‘Yeah, so we’re going in because David wants to see one of the support acts,’ my Kiwi friend trilled down her phone. ‘I don’t know, Gas-something.’
‘Gaslight Anthem,’ I said and glanced at my reflection in her oil slick aviators. I shimmered back at myself.
‘Gaslight Anthem. No, I’ve never heard of them either. They sound old though. Because David’s really old.’
‘Hey,’ I interrupted: ‘I’m only four years older than you.’
‘Whatever. Catch us up, okay? Laters.’
We made our way through the barriers and picked a path through the throngs sitting in the heat, letting the music wash into their sweat. Scuffed footsteps, those that tapped along to the beat, caused more dirt disturbance and already I could feel the clogging of my nostrils. The thick frantic drums throbbed along my breastbone behind the a brisk guitar that caught on the summer’s breath.
‘Hey,’ she said and turned to glance at me: ‘They’re actually quite good’
Seven months later in the biting chill of my flat, the Gaslight Anthem’s second album, The ’59 Sound, is chosen by the dice.
I don’t remember how I got into the Gaslight Anthem. This album just seemed to appear in my collection. I don’t remember buying it nor the first time I listened to it, but it must have been sometime before Easter 2009. That weekend, I picked Architect-Steve up to drive to Snowdonia for some hiking. The rattling chains of guitars pelted out of the stereo until, after a while, Steve said:
‘I haven’t heard music like this for a while.’
‘Music like what?’
‘I think I’m getting too old for angry young men with guitars.’
But a lot of great music has been made my angry young men with guitars desperate to change the world. It’s the classic route of rebellion from the late fifties to the future. It is fuelled by the accessibility of the guitar, the band-as-a-gang structure inspiring people to riff on how they’d rule the world to get the girl and step out from the shadow of the dreaded adulthood they’d imagined. The band, at least in a youngster’s eyes, is the opposite of their parents' choices.
In the band, you never need truly grow up.
Punky Springsteen is the easiest way to describe the Gaslight Anthem. They sound a little like a twenty-first century version, which would have been a coincidence with last week’s entry, although frontman Brian Fallon claims that he’d didn’t really listened to the Boss until after forging his own band’s sound. He claims a greater inspiration from Joe Strummer. A song from a different album is called I’da Called You Woody, Joe, an allusion to the Clash singer's earlier pseudonym which, I guess, works well for those who like links under the lines.
The comparison with Springsteen’s sound whilst accurate is also lazy. Sure, the Gaslight Anthem roar tales of suburban heartbreak and heroes in the Boss’ hometown of New Jersey, but where Bruce’s music has a soaring sickly epic haze to it, a arc of relentless inevitability, confident in its own grandeur, the Gaslight’s racket is more ramshackle and seemingly accidental. The guitars are quicker, more soaked with the late seventies, and the characters are more beat-up, desperate and hopeless. Ordinary Joes failing at life without the romanticism that everything can be redeemed by the open road. It’s never going to get better than bearable for the ciphers packed into these songs where triumph is the refrain “ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night” and Fallon groans like the trouble is sinking deep into his guts: “See, I been here these twenty-eight years, pounding sweat beneath these wheels, we tattooed lines beneath our skin.”
Twenty-eight? Pah. It’s absurd and yet, I believe him when he says enough is enough.
‘I love their lyrics,’ said my Kiwi friend bopping gently under the open sky.
‘Yeah, this one’s great,’ I replied as they ripped into the next number. ‘A song of broken hearts, sailors down on the damp docks getting new tattoos, broken down iron framed American cars and no way out.’
‘Yup, check, check and check. All clichés presents and correct.’
But there’s a reason why clichés are as such. They really do ring true. And that familiarity allows you to know what the rules of the game are. There’s an argument, maybe, for writers having a consistency of voice and theme that allows the reader to know in whose hands they are placing their need to be entertained. I don’t mean rewriting the same dross over and over, but crafting something that reeks with the author, something that reflects identities.
Graham Greene’s characters are, in the main, parts of each other. They change over the course of his career, but they are nearly all haunted by lost love with a penchant for whisky, a struggle for the normality of marriage and a willingness to visit brothels; their principles are flooded with emotional swelling that thrases against their otherwise pragmatic nature and then there's the never ending shiver of unrealised Catholic guilt. Querry from A Burnt Out Case could well be a worn down Bendix from the End of the Affair; Farnworth in England Made Me could grow into Brown from the Comedians or maybe even Fowler in the Quiet American. If things had ended differently, it isn’t that hard to see Scobie from The Heart of the Matter growing blindly into Forntum in The Honorary Consul.
And, anyway, aren’t they all just exhalations of the author? Just bits of himself that Greene expelled and breathed back to life on the page?
Recovering alcoholic, Raymond Carver, whose wife was crucial in his survival, writes of broken down drunks, almost always in retrospect and with a hinted mixture of regret and longing. His characters swill through heartbreak, their love crying out to be rescued or rescue from the tedium of life, but all that remains is the descent into numbness. That single reason to exist – the last escape.
Ernest Hemingway, Martin Amis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, JG Ballard, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal... They all do it. Their works are all stuffed with narrators and characters who you can't help but think you've met somewhere before.
I wonder whether my own characters and stories are beginning to have this consistency. The misfits who populate my writings are almost certainly going to be some sort of emotional crisis, or complexity – an interaction between their former, current or potential lover that doesn’t quite fit the norm. They like a drink. Perhaps too much. They are frequently based in, but rarely from, London. They may be weighed down by their middle-classness or struggling in having to come to terms with the surprising end of youth. Is this bad writing or does it give me a solid base from which to deviate? Is what I’ve previously claimed to be laziness in inventing detail instead cementing a control from which the story can be spun in any which way I choose?
It is, however, important to remember that whilst these may be my characters’ obsessions they are not all of me. Greene’s characters are clearly infused with who he was, but it doesn’t mean they are complete representations. Despite the parallels it is a mistake to read his work as a direct confession. All the writers above, whilst almost certainly possessing the male vanity need to fictionalise the self by inventing shit up to show off, don't get away with it that easily. So if in the end it is all made up, then there are still reasons for the shroud.
As The Gaslight Anthem point out to us, on Here’s Looking At You, Kid, the things we say always have a reason; the lies layered in our fiction suggest something else. The characters are just that – caricatures. The real is more mundane. Or, just occasionally, more exciting.
“You can tell Gail if she calls,
Tell her… That I’m famous for all these rock and roll songs.
And even if that’s a lie
She should’ve given me a try.”
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