I Think About The 'john Thinks Certain Paul Songs Like Dear Boy / Hey Jude Are About Him' Thing A Lot.

Director's Cut - Kate knows what she's doing

Kate Bush’s new/old album Director’s Cut, a reworking of tracks from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes, has received largely positive reviews from critics and rather more mixed responses from the public. I’ve heard a few radio DJs expressing unhappy bemusement after playing the new versions of classic tracks such as 'Deeper Understanding', 'This Woman’s Work' and 'The Sensual World', a bemusement echoed and intensified by listeners’ texts. No doubt hearing new versions of old songs, especially ones that are already much-loved by fans, is going to provoke a reaction, and not always a good one. But I’m of the belief that the pissed-off fans are letting their emotions get in the way of their critical judgement.

I can accept that Director’s Cut, as a concept, could seem a bit pointless and redundant if you are a fan who already owns and appreciates the albums on which the tracks originally appear. But for people who are not familiar with her work it provides an almost perfect introduction to it, like a Greatest Hits, but with more care and effort put in. I am one of those people and I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to hear a cross-section of her older work and to hear how she is working now – how her voice sounds now as a mature woman, how her producing skills are as experimental and precise as ever, how her interest in music is not frozen in time and how (unlike many other world-famous artists) she is not resting on her laurels and releasing a best-of every couple of years to keep bread on the table. A lot of work has gone into producing this album, and that alone justifies the price.

Like most people, I was always familiar with Kate Bush; I knew her famous tunes and knew that she was the kind of artist I would like, but had not gotten around to investigating her properly. This was partly because of a fear of 80s production values – I couldn’t help but think that my enjoyment of her work would be hampered by an overload of cheesy synths and reverb. These fears have turned out to be unjustified, but it’s not hard to understand why I might have had them. Listening to the new tracks gave me a chance to sample a cross-section of her songs and decide from there if I thought her work was worth investigating further. The answer was, to echo the new version of the title track of The Sensual World, a resounding YES.

That song provides a good jumping-off point for approaching this album as a neophyte. I was only vaguely aware of the original song so on hearing the new version (now called 'Flower of the Mountain') I carried no baggage of expectation. All I knew was that she had succeeded in gaining permission from the notoriously protective Joyce estate to use Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from the end of Ulysses as the lyrics. People who were used to the 1989 version, with Bush’s own adapted lyrics, can’t seem to get their heads around the song now, but as far as I’m concerned it works much, much better (as would befit its original conception). As Bush said herself: ‘I’m not James Joyce’, - while her adapted lyrics are quite poetic, they have nothing on the fluid, rushing, earthy lines of the original text. The soliloquy lends itself extraordinarily well to music, with lines like ‘when I put the flower in my hair like the Andalusian girl used or shall I wear the red yes’ flowing gorgeously through the tune and giving the song a subtler yet more powerful sensuality than the original’s somewhat-overdone breathiness. The drums and bass are stronger on this version too, giving the song a secure scaffolding and letting the uilleann pipes come through with more clarity. It’s not only the new lyrics that make this the definitive version of this song.

Other tracks serve as complements to the originals, rather than supplanters. 'Deeper Understanding', told from the point of view of a programmer drawn into an obsessive relationship with a computer has been extended and reworked to include a creepy Auto-Tune effect on Kate’s voice in the chorus (when the computer is supposed to be addressing the programmer). Some have argued that this cheapens the song somewhat, ‘spelling out’ the meaning for the listener rather than leaving it ambiguous. My main issue with this song is that on first hearing I thought the obsession described by the narrator was simply the rush of becoming absorbed in the complexity and mystery of programming itself, but on closer listening the lyrics seem to indicate that the narrator installs a programme that directly simulates a friend, a meaning that strikes me as overly literal. The new video, starring Robbie Coltrane and Noel Fielding, seems to bear this interpretation out. The song would be more compelling if the concept of the narrator befriending or falling in love with the computer was approached metaphorically, framed in a story about absorption in the programming process. This issue remains the same in either version, so I have no preference of the new over the old track or vice versa – they are both musically interesting in different ways, and the use of a Bulgarian women’s choir in both is very well done. The extended ending of the new version has a good deal of experimentation in various electronic sounds which will appeal to some and not to others – again it’s a matter of taste. 

'This Woman’s Work' is one of the few tracks that has been completely re-recorded, in a lower key to accommodate Bush’s mature voice. Again I wasn’t familiar enough with the original to be especially attached to it over the new. The original scores points for being sparer and not as reverb-heavy as the new, but Bush’s current, slightly lower voice is more to my taste. In both versions the power of the song remains undiluted. The same can be said for 'Moments of Pleasure', another entirely re-recorded track. 

A few critics have referred to The Red Shoes as one of Bush’s weaker albums, which only leads you to amaze at how good the good stuff must be, if tracks such as 'Lily', 'Moments of Pleasure', 'The Song of Solomon', 'Top of the City' and the title track are ‘bad’ by her standards! The songs from The Red Shoes that have been re-recorded remain fairly close to the originals so again fans can’t froth too much at changes. Having listened to both the new and original versions I think these tracks benefit hugely from the more muscular drumming and deeper vocals they receive on Director’s Cut – the vocals on 'The Song of Solomon' and 'Top of the City' particularly are much more powerful and affecting than in the originals, and the new drum track on 'The Red Shoes' – a track Bush has said in interviews that she is particularly happy with – gives the song the full, crazy propulsion necessary to carry its whirling-dervish beat and melody. 

Bush’s reasoning for recording this album was that she felt that the songs on the two original albums were not produced as well as she would have liked. The results on Director’s Cut bear her creative judgement out. There have been so many developments in audio technology since 1989 and the digitisation of the two original albums, at a time when digital audio technology was still developing, seems to have given the originals a rather thin sound. Bush’s decision to transfer the audio to analogue and re-record the drums and vocals was intelligent – it brought out the strength of the instrumentation that had got lost in the digital mist, and the new additions helped to, well, make the songs louder, which they needed to be.

'Rubberband Girl' is the only track which doesn’t seem to benefit much from re-recording – it has a strangely muted audio quality, which, if intentional, was misguided.  But apart from that Kate Bush hasn’t put a foot wrong in this album, and unlike many established artists, she’s not just plugging the gap between albums with repackaged old albums – she’s actually put in studio time and commitment, and given her fans something new and interesting. Breath is bated for her new album, and in the meantime there’s a whole back catalogue to discover.

everytime I read this story I'm so disturbed by yoko's manic participation, like she was 38 at this point. girl what are you doing with this mean girl baby nonsense you're nearly forty.

Beatlemania was fun but now it's time for beatledepression

All aboard

A review of Thomas Keneally’s latest novel, The People’s Train. This review has also been published on Politico.ie.

Since the days of Margaret ‘There Is No Alternative’ Thatcher, many (if not most) people have accepted as natural that economic prosperity can only be achieved through a free-market economy that flourishes as speculators make it big on the international markets. Few governments in the West, despite their political allegiances, have made any serious effort to embrace a different system over the last two decades. Even in the midst of the current collapse, official response has been to attempt to return things to the previous status quo, and public response, while angry, remains largely inchoate.

In the current atmosphere, the sheer audacity of what the Russians attempted to achieve from 1917 onwards can look naïve at best, and malevolent at worst, especially with the knowledge of the later atrocities and failures of the Soviet regime. Drummed as we are today with the message of ‘there is no alternative’, it’s hard not to look at the Soviet experiment cynically, yet its core message – that not only is there an alternative, but that it can be achieved – was taken utterly seriously by many men and women whose standards of integrity still stand up today.

Evoking the sincerity of this belief and its potential to change the world is tricky business for any writer looking back through the miasma of 20th-century opinion, but Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark, is more than qualified to take on the challenge. In his latest novel, The People’s Train (recently out in paperback), a Russian emigrant to Australia in the early years of the 20th century tells his story of organising strikes and fighting for workers’ rights in Brisbane, before the action moves to Russia and the heady countdown to the October Revolution. The Australian part of the book is presented as a memoir by Keneally’s hero, Artem (Tom) Samsurov, who gradually reveals the details of his journey down under; the perilous escape from a tsarist prison camp, treks across Siberia and journeys by boat through Japan and China. Artem is a committed revolutionary who believes nothing less than a complete overthrow of the capitalist system will be sufficient to bring equality to the world.

Keneally does a wonderful job of bringing this character to life; too often revolutionaries in fiction come across as either hysterical or dully obsessed with political theory, but Artem is portrayed as a thoughtful, self-aware man who nevertheless cannot and will not compromise on his ideals. He is utterly believable as a man of his time and milieu, and the conflicts he faces with his fellow emigrant Russians and with the radical female lawyer he finds himself in a complicated attachment with are entirely believable.

Australia’s labour history is not a well-known topic, but the Brisbane of The People’s Train is full of agitation, strikes, union meetings and corrupt police, and the feel of a country still trying to establish a conclusive identity is powerfully evoked. Indeed, the titular train is an idea for a worker-owned monorail serving Brisbane, conceived by one of Samsurov’s friends. It remains unbuilt, serving as a symbol for the ever-retreating dreams of the young radicals. Australia is represented in the Russia-set section of the book by Paddy Dykes, a young journalist with the Australian Worker, who asks many of the book’s crucial questions about the nature of revolution and what happens when theory meets reality.

The Australian story is more engaging than the Russian; the familiarity of the story of the Russian Revolution leads to a slightly rushed narrative in the second part of the book that isn’t helped by various brief, cameo-like appearances by historical figures. However the pace recovers at the end; the momentous events of history are mirrored by equally turbulent upheavals in the minds of the central characters, with a last line that will take its place among the great endings of fiction.

Keneally leaves the question open as to whether the failure of the Soviet project was due to corruption of the original ideal, or whether the seeds of tyranny lay within it from the beginning. His characters are telling their story as they see it, nothing more. In an age where this period tends to be either glamourised or subject to revisionism, Keneally has succeeded in conveying what it was actually like to live during this unforgettable time.

One of the best historical novels of the year.

The People’s Train by Thomas Keneally

Sceptre, August 2010 (paperback)

£7.99

Sugar Street

My Goodreads review of Sugar Street, the third in the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (Black Swan edition, translated by William Maynard Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan)

Two main things struck me while I read Sugar Street: firstly that while I don't know Arabic, I got a strong sense of the elegant economy and poetry of the written language from this translation. The second thing was how much traditional Egyptian middle-class life in the 1920s and 30s as depicted in the book reminded me of Irish culture up until relatively recently. While on the surface there wouldn't seem to be many similarities, the conservative, family-focused, deeply religious patriarchy in which mothers dominated the home felt very familiar. Even the way religion infused the language and thinking of the characters, even the nonbelieving ones, was very like the way Irish culture was for much of the 20th century a Catholic culture. Like in Ireland, families observed religion, gossiped about neighbours, argued about the politics of a young nation and mothers hoped for a civil service career for their sons and a good marriage for their daughters. 

The story covers a long period of time and is a little episodic - there were many subplots that could have been explored more, and some main plots that could have been trimmed. I had limited patience for Kamal's endless romantic vacillating, but was engaged by his nephew Ahmad's adventures working for a Marxist magazine and trying to break free of the constraints of traditional middle-class life. 

Politics runs through the story constantly, as the characters debate and wonder where the new country will go once the double-crossing English are finally gone. It might be advisable to have a wikipedia entry on pre-war Egyptian history open as you read as the various parties and individuals are mentioned without backstory (and there's no reason why they should be, considering the novel was written first for an Egyptian audience.)

Edited to add: him and Linda's mealymouthed explanation "It's not fair on the children! the bosses and workers should just work it out rationally!" is easily explained when you remember that this is a person who never had a real job and therefore doesn't have a CLUE. Not that he didn't work hard, but that he never had the experience of being an ordinary person with a boss (a few weeks winding coils doesn't count). All the sending-your-kids-to-state schools in the world won't change that fact: it makes you out of touch with most people. Not a crime, but it leads to nonsense like this.

What did goddess mean by this?

Half Agony, Half Hope

A canon-divergent AU, inspired by Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

In the summer of 1959, Paul’s life is perfect. He has his music, his new band, and his first true love; his song-writing partner, his best friend. John. But then autumn comes, and Paul’s dad convinces him that his dreams are nothing but a foolish fantasy, and that he needs to grow up, get a real job, a real life. Five years later, John is an international music sensation, his band taking the world by storm. And Paul? Paul is exactly where John left him, working a dead-end job, no family, no prospects, no life. And then one day, John comes back to town…

The playlist (further suggestions welcome)…

And the theme song for chapter 1...

How to write a historical novel

I recently read two books which could be handily placed on opposing sides of the ‘how to write historical fiction’ spectrum. They are The Map of Love by Adhaf Soueif and Brooklyn by Colm Toibín. One takes in the entire modern history of a particular country through the experiences of its characters, the other’s scope is limited to the point of provinicial. Yet, it is the small story, Toibín’s Brooklyn, that is infinitely more successful. Souief said of her leading male character, Sharif al-Baroudi, that she wanted to write a character one could fall in love with, using the appearance of a romantic hero in Egyptian cinema as her template. The story of the Map of Love is split across the 20th century, focusing on the romance and marriage between Lady Anna Winterbourne and al-Baroudi in Egypt in the 1900s and the discovery of her diaries by two of her female descendents, American Isabel and Egyptian Amal. Soueif had an admirable aim in the book – to tell the little-known story of the nascent Egyptian struggle for independence in the years before the First World War – and while the research is comprehensive and the historical details are fascinating, the characters utterly fail to convince, in my opinion. Lady Anna is too modern a woman to be believable as a character of her time, and her unquestioning, wholehearted adoption of her new husband’s family, culture and country come across as forced rather than romantic. From a secure position within conventional Victorian genteel society, she abruptly and without question pledges uncritical support for the cause of Egyptian independence. Even though she is portrayed as more thoughtful and historically aware than her peers, her decision just doesn’t feel believable. History shows us that the need for independence in former colonies was justified, but it seems implausible that someone like Lady Anna would take that position so quickly and easily in her place and time. The story isn’t helped by the fact that Lady Anna and her husband are too saintly to be true – apart from some minor cultural speedbumps they remain sickeningly in love, without any of the normal gripes and confusions that accompany even the happiest of marriages, let alone one across a cultural gulf. The two are like a cardboard cut-out couple, cloyingly devoted to each other and to the cause of independence with barely a question asked or a dissenting voice raised, and they are also implausibly modern in their attitudes to each other. Perhaps if they were not presented to the reader in the form of Anna’s diary entries a more convincing inner life might have arisen, but as it stands they don’t convince and it is hard to care about them. The modern Egyptian, Amal al-Ghamrawi, is more rounded, but again her edges seem to have been neatly rounded off to leave a character who, despite all her soul-searching, seems somewhat hollow. The main problem with The Map of Love is that the characters seem to have been designed to represent particular things and so perform a kind of wish-fulfilment for the author. Lady Anna is the contrite face of colonial Britain turning her back on her old life to embrace that of the people her nation is oppressing, Sharif al-Baroudi is an unusually enlightened 19th century man who disavows gender stereotypes and political violence and Amal’s brother Omar lives a successful, cosmopolitan life but remains loyal to his ethnic background. It is always obvious to the reader when a writer is using characters as a mouthpiece, and immediately interferes with any spontaneous enjoyment of the text. The Map of Love aims nobly to tell the story of modern Egypt, and does succeed to some extent, but it ultimately fails due to the lack of believable characters. Brooklyn, on the other hand, appears to be telling nothing more than the story of one unremarkable young woman, from an unremarkable town in Ireland, and her emigration to America. Eilis Lacey, the woman in question, is not even moving to New York as we know it from movies – the American sections of the book centre around a few streets of the Irish-American district of Brooklyn with its large Irish community, complete with an omnipresent parish priest. But prosaic though Eilis’ life and experiences may be, her inner world and small conflicts are rendered so thoughtfully and reverentially by Toibín they end up telling a larger story – that of the Irish emigrant experience. Eilis has never expected more than a life in Enniscorthy, working in an office until someone marries her and she devotes life to having his children, but events conspire to send her abroad to work in a department store and study bookkeeping. Initially Brooklyn is not much more exciting than Enniscorthy – Eilis lives in a Irish-run boarding house with a curfew, her days are spent wearily trekking across the shop floor and her free time taken up by evening classes and helping the priest with parish activities. But as time goes by the opportunities American life begin to open themselves up – from exposure to people of different races and cultures, to the excitement of the latest fashions. Toibín is a compassionate author who doesn’t sneer at the joy ordinary people find in ordinary things - in fact he accords these things the respect they deserve. Eilis even finds romance in America, but the slow tugs of obligation from the two sides of her life threaten to undo her when circumstances require to return home to Ireland. The premise of Brooklyn is the choice Eilis must take between her two worlds, and interestingly this choice is not presented as a clichéd split between home, obligation and repression and abroad, freedom and experimentation. On the contrary, Eilis faces potential nooses wherever she looks, and the ties that bind can take unexpected forms. Her mixture of engagement and passivity are wholly convincing as the experiences of an individual, yet also seem to encompass the thoughts and feelings of a whole generation that were put in her position. This novel has no overawed glimpses of the Manhattan skyline for the arriving immigrant, but a collection of moments – a parish hall dance, a trip to a bookshop, a day out in Coney island – to give us a truly authentic sense of the migrant experience. Brooklyn has been as carefully worked and polished as The Map of Love - the difference is the joins are not visible and the author has all but disappeared, and that is why it is the more successful work.

Someone please do fanart of Paul at Noël Coward's feet, learning how to be satirical.

(Source: Magical Mystery Tours by Tony Bramwell)