When I was nine years old, I would occasionally be granted the massive privilege of a sleepover at the Harcourt Brothers (names changed to protect the virtues of a small town dynasty), who were as close as you could get to pre-pubescent hip in early 70s Lincolnshire. They were the first to get Chopper bikes, and they had rich half-sisters in Canada who’d send them money that they accrued in a savings account. We would regularly hear from the brothers how many hundreds of pounds they were racking up, with interest, and be scorned for suggesting that they might blow some of it on, say, a mass visit to Arthur’s Tuck Shop. They may not have actually used the words ‘retirement fund’, but they were definitely implied.
The Harcourt Brothers didn’t just collect money. Another benevolent relative would send them valuable coins which, they assured us, had never been touched by a human hand. These coins were locked away somewhere in case some non-believer in the importance of limited edition currencies took it upon themselves to slap a fingerprint on a virgin surface. A wise move, because I must admit that I would have been severely tempted. Meanwhile, we could see their stamp collections, but they had to be handled with extreme care, an earnest expression, and the odd declaration of spurious awe. But what I liked best of all among their hoarded treasures were the stickers.
Some of us find it hard to save money (we spend it), or collect stamps (rather than soak them off the envelope, dry them out, then carefully fix them in to a designated book, we chuck them out). Some of us also find it hard to see a sticker without peeling off the back and sticking it somewhere, as the inventors of stickers intended. ‘Stickers stick’ is the centric principle of stickerdom. Especially for a nine year old. But the Harcourt Brothers possessed the strength of character to resist that temptation. They coveted piles of unstuck stickers. They’d let me look through them, but although I begged pleeeeease, they wouldn’t let me have any spares. They weren’t a charity. These boys were investors in adhesive-backed futures.
Every year I went to the Lincolnshire Show and ran from tent to tent collecting free stickers. I didn’t care if they advertised tractor tires, pig feed or the benefits of five portions of potatoes a day - I’d grab them and run, and when I got home I stuck them down, mostly on to a cupboard in my bedroom, which was eventually covered entirely in stickers, with neither theme nor form. The idea of preserving them in a stack and keeping them for some unknown future purpose was as unthinkable as being given a tube of Smarties and being told to keep them until my fortieth birthday.
I was reminded of my free-sticking habits last week when reading ‘Swap Yer! The Wonderful World of Football Cards And Sticker Albums’ by Rob Jovanovic, a compact and delightfully pictorial history book that delivers on its title. It had me reaching for my still incomplete Panini sticker albums of the late 1970s. And the reason for their incompleteness? Instead of using my doubles for swaps, I would just stick them somewhere else. On my pencil case, on my cupboard (which started to acquire second and third layers), on my radio, on my school bag, or on any available surface that wouldn’t garner me a crack around the head for spoiling the paintwork.
I looked on EBay to work out the chances of getting the last eight stickers I need to complete my Football 78 album. It seems that the Harcourt Brothers weren’t the only hoarders. There are people who have been sitting on their swaps for 30 years, resisting for nigh on three decades the urge to peel the back off and stick them. This is of course good for my chances of eventually filling the Football 78 album, but a pitiful reflection on the characters of the EBay vendors. Upon discovering the items in an old shoe box they should have ripped off the backs and slapped them on to the nearest desk top or household item. That is, if they had been even half way human.
But no, like some seedy pornographer, they lined them up on a table side by side, took photographs of them, and then put them up for sale on the internet. And they didn’t even have John Hickton (Middlesbrough, Football 78 sticker number 258) or Irving Nattrass (Newcastle United, 265) for sale. Bloody sticker sickos. As Captain Beefheart would have told them - lick my decals off, baby.
No doubt to the dismay of my multi-million readers, this blog’s been living a white lie for the past year. Its title gives the impression that I am a stay-at-home Dad who cooks, irons, shops and does the kids’ homework for them while they pretend to understand my (Queens of the) Stone Age method for calculating long division. But until last Friday I was something different – a stay-at-home journalist.
After an eleven year career break, I resumed the perennially dubious career of hackery-pokery, as editor of and contributor to a football website. The conditions suited me well – I could work from home, setting my own agenda, writing about something I think I’m supposed to love, tied to colleagues only by a Monday morning conference call, during the course of which I usually swept the floors while saying “yeah” and “uh-huh”.
However, in my zeal to make up for eleven years out of the business, I took it all too seriously and achieved burnout after just 13 months. Also, something got broken that couldn’t be fixed, and my previous professional verve evaporated overnight into a hollow existential void wherein echoed the question, “Exactly why the fuck am I writing a piece about the Colorado Rapids’ off-season signings?”
Some people have expressed surprise that I quit my job. That’s because they didn’t realise I’d gone back to work in the first place. When I told them I’d quit working, they assumed Frau Indie-Pop had thrown me out. “Were you so bad at the shopping?” Having to explain that I’d actually resumed my career and now I’d jacked it all in again somewhat blunted the impact of my dramatic decision to get back in slack.
Frau Indie-Pop was suspicious too. Was this going to be like my recent decision to retire from playing football that lasted exactly two weeks? On top of that were all the grand proclamations last year about how happy I was to be working again. Followed by all the declarations this weekend about how happy I am not to be working again. Given this time scale and my history of vacillating enthusiasms, I should be taking up a 90-hour-a-week CEO position at a top blue-chip company in around 24 hours (offers notwithstanding).
“My stepson’s worried because he’s 16 and he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life,” a friend told me on the phone today. How we laughed. Wait until he’s 42 and still hasn’t got a fucking clue. How could you ever trust someone who thinks they have a clue what they’re doing with their lives?
And another question, in counter-response to those who have asked me why I quit. Why not? Who in their right mind doesn’t want to quit working? Never mind walking the streets in your underpants barking quotes from Leviticus in Latvian dialect – the only true rule of an individual human’s insanity should be his or her willingness to stay in the job.
So it’s back to slouching around Safeways at a decent pace instead of muttering curses at pensioners standing in the middle of the aisle peering at the instructions on the soup cans as they try to work out if cream of broccoli will knacker up their intestines for a day. “Out the frikkin’ way,” I’d seethe before. “I’ve got to get back and check my e-mails to see who Real bastarding Salt Lake picked up in the waiver draft.”
Now it’s: “Cream of broccoli? One of my favourites too, sir. Beautiful out again, eh?” Which it is.
I must be growing up at last. Last year, for the first time since 1993, I didn’t compile a tape or CD of my favourite music of the year and send it out to friends and family as a cheap (not to mention illegal) present, hoping in return to receive praise for my incredibly broad and sophisticated taste in music.
The truth is, I didn’t have the time. The missing compilation also coincided with my first year in almost full employment for over a decade. I remembered what it is that you do with your spare time when you’re working – sleep, eat and then sleep some more, while dreaming about good intentions. I am no longer the bloke who instantly replies to e-mails and then sits impatiently tapping his fingers on the desk waiting for a reply and wondering, “What on earth can they be doing that’s stopping them from immediately responding to my request for an MP3 and full track listing of that rare Blue Orchids live bootleg?”
I also found out what happens when you get into the habit of doing something for years and the suddenly stop it, unannounced. The answer is, nothing.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was out with two friends from my football team who always receive a copy of the SAHIP annual compilation. One of them even bothers to listen to it and tells me his favourite tracks. The evening passed pleasantly enough, but without any mention of the void on their shelves in the section labelled ‘SAHIP Compilations, 1994-2006.’ Finally I mentioned it and they just laughed, slightly nervous in case I was going to pull a wad of CDs out of my pocket. I’m more than half sure that the friend who doesn’t normally comment on the CD had no clue what I was even talking about.
Then last week I was in England seeing the very family and friends who for years have been taking delivery of the personal anthology. Again, silence. When I mentioned it, one recipient was kind enough to say that he relied on the CD to have some vague idea of ‘the current scene.’ But I’d be lying if I said he’d fallen to his knees and begged me to get burning in order to re-enrich his meagre cultural existence.
The chief emotion was relief – on my part, that I won’t ever have to bother doing this again, and on their part, because I won’t be badgering them for detailed opinions, track by track. No longer, when they innocently enquire what that song is on my stereo, will they have to absorb the accusation, “What do you mean, you don’t know what this is? It’s track 13 on the 2003 compilation CD - ‘Cutters, Dealers, Cheaters’ by Janet Bean and the Concertina Wire, you fekkin’ idiot.”
I mean, how can people not know that? Such ingrates. It’s almost enough to make me spite them by doing one after all. Maybe I’ll wait until the end of this year when their guard is down. Merry Christmas everyone, and oh, big surprise - 2007 and 2008 double compilation CD! Let me know which tracks you liked the best, eh? By New Year, at the very latest.
I hate to deal in stereotypes, but there’s a certain kind of white-skinned, white-haired American gentleman of a certain age (55 and upwards) that I strive to avoid if at all possible. He’s a BAG (Boring American Guy), and he wants to talk to you because…well, just because he can and he’s nothing better to do. To exercise his tongue and fill the air with the kind of questions that make you stretch for the strychnine as a happier alternative to heaving your vocal chords into a quasi-courteous response.
I was on a plane from Frankfurt to Washington DC at the weekend, and I was thankful to be two seats away from a classic BAG. In between us was a bloke who’s my kind of air passenger – one who clearly doesn’t want to talk, at all. He had his headphones in, and his magazine open, right from take-off. We reached an unspoken No Small Talk pact right at the point of our initial curt, barely grunted greeting.
But the BAG two seats away didn’t get the message. My neighbour was reading Modified Mustangs magazine (“The Performance Magazine For Mustang Enthusiasts”). The BAG tapped him on the arm, and my neighbour turned off his music.
“You got a Mustang?”
“Yeah.”
“A friend of mine’s got a Mustang! Not sure how many horse power it is though.”
Silence. My neighbour turned his music back on, closed his eyes, and pulled his hood down over his head. About an hour later, the persevering BAG tried again.
“How many horsepower’s your Mustang?”
My own answer would have been, “About one, I think, not that it’s any of your fucking business,” but Mustang guy managed to dredge out a few answers until the conversation shortly after died a second painful death, the BAG now nursing his new knowledge about the power of a car he’s never seen, belonging to a man he’ll never know.
Around this time a meal was served, and across the aisle my youngest daughter duly ate her portion. When I leaned across to talk to her, the ominously perky voice of a male retiree came from the seat directly behind me.
“Say, is that you daughter?”
Oh Christ. Another one, but louder and smilier. “Erm, yes.”
“She’s a real good eater. She ate that whole meal up. Does she always eat that well?”
“Erm, not always.”
“Where you from?”
It’s hard to have a conversation with your back to someone, strapped into a seat, when you’re trying to read a book. Every time I thought we’d finished and put my head back down, the BAG chimed in with a new query. I know now that the Boring American Guy sitting behind me on the plane on Sunday was once stationed at a Royal Air Force base somewhere I’ve never heard of near Portsmouth, and that he now lives in Frederick, Maryland because his wife does something or other there. Once we’d exchanged that and a whole load more astonishing information, our new friendship petered out.
I know airlines are all cutting costs nowadays, but now that everyone knows there’s no smoking on board planes, can’t they just modify the No Smoking lights to read No Small Talk? Yes, and we’d still need to keep them on for the whole flight. In an emergency you could press a button that would make the light blink, and then a stewardess could come and issue a BAG-gagging order. Any persistent offenders would be arrested upon landing (preferably bundled to the ground and then silenced with a secure muzzle) and given a lifetime flying ban.
Soon there’d only be Miserable British Gits flying. There’d be peace at last above the clouds, just like in heaven.
This year’s top 20, in words, with albums 21-40 in lazy list form. People who haven’t been paying attention always say it’s been a bad year. People who buy more CDs than they ought to always say it’s been a good year. I think it’s been a very, very good year.
20. Dan Wilson – Free Life. If this had been available on eight-track cassette in the early 1970s, would my Dad have been playing it in his car alongside Abba and the Carpenters? It’s really that straightforward – a singer-songwriter writing well-crafted songs to sing along to. In the back, the kids sing along too. Nothing not to like about that.
19. The Innocence Mission – We Walked In Song. The reason that The Innocence Mission exist is to provide an aural definition of the word ‘gorgeous’ in the musical lexicon. They haven’t changed their sound in almost two decades, and there’s no reason for them to. Only their sudden conversion to an industrial goth-noise outfit would prevent me unquestioningly buying their perfect and elegiac discs for another 20 years.
18. The Watson Twins – Southern Manners. Imagine two artistically talented twin sisters from the US south making guitar-based music, and I bet you know what this harmonic-Americana eight-song CD sounds like before you’ve even heard it. On its cover the twins pose in silhouettes as a simulated vulva, overtly suggesting a tempting surface of beauty that doesn’t disappoint once you’ve immersed yourself inside. I am enamoured.
17. Laura Veirs – Saltbreakers. Another unsung singer who effortlessly stamps her own identity on successive albums of bitter-sweetness all draped in intricately acoustic guitars. Looks like a librarian, sings like a nightingale. Or a "nattingale", as she so charmingly warbles.
16. Feist – The Reminder. Mrs Stay-At-Home Indie-Pop latched onto Feist after seeing her on Saturday Night Live, and she was all set to buy this until I pointed out we already had it at home. Tsk, she only needed to pay attention a little to the vast pile of CDs by the stereo with the invisible ‘2007’ marker. I sometimes wonder what working women do with their spare mental space. They should stay at home, bake cakes, raise the kids, and make wonderfully dreamy, singalong music like Feist.
15. Tracey Thorn – Out Of The Woods. The first Tracey Thorn solo album, A Distant Shore, came out in 1982, and I used to listen to its solo acoustic meanderings while staring out my bedroom window hoping that the girl from three doors up would walk past, think I was deep and sensitive, then snog me. With Everything But The Girl intervening (between the two Thorn albums, not me and the girl from three doors up), it’s taken a quarter of a century for her second, but amazingly (seeing as EBTG have been, to my ears, largely dull) it’s been worth the wait. Left alone, she’s still an outstanding songwriter, even if now the backdrop’s all R&B arrangements and enhanced production values. So, none of the scratchy guitar and whiny voice that leant her first disc its fresh-girl genius, but a worthy follow-up, even if it’s all grown up.
14. Maria Taylor – Lynn Teeter Flower. A second sweet slice of what I’d happily call cake-shop pop if it wasn’t stranded so high up on the banks of the mainstream by the vagaries of misled taste. If the world was a just place, this kind of music would be going gold. Go on, try it. Honestly, cake’s really good for the soul.
13. Jesse Sykes And The Sweet Hereafter – Like Love, Lust And The Open Halls Of The Soul. No one seems to have heard of Jesse Sykes, yet every time I play her records, people ask me for her name. Her lisping, whispering voice creeps into ears and rests there like a transient and benign underground pleasure you know might just wake up one day and kill you from within. Not that I can think of any better ways to die.
12. Kristin Hersh – Learn To Sing Like A Star. This one had the benefit of a release early in the year, otherwise I’d just have filed it along with all the other mostly stunning Hersh albums on the shelf -- some peoples’ genius you end up taking for granted. But with the benefit of iPod shuffle, it just kept coming back, and getting better and better, and all the paranoid frenzy alternating with soothing bedtime threnodies came through with its usual depth of emotion and sheer, shocking brilliance.
11. Au Revoir Simone – The Bird Of Music. Every year needs a lo-fi, home made electronic album composed by unlikely musicians who just sat down and started harmonizing for the hell of it. Player instructions: start the drum machine, press a synth button, then sing along. Listener’s instructions: sit back and enjoy. Just occasionally, as on this disc, it works almost perfectly.
10. Steve Earle – Washington Square Serenade. One of those discs I bought because it was another Steve Earle album, and I usually buy the new Steve Earle album because I just feel that I ought to. That’s not the best reason to buy a CD, but this time it worked, with this being his best since the mighty collaboration with the Del McCoury Band a few years back. Could be that his sixth marriage, to country singer Alison Moorer, has given him an inspirational kick aside from misery and litigation. ‘City Of Immigrants’ is vibrant, political and celebratory singalong all in one.
9. Rilo Kiley – Under The Blacklight. Pristine pop. You start off hearing all kinds of semi-familiar tunes from songs you think you know but can’t quite pin down. You end up not caring, because the crystal clarity of Jenny Lewis’ vocal and all that backs her up make you play this disc on multi-repeat. How can a song sung by a woman about a man being seduced by a precocious 15-year-old sound so breezy and innocent?
8. Wilco – Sky Blue Sky. I can never quite grasp Wilco or why people, myself included, tend to deify them. I wouldn’t know where to start in their catalogue of achievement while trying to convert a reluctant listener. I couldn’t, off the top of my head, sing my favourite refrain off ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.’ Yet if I could only take the CDs of one band on an east-to-west coast road trip, they’d be Wilco’s. I could listen to them for four days and four nights and still find something new in every song. At least I reckon I could. I should try it sometime and see.
7. Iron & Wine - The Shepherd’s Dog. A beefed up sound was definitely the way to go for the bearded wonder that is Iron & Wine. There’s the same quasi-mystical aura that surrounds his songs, but there’s more effort to build them up, take them places, and fade them out again. One review I read complained some of the songs went on too long, but for me these songs could meander on their hypnotic way for hours, provided I was in the mood for sitting back, shutting my eyes, and staring at the dark in a world of breathy vocals and weaving guitars.
6. The Shins – Wincing The Night Away. ‘Phantom Limb’ is song of the year, and the problem with producing a song so magnificent is usually that the rest of the disc can struggle to stay in touch. Mostly the distance is close enough to make this a successful, if more expansive and more ambitious, follow-up to previous triumphs. The words are either dead profound or they’re nonsense - either way, I haven’t a clue what these songs are about, but it really doesn’t matter. In pop, context is king.
5. Robert Wyatt – Comicopera. Wyatt shifts our ideas of perceived musical normality and allows us to receive sound across new waves. The crown prince of atonality resides in the town where I was born (Louth, in Lincolnshire) and I like the idea of all this weirdness being conceived in the air where I screamed my first complaints. At times playful, weirdly flat, and jazzy, but mostly just on its own perfectly tempered wold of nasal beauty altogether.
4. Brandi Carlile – The Story. Need a seat on the underground? Try hitting the high notes when you’re listening on your iPod. Passion and pop rolled into one, with more than enough edge to stop songs that could, in the hands of the wrong producer, have lapsed into AOR. Or maybe it is, and that’s what I’m into nowadays.
3. Magnolia Electric Co. – Sojourner Boxed Set. Most boxed sets are compilations, live sets or outtakes. There are very few that are effectively quadruple albums of entirely original material, plus documentary DVD, wrapping paper and forged medallion. On top of that, the quality of its slow-burning melancholy is maintained pretty much throughout, and Jason Molina’s fixation with earth’s orbital muse stands as the most productive man-to-moon relationship in musical history. Ache to Z.
2. The National – Boxer. Vocals that range from a murmur to a growl, backed by a band never short on ways to accentuate the mood within the melody. The National Sound is a national asset that deserves its own listening booth at the Smithsonian.
1. The New Pornographers – Challengers. With more hooks than a hardware shop, this deserves the year’s best album award for its consistently strong songs and its peppy pace. Makes you move, makes you want to sing, deludes you that you’re young. Empowerment pop of the highest order.
The rest:
21. Jens Lekman – Night Falls Over Kortedala
22. Band of Horses – Cease To Begin
23. Dean & Britta – Back Numbers
24. Mary Gauthier – Between Daylight And Dark
25. Thurston Moore – Trees Outside The Academy
26. Anjani Thomas – Blue Alert
27. Josh Ritter – The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter
28. PJ Harvey – White Chalk
29. Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger
30. Evan McHugh – From The Second Chair
31. Jeremy Fisher – Goodbye Blue Monday
32. Caribou – Andorra
33. Over The Rhine – Trumpet Child
34. Zap Mama – Supermoon
35. Oliver Mtukudzi – Tsimba Itsoka
36. Sonia Leigh – Run Or Surrender
37. Richmond Fontaine – Thirteen Cities
38. Bright Eyes – Cassadaga
39. Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
40. Lucinda Williams – West
Other Years: 2006, 2004
You have to say one thing in suburbia’s favour. It’s so fucking dull out here that every day at six o, clock, without fail, you’re dying for a good stiff drink.
Just think. The day’s behind you, and you’ve accomplished nothing besides getting half way through the laundry, buying some groceries, successfully managing the school run, drinking scads of coffee (and peeing it out again), and thinking vaguely about some much more fruitful, creative and rewarding projects that you’d rather be doing instead, but are currently putting off until the next decade.
Ahead of you lies the evening, when you’ve got dinner to make, and home to stay at. This could further involve activities as pulse-pumping as finishing off the laundry, watching a broadcast program on the highly popular electronic medium known as television, or trying to read a book or a magazine before falling asleep in the process.
In between, though, is cocktail hour. There’s no getting around the fact that this is the best moment of the day out here on Quiet Street. That keen rush of want, round about 1800 hours, is almost as delectable a hit as the first swig of the drink itself. It comes with the acknowledgment of the need - which is an integral part of knowing, recognising and ultimately enjoying your own weaknesses - followed by the decision on whether to succumb or defer the pleasure for a further 24 hours.
Either way is fine. Give in, and you get the drink. Resist, and you can allow yourself the brief and deceptive comfort that you are not, really not, in any way alcohol-dependent. This makes the following day’s cocktail hour all the sweeter. If you’re in that rare suburban club that can hold out until Thursday (otherwise known as The Big Fat Liars’ Society), then good luck to you and all, but you should know you’re severely missing out on suburbia’s greatest reward.
The ironic thing is that in US suburbia there’s rarely a bar (or anything else useful) within walking distance. One of my great schemes that I’m putting off until next decade is a chain of impromptu roadside suburban cocktail stands, open between 5.30 and 7 only, to be called something like The Shot Of Life. They should do roaring trade, and by the time every street’s spoilsport puritan has called the cops, we’ll have packed up and left.
This would require people to leave their houses, talk to their neighbors, loosen up, and publicly take part in something considered to be detrimental to one’s moral, mental and spiritual health. In the rest of the world it’s known as ‘drinking.’ Here it would be a revolution. Until then, we remain the silent majority, serene and satisfied for an hour each evening as we gratefully knock back our fool’s medicine.
Yes, I know, it’s not just people in the suburbs who have to go grocery shopping. But the difference for suburbanites is that going grocery shopping is one of the few times that we get out the house. Ironically, we spend a lot of time pining to leave the house for a change of scenery, but the only time it happens is to do something we hate. Or, as I regularly express it when I’m on the way out the door: "I’m just off to the fucking shop."
That’s a sort of cry from the heart hoping that someone else might take the chore off my hands. But as my daughters are nine and 11, they’re no more likely to volunteer for the task than in future years when they’re 17 and 19 and in possession of drivers’ licences. As for Mrs. Stay-At-Home-Indie-Pop, she’s not home mostly (that’s why, alert readers will have noted, I’ve got the SAHIP gig), and at weekends she sensibly follows her daughters’ lead of ignoring my desperate appeal. If I’m lucky, a response may echo from some distant corner of the house, such as, "Bye, see you later" or "Don’t forget my hibiscus and broccoli tea-bags."
SAHIP. I’m a SAHIP. I’m saaaaaaa hip.
On weekdays, supermarkets are full of horny housewives who ‘accidentally’ bump into you, spill their shopping, and then after you’ve helped them pick it up, thank you by inviting you back to their place for no-holds-barred, no-emotional-strings-attached sex. I’ve lost count of how many times this has happened to me. Probably on average at least never in my eleven years as a SAHIP. Not that I’ve been looking for it, you understand.
It’s different at weekends, when you can see Clueless Saturday Dad wandering around the supermarket aisles with a crumpled list in his hand, accompanied by an irascible kid (usually a boy) trying to kick him in the nuts from his prime vantage seat in the front of the trolley every time Dad turns down his demand for something unhealthy to eat. Saturday Dad’s too pre-occupied working out why he’s now going down the same aisle for the eighth time and still hasn’t found shortening ("What the fuck is shortening?" he’s now finally asking myself) to listen to the increasingly shrill demands for the tropical fruits bubblegum maxi-pack. Eventually he caves in and thrusts the Superbowl-Sized Cheetos Jumbo Bucket into junior’s hand before breaking down in tears when he sees the length of the queue at the deli and realizes he’s going to miss the Tampa Bay Fratheads’ midday kick-off against the Chunkneck College Beefboys.
Anyway, as if going to the shops wasn’t already an unadventurous enough experience, there’s Morton.
I’ve changed Morton’s name in case he’s one of the three people that read this Blog. He’s a cashier at one of my regular local supermarkets. He’s a very big, morose lad in his late 20s, and he never smiles. When I say never, I mean never, as in ‘sex-with-horny-housewives-I’ve-met-in-the-supermarket’ never. It’s his life policy. I’ve been passing through Morton’s till for years, and not once has he hinted at any kind of internal or external happiness.
It’s now got to the point where I’d rather go to a cashier with a longer line than watch Morton dolefully scan my groceries. You may think I’m exaggerating, but the moment I see Morton, I feel profoundly depressed. It’s not empathy. It’s resentment at his failure to escape a job and a life he clearly despises (why can’t he find work as a SAHIP?), and the imposition of his misery every time I go shopping. When you catch a glimpse of Morton it’s like being physically struck around the head by an embodiment of all that’s hopeless in the human condition. Like the dementors in Harry Potter, Morton will suck your soul out, make your shoulders slump, and force you to feel, "Jesus Christ, what is the point of going on for another single fucking minute?"
If there’s no avoiding Morton’s queue – say, for example, there are 16 people in line at the checkout next to him, and he’s completely free – then I’ll always be polite and friendly to him, though I won’t bother trying to waste an attempted joke, which would be like pissing on a Californian forest fire. Not because I want to be nice to the sad fuck, but because the day he comes to work with a plastic carrier bag full of heavy weapons and goes on the rampage, aisle by aisle, he might just notice the bloke who politely answered his drawled and automated query of "howyadoin" with a chirpy, "I’m fine thanks, how are you?" and finish me off cleanly with at least ten bullets to the head rather than letting me bleed slowly to death through a single, careless shot.
It’s the kind of exciting outcome grocery shoppers secretly yearn for.
Great Suburban Traditions: Number 1 – The Piano Recital
Great Suburban Traditions: Number 2 – Neighbourhood Watch
Great Suburban Traditions: Number 3 – Dog Crap
Great Suburban Traditions No. 4 – Asexuality
Great Suburban Traditions No. 5 – Limited Guilt
Last night I was watching the wonderful Watson Twins sing at the Black Cat in DC, with a couple of black German beers taken at the nearby Saloon pub (the friendliest, beeriest watering hole in the city) swishing through my grateful veins, and generally feeling that if I was born to be enlightened in any way, it was during moments like this.
The twins were acting as more than adequate support to the rock-n-soul-country-blues fusion (a new coverall category for every CD I own) of the equally magnificent Magnolia Electric Company, the only band I like whose genius lead singer-songwriter looks like the kind of bloke who used to stop me outside English rural pubs in the early 1980s and say, “Be you wantin’ a foight?” Jason Molina in his various guises brings out more records than I’ve got time to listen to, the latest being a five-disc genuine wooden box with a free medallion and MEC wallpaper. I haven’t actually played it yet, just fondled it.
Anyway, after the Watson Twins had played I ambled over to buy a t-shirt, and started talking to the twin with the flashing smile, Chandra. She asked me where I was from, and when I said Lincoln, UK, she said, “Oh, that’s near Grantham.” Alarmed that she should even have to know of Grantham’s existence, I asked her how she’d heard of the place. Turns out the Watson Twins once spent a term there on a study exchange. “I think they sent us there so that we wouldn’t have a chance to go crazy or anything.”
She said some kind things about the Lincolnshire countryside, and that she was aware Grantham was the town that had spawned and raised the most destructive, and most hated, British prime minister of the 20th century. Fortunately, I resisted the impulse to ask her if she’d been to watch Grantham Town FC during their Lincolnshire sojourn, thus avoiding the Instant Idiot label I’ve historically found plastered to my brow when talking to attractive women.
This post needs a conclusion. It’s this: I feel certain The Watson Twins were the best thing that ever happened to Grantham. Lack of comments below will serve as confirmation.
I was driving down Democracy Boulevard in Bethesda yesterday, listening to a retro-compilation CD of early 80s Scottish indie-funk boys APB. It was a warm day, so the windows were down. At a red light, a pick-up truck stopped to my right. ‘What Kind Of Girl?’ was blasting out. The bloke in the driver’s seat was staring at me, not in a hostile way, but like he wanted to ask me something.
“What year’s that?” he shouted, pointing vaguely.
“1984, I think,” I shouted back.
He looked baffled, began to mouth something, and pointed again, this time at the car. Then I realised. “Oh, you mean the car?” I said. “Passat, 2003.” He looked relieved, began to talk something auto-technical, I switched off immediately, then the light changed and I sped off (I was running late).
That’s the ridiculous mental world that I live in. I genuinely believe that when someone in a pick-up truck stops next to me, he may have enough knowledge of an obscure early 80s band from Aberdeen to not only recognise one of the songs, but to be genuinely curious about what year their biggest hit came out.
This is the same mentality that has seen me waste much precious life-time making compilation tapes and CDs of music I think other people ought to know better. And that they will come to love that music and thank me for culturally enriching their lives. Occasionally it works, a little, but never as much as I think it’s going to.
If it had been a film, the pick-up truck driver might have been into APB. In scripts, characters are supposed to say things that surprise us and confound our prejudices. In real life, though, it doesn’t happen quite so often. Not that this is something I’ll ever learn.
Concert audiences of my generation stand mostly still. In my teens I would bounce and spit at the front. In my 20s I’d get drunk beforehand, then bounce and ruck somewhere in the middle of a sweaty, heaving mass of leather jacketed indie-boys. In my 30s, I started watching from further back. Now I could just as easily be at the front again, if I politely eased my way forward, because nobody up there at the lip of the stage is moving either. The most mobile people at an indie-concert these days are the bar staff.
Last night at the 9.30 Club in DC, the captivating and richly voiced indie-sextet The National played plenty of mellow songs to sway to gently while contemplating The Great Existential Posers (now there’s a band name, although I tend to contemplate more obscure stuff - last night it was a game of football I played badly in 17 years ago). But there were also more than enough fast and loud numbers to which, at one time in musical history, you might have expected people to shake their heads and wildly move their bodies. And you could tell that some of us still wanted to, as though the mind was willing, but the body wasn’t. Because we’re all in psychological straitjackets.
I can’t speak for all the other inconspicuously leg-jerking but chiefly static pundits, but my own feeling is that it’s unseemly for an Indie-Pop of my age to be throwing himself around at a night club. First, I’d only had one beer because I was driving. Second, if you touch anyone at a concert nowadays, even just brush past them, you feel obliged to apologise. So knocking them over in the thrall of a speedy, thrash-led song is just no longer part of indie-etiquette. People drink, but you never see them drunk. No one caterwauls the lyrics. Instead they sing quietly to themselves.
Although the cheers and applause at the end of every song were loud and spontaneous enough, the crowd behaviour during the songs themselves reminded me of a classical music concert, where the unstinting bourgeois norm has always been to sit rigid and noiseless, internalising any emotion that you might be experiencing at the beauty of the music. A discreet tear at evening’s end may be allowed to modestly display one’s sensibilities.
The live concert used to be an experience you took part in by moving and screaming. Now I feel I might as well buy the requisite technology - massive screen and surround sound technology - and watch the concert DVD at home. With no one there to watch me, I might even dance.
