Construction No.128 (1920)

The dash of Beatles magic comes as they reach the end of the verse and bounce together on the strung-out “pleeeeeeease . . .” answered by Paul’s solo “ . . . love me do.” The spirit in the harmony and the expectant silence that follows heightens the sense of anticipation...

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In the drawn-out “plee-ee-ease” of “Love Me Do” the lilting harmonies yearn politely—in “Please Please Me” it’s dirty and polite all at the same time. John and Paul’s verse duet gains on the Everly formula: Paul stays on the initial high note as John pulls away beneath him (“Last night I said these words to my girl”), putting the Everlys’ “Cathy’s Clown” lilt to a brighter beat. The rasp in Lennon’s voice on the repeated “come on”s is far from innocent—he wants this woman to do more than just hold his hand. As they hit the second “please,” Paul and John leap away from the pleasantry of the first, soaring up to convey a real adolescent sexual frustration. Even the sound of the band has more rough edges than the thunking bass of “Love Me Do.” Where the first single is genuinely coy, the second makes a “polite” demand on the female, and Lennon deliberately tries to stir up a reaction.

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Although John and Paul can be worlds apart (as this album [“Please Please Me”] demonstrates), when they harmonize the common brilliance they achieve is breathtaking. The two share a space of musical effervescence that only they know how to reach for, and they hit it with uncommon grace.

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The first and last songs on the album, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout,” are its bookends: both revolve around the idea of falling in love on the dance floor. But where Paul gets the dance floor jumping, Lennon makes the earth move. It’s as raunchy as anything the Beatles ever recorded, and it stands up beautifully to records with raunchier reputations (like the Stones’ “Satisfaction”). Where the opening tune suggests an adolescent sexuality, “Twist and Shout” conveys a loss of innocence; where Paul’s singing is charged but charming, Lennon’s delivery is nothing short of lustful.

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Throughout rock, and throughout the history of music—from Bach’s French Suites to Ravel’s La Valse—the image of the dance in music has been linked to the act of sex.

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After two verses [“Twist and Shout”], the singers—John with Paul and George in support— back off to play their guitars for a verse, as if resting for the final round. When the voices come back in, the personalities we’ve heard throughout the record stack up one by one for the rave-up, building the chord with mounting excitement. At the top of the ladder, they spill over the edge with hysterical screams, the musical dam breaks, and before we know it they’re into the last verse. It’s the musical equivalent of an orgasm, and it counts among the most exciting moments in all their music.

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It’s not that they’re telling teenagers to dance or have sex: they’re simply enjoying life so much that they can’t contain themselves—they want the beat to seduce the whole world into having fun.

(Tell Me Why by Tim Riley, 1998/2002)

everytime I read this story I'm so disturbed by yoko's manic participation, like she was 38 at this point. girl what are you doing with this mean girl baby nonsense you're nearly forty.

Naming the city

Towards the end of Claire Kilroy’s 2009 novel All Names Have Been Changed, set in the mid 1980s, the narrator prepares for emigration with the damning speech: ‘There’s nothing for us in this country. It’s never going to change. It’s never going to get better.’ As Kilroy has said herself: ‘When I wrote that, we were still in the full throttle of the boom…There was no sense we were going back there.’

In a way it’s good that the novel’s prescience is accidental, since self-conscious ‘boom-to-bust’ novels are painful to read. I was drawn to the novel not so much for its subject matter (a group of mature students and their incestuous relationship with the famous novelist who teaches them creative writing in Trinity) but for its historical and geographical setting – Dublin in the 80s. By all accounts it was a pretty depressing place, though Kilroy’s narrator Declan lays on the misery a bit thick in places. Still, overall the city is beautifully, even lovingly evoked, with burnt-out corporation flats described as keenly as the rarified campus of Trinity.

Wisely, Kilroy avoids a too-broad geographical sweep, instead focusing in on a few key areas – Trinity and its surrounding nexus of College Green, Dame Street and Westmoreland Street,  Mountjoy Square and its decayinge environs, and a brief excursion to the southside suburbs. The Trinity campus is a haven for characters seeking to escape the sudden violence and unpredictability of the city, particularly the alcoholic novelist Glynn, but no-one can escape reality for too long, no matter how much they may try to through writing.

A wonderful set-piece follows Glynn, storming out of a pub on Westmoreland Street in a rage and heading back to Trinity. This is a walk of no more than five minutes, but it becomes an Odyssean journey of danger and wonder, as Glynn boosts his spirits by taking in the city he thinks he knows, before being attacked by a gang of youths and fleeing for safety into the protective arms of Trinity campus, where he still rebels against the college’s incongruous ownership of acres of valuable city land by kicking up the grass of its rugby pitch. Much is said about Ireland’s contradictions in that chapter, and said more effectively than in a later chapter in which Declan rages against the excesses of St Patrick’s Day.

Drink is a curse in the novel, as it is in so many Irish novels, but the other curse of working-class Dublin is brought to life by Declan’s accidental friendship with stoner-turned-junkie Giz who occupies the bottom floor of his building. It would be easy for this character to feel tacked-on, but Giz comes to life and in some ways seems more real than the main characters. It would also be easy to make him more sympathetic by adding a tragic backstory or imbuing him with a fake ‘salt-of-the-earth’ dependability, but Kilroy avoids the clichés.  Giz is violent, aggressive and untrustworthy; a real friendship between him and Declan is impossible due to their insurmountable differences in background, yet somehow he elicits sympathy. His decline mirrors that of the city, but he is not just a symbol. It can be very difficult for a writer who has not grown up poor to successfully evoke inner-city characters – descriptions tend to fall prey to dehumanising hatred or pity – but Kilroy’s observant eye sees the realness of the ‘scumbag’ without glossing over his unpleasantness.

It is these, almost peripheral aspects of the novel that interested me most. The main plot offers much of interest, but the opaqueness of the characters as seen through Declan’s eyes meant they took a while to come alive.  Glynn himself is despicable, yet like Giz, is oddly engaging and realised, but the four women who make up the rest of the class are hard to fathom. Kilroy has said:  ’At all times I know what the women are thinking in the novel and from there I had to guess at what he [Declan] was thinking.’  As the novel progresses it’s clear that there is a whole, untold aspect of the story that’s hidden from the male characters. Declan for the most part is well-drawn, except for a few brief instances where he thinks or behaves in a self-consciously ‘male’ way – the trap that female authors writing in a male voice must constantly try and avoid falling into, and vice versa. He’s not particularly sympathetic, yet he’s worth following nonetheless. Of the female characters, only Aisling the mentally unstable goth and Antonia the brittle, sharp-tongued divorcee convince. The pliant Guinevere appears to have no other function in the plot other than to be beautiful, which is perhaps the point, and the mumsy Faye barely registers. As seen from the point of view of Declan (and, vicariously, Glynn) this is perhaps an entirely accurate depiction of the group.

Unfortunately the group’s worship of Glynn in the first half of the novel is hard to fathom – his legacy is well-described, but they all seem so helpless and cringing before him as to be unbelievable. I read a comment somewhere that the friendship between the group seemed unconvincing because none of the epic conversations engaged in during their marathon drinking sessions with Glynn are described in any detail. Also, for a crowd who spend so much time drinking, they rarely seem to laugh or have any fun. Maybe that’s literary types for you! Or maybe Kilroy is making another point here – that a lot of the conversations we have while drunk are so much pointless nonsense. She’s an intelligent writer; I’d be inclined to think that the seeming flaws in the novel are intentional.

All Names Have Been Changed is worth reading once you get past the first few, somewhat turgid, chapters; though its occasional self-consciousness and elaborate language will not appeal to some. It certainly deserves a place among works of art that bring to life the psychogeography of Dublin, a city that continues to inspire, even at its bleakest.

I was looking through editions of my local newspaper for mentions of The Beatles and I thought this piece in the Bristol Evening Post was so interesting that I typed the whole thing out. I'm such a sucker for these early-ish interviews when they're all still so chatty and relatively excited by the fame and money.

Source: The Bristol Evening Post, 10 November 1964 (they played a concert in the city that day).

Transcript below the cut...

A distant volley of screams penetrated the quiet upstairs foyer of the theatre.  

“Oops, here we go,” said a middle-aged reporter.  “They’re here.  Can somebody tell me which one is which?”

The television men switched on their lights, the photographers squinted through their viewfinders and the journalists juggled with notebooks and pencils.

“I know one of them’s called Ringo,” said the middle aged reporter.  “Could somebody point him out?”

There was a clatter of feet on the stairs, and the Beatles appeared in single file through a doorway, grinning all over their faces, and made straight for the bar.

Everybody instantly forgot all their pungent, searching questions they had been thinking up for weeks, and started firing away with fairly idiotic queries like: “How do you feel?” and “What are you doing these days?”

The television people grabbed John and Paul, who happened to be in the front, and I grabbed George, who started telling me about his new airgun.

“I spend my spare time shooting potatoes off trees in the garden,” said George. “I started with bits of cardboard on the clothesline, but cardboard doesn’t do anything very spectacular when you hit it.  So now I balance spuds on the trees and blast them to bits.”

A television man sneaked up behind me and shoved a microphone in between me and George. George clinked his glass on it and shouted “Cheers” down the mike.

“What are you going to do when the Beatles finish?” asked the television man.

“I’m going to be an engine driver,” said George.  “If they won’t let me have a train, I’ll drive a fire engine.”

Ringo, meanwhile, had retired to a corner for a quiet smoke.

The middle-aged journalist was busy interviewing Paul, whom he thought was Ringo. 

 “Press conferences can be quite a laugh,” said Ringo.  “Have a ciggie.”

We lit our ciggies and talked about Ringo’s New Image.

“Since the film, people seem to notice me a bit more,” said Ringo.  “They used to talk to the others and leave me out because I was supposed to be the quiet one.  Actually I can be quite noisy.  I used to feel rather out of it, but I feel like a proper Beatle now.  It’s amazing though how many people still can’t tell us apart.  Reporters still ask me, “How are you, John?”

The Beatles’ road manager, Neil Aspinall, came over and led Ringo off to have his picture taken.  The Aspinall rescued Paul from a bunch of reporters and the Beatles wandered off to inspect the stage in the A.B.C. theatre.

On stage, Paul was doodling on an electronic organ, and Ringo was doing a violent drum duet with the drummer of one of their supporting groups.

Neil Aspinall had promised me half an hour in the Beatles’ dressing room - the pop equivalent of a pass to the Kremlin.

“I can’t disturb the others for a minute,” he said, “but John’s upstairs.  You can start with him.”

John was chatting with two old school friends from Liverpool.  In the corner of the dressing room a TV set was showing a children’s programme with the sound turned off.

John jumped up, shook hands, and insisted on me taking his armchair. “You look as if you need it, Rog,” he said.

We talked about the allegations that the Beatles are slipping.

“Last year,” said John. “Beatlemania was news. Now No Beatlemania is news. The press have gone to town on the places where there have only been a couple of hundred kids outside of theatres instead of a couple of thousand.  They haven’t bothered to report things like Leeds, where there were 15 of the kids on the stage at one point.”

“Last year that would have been news.  It doesn’t bother us.  We’re sold out pretty well everywhere.  Can you think of another group that is filling halls at the moment? The Stones aren’t.  Maybe we should have done this tour earlier.  We all wanted to do England again before America this year. But Brian said no. And what Eppy says goes. He literally plans our careers.”

“I think we’re better organised now, anyway.  The police are marvellous.  They get us stowed away in the theatres before the kids come out of school, so obviously there aren’t so many riotous scenes.”

The idea of the Beatles breaking up still seems unthinkable. But I asked John if they ever considered adding any extra musicians.

“We’ve thought about it — yes,” said John. “We were once a five-strong group, before Stuart Sutcliffe died.  We’ve toyed with the idea of adding a piano or organ in the past. And for our last disc, we did think of bringing in an orchestra.  But we always rejected the idea in the end.  You see, for the kind of music we play, any more musicians would be superfluous.  I suppose we might have a couple of guest people on the odd occasion, but they wouldn’t be real Beatles.  I’d turn round at the end and say: “Ta very much to Arthur on the organ and Harry on the flute” and that would be that.  I just don’t think anyone else could fit in with us now. We’re a sort of closed shop, the four of us.  An outsider just wouldn’t be accepted, if you see what I mean.”

Before the Beatles’ Christmas show in London and the shooting of their next film — “which is going to be a bit madder than the last one” said John — they are taking a fortnight’s break.

“I’ll just stay home with the wife, Cynthia, and play records,” said John.

Home is his £20,000 Surrey country house, purchased in July as a retreat from the fans.

“Cyn and I are living on the second floor with the cooks and people,” said John. “The rest of the place is like a battlefield.  It’s swarming with electricians and plumbers and odd job men, all trying to get it straight for us before Christmas. I keep on bumping into these strange blokes on the stairs.  I haven’t a clue who they are, but Cyn seems to have them organised.  I’m not sticking my nose into that side of things, except to say vaguely how I want the house to look. Can’t even put a plug on myself.”

“The gardens? Well, there are an awful lot of them, I’ve seen a bloke sort of digging around the place. He smiles and waves, and I smile and wave back. I suppose he must be the gardener. His name is probably Fred.”

John said occasionally Beatle fans manage to find the house.

“They’re usually so exhausted by that time that they haven’t got the strength to actually battle their way in and pull my hair.  Though, the other morning when I was asleep, Cyn found some of them crawling up the stairs.”

Paul and George came in.  Paul sat on the windowsill and George read out an interview with P.J. Proby in a pop paper, in which Proby claimed to have been the first to introduce a certain sound to pop.

“He’s fantastic, isn’t he?” said Paul. “He really believes he’s the greatest. We must tell him some time.”

I asked Paul if he could think of anything which the Beatles hadn’t already been asked.

“There isn’t anything,” said Paul. “But we don’t mind answering the same questions all over again. We like talking to people.”

He enthused about his new Aston Martin. “I did 120 up the M1 and died of fright.”

And he talked about the Beatles futures.

“Whatever happens, I think John and I will carry on writing songs. And I think George, Ringo and I will all get married eventually. But not yet. We haven’t got time.”

Ringo came in with a musical paper carrying a feature article about Paul.

“Don’t like the picture,” said Paul. “They had a much better one of John last week.”

“It made me look like a fat idiot,” said John.

“Exactly,” said George.

A picture of the Beatles suddenly flashed on to the television screen.  

“Quick, turn up the sound, Rog,” said John.

“Don’t bother,” said George. “It’s only that ugly old Beatle lot. I thought they were all dead.”

The Threepenny Opera

Image: Dada Rundschau by Hannah Höch, 1919.

(A review from last year of the Threepenny Opera in the Gate Theatre. Trying to get this post to nestle into the correct chronological space, but Tumblr seems to have a problem with that kind of reverse-scheduling. Hence this introductory note - this review was written in October 2013.)

Seeing the show in the flesh, in the theatre, after years of exposure to the myth, is a slightly disorientating experience. The expected, stunning musical set-pieces are interspersed with narrative-prolonging longeurs, while the most famous songs (Mack The Knife and Pirate Jenny) pop up at rather incidental points in the story. The political message is less a message than an announcement, clunking the audience over the head with the complaints of the oppressed in rags.  The show itself, as presented by The Gate and directed by Wayne Jordan, is both less strange and more wonderful than I’d imagined it would be. This is a production that takes the source material seriously, as shown by the 18-piece orchestra that starts playing as soon as the curtain lifts. From then on the show dazzles with pitch-perfect (and refreshingly unamplified) singing, choreography that manages to be challenging without being confusing and costumes and set design that convey just the right amount of ragged decadence.

The lack of subtlety and nuance in the original storytelling persists through a game reimagining by Mark O’Rowe, but the music and aesthetic for which the name Threepenny Opera is synonymous more than compensates. Allusions to the present economic situation are kept mercifully subtle. This production is no exercise in superficial window-dressing – it is the very sincerity with which the cast and crew present this musical and visual feast that gives this production its extraordinary power.

Highlights include Hilda Fay as Jenny, Mark O’Regan as Mr Beecham and the aforementioned 18-piece orchestra.

It actually happened.

On Instagram

The News Today, OH BOY!

Phoebe and Daphne discuss the (Beatle) news of the day in this unfiltered, bonus AKOM.

Eyes of the Storm

Paul Mescal

Another Grammy!?

Gettin’ High w/ Paul

Bowery Ballroom

SNL 50

New Paul album?!

Does He Think of Me? Was He Jealous?

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

McCartney Legacy Pt.2

Paul’s Money

THE PAUL MCCARTNEY DRAG BALL! Listen HERE

Review of an early Hilary Mantel

Goodreads review of 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street', an early novel by Hilary Mantel:

A terrific sense of menace pervades this story from the beginning, as cartographer Frances struggles to navigate her new home in Jeddah, where her husband has landed a lucrative construction job.

It's the mid-1980s, and Saudi Arabia is riding high on the back of oil wealth, marble and glass towers rising out of empty lots, a modern-looking yet feudal economy carried on the backs of exploited immigrant workers. Cloistered in a luxurious apartment, Frances is frustrated by her Muslim women neighbour's refusal to accept Frances' assertions that life is better for women in the West. It's cautionary tale in how a superior attitude will only drive others further into their own convictions.

Frances recognises her essential prejudice against Saudis and Muslims in general, but the crushing imprisonment and police state-like surveillance of the society she's living in break what little will she has to separate her legitimate protests from bigotry. The novel presents expat life satirically, showing the other English people living in Saudi as essentially venal and bigoted, staying the country just long enough to save up for a 'city flat' in London. Expat life hasn't changed much in 30 years, it seems. Corrupt, arrogrant Saudi politicians and minor royals are equally skewered. The novel's main flaw is the lack of resolution in the central mystery, a story that is built up, clue by clue, through the whole story. Perhaps the details are unimportant and that aspect of the plot merely functions to illustrate Frances' growing paranoia, but what little details that emerged were interesting enough to warrant further explanation. The powerful sense of dread ended up feeling anticlimactic. Also, Frances herself was somewhat thinly drawn, considering she was the central character - her neighbours and the other expats came much more vividly to life. Some experiments in structure didn't really work for me either.

Overall, worth reading, if only as a warning against falling into the trap of becoming the eternal expat, staying in the hated host country for “just another year”....

me when I'm gay and omw to yell at teachers striking during my son's exams