked from American rock band The MC5. Unlike Rick Wakeman, Lemmy keeps his anecdotes short and to the point and is never less than entertaining. One former manager he describes as ‘a very interesting man… from an anthropological point of view. A complete ******* lunatic.’

Ginger Baker’s Hellraiser (John Blake, 2010) leaves you wondering how he lived so long. His parents’ generation would have called him a tearaway and he was undoubtedly mad, bad and dangerous to know. But among the tales of a decades-long smack habit, multiple infidelities and trying to set fellow band members hair on fire, you can’t help noticing that his daughter Nettie has done a really good job on the ghost writing. 

And to finish, two biogs written by a band accomplice and a journalist respectively, rather than the musicians and their ghost writers. Richard Cole’s Stairway to Heaven (Pocket Books, 1997) and Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods (Pan Books, 2005), both about Led Zeppelin.

The band’s oft told tale reads like a Greek tragedy and by way of comparison, I’d say the best account of them all is undoubtedly Barney Hoskyns’s Trampled Underfoot, where artfully chosen and often quite contractionary quotes illuminate this cautionary tale. (Jimmy Page claims his drug use never affected his playing. The rest of the world disagree.) As a rule of thumb you can tell how crappy a Led Zeppelin biog writer is by the ease and frequency in which they resort to aerial metaphors to describe the ‘flight’ and ‘crash landing’ of the Leds. Hoskyns doesn’t do this and his is a sad and sorry tale which also leaves you in awe of their extraordinary talents and multi-faceted music.

So, what of these two aforementioned accounts? Richard Cole, who was the band’s road manager throughout their 12-year existence, tells a weary tale, from the stale, obvious title onwards. His is a book of paint-peelingly sordid revelations, made even more distasteful by Cole’s corrosive misogyny. If you have pearls, prepare to clutch them. It’s like eavesdropping on the Russian Mafia drunkenly guffawing about how badly they treat the local prostitutes. On one occasion, for example, Cole persuades a gaggle of thirteen and fourteen year old girls to join the group on their private plane at Los Angeles airport. When the plane unexpectedly takes off for New York, the girls become distressed when they realise how much trouble they’re going to get into with their parents, who they probably told they were going to a sleepover with school friends. What larks.

 Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods is also a hair-raising expose of rock piggishness both within the group and their piratical road crew. Herein lurk tales of underage groupies, medieval brutality and Olympic-standard drug use.

But let's not end on such a negative note. Like Hoskyns, Davis loves the Leds. He even sings the praises of their underwhelming In Through the Out Door album, the last they made before their fearsome drummer, John ‘The Beast’ Bonham drank himself to death (48 vodkas, apparently…). Davis is an educated, erudite guide, quoting Primo Levi and snippets of Anglo-Saxon literature and while Cole’s book is a sordid swank along a very seedy avenue, Davis clearly revers his subjects, and finishes his book with a vivid and moving pilgrimage to John Bonham’s grave.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE PIANO TUNER by Daniel Mason

 

"It’s a first novel but comes with the glow of deep thought, deliberate craft and essential care in construction and development."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

How many books out there lurk, unnoticed, to be read? To be found, a word from a friend, a casual hand reaching for a title all but lost in a pile of discards? The chance of serendipity, the unlooked-for discovery or gift at birthday or Christmas? And what delight to come upon the hidden gem. And then to have the pleasure of passing on the news of it.

You know by now that I do not relate the story of the books I speak of here. I don’t read blurbs even if that jeopardises the already onerous, the unforgiving task of writing them. I will note but briefly some of the traits of this book which linger and make me want to broadcast its virtues more widely. It’s well-written, the characters live and breathe. The story is compelling, the layers of richness, in narrative, outreach, idea, many.

Tuner of pianos speaks for itself and you hardly need me to point to the metaphorical force of this: the adjustment of tension so that the instrument plays in tune….and what care, expertise, consideration, understanding, thought would go into adjusting the tensions in our own currently jangled society? An epigraph Mason chooses, from Plutarch: ‘Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord.’ ’tis well said.

The setting is British Burma of the final years of the nineteenth century but do not be deterred. Mason wears his research lightly. He gives context and, where necessary, background, but the information is neither stifling nor overwhelming. The action begins in London before moving eastwards and the detail is deftly managed. One example of how well he interleaves learnt material from imagined: the British protagonist makes an expedition into the jungle in the company of a local. They are followed by a gaggle of local children, drawn to this wonder, this exotic, the stranger with his odd purpose. They banter and chatter and make a nuisance of themselves, the Brit is discombobulated and, to help him, the local rounds on the gang of urchins to reprove them. They back off. ‘What did you say?’ asks the Brit. ‘I told them that you eat children.’ This upsets the man; the local laughs: ‘Don’t be upset, we have giants in our folklore who eat annoying children.’ ‘Perhaps not the best way for us to be perceived, however.’ And the matter is closed. However, a nice story cleverly used.

Names of places familiar from tradition and romance loom: Mandalay, Rangoon, Irawaddy, Siam; Burma, the fabled land, hemmed in by old China, India, Bengal, the oriental sea. If the premise might seem to be unlikely, the setting is perfect for the oddity and there is something quite beguiling in the mechanics of turning the key on the poorly strung wires to make the sickly piano sing once more. There is unlikely drama, too, in the onward tug of the narrative, nothing forced, to a fine dramatic conclusion.

I opened the book, began to read and knew, after a very short time, that it would be my companion for a while, this at a time when I have found some novels really quite difficult and lacking in sustained or even rudimentary charm or seduction. No names, no pack drill, even if the temptation to lard this notice with a number of titles – vaunted winners of glittering prizes – is powerful. A gushing review is enough, it seems, these days, to trigger further spate of gushing review, without basis or sense. I hope, therefore, that in the course of my recommendations here, I have proved an honest broker. There’s no point in fibbing or hyperbole.

I enjoyed The Piano Tuner immensely. It’s a first novel but comes with the glow of deep thought, deliberate craft and essential care in construction and development, the dashes of colour, evocative:

‘There was a statue in the spirit house, a faded wooden sprite with a sad smile and a broken hand. Edgar stopped in the road and took the paper (‘For Edgar Drake who has tasted.’) from his pocket, and read it once again. He folded it and tucked it next to the little statue, I leave you a story, he said.

He walked and the sky was light but he saw no sun.’

The writing is full where it needs to be full and spare when that suggests, a finely tuned instrument with pedal effects.

(Érard was the first maker in Paris to fit pedals on the piano, and his instrument had several: the usual sustaining pedal, an action shift, a celeste, and a bassoon pedal (which put leather against the strings to make them buzz).

The Piano Tuner is published by Picador.

More reviews by Graeme Fife:

House of Glass by Hadley Freeman
A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham
West of Sunset by Stuart O'Nan
Adolfo Kaminsky: a Forger's Life by Sarah Kaminsky
Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu
Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown
Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Guest review by Judith Allnatt: TRIO by Sue Gee

"A beautiful novel about loss, the process of grieving and coming alive again to beauty, friendship and love."

Judith Allnatt writes short stories and novels for adults. Her novels have been variously shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature, the East Midlands Book Award and featured as a Radio 5 Live Book of the Month. Short stories have appeared in the Bridport Prize Anthology and the Commonwealth Short Story Awards, and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.

Judith’s latest novel, The Silk Factory, is an eerie story of love and memory drawing on both the Luddite weavers’ rebellions in the nineteenth century and a modern day haunting. She has lectured widely on Creative Writing for over two decades and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She lives with her family in Northamptonshire and is working on her fifth novel. For more information and blog posts see Judith’s website. 
Twitter: @judithallnatt

Trio  is a beautiful novel about loss, the process of grieving and coming alive again to beauty, friendship and love. The main character, Steven Coulter, is not part of the eponymous musical trio but a teacher who tragically loses his young wife and is paralysed by grief. A year later when a colleague, Frank Embleton, invites him to a concert given by his sister and two friends, the music moves him. He begins to open to new possibilities for involvement in the world beyond his daily classes and his lonely house on the Northumberland moors and to the chance of new relationships.

Music is a healing power throughout, allowing feelings to form and be acknowledged. It releases the expression of feelings that are beyond words, as when a fellow teacher, morose Mr Dunn, veteran of the Somme, weeps to hear a young chorister sing Once in Royal David’s City.

Many of the pleasures of Sue Gee’s novels are here. Remote moorlands, Bamburgh Castle, Lindisfarne and the country house, with its pele tower and haha, where the trio practises, are lyrically described. Her subtle observation of human behaviour and her nuanced dialogue provide tantalising glimpses of her characters’ secret desires.

Set in 1937, the novel balances themes of stability and fragility. The English country house seems timeless with its ancient cedar still with its childhood swing. Its grandfather clock acts as a symbol of continuity with its rising moon and reliable quarter hour peal. Yet beneath this is the continuous sense that all can be turned in a moment: through the ravages of TB, the sense of war stalking ever closer; through loves revealed and rejection turning worlds upside down.

In a bold move, the story transitions from 1937 to the present day in the last section, and follows the next generation of Steven’s family. Although this might seem disconcerting and a challenge for the reader to engage with a new character, I quickly became fond of Geoff and interested in his nostalgic journey to his past. At first I thought the main purpose of the section was to show the reader what had become of the original characters through and after the war. I soon came to realise that something much more subtle was also going on. Gee shows us the past inextricably bound up in the present; the strength of attachment to childhood places, memories triggered by chance encounters, the need, near the end of life, to make a pilgrimage to one’s roots and to honour one’s ancestors.

This is a gentle, thoughtful and elegiac novel where appreciating the texture of the writing is as enjoyable as working out the characters’ secrets. It has the rare depth of insight one has come to expect from Sue Gee’s novels and I found myself pondering on loss, love and time, long after the last poignant scene. 

Trio is published by Salt.

TAKE NOTHING WITH YOU by Patrick Gale, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"The sureness, eloquence, humour and hope of this novel will endear it both to Patrick Gale's many fans and to those coming to his work for the first time."

Linda Newbery has written widely for young readers and is now working on her second novel for adults.

Patrick Gale's most recent book, A Place Called Winter, was set mainly in Canada in the early 1900s, drawing on the experience of his great-grandfather, a pioneer farmer in the prairies. His new novel marks a return to more familiar territory - boyhood and adolescence in the West Country, music, the complexities of love, sexuality and relationships.

Take Nothing With You sounds like a foreboding of death, but although the threat of death is always present - central character Eustace's parents run a retirement home, where any reference to 'change' in the resident population is euphemistic - the novel is ultimately about survival and the renewal of hope. Our first encounter with Eustace is as a man in his fifties, recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer and about to experience radioactive treatment. Having lost one lover to AIDS and another to mutual indifference, he's been alone for some while, but has recently fallen in love, long-distance, with a much younger man, Theo. They are soon to meet in person for the first time, but although they've shared confidences via Skype he has yet to tell Theo of his cancer treatment, fearing that such news would end the relationship before it's properly begun.

In the lead-lined room in which Eustace receives his treatment, everything he wears or touches must be discarded afterwards, so he must take nothing he wants to keep - a warning which give the novel its title. But the main part of the story concerns itself with his boyhood in Weston-super-Mare and the growing importance of music in his life. An unsporty misfit at his fee-paying school, he finds purpose and expression in playing the cello, taught by the flamboyant Carla Gold. Through her, he enters "a world in which art, headily, was everything" and meets pianist Ebrahim and painter Louis, with the revelation that two grown men can live openly as a couple. Relationships, however, prove fickle for all the adults in Eustace's life. Like L P Hartley's The Go Between, this novel of emerging sexuality and self-awareness allows the reader to see tensions in adult interactions over the head, as it were, of the viewpoint character. The marriage of Eustace's parents undergoes a cataclysm, the remnants of which we partially assemble from the present-day episodes.

Although Carla quickly sees Eustace's talent, this isn't a tale of a prodigious performer who soars to the heights against all odds. There are practical difficulties: although Eustace secures a place at music school, his parents can't afford the fees. His potential is seen by Jean Curwen, another charismatic teacher who runs a summer school, and although she seems to offer a solution there are plenty of other talented players who deserve her attention. And a family crisis, combined with a change of school, pushes Eustace's cello-playing into the background for a while. 

The Ancrum summer school section is particularly intense, with the hothouse atmosphere of living with strangers and the potential for friendships and sexual encounters. Eustace has a hurtful skirmish with a handsome older boy, but also forms a lasting and important bond with fellow cellist Naomi, who plays a significant role in the present-day scenes. And Patrick Gale excels when writing about the music - which is notoriously difficult, but these sections sing from the page. A cellist himself, he give enough but not too much technical detail, alongside a sense of how it feels to play in a group, the lines interweaving to powerful, poignant or playful effect. "Ralph played a hesitant sort of interrupted monologue on the violin to which Eustace's cello responded with a sequence of pizzicato phrases while the other three players sustained harmonies that shifted so slowly the changes in tonality were barely detectable. It was like watching a square of moonlight move across a floor." Eustace gradually appreciates that "it was chamber music, the creation of music with others, not pyrotechnic solo playing, that was the benchmark of true musicianship." 

Reading this, those of us who aren't musicians will wish that we were able to take part in this most exhilarating form of communion. "Music knits," Jean tells her students. "It heals. It is balm to the soul but is also the refiner's fire. It requires rigour and application." (Like writing.) The sureness, eloquence, humour and hope of this novel will endear it both to Patrick Gale's many fans and to those coming to his work for the first time. 

Take Nothing With You is published by Tinder Press.

DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING by Madeleine Thien, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"Reaching the end of this memorable and rewarding novel, I felt that I needed to start again at the beginning ..."

Three weeks ago we featured Sheena Wilkinson's review of The Dark Circle, by Linda Grant, which is currently shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Here's another strong contender.  

Like Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago or Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, Madeleine Thien's novel takes the reader through a harrowing time of political upheaval in which individuals struggle to keep any sense of purpose and integrity. The story here revolves around three exceptional musicians at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music: Sparrow, his young cousin Zhuli, and a pianist, Jiang Kai. The novel opens in Canada with the first-person narrative of Jiang Kai’s daughter, Li-ling or Marie, from whom we learn that her father killed himself in 1989. 

The circumstances of this are slowly revealed, taking us back, through three generations of linked characters, to communist China under Chairman Mao, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the rule of Deng Xiaoping – leading, with a sense of inevitability, to the Tiananmen Square protests. This sounds grim, even daunting, but we approach obliquely through various intertwining stories, linked by music, especially Bach’s Goldberg Variations and by Sparrow’s own composition, and by chapters from a fragmented book, part fiction, part reality, which is copied, preserved, and passed from one character to another. These writings first appears in notebooks given by Wen the Dreamer to his future wife Swirl: “As her candle flickered, she became certain that the writer had gone into exile or perhaps met with some tragedy”. Or maybe “the names were part of a code, a trail that someone could follow.” As readers, following this trail back and forth through the generations, we begin to see patterns: love and loss, loyalty and rebellion, exile and survival, music and silence.  

Both writing and composing were of course highly dangerous in a culture in which nothing could be private, and where attitudes, tastes and even thoughts were expected to conform to narrow party lines. Sparrow’s own Symphony No.2, “which he knew to be a work of great beauty, languished in his desk drawer, having never even been submitted for approval … His students wanted revolutionary accessibility and his superiors tried to educate him on the correct political line, but what line could this be? As soon as he contained it in his hands, it opened its wings and filled the sky.” Western music, especially, is seen as bourgeois and contaminating, and soon Zhuli, a violin student devoted to Bach and Prokofiev, is targeted, denounced and assaulted by zealous Red Guards. Tellingly, Sparrow gives up his music to work in a factory making radios: radios which blast out Party propaganda from every open window. He feels that “the weakness of his time had lodged inside him, slowly pulverising all that was unique and his alone, because he had allowed it to do so.” Even to love is to risk Party disapproval: “Love, if it served the smaller self before the greater one, the individual before the People, was a betrayal of revolutionary ideals, of love itself.”

In spite of the weighty and tragic events recounted, there’s often a beguiling innocence to the writing, as in this charming glimpse. “Swirl heard an infant weeping, went to the window and when she looked down, she saw a couple trying to fit their baby into his winter coat, adjusting arms then legs then head as the baby lolled and weakly fought, then scrunched up his face and wailed, and still the outerwear refused to fasten. Wen the Dreamer came along the avenue, a block of pages sticking out of his pocket. He leaned towards the weeping child like a comma in a line so that, momentarily, the child, confused, suspended his wailing, the outerwear was fastened, and the little family went on their tremulous way.”  

The story is framed by the arrival in Vancouver of Ai-ming, Sparrow’s daughter, who has fled China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Marie and Ai-ming form a close bond echoing that of their fathers; but Ai-ming, attempting to take up residency in the United States, disappears again, mourned by Marie. “Long after she departed, Ai-ming’s voice tugged away at my thoughts, returning me again and again to the same ever-expanding, ever-contracting piece of music … It’s taken me years to begin searching, to realise that days are not linear, that time does not simply move forward but spirals closer and closer to a shifting centre.” The Book of Records is fragmented and unfinished, but copied and disseminated. Sparrow’s music is concealed but eventually rescued, recorded and distributed. Marie / Li Ling continues to piece together her past and that of her family. In this way the characters, their dreams and aspirations, live on.

Reaching the end of this memorable and rewarding novel, I felt that I needed to start again at the beginning, and in retrospect I should have made notes, to understand more quickly how the characters are connected. (A friend to whom I passed on the book also stopped halfway to start again, for clarity - it does demand some initial effort from the reader). As I was about to leave for two weeks in China, it sent me back to Wild Swans, which covers the same period in memoir form and kept me absorbed throughout my trip. I learned that although Wild Swans is translated into 38 languages it is still banned in China; that most Chinese people are unaware of the events in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989, and that Madeleine Thien has been told that her novel can be published there only if the chapters about the protests are removed - reminders that China, though embracing Western influences in many ways, is still under tight control. 

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is published by Granta.