Songbook (8 page)

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 anyway, 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.

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.

You couldn't really find anything more American-sounding than the music Ian Dury's band the Blockheads play on ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful': chicken-scratch James Brown guitar, a sax solo which quotes from the theme to
A Summer Place
 . . . except, right there, in that odd combination of late-fifties American kitsch and early-seventies American funk (and ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful' is funky enough to bring on a patriotic, we-can-do-it-too glow), there is something uniquely English: Dury's generation was not afraid of the past, nor of popular culture outside the rock and blues tradition. (Compare The Beatles or The Kinks to just about any American band of the same era,
and you can only conclude that our bands liked their parents more.) ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful' is, as its title implies, a list, and in the way the list consists of a great many things that are not English, it is as curiously representational of a certain kind of post-war Englishness as the music. Stephen Biko, for example, the black activist who was murdered by the South African authorities, was an integral part of our liberal-left political landscape of the early eighties – it was an English singer, Peter Gabriel, who wrote a song about him. And the trombonist Rico is Jamaican, but our 1970s obsession with reggae wasn't shared on the other side of the Atlantic, and Rico was a reason not only to be cheerful but also why The Specials sounded so distinctive (and, at the time, so distinctively un-American). I'm not attempting to claim British credit for any of these people or their achievements, merely pointing out that they are meaningful to us, that they are part of what being British has involved in the last few decades.

The more I listen to ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful', the more it sounds like the best kind of national anthem, one capable of inspiring pride in those of us who spend too much time feeling embarrassed by our country. In fact, if Tony Blair has any guts, he should explain to the Queen that, because none of us cares about her any more, the old anthem is no
longer applicable, and that Dury's tune will henceforth be used at all sporting events and state ceremonies. Just imagine: before each England international, David Beckham sings ‘Summer, Buddy Holly, the working folly, Good Golly Miss Molly and goats', while the rest of the team chants ‘Why don't you get back into bed?' The boost to national morale would be incalculable. And the beauty of it is that the song could evolve. If we decided as a nation that, say, Jarvis Cocker or Judi Dench or Michael Owen are reasons to be cheerful, then the Poet Laureate would be told to knock up a couplet for insertion. (An added bonus would be that we could dispense with military bands, none of whom possesses the requisite swing, let alone the requisite electric guitars.)

There hasn't been much, certainly since punk, to inspire pride in anyone who doesn't buy the John Major vision of Britain, a vision involving old ladies cycling to evensong and cricket; the re-energizing effects of Tony Blair's election in 1997 are long gone now that he and his government have been exposed as a bunch of hollow, career-preserving hacks. I can't get excited about our foolish, phony gangster films, or most of our leaden, snobby authors, or much of our leaden, philistine pop music (and if you think all pop music is philistine, then compare
Lennon's influences – the Goons, Chuck Berry, music hall, Surrealism, loads of things – with Noel Gallagher's, which seem to consist entirely of The Beatles). But Dury's song is a reminder that there is (was?) a different British heritage, something other than Cool Britannia and Merchant Ivory. ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful' mentions Health Service glasses (we still have a Health Service), and the Bolshoi Ballet (we never had a Red Scare) and singing along to Smokey (we love, have always loved, our black American music – indeed, we have turned into its curators – and we never thought that Disco Sucked) . . . And when Ian Dury gives thanks, in that art-school Cockney voice, for ‘something nice to study', it almost breaks your heart: self-teaching, too, is part of our twentieth-century history (think of the Left Book Club, Penguin's original remit to provide cheap classics to the masses, the Open University) although one suspects that it isn't going to be a big part of our twenty-first. For a piece of funk whimsy, ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful' is culturally very precise, if you listen to it closely enough; whether it refers to a vanished golden age, only time will tell.

In Richard Thompson's ‘The Calvary Cross', it's possible to hear an older England, the one that Blake and the Brontës write about, the old, scary place, full of dark
satanic peasants and howling winds and pigs' bladders and what have you. And though there is a lot of English folk music that can conjure up those dark days, when there were only three terrestrial TV channels and no decent takeaways, Thompson is the only one who does it using an electric guitar – he's swallowed rock 'n' roll whole (he's not averse to the odd Chuck Berry cover, and his version of The Byrds' ‘Ballad of Easy Rider' is a wonderful, folk-inflected hybrid of Here and There) and coughed up something that could only have been made in Britain. The first time I saw him and his ex-wife Linda perform, in 1977, they looked like a couple of Hardy characters: the gig was in an austere lecture theatre in Cambridge, and Thompson's gaunt, haunted, old-fashioned face made me think of poor Jude Fawley and his doomed attempts to study at Oxford. Linda, meanwhile, was wearing a smock and a headscarf, sat on a stool (she may have been pregnant) and looked miserable, as though Thompson were trying to sell her, just like Henchard sold his wife in
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. It was all very bleak, and curiously memorable, and though I'm glad I saw them, I never felt for a moment as if I lived, or even wanted to live, in the country that had produced their music. Does that matter? Probably not – I have never wanted to live in Mali, or in Trenchtown, Jamaica, either,
but I've got a few good records that have come from those places. It's just a little uncomfortable, though, hearing music of and about your native land that makes your native land sound like the coldest, bleakest place on earth. I want to live where Ian Dury lived; I hope I still do.

What was I listening to in 1974, when ‘Late for the Sky' came out? Not Jackson Browne, for a start. I wasn't really aware of him until 1977, when my musical microclimate was way too ferocious to accommodate delicate Californian
flowers; the ubiquity of ‘The Pretender' in all the record collections of the girls I met at college confirmed my suspicion that when it came to music, girls didn't Get It. And then, a couple of decades later and going through a marriage break-up, I found that
Blood On the Tracks
and
Tunnel of Love
, having been mined exhaustively during peacetime, didn't have much left in them, and meanwhile, The Clash and the Ramones, the people who, I felt, had wanted me to turn my nose up at ‘The Pretender', had long since ceased to be much use to me. (Which is not to say that the college girls had, after all, Got It back then. We were nineteen – we should all have been listening to punk, not listening to songs about marital discord and early mid-life crises, although considering that the boys were listening to punk while studying English literature or law at the University of Cambridge, you could argue that either option involved an element of make-believe that young adults should have grown out of.) So, after taking advice from my friend Lee (q.v.), I returned home with a couple of Jackson Browne albums, and found within minutes that I had made a new friend.

I didn't know any of the great songs on those first three or four albums, apart from ‘Doctor My Eyes' and ‘Take It Easy'. I'd never heard ‘Late for the Sky', or ‘These Days', or
‘For a Dancer', or ‘From Silver Lake', or ‘Jamaica, Say You Will'. It was almost like discovering a writer I'd never read – except we discover writers we've never read all the time, and only rarely, as adults, do we stumble across major pop artists with a decent back catalogue: it is usually prejudice rather than ignorance that has prevented us from making their acquaintance, and prejudice is harder to overcome (indeed, much more fun to maintain). And, yes, of course it was prejudice that had stopped me from listening to Jackson Browne. He wasn't a punk. He had a funny pudding-bowl haircut that wasn't very rock 'n' roll. He wrote ‘Take It Easy', at a time when I didn't want to take it easy. And though I hadn't heard any of the songs, I knew they were wimpy, navel-gazing, sensitive – American in all the worst ways and none of the best.

And suddenly, there I was, aged forty-plus, lapping it all up, prepared to forgive all sorts of lyrical infelicities and banalities in the sad songs; prepared to forgive, too, all the limp, hapless, thankfully rare attempts to rock out (although I would have been much less forgiving in vinyl days, when I had no access to a remote control and a skip button). I'm prepared to forgive the bad stuff because the best songs are simply beautiful, and beauty is a rare commodity, especially in pop music, so after a while anything
which stops you from embracing it comes to seem self-injurious. I can't afford to be a pop snob any more, and if there is a piece of music out there that has the ability to move me, then I want to hear it, no matter who's made it. I used to have a reason not to like Little Feat (too polite, as far as I can recall, and maybe too musically precise) and Neil Young (over-long guitar solos) but no one can nurse those kinds of quirks in taste now. You're either for music or you're against it, and being for it means embracing anyone who's any good.

The pop snob's dismissal of people like poor Jackson would be forgivable if everything we spent our snobbiest years listening to was of comparable worth, but of course most of it was the most terrible (and ephemeral) rubbish. Recently,
Mojo
magazine ran their list of the 100 Greatest Punk Singles, and it would be fair to say that probably eighty of them were and remain simply awful – derivative, childish, tuneless even within the context of punk, nothing I would ever want to hear again. And yet at the time I would have taken Half Man Half Biscuit or The Users over Jackson Browne any day of the week. (What am I talking about? I did take Half Man Half Biscuit over Jackson Browne, every day of the week.) I didn't hear David Lindley's hymnal, soulful guitar solo in ‘Late for the Sky' for a quarter of a
century because I was a bigot, as narrow-minded and as dumb as any racist. (And speaking of which: I was old enough to vote, and yet still I made excuses for ‘Belsen Was A Gas' by the Sex Pistols, while simultaneously finding myself unable to absolve a man for an iffy haircut and a touch of introspection . . . It was all pretty scary back then, now I come to think about it.) Now, I feel far more belligerent about Jackson Browne than I ever did about the Pistols: ‘You don't like “Late for the Sky”? Well, fuck you, because I don't give a shit.'

This may simply mean that I have become old, and so therefore Jackson Browne's sedate music holds more appeal than punk – that all this is a long-winded way of saying that I'm forty-five (today, as I write!), and so I listen to folky singer-songwriters now, not bratty and loud guitar bands . . . kids . . . lower-back pain . . . a nice night in watching
The West Wing
 . . . blah blah. And yet I still appreciate, and recognize the value of, noise, as my partner would no doubt unhappily concur. None of my friends likes The Strokes as much as I do (although admittedly this is because they feel they've heard it all before, whereas I like having heard it all before, so this might not be the incontrovertible evidence of hard-rockin' eternal youth I'm looking for); Marah's recent live shows, the volume of
which reminded Lee of Ted Nugent at his most terrifying, simply made me realize that I should allow my ears to ring more often. So I don't think that my new-found love for Jackson can be explained away by my advancing years.

He would have been wasted on me at the time, though; I wouldn't have understood. I'm not referring to the lyrics, which, after all, are hardly opaque (my late-seventies singer-songwriter Elvis Costello made me work much harder at my practical criticism); I'm referring to the soul. And that's where being older helps, because just as I was mistrustful of any melody that didn't come wrapped in a heavy-metal riff when I was fourteen, I was at twenty-one unable to distinguish between soft rock that expressed pain, and soft rock that expressed a smug stoner's content with his wife, his dog, and his record-company advance. There are so many bits in Jackson Browne's music that I don't think I could have responded to as a young man, because their delicacy and fragility I would have mistaken for blandness. The fragment of chorus in ‘The Times You've Come', when he sings, in a climactic harmony, ‘Everyone will tell you it's not worth it', the piano intro to ‘I Thought I Was a Child', the first few bars of ‘Late for the Sky' itself, when Lindley's guitar, Browne's piano and an organ create a breathtakingly sombre beauty (and how many record
labels would allow a major artist to kick off an album with that now?) . . . You have to have lived a little, I think, to be able to recognize the depth of feeling that has shaped these moments, and these songs, and if ‘Late for the Sky' is perfect accompaniment to a divorce, it's not just because its regretful lyrics fit; it's because divorce peels away yet another layer of skin (who knew we had so many, or that their removal caused such discomfort?), and thus allows us to hear things, chords and solos and harmonies and what have you, properly. I should add that I'd rather not hear things properly, that part of me wishes that I had all those extra layers of skin, and I was still in a position to dismiss the music as Californian piffle. But I'm not, and I'll have to make the best of it, and to tell you the truth, the best of it is much, much better than I could possibly have imagined. And isn't that just like life?