I’m forever tripping over things that would have been useful nuggets to include in my book about the Noughties. That’s the glory of print media, I suppose; as Zadie Smith put it, “...the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after it’s published.” Anyway, in the section about reality TV, I argued that Noughties celebrities in general, and Jade Goody in particular, needed to be “at once real, unreal and hyperreal.” Now the excellent Billy Stockbroker directs us to a thread on David Icke’s site, which starts with the contention that the whole Jade story was a conspiracy to persuade us, the sheepy people, to accept cervical cancer jabs and then gets even weirder:
i challenge you to find me any verifiable proof that Jade Goody existed at all. by verifiable proof I mean a copy of a birth certificate, copy of a tax return, or someone who knew her growing up in her poor white trash lifestyle she supposedly had. Jade Goody was a character played by an actor.
Well, as far as the last sentence goes, aren’t we all? But another user appears to have been reading Baudrillard with one eye and Robert Anton Wilson with the other:
That’s perhaps the most amazing thing about that woman when you think about it. He [sic] whole bizarre life, celeb status and surreal demise was real... She could only be something that could be real in an illuminati controlled world.
So that’s answered that then. She was real. But she was only obeying orders.
I’ve been reading Tom Cox’s Educating Peter, described on the front cover as being “a bit like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but with crisps...” It’s the rock journalist’s memoir of a period when he was asked to take under his wing the 14-year-old son of a friend, which mainly involved going on long car journeys, listening to and talking about music, and meeting a few musicians. It’s a slightly contrived scenario, notwithstanding its apparently factual basis (I don’t think we’ve got a James Frey thing going on here), as it seems to have been purpose-built for any Nick Hornby fans who might want the best bits of High Fidelity and About a Boy in one tidy package.
Inevitably, one of the themes of the book is that Cox learns as much from the experience as the black-clad, Slipknot-loving Peter does, forcing himself to interrogate his own likes and dislikes, and the very nature of the relationship between the fan and the music. So they visit the petrol station where the Rolling Stones pissed against a wall in 1965; attend a Brian Wilson concert at the Royal Festival Hall, and find themselves sharing a lift with Brian himself; and go to the tree on Barnes Common that took the life of Marc Bolan. It becomes clear that Tom and Peter differ in their musical tastes not because of anything inherent in the noises that come out of the speakers, but because of their contrasting responses to the mythology that surrounds them, the connotations rather than the denotations. Before they go to the Wilson gig, Peter thinks he might know three songs by the Beach Boys: “‘the one with the weird video that they always show on VH-1’, ‘the one about surfing’ and ‘the one about California’.” Instead of playing him more of the music, Cox
Later, they go to Cambridge, not so much in search of Syd Barrett, who was still alive in 2002 when the story is set, more to look for the myth. After all, as Cox admits, he doesn’t really care much for Barrett’s songs per se, especially not the solo stuff:
I was in Cambridge because I was enchanted by his legend, or at least my own romanticised version of it, and, in a way, I felt even that was losing its appeal, now I’d stopped pretending that I liked his music.
Peter shares his scepticism (“Did they not have proper studios in those days, then?” he asks as they listen to The Madcap Laughs on the way.) but still tags along for the ride. When they arrive, they find little evidence of the lost genius, and little interest in him from the locals:
The place seemed somehow beyond Syd Barrett. And while he was surely still here somehow, painting or being diabetic or hanging out in someone’s local pub or having a picnic or gardening or having a secret party with Brian Eno, his ghost had obviously skipped town aeons ago.
Cox ponders whether his home town might have been more respectful had Syd actually died decades before, like proper rock legends do; then fans would have been free to fill the intervening 30 years with imagined, projected glories, rather than the mundane reality of a tubby, ill man trying to avoid his more besotted fans. But if we do consider the pantheon of died-too-young rockers, in very few cases (Holly? Hendrix? Redding?) is there evidence that they might have gone on to make music even better than what we have available to us now. Far more common are the stars who are still young, but already past their best. As Lennon said, Elvis really died when he joined the army; Lennon himself recorded very little of any real worth after about 1971; Jim Morrison maybe never really had it to start with.
In an ideal world, maybe we should be able to order our idols to die at the optimum time, and in the most appropriate manner: Dylan, in the bike crash in 1966; Wilson, burning to death in his sandpit as he finishes Smile; Barrett, overdosing on Mandrax and Brylcreem; Bowie, shot while trying to scale the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1970s; at the photoshoot for Thriller, Michael Jackson gets rabies from the tiger, rather than his weirdly anticlimactic demise in 2009. I briefly covered the last one in my book about the Noughties, still available, blah blah:
...but in truth Jackson the man had died years before, to be replaced by a grotesque post-human, a parody of celebrity concocted by a cabal of publicists and plastic surgeons.
Of course, we’d then lose some of the unexpected late flowerings of rock gods in their mature years. That said, great as these can be, if you were to play ‘Hurt’ to someone who’d never heard of Johnny Cash, he’d just hear an old man ranting about drugs and self-harm. And I was at the same Brian Wilson concert that Tom and Peter attended, and it was probably the most enjoyable gig that I’ve ever attended; but I know that was probably down to the huge outpouring of goodwill towards the man on stage, and the recognition that he’d at least partly defeated his demons. Watching footage of the same event, you see a slightly befuddled Wilson fronting a well-drilled covers band.
Still, the whole thing gives me an excuse to post this clip of Syd defending his music, rather than his myth. Fortuitously, it also includes a brief glimpse of the magnificent Robert Robinson, whose retirement was announced a few days ago. Maybe, in years to come, there will be diehard fans hanging around his Chelsea flat, swapping bootleg DVDs of Call My Bluff and talking about what might have been.
One of the rules that most writers learn is to be very wary of the word "famous". The phrase "the famous actor Judd Nelson" is wrong, goes the logic, because if he is indeed famous, the adjective is pointless, and if he is not famous, it is untrue.
I used to follow this diktat, until I started working in Bangkok. Writers here seem desperately keen on the adjective "renowned", which is really just "famous" with a built-in positive spin. A hotel bar will be proud to present "the renowned jazz saxophonist Wally Schtuppe"; a restaurant will promise diners traditional Thai dancing from "the renowned Hogplum Theatre".
At first I cringed at all this incessant renown; until I worked out what it really meant. You have to understand that Thailand, as a rapidly developing nation, has people in positions of wealth and influence whose parents were rice-picking peasants; it is also home to a great many expatriates who would have led fairly humdrum lives at home, but suddenly find themselves in a lifestyle they might previously only have seen in the pages of Hello magazine. Add to this the overwhelming social pressure, prevalent in many east Asian societies, to maintain face at all times; and you've got a critical mass of people who are suddenly expected to be au fait with fine wine, classical music, designer frocks and all the cultural gewgaws associated with a successful lifestyle.
So what "renowned" means in these cases is an implicit nod to the culturally befuddled: this person is worthwhile, it says; this person's name is worth dropping. And if everybody in Bangkok (or everybody in Bangkok who matters) reads that Wally Schtuppe is renowned, then everyone will believe it. The fact that Wally Schtuppe's been playing bar mitzvahs in suburban Omaha for most of his career is neither here nor there, and certainly not to be mentioned in polite society.
Of course, once you leave Bangkok and start raving about Wally, and the Hogplums, and the renowned modern artist Cornelius Ding, and the renowned post-fusion tapas chef Mimosa Pondicherry, you're on risky territory. You might be exposed as someone who knows nothing about jazz or dance or art or food, beyond what you read in a fawning advertorial in a free magazine in Starbucks at Central Chidlom. On the other hand, you might discover that your new friends in London or New York know bugger-all either, and they'll start hymning these people's praises too, just as art critics began fawning over the entirely invented Nat Tate. And from such combinations of chance and embarrassment are lasting reputations made.
I’m forever tripping over things that would have been useful nuggets to include in my book about the Noughties. That’s the glory of print media, I suppose; as Zadie Smith put it, “...the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after it’s published.” Anyway, in the section about reality TV, I argued that Noughties celebrities in general, and Jade Goody in particular, needed to be “at once real, unreal and hyperreal.” Now the excellent Billy Stockbroker directs us to a thread on David Icke’s site, which starts with the contention that the whole Jade story was a conspiracy to persuade us, the sheepy people, to accept cervical cancer jabs and then gets even weirder:
