Sinister: Fever Pitch!
stephen troussé
poetryplace2 at xxx.uk
Fri Nov 14 14:01:56 GMT 1997
Blimey! There I was going along to Salon online magazine
(www.salonmagazine.com) for my weekly fix of Camille Paglia's advice
column, when who should I come across raving about our favourite pop-kids,
but Nick Hornby! I've attached the full piece for the benefit of those of
you without browsers... it's a bit long, and he takes a while to get around
to B&S, but it's a lovely review. I might even read one of his books now..
Gosh, but Britain's got loud all of a
sudden. You can hardly hear yourself think
at the
moment, amidst the sounds of crashing and
banging and
weeping and wailing and self-proclamation
and
accusation and electric guitars. The noise
started on
May 1st, when Tony Blair was elected Prime
Minister:
Blair's landslide victory changed the
national mood
literally overnight. The raucous
celebrations lasted well
into the summer, and even Britain's
notoriously
conservative national press -- somewhat
perversely,
given how much work they had put in to
preserve John
Major's exhausted, deeply unpopular and
increasingly
sleazy party -- started tapping its toes
discreetly in the
corner, like moms and dads at the end of
rock'n'roll
films. Blair's approval rating shot
through the roof, and
Britain suddenly discovered that, contrary
to all our
suspicions, we were a young country,
brimful of talent
and vision and energy. Those of us who had
got used to
the idea that we were an awful, senile
country, full of
reactionary old farts who hadn't read a
novel in 30 years
and who still disapproved of the length of
Ringo's hair,
couldn't take the pace. By July, I felt
like I wanted to
stop partying and go and have a sit-down.
But there was no let-up. Our cricket and
football teams
began the summer by winning handsomely and
unexpectedly, victories for which Tony
Blair seemed
obscurely responsible -- something to do
with young
people being better than old people at
sports,
presumably. The Oasis album came out
amidst a great
deal of ear-splitting ballyhoo, and Noel
Gallagher was
one of the first to be invited to 10
Downing Street for
one of Blair's occasional artsy parties,
another indication
of fundamental change: The only rock 'n'
roller that the
previous administration had been able to
invite to
parties was Andew Lloyd Webber. (Lloyd
Webber,
incidentally, made vague threats about
leaving the
country in the event of a Labour victory,
a threat that
may well have been responsible for the
size of Blair's
majority, but scandalously he never went
anywhere, as
far as we know.) And then, of course,
there was the
Diana thing, about which there is only one
observation I
wish to make here: Whatever else it was or
wasn't, it was
certainly loud. Sometimes you get the
impression that
we have turned ourselves into one huge
braying mob,
bursting with nervous energy and
Adrenalin, looking for
an excuse to make even more noise than we
are already
making. Recently, as another Salon
correspondent
noted, it was poor Louise Woodward who got
the
treatment.
I've been listening to Belle and
Sebastian, a ramshackle,
cute and only occasionally fey folk-pop
band who have
spent the summer releasing four-track EPs
with quirky
names and classy sleeves: "Dog On Wheels,"
"Lazy
Line-Painter Jane," "3, 6, 9 Seconds of
Light." Belle and
Sebastian have not, as far as I am aware,
described
themselves as "the best fooking (sic) band
in the world,"
unlike the rest of their peers, and nor
should they: A
recent sold-out show I saw in London was a
shambles,
and to this member of the audience an
irritating, as
opposed to adorable, shambles. One of the
support acts
was a rambling and very drunk poet, and
the boys and
girls themselves took their own sweet time
tuning up
and messing about between each number. It
took a good
five minutes before they deigned to play
anything at all.
But quirkiness is a much rarer commodity
in this new,
brash Britain than it was. We used to be
rather good at it
-- generally, we took the view that if we
couldn't
compete with the Yanks properly, then we'd
refuse to
play the game by acting daft. This new
Brit feistiness,
however, has meant that everyone wants a
shot at the
mainstream: Self-confidence is in, and
self-deprecating
charm is out -- almost. Luckily, Belle and
Sebastian
have charm in glorious abundance, and "A
Century of
Elvis," the last track on the new "Lazy
Line-Painter
Jane" EP, is surely the most charmed
you'll be all year.
"A Century of Elvis" is in effect a short
story, spoken in
broad Scottish over a gorgeous, aching,
jingle-jangle
guitar and a couple of tootling organ
notes; the story is
about a period in the narrator's life when
Elvis -- the
very famous one -- visited him in his flat
every evening.
It's one of those rare pieces of work that
you love partly
because you have no idea where it came
from: I haven't
heard much recently that describes Elvis
poking around
a post office van, apparently
contemplating whether to
drive it away. It's the accumulation of
detail that makes
the track -- there's actually some
deceptively fine
writing going on here, although the band
probably
wouldn't thank me for pointing it out. In
one passage the
narrator wonders whether it was Elvis'
love for squirrels
that attracted him to their particular
leafy suburb;
another concerns the great man's impassive
consumption of a video entitled the 'The
E-Files," about
unlikely Presley sightings. You end up
smiling at the
simple joy taken in picking up an idea and
running with
it -- if you can make anything out in the
mix, which is,
needless to say, pretty crappy. Oh, and if
you love the
tune but get tired of the story, the
jingle-jangle is
recycled for "A Century of Fakers," the
song that kicks
off "3, 6, 9 Seconds of Light."
Maybe you have to be living here to
appreciate just how
welcome this kind of egoless homecooked
whimsy is at
the moment, but if you've heard the Oasis
album, or seen
the mass Disteria on TV, you can probably
guess. Me,
I'm going to sit the New Britain out with
a couple of
Belle and Sebastian EPs and a good book;
it won't be
long before we turn back into ourselves
again.
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