Now, I already have stuff problems of my own, notably with cd’s and to a lesser extent with books.  When I decided to go over to cd’s from vinyl, I rejoiced in the fact that I had managed to create a huge amount of space in the house and that these new shiny silver discs with their economical dimensions were surely never going to become as oppressive a problem as those big boxes of LP’s.    Jump forward 15 or so years and all the space once occupied by clunky crates of vinyl is now taken up with smaller crates of cd’s.  The economy of scale offered by cd’s has just encouraged me to acquire more of them, so in essence, I now have a larger quantity of music taking up the same space as before.  Hmmmm….

With books, it’s not quite so bad, but I can nonetheless boast an impressively tall  and increasingly unstable ziggurat of unread volumes next to my bed, which, should it ever collapse on me during the night, would probably result in a severe case of concussion.

All of which goes to show that for people like myself with a magpie disposition, you could probably rehouse us into a 25-room mansion and we would still – over a period of years – manage to fill the place up with stuff.

In some respects, I am fortunate to live with someone who is of a quite different viewpoint; the partner sees herself as some latter-day Gandhian ascetic who only needs a spare loin-cloth and a packet of B&H to keep her happy.  As in many things, she’s not totally consistent about this, having a weakness for jewellery, cosmetics and handbags to name but a few conspicuous items, but she is generally happier to be less burdened with stuff than I am.  I am always being encouraged by her to ‘sacredly cleanse’ the various cluttered areas of my life – my wardrobe, my cd collection, my books – and it’s sometimes hard to make her understand that the stuff I have accumulated over the years is somehow intrinsically bound up with my personality and forms an essential part of the way in which I see myself in relation to the rest of the world.  Well, that’s my excuse anyway – another view would be that all my stuff is like a big security blanket that helps me maintain the illusion that everything is under control and that I actually do know what I’m doing.  As if….

Of course, all of this comes from somewhere, and – unsurprisingly – I get it from my parents, both of whom were magpies up to a point.  However, with them there was definitely an extra dimension that I think is probably peculiar to people who lived through the wartime years.  This can probably best be summed up by the phrase – and it’s a phrase that I heard both of my parents use on numerous occasions – “I’ll hang on to that/those; it/they might come in handy.”

So now I am reaping the whirlwind of stuff that my folks accumulated in this house over the 28 years they lived here together and the final 7 years my Dad lived here as a widower.  Having an appreciation of things that ‘might come in handy’ perhaps suggests an almost prescient appreciation of potential future needs, but as I’m finding, it’s more like an obsession with being prepared for any and every eventuality, no matter how unlikely. 

I’ve already written here about how, after my Mum’s death, I was (partially) clearing out her kitchen and found several large tupperware boxes crammed full of those little sachets of sugar that are available in cafes and motorway service stations.  My Mum would undoubtedly have accumulated these on my parents’ many post-retirement caravanning holidays and I can see the way her magpie mind would have justified this consistent and systematic pilfering of sugar.  She knew perfectly well that neither she nor my Dad used sugar, except perhaps on breakfast cereal – something they ate only rarely, so there was little point in keeping any sugar in the restricted storage space within their caravan.  On the other hand, it was not unknown for them to entertain other caravanners for a cup of tea from time to time and those people might be users of sugar, so having a few sachets handy would be a good thing.  So far, so logical, but then the wartime hoarding mentality, not to mention the something-for-nothing mentality obviously kicked in and what started out as a piece of common sense rapidly became a full-scale obsession, eventually requiring tupperware boxes and cupboard space.

Now that I am having to clear the entire bungalow, what I am finding is that my sugar sachet experience was just the tip of a candy-coated iceberg.  It’s becoming abundantly clear that my folks kept just about everything, treating the house as a repository for the accumulated stuff of their lives.  However, whilst their previously-mentioned prescience about the things that they kept because they might ‘come in handy’ perhaps hints at  an organised approach to their squirrelling, what I am now finding is that there was a total absence of such an approach. Obscure cupboards and unused shelves became spaces where stuff could be shoved in a fairly haphazard manner and it has become customary for me to find small and often broken ornaments filled with assorted detritus – for example, fuses, perished rubber bands, paper clips, foreign coins, keys (to unknown locks), 50-year old letters from obscure or unknown persons, old passport photos, yellowed newspaper cuttings featuring useful gardening or household tips, recipes clipped from old magazines and so on.

Larger receptacles such as cardboard boxes may feature tourist brochures for somewhere in Scotland or Switzerland, theatre programmes, football programmes, single gloves, plastic flowers, broken Christmas decorations, 30-year old credit card bills, postcards from friends or family, invitations to weddings of people I’ve forgotten or never heard of and desiccated chunks of that weird green foam that florists use (or once used) for flower arrangements.

A cupboard occupied principally by a well-lagged hot water tank was additionally filled with dozens and dozens of tea-towels and hand-towels, washcloths and threadbare old tablecloths, all of which had over the years been stuffed in there and had slowly forced themselves down and  around the tank like an extra layer of lagging and had been slowly compressed into almost sedimentary layers of exhausted cotton and towelling. 

Wardrobes were another horror show; odd slippers, dozens and dozens of ties, wildly kitsch sixties jackets, multiple old cagouls that had somehow become stuck together, so that they were like some bizarre gore-tex sculpture, weird hanging contraptions that dangled from the inside of wardrobe doors as receptacles for shoes and more stuff…..as if any extra space were needed.

And so it goes on.  A peculiarity of the house compared to the others in the vicinity – all built in the early ’70′s – is that my Dad’s place was built by the builder for himself; he lived there for 4 years before selling the place to my parents in 1976.  As such, it’s bigger, has more garden and – in particular – has a  small room (maybe 8 feet wide and 15 feet long) leading off the main living room which could, in another lifetime, have been a small bedroom or, more likely, a study.  Instead, my Dad slowly turned it into what I called (somewhat inappropriately) his ‘glory-hole’ .  It all began well enough, with large and capacious shelves for books, files and the like, but as the years rolled by and the  shelves filled, the floor-space eventually became covered with boxes, pieces of old (and frequently broken) furniture and, in the end, random piles of papers and junk.  By the time I started in on it about 3 weeks ago, it was barely possible to open the door and it took me the best part of a week just to clear a path to the shelves at the far end.

Thus far, I have found some real gems among an awful lot of shite.  On the plus side, there were some really old family photos that I’d never seen before of relatives (most of them long gone now) taken during the war years.  In amongst that were letters from LMS Railways in Leicester detailing aspects of my Dad’s glorious and brief  Casey Jones career before he got into teaching, love letters from my parents to one another before and just after their marriage, a letter from my maternal Grandmother to my Mum at her workplace a week after she’d stormed out with my Dad, begging her to come home and begging forgiveness for the terrible things that had been said (she never went back) and finally a letter written by my maternal Grandfather to my Dad’s parents, turning down their invitation to my parents’ wedding on the basis that there had been too much ‘lying and deceit and insulting behaviour’  from my Mum & Dad for them to accept.  Dramatic stuff and though I knew the stories I’d never seen the documentary evidence.

However, for every piece of genuinely interesting stuff I’ve had to wade my way through piles and piles of detritus – most of it prompting the question ‘Why on earth did they keep this?’  About 50 address books – most of them unused, zillions of tourist pamphlets from Salzburg to Saltash to Salt Lake City and a whole box of postcards going back to the 60′s – some of them used/received, others unused/blank.   In another pile were about 150 postcards of Inveraray Castle – all of them unused, all of them identical.  Shelf after shelf of VHS videotapes, boxes of audio cassettes, boxes of 35mm transparencies – the footsoldiers of obsolescent technologies.  I’d already disposed of my Dad’s classical cd’s and old vinyl and there were some favourite pieces like Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’  which he had on cd, LP and audio cassette.  Well you never know….

However, if I needed a metaphor for this whole process, it would be a plain terracotta flowerpot that I found tucked behind a curtain on a windowsill in this overstuffed room.  In it were some pieces of World War 1 shrapnel that my Dad picked up on a trip round the Somme battlefields about 20 years ago.  Apparently, farmers in north-east France still plough up thousands of tons of this stuff every year – they call it the ‘Iron Harvest’ – and they tend to leave it lying by the side of the fields for Bomb Disposal (in the case of munitions) or for the tourists (in the case of less lethal artefacts) to pick up – which is exactly what my Dad did.  He’d picked up several random pieces of very heavy metal, including what was recognisably the remnants of a horseshoe,  and was clearly transfixed by these souvenirs of a war that fascinated him even though it had ended fully 6 years before he was born.  Kept around as a conversation piece for a few weeks after their return from France, the shrapnel had finally been lodged in a random flowerpot, dumped on the windowsill of this room and forgotten.  Twenty years of sun and oxygen and condensation have done their work and most of the shrapnel has by now disintegrated into powdery red dust, which poured out of the hole in the base of the flowerpot the minute I picked it up.  So much for history.

Still, you never know when you might need a few handfuls of rust…might come in handy.

In any case, it was clear whilst watching the game that Pat was extremely upset about something that Goofy had said to him.  He kept looking across to the United bench, as if for guidance.  It was abundantly clear that Suarez was trying to wind him up.

All in all, having read large chunks of the Report, there seems little doubt that the case is proven.  Suarez probably isn’t any more of a racist than any other footballer, but he did seemingly use racist remarks  to Evra on this occasion in an attempt to get him booked (he succeeded) or sent off (he didn’t).

Mr Suarez

Who knows how many more ‘undocumented’ cases like this happen at all levels of football during any given season?  Goofy’s mistake was that he picked on the wrong guy.  Gaining an advantage in key games like Liverpool vs United is par for the course and winding up opponents is axiomatic if you think you can needle or unsettle your opponent and provoke them into a rash challenge or injudicious foul.  Through the years, there have been a number of high-profile players with ‘short fuses’ – Denis Law, Roy Keane, Joey Barton, to name but three – who have doubtless been on the receiving end of barbed comments from opponents that were similarly calculated to unsettle and enrage.  It will be interesting to see if there is an increase in this kind of complaint from now on.

What has been far more interesting throughout this whole affair has been the relative responses of the two clubs and their managers.  Fergie and the United camp have been at pains to stay out of it, by and large.  This is fair enough; after all the case was being brought by the F.A., not by Manchester United F.C..  Fergie’s only comment on it was that they were supportive of Evra’s standpoint.

Predictably, Liverpool’s response – and that of  their manager in particular – has been far more of a comedy turn.  The ghosts of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley must have been spinning in their graves at some of ‘Worzel’ Dalglish’s comments. 

Apart from trying to discredit  Patrice Evra’s testimony due to the totally unrelated incidents that took place at Stamford Bridge in 2008 – whilst conveniently neglecting to mention Goofy’s ban for biting a (black) opponent whilst playing for Ajax in 2010 - Worzel has lost considerable respect among the wider footballing community due to the one-eyed parochialism of his responses.  His attempts to plug into Liverpool’s well-documented ‘victim culture’ via Twitter  to ensure that Goofy ‘never walks alone’ (yawn…) have recently been in full flow after L.F.C.’s recent defeat at Fulham – in particular his response to the chants of the Fulham fans about Goofy’s behaviour.  Suck it up, Kenny, because, thanks in no small part to your public utterances,  the terrace wags around the country will be reminding Suarez of his misdemeanours for as long as he remains a Liverpool player, no matter your affronted outrage.  The only surprise is that Dalglish hasn’t yet taken issue with the fact that both of the F.A.’s ‘linguistic experts’ who advised on Goofy’s use of ‘Rioplatense’ Spanish were attached to the University of…..you guessed it…Manchester.

 United fans, of course, have predictably already developed a parody of Liverpool’s ‘Just can’t get enough’  Suarez song that makes their views on his behaviour perfectly clear.  Should he play at Old Trafford in February, we will undoubtedly be treated to lengthy renditions of this.

Then there was the whole business of the Liverpool squad (and manager) wearing cheap-looking Suarez t-shirts before the recent Wigan game.  Showing solidarity with a team-mate is one thing, but to do so in such an ostentatiously public display is quite another.  Contrast that with the way in which United dealt with Eric Cantona’s ban for assaulting a mouthy idiot in the crowd at Selhurst Park back in 1995.  We all knew – and the club publicly acknowledged – that Eric shouldn’t have done it, but we all supported him anyway – if only because it swiftly became clear that Eric’s target was the worst kind of Sarf London moron.   However, once the seagulls had abandoned the trawler to his fate, the whole thing was quietly taken in-house and he was supported behind closed doors – a concept that Worzel doesn’t seem to have grasped.    

Mr Dalglish

Consider the scale of the screw-ups and the enthusiasm with which everyone connected to  The Dippers has managed to paint themselves into a corner over this issue: first, there have been frequent testimonials from Goofy’s team-mates to the effect that he isn’t a racist, but that is something that he was never charged with.  Add to this Worzel’s attempts to discredit Evra and engage with all those miserable, self-deluding Scousers who have chips the size of Pier Head on their shoulders and think that everything is an anti-Liverpool conspiracy,  plus the sheer embarassment now being felt by Goofy’s advisors who set him up with all kinds of do-gooding anti-racism initiatives in South Africa and elsewhere.  It’s almost beyond belief that a major football club could miscalculate so badly over an issue of such seriousness.

Liverpool’s players and staff have publicly gone out on a limb for Luis Suarez, but now the rest of us get to watch them squirm as the penny finally drops and they realise that they are going to have to back down and eat humble pie over this.  Their aggressive stance and their belated understanding that they were just making things worse with each successive public statement will make the inevitable, eventual climbdown even more hilarious.  If I were Evra, I would insist that Suarez is made to apologise publicly in the middle of Moss Side at 10:30 pm on a Saturday night.  I’m sure then that we would see some of the speed and movement for which he is so famous.

Postscript 04 Jan 2012

Well, well, looks like I over-estimated the capacity of Liverpool F.C. to see beyond their own parochial interests and regain a little dignity from a situation that has left their reputation – and that of Dalglish and Suarez in particular – in tatters.

But no; the wagons have been pulled into an even tighter circle and they have decided to move on without any  apology to the affronted party, without any acceptance that Suarez was guilty or that their response to this problem has often been crass and inappropriate in the extreme. It’s not often that I am guilty of over-estimating Liverpool F.C., but here is one such occasion.  Mea culpa.

Had the situations been reversed, I would like to think that my club would have had the wisdom and humility to see that more was at stake here than just their own narrow interests and over-developed persecution complex.  As mentioned previously, they did so back in 1995 over the Cantona Affair and managed to handle it just about right.  When Cantona returned after a much longer ban, it was with a sense that justice had been served and that he could resume his career with a clean slate.  He did so and although his absence probably cost us the Premiership Title that year, the following year we did the Double with Cantona scoring a brilliant winning goal in an otherwise drab FA Cup Final against Liverpool.  Eric won numerous Player of the Year awards and both player and  club were feted for their phoenix-like revival.  Football moved on.

Can’t see that happening with Goofy, no matter how good a player he is.  Liverpool’s aggressive and unrepentant stance over this sorry affair will ensure that upon his return, Suarez will no doubt be treated as a Martyr and another member of the pantheon of Merseyside Victims  at the Dipperdrome, whilst everywhere else he will be treated as a racist, even though he probably isn’t.  Last night, the City fans were singing ‘Where’s your racist gone?’  to their Scouse counterparts and this will no doubt continue for the rest of this season and probably beyond.  Serves ‘em right, frankly. 

Dalglish and Co may reject the views of the F.A. Commission, but the ‘Court of Public Opinion’ has already made its mind up and though Patrice Evra isn’t exactly a popular figure outside of Red Manchester, most people – except for Dipper fans - understand that he had a genuine grievance here; one worthy of some contrition and some kind of apology from Suarez and LFC, neither of which it seems will now be forthcoming.  This was a moment for Liverpool as a club and for Suarez as a human being to show a little class and even I am surprised at how far short of the mark they have fallen with their intransigence and their arrogant, delusional self-interest.

It will be interesting to see how the F.A. respond to the scorn poured on their Commission by Worzel in particular; if managers can be charged with Disrepute raps for abusing referees, surely Dalglish has a case to answer for his arrogance and contempt towards the governing body?  On the other hand, the F.A. may just want to let the whole thing quietly subside.

Another curious aspect of this concerns the total silence of  LFC’s American owners over this issue.  NES probably have a greater appreciation of ‘race’ issues through their involvement with Baseball in the USA and you would have thought that a little of their accumulated wisdom might have trickled down from on high and into the ears of Dalglish and the players.  John Henry will know that this affair has left a severe dent in Liverpool’s reputation, and further damged their relationships with both the F.A. and with Manchester United.

The latter is a real concern as what used to be a healthy local rivalry becomes increasingly toxic by the year.  Suarez is due to be back for the Old Trafford game next month and I would imagine that police forces in Greater Manchester and on Merseyside are already gearing up for what is likely to be a powder-keg of a day.

Post-Postscript 14 Jan 2012

To use an over-used cliché, you couldn’t make it up…

Just when the F.A. thought that things couldn’t get any worse, we get what must seem to them to be the F.A. Cup Fourth Round Draw from Hell…..QPR v Chelsea and Liverpool v United.    Just when they were hoping that the whole ‘racism in football’ issue would dry up and blow away.  No chance of that now.  Suarez, Evra, Terry & Anton Ferdinand  are back under the microscope.

  To be honest, I have been in a state of shock about this for the last 10 days.  At the very least, these fixtures – especially the Liverpool/United tie – raise a whole raft of issues that will no doubt mean that any and every public utterance from either side ahead of the Cup game will be subject to intense media scrutiny.  From here, with a favourable wind, I can almost hear the sound of sacrificial knives being sharpened in the Street of Shame.

Suarez has issued a half-arsed and general ‘apology’ that satisfied nobody and merely highlights his and his club’s contempt for  Evra, the F.A. and Manchester United – and probably in that order.  Fergie has commented sarcastically about Liverpool’s predilection for making large and empty public statements.  Clearly, his view is that ‘peace talks’ at board level will not alleviate the tribal toxicity that Dalglish et al have let loose – and he’s probably right. 

Things are coming to the boil and by the end of this, the result of a couple of football matches (the Cup game and subsequent Premiership game at Old Trafford in early February) may be the least of our worries……

The safest bet – being as ITV will almost certainly broadcast the Cup game live on free-to-air TV  – would be to play it ‘behind closed doors’, but that would undoubtedly be seen as an acknowledgement by the football authorities that the fans are out of control and the police and stewards will be able to do little or nothing to control them if there are any flashpoints.  No doubt if that should prove to be the case, Kenny Dalglish will be as disinclined to accept any responsibility as he has been throughout this whole sorry mess.  Pretty classy for someone who witnessed at first hand what happened at both Heysel and Hillsborough.  

If the abuse one (black)  Oldham player got from the Kop during a recent cup tie is anything to go by, what kind of reception can Patrice Evra expect to get – assuming he is picked to play?  And if he doesn’t play, what does that say about the levels of snarling vitriol that Liverpool FC have effectively sponsored and encouraged throughout this affair?

You would like to think that Liverpool and United fans alike will be aware of the fact that – more than ever – the world will be looking on and  that they will consequently show some restraint and some maturity.  However, Dalglish and Liverpool have already set the tone ahead of this match and in an atmosphere of resentment, loathing and parochial prejudice, does anyone seriously believe that an outbreak of peace is likely? 

Books will be - in fact they probably already have been - written about the whole  ‘Smile’  saga – and herein lies the problem, because it would be impossible for this album to ever live up to the hype that surrounds it.  Not that what we have here is at all unfamiliar.  Many of the songs from ‘Smile’  – ‘Wind Chimes’, ‘Vegetables’, ‘Surf’s Up’ , ‘Heroes & Villains’ and others  - were released in one form or another by The Beach Boys during the late 1960′s or early 1970′s and in any case, Brian Wilson has already issued his own version of ‘Smile’,  released 7 years ago.   And that’s to say nothing of bootlegged versions of the ‘original’ album, one of which I bought from a stall on St Albans Market at least 10 years ago.

So, it would be reasonable to ask why this after-the -Lord -Mayor’s-Ball  official release has created even a moderate stir, and to explain that requires a look at the whole Beach Boys story – especially the crucial period from 1965-1971.

The thing about The Beach Boys is that  they were both naff and cool at the same time.  In the early days, there was always something geeky and awkward about the band as individuals, with the sole exception of drummer Dennis Wilson, who seemed a conventionally good-looking Californian scruff.  The other Wilsons, Carl and Brian, always tended towards porkiness even as young men.  Al Jardine was scrawny and Mike Love was rapidly losing his hair, something that he tried – fruitlessly – to disguise with various hats and elaborate comb-overs.  On stage, they affected camp candy-stripe shirts and white trousers and seemed to borrow heavily from the rock and roll traditions of the 50′s.  Judged on image alone, they weren’t in the same ballpark as The Beatles or The Stones and over and above all that, multiple songs about fast cars and surfing were never likely to resonate overmuch with a young teenager growing up in the East Midlands.

This being the case, everything hinged on the quality of the band’s music and that was always special.  Even the early rock & roll inspired romps like ‘I Get Around’ were a cut above the norm because of their superbly arranged vocal harmonies.  These suggested a level of musical sophistication that was well in excess of the requirements of the material the band  were churning out. Subsequently, once Brian Wilson began to flex his compositional muscles with songs like ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ or ‘In my room’, what rapidly became clear was that  in musical terms The Beach Boys were a substantial cut above most of their contemporaries. 

Even so, whilst Wilson’s compositional chops were a decided asset, the band’s influences were not exactly what you might expect.  If The Beatles were inspired by early Motown and the Stones by post-war Chicago blues, then The Beach Boys’ influences, Elvis and Chuck Berry aside,  were straight out of white Norman Rockwell suburban Americana.  On one level, whilst that meant Gershwin and Sinatra, it also meant preppy favourites like Doris Day and The Four Freshmen, all  growing out of  the  gauche, crewcut, bobby-sox awkwardness of post-war white American teen culture.  Years later, the band would release Bruce Johnston’s  open love letter to this whole era – ‘Disney Girls (1957)’ on 1971′s ‘Surf’s Up’.  They did so without any apparent sense of irony  or regard for the prevalent counter-cultural zeitgeist.

 ”She’s really swell
Cause she likes
Church, bingo chances and old-time dances”

Well, gee whizz, fellas……it’s a long way from there to Woodstock nation, but the same album also featured eco-anthems like ‘Don’t go near the water’ and openly experimental songs like ‘Feel flows’…..would the real Beach Boys please stand up?  By this point, it seemed that not even the band knew who they were or what they wanted to be.  However, I’m getting ahead of myself here….

As mentioned,  what set The Beach Boys apart from Jan & Dean and the other surf groups of the mid-60′s  was Brian Wilson.  It was Brian who, as a child, had led the way in teaching his brothers to sing harmonies.  It was Brian who, throughout his stellar career as a high school quarterback had continued with his musical studies, it was Brian who drove The Beach Boys on to greater and more ambitious projects despite growing unease among other band members – particularly Mike Love.  Finally, it was Brian who led the band out of their collective comfort zone and into uncharted waters like ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Smile’.

The Beach Boys in one of their stage outfits; probably around 1964

Brian stopped performing regularly on stage with the band in 1965, with first Glen Campbell and then Bruce Johnston taking his place.  Fear of flying seemed to be the immediate cause of this, but whereas The Byrds used a similar problem as a lever to force Gene Clark out of the band at around the same time, The Beach Boys were savvy enough to realise Brian’s value to the band.  He had swiftly moved on from niche songs about surfing and hot rods to a growing collection of more personal songs that revealed his vulnerability and sensitivity and it was these songs – ‘In my room’, ‘The Warmth of the Sun’, ‘Help me Rhonda’ and the like – that were turning heads around the world.

So Brian stayed home with his piano and his thoughts whilst the rest of the guys headed off round the world to fly the Beach Boys flag.  In many ways, the removal of the pressure of live performance released the brakes on Brian’s talents and the work he did at this time took the band’s music to a whole new level of sophistication.  They had by this stage already recorded basic tracks for an intended new single, a version of an old folk tune called ‘Sloop John B’.  Careful listening reveals a broadening of the band’s instrumental textures - now it wasn’t all Phil Spector-ish organ and guitar; there were glockenspiels and piccolos and other less discernible sounds lurking in the mix and the overall quality of the production had been cranked up a notch or two.

It was always said of Duke Ellington that although he played very good piano, his real instrument was his Orchestra and with Brian Wilson, it would probably be fair to say that although he played piano and sang well, his real instrument was the recording studio.  Brian wasn’t a great instrumentalist per se, but he had a great ear for innovative arrangements and a vivid imagination.  With the band away touring, Brian began a collaboration with lyricist Tony Asher early in 1966  and around the same time also went into the studios with ‘The Wrecking Crew’, an assemblage of L.A.’s finest session players, to lay down the backing tracks for ‘Pet Sounds’.   

A previous Beach Boys box set ( Good Vibrations – Thirty Years of The Beach Boys)  included a ‘bonus disc’ of some of the sessions (and the between-takes studio chat) that created ‘Pet Sounds’ and they offer a fascinating glimpse of  a confident Brian deploying an astonishing range of musical instruments including oddities like bass harmonica, ocarina, contra-bassoon and harpsichord.  The impression you are left with is that the use of such a wide palette of instrumental colouration was no accident, nor was it a wilful embrace of novelty for the sake of novelty.  Yes, Brian Wilson comes across as a kid let loose in a toyshop, but this kid seemed to know exactly what he wanted and exactly what he was doing.  Even if he didn’t, the results - when ‘Pet Sounds’ finally came out later in 1966 – justified all the complexities of instrumentation and arrangement.

The full story of ‘Pet Sounds’ could detain me here for hours, but it’s ‘Smile’ that I’ve been listening to, so I’d better restrict myself to observing that  ‘Pet Sounds’ marked a sea change in Brian Wilson’s development as a composer/arranger and also in his relationship with the rest of the band.

They returned from an Asian tour to be presented with a ‘fait accompli’ of six backing tracks for the new album with Tony Asher’s lyrics ready to be sung and only the vocal harmonies to be worked out.  This did not go down well with some of the other members, notably Mike Love, whose musical conservatism led him to question why the band should abandon the successful formula of surfing & car songs that had propelled them to worldwide success.  From ‘Pet Sounds’ onwards, Brian was effectively ’on probation’ as far as Love was concerned and though the band would continue to follow their Pied Piper, they would do so only as long as the hit singles continued to flow.  From hereon, Brian was part of the band but was also apart from the band, his growing use of drugs was starting to have an impact and the mental unravelling that would blight his career was only just around the corner.

In some respects, by 1966, Brian Wilson was no longer looking to his fellow Beach Boys for inspiration – they probably didn’t understand what he was trying to achieve and in some cases (Love) were openly hostile to it.  His peers were now the likes of The Beatles and if ‘Pet Sounds’ was directly fuelled by Brian’s response to ‘Rubber Soul’, then ‘Smile’ was probably Brian’s attempt to match ‘Revolver’.    Subsequently, the fact that ‘Smile’ was shelved was partly because of Brian’s sense of insecurity about his own work when confronted  with ’Revolver‘ and ‘Sgt Pepper‘ .  One of the problems here was that unlike Lennon and McCartney, Brian had no-one to compete with or to bounce his ideas off.  The ‘guys in the band’ had just become his ‘voices’ as The Wrecking Crew had become his orchestra.   As late as 1968, The Beatles would still audition one another’s songs by getting together with acoustic guitars and sitting round playing their new songs for the rest of the band.  For Brian Wilson, it was a much more solitary path and he was way ahead of virtually everyone else in his field.  The Beatles had George Martin to lean on, Smokey Robinson’s arrangements were taken care of by in-house Motown arrangers but with The Beach Boys, the songs, the production and the arrangements were all down to Brian.  No wonder he cracked in the end.

Brian plays his new stuff for the rest of the band….

The link between ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Smile’ was ‘Good Vibrations’.  Originally slated for inclusion on ‘Pet Sounds’, Brian decided that he wanted to do more work on it, so it was held back…and held back….and….

Early sessions for the song date back to February of 1966, fully 8 months before it was finally released.  It has been estimated that it cost 50, 000 dollars to make – a colossal sum at the time for just one song - and involved no less than seventeen recording sessions in four separate studios during the spring and summer of 1966.  Tony Asher supplied the original lyrics but these were later replaced.  Mike Love gets a co-writer’s credit but given his generally negative attitude to ‘Brian’s New Direction’, it beggars belief that he could have authored some of the song’s wilder flights of lyrical fancy.  At one point, Love allegedly dismissed the song as ‘avant-garde shit’ and as the passing years have revealed him to be – amongst other things - a man who has an over-developed sense of his own importance, it hardly seems likely that he would pour such scorn on anything for which he might be held partially responsible.

Whatever the case, ‘Good Vibrations’ was released in October of 1966 and probably changed perceptions of The Beach Boys forever.  In the UK, it was received with reverence by BBC and Pirate DJ’s alike – I can recall one informing us that this was ‘what the future will sound like.’  For all its innovative stylings, it was still recognisably a Beach Boys single and it fairly  hurtled up the UK singles chart to give the band their first British # 1.

Some-time Beatles and Byrds publicist Derek Taylor described  ’Good Vibrations’  as a ‘pocket symphony’; an apt description, especially as it hints at an internal structure of different ‘movements’ with differing moods.  The song was certainly a landmark on many levels – for one thing, it was probably the first truly ‘psychedelic’ hit record but more significantly in the light of what was to come, it represented a new way of making records for Brian Wilson.  ‘Good Vibrations’ was recorded in sections which Brian then assembled, rather as you might put together a pre-fabricated building.  This was not necessarily ground-breaking, but what changed with ‘Good Vibrations’  was that rather than being edited out to create the impression of a seamless performance, the ‘joins’ between the different sections were not only left in but were almost exaggerated.  The classic example here is the section where the band softly sing “Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations / A happenin’ with her” and repeat it several times before plunging back into the main chorus.  This section begins abruptly with only a quiet organ and softly plucked bass before the voices come in.  At the end of 2011, it doesn’t sound like much, but in 1966, it was.  

‘Good Vibrations’ was a huge success for the band all over the world and it gave Brian Wilson the license to pursue this approach with his next project, which was to be called ‘Smile‘.  For this project, he enlisted the support of Van Dyke Parks, a Los Angeles session musician who had recorded with The Byrds and written songs for bands like Harper’s Bizarre.  Parks had a reputation for witty and literate lyrics and Brian Wilson decided that he was the man to help him with ‘Smile’.

Brian Wilson in the studio with Van Dyke Parks, 1966

In the loosest terms, ‘Smile‘ is  that dreaded beast, a ‘concept album’, but only in the same way that ‘Sgt Pepper’ is.  Both albums are really just an umbrella for a group of songs that (in the case of ‘Sgt Pepper’) we have grown used to hearing run together in a sequence  - the lack of tracking between the songs on ‘SPLHCB’ creates the illusion of a unified structure, but there is actually little connection between the suburban angst of ‘She’s leaving home’ and the ensuing acid-fuelled whimsy of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ .  It’s the same with ‘Smile’; not much connection between ‘Heroes & Villains’ and ‘Wind Chimes’, except that they were both part of the ‘Smile’ project.

What makes ‘Smile’ interesting in 2011 is not so much the flimsiness of its over-arching concept as its massive grab-bag of influences,  the continuation of Brian’s ‘cut & paste’ approach to recording, the way in which it drove a wedge between Brian and the rest of the band and his eventual decision to relinquish not only the album but his role as The Beach Boys pioneering leader.  What’s interesting about the 5 CD Box is that a whole CD is given over to version after version of ‘Good Vibrations’ (or parts of it), whilst another disc is mainly taken up with multiple versions (or part-versions) of ‘Heroes & Villains’.  Both of these discs are – in my view – for serious ‘anoraks’ only. 

After ‘Good Vibrations’, Brian Wilson’s next big project was indeed the epic ‘Heroes & Villains’, a song that to my ears is every bit as awe-inspiring as its predecessor, but which was ultimately ditched in its original ‘expanded’ format and  released as a stripped down and re-recorded single later in 1967 after ‘Smile’ had been shelved.  Brian spent just as much time noodling with this  one as he had with ‘Good Vibrations’ , but the ‘finished’ version available to us on ‘Smile’ has extra sections which render it disjointed amid an already slightly chaotic soundscape.  More than anything else it was Brian’s failure to produce a version of ‘Heroes & Villains’ that satisfied him for a single release that led to the release of ‘Smile’ being put back and ultimately cancelled.  You have to ask, what was Brian doing messing with these 2 songs for so long?  Here is the point at which an experienced ‘outside’ producer could maybe have had a positive impact on a fraught situation in which arguments between Brian and the rest of the band were becoming commonplace.  Whether an ‘outside voice’ could have helped or not, we’ll never know. After the re-recorded single version of ‘Heroes & Villains’ failed to match the success of ‘Good Vibrations’, Brian effectively gave up his attempts to emulate The Beatles and began his long retreat from the public eye.

So, apart from ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes & Villains’ what is there to excite us about ‘Smile’?  Sure, there are some other fine songs – especially  the luminous masterpiece of  ‘Surf’s Up’, but my own history forces me to see that as being part of the wonderful 1971 album of the same name, which featured a partially re-recorded version of what is one of Brian Wilson’s greatest songs.  The original version of ‘Wind Chimes’ certainly knocks spots off the weird, revamped version that eventually came out on the late ’67 ‘Smiley Smile’ album.  However, what has to be said about ‘Smile’ is that it signally fails to leap out of the CD drive as a full-blown classic as Brian Wilson intended.  It comes across as more of a curio, a fragmented collection of  toytown whimsy,  half-songs and embryonic ideas that actually reflected the collective state of the whole band in 1967. Wilson would no doubt argue that he never properly completed the project and that this new release has been assembled from a series of unfinished fragments that don’t really do the material justice.  Well, maybe….

Whilst those of us who were old enough were out enjoying 1967′s  ’Summer of Love’, The Beach Boys – and Brian Wilson especially - were falling apart.  Brian had (consciously or inadvertently) excluded his bandmates from the creative process and was clearly happier in the studio dealing with the likes of Van Dyke Parks and The Wrecking Crew.  The rest of the band, with Bruce Johnston aboard as Brian’s doppelgänger had, meanwhile,  effectively become their own tribute band, long before such things were ever thought of.  A stronger, braver Brian Wilson would have officially parted company with the band at this point, leaving them to their surfing and car songs, whilst pursuing his own star as a solo artist.  However, Brian wasn’t strong – his mental health was already poor and for whatever reasons he was unable to sever the umbilicus connecting him to his brothers.

Drugs may have been another contributory factor in Brian over-reaching himself but the rift between himself and the other band members was at least partly down to poor judgement on his part.  The hours he spent fine-tuning endless versions of ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes & Villains’ was a strategy that was never going to play particularly well with a group who were slogging their way round the world and had fundamental concerns about where Brian’s new conceits were taking them.

The received wisdom about ‘Smile’ was that Brian wanted it released but the others wouldn’t agree – after all, he eventually recorded it and toured with his own version in 2004.  Having now heard what will be seen as the ‘official version’, no matter its unfinished nature, I would have to say that I have some sympathy with their reluctance and it really doesn’t matter which of them blackballed it up until now..  As I said at the outset of this piece, no matter how good it was, ‘Smile’ was never going to live up to all the hype that has slowly built around it over the intervening 40-0dd years.  More than anything else it reveals a band in the process of disintegration. 

It cannot be a time that any of The Beach Boys remember with much affection; after all, the mid-60′s is littered with the carcasses of post-Beatles bands who never made the transition from pop to rock.  Seen from a 1967 standpoint, The Beach Boys must have feared that they were about to be eclipsed by all these new young bands who were coming through with their long hair and outlandish names – The Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Spirit – and that was just in California.  None of them could have foreseen the way in which the band would rehabilitate themselves in the 1970′s with albums like ‘Surf’s Up’ and ‘Holland’ , let alone a series of triumphant live shows such as the one I witnessed them give at a packed and sunny Wembley Stadium in June of 1975.

Last year I wrote about the best gig I have ever attended – The Blue Nile at Birmingham Town Hall in 1990, as you asked – but The Beach Boys at Wembley is # 2 on that list and though Brian Wilson was not there, his songs were and a band I had never considered to be a top live act produced a show for the ages.  Not only that but they did so amidst some pretty serious company – great sets by Stackridge, Rufus, Joe Walsh and The Eagles (aided and abetted by both Walsh and Jackson Browne) had already established a buzz among the capacity crowd.  The sun beat down; it was perfect weather for a Beach Boys gig and – augmented by some seriously good session players (including Chicago’s early producer, James William Guercio) - Carl & Dennis Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine came out and set the place on fire.  What’s more, Brian Wilson’s absence didn’t mean that Mike Love’s greasy MC routine was allowed to dictate the setlist – they played ‘Sail on Sailor’, they played ‘Surf’s Up’.  they even played some avant-garde shit called ‘Good Vibrations’.  Summed up, they were little short of sensational and it must have warmed the cockles of their Californian hearts to hear 100,000 sunburned kids bellowing the chorus to ‘California Girls’ into the London skies.

Carl Wilson at Wembley Stadium in 1975

As a footnote, I should probably point out that The Beach Boys were actually a last-minute replacement for Stevie Wonder, who had been taken ill.   I wonder how much top-of-the-bill Elton John regretted the decision to book The Beach Boys as he had to follow them on stage. Poor dear didn’t stand a chance.  In the years since, I must have spoken with 100 people who were also at that gig and I have yet to meet one that stayed to the end of Reg’s set, even though he had Steely Dan’s Jeff Baxter playing guitar for him that day. 

That glorious day at Wembley is the way that I would like to remember  The Beach Boys.  Listening to ‘Smile’  in 2011 is, by contrast,  like wandering through the rooms of a dusty old house where no-one has lived for 45 years;  it’s fascinating and exhibits moments of brilliance to match anything that had come before, but whether it’s the ‘unfinished’ nature of the songs or some other factor, it just doesn’t cut it as an overall project.  In the end , it remains for me just an interesting peek into Brian Wilson’s world shortly before all his dreams came crashing down, denying him his health and denying us the work of a true genius.  Sure, it’s been great to see him back in recent years performing and playing the old hits, but you do wonder about what might have been….

I’m able to believe that for those more peripherally involved,  yesterday was a perfect opportunity to say goodbye to an old friend and I’m happy for that to be the case.  For myself, though, I am still faced with a house full of memories and photos and junk that will have to be cleared once Christmas and New Year are over and done with.  Whether or not I am able to put it all behind me once that is done remains to be seen.  Maybe my closure will come when I have cleared the house and walk away from it for the last time. Or not, as the case may be.

Saying goodbye to my Dad is proving to be an elastic process.  In most respects, I was saying goodbye when I last visited him in hospital on December 1st, just an hour or so before he died, and although the subsequent shenanigans with the Coroner’s Office, the post-mortem and the ensuing tests on tissue samples were irritating, they caused me stress mainly because I was starting to think that I wouldn’t be able to get my Dad buried before Christmas rather than due to any squeamishness about them carving lumps from his internal organs to try to ascertain what actually killed him in the end.

I wrote here last time about him dying of old age; his body just giving up on him after 87 years of reasonably faithful service.  Unsurprisingly, the post-mortem tests revealed a plethora of ailments that could have or did kill him – hypertensive heart disease, ischaemic colitis and so on, but by sheer chance, when I returned to the hospital where Dad died to collect his belongings, I ran into the very Doctor who had refused to sign off on cause of death, triggering the whole post-mortem farrago.  He had the good grace to shake my hand and express  his sympathies, so I quickly reconsidered my initial instinct which was to offer him a sarcastic ‘thank you’ for all the ludicrous delays I was now contending with.  I asked him if he knew of the post-mortem test results and he didn’t, so I told him.

When I mentioned the colitis, he nodded his head rapidly and expressed the view that this was what had probably killed Dad.  Ischaemic colitis is a condition that arises when the heart is not getting enough blood to the bowel and the whole colon essentially starts to disintegrate. This, he said, would also explain the chronic diarrhoea that plagued my Dad for the last 4 months of his life.

Well, gee Doc, glad that your curiosity has been satisfied and don’t worry about holding the whole process up for a week.  Oh well….

In the end, because of all the delays, there was something of an unseemly scramble to get my Dad buried before everyone disappeared into a blizzard of tinsel & turkey.  After problems with the medics and the  bureaucrats, it was time for problems with the parish priest.  This elderly gentleman is almost a stereotype of the  old-school, high church, aloof and slightly batty Church of England vicar.  Local rumours of ‘problems with the Diocese’ seem to indicate that he has been banished to this remote corner of Northamptonshire just to keep him out of the way.  Whether that’s the case or not, he presides over churches in two adjacent villages and nothing happens in those churches without his say-so.  In any case, my Dad had been on the Church Committee with Father W. (he’s very ‘high church’ and  likes to be called ‘Father’) and wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to conduct his funeral.

I have a bit of ‘previous’ with Father W.  He conducted my Mother’s funeral some 7 years ago and outraged me (though not my Dad) by treating it as an opportunity to deliver an extended commercial for the Church of England.  That day, his opening remark was ‘We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Jesus Christ’ – guaranteed to raise my hackles – and it sort of meandered downhill from there.  I was torn between grief and anger and though I had ‘kept things together’ up until that point, I just broke down in floods of angry tears in the churchyard as my Mum’s coffin was lowered into the ground.  Of course, I understood even through my anger that Father W’s problem was that he didn’t know my Mother at all.    My parents had been commuters who worked in a neighbouring town and only spent weekends in the village. What’s more, they were off caravanning as soon as holiday time came around – and even more so once they retired.  More significantly still, they were not churchgoers,  so Father W. was always going to struggle to  say anything of consequence about my Mum or her life. Even so, all the dreary cant and endless invocations of various parts of the Holy Trinity just left me suffused with a cold rage and the whole thing just felt impersonal in the extreme.

Anyway, once my Mum died, Dad became much more involved with village life and especially with the Church.  His time serving on the Committee meant that he’d got to know Father W. pretty well, so I was more optimistic that we might get some personal reflections in amongst the usual ecclesiastical waffle.

However in order for any kind of service to take place, the funeral directors had to get hold of Father W. and this was easier said than done.  This is a man who is renowned for not answering his phone unless he’s so inclined, doesn’t have an answerphone and doesn’t use a mobile.  It took the funeral directors nearly 36 hours to track him down, but I have to say that when I finally did get to discuss the details of the service with him, he was sweetness and light personified.  Couldn’t have been more helpful and clearly had a warm regard for my Dad, so I approached the day of the funeral with a little less trepidation than had originally been the case.

My Dad organised my Mum’s funeral, so I’ve never been so intimately involved in the process before.  I spent the night beforehand alone at my Dad’s bungalow, partly to get a head start on any urgent administrative issues  that I would need to deal with before Christmas and partly to be on hand in case anyone rang about the funeral.  During Dad’s final illness, I spent quite a lot of time on my own in the house and I have to say I found it a very spooky experience.  Not spooky as in ghosts, just uncomfortable and too solitary for the way I was feeling.  It’s never been a house for which I had any particular fondness – I didn’t grow up there and was living in Copenhagen when my parents moved to the village in 1976.  The house is an anodyne 1970′s bungalow with small rooms, thin walls and woeful decor that my folks somehow never got around to changing.  This was a sign of their use of it more or less as a ‘pied-à-terre’  – somewhere they could just dump the accumulated detritus of their lives whilst they got on with work or with holidaying,  and it really remained that way until my Mum died in 2004. 

By that point,  Dad was too old to make any major changes, though as part of his ‘moving on’ process, he did at least have the hopelessly dilapidated kitchen replaced with one of the usual identikit modern versions.  However, for him, the kitchen was the room in which he felt least comfortable.  That had been my Mother’s domain and until she died,  I would doubt if he cooked more than a handful of meals for himself in nearly 40 years – no wonder he came to rely so completely on microwaveable ‘ready meals’ from the supermarket.

The part of the house in which my Dad felt most comfortable after Mum died wasn’t actually in the house at all, but was the garden.  Except in the dead of winter, Dad would spend hours out there every day and he loved it dearly.  I arrived in fading daylight and looked out on to a bleak and chilly landscape in which some of his gardening tools still lay out on the patio where he had left them.  The bird table and its associated feeders looked empty and forlorn – the garden itself seemed to be in mourning.  A pot on the patio had been blown over by the wind and a random impulse sent me out into the fading winter light to set it upright again.  As I did so, the phone began ringing in the house and before I could get to it, the answerphone kicked in.  I stood, transfixed, as my Dad’s familiar baritone voice echoed along the empty hallway; a proverbial ‘shivers up the spine’ moment for me.  One of my first tasks that evening was to re-record the outgoing message – I just didn’t want to hear that (literally) disembodied voice again.

Overnight storms matched my mood as winds buffeted the house throughout the night.  However, the morning of the funeral dawned cloudless and calm with a watery sun struggling to offer some warmth in the December chill.

The Partner & the Princess were travelling down from Birmingham and other friends were coming from even further afield.  Two of my closest friends flew down to Luton from Glasgow and  were the first to arrive.  Soon the house began to fill up with friends and I was kept busy making cups of tea and coffee and climbing into a suit and tie – never my attire of choice, but there was never any other option here.

Soon enough it was time to take the short stroll down to the village church.  It’s a stocky building with a square tower, built from the honey-coloured local stone and can be seen from pretty much anywhere in the village.  Various people were milling about outside including – extraordinarily – my half-Danish ex-girlfriend with whom I’d been living in Copenhagen when Mum and Dad first moved into their bungalow.  I hadn’t seen her for well over ten years and although she had mailed me to say that she was coming,  it was still slightly astonishing to see her chatting to the Princess as though they’d known one another for years.

There was a surprisingly large ‘walk-up’ attendance from the village – people who my Dad had known from Church and other social events.  I predicted an attendance of about 30 and it was instead nearly 50.  Father W. was dressed for the weather in a voluminous black cape and biretta.  We shook hands as we waited outside for the coffin to be brought into the church, then followed it in.

As the first hymn ended, I was wondering what kind of show we were going to get from Father W. and to begin with the portents were not good.  In the most reasonable and mellifluous of sing-song tones, he worked his way through what seemed like a series of interconnected prayers and homilies that appeared to make some sense to him, though I soon tuned out and waited patiently for him to finish.

In the end,  I decided that his approach was akin to the improvisations of a jazz musician;  someone like John Coltrane would carry round in his head a repertoire of stock riffs and phrases that he would mix up and weave together into apparently seamless solos and it occurred to me that Father W. was essentially doing the same thing.  Here he was with his soft, gentle voice and his  cut-glass accent, spinning together random sections of  comforting doggerel into what he obviously hoped would be  a message of faith and hope and salvation via Mother Church.

Eventually, he finished and gave an offhand introduction to ‘ a member of the family.’  The  Partner got up to read the Eulogy that I had written to deliver myself until I was persuaded otherwise by a number of people.  They were right because I’m fairly sure that I would have been unable to get through it without breaking down.  The Partner did a magnificent job, telling the story of a few select episodes from my Dad’s life; there was a little sadness, a little humour and a lot of pride for a life well lived. 

The Partner sat down – no applause; it’s too traditional a church for that - and we waited.  Father W. had retreated to a seat near the choir-stalls and though we couldn’t see his face, there was the unmistakable feeling around the church that the old bugger had dropped off.  The Princess wasn’t about to wait, so she got up and launched into a Victor Hugo poem, which is essentially an extended metaphor about watching a ship recede from the shoreline towards the horizon, before finally making the point that on another shoreline, someone else is watching it arrive.  Simple, but effective and she read it very clearly in a strong enough voice to guarantee that Father W. would be woken from his nap.

As indeed he was.  Thankfully, at this point, he launched into some warm and seemingly heartfelt comments about my Dad that seemed to reflect the person we had all known.  After that, it was more holy-rolling extemporisation from him, a New Testament reading that passed me by completely and a second hymn, then the organist struck  up ‘Nimrod‘ from Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’, which was the music to which my parents left the church at their wedding back in 1948 and to which my Dad left it now. 

Quite a few of the village folks left at this point, but there were still about 30 at the graveside for the interment.   This is the point at which I lost it at my Mum’s funeral and pretty much the same thing happened here.  What I realised is that I am fine until I see someone else breaking up and then I can’t hold back the tears.  This time it didn’t happen until the coffin was in the grave and people were scattering dried rose petals on top of the coffin.  My friend Jenifer came walking towards me and I could see her face crumpling into tears as she got to me.  Before we knew it, we were hanging on to each other for dear life and the tears were flowing. 

Holcot Church – journey’s end for both of my parents.

Afterwards, everyone convened at ‘The George’, an old coaching inn in the nearby village of Brixworth - well, I say ‘everyone’, but Father W. never showed and there were hardly any of the villagers there either.   They’d been at the church for my Dad but really had no interest in the incoming mob from ‘furren parts’ , so didn’t show up at the pub, which is actually fair enough as far as I’m concerned.  The rest of us – Birmingham friends, Glasgow friends,  the partner’s relatives, my old school friend John who now lives in Shropshire and my ex-flame from Copenhagen – made the best of things on a freezing day and as is often the case, the mood was cheery – and the home-made Leek & Potato Soup was terrific.

As for closure….we went back to the house after the ‘reception’ and Jenifer remarked on how full of memories and photos and a lifetime of accumulated ‘stuff’ the house is.  My Dad’s presence fairly screams from the walls. 

So, no closure yet and not for a good while I suspect.  For now, because I face an immense task in sorting and clearing the house and dealing with Dad’s affairs, I decided that in order to have any kind of Christmas at all, the best thing to do was simply to shut everything non-essential down and lock up the house until the New Year.  As I’ve said here previously, my feeling is that there will be precious little of the accumulated stuff of my parents’  lives that I will take away with me, but who knows what I will find once I start delving?  I plan to clear the house over an extended period – for one thing I haven’t yet decided whether to sell or rent it – and I want to do it in a considered fashion, rather than treat it as an exercise in clearance on an industrial scale.

When I finally walk away, that will be all that I take into the future for the benefit of any grandchildren I may yet have and for their descendants.  At that point, there just might be some closure, but I suspect that there will be none until then.

Not much blogging of late as I have been somewhat preoccupied with my ailing 87-year old Father, who finally died a couple of days ago.  It was nearly 7 weeks since he had gone into hospital, so I had plenty of time to prepare myself for what eventually became an inevitability.  Ultimately, what my Dad died from was really just old age; different parts of his body were wearing out at the same time and it was this ‘cocktail’ of  bodily exhaustion that gradually ground down his resistance.  However, this vaguely holistic view of his eventual demise cuts no ice with the bureaucrats who staff our National Health Service, as you will hear in due course….

Before I get into that, I want to digress sufficiently to tell you about my Father’s final day – in fact I should probably start at the beginning of his ‘final act’. 

Briefly, he had languished in Northampton’s busy General Hospital for 5 weeks.  He was admitted having vomited blood, something that was seemingly triggered by an oesophageal tear just above the stomach.  That was fixed quite quickly and  after a week he was moved from a High-Dependency Unit on to a General Surgical Ward and appeared to be getting better.  However, he then suffered a major setback, contracting  a ‘c.difficile’-type bug which created huge amounts of an infectious diarrhoea that triggered my gag reflex every time I went into his room.  Knowing what I do now, I understand that he was actually ill with multiple ailments; swollen kidney due to a blocked urethra, progressive deterioration of his heart, to say nothing of the problems he was suffering throughout his alimentary tract.  What the bug did was to weaken him appreciably, making it very difficult for a man of his advanced age to recover and making it more likely that any kind of innocuous ‘event’ could tip him over the edge. 

According to the Consultant overseeing his case, he then entered a period where he neither improved or deteriorated – in the words of the doctors treating him, he had ‘plateaued’.  The diarrhoea abated but never stopped and in searching for the cause, they duly discovered a raft of other problems, as mentioned.  After 5 weeks, the staff in Northampton clearly felt that they had done all they could for him medically.  He just lay there, day after day, usually lucid, occasionally confused but always weak.  With the pressure on beds in NHS hospitals, they are clearly under greater pressure than ever to produce tangible results.  Wheel ‘em in, get ‘em better and wheel ‘em out would seem to be their modus operandi.  My Dad’s case just didn’t fit their ‘template’ at all, but on the other hand, he was far too ill to go home. 

What they did was to move him ‘sideways’ to Danetre Hospital in Daventry.  It’s a bright, modern facility that was only built in 2006.  Their real job is to rehab stroke victims and those recovering from serious surgery, ready for a return home.  They also have a small ‘wing’ dedicated to palliative care for terminal cancer patients and it was to a room on this wing that my Dad made his last journey.   I must pause long enough to pay tribute to the dedicated men and women in both hospitals who tried in vain to get my Father back to health.  We are hugely lucky to have the NHS in this country, but the reality of my Dad’s situation was that no-one could really work out what to do about or with him. 

The staff at Danetre were great and he certainly got better care there than in Northampton.  He was warm, comfortable and well cared for.  On the other hand, the Palliative Unit at Danetre is specifically designed to be an oasis of calm, whereas the wards at Northampton are much busier and the staff consequently more overworked.  Despite the peaceful surroundings, my Dad didn’t fit Danetre’s ‘template’ either and one of the doctors there told me that they would review his case in a couple of weeks and that if there was no significant improvement, he would have to be ‘placed’ in a nursing home.  I was loath to discuss this with him as I knew such a move would crush what was left of his spirit.

As mentioned in a previous piece, I was advised by the hospital to stay away from Danetre for most of the first week my Dad was in there as I was suffering from a heavy cold, which, had he picked it up, would in all probability have rapidly morphed into pneumonia or something far more serious.  Having been ‘thus ‘quarantined’ for the best part of a week, I could immediately see, when I did get back to visiting,  that he was now ’sinking’ and that he didn’t have much time left.

And so to his final day.  I got a phone call from the hospital in the late morning to say that his condition had deteriorated.  They would give me no ‘hard information’ over the phone (as it transpired, they didn’t really have any) but did at least concede that this latest downturn was potentially life-threatening.

Fortuitously, the Princess was off work that day and equally fortuitously, the Partner managed to find a hole in her busy schedule, so we travelled to Danetre ‘en famille’, arriving in mid-afternoon.  When we got up to the Inpatients Unit, the nurse met us and told us that his condition had improved since the morning and that he had both drunk and eaten a little and was quite lucid.  When we went in, he was dozing but soon woke up and became as ‘engaged’ as I had seen him since his early days in Northampton General.

He seemed keen to check on a few tasks that he had asked me to carry out some weeks beforehand.  He wanted to know about the state of his house.  He wanted to tell the Partner that he wanted her to have his car.  We assured him that everything was OK and that he shouldn’t worry.  Looking back it now feels like he was checking off items on a final list.  Looking back it seems like we were giving him permission to go.

The Princess even managed to persuade him to eat some mashed-up peaches and whilst she was feeding them to him, I slipped out to question the nurse about what had happened to him that was serious enough for her to call me.  She told me (a sign of things to come) that she wasn’t sure, but that they thought it might have been ‘some kind of cardiac incident’.  There would be a review in the morning she told me, after which someone would call me to let me know their thoughts.

We left shortly afterwards and stood in the corridor outside the room chatting with one of the staff.  I looked back in and saw my Dad lying there peacefully with his eyes closed and still clutching the bottle of  spring water I had left him with.  Quite on impulse, I walked back into the room, kissed him on the forehead and told him I loved him, then left.  At the time, I couldn’t have told you why I did it, but it seemed absolutely necessary to me then and I am so glad I trusted my instincts.

It had been a really positive visit and though I had no expectations of a Lazarus-type recovery, I was glad that we had all been there to catch him on what had seemed to be a good day. We drove home along the A45 through Coventry’s rush-hour traffic and finally got back  here at about 6:20.   At 6:30, the phone rang and the same nurse I’d spoken to about an hour beforehand told me that Dad had died about ten minutes earlier.  My main sensation was astonishment that he had been chatting away to us  quite animatedly only just over an hour previously and now he was gone for good.  At that moment, my main feelings were relief that his travails were over and that he died with dignity in a caring environment where he felt comfortable with the staff and the place, rather than in some anonymous ‘Care Home’ where he knew no-one and could not expect the same degree of professionalism or competence from those looking after him.

In the light of what has happened since, the only ominous note was that the nurse could offer no insights about what it was that had finally killed him.

I rang the Funeral Directors that same evening and set the wheels rolling for the formalities.  Danetre has no facility to store bodies so Dad was taken to an undertaker in the town and I was told that he would be collected and brought back to Northampton the following day.

The following morning (Friday), I  rang the Registrar’s Office and booked an appointment to register the death on the following Monday as they couldn’t find me an appointment slot that day.   I spoke to a woman in my Dad’s village with whom he served on the  Church committee who promised to contact the local Rector with a view to officiating at my Dad’s funeral.  I rang his few surviving friends and broke the news to them.  I spoke with several of my own friends as well, who were quick to offer condolences and help.  The most difficult call was to Dad’s sister who lives in the north-east of Scotland and with whom he had a major falling-out last year.  They were never reconciled and she was devastated by the news.  Still, as I pointed out to her, he was a churchgoer and so is she, so if what they profess to believe in is true, she would have a chance to patch things up with him in the Great Hereafter.  Don’t think she was much consoled by my crude amateur metaphysics, somehow.  Still, as I told her, they were both a couple of stubborn old curmudgeons and therefore equally to blame.

By mid-afternoon, things were coming together nicely.    I had arranged to drop into Danetre, en route to Northampton,  to collect Dad’s belongings and the Death Certificate, the Rector – an elderly, Runyonesque, old school  Church of England  windbag (to be quite honest) - was on board, Dad’s body had been retrieved from Daventry and a day and time had been tentatively set for the funeral.  Sorting this out, followed by Dad’s ‘affairs’ and then, finally, his house is going to be a mammoth task and there’s only me to do it, but I was feeling quite pleased about how smoothly this first bit had gone.  I should have known better.

About 3 pm, the phone went and it was one of the doctors who had been treating Dad at Danetre.  I told him that I had spoken with the Ward Clerk earlier to arrange to pick up my Dad’s personal effects and the Death Certificate, at which point he informed me that there would be no such Certificate for me to collect.  This was, he informed me, because he was not in a position to definitively identify the cause of my Dad’s death, which, under English law, automatically triggers a post-mortem, to be carried out, in this case, by doctors acting under the direction of the Office of the Coroner for Northamptonshire.

In immediate terms, this was a major irritation as any and all funeral arrangements have now had to be put on hold and I am currently in a limbo from which only the Coroner can release me.  Until the body is released back to the Funeral Directors and a Death Certificate issued, I am unable to do anything at all and I have no legal right to challenge this decision.  The various Coroners around the country are apparently answerable only to the Queen. 

The man responsible for this wretched state of affairs is, of course, not the doctor at Danetre, but the late Harold Shipman who faked numerous death certificates he issued whilst practising as a G.P. in Todmorden and Hyde.  The full extent of Shipman’s killing spree has never been fully revealed, but it is thought that he was probably responsible for the murder of around 250 people between 1971 and 1998.  Since the Shipman case, the rules governing doctors issuing death certificates have been tightened up considerably and to set down ‘Old Age’ as a cause of death is no longer a viable option.

And so, my Dad, who spent 7 weeks in hospital being poked, prodded and pummelled, scanned, screened and scraped is now set to be sliced and diced in order to find out probably not very much at all.  I  know that some people would find it traumatic to think of their father’s body being treated in such a fashion, but I will confess to feeling fairly unsentimental about the empty shell that remains after my Dad’s essential spirit had departed.  Even so, I think it only goes to show something that we all know full well; which is that the law is an ass at times and that sometimes a bit of common sense has to prevail.  I have not quite abandoned all hope that this will be the case with my Dad and that over the weekend the Northamptonshire Coroner (in her infinite wisdom) will have an attack of the aforementioned common sense. 

Dad was 87 years old  after all and it’s not exactly rocket science to know that he was weak and suffering from a range of quite serious ailments (for a man of his age and medical history).  His poor body was just worn out and I fail to see that the cause of medical science is going to be much advanced by this farcical piece of posthumous butchery.  Aside from anything else, it places an unreasonable delay on the process by which  myself, my family and my Dad’s friends have  the opportunity to say a final goodbye to the old fella and achieve a little peace ourselves.  No prizes for guessing who I’ll be calling first thing on Monday, though as is the case with bureaucrats all over the world, I doubt that the troubles of a handful of ordinary people will perturb their pressing need to get their paperwork in order.

As a consequence, I was able to catch up on United’s current crop of young players in this morning’s U-18 Academy League game against West Bromwich Albion, then shoot off to Asda to get some shopping in before returning in good time to watch the first team who were featured in the teatime kick off at Swansea.

Last year I was able to follow the development of the U-18′s from a collection of gawky misfits to cultured FA Youth Cup winners, but this season it’s been more difficult to keep in touch with things.  In truth, the U-18′s looked a ragged bunch at the start of the season, losing successive games to Portsmouth and Southampton.  I suppose we had been spoiled by last year’s ‘bumper crop’, most of whom have now ‘stepped  up’ to the Reserves and in some cases to Carling Cup action with the first team.

I suppose I should really start with the Reserves, as they played Wigan at Altrincham on Thursday night.  In the end, they got a comfortable 4-1 win against a young Wigan team, thanks to goals from Ravel Morrison (2), Zekky Fryers and Davide Petrucci.  Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Wigan’s team was that one of their subs was Johan Cruyff’s grandson.  Where do the years go?

All of the best players from last year’s FA Youth Cup team seem to be progressing satisfactorily in their first full season in the Reserves.  Goalkeeper Sam Johnstone and midfielder Ryan Tunnicliffe are both out on loan, but most of the rest are still there; Will Keane, Ravel Morrison and Paul Pogba are probably the obvious ‘stars’, but players like Jesse Lingard and Michael Keane are now developing nicely as well.  The real problems are likely to start at the end of this season when the fact that they’ve been handed a first-team squad number will no longer be enough to satisfy them.

Ravel Morrison; 2 goals against Wigan for the Reserves

I feel particularly sorry for Will Keane, who has 7 strikers (Rooney, Hernandez, Diouf, Owen, Welbeck, Berbatov and Macheda) standing between him and a first-team slot.  Keane is a genuinely gifted striker with a great eye for goal and an uncanny ability to create time and space for himself in even the most crowded of penalty areas.  Hopefully Fergie knows what a gem he has on his hands here and will give him his chance. 

Paul Pogba is (apparently) less content to await the manager’s pleasure and has reputedly refused to sign a new contract until he gets some guarantees about his future at the club – and personally, I think he’s right to do so - Pogba is 18 , an age at which Ryan Giggs was pretty much a first team regular. If I were Ferguson, I would have him on the bench all the time now.  He’s clearly ready for the next challenge and is surely destined to become a great midfielder wherever he ends up.  The first and most pressing task is  to ensure that his future lies with United.  Midfield is undoubtedly the weakest area of the first team right now and they could surely profit from having someone of Pogba’s precocious talents available on a regular basis.  Whatever they have to offer him to secure his services for another 5 years or whatever will almost certainly turn out to be money well spent.

We may learn more when United take on Crystal Palace in the next round of the Carling Cup, the week after next.  At least half of the team who cruised past Wigan will be hoping or expecting to get the call – and rightly so.

It was a bright, cold but sunny morning at Carrington as United took on West Bromwich Albion in the U-18 Academy League.  It turned out to be an exciting game with the outcome in doubt until the very end.  The Junior Baggies look like an exciting crop, whilst United’s youngsters, though improving, are still a work in progress.  The team’s outstanding players this year have probably been skipper Luke McCulloch (apologies for calling him ‘Sean’ in a previous piece) who is a calm and powerful presence at centre-back, left- or centre-back Tyler Blackett, who played in the Youth Cup run last year and wingers/strikers Tom Lawrence and Jack Barmby (son of former Spurs striker, Nick Barmby).  Lawrence was missing this morning, but the other three all played. 

United’s opening goal after twelve minutes came due to a piece of quick thinking by Barmby.  Fouled in the centre circle as the Baggies back line pushed up, he got up quickly and played an instant free-kick into the path of onrushing Norwegian midfielder Mats Daehli, who took it on and beat the ‘keeper from the edge of the area with a composed finish into the bottom corner.  Albion responded strongly and striker Alex Jones had a goal disallowed for offside before winning a penalty which he himself converted just 3 minutes after Daehli’s goal.

The rest of the game was played at a furious pace and United got most of whatever Lady Luck was dishing out today.  West Brom had another goal disallowed before half -time and in the second half had a good shout for another penalty dismissed by the referee, who sent off Albion’s Jamie Edge for dissent around that incident – red cards are something of a rarity at this level.   Later on, United keeper Liam Jacob fumbled a cross on to the post and then re-gathered the ball, with the Baggies players protesting vociferously (but unsuccessfully)  that the ball had crossed the line. 

In the end, the game was settled by a second goal from Daehli.  Blackett got away down the left and slung over a long cross to the back post where the unmarked Norwegian arrived in time to carefully volley home off the underside of the crossbar.  Had he just blasted the ball, it would probably have come down in an adjoining postcode.  And that was that, though you had to feel sorry for the Baggies youngsters, whose performance  definitely merited a point.

Mats Daehli; 2 goals for the U-18′s against WBA

And so to the first team who had what looked like an awkward fixture against Premiership newbies Swansea City,  currently sitting comfortably in mid-table.  Fergie named a strong team, with Carrick and Giggs in central midfield and Park and Nani on the flanks.  United scored early; after 11 minutes, Giggs intercepted a poor clearance and drove into the area before squaring the ball into the path of Hernandez, who expertly steered the ball into the net despite being slightly off-balance as he struck it.

And to be honest, that was pretty much it.  United seem to have adopted the old Arsenal tactic of 1-0 being enough and they never really looked like adding to that early goal until late on, when first, Phil Jones hit the post with a cross-shot and then Nani curled a shot just wide.  Swansea pressed hard in the second half, but in truth, ex-Chelsea starlet Scott Sinclair had their best chance when he missed an open goal in the first half and that was as good as it got for them.

Hernandez scores the only goal against Swansea

But whatever happened to the Great Entertainers who swaggered through the early weeks of the season, swatting Arsenal aside 8-2 and looking as though they were going to take the Premiership by storm?  It seems as though Fergie’s response to the Derby Day hammering has been to revert to a kind of crabby pragmatism which might win games but is deathly to watch.  Of course, with City winning at home earlier, anything but a win would have resulted in a sharp decline in the noise from the Noisy Neighbours as they accelerate away into the distance.  This was like a performance from a difficult away European tie.  Effective, perhaps,  but entertaining ? Only if you find toothache entertaining…

Dad is  still in hospital but has now been moved to another facility in Daventry where the emphasis is on rehab rather than on clinical treatment.  In some respects, it could be argued that this must mean that he’s getting better, but it could also be argued just as convincingly that the doctors believe that nothing more can be done for him medically and they’re now just going to see if they can patch him up and get him well enough to go home. 

I suspect that the true impact of his recent illness won’t truly become clear to me (or indeed to him) until he is back in his own place.  He has a shiny new(-ish) Ford Focus sat in his garage and I fear that he may never drive it again.  He has a substantial garden that has given him untold pleasure over the years and I wonder how much time he will be able to spend working in it from now on.  If he is effectively housebound, how will this independent individual cope with such reduced circumstances…..or perhaps the question I should be asking is, for how long will he be happy with his wings so severely clipped?

And that is really the ‘best case scenario’ for him.  Other less attractive options would see him requiring substantial medical care to the point where a move into a nursing home would start to look like a better option for all concerned.  I fear that would rapidly crush his spirit.  He will want to go home, even if it’s only for a short time. 

Of course, he could live until he’s 100, but, somehow, I doubt it.  If this recent episode has unveiled any Big Truths, the main one would be that, at 87, whilst the spirit may be willing, the flesh is struggling to mend itself.  The 5 weeks he’s spent in hospital have been a rollercoaster of infections and interventions, of jabs, pills, tests, screens and scans.  He’s been pummelled, prodded and poked from every imaginable angle and via every conceivable orifice. Even for a man with a fairly unquenchable spirit, this has laid him low and it has taken him untold amounts of grit to get this far.

One thing is for sure, when my time comes, I hope that I just drop in my tracks, or as Roger McGough once memorably wrote, get run over at an advanced age by a blonde in a red sports car on my way home from an all-night party.

Just in case there is anyone reading this who has recently returned from 10 years of exile on a tropical island without cable tv, ‘The Wire’ was made by HBO with a star-free cast and across its five seasons (2002-2008) aimed to take a cold, hard look at the life of a strictly non-hip US city – Baltimore – through the eyes of its police, its politicians, its journalists, its drug gangs, its dock-workers and so on.  Though many of the ensemble cast appeared in all five seasons, each season took a slightly different focus; thus Season 1 was largely about the interaction between the police and the drug gangs, Season 2 focused on the plight of Baltimore’s shrinking docks and those working there, Season 3 concerned itself with City Hall politics, Season 4 with the school system and the final season with the print media.

Much has been written and said about ‘The Wire’ and most of what has been written and said – in this country at least – has been  extremely positive.  Most fans feel that it offers an unflinchingly accurate portrayal of black urban street life, of City Hall ducking & diving, of the slow death of print newspapers and of the travails of a city police department, to name but a few of the areas singled out for praise.  Across all these different facets of city life, ‘The Wire’ is, above all, feted for its apparent ‘authenticity’.  This is a drama that seeks to portray the harsh realities of life in a modern American city and spends much of its time concentrating on the choices and compromises that people make to get them through their daily round.  There are good guys and bad guys, mavericks and team players, there is friendship, even love, but then there is corruption and disillusionment, squalor and death as well. 

There is hope, too. ‘The Wire’ is a long way from being just a nihilistic hatchet-job on the life and body politic of Baltimore (or the USA).  Through the five series, characters are redeemed, either by circumstance or by their own efforts.  Junkies clean up, gangsters go straight, failed cops find themselves having far greater success in other walks of life.  The milk of human kindness does flow through the veins of ‘The Wire’ and the only characters with whom the writers appear to have little or no sympathy are the politicians. 

Among many of my friends, ‘The Wire’ has been lauded as the greatest piece of extended television drama of all time.  The socio-political insights, the finely-drawn characters, the shrewd and effective plotting – all of these factors are cited as reasons why ‘The Wire’ is so good.  It lacks the obvious Liberal/Democrat wish-fulfillment of ‘The West Wing’, it lacks the sentimental  clichés of Italian – American life littered across ‘The Sopranos’, but offers us instead what seems like a non-idealised view of Baltimore life at the sharp end.  The story arcs remain credible throughout,  whilst the characters generally develop in ways that seem consistent and realistic.

For all that, I am sure that there are many middle -class  people living in Baltimore who barely recognised their own city from ‘The Wire’ and who probably have a very different take on how it is to live in that city.  At the very end of Season Five, Dominic West’s  (ex-)Detective McNulty pulls over to the side of a road and looks out over the city.  Through his eyes we see snippets of  a possible future; characters move up or move on or sink into the mire, either regaining or losing their integrity along the way.  But we also see a Baltimore that we never really see in the other 59 episodes – we see long-shots of a city with broad avenues and grand buildings, we see bustling streets with a ticking heartbeat that is a long way from the ‘corners’ of the West Side or the grim post-industrial landscapes of the old docks.

I’ve never been to Baltimore so can’t really comment on the veracity of ‘The Wire’s portrait of a city in virtual meltdown.  However, I find it hard to believe that there aren’t other Baltimores where people lead lives that are quite different from McNulty and  Omar,  from Lester and Bubbles,  from Daniels and Marlo.  The fact is that Baltimore is really just a shop window for the themes of ‘The Wire’, themes that could probably apply to any large American city with a substantial black population and a fading blue-collar tradition – Washington DC or Cincinnati  for example.  Those themes – racial tension, political corruption, drugs, economic downturns, education, media manipulation of facts, broken homes and broken dreams are universal to all such cities.

McNulty, Bunk and Lester; allegedly the ‘Good Guys’

The status of ‘The Wire’ as a favourite of critics and huge numbers of fans across the world  cannot, however, disguise the fact that it was some way from being a mainstream hit in America.  Many people who didn’t subscribe to HBO wouldn’t have seen it anyway and many others were in all probability put off by what creator David Simon has itemised as  “the complexity of the plot; a poor time slot; heavy use of esoteric slang, particularly among the gangster characters; and a predominantly black cast.” (Wikipedia). ‘The Wire’ would often find itself up against NFL games on the Sports channels and other more mainstream series such as ‘Desperate Housewives’.  Ratings were increasingly poor on a season-by-season basis, though HBO apparently accepted that many fans were picking up illegal postings of the series via the Net, watching it online via HBO On Demand or simply waiting for the box set to come out.

For me, there’s something else about ‘The Wire’ that would explain why it nearly got cancelled twice and why it was consistently overlooked by the people who dish out TV awards.  In my view, many Americans would have a problem with ‘The Wire’ because it paints the urban society of – in this case – Baltimore, but by inference most major American cities in such an unflattering light. 

If we backtrack to 1980, we can see another example of this phenomenon with Michael Cimino’s ‘Heaven’s Gate’ - a movie that became almost a watchword for the excesses of the post-‘Easy Rider’ crop of ‘auteurist’  Hollywood directors.  Anyone who has read Steven Bach’s book about the movie (‘Final Cut’) will quickly have gained an appreciation of all the errors of judgement that Cimino made in making ‘Heaven’s Gate’ and there is no doubt that there were many of them. 

 Cimino’s arrogance and his cavalier attitude to cost and budget over-runs ensured that his reputation took a pounding even before ‘Heaven’s Gate’ was ‘in the can’.  His  hubris was probably the last straw for the studios, ensuring that the era of the Hollywood auteurs was effectively over.  From that point onwards, studios exercised far closer control over budgetary issues and prima donna directors.

However, what that left us with was ‘Heaven’s Gate’ itself. Despite being drastically cut in its initial 149-minute cinematic release, what was clear was that this was what David Thomson has referred to as a ‘wounded monster’ of a film and even expanded and revised versions continue to divide opinion – many people think it’s the worst movie ever, others that it’s a great film.

I definitely fall into the latter camp; for me, the cinematography (by Vilmos Szigmond), the music (by Bob Dylan alumnus David Mansfield) and many of the performances are masterful.  It’s a long way from being the perfect movie but it is pretty damn good on many levels . Most significantly, the fact that Cimino chose to plant a bomb under some of the most cherished myths of the American West was a brave and adventurous strategy that would have gone down a storm just a few years earlier.  Ralph Nelson’s ‘Soldier Blue’ from 1970, an infinitely less accomplished piece of work in almost every respect, had drawn a favourable response in its depiction of how Native Americans got well and truly shafted by the American ‘establishment’ – as I recall, it’s a depressing and not particularly well-made movie.  ‘Heaven’s Gate’  – a much better movie on every level – did a similar job for the plight of the poor European migrants who flooded west and began to set up homesteads on the massive ranges that had previously been the exclusive province of rich cattle farmers.  Even so, it got completely trashed by most critics.

‘Heaven’s Gate’ – the Harvard Waltz Sequence; the ruling class at play

‘Heaven’s Gate’ is based on events that happened during the so-called ‘Johnson County War’, which took place in Wyoming in April 1892.  The Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA) – an organisation of rich cattle farmers with links to the Republican Party - hired gunmen to stop the sporadic outbreaks of rustling carried out by starving migrant farmers.  These gunmen often dispensed summary justice, killing suspected rustlers without recourse to the mechanisms of the law.  The WSGA gunmen were eventually pinned down in farm buildings near Fort McKinney by a Sheriff’s posse of about 200 men , but were saved from annihilation when Wyoming’s Acting Governor sent an urgent telegram to President Benjamin Harrison who ordered the Sixth Cavalry, based at Fort McKinney, to intervene.  The WSGA ’enforcers’ were close to being routed but the Army’s intervention meant that they were instead spirited away and held at an army fort near Cheyenne.  Documents taken from their leader implicated many of the leading lights of the WSGA in a plan to systematically murder up to 70 suspected ‘rustlers’.  Despite all this, the ‘enforcers’ were eventually freed on bail and many fled south to Texas.  In any event,  the case was dropped when the Johnson County authorities refused to pay for the upkeep of the ‘prisoners’ or the costs involved in bringing them to court.  The whole affair swiftly fizzled out, though feelings in Johnson County ran high for many years.

Many of these events form the basis of the action in ‘Heaven’s Gate’.  Kris Kristofferson’s sheriff attempts to mediate in the disputes but he is very much of the same social background as the WSGA and though he tries to do his job honestly, he clearly does not relish being seen as a ‘class traitor’.  Cimino depicts the WSGA leaders and vigilantes as the bad guys and the huddled masses of the incomers as the good guys.  It’s an almost Marxist take on the mythology of the West with the proletarian migrants taking on the fat cat WSGA and almost winning, but for the intervention of the Army at the 11th hour.  In a coda at the movie’s end,  we see an older, disillusioned Kristofferson aboard his steam yacht off Rhode Island.  He has returned to the East and re-assumed his position of privilege within the ruling elite.

‘Heaven’s Gate’ – the Roller Rink sequence; the huddled masses take to the floor

‘Heaven’s Gate’ was released in 1980 and it could be argued that a kind of Marxist Western was never going to play too well in an America where an old school ex-Hollywood cowboy was riding the range in the White House.  In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s popularity as President was probably approaching its zenith and for that reason alone, ‘Heaven’s Gate’ was doomed as far as ‘middle America’ was concerned.  It portrayed some unsavoury truths about the American West, truths that many Americans saw as ‘unpatriotic’ at a time when gung-ho was the name of the game and pinko liberals were lying low.  No wonder it bombed at the Box Office, though predictably, the movie fared much better in Europe. However, in all likelihood, had the movie been released 5 years earlier, it might well have been received more sympathetically in a country still just about clinging to the tail-end of 60′s ideologies.  By 1980, the USA had changed and become much more conservative, Hollywood had changed and the studios were sick of all these bratty directors and their grand narratives of American dysfunction.  It was time for Rocky and Rambo and all those rugged American heroes; no-one had much time for class warfare in 1890′s Wyoming.

Returning (finally) to ‘The Wire’, it seems to me that there are strong parallels with ‘Heaven’s Gate’ in this specific area. Like ‘Heaven’s Gate’, ‘The Wire’ asks ordinary Americans to face some unpalatable truths about their history (in the case of ‘Heaven’s Gate’) or about their cities (in ‘The Wire’) and it seems to me that some conservative-minded Americans aren’t always that good at acknowledging the Elephant in the Room – same with the Tories in this country.  For some Yankee chauvinists (particularly those of the Rush Limbaugh school of twisted thinking), everything has to be wonderful from sea to shining sea and anyone that doesn’t think so is probably some kind of dangerous subversive commie terrorist (or similar) and should relocate to Pakistan or Eye-Rak.  Like Frank Zappa said all those years ago, ‘It can’t happen here.’

The fact is that for many middle-class Americans, the inner cities of their country have become no-go areas.  Drugs, violence, homelessness, life in ‘the Projects’ – all these issues are something that many Americans have just blanked out.  They’ll deal with as much of it as they have to and hope the cops can keep the lid on the rest of it.  Same story here, really; the recent Tottenham Riots showed a side of London life that many Londoners knew nothing of and didn’t really want to engage with.

The Wire: Michael Kenneth Williams as Omar; ruthless, driven, gay, feared, a loner with his own sense of morality and – allegedly - a favourite of Barack Obama 

In some respects, ‘The Wire’ – particularly in its final season – is even more damning of American society than ‘Heaven’s Gate’.  Season 5 is built around the idea of a lie that just gets bigger and bigger; there’s an element of black comedy in here somewhere. The Baltimore Police Department is suffering from budget cutbacks and overtime bans, so Detective McNulty effectively ‘invents’ a serial killer preying on the homeless, knowing that City Hall will be compelled to loosen the purse strings as this is such an emotive issue.  McNulty then surreptitiously diverts the resources and manpower he is given to continue the pursuit of drug lord Marlo Stansfield.  However, the lie just gets bigger and bigger; Mayor Carcetti picks up on the ‘serial killer’ case to use as a weapon against the State Governor’s lack of action on homelessness and promote his own claims to replace him.  The local ‘Baltimore Sun’ newspaper also gets involved, with an unscrupulous reporter further embroidering the story in order to advance his own career.  In the end, only a very few of those who are supposed to be on the side of truth and justice are free from the taint of this lie and by the time the truth emerges, it’s too late for anyone to unravel the multiple layers of deceit in which so many have become complicit. 

Comparing ‘The Wire’ to ‘Heaven’s Gate’ is  – of course - an idea that you can only push so far.  I have  a lot of time for both, but there’s no doubt that ‘Heaven’s Gate’ is deeply flawed on many levels whilst retaining an indefinable ‘je ne sais quoi’  that makes it a far more interesting proposition than many other movies of its type.  At the time of its release, the smokescreen of outrage at Cimino’s perceived excesses tended to legislate against any genuine appraisal of the film , but many contemporary analyses take a less polemical stance. Sure, ‘Heaven’s Gate’ has many flaws , but at times it’s an interesting and beautifully-staged movie and if you haven’t yet seen it, I urge you to do so.

By contrast, ‘The Wire’ - for me - offers a far sharper critique of American society – then again, it has a much broader canvas on which to tell its tale.  Across 60 episodes, it illustrated – often graphically - the crushing realities of life in the inner city, the bureaucratic minefields of police work and the institutionalised corruption of local politics.   ‘The Wire’  told a story that often exposes aspects of American life with which few establishment figures could be comfortable.  It also laid down a new standard of excellence for television drama and I think it could be a long time before we see anything that combines such a compelling story-line with so many insights into American society.

I left Northampton at 18 for the world of Higher Education and did so without too much of a backward glance.  It was the early ’70′s,  a key era in the history of the town.  The decision had been taken to flatten large areas of London’s East End and relocate people up here – they were referred to, often scornfully, as ‘London Overspill’.  Huge new estates mushroomed on the eastern edge of the town, the incomers poured in and the ‘locals’ didn’t much care for the impact they had on the place.  I remember returning some years later to find – to my astonishment – that an Eel, Pie & Mash shop had opened on Abington Square, though that’s long gone.  The same area is now dominated by an astonishing number of Eastern European food shops and even a restaurant called ‘The Hungry Polack’.  One of the few pleasures of my current circumstances is that I can pop in to these shops and stock up on wonderful Polish bread, marinated herrings and other Baltic delights.

I came back intermittently, but most of my Northampton friends had also left for university and the people who remained and who I ran into in the pubs were familiar to me without being close.  I largely missed out on the impact of the Cockney invasion, but there were other changes that were easier to spot.  These were the days when, across Britain, old and often beautiful buildings were being pulled down to make way for  indoor town centre  shopping precincts and Northampton was no exception.  The ultra-modern Grosvenor Centre went up during this era at the expense of some extraordinary old buildings, notably the late Victorian confection that was the Emporium Arcade.  Church’s china & porcelain shop dominated the frontage, but inside the arcade was an Aladdin’s cave of small shops, cafes and offices that wound uphill on a slight incline and was surely unique. 

 Northampton’s late lamented Emporium Arcade

No room for sentiment in the bright shiny world of 1970′s consumerism so down came the  Emporium Arcade – and much else besides – to be replaced by the bland brutalism of the Grosvenor Centre, flanked by the architectural carbuncle that is Greyfriars Bus Station.  You don’t need to see it, do you?  OK, but don’t say I didn’t warn you…..

The twin orifices of Greyfriars Bus Station, looking a bit like the ‘atmosphere processors’ in James Cameron’s ‘Aliens’

This depressing, ill-lit monstrosity was like the chute in a slaughterhouse; people would emerge like doomed cattle from their buses and be funnelled down the escalator into the threshing retail mayhem of the Grosvenor; it was virtually impossible to get out of the place via any other route.   As usual, with late 20th Century urban development, the needs of ordinary people were playing second fiddle to the demands of  greedy retailers. 

Of course, Northampton is not alone in this respect; Birmingham’s Bull Ring, Manchester’s Arndale and the whole Brent Cross complex in North London were contemporaneous big brothers to the Grosvenor’s cheesy charms.  And, when all was said and done, there were still areas of the town – St Giles Street, for example - that remained largely untouched by the Poulson-esque excesses seen elsewhere.

Since those days, there have been other changes, all of them fairly predictable.  The main thoroughfare of Abington Street has been pedestrianised, the old cattle market has been flattened and replaced by a huge supermarket and the site of the former Barclaycard complex on Marefair is now a hotel and retail complex.

Miraculously, a few other distinctive features have survived more or less intact – the Market Square is the largest in the UK apart from Stockton-on-Tees and has survived, albeit with an ever-diminishing number of stalls on market days.  The old Fish Market is still standing, though it’s no longer a market of any kind and the old Co-Op Arcade has survived as well, though it’s now known (I kid you not) as ‘The Ridings’. 

However, a town is, of course, more than just a collection of buildings and where I am suffering a certain disadvantage these days is that I don’t really know anyone in Northampton any more.  There’s a certain irony in the fact that 2 of my closest friends are from the town, but, like me, they escaped as well.  As I have observed previously in this blog, our shared origins are significant to all of us inasmuch as they have helped to define us as people, but we only come back to minister to ailing elderly relatives or – in their cases, but not in mine – to pay flying visits to siblings.  In a very real sense, the Northampton we knew ceased to exist a long time ago. 

Despite the passage of time and the fact that many of my contemporaries and their families have either died or moved away, that old and forgotten town actually lives on in my memory and I find myself walking past buildings that have survived and trying to remember what they used to be.  So, that Wetherspoon’s used to be a furniture store, the cinema where, aged 11, I saw (but could hardly hear) The Beatles is now the HQ of some happy clappy Christian cult and that old corner cafe is now an estate agents. 

This process is aided and abetted by my tendency to walk round plugged into an iPod set on ‘Shuffle’, so just occasionally, I get a soundtrack to match my nostalgia.  The other day I was passing by The Racecourse Pavilion (now a Chinese restaurant) when up came Cream’s ‘White Room’, a song that was a major playlist item back in 1968.  Similarly, I was walking down Abington Street yesterday when up popped ‘Little house I used to live in’ from the Mothers of Invention’s 1970 ‘Burnt Weeny Sandwich’ album.  Perhaps most appropriately, however – to the extent that I almost burst into rueful laughter – was a souvenir of my sixth form days; Egg’s ‘A Visit to Newport Hospital’, which began playing the other day precisely at the moment that I walked into the grounds of Northampton General.  Spooky or what?

It’s probably inevitable that for someone with as ludicrously encyclopaedic a CD collection as I have, music can be a powerful ‘aide-memoire’ .  For some people, such memories are triggered by old photos or meeting up with old friends, but for me, it’s definitely music.  I could probably return to Manchester and experience something similar whilst listening to early U2 or Joy Division.  Same story up in Newcastle, except there it would probably be The Blue Nile or The Waterboys.  In Scandinavia, it would have to be Culpeper’s Orchard, Dollar Brand, and early Pat Metheny.  I have nearly 7000 individual pieces of music on my iPod – not entire albums, but cherry-picked tracks  and many ( though not all) evoke memories of a particular era or place or  a particular person or group of people.  As I head for my 60th birthday, it’s become almost  geological in terms of the different strata of music from the different parts of my life.

 In 1968 or 1971, the idea of an iPod and music as a moveable feast would have seemed like something out of Ray Bradbury novel, but now it’s 2011 and here I am, headphones on, strolling around streets that are sort of familiar and yet also slightly alien at the same time.  The addition of musical time bombs from the depths of my iPod leads to a weird kind of emotional fracture; it’s like taking two similar (but not identical) transparencies and laying one on top of the other. The music reminds me of the person I used to be; like the town, I have changed as well and, like the town, not always for the better.

There are 12 tracks in all on this short-ish album, all drawn from Steely Dan’s key period – roughly 1971 -1980.  The band were always renowned for their sophisticated arrangements and their ability to  slide seamlessly from one sub-genre to another, often thanks to input from the best musicians around at the time.  The likes of Jeff Baxter, Wayne Shorter, Dean Parks, Steve Gadd and Michael McDonald have, over the years, all brought their talents  to  bear on Becker and Fagen’s artful compositions, but  Isakssson and  Törnqvist offer us something just as compelling by stripping away all the horn arrangements, percussive fol-de-rols and slinky guitar parts. 

Rebecka Törnqvist (L) and Sara Isaksson (R)

It is, in fact, the very simplicity of the arrangements that works in their favour, helping to expose the skeleton of the songs and emphasise the (often) astringent lyrics.  What quickly becomes clear, if we weren’t already aware of it, is the fact that Walter Becker & Donald Fagen are very fine songwriters and the songs themselves are muscular and powerful enough to withstand this stripping-down process; indeed, it enables us to re-experience them anew and appreciate them all over again.

As for Törnqvist  and  Isaksson, they have both experienced some success domestically in various rock and pop bands since the 1990′s and were both previously members of a band called Gloria, who had a good deal of success between 1999 and 2003.  They have toured domestically around the success of ‘Fire in the Hole’ but the enduring popularity of Steely Dan and the simple effectiveness of the album have led to a good deal of interest from overseas.

On paper, the idea of two mature Swedish female singers recording an album of  30-year old Steely Dan songs seems like a recipe for commercial disaster, but somehow it just works.  Stand-out tracks for me would be ‘Don’t take me alive‘ and ‘Pearl of the Quarter’, but I guess everyone will have their favourites.  If your interest is piqued, the album is available here:

http://cdon.eu/music/isaksson_sara_%26_rebecka_t%C3%B6rnqvist/fire_in_the_hole_-_sara_isaksson_%26_rebecka_t%C3%B6rnqvist_sing_steely_dan-623848