Self-made hero

When I was a young teenager I would while away damp lifeless Sunday afternoons in my room reading and losing myself inside my head. I was, I find myself forced to admit, into comics about superheroes and magicians and fantasy characters often written by people with over-inflated senses of high drama. Somewhere along the way I muddled my admiration for the story’s turn with a sense that these tales might be telling me something more. Whilst other kids were still just about fantasising about scoring the winning goal in the FA cup final or discovering a cure for dementia I was looking for the secrets of life in four-colour pamphlets.

I got over it in the end. Music and girls and proper books without pictures became more important, but still I would let my mind drift into images of the impossible. Save the world? Pah, I couldn’t even stay awake during class.

This meandering narrative which I’m trying to explain is about heroism. Not real heroism. Not saving people from burning buildings without flinching but idealistic heroism, an idea of the hero as an abstract. Something to believe in. We, all of us, need those sorts of heroes in our lives. Ideals can be false, but they can also bring us hope. As the global economy teeters towards wilful self-implosion of greed where do we look for inspiration? If there was any righteous anger behind the opportunism of the kids that ripped apart London and Birmingham and Manchester and, God, even Gloucester one week in August then wouldn’t be better if that could be articulated into something better than nicking shit?

So, for those of you who haven’t been keeping up: Sportsmen may bring a sense of drama, they break hearts and offer elation, but surely it’s only ever fleeting? You could call in entertainment, even something which has the potential to unify peoples but it lacks the ability of communication to offer a message. Scientists may well be great men and women, striving for the betterment of society even if the by-product is personal glory, but their objectives and methods are too far out of most people’s realms of understanding. Writers, alas, are possibly too anonymous as individuals. So where do people look? To whom will they still listen?

I can’t remember when I last fell in love with a band. Or, if not a band for there’s often something more functionally workmanlike about a band, then a pop star. I do still get arguably too obsessed about music meant for the young when I’m a thirty-something, but it is one thing to be nodding appreciably at the drum riffs or the myriad range of influences being cleverly note-checked it is quite another for them to matter more than life.

Of course, once upon a time it was easier. There was an enemy. These days Tinne Tempah talks in management speak about his global brand, but once youth hated the establishment whoever it was. Thatcher in the eighties or Wilson in the seventies, the “man” was always someone to push against. Pop could harness the natural rebellion of the teenager into listeners. Sid Vicious and Adam Ant, Jarvis Cocker and Pete Townsend, Elvis Presley and Dizzie Rascal, the purpose of the pop star has always been to be confrontational; to stick two, preferably outlandishly garbed, fingers up at government and encourage teenagers around the world to slam their doors and play it fucking loud.

So they’re the ones, the last ones left who can help us. Right?

Well, no. Not really. Sorry.

Billy Bragg, the champion of the downtrodden wearily romantic lost causes everywhere, appeared in the Guardian at the weekend in conversation with Johnny Flynn about the St Paul’s protestors. By coincidence I’d first heard of Flynn, an earnest floppy haired young singer-songwriter with some acting in his back pocket, the night before. He’s appearing in the play Jerusalem, which my girlfriend and I are going to see soon, and someone insisted on playing us some of his songs. “It’s the most amazing music ever,” she gushed. It’s not, but that’s kind of beside the point. No, the curious point was Flynn’s claim that in 2011 it’s harder for pop stars to play a part in the end of capitalism protests, to have a platform for any articulated voice because the charts are dominated by X-Factor sponsored rubbish.

But then it’s always been like that. Just think of The Osmonds, Boney M, Chicago, Mud, and any number of shit seventies plastic pop bands. Punk was partially a nihilistic resistance to society but it was also a protest against there not being any music to love aside from Iggy Pop. Even Bragg’s earliest stuff was more about East End teenage heartbreak and not wanting to be in Pink Floyd than the more clear political agenda of the red-wedge eighties.

The disadvantage today’s politically aware musical rebels have is that the X-Factor tripe has a multi-million marketing campaign absorbed by millions of dribbling brain drains on a Saturday night. It’s as though it takes pride in being the optimisation of the giant disco hits album available in the supermarket that the Clash had such disdain for, but still everyone laps up the advertising like its entertainment in itself.

So, if pop hasn’t ever really tried to lead us, what about their precursors as the representation of the teenage wet dream, movie stars? Douglas Fairbanks Junior, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, an ever changing cast of smouldering dark eyes in the skull of young men questioning what the future was for, fighting against the establishment with sexual deviancy, powdered thrills and broken down livers. Only Errol Flynn became sufficiently confused to believe his own legend when, drink sodden and without a bow and arrow in sight, he flew off to Cuba to report on and play a part in the revolution.

We can’t really blame them for failing us. I mean, they were only ever supposed to be acting, but they would be so beautifully outrageous that we’d occasionally forget. We’d imagine they could be something more, something greater than us. Today’s movie stars are too well media briefed to ever wander off message and say something that matters to anyone other than to the people whom they’re making money for. As Noel Gallagher, to return to music, recently said about the Arctic Monkeys and Kasaibian, they’ve got the tunes but you just want them to start sounding like pop stars. Say something controversial for god’s sake. No-one’s paying you to be nice boys. We want you to live a life so that we don’t have to.

Droning self-indulgent drip Ed Sheeran makes Lego models to relax for fuck’s sake. I can do that, if I wanted to. He’s supposed to be offering something more, but at the moment I can see the puppet strings of reality. If we’re to love our pop or movies stairs we need to believe in them wholeheartedly. True adoration comes when we’re fooled and they transcend reality. It’s never been about the politics or the hidden message. Sorry, Paul Weller, people loved the tunes and the brashness of Eton Rifles and Going Underground and a Town Called Malice, they loved your skinny trousers and sparkling shoes and the tight hair cut, they loved you more than they loved Margaret but they could never quite join in with your hate. That’s why they kept on electing her.

We need a hero. The St Paul’s protesters are being accused of not knowing what they want when asking for in an alternative to capitalism, of hypocrisy when they wee in Starbucks, of slipping off home at night to a comfy bed. Tuh. What’s a middle class revolutionary to do? Can’t pee in the streets, the concrete is tough on the hips as you get older and as for coming up with a whole new economic system that needs global buy-in? Come on, surely it’s just enough to be asking the question rather than blindly following. So they, we, need a hero of some sort and if music and film aren’t going to provide them, then perhaps we better make them up.
Because sometimes what you make up comes true.

To return to my younger, more teenage self, reading late at night by the lamp stuffed down the bed, face splotched with zits, hair just beginning to snake down to the edges of my collar. One of my favourite comics was Hellblazer starring John Constantine. Constantine was a trench-coat wearing, chain smoking, sarcastic, heavy drinking mage made out to look like Sting in a cheap suit and a hell-blood stained tie. Alan Moore invented him in the eighties and claims to have met him shortly afterwards. In a cafe.

“All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine. He was wearing the trench-coat, a short cut—he looked—no, he didn't even look exactly like Sting. He looked exactly like John Constantine. He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner.”

Jamie Delano who took over writing chores after Moore, had a similar experience outside the British Museum. “I didn't realise I'd walked past him until I'd gone fifty yards down the road, I looked round, and he was just vanishing round the corner.”

For a while, I completely believed in this idea that you could write stuff into existence. Grant Morrison, writing the bonkers conspiracy end of the millennium psycho-babble romp that was the Invisibles, claims that by shaving his head and buffing up to look like the main character he began to take on the fictional characteristics, even to the point that when he put his invention through a torture scene Morrison’s own body collapsed and replicated the ailments, all the way down to blood poisoning, a collapsed lung and a rotted hole in his cheek. Morrison, allegedly, almost killed himself through writing.

More recently, in a performance art piece, Moore claimed another encounter with Constantine: "Years later, in another place, he steps out of the dark and speaks to me. He whispers: ‘I'll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it.’"

And then the spell is broken, because it’s too wry and too knowing. It’s too close. I can see the strings again as Moore uses the invented anecdote to make a joke, to prove a point about the reality of magic. Fictional heroes, they’re all mysterious and enticing, but they’ll only ever go and let you down.

After all, they are only made-up. Just like Pete Docherty. I had a moment, sometime around 2004, where I latched onto the idea of the Libertines as a band for tomorrow. It only lasted for a few months, but briefly I almost loved them in the way a late teenager loves a band. Especially a band that carried around their own lyrical myths of country and self and lifestyle; a band with an ideal for living. And I then woke up, the bodies began to pile up, and I realised that they were just a gang of wannabe musicians led by a self-centred drug addict. You can’t bring fictions into the real world by making them up and you can’t apply the mythical inventiveness to real people; we’ll only be disappointed.

No, if their hero is going to mean anything it needs to come from the real world and be able to make a difference. Mr Milliband, the stage is yours.

(Part 1 to be concluded next week).

The truest poetry is the most feigning

In the sixteenth century, Deptford was both different and the same as it is now. There were no high rise tower blocks and backed up motorised traffic struggling to get through the Rotherhite tunnel, nor would there be the occasional mislaid tourist up from Greenwich and the market wouldn’t have had racks of Domestos and Andrex knocked off through the backyard of the Tesco’s distribution warehouse, but still, there would have been festering vegetable waste in the drains, an undercurrent of violence, of poverty through aimless men sitting around on street corners and it would persist as one of London’s forgotten areas. Back then it was dominated by the Royal Naval dockyards sitting on the estuary side of London, defending against potential invasion and aiding smugglers for a coin. Deptford was convenient for drafting in drunken lost souls from around the city. Deptford was the end of London, the last point before a lifetime aboard the waves whether that was the way you wanted to go or not. It was a place that people came for looking for trouble.

One imagines the Dog and Gun has changed little since then. It is a traditional boozer with a marvellous range of ales, but it lurks down a side street amongst a relatively run down estate and when I last went in there three men sitting along stools at the bar turned and stared, their gaze warned me to mind my own business.

It was a similar establishment, I imagine, where Christopher Marlowe holed up after his arrest for heresy in 1593. At the time, Marlowe was one of the most famous men in the land. A playwright extraordinary, dandily dressed, handsome like a cherub and possibly an Elizabethan spy. What he was doing in Deptford, amongst the rough and tumble of rum drinking sailor dens is unclear, as is so much about his life and death. Perhaps he was hiding out amongst the dregs of the city for the false glamour of it all; perhaps he was about to embark on some secret foreign mission or to flee for asylum abroad. All we know is that he became embroiled in an argument that ended with a rapier penetrating his right eye and then his brain. He bled to death in the gutter outside down amongst the urine and turnip cores and fish intestines and the thousand other dead men of a generation. The man arguably destined to be the greatest playwright of his age was cut down in some booze filled row, or silenced for the too many secrets he had in his head. Too fast too young is not, after all, a twentieth century concept. Marlowe went down aged twenty-nine having already lived a life.

The title of the bard rather than merely being a bard could have been within his grasp. The incredible Dr Faustus may have only been the first building block towards a canon unrivalled for half a millennium, Instead the title was taken by his contemporary, the no doubt equally raucous, but significantly less glamorous, playwright, actor, husband, father, middle of the road man from the middle of the country, William Shakespeare. Or was it?

Unsurprisingly for a death that involved the threat of high treason, religious defilement, whispers of then-perversion, the alleged perpetrators dying is custody and a handsome, quick-tempered dramatist, strange myths linger around Marlowe’s death. The most common is that he faked his own death in Deptford, hoped on a clipper headed out to sea and spent the rest of his life ghostwriting Shakespeare’s plays from a Tuscan retreat whilst conducting the odd act of espionage for the Queen and Country.

As anyone stumbling over a review of what looks like a pile of trite melodrama masquerading as historically accurate film, Anonymous, knows there are conspiracy theories are abound that Shakespeare was nothing more than a front for a wide range of alternative playwrights. The film decides that the Earl of Oxford is the real man behind the pen. “People like me don’t write plays, people like you do” he declares, whereupon, in the trailer I had the misfortune to see the other evening, he tosses a manuscript in the face of a half naked young William, who has presumably been disturbed from a drink-sodden evening defiling a pub wench, as an actor’s bohemian, even if the concept hadn’t been invented yet, lifestyle demands.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was put forward as the real writer of the canon in 1920 by, the appropriately named, J Thomas Looney. The basis for this is the intricate knowledge of the royal court system Shakespeare displays, the fact that Oxford was a champion of poetry and art and was probably Shakespeare’s patron whilst William himself was an uneducated oik, and that many of the plays, especially Hamlet, reflect de Vere’s own life. In other words, they’re nothing but shrouded autobiography. This ignores the fact that Shakespeare was appointed to the royal court and that many of the plays are based on other fictional works or actual history. Shakespeare was a precursor to the likes of Neil Gaiman, the sort of author who happily pinches bits here and there of different myths and half-remembered legends until some sort of flimsy fictional shroud comes into being.

My favourite bit of evidence is the suggestion that the code E.Vere appears 17,000 times in Shakespeare’s forty-odd plays. Given that it can be found in ‘every’, ‘ever’, ‘never’, and so on I’m surprised it’s not more. Still, lots of things are surprising about Shakespeare, not least that I struggled with it at school.

Even though most of what I read at the time was accompanied by pictures, I didn’t struggle with the language particularly. I may have initially found myself flummoxed by the sonnet structure and the odd archaic word, but all teenagers, except the exceptionally precocious, do. I got the lyricism and even enjoyed the, in hindsight, somewhat over-analysis of the plays. Line by line we went, seeking quadruple meaning in every pretty turn of phrase as though determined to prove that genius has to shine in every third turn of the plot. In retrospect it should have been enough to just appreciate the language’s rhythm and the clever metaphors for what they were; phrases that four hundred later still told us something new about the world and our place in it.

Anyway, it wasn’t a lack of understanding it was more that the deeper the comprehension the more I found it a little boring. Maybe it was partly because we flew through Macbeth one summer term and then spent three years dissecting Romeo and Juliet act by sodding act. I wanted to like it. I liked reading and I liked books; I theoretically liked the theatre although at thirteen had limited experience of it beyond the obligatory Christmas panto. Yet it wouldn’t quite click for me.

In many ways, I blame Romeo and Juliet and thus by proxy William himself, for my abandonment of English Literature at sixteen. The over-analysis broke down the work, the magic, so that all that was left was a combination of familiar phrases and reinterpreted myths slouching across a plot riddled with holes. Nothing was left but a bruised and bloody, used and soggy script, an idea of fiction destroyed. I didn’t want that to happen to all the other heroes I loved: Conrad’s colonial adventurers, Greene’s spies, another Marlowe, this one with a cheap suit and wry series of put downs, the myriad characters that filled up Terry Pratchett’s and Douglas Adams’ novels. They were all three dimensional beings for whom I didn’t want to understand how the mortar that held them together was nothing but words. I preferred to think of them as almost people; as though they might just about exist beyond the page, whisked from my sub-consciousness and out, out somewhere into the real world. There were, I felt, too real not to exist.

So, it was only as an adult that I finally came to Hamlet and Othello, Shylock and Lear, Benedick and Beatrice and all those marvellous histories (my enjoyment of which was no doubt enhanced by studying the war of the roses for A level meaning I understood who all the Richards and Henrys were). And slowly I began to understand that what made them great characters was their complexity. I’d missed the bleakness melancholy, the otherworldly knowing authorial hand behind Greene’s, Conrad’s and Chandler’s words. (It is, after all, hard to spot). I read instead at a surface level of black and white. Good and evil. Shakespeare’s heroes were bigger than that, because life is bigger than that. It is a contrary, mixed up, muddling block not designed to make sense. ‘Couldn’t have’ doesn’t really apply, except when based upon the laws of science. Anything is possible, even people with little formal education explaining the complexities of the heart in choice, succinct lines.

Which is why the frantic urge to attribute the canon to anyone other than William is somewhat galling. Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I’s spymaster was the first alternative suggested to the author, allegedly because there are a couple of coincidences in metaphor between the two’s poetry and the plays, allegedly, contain numerous legal terms which Bacon, as Queen’s Counsel, would have known. Toss, yet people – academics no just vain-glorious movie directors – noisily look for truth where there is no lie.

They pick on the Earl of Derby for pretty much the exact same reasons as Oxford and get no closer. And these are just the serious suggestions. After them, then it becomes pretty much anyone who could have held a pen during the same period: Francis Drake (too busy being in charge of the navy, surely, and on the wrong side of the world at several key performance dates); Anne Hathway, William’s wife (which is just odd); Ben Jonson (more famous himself at the time); Thomas Kyd (usually in the debtors prison); Thomas More (already long dead); Mary, Queen of Scots (headless); James Stuart, Kind of England and Scotland (a child and then a monarch).

Out of all seventy-nine candidates proposed, the Marlowe theory at least has some possibility behind it. Jonson was almost as good as playwright and so comes close. Someone once wrote, “I admire Ben Jonson the most, but I love Shakespeare more.” But Jonson was too prolific in his own right to fit in an extra forty odd plays and also had an ego too big to allow a piece of work such as Macbeth to appear under anyone other than his own name.

Marlowe’s Faustus is held up as the direction his work is travelling in and it is indeed excellent. Although, no Hamlet or Lear. Besides, Shakespeare’s writerly trajectory is supposed to go entertainment (comedies), royal patronage (histories), despair (tragedies), melancholy, (the hard to place romantic-comic-tragedies of Alls Well that Ends Well, the Winter’s Tale and the Tempest). Marlowe was already on the tragedy arc by the time of his death and never seemed that interested in laugh-out-loud comedies let alone conventional pandering to the monarchy’s rather dubious claim to the throne. In 1593 Shakespeare only had half a dozen plays to his name, of which only Richard III could stand up to Dr Faustus. Would Marlowe really have taken a dozen steps backwards putting out filler work until mining the vein he’d already ripped open?

But the main reasoning behind the theory that Marlowe ended up in Tuscany and writing the plays, or indeed anyone else writing the plays, is Italy itself. Two Gentleman of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, the Merchant of Venice, Othello, again and again Shakespeare’s plays are based in Italy, a country Shakespeare never visited: why? Who knows? Who cares? They certainly weren’t based on any accurate representation of Italy. In The Merchant of Venice he even forgets to mention the canals. It’s made up. It’s fiction. You don’t have to go somewhere to write about it – especially in Elizabethan England where most of your audience had never left the home counties let alone ventured further afield. And even if they had it was probably to war and one imagines that a muddy field filled with canvas shelters, the taste of adrenaline and the echo of screams in the night air looks the same whenever or wherever you may be.

Italy? Pah. That isn’t a reason. The real reason that there is this debate, is class.

Because in this screwed up country during a particularly screwed up period of time, the Victorians and their immediate hiers couldn’t comprehend that a relatively uneducated lad from the Midlands was touched by genius. He had to be either a patsy or a thief, either covering up for his social better who, for reasons which slightly escape me, shouldn’t have been writing literature of such dazzling variety and quality, or a convenient pen name for a member of the early middle classes who had at least managed to trudge up from his parent’s Kentish shoe shop and attend Cambridge, as Marlowe did. The concept of the working class kid done well was forbidden.

And at least in terms of literature it remained so until the 1950s at least when the likes of Alan Stillitoe and John Osborne emerged, blinking into the published light, fresh faced and sporting chips the size of a mine on their shoulder to tell grimy realism of the north, drink, being poor and frustrated by it and desperate for the weekend to forget the tedium and physical harshness of the week. And, unlike George Orwell or (Lord help us) JG Priestley they weren’t middle-class observers but they had actually lived what they wrote about: a not watered down by agenda.

It was but a fleeting moment when the creative flourishers from a working class background flocked towards literature. It was before rock and roll and mass market television; before the lure of easy glamour and girls was attainable with slicked back hair and a guitar. Nothing but a brief period when ale in tankards mid-afternoon, a thousand cigarettes accompanied sensible coats that kept the inevitable rain off and cheap suits as the fashion of the class rebel.

Now, in twenty-first century Britain it almost feels like we’ve taken a step backwards. Sebastian Faulks, Zadie Smith and Adam Thirwell, all three of the British writers whom I’ve read recently went to Oxbridge. Clearly this is not an exhaustive sweep of the literary establishment and I’m making a generalisation about writers who come out of Oxford and Cambridge – a generalisation which I know for a fact to be incorrect - but the real point is that this doesn’t actually matter. I loved White Teeth and Politics. A Week in December was a bit meh, but it had a couple of good moments and it certainly didn’t lack for ambition. (Although, perhaps it was Faulk’s background that prevented him from fully painting his broad society landscape that he got close to, but that’s another discussion...)

Good writing is a good writing no matter whom it comes from. This isn’t a campaign for William Shakespeare as an early working class hero; it’s just an expression of disappointment that in 2011 we’re even having that conversation about someone whom should be amongst the nation’s heroes for giving us a language with which to argue.

Big bang better than theory

“I’m going to save the world,” said the man with a glassy gleam to his eyes, “through the application of science.”

Or some similar sort of dialogue.

I’m sure you know the sort of thing. It happens in the moment during the ridiculous movie when lengthy exposition about something fundamentally impossible is only going to get in the way. So the writer, who really didn’t want to waste those sitting around hours, dropped in the shorthand version. It’s probably less prevalent these days if only because Wikipedia enables you to at least sound convincingly full of shit, but in those terribly glorious B movies the only scientific qualifications you needed was to be vaguely reclusive, have a creepily calm demeanour and to smoke a pipe.

In reality there is no such thing as science. Not really, it’s a complex collaboration of astrophysics, microbiology, hydro-chemistry and a hundred other sub-specialities. Sure, they all get to combine into one as science, but it’s a bit an uneasy alliance. Kind of like saying “fiction”.

Maybe the confusion is my fault, after all I do find it hideously complicated. Unfortunately, I had a habit of not paying attention at school when a subject was challenging, rather than struggle to gain ground I would just tune out. Science was one of the worst (after geography, maths, IT, design and graphics, French, German, and so on). Raised on the sort of movies described above, I was expecting science to be fantastical, but instead it all seemed somewhat mundane. Biology was little more than trying to remember by rote the correct anatomical correlation of our reproductive system or how photosynthesis worked, physics an extension maths with seemingly even less practical application and chemistry understanding how oil formed. Perhaps we did experiments, but I think we were mainly just taught theory. Things that went bang, smoking formulas bubbling over the top of test-tubes, leaping into the quantum physics divider to visit the fifth dimension? We didn’t actually get to try doing stuff ourselves.

State education, eh?

I’d completely expected science to be akin to magic. In the world in my head, science could be used to build space ships that could reach the universe’s perimeter. It existed in the same theoretical zone as serums that transformed skinny weaklings into buff athletes, radiation poisoned animals attached school boys with positive after-effects, bomb detonations didn’t always kill or lightning strikes that hit a specific combination of chemicals and splashing them over someone would create heroes. Okay, so I took my early years science education from comics, but I was expecting something which would illuminate a brighter, more exciting universe than suburban eighties Birmingham. Was that so bad? Instead I got systems of classification and basic electronics, neither of which were going to help me build a time machine.

I don’t think this was helped by my disruptive class. From the boy who routinely called out “I’ve got gametes up my nose” for no apparent reason to the couple who spent the entirety of every lesson trying for a practical biology demonstration it was somewhat difficult to concentrate. We were virtually riotous, scaring off one supply teacher by pelting her with insults so as the head of department arrived with a cricket bat to quell the noise. On one of the few times I recall actually were allowed to do any real experiments it almost always ended in disaster.

Disaster or fire.

I remember quite distinctly sticking the ends of paper aeroplanes in the Bunsen burner’s flame, blowing it out and imaging the smoke trail belonged to a real plane, a fighter jet maybe, crashing due to a missile strike on its tailfin or an engine malfunction. Incredibly I was thirteen, not six, at this point. When one of the even less tuned in kids did the same, he found suddenly holding burning paper to be disconcerting and so decided to get rid of it as soon as possible.

By dropping it in the waste paper bin.

Poomf.

Instant fire. Well done. Smoke and flames billowing, the no doubt exasperated teacher strode across the room to extinguish the fire.

By standing on it.

Whilst this did have the desired effect of putting the fire out, unfortunately, it didn’t do so before his trousers were burning.

In a panic about getting sufficient GCSEs to get into the local sixth form college I crammed Double Science because it was worth two and somehow ended up with BB despite not having seen a mark higher than a D on any work for years. When I went to university I found myself living with and then friends with an extended batch of scientists, mainly zoologists. I had no comprehension of the work they did. They would try to explain, but it would come across as gibberish. And yet there was a touch of envy on my part. I remember at least one conversation about the value of their studying over mine. History was worthless; an analytical appraisal of things which no longer mattered. Whilst the application of biological investigations had the potential for a profound impact upon society. Depending, of course, on what they found out. To an extent, they were right, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I couldn’t, at least not without the help of a scientist with dubious mental health and a fortress in an inclement mountain climate, rewire my brain.

So, science is clearly important and by definition, therefore, so must be scientists.

David Baddiel wrote very elegantly a couple of years ago about how scientists are the last heroes. Or to be slightly more accurate, that they are the last profession to be universally ordained as “great men.” (And for the purposes of this argument, I’m going to keep Baddiel’s definition of men, but we all know it can include women too, right?) James Joyce, he points out, was called a great man, a great writer by Erza Pound and TS Elliot, both of whom would have some claim on the title themselves, and so it became commonly agreed that indeed he must be. Yet if Ulysses were published in 2011 it would be pulled apart and bickered over – mostly via the internet – and any argument for its greatness would fail to reach a consensus. People would start sniping about his Irish background, his drinking, his failings as a teacher in northern Italy and how reliant on his wife he was. All irrelevant to the sentences on the page, but try telling the baying masses that.

But scientists are different. They’re more revered, because we don’t understand what they do. If someone cures cancer they will automatically – and correctly – be acclaimed as great. No debate amongst the masses. Perhaps this has always been the case, but whilst Shakespeare, for example, was ordained in genius fairly early on there seemed to be more reluctance to voice passionate support for medical scientists who advocated leeches for every ailment. Alexander Fleming, in contrasting example, and the discovery of penicillin must have been a revelation; a cure that didn’t have to be removed with a match. Anyway, perhaps today we recognise that scientists, whatever their field, have done, or are capable of doing, something which is so far from the everyman’s ability that it becomes almost inconceivable. In contrast, most people equipped with laptops think they can write a novel. Most people are wrong, but that’s kind of beside the point.

Margaret Atwood (no slouch herself, but rarely acclaimed as great without dispute) recently defined science fiction as being split into two types. Essentially, the fantastical and the exaggerated, or the Jules Verne versus HG Wells death-match. Verne, the man whose fiction was based at the edges of the scientific knowledge at the time and Wells who had Martians invade Woking.

Essentially, I believe – no doubt incorrectly – that you can divide real science into two equally matching sub-sections. (And, okay, numerous other bits as well, give me a break here). Jules Verne twenty-first century science is the science that keeps us progressing at a steady rate; it’s research into new medicines, computer engineering, formulas for hair dye and toilet cleaners and pesticides. Like the Mitchell and Webb Laboratoire Garnier sketch where the powerful and rich Monsieur Garnier gathers a team of crack scientists not to cure cancer but to formulate hair dye. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still inventive stuff which arguably improves people’s lives on a daily basis, but it’s still capitalism science. Science which supports the economy and, like the science I was subjected to at school, more than a little boring. HG Wells twenty-first century science is the hadron collider, it’s the inside of Stephen Hawking’s brain, expeditions to Mars and the international space station; it’s the sort of work where staff arrive thinking, “fuck, yeah, I’m a scientist, baby.”

Perhaps we plebs trundling through our daily, dreary lives can’t properly understand the distinction. And maybe that’s fiction’s fault. A few years ago I was crammed into the cattle shed commuter train at some ungodly hour and failing to concentrate on my book. It wasn’t helped by the young woman yattering excitedly down her phone. “Oh, I don’t mind the commute in, it gives me plenty of time to read,” she plainly lied as she’d spent the entirety of that particular journey yacking down the phone.

“Yeah, yeah. I read. I so read. Yeah, actual books. You know, like, science fiction.” She then named a couple of authors I’d never heard of, but it seemed to be of alien armada guerrilla marine testosterone never-ending serial bullshit sort beloved by their fans and bemoaned by everyone else. “Yeah, and when he gets his badass caught behind enemy lines then he breaks out the hyper-tension gatling gun and a neo-spike pill to keep the Bortch hordes at bay. Science faction, baby. Science faction, this shit is totally being reeled back to us from a better world.”

(Or something like that, anyway.)

The point is the use of the invented word, faction. Even if you accept that for those who love this sort of science fiction can be delightful, meaningless entertainment, it is not, it is never, trying to pass itself off as real life. I think, as a child, that was what confused me. It was written down and so I wanted it to be true. More than anything in the world, I wanted an exciting future full of space ships and epic journeys to beyond and back, of noble heroic captains and their rag-tag crews from the far corners of the galaxy and easily defined alien villains bristling with additional arms and spikey things. The drab greyness of reality where the bad guys are dressed in designer suits and shirts from Pink and either fucking up the economy, contesting your patents or disagreeing with your research funding has a sheen of boredom. It takes empathy to appreciate the underlying human drama.

Case in point: The suspension of operations by NASA and the apparent gradual winding down of space exploration operations by everyone (except China, India and Iran) is a shame. There’s a nice bit fairly early on in The West Wing when the Mars exploration probe ‘Galileo’ goes missing as it attempts to touch down on the red surface. Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett is disappointed because he sees space exploration as the natural extension of humanity’s strive for a better tomorrow. He even infuses ‘Galileo’ with more than a nominal nod to an Italian philosopher so as it becomes something greater, something more noble.

Yet it clearly makes complete economic sense, the average trip into space to pootle around and watch the sun come up over the Earth’s rim, costs – no doubt – the same as Belgium, the end of something as aspirational as the voyage to another planet, another solar system, is something to mourn. As Kevin Fong, a director of the somewhat implausibly named Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine (who I’ve met in real life and is a thoroughly nice guy, so apologies for his inclusion here) says it taught us to dream. The shuttle, despite apparently flying like an open safe still gave of an air of grace and beauty. It was the ideal vessel to touch the rim of knowledge, but for the time being it’s gone; we are earth-bound once more. Science is being beaten back by economics.

I know little about science, and actually I don’t care. I’m happy with that. I understand that ninety-nine percent of science isn’t as photogenic, not quite as phallic as a rocket launching out the desert and into space (and hopefully not as bad for the environment as something packed with sufficient fuel to give it the equivalent explosive capability of a small nuclear warhead). Whilst childish idiots like me want to be wowed, most science is done by people sitting at computers late into the Saturday night, ploughing through reams of data looking for the pattern, or lack thereof, which will give them an answer to the question: why?

And that’s true heroism. The risk of wasting a life time looking for better when there might be nothing. Real people’s mundane life cycle becomes heroism, greatness. Perhaps we should push our empathy further and find stories to write about this reality so as kids like me are happy to be bored for a couple of hours a week. Bored yet maybe just a smidge of something useful will be retained.

You know, for the future.

Balls. Balls and running.

I am not, it may surprise you to learn, a big sports man. I have had moments where it may have appeared otherwise but these have been a facade. If I’m being really honest, I just don’t get it.

Even if I have pretended otherwise on many occasions.

My Father was a rugby player as a young man. Rugby and no doubt the associated high-jinks of the club filled, as far as I can tell from the affection which he speaks of tearing along the flanks with mud spraying in his wake, a large part of his life for many years. I don’t actually remember him ever playing, but I suspect buggered knees at a relatively young age and increasing job demands as much as the stresses of raising my infuriating infant self ate into his time too much. Still, it was this rather than football or cricket or, I don’t know, water polo, which he attempted to share his enthusiasm.

I was, I say with regret if only because it probably would have bought him happiness, lamentably bad. In many ways it was one of the few sports where I stood a slim chance. Speed, competent hand-eye coordination and graceful agility are not prerequisites. Indeed, fat, stocky kids who can get in the way make ideal forward props provided they are also brave and prepared to throw their face in the way of someone else’s boot. I wasn’t brave. I was the exact opposite, being particularly cowardly about the prospect of physical harm and so coupled with my inability to run, pass, kick or catch I was doomed for a brief rugby career. Even so, I did spend a year or so lurking around the edges of the school team – who clearly must have been pretty dreadful if they were considering letting me take the field – before my eagerness to take part in anything that wasn’t sitting in my room reading comics subsided and I spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings sleeping in later and later rather than jogging, slowly, around a frozen grass pitch.

As I have grown up and become more physically able I enjoy being outside doing activities. I don’t mind kicking a ball aimlessly around, although I could think of better things to do. I quite like swimming in the sea, although have no real interest in doing laps of a pool. I love hiking, canoeing, climbing, cycling – well, okay, maybe not love, but I am starting to enjoy cycling. The point is that I’m not a fat slob who gets out of breath taking a shit. I’m moderately fit; I do sporty type things.

And yet, I have very little interest in sport itself. I can drive and like driving fast and along difficult country lanes, but I cannot watch formula one without wondering whether I’ve died and gone to hell. Doing is not the same as participating, but sport is primarily a spectator activity. Far more watch football than ever lay on a chilly Sunday morning, happily berating foreign players for weather gloves and snoods whilst refusing to leave their electric blanket fuelled dens themselves. It’s entertainment, I get that, even if I don’t particularly find it entertaining.

People looked at me like I was mad when I made zero effort to secure Olympics tickets. To be honest, if I was there I would no doubt get swept up in the moment, be taken over by a crowd’s hysteria of anticipation on the verge of being squashed and fear that every loud noise is the thermite being detonated. I may even enjoy myself, but equally it may make me want to tug my eyeballs out and eat them as watching the games in Beijing did. I didn’t want to watch the games, but they were shown in the pub I tended bar for during my Masters. The afternoon shifts were far from busy and the time difference meant it was likely to be men’s third round hurdle-javelin hybrid blaring at high volume. It was either watch or play on fruit machines. Or read the Daily Mail. Anything to avoid talking to the midday drunk with tattoos on his knuckles and scurvy scabs at the corner of his lips.

So, next summer: I’m not sure I really want to risk spending money on an event that will leave me initially frustrated at the inevitable claustrophobia of the queues in and then potentially suicidal at the dreariness of it all. I’ll be okay if I skip this one. But people can’t believe me. I’m missing out, they insist, on a once in a generation experience of terminal public transport collapse. What will I do whilst the games are on? What other thing is there possibly to do? Get on with my normal life and read less news, I guess.

A working knowledge of football is, however, a necessity for a man trying to negotiate with the rest of the world. There’s a default presumption that you will support a team. My choice, for having a false one is usually easier than explaining otherwise, of Birmingham City is mainly based on their lack of success meaning few people know anything about them either so I am less likely to be caught out in any error. But, after several years of pretence it started to become genuine, as though I was an undercover agent gone native, unable to remember what was a lie and what wasn’t. The deeper I went the greater the required knowledge to engage in the banter. I was reduced to actually reading the BBC Sport’s section on an almost daily basis to keep up with the statistics and gossip the clichéd twists and fucking turns that defined any season. And this is, I think, largely my problem with sport. It refuses to let you be passive; you have to give money and become emotionally involved.

To be honest there was a part of me that quite enjoyed the time in my life when evenings out were dedicated to watching football as part of a group. Not, I should clarify, the time during the 2006 world cup when I went to a pub in Islington with my colleagues and someone, not one of us, spent the match’s duration berating with ever more elaborately offensive language England. He was English, but clearly the players weren’t trying hard enough as they huffed and puffed their way to a not terribly convincing, but rarely in doubt victory. If it was he in Germany then the whole thing would be sewn up with a series of solo wonder goals, presumably. But, alas, he was a fat, balding, drunk, abusive moron who couldn’t even manage to sing the relatively easy tunes in anything other than a howl. Twat.

It was easy enough to enjoy the camaraderie of rooting for the same team. Male bonding takes place in few areas, but amongst the beer heavy adoration of a well-struck goal it is fully acceptable to hug a near stranger with tears of joy in his eyes and some sort of politically incorrect xenophobia on his lips. I think, however the need to be constantly aware of a player’s form, their number of assists, the clichés associated with their temperament, build, mercenary or sexual activities simply requires too much homework. I have enough obsessions to tend to without feeling socially obliged to know Peter ‘good touch for a big man clichéd lanky twonk’ Crouch* international scoring record against major or minor teams. Yet without this knowledge the whole dramatic tapestry makes no sense.

(* I had sports commentary clichés by the way for this to work... I feel mildly ashamed.)

Yes, I did just say the whole “dramatic tapestry” because the one thing I do appreciate, indeed am even jealous of, is sport’s artificially created drama. The result is always achingly tense because there’s your whole life as a fan hanging on it. The heroes and villains are perfectly formed and operate in a world of clear cut moments, of death defying, child sacrificing importance. Real ife is more subtle and complex and therefore full of apathy; rolling along is easier than struggling to understand.

Those moments of anguish are impossible to create in any other medium. That’s why novels about sport are almost always rubbish because they are too contrived, too scripted. Even good ones are really about something else. David Peace’s Damned United isn’t about football, it’s about the destroying obsession of ambition and shyness drowned out by overconfidence. Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland isn’t about cricket, it’s about loneliness and despair and last chances post 9/11. Don DeLillo’s EndZone isn’t about American football, it’s... Actually, it’s a clunky analogy of warfare being everywhere so let’s just ignore that one.

There’s no real competition. Sport allows the dullness, the sort of tedium novel readers would burn, of a nil-nil draw, or a long fought out five day test match broken every half hour by rain, or Steve Davis playing snooker game to help prepare for the thrillingly where literally anything could happen. You really can’t actually make it up. For example, I’m reliably told that when Birmingham City won their first trophy for forty-odd years back in the spring against far superior Arsenal side it took the Londoner’s goalkeeper and defender to stop playing and watch the ball bounce in the air between them and roll away as they then, passively let the Birmingham striker score. If you tried to write something like that random sequence of events no-one would believe your ham-fisted prose. And yet, because actual football has the twenty-two independent spoilt, overpaid characters roaming freely each with their own calculated agendas trying to fuck it up for everyone else, people believe in the impossible.

In fact they crave for it. No-one cares if Andy Murray wins a long sequence of Masters titles and advances on the world number one spot. No, they want a jaw stretching scream of triumph and then the broken, sobbing mess of man clutching the base-line two matches later as he fails to win Wimbledon. Sport really, implausibly, matters to people, far more people than ever give a toss about fiction. And it matters, ridiculously, because they love drama; they want to have the thrill of the briefest high and then crushing despair for the majority. It’s kind of like crack-cocaine.

Wish I could write like that.

Fix up, look sharp.

‘Are you going to a wedding?’ my colleague asked the other Tuesday morning.

‘Um, no.’

‘I’ve never seen you looking so smart.’ Then she burst into hysterical laughter, slapping her knee with unrestrained glee.

I have, it appears, something of a reputation for scruffiness. One that, to be honest, is well founded. My shirts are frequently rumpled. My face often cast by a few days of shadow. My hair ruffled to varying degrees depending upon how many seconds I have in front of the mirror that morning. I may well own some shoe polish, but I’ve long lost it. Outside of the work place, the theme continues with my shirts open a couple of buttons too many, scuffed trouser rims, holes here and there and a general sense of being dishevelled.

I wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time I cared and whilst, it could be argued, I frequently failed at I least tried. But what began as a money saving exercise during my Masters became more of a way of life. I developed a determination that appearance required time and time was something precious. If my degree wasn’t going to gift me a book deal and I had to go back to work, then I wasn’t going to waste additional minutes ironing when I could be writing.

Deep down I always knew it would be like this. That is to say it would be hard. Objectively I understood that most things worthwhile doing are difficult. At no point did I genuinely believe that a career of letters, writing and general self-indulgence in being lost inside my head beckoned and all I had to do was spend a year talking pretentiously about words to enable it. That would be silly. But then I do like to dream.

Daydreams, unfortunately, have been somewhat omnipresent in my life. I am far too willing for my imagination to slip away from wherever I am supposed to be and to wonder about somewhere else; another time, another place, another person I might have been. Which is ridiculous. My lot in life is pretty good, and yet I’ve always been like this.

I remember quite clearly attending first year junior school, when I would have been seven or eight years old. One wall of the class room was entirely taken up by a window, from lino floor to stained ceiling, from blackboard to dented lockers. The teacher was of the old style where rote and repetition was the basis of learning. And so on she droned; on and on about, well, who knows. Whatever seven year olds were supposed to learn in 1986. I don’t remember, but I do recall looking out the window towards the playground and the sloping grass bank that ran alongside the school and thinking about all the things that the slope could be. Covered in snow and sledged along. Skidded down in wet grass. A point of momentum for the terrorists who were coming to seize control of the school and hold the area at gunpoint until a valiant resistance, spearheaded by myself, could wrest control of some of their weapons and lead a fight-back.

Ahem.

For some reason, that later scenario was a daydream I often indulged in. I cast myself as the seven year old hero who gets the girl and beats the baddies.

I was something of a strange child.

But I digress (sort of). Let’s return to me sitting and gazing out the window, completely lost in the scene unfolding inside my head. Ow! A sharp slap across the back of the skull snaps me back into the tedium of school life and the dream is not broken, but paused, ready to be restarted the next moment reality gets a bit too much.

I was bored and I wanted something more exciting to happen. Something so exciting that life would never be the same again.

It was a problem that persisted long after I should have grown out of it.

When I was a teenager I spent hours meandering around the local streets (usually delivering newspapers to be entirely fair to myself) submerged in dreams of what if and glory. I wanted to be in a rock and roll band. I wanted to write stories. I wanted to act. I wanted to be a politician. I wanted to burn out and be finished by my mid-twenties. I wanted to be the centre of everyone’s attention and for them to love me for it and to miss me when I was gone. Daydreams were solace to hide in. The problem was, aside from some pretentious short stories and scripts for comics I was too talentless to draw, I didn’t really do anything about it. Certainly, I expended far greater effort in the imaging than in the actual doing.

Inertia was never really going to make me popular with the girls.

This attitude persisted into adulthood. Maybe it was inevitable given the long periods of time life made available when I could be thinking about what might else have been. Long lonely drives across the country, almost moving the car subconsciously, my mind not really there but wistfully imagining whilst a more rewarding life. Or the hours spent hiking when the weather closes in and you pull inside your waterproofs and conversation evaporates as you mechanically concentrate on one foot in the front of the other. But there’s still space in your head for unrealised aspirations, to wonder of different futures and maybes and perhaps and what would have happened if I’d done it first or differently, said no, or stepped left.

Eventually, I did do something about it. Despite the long hours of my day job, I began to write more diligently. I put in time every night and most weekends, submerged myself and dragged the things in my head out onto the page. I even got some results. I told myself to go for it properly, to stop thinking and start doing. I told myself time and again that it wouldn’t easy, that it would require effort and disappointment and grief and frustration and maybe even a little blood. But I couldn’t stop myself.

During my year of self-indulgence, I would writing in the mornings and then go for long afternoon walks, ostensibly to compose “lyrical masterpieces” in my head, but almost inevitably my mind would empty and either the latest domestic issue – needing to service the car, or paint the bedroom properly, or what to have for dinner – would trickle in and once that was clear, well then there would just be the void. The imaginative chasm which would slowly flood with first a completed manuscript and then an excited call from the agent I’d sent it to and then, finally, an actual, real printed novel bearing my name at the masthead.

My dreams would come true.

That is, if they weren’t just dreams.

I sit now at my new desk in my new flat. Somewhere amongst my files is a growing stack of rejection slips. I thought that I’d done the hard bit. I’ve completed a manuscript, but now the dreamy bit doesn’t seem to be happening. The truth is that I’m not trying hard enough. I haven’t sent out any pitches for months allegedly because I didn’t know where I’d be living.

Here, I’ll tell you a secret. The real reason is that I’m scared that when I’ve sent it to everyone the dream will still be just that; nothing.

At the moment there is still possibility, although of most intangible unrealistic variety.
But there’s a new home and another new, better life. I have more chance than many if I have the determination. On the way home from work this evening I glanced over a fellow commuter’s shoulder at the magazine they were holding. The cover said ‘What chance does Amanda Knox have for the life she dreamed of?’ Maybe the question should be about Meredith Kercher’s dreams, but the comparison shames me. It’s time to get my act together. It’s time to reboot. I’ve been spending too much time on the fun stuff, the making shit up, the actual writing and avoiding not the difficult, scary part where I try to force other people to read my work.

It’s time to smarten myself up. So, I’ve been ironing hot creases into my shirts, I’ve been shaving most days, I’ve started to take care in my appearance not because I am giving up and returning to the office career trajectory, but simply because it is time to take myself seriously. It is time to do, rather than looking for excuses to keep on dreaming.

The razor bites into the hair on my chin; the new blade wrenches the follicle from the root. Underneath the flesh is raw and the splashed water and alcohol on my face stings. Nice and sharp.

Like lemon and gin in the open wound.

Like jealous nails gouging for the eyes.

Like used syringes in the ice cream.

It’s time to wake up.

Monty got a raw deal

It was an early evening approaching the end of the summer and the last of the tired light dragged itself across the patio slabs at the back of my friend’s parents’ house. The day was coming to an end and soon it would be time for me to go home. His sister, older by four years and thus a generation of life away from our thirteen year old end of innocence, had just got back from her Saturday job at Woolworths. She liked working there, listening to the rustle of her polyester uniform as it frazzled against her skin, against the plastic surface where she propped her elbows up and rested her chin in her hands to distractedly watch boys even older saunter past outside in the central square, underneath the wilting fountain waters. At some point in the non-too distant future I would want to be one of those boys in leather and demin hanging around with not much to do, but not that afternoon. I was interested in the girls in my class, I liked how their body shapes were beginning to change, but I didn’t really understand why. It was easier to just sit around the bedrooms of other just about teenage boys listening to worn down cassettes of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell and Anthrax’s Spreading the Disease, and Megadeth’s Killing is my Business...and Business is Good copied from library loans, thrashing our non-existent long hair with jerky neck throbs.

But the main reason she loved working in Woolworths was because she got a discount on new records and tapes and CDs. She’d got a CD player the previous Christmas and the staff reduction made the otherwise prohibitively expensive albums within reach. “But only for special albums,” she’d said. “The ones that matter. Everything else, I’ll still get on tape.”

That evening she clasped her latest purchase by a band I’d never heard of. The cover showed some odd drab grey spiked cube, like a tool for demolishing houses but with added spikes; an industrial mace; an extension to a space station. She put the album on and gently jangling guitar that sounded lazily tedious echoed across the room and a soft vocal gave us arcane instructions: “smash, crack, bushwacked, tie another one to the rack, baby.”

I didn’t think much of it.

The album was Automatic for the People, the band were REM.

It feels odd to think today that there was a time when I neither knew who REM were nor thought much of their music. The band, all their albums, but that one in particular, came to soundtrack a lot of my life, always dipping away and then returning fresh and ready to play over whatever events were taking back and now they’re gone. REM, once the biggest band in the world, after fifteen albums and thirty-one years have gone home for good.

Curiously, for a band who were once straddling the planet with singles which were inescapable and smart albums that both rocked and tugged on heart strings their passing seems to have been met by a mixture of satisfied “good, should have gone years ago” and surprise that they were still active, despite Collapse into Now being released earlier this and reaching number 5 in the UK charts. Perhaps that in itself is a sad indicator of how easy it is to top the album charts in these days of single track downloads unlike when Monster, Out of Time and New Adventures in Hi-Fi sold millions in the mid nineties.

Unlike many of today’s bands they also took it slowly. Whilst debut album Murmur is brilliant not too many people thought so at the time. It sold moderately well and they continued to tour and release records, but it wasn’t until The One I Love, with its frequently misunderstood chorus of sexual misanthrope, was an unexpected hit from album number five that they edged towards the big time with barbed, smart and rocking songs of loss and times disappeared. Now, even more so than then, debut albums seems to explode onto the scene and acts fade from view without the time to grow.

Despite giving a foundation for most guitar-based music over the last twenty years, from grunge to Britpop and then the slew of nu-indie a few years ago, REM seem to be continually accused of musical irrelevance. To whom should they be relevant? There seems to be an endless need to stay forever young only to be eventually reborn as an elder Statesman able to give sage, gravely-voiced, emotionally cracked advice to the younger peers, but then, REM were never a normal band. An intelligent group who sang songs on obsession and environmental concern and pleas against suicide and tributes to long-gone comedians, relevance be damned they nearly always had something to say without descending into tedious he loves she doesn’t stadium rock filler.

And anyway, those much maligned latter period albums after Bill Berry’s aneurism and then retirement aren’t as bad as they’re often derided to be. Sure, they had strong competition – not least within in their own back catalogue – and despite the occasional bit of fluff there are good songs to be found. Up, may be a bit of a muddled mess, but Daysleeper is a great song and At My Most Beautiful is self-fulfilling in its title. Reveal is a little too sugar addled for my tastes, but All the Way to Reno is wonderfully lost. Around the Sun may be musically tepid, all heavily programmed keyboards set to soggy scope, but Michael Stipe is at his lyrical best singing mournful tales of heartbreak and the collapse of a national ideal. Accelerate is all punky aggression and energy almost shocking for men hovering around their fifth decade to be sweating out.

But those very early records, Document, Murmur, Fables of the Reconstruction: no wonder they became cult heroes of the alternative scene for they genuinely offered something different, something almost classical compared to shallow hair metal, shock rock and the pop scene. Van Halen didn’t write songs about famine (Talk about the Passion), the futile waste of Reaganomics (pretty much all of Document) or oppression (Fall on Me).

They may have a reputation for making music that people who don’t like music like to listen to, but they made them listen to the barbed perfect plastic pop of Shiny Happy People and the frequently misunderstood ballads like Everybody Hurts period and Losing My Religion (surely the most popular song to feature a mandolin) which, whilst now somewhat irritating, at the time sounded like Stipe was drowning under the weight of what he was supposed to be. They then followed up those maudlin, couples coupling friendly, yet still staggering beautiful albums with fuzz rock and weird open American skyscapes; here was a band that made the music in their head not necessarily the music other people wanted to hear.

I saw them live twice. Once touring the quiet Up in Earl’s Court, where the concrete behemoth swallowed them whole. At one point Stipe paused and looked around. “Wow. We never thought this place would be so horrible.” On the Around the Sun tour they played Hyde Park and were barnstorming, pushing otherwise gentle songs with barbed lyrics to their very edge, Peter Buck’s guitar playing was like razor wire running through the grass. At the end Stipe, his face smeared with a blue paint eye mask that was dishevelling itself around his bald head like a tribal warrior from a lost island, a prophet speaking out from madness, said: “Thank you. We’re REM and this is what we do.” Quite, defy expectation – I’d thought the gig to be as shambolic as it had been years before, that the open sky would soak up the slow songs, but I was happily wrong.

That ability to remain timeless and to defy expectation is what keeps them relevant, if they do need to be any such thing. Over the past sixteen years or so they’ve sound-tracked my endless car journeys across dust speckled open highways and tightly wound Welsh hillsides, formal dinner and open house parties, foraged sexual encounters, relationships cracking apart into tears and bruises and were used as a yardstick to identify intelligent girls with good music taste in the late nineties, the more obscure their favourite track, all the better. They gave a sense, as a teenager when music is most important, that both anything is possible and the whole world is falling inside itself around you. They were a band whose records I would think I’ve listened to enough, that there is nothing else I can glean from them, and then I’ll idly put an album on and hear something that I never noticed before. Another glimpse of a mumbled half truth, another second of heartbreak or pump of adrenaline to a cord. They leave a fine body of work that I’ll listen to, probably, for the rest of my life, that there will always have a suitable song for the moment. Unlike Anthrax.

Five great REM songs:

Living Well is the Best Revenge: A spiky number from their penultimate album. I listened to this a lot at one point; exceptionally good life advice.



Nightswimming: A simple, elegant piano driven song with one of Stipe’s most plaintive vocals. The mourning of the song isn’t, as is often presumed for a lost love, but for the innocence and ease of youth slipping away.



It’s the End of the world as we know it (and I feel fine): My personal favourite. A marvellous celebration of impending eco-collapse and apocalypse; Stipe sings so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up with the scale and range of the disasters. The best moment is when, as he desperately reels off the portents of doom, he can’t quite believe that this is all really happening: ‘Right?’ he asks hoping that the answer will be in the negative. ‘Right’ affirm the band with a growl.



Pop Song ‘89: The whole of Green, their major label debut, was pristine pop covering up something much smarter and with greater depth than the facade. Pop Song ’89 was intended to kill of the impression that they needed to be more commercial to fulfil their potential; perhaps as Shiny Happy People followed shortly afterwards it wasn’t the killer blow, but it was a mortal wound well struck.



Don’t go back to Rockville: Deep South country-style plea for a girl to not abandon her lover, bassist Mike Mills, by heading back to the city. She goes, but this more than any other song is about where REM came from; it exemplifies their Georgian roots, letting them coil around the song in stranglehold that pleases rather than kills it. Whilst by no means their debut track, it’s hard to escape the feeling that everything else grew from here.

London's Burning

There’s a scene near the beginning of Transmetropolitian, Warren Ellis’ and Darrick Robertson’s black sci-fi comedy about a campaigning journalist called Spider Jerusalem, when the City (it’s always just “the City” as though it was all and yet none of them) is ablaze with rioting. Spider stands on a rooftop above the crackling flames and the cranking of batons on heads and the dull thuds of rubber bullets being pumped against the young. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘I feel a column coming on.’

High above the violence that, from memory my copy is somewhere in the West Midlands, Spider has helped cause through the arrogance of his moral right he sits and bashes out a vitriolic attack on both the perpetrators and the authorities. The smell of burning rubbish and cordite helps him find inspiration. Spider has to be on the inside in order to write.

Spider, fortunately, is only made up. This isn’t like that. I’m not like that.
But he City, this City, my City, and others have been ablaze and I can’t ignore it.

After all, I wrote it first.

On Thursday, my Kiwi friend almost got caught up in the shooting that sparked the whole fucking mess. Trying to cycle across the Tottenham viaduct she was turned back by police and sent the long way round, whilst in the distance men with guns surrounded the mini-cab with its doors open and a shape, motionless, on the floor by the rear wheel.

I was away for the weekend in deepest, darkest, wettest north Wales and so missed all the initial excitement until watching the news on Monday morning. Images of Tottenham’s burning on Saturday night cut through the pain in my legs. The looming totem of the Carpet store on the main drag raged golden orange until it was little but a husk.

As the horde rampaged and destroyed it was clearly dangerous and scary for those on the ground, but I also had a certain degree of respect for the rioters. The police appeared to have acted rashly or maybe inappropriately around Mark Duggan’s death.
The situation in Tottenham seemed deeply antagonistic as years of stop and search over-flowed into public resentment and a frustrated need to articulate complaints. Violence doesn’t necessarily work, but it certainly gets people’s attention. I watched the news, read some accounts online, but didn’t really give it much thought. After all, despite my pseudo-anarchistic leanings it on the other side of the City and already over. Nothing to do with me.

Until Monday night that is.

Monday night when the fires and mobs and broken glass and stolen property filled the City from Enfield in the north to burnt-out Croydon in the south, from eerie ghost filled Woolwich in the east to affluent Ealing in the west they came and they smashed and they looted.

But the thing is, I told you this would happen. Two years ago.

In my still as yet unpublished novel, You’ll never be Joe Strummer, the finale takes place against a London engulfed in riot. Starting up in Tottenham and Walthamstow anarchists and hard-line socialists clash with adherents to the nu-right and both lay into the police when they intervene. My characters find themselves drawn into the chaos, fire and violence unable to be anywhere else. Only in the trauma of a London tearing itself asunder will they find the answers they’ve been looking for: someone to blame, or maybe just themselves. The riot swells through most of the East End until the beltingly hot summer sun that’s scorched the City for months finally breaks into torrents of rain and everyone suddenly feels better, well enough to go home even.

‘How does it feel to have your novel coming true?’ my girlfriend texted on Monday morning. I jokingly replied that I had it already been published, rather than finding myself on a commuter train I’d have been on Newsnight.

But Monday was nothing like I’d imagined.

You see, the big difference between reality and fiction, and indeed between Monday and Saturday, was that one set of rioters were fighting for something they believed to be better and the other, well, who the fuck knows what they wanted.

‘Hey man, let’s get some watches,’ a youth gabbles on some Youtube footage filmed on Clapham High Street outside Debenhams, right before the department store was ransacked. And that’s the problem. Monday night wasn’t about anything bigger than individuals, it was about nicking trainers from Footlocker and laptops from Curries and burning down a family business in Croydon or an ethical supermarket in Ealing or trashing market stalls in Lewisham or tearing the Western Union on Mare Street, Hackney, trying to rip the TVs off the wall in Ladbrookes, torching buses in Peckham and destroying a Greggs in Deptford.

A Greggs for God’s sake. As though anyone is that desperate for pasties and sausage rolls.

Things got a little out of control. Mobs launched down Woolwich high street; a group attempted to raid a Michelin starred restaurant in Notting Hill, smashing their way through the window only to be seen off by kitchen staff armed with frying pans and knives; the Tescos close to flat six was attacked; video footage of the riots showed people helping a young man to his feet before stealing stuff out of his backpack; a man was shot and killed in Croydon, three in Birmingham.

My novel was intended to be a black comedy. This is not funny.

Rumour and counter-rumour spread like wildfire. Someone claimed that both the Venue nightclub in New Cross and the iconic Cat statue in Catford had been destroyed. Both were false. The Guardian labelled the Pembury Estate in Hackney as the epicentre and described barricades, Molotov cocktails and hurled bricks. Someone I know who lives there denies this. And yet the photos of torched cars are definitely in Clarence Street which runs down the side of the estate. Who should we believe? So much news is bound by the gaudy images of the most striking assaults and the ability of reporters to get there, but on the Twittersphere anything goes. You can tell the world false truths and they become real before your fingers have left the keyboard. I hear from someone not prone to exaggeration and who would be in the know that King’s A&E ward was closed due to a gang armed with knives roaming through. Surely this would make the news if it wasn’t being overshadowed by big, fucking fires everywhere, unless it’s all exaggeration, the need to be the centre of attention.

At one point with trouble in New Cross, Deptford, Peckham, Lewisham and Catford I felt utterly surrounded sirens screamed up the Brockley Rise. And yet, in amongst it all there was a very British humour: BrockleyCentral blog posting an update that said: ‘BBC news just described Lewisham as relatively central London. Every cloud has a silver lining.’

Tuesday was even stranger. Conversation and the internet were dominated by increasingly diverse and obscure rioting facts. In the afternoon the rumours started again. News of shops closing early saw people fleeing work to get back to areas otherwise unaffected. A woman sitting next to me on the 630 out of London Bridge talked rapidly into her mobile phone about all the bins in her street being on fire the night before and her co-worker who ran away from the office at lunchtime and refused to come back. A colleague of mine, another Brockley resident, spoke of hearing “intel” that something was going to explode in Lewisham.

Instead all was quiet. False information or people hitting the panic button? Who knows? I was supposed to meet a friend in New Cross for a drink, but everywhere was closed up. The shops, the takeaways, the pubs all were endless lines of steel shutters and hastily hammered in wooden panels giving it the feel of three in the morning yet with the glistening early evening sunshine it was more like an post-apocalypse movie. Still, nothing, in London at least, happened. The main excitement in the south-east was squatters taking over Ladbrookes in Deptford in the name of peace and the spooky sight of Milwall fans marching out of Eltham to defend the streets, whom by Wednesday night would themselves start pelting police with missiles and bottles as though disappointed at having no-one to fight.

London survived, but the violence spread across the country. To Manchester and Birmingham, to Liverpool and Leeds, Wolverhampton and West Bromich, Nottingham and Bristol. Gloucester even. Bloody Gloucester. I wonder whether the local police even knew where the riot gear was kept. This sort of thing is not supposed to happen in gentle, rural Cathedral towns.

But, as you know, this ain’t exactly normal.

Magistrate courts have been running a twenty-four hour service to deal with the hundreds arrested, as the trouble seems, at least temporarily, quelled. We need to think about why this happened. On the internet much of the focus seems to be for retribution and future control orders. These veer from the extreme (get the army, who are kind of busy you know, to gun the whole lot down) to the misguided: Do people genuinely not realise that Nottingham’s plans to evict any council residents shown to be involved, or the petition to suspend benefit payments will drive homeless and even poorer people to break the law. Desperation makes you do crazy things.

Yet, I can understand people’s anger. My liberal attitudes struggle to find sympathy for people aspiring to something so ultimately useless as an iPad. I believe in struggle, when necessary, to support an ideal. I don’t condone violence and looting because you fail to distinguish between television glamour lifestyles and real life.

Although, the everyman supporting character, Lucky, in You’ll never be Joe Strummer doesn’t understand the riot. He’s poor, he’s frustrated, but he can’t see the point in getting so het up over words.

Lucky, to be honest, is a bit of cipher. Not a real character, but a vessel for opinions. He’s a deliberate stereotype. But those involved earlier this week are impossible to stereotype. The image of young unemployed drop-out teenagers being to blame is false. Yes, an eleven year old girl was arrested for her part in the attempt to fire bomb a police station in Nottingham. Yes, there is something hugely sinister about trails of discarded sweet wrappers and crisp packets littering the destruction sites. Yes, the two girls who were interviewed by the BBC whilst drunk on stolen rose wine in Croydon at eight-thirty in the morning should have been in bed hours before. But amongst the first to be charged were, apparently, a thirty-one year old teacher and a forty-two year old resident of Brockley who worked for a homeless hostel and was arrested for breaking into Primark in Peckham. This isn’t an age thing.

I can appreciate that people are frustrated at being unemployed or on low wages, that the last vestiges of racism still clinging onto our institutions (although a lot of the rioters were white) are a disgrace, that being priced out of education crushes social mobility, that feeling as though you’re being deliberately kept at the bottom of the heap is an insult; I get all the socio-economical clichés you want to throw around. They’re all true. They all count. They’re part of this. They all help explain why the violence took place, but the direction of it, towards the acquisition of material goods, well I would suggest that a society that is grounded in crass commercialism and notional wealth, such as ours is, needs to look hard at itself.

But then again, what do I really know? I was raised comfortably enough, I went to University, I’m in full time employment and paid well enough to spend my evenings making shit up and passing judgement on people. Maybe I understand fiction people better because I get to control them. Maybe I was setting standards too high for people when I had them riot for a political ideal rather than just free stuff. Maybe the bleak dystopia I drew in You’ll never be Joe Strummer, sent shortly in the future where a selfish, materialistic yet economically shattered society is ruled by a flabby cheeked, floppy haired, principle-free berk called the Boss, I was correct to expect that rioting would come to the streets of London. I just never envisaged that the rationale would be so shamefully shallow and devoid of morals. Like the woman who took to the streets to berate rioters for not fighting for a cause and was ashamed to a Hackney person, I’m ashamed of Britain. Each and every one of us.