auto biography

Life After Music, Music After Life

Robert Cochrane — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 13:43:30 +0000

Life After Music, Music After Life Robert Cochrane June 14, 2022 - 09:43

Topics

Book Review

Tags

auto biography

In The Eyeline Of Furtherance

by JOHN HOWARD (Fisher King)

This latest memoir is English singer-songwriter John Howard's third appraisal of his tryst with life. Covering the last two decades of the century gone, it details the underside of a convoluted but event strewn sojourn in music.

By virtue of happenstance, personal charm and a fan's knowledge of pop songs, Howard enters the world of men in suits, set in their ways and driven by a need to have their own sense of self-importance constantly confirmed. An avenue through which he navigates with good grace, despite it being festooned with antiquated sharks, Dickensian in mode.

Once the "next big thing" signed to CBS Records in 1973 he becomes fifteen years later a licensing A&R man for budget labels, a brief stint at MCA and then Reader's Digest. His previous career being a time he barely mentions to his colleagues, if at all.

There pervades an air for the reader of sadness at a man of his obvious gifts being reduced to licensing the elderly recordings of stars on their descent from fame. It is a fascinating insight into the underside of the tapestry of ambition and success. Careers in decline, an audience aging with their icons in a sadly Proustian fashion. Howard however is in his element and simply goes with the flow. Compilations of budget priced records and compact discs that still clutter market stalls, charity shops and thrift stores, the bane of any vinyl junky in that need for a hit, the detritus of his efforts.

Here walk the ghosts of vinyl pasts. Lonnie Donnegan, Bert Weedon, Acker Bilk, with the occasional near modern blast of Madness & Culture Club, who now most definitely belong to the trade of nostalgia also. Along the way is a lost Dusty Springfield project, sadly curtailed by illness and the Grim Reaper, a previously unknown Doris Day platter from 1968, and vignettes from the likes of the indomitable Brenda Lee and the vastly underrated Elkie Brooks. People who maintain a following without a reliable recording deal. The potency of nostalgia.

There are other moments of more personal transcription. Howard's vivid portrayal of his bereavements through Aids, sensitively recreates an era of paranoia and loss. It is a timely reminder and testament to, a wave of grief that has thankfully been depleted of its savagery. Forgotten lives remembered like those lost in a war.

He writes with exasperated tenderness about his late father's difficult second marriage to a woman whose mental health problems, sadly undiagnosed, made her a controlling and vindictive presence. Alan Bennett meets Samuel Beckett. I met his father once and found him to a be a genial soul, but one ill-prepared for the level of coercive control to which he was daily, mostly secretly, subjected to.

His wife routinely censored his newspapers with scissors of any women he might have found attractive. In every dream home a heartache as Bryan Ferry so evocatively intoned. Howard briefly earned some brief-lived kudos from her by facilitating an after-show introduction to her hero Barry Manilow. An irony she refused to sanction by hanging a photograph of the occasion on their bedroom wall. It proves a saddening centre to the book, both frightening yet absurd. His father even pleads with his son not to let her know he watched television when he visited him, because she had to sanction everything he viewed.

As the book progresses the muse of Howard's rarely mentioned former pop career flits and flutters in mostly unrewarding ways. Songs recorded for children's records, a near chart hit he penned, covered by family entertainer Des O'Connor ( it reached No 76 in the UK charts) and a lost album consumed by the implosion of the record label that was days away from releasing it.

From these pages Howard emerges as an assured, charming soul with the heart of a fan. There's a delightful cameo encounter with Beach Boy Bruce Johnson, and the night when an unusual and unexpected attack of the jitters robbed him of a conversation with his idol Paul McCartney. This is a wonderful journey into a lost world of record companies, largely swept aside by the digital age. There are many insufferable dinosaurs, given the light of print and memory. One unsavory European is particulary vile, but his arrogance allows Howard a well-rewarded final say. A rare example of karma in full flow.

For the past twenty years John Howard has been consistently productive. A myriad of albums and songs have tumbled forth as he has gained the rightful respect of of his peers. Though he says he has no wish to annotate his 21st century revival, I fear that would be an oversight since his return to music with such vitality and aplomb happens rarely. Bill Fay and Sixto Rodriguez being two notable exceptions. This book is in some ways his years in the wilderness, but is a funny and rewardingly touching read.

It is vital and imperative that he transcribes his return to the land of promise he always had a divine right to inhabit, the best revenge being able to live and wear it well.

Add new comment

Survival As Polite Defiance

Robert Cochrane — Tue, 17 May 2022 20:13:41 +0000

Survival As Polite Defiance Robert Cochrane May 17, 2022 - 16:13

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

auto biography

An Accidental Icon

by Norman Scott (Hodder & Stoughton)

Had his life gone as others had planned it, Norman Scott's would have long been over. An unsolved murder on the moors of Southern England, his body discovered beside that of Rinka, his adored great dane. Plans have a tendency to warp and change so Scott thankfully remains alive and well. His life, one worthy of writing about, but not an easy trip to have survived and prospered through. He transcribes with great candour, details that make their awfulness seem strangely benign. A perfect mix of farce and tragedy, it represents a world most fiction writers would steer clear of for fear of being disbelieved, though it also perfectly proves that revenge is a dish best served stony cold.

To modern eyes Scott was a victim of grooming, though one with an innate tendency to survive. Sexually abused by his remote and imperious mother, after a term in remand at her behest for the puported theft of a bale of hay, and a stay psychiatric care, this needy youth fell under the gaze of the exploitative and powerful politician Jeremy Thorpe, once seen as a future Prime Minister of England. When he got his hands on Scott he repeatedly performed the first of many acts of rape. He also kept his National Insurance papers thus hampering his victim's right to paid work. An act of imperious control that would became Thorpe's eventual self-generated nemesis.

As with many whose human peers emotionally disappoint them, Scott developed a passion for animals, horses primarily, and dogs, that yet remains, although he has also maintained a loving relationship for the past quarter of a century. Fame is often a poisoned chalice that falls upon those least prepared to savour and survive it. With more twists than dime store pulp fiction, Scott traverses the Swinging Sixties in a medicated haze of prescription drugs. Along the way he has affairs, the most notable being with the artist Francis Bacon, is befriended by the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, and the heir to the Guinness dynasty. He also forges a successful career as a fashion model and designer, whilst surviving a myriad of suicide attempts, a plethora of prescription drugs, and a brief stint of homelessness where he takes up residence in the cubicle of a public toilet.

Along the way his on-off-on affair with Jeremy Thorpe, a charming, ambitious man, but also in the closet. Scott becomes a problem which Thorpe decides to solve by having his lover murdered. The dog becomes the first and only victim since the murder weapon jammed twice. Eventually a vulnerable young man is thrown to the lions of the establishment at a time when homophobia was a moral right and not a facet of ignorance. Scott, duly crucified and shamed lost the court case, but the damage to Thorpe's career was irredeemable. A hollow victory that saw him fade from public view.

With the ensuing years and the emergence of new evidence Scott has been reassessed and understood, portrayed with tremendous aplomb and sympathy by Ben Whishaw in the film A Very English Scandal which starred Hugh Grant as a brilliantly cadaverous Thorpe. Norman Scott emerges from these pages as a sanguine and genial soul, who when young was his own worst enemy. Now eighty-two he lives quietly in an ancient cottage on Exmoor surrounded by his menagerie. A grandfather of four, and a father of two, he is a modern personage who has lived beyond the time of simple labels to become An Accidental Icon. A man perfectly entitled to having the last word.

Here is a book that deserves to be The Naked Civil Servant for the modern world. Affectionately dedicated to his late friend April Ashley, it is a crash course on survival, a source of pleasure as well as inspiration that leaves the reader with the warmth of a lingering inner smile. An example that truth prevails against the odds, sometimes.

Add new comment

Do You Remember Bob Mould?

Steve Holtje — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 04:29:36 +0000

Do You Remember Bob Mould? Steve Holtje June 30, 2011 - 00:29

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

auto biography

See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody

by Bob Mould with Michael Azerrad (Little, Brown)

This is an obvious must-read for anyone interested in punk rock: the story of the main force behind one of the top five American punk bands, Hüsker Dü. And though by page 150 Hüsker Dü has broken up, there's a lot of interesting stuff after that. By which I don't just mean his also excellent band Sugar, his solo albums, etc. More than most music bios, this is the story of a man whose job just happens to be "musician."

That's not to say that it's an entertaining book full of uproarious anecdotes like Keith Richards's autobiography. This book lacks that sort of celebrity dazzle and charm; Mould's wit is dark and wry (such as his memory of a Finnish festival performance where he "saw an inebriated local approach one of the festival agents and, mistaking him for a tree, began to urinate on his leg") rather than sparkling and exuberant. But in a way it's much more satisfying: One never gets the sense that Richards has matured or learned any life lessons (junkie business doesn't count), whereas Mould's autobiography strongly focuses on the developmental trajectory of a man coming to terms with himself and conquering his faults. So while it's a bit disappointing that Mould spends relatively little time talking about the construction of his music -- its lyrics, equipment, and influences, yes, but almost nothing about the actual notes -- his long voyage of self-discovery is downright uplifting.

It starts with the dysfunctional family he grew up in, which already had made him a heavy drinker in his teens; then at college he begins indulging in drugs. Some of his musical relationships turned dysfunctional as well; his drinking escalated. He had to come to terms with his homosexuality, a long, gradual adjustment that eventually made him happier as he concurrently gave up some of his bad habits.

There are times when the music geek in me wishes there had been a little more detail injected into the narrative. For instance, Mould used cellist Jane Scarpantoni on his first solo album. How did he hear about her? It's mentioned that she'd recently contributed to R.E.M.'s Green album; is that a hint at the connection, or just an interjected factoid? We're not told. It's then mentioned that she later recorded with "many notable artists, including Nirvana, Sheryl Crow, and Bruce Springsteen," but to NY-area music fans she was already a familiar name before she'd recorded with R.E.M. -- to the sort of reader this book will attract, it would be more interesting to know that by the time Mould used her, she'd already been a member of the band Tiny Lights and collaborated with ex-Bongos frontman Richard Barone, notably on his cult-favorite live album/solo debut Cool Blue Halo.

There's still plenty of "inside baseball" info, though: that Mould's theme music for the Daily Show was an outtake from his third solo album; that the guitar sound of Sugar's debut LP Copper Blue was flavored by Kevin Shields's style in My Bloody Valentine, while the songwriting was sometimes influenced by Bob's love of Cheap Trick. There is also the avowal that though Bob is gay and Hüsker Dü bandmate Grant Hart is bi, they never got involved -- which contradicts the rumor that went around when Hart's EP 2541 was released which said that it was about their romantic breakup. And it's interesting to learn which songs Mould thinks are good and which he now disdains, although sometimes it seems that extramusical considerations enter into that equation.

Since Azerrad covered Hüsker Dü in depth in his seminal book on indie rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and has been a respected rock journalist for over two decades, one goes through See a Little Light with the reassuring sense that he was well equipped to call Mould on any biz BS. There are no obvious distinctions between his voice and Mould's, however; the authorial voice is pretty seamless, though I did occasionally, with my own rock crit/editor radar, suspect that various elucidating facts sprinkled among the musical topics came from Azerrad. Also, there was a structural decision that I think worked out very well. Though the narrative is largely chronological, there are some crucial exceptions; a few topics, such as Mould's interest in and eventual involvement in pro wrestling (and a more important personal event I'll leave for readers to discover), are dealt with contiguously instead of being spread out in bits and pieces.

There are a lot of biographies and autobiographies of musical icons, often rather slapdash and/or trivial. This is neither; it is a carefully considered, thoughtfully constructed, and emotionally fulfilling look at one man's fascinating life. Even people who aren't fans of underground rock, should they take a chance on it, will find it an excellent example of autobiography, not merely of "musical autobiography."

That Always Fatal Waltz with Time

Robert Cochrane — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:20:41 +0000

That Always Fatal Waltz with Time Robert Cochrane April 3, 2008 - 07:20

Topics

Literary Review

Tags

auto biography

Somewhere Towards the End

by Diana Athill (Granta)

Age is not a popular topic in literature. When young, it seems too distant, once old it looms too near, so it is sparingly used, the full picture being perceived as too grim and too painful for prolonged attention. There is also the distinct likelihood that being caught up in the process, one is rendered incapable of annotating the experience. Diana Athill can and has. She didn't set out to write about age, but being born in 1917, has experience on her side, and talent to share.

Two minor incidents, her desire to own a pug (denied) and her wish to buy a tree fern (permitted), preface the opening of Somewhere Towards the End, her astute reflections upon the inevitable journey. The dog idea gets short shrift.

Athill begins the book aged eighty-eight, forced to concede that the sole reason she can manage the canine she already has is because it has aged in tandem with her. This becomes linked to the arrival of a much anticipated, equally craved tree fern. Instead of the large specimen, a mere sapling is dispatched in a disappointingly small box. This forces her to admit that it will never be, in her lifetime, the tree she had desired.

After forty years in publishing (Andre Deutsch), Athill has experienced a late-flowering recognition as as writer of pithy, honest memoirs. She has also found, much to her surprise but also to her satisfaction, that she enjoys the attention afforded by literary festivals and events.

Her sole novel, Don't Look at Me That Way, published in the '60s, is a riveting account of a fairly libertine young woman who embarks on a series of affairs, one with her best friend's husband. It still reads as a remarkably assured postcard from Bohemia. No angsty wringing of hands. No preachy moralizing. Strangely modern, it is a secular example from a time when such free-wheeling was largely frowned upon, but then Athill has always had a rather flexible attitude towards staid conventions.

Her latest literary exercise is part memoir, part confessional, and part guide book to the wary. It is not a depressing enterprise, and in that she is assisted by a sharp and acute mind, being of relatively robust health, and by maintaining a distinct need to question, even if the answers are not the kind she had anticipated. Those with fortunate faculties would naturally shy from the level of scrutiny and candor which she affords the reader concerning her long and unconventional life.

This is a warts-and-all confection. Her musings are resigned, without any sense of rancor, and are afforded a disarming sense of honesty. She willingly reveals her failings, imagined and perceived, and her regrets, persistent or incidental, in a way that proves a tonic to the advancement of years.

Her affairs have always been a tad unconventional. Never one for marriage, despite the offers, nor for fidelity, because of a realization that such limitations ultimately stifle, she has lived into the lack of libido, the diminishment of cachet, and the increasing threat time places on one's tenure.

Possessing a sanguine outlook that is as unblinking as it is gentile in its brutality, she raises salient issues concerning the importance of experience in lives bereft of religious conviction. This is a poignant consideration of the transitory pointlessness of things. There is also wit and mirth aplenty, as in her description of an old friend's undiminished reliance upon red lipstick:

"It would begin to run round the edge of her lips, making her look like a vampire bat disturbed in mid-dinner."

This will have most ladies of a certain age casting worried glances in the first available mirror. When her long-term companion Barry takes a new girlfriend, their physical relationship having merged into understanding companionship, Athill befriends her, and maintains this even after the affair withers.

Her partner in life has been less fortunate in the lottery of age. Despite being several years her junior, he is beset by infirmity. After attending a rather undignified mess, and bemused by her own unflustered reaction, she likens such relationships to the unpredictable flowerings which emerge from otherwise unprepossessing roots.

Diana Athill has written a stimulating and uplifting report from a voyage on which everyone is embarked. It could be a handbook for alarm, but in her considered hands, there is hope, humor, satisfaction in small things, and the ability to learn from what one has witnessed in others of age, when she was less advanced upon the journey. A rare account of the difficult truth which arises from our slow, and always fatal, dance with time.

Purchase Thru Amazon

Memories From a Faded Era

Dusty Wright — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:23:41 +0000

Memories From a Faded Era Dusty Wright September 17, 2007 - 10:23

Topics

Book Review

Tags

auto biography

Dandelion: Memoir of a Free Spirit

By Catherine James

(St. Martin's Press)

Catherine James has lived eight lives in 57 short years and her autobiography devastates with emotional sabotages that seem so outrageous that you swear you must be reading fiction.

I read the advance copy in one sitting, blown away by the poignancy and ease with which Miss James shares her years of perilous plight. The abuse she suffers at the hands of her Hollywood femme fatale mother Diana reads like Mommy Dearest meets Piper Laurie's character in the movie adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.

Chapter after chapter she is left pummeled by another emotional battering from someone close to her. Even when she's able to finally run away from tortuous reality, which is one of her early blessings, she encounters emotional hardships that rival any I've read or seen in film. Only her grandmother Mimi -- one of the few normal eccentrics she encounters -- is courageous enough to try to shield her beloved granddaughter from harm's way, although she ultimately loses her. To say that she was trapped in a house ruled by a witch would be a gross understatement of the human condition.

Her mother continually tortures her both physically and emotionally, whether it's tying her to chair or locking her in closet to keep four-year-old Catherine in line so that Mom might socialize on the town without worry. Or not feeding her and making her swill hot sauce or dishwashing soap for punishment. Poor young Catherine is not out of harm's way until she is finally able to run away from her forever. And not until the very end of the memoir is there any contrition from Mom, as though that would suffice the years, though Ms. James emotionally detached herself from her shamelessly narcissistic and destructive mother years earlier. She continually denies her daughter's safety in all areas of parenthood. You'd be hard pressed to find such abuses in today's family courts.

Thankfully she is befriended by many wonderful and colorful characters along the way who help shine a brilliant light on her budding spirit, including such very famous folks as Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, and Roger Daltrey, to name but a few. From the musically charged '60s of Los Angeles to Andy Warhol's Factory in New York to the swinging parties of London and back to the woodsy solitude of Connecticut, mature beyond years Ms. James crisscrosses America seeking solace in a tranquil corner. Her unlucky-in-love character remains optimistic even when her life seems to be spiraling out of control.

Time and time again you are certain the fates will finally cast a favorable light on such a courageous soul. But it is not to be. Even as a pregnant teenager, she is able to rise above her condition and find the silver lining in a seemingly desperate situation. When Denny Laine, her son Damian's father, once of The Moody Blues, Ginger Baker's Airforce, and Paul McCartney's Wings, swoops her up, you think she's turned the corner. But the physically abusive rocker only adds more heartache and pain to the young bruised beauty's tale.

Her supremely dysfunctional family will remain with you long after you've finished this book. And her triumphant spirit will make most readers take stock at how petty most of life's seemingly unfair inequities might actually be quite trivial in comparison. Dandelion deserves to be picked from your local bookstore shelf immediately.

Purchase thru Amazon