Category: Essays (page 1 of 4)

Long-form rants, explorations, flights of fancy.

A still from 'Flyg! Sa Alfons Åberg' (Flight! Said Alfons Åberg'), an animated film featuring text and images by Gunilla Bergström, the creator of Alfons Åberg (who is known in English as Alfie Atkins). Behind Alfons is his father, who for once is not shown smoking a pipe.
4 November 2021 / 0 Comments

Writing the unspeakable: On parenting and poetry

A couple of weeks ago I had a minor emotional breakdown.

I suspect it was actually a panic attack, caused by my decision to attend a silent retreat, and the subsequent stress and anxiety the thought of a weekend of silence triggered in me. (Spoiler alert: the retreat went really well, and I hope to write about it in due course.)

Anyway, as I recall it, I was sitting at my desk trying to think of something to write. You know, as usual. And right then, I was overcome by a massive wave of sadness. Like, the big-tears-dripping-down-your-hot cheeks kind of sadness. I was almost hyperventilating. Where was all this emotion really coming from?

I’d been wanting to write a poem—any old poem—for quite a while. But writing poetry seems to have landed a long way down the old to-do list, right under several big-ticket items like ‘get through the day’ and ‘bring up your children’, plus all of their fiendishly nested sub-menus.

I’m as prone to procrastination as the next person. But in the case of the past seven years of my life, I felt like I had a legitimate excuse not to write. Or to put it another way, I realised I shouldn’t be too hard on myself when I looked at my miserable creative output for the period 2014–present.

All of which does nothing to explain the poem I then sat down to write. But bear with me while I reflect on the reality of the trajectory of my poetics, if we may call it that, over the past however many years.

“Dad Poet Society”

I mean, let’s face it, I’d had a pretty good run. Unlike many of my friends (and fellow poets), I had plenty of time and space to write. I became a parent pretty late, at the age of 42. To put that into perspective, by the time my parents turned 42 they already had five children, including yours truly.

Still, I seem to recall that, right before I became a parent in 2014, I subconsciously subscribed to an idealist notion. It involved me moprhing into a Dad Poet. Someone who can dash off a sestet about changing a nappy or craft an epic poem that rewrites gender roles in The Odyssey in my spare time.

But it turns out I made up that ridiculous notion. Which makes even more problematic my subsequent failure to live up to it. Who are we to burden ourselves with such unrealistic expectations? Once our children arrive, they’re more than equipped to take on that task for us. Oh, and how.

Fortunately for me, I have documentary evidence of my actual preoccupations regarding parenthood back in those heady days when the whole experience was just an abstract notion to me. In 2004, I wrote a poem which, in hindsight, was a prophetic indicator of my future life.

While your children are (still) small

While your children are still small takes its title from a Finnish parental leave policy (I can’t find the reference now). The policy encouraged parents to take time off in the first weeks and months after the birth of a child. (It also provided financial incentives to do so).

While your children are still small draw bees
Skate on ice and lead ponies through the snow
Go to sleep each night and dream compulsorily
They say it helps when the sun doesn’t come up

‘While your children are still small’ (draft, 2004)

It’s a very early version of the poem—I’ve always used this website as a kind of sketchbook for poetic ideas. I would go on to shorten the poem before including it, under the title ‘While your children are small’, in my collection We Will Disappear (papertiger media, 2007).

The image featured on the cover of We Will Disappear was taken with a disposable camera in the old Austin Car manufacturing plant on Dudley Street, West Melbourne. According to Shannon Bufton, ‘the Ruskin Motor company had also used the building to manufacture body parts. Later on in its life it was used by the Commonwealth Department [of Administrative Services] to maintain its fleet of cars’. The car pictured may well be one of these sad old beasts.

The sentiment of the Finnish policy (which is similar to Sweden’s) explored in the poem is lovely and deeply emotional. But as with so many of the poems in We Will Disappear, this generally positive aspect is tempered by darker thoughts regarding mortality.

In the final version, I deleted the final stanza, and changed the last word of the poem from ‘prayed’ to ‘believed’. I made the first word of each line lower-case and did the same for ‘santa’. The editor in me would probably change ‘though’ to ‘although’ now, and perhaps insert a comma or open bracket before ‘glow’.

though our pyjamas announce themselves glow
warm as santa’s sack of rhymes & candy teeth
remember to cross your hands before sleeping
if you die at night they’ll know you believed

‘While your children are small’ (We Will Disappear, 2007)

I find it had to read many of the poems in We Will Disappear now. I am forced to confront the fact that the entire collection is infused with a tragic melancholy. This doesn’t necessarily sit with the person I was, or the life I was living at the time.

But this poem, at least, reminds me that I’m actually pretty fortunate. I’ve literally been able to spend time with each of my children while they are small. Who cares, in the end, how many poems I write, or what they’re about? And isn’t melancholy a relatively harmless emotion?

Just on that tragic melancholy

But it’s not as if I had got that melancholy out of my system once We Will Disappear … ehm … disappeared, either. While it didn’t come out until seven years later, my second collection, Leaves of Glass, struck a similarly maudlin tone. Although I managed to spice up with some surreal poetic interplay.

My subsequent chapbooks, including Tjugotvå, carried on in that vein. I can’t help it. In fact, pretty much every poem I’ve written over the past seven years has taken up a similar theme. And given that there’s only six of them, let’s introduce them all.

Line dancing with Matthew Rhys is an exception because I wrote it in response to a poem by Alicia Sometimes. (In fact, there’s two more about other shows but, again, that’s the subject of another post.) Then there’s Vast, a poem written after listening to to Milton Nascimento’s beautiful but devastating song, ‘Os Povos’.

Listen to ‘Os Povos’ (‘The Peoples’), from Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges’ 1972 album, Clube Da Esquina. Interestingly, it was widely assumed that the album cover showed Nascimento and Borges as young boys—but it turns out it’s a photo of two random kids beside a road in Rio de Janeiro state.

Then there’s Ray, a poem about seeing my son’s fingerprints on a window; Toxic Gulf, a cheerful poem about children and the poisoning of the water in the harbour in the town where we live; and You have memories, another poem about war and death. Can you see a pattern emerging?

The only light at the end of this particular tunnel is Executive Orders, the shortest (and maybe the best) poem I’ve ever written:

1. Make broccoli delicious again.

‘Executive Orders’ (2017)

In fact, if I ever do manage to put together a new collection—which would therefore probably be my last—I don’t think I could do worse than call it Make Broccoli Delicious Again. But even then, it would still be dominated by poems of the ‘Toxic Gulf’ variety. Becuz that’s what I do.

Writing the unspeakable

Which brings me to the real subject of this post: the poem I sat down to write during my minor emotional breakdown. The poem’s called Folding their clothes. It hopefully speaks for itself in terms of the feelings I was feeling at that very strange moment.

The poem is a sonnet—in basic form, at least. It seeks to express the deep sadness I felt when I realised all over again my own mortality. And to prove that I can write a sestet, here’s the final six lines, complete with not one but two unresolved parentheses:

(we must rely on this idea of new friends with games,
otherwise there’s nothing to hold onto in the dark,

when we listen for some sniff or cough and realise
those nightmares were really our own (oh! but look—

the moon falls behind the trees and we say: “goodbye!”
just fold their clothes, then try extra hard not to cry

‘Folding their clothes’ (2021)

But in several other respects, the poem is trying to speak to something unspeakable. Something we as humans generally discourage ourselves from expressing. And that’s the unavoidable ruminating on life and death that having a child has a tendency to trigger.

I’m using that word ‘trigger’ advisedly, nervously and hesitantly—but with a respectful purpose. I’ve been slow to realise that writing about death and mortality can have unintended effects on readers. This goes just as much for my ‘back catalogue’ as it does for one poem.

If I can put it another way: many perspectives on this subject are infinitely more tragic than my own. I should be careful not to become too melodramatic over what are, after all, completely natural feelings of anxiety.

For this reason, decided not to change the last word of the poem from ‘cry’ to ‘die’ before posting it here. It’s one thing to morph from ‘prayed’ to ‘believed’; it’s quite another to suggest some kind of death wish based on my having felt sad over some folded washing.

Postscript: What’s Alfons Åberg got to do with it?

You may have noticed that the feature image for this post is a picture of Alfons Åberg. You may also have noticed that ‘Folding their clothes’ is dedicated to Alfons’ Swedish creator, Gunilla Bergström. These two observations are of course connected: Bergström passed away earlier this year.

As for Alfons (who is known in English as Alfie Atkins), there is a further connection. I’ve been reading several of Bergström’s books about him to my children for some time now. Like most kids of a certain age, he’s cheeky and adventurous, not to mention mildly infuriating.

A scene from another Alfons book, ‘Skratta lagom, sa pappa Åberg’ (which can be translated as ‘Laugh gently, says Daddy’, although ‘lagom’ is one of those words that can mean various things).

But Alfie’s dad, who’s just called Daddy (in the English versions at least) is one of my secret heroes. He’s patient, kind and very human. He’s also a little outrageous: Bergström draws him smoking a pipe, which he does all the time (especially indoors). It’s a strange contrast, but I love it.

Our children love Alfie—he doesn’t like going to bed, or putting his clothes on and getting ready for school. He also tests his dad’s patience on a regular basis. A typical example is God natt, Alfons Åberg (‘Good night, Alfie Atkins’, 1972) in which, unsurprisingly, Alfie refuses to go to bed.

It’s a typical children’s story in terms of plot. Alfie asks his dad for a series of things; eventually his dad falls asleep from exhaustion; and only then does Alfie go to bed. Right before he does so, however, Alfie experiences a remarkable insight into the human condition:

A daddy who is sleeping can’t come running to take care of things.
And if no one comes when you call, you might as well be quiet.

Gunilla Bergström, God natt, Alfons Åberg (1972)
(trans. Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard)

Every time I read these lines, their impact becomes more powerful (for me, anyway). There’s no suggestion here that Alfie should stop asking for things—not while his dad’s awake, at least. But the implication of silence and its impact on a child—that’s pretty devastating.

Unspeakable, even.

The old Sankt Olof Express puffing away at the Brösarp railway station in Skåne, Sweden.
29 January 2021 / 0 Comments

The Old Invisible Sankt Olof Express

I come to the railway crossing and stop.

No sounds, except the wind in the pine trees. Is the train even coming? How will I know? Should I crouch down, put my ear to the tracks and listen? I’ve seen countless people do this in movies but never believed in it until now.

Then I hear a high-pitched whistle. And the chug-a-chug of the steam train’s engine. Yep, that’s it, I think. That’s the Ångtåget på Österlen I saw 15 minutes ago at Brösarp Station, about to depart for Sankt Olof. And now it’s headed this way.

I cross the tracks, alight from my bicycle and lean it against the fence. Then I pull out my mobile telephone and open its native camera application.

Holding the phone in front of my face with both hands, I turn to landscape view. My eyes train on the screen, in which I see the still-empty railway track and the cutting and the pine forest. Patches of blue in the overcast sky.

At last, sensing that the train is about to round the bend, I press record.

The opening frame from my epic video of a train bawling round a bend just outside Brösarp in the Österlen region of Skåne, Sweden.

The spectacle that unfolds on the screen in my hands is nothing short of mind-blowing.

As I stand there spellbound, the old steam train comes barrelling around the bend in full cry. Its funnel jettisons smoke into the sky with majestic power. Its black fuselage tears through the cutting. Its whistle howls like a banshee.

Within seconds it’s past me, its packed carriages hurtling by. I swing around to capture the caboose disappear around the bend.

Within that brief period—twenty seconds, no more—an array of thoughts flit through my mind.

I think about Paul Theroux’s journey in The Old Patagonian Express. About his maddening companion, Thornberry. I think about Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. I think about my four-year-old son, and wish he was here with me to watch the train careening past.

And I think about my bike trip through Osterlen, which I am about to complete.

Once the train is definitely gone, I press the button on the screen once more to end the video. As I do so, a thrill runs through my body.

I have created a masterpiece of amateur cinematography, that much at least is certain. I will show the clip to my son and he will be awestruck. I shall post it to various social media services and then sit back as the torrent of likes and comments come in.

“Did you take this on a phone? Wow!”

—Nobody, ever.

But as I press the screen, I hear a click. It is the sound my device usually makes when I’ve taken a photo.

That’s when I realise I haven’t filmed the train bawling through the cutting at all.

In fact, I’d pressed the button at the beginning and taken a photo. (I hadn’t heard the click that first time, in the bedlam of the train’s approach). I’d then panned around and taken an imaginary video. And then I’d taken another photo once the action was over.

You can just make out the puffs of steam coming from the engine of the steam train that passed by this very spot. One second ago.

It would be too easy to think of this non-event as an indicator of the mindlessness of modern-day tourism.

I do indeed take a moment or two to reflect on my utter stupidity as I stare in turn at the two photos I had taken. They aren’t bad photos, by any means.

But neither of them features a train. Not to mention a mighty, old-fashioned steam engine. Spewing black smoke as it carves its way through a primeval Swedish forest.

Then I think of my son and feel a familiar wave of self-pity, tinged with self-hatred. A heady combo, that one. A kind of depression-induced cocktail I’d imbibed for over 30 years. (I’d actually stopped drinking more than a year before the day in question. But I still recognised the emotions that coursed through me back then.)

You (adj.) idiot! Time for a drink or six, eh?After three drinks, you can post those two photos on Instagram anyway. And to (sheol) with trains.

—My former (dispomaniac) self.

Yeah, that didn’t happen.

Instead, I ride the final two kilometres back to the village of Ravlunda, where I’d first hired the bike. Then I make my way back to Stockholm.

That homeward journey by bus and train takes around eight hours. By the end of it, I’ve almost forgotten my attempt at cinematography.

But I’d be lying if I said it spoilt my trip. If anything, that imaginary video made my four days in Österlen something special.

Something almost hyperreal.

11 May 2020 / 5 Comments

My Bloody Valentine, ‘Soon’ and the ideal song length

Size is not everything: just ask My Bloody Valentine

When I think about early-1990s indie, my mind immediately turns to a song by My Bloody Valentine, ‘Soon’. Originally released in 1990 on the Glider EP, it’s a swirling, strangely danceable mish-mash of deep grooves, shimmering guitars and barely-there vocals. It sums up the whole MBV vibe. And it’s also seven minutes long.

My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Soon’—this is the ‘radio’ video-only [h/t: Andrew in comments] edit of the song originally released on the Glider EP in 1990 and later remixed by Andy Weatherall (RIP).

For listeners who’ve grown up on free-form jazz or dub—or even Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation—a track of this length might seem trivial. To take one example, there are seven tracks on Miles Davis’ 1970 opus Bitches Brew, six of which clock in at 10 minutes or more. The title track alone is almost 27 minutes long.

In comparison, Wire’s debut album Pink Flag crams 22 songs into its exhilarating 35 minutes. The Pixies have only ever released one song that breaks the five-minute mark. Clearly, size is not everything. And in the context of pop, anything longer than three minutes could also be seen as extravagant.

Remembering My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Soon’

In the case of ‘Soon’, however, the surface-level extravagance quickly gives way to brilliance. Every second of ‘Soon’ is a triumph. From the opening snatches of faraway drum-machine sound effects through to the washes of guitar raining down on the massive fade-out, this is early-1990s indie at its absolute peak.

My Bloody Valentine's 'Soon' first appeared on the Glider EP.
The front cover from My Bloody Valentine’s Glider EP, issued in 1990. Sleeve by Designland.

MBV have not issued a longer or better track, before or since—unless you count Kevin Shields’ own remix of ‘Glider’ which, coming in at 10:20, is surely the most pointless thing they’ve ever done. You could also count every live performance of ‘You Made Me Realise’ (complete, naturally, with ‘holocaust’-style instrumental break) but that would be cheating.

Apart from the towering edifice that is ‘Soon’, MBV are reasonably consistent in terms of song length. This is not to say that anything else about the band is predictable. For instance, 1991’s Tremolo EP lists four tracks but actually contains three unlisted ‘codas’. Oh, and there’s that 20-plus year gap between albums thing.

My Bloody Valentine, ‘Soon’: “the vaguest piece of music ever”

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to think of ‘Soon’ as a remarkable and unusual piece of music. Who else would have the audacity to release such a song as a single? Brian Eno, in a 1990 lecture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, apparently described it as “the vaguest piece of music ever to get into the charts”.

Even a glancing review of the song’s lyrics would seem to confirm Eno’s observation. Sing this with me, if you can (otherwise, just hum along):

Wake up
Don’t fear
I want to
Love you
Yeah (doll of pain)
I let you get to me
Yeah yeah

My Bloody Valentine, ‘Soon’ (lyrics by Kevin Shields)

Then again, as MBV’s Kevin Shields himself admitted in a 1992 interview, the ‘official’ lyrics (and therefore any online annotation of them) are a load of absolute gobshite:

These people don’t just not want to talk about their lyrics. They’ll go to any lengths to avoid people even knowing what the lyrics are. They’ve even got round the problem of letting their publishers see the lyrics.

“I give them the titles,” says Kevin. “Then a girl at Creation listens to the songs and writes down what she thinks I’m singing. And that’s what she gives them. They’re actually more her lyrics than mine. And some of the discrepancies are hilarious.”

When Bilinda [Butcher] is asked about this later she bursts out laughing and says she never knew that. She seems delighted at Kevin’s ingenuity. But she then refuses, even in the face of undignified journalistic begging, to reveal so much as the first line of ‘Loomer’ off the [Loveless] album. Kevin himself admits he has “absolutely no idea” what she is singing.

David Cavanagh, ‘3AM Eternal’, Select (February 1992)

Indeed, it now seems quite extraordinary that the Glider EP did as well as it did. Wikipedia tells us the EP reached #2 on the UK indie charts in May 1990. Think about that while listening to the extended version of the challenging title track and let me know what you think about the musical tastes of the British listening public at that time.

A casette version of the Glider EP, on which My Bloody Valentine's 'Soon' first appeared.
Perhaps another reason for the success of My Bloody Valentine’s Glider EP was its availability as a ‘specially-priced mini-cassette’, although I have no data on what that price actually was.

But speaking of the UK listening public, it would be wrong to assume that ‘Soon’ was the longest or even the most challenging piece of music inflicted on them back then. There were at least 20 longer songs by indie acts released at the time (see Table 1). Including, ironically, ‘Soon’ itself, which is two seconds longer than the version later included on the Loveless LP.

Table 1. 20 early-1990s UK indie songs that are longer than My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Soon’*

RankBandTrack (Year)LengthNotes
1.SwervedriverNever Lose That Feeling/Never Learn (1992)11:51First appeared on the Never Lose that Feeling EP; later appended to the Mezcal Head LP.
2.The Stone Roses Breaking Into Heaven (1994)11:21The opening track from Second Coming.
3.RideGrasshopper (1992)10:56B-side to ‘Leave Them All Behind’.
4.Primal ScreamScreamadelica (1992)10:46Appears on the Dixie-Narco EP.
5.My Bloody ValentineGlider–Kevin Shields Remix (1990)10:20Appears on the 12″ version of the Glider EP.
6.Primal ScreamCome Together (1990)10:21Album version, not to be confused with the 12″ Weatherall remix (10:12)
7.VerveFeel (1992)10:42Appears on the ‘She’s a Superstar’ single.
8.The Stone Roses Fools Gold (1989)**9:54Released as a double a-side, with ‘What the World is Waiting For’.
9.Verve She’s a Superstar (1992)8:54Released as a single.
10.Verve Gravity Grave (1992)8:21Released as a single.
11.Ride Leave Them All Behind (1992)8:17Appears on Going Blank Again.
12.The Stone RosesI am the Resurrection (1989)**8:15Appears on The Stone Roses.
13.Slowdive Avalyn II (1990)8:10Appears on the Slowdive EP.
14.The La’sLooking Glass (1990)7:51Appears on The La’s.
15.The Stone Roses Something’s Burning (1990)7:50B-side to ‘One Love’.
16.The Stone RosesOne Love (1990)7:45Issued as a single only.
17.My Bloody ValentineSoon–Andrew Weatherall Remix (1990)7:34Appears on the 12″ version of the Glider EP.
18.The Charlatans Opportunity Three (1991)7:29Appears on the Over Rising EP.
19.Verve One Way To Go (1992)7:17B-side to ‘All In the Mind’.
20.My Bloody ValentineSoon (1990)7:00Appears on Glider and Loveless.
* The version of ‘Soon’ released on the 1991 Loveless LP has a track length of 6:58, while the original version on the 1990 Glider EP has a track length of 7:00. Therefore, ‘Soon’ is technically longer than itself, allowing it to constitute the 20th and final entry in this table. The table does not, of course, exclude the possibility of the existence of other songs by My Bloody Valentine (or by other bands that could be described as early-1990s UK indie) that are longer than 6:58.
** The Stone Roses’ eponymous album was released in 1989 in the UK but not until 1990 elsewhere, with ‘Fools Gold’ added as its final track.

20 early-1990s UK indie songs that are longer than MBV’s ‘Soon’: the playlist!*

* Note: the above playlist, compiled on Spotify, does not include several of the tracks listed in Table 1. To take one obvious example, My Bloody Valentine removed all of their tracks from Spotify in 2019. Primal Scream’s Dixie Narco EP is also not available on the Spotify platform—at least, not where I live. So, I’ve added Happy Mondays’ ‘W.F.L. (Think About the Future Mix)’ and the Wedding Present’s ‘Take Me’ as special bonus tracks, even though they were both released in 1989. And, to show that there are potentially hundreds more tracks that could go on this list, a couple of extra-special bonuses from Spiritualized and Stereolab.

Excessive and self-indulgent?

The question is: if size isn’t everything, then how should we evaluate these tracks? What’s remarkable is that Table 1 reveals that the excesses and indulgences of the period are concentrated in the releases of a handful of bands. The only big act missing is the Happy Mondays, who released their big remixes in 1989.

The over-10-minutes club

Be that as it may, let’s get critical. At the risk of repeating myself, Swervedriver’s ‘Never Lose That Feeling/Never Learn’ (11:51) is a totally bodacious track, and one that is fully deserving of its spot at the top of the table. If only because its long-form ‘coda’ featured unironic sax and sheets of reverb-drenched guitars.

Swervedriver: the good guys of early-1990s UK indie. Yeah.

But the Stone Roses’ ‘Breaking Into Heaven’? Well, it starts off okay, with four-and-a-half minutes of field recordings, tribal drums and atmospheric effects. But, 11 minutes and 21 seconds later, we’re left in no doubt as to who hogged all the cocaine during the recording sessions for The Second Coming.

This feeling of indulgence continues with the next five entries, all of which also ‘break’ through the 10-minute mark. Ride’s non-album track ‘Grasshopper’ (10:56) is all right, I guess, despite its lairy intro and OTT drumming. But, as with Kevin Shields’ ‘remix’ of ‘Glider’ (10:20), you’ll never get any of those 10 minutes back.

Things take a turn for the psychedelic—in a good way—once we reach the first of Primal Scream’s entries. In contrast to another of Ride’s turgid non-album tracks, ‘Going Blank Again’, I have no idea why ‘Screamadelica’ (10:46) never made it onto the Primal Scream album of the same name. It’s an absolute masterpiece.

Dixie Narco is apparently a brand of vending machine found in the United States. But I’m sure there’s some other reason why Primal Scream chose it as the name for this underrated EP.

‘Come Together’ (10:19), on the other hand, suffers from the fact that it has been played to death ever since its first release. To be honest, I’ve never totally understood the fusion of dance and gospel in early-1990s rave music, genre-wise. All that preachy hands-in-the-air crap really just lost me at the time and still does.

The less-than-10-minutes club

Verve’s early works, on the other hand, will never get old for me. Which is just as well, as with four tracks included here, I’ll need to say something significant. I’ve covered this territory before, but ‘Feel’ (10:42), ‘She’s a Superstar’ (8:54), ‘Gravity Grave’ (8:21) and ‘One Way To Go’ (7:17) are all blissed-out and barmy.

The inclusion of two Stone Roses tracks from 1989—’Fools Gold’ (9:54) and ‘I am the Resurrection’ (8:15)—may seem controversial. But in my defence, I only heard The Stone Roses in 1990, and these tracks both belong to that era, too. But the less said about ‘One Love/Something’s Burning’ (7:45 and 7:50, respectively) the better.

I always come back to Ride’s ‘Leave Them All Behind’ (8:17) as one of the cruellest stunts ever pulled on a band’s fans. Coming hot on the heels of the Today Forever EP, ‘Leave Them All Behind’ was a jaw-dropping, if bombastic, statement of intent whose true power was best experienced in a live setting.

You want fey? You want shoegaze? You got it. Ride live at Brixton Academy, 27 March 1992.

‘Leave Them All Behind’ suggested that Ride would continue exploring the noisy dynamics of earlier releases. It was obvious that this track would kick off the band’s second album, Going Blank Again. It all sounded so promising. And then Ride chose ‘Twisterella’ as the follow-up track and second single, and it all went to shite.

The 8-minutes-or-less club

How relieving, then, to turn to the ultimate shoegaze band, Slowdive, who could never be accused of selling out in the first place. ‘Avalyn II’ (8:10) is literally the blueprint for early-1990s dream pop. It takes a whole lot of time to get where it’s going, and that’s more than all right by me.

We now come to the La’s, the band who should have had it all. They released two single in 1990—I speak, naturally of ‘There She Goes’ and ‘Timeless Melody’—that wiped the floor with every other pop-rock song at the time. ‘There She Goes’ was actually first released in 1988 and has since been re-released three times.

‘Looking Glass’ (7:51), on the other hand, the epic final track on their eponymous 1990 debut LP, showcases frontman Lee Mavers’ gritty Liverpudlian accent. Its slow build and epic climax are reminiscent of the Stone Roses’ ‘I Am the Resurrection’. Sadly, once the song ended, so too did the recording career of the La’s.

The La’s perform ‘Looking Glass’ at LOndon’s Town & Country Club on 26 May 1989.

And so we come, finally, to the Charlatans, a band destined forever (in my mind at least) to be the poor person’s Stone Roses. But for a while there, around the release of their debut album Some Friendly, the Charlatans had a serious late-60s edgy vibe going on. It was like a duel between the Hammond organ and the indie riff.

‘Opportunity Three’ (7:29), which appeared on 1991’s Over Rising EP, might just be the most perfect encapsulation of that duel. It might also be around five minutes too long. And here we return to the problem of the ideal length of a song. Or to be specific, the perfect indie song length in the early 1990s.

The back cover from My Bloody Valentine's Glider EP, issued in 1990. Sleeve by Designland.
The back cover from My Bloody Valentine’s Glider EP, issued in 1990. Sleeve by Designland.

My Bloody Valentine, ‘Soon’ and the ideal song length

Because when it comes right down to it, some of us like long songs and the rest of us prefer something much shorter. The songs in Table 1 amount to over two hours of listening time. That’s about four Wire albums, or the entire Pixies discography up to 1991. It’s longer than a football match, or even a longish movie.

What was the thinking behind the release of these songs? Admittedly, some of them were b-sides, or else appeared on early EPs on which bands were ‘finding their voice’. But for other songs, one can’t help but think that the decision to release a 10-minute-long guitar track was simply self-indulgent.

In this context, My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Soon’ actually seems like an act of self-restraint. It’s also one of the very few tracks discussed in this post that is truly danceable, meaning that its length (7:00) is more than appropriate. There’s also something satisfyingly neat about the exactness of that run time. Perhaps, just perhaps, it’s the luckiest number of them all?

10 May 2020

Oasis’ Definitely Maybe and the end of indie

1990s UK indie bands were the best bands. You can take my word for it, even though I wasn’t in the United Kingdom at the time. But the older I get, the more clear it becomes that I’m actually a child of the early 1990s. A hazy period of my life which ended in 1994 with the release of Oasis’ Definitely Maybe.

Or let me put it another way. I’m a child of the 1970s and 1980s who left home in 1990. Which, um, was when early-1990s UK indie began. The fact that I graduated from university and got my first full-time job in 1994 provides a way to bookend that era. It also functions as a symbol of the personal nature of this post. 

You could also argue that 1989 was an even more significant year for 1990s UK indie. No to mention indie worldwide. That’s the subject of another post I don’t have time to write. ‘Or at least, not yet’, as David Gedge would say. But before we can get to the end of the era, we have to go back to the start. 

1990: [definitely not just] time for Guru

Do you remember Guru Josh? He was the guy who drew a line in the sand between the 1980s and the 1990s. Sure, he was doing so for reasons of self-interest and self-promotion. But the fact remains that 1990 was the start of a decade. One in which 1989 would never play a part. Guru Josh told us so.

“1990s: time for Guru.” RIP Paul Walden, Jersey’s greatest post-acid house DJ.

I left home the week Oxford shoegazers Ride released their first extended play (EP) record. This was back in the day when a lot of records still came out on vinyl. It was January 1990, the beginning of the greatest couple of years in UK indie. I was living in Australia at the time but in my mind I was living in the UK. 

Unfortunately, I knew nothing about shoegazing, Ride or UK indie. So there was a problem. Here’s another: I was a passionate R.E.M. fan, and still thought John Cougar Mellencamp had something. I listened to commercial FM radio. Noiseworks was the soundtrack to my antipodean summer of 1989/1990. 

It’s okay, we can all move on now. Okay? 

The first rumblings of indie? Maybe . . .

Then again, in my defence, in 1989 I was also into Australian indie. This was the actual soundtrack to my first summer out of high school. Ratcat’s That Ain’t Bad EP was brilliant. ‘That Ain’t Bad’, was not released in the 1990s. But by God Simon Day was indie. Didn’t hurt that he was hot as hell, either. 

Simon Day, of Ratcat, wasn’t from the UK. His best song, ‘That Ain’t Bad’, was not released in the 1990s. But by God he was indie.

The Hummingbirds’ loveBUZZ album was also fantastic. They named it after the Shocking Blue song Nirvana covered on Bleach. It was fourteen singles in a row. All with that R.E.M.-style Rickenbacker jangle. Which made sense, as Mitch Easter produced the album. That jangle was so hot at the time. 

But by 1990 it had dated a little. Despite my supposed indie  credibility, I was in for a shock. I started university in 1990 and fell  in with a bunch of guys who were into indie music. They were not only aware of UK indie but also lifetime subscribers to New Musical Express. Or so it seemed. 

Through them, I discovered a whole world of indie beyond R.E.M. And let’s face it, by 1990, R.E.M. were no longer indie anyway. They’d left behind the moody jangle of their IRS albums, starting with Murmur (1983). Instead, they’d begun taking a more direct and less mysterious approach. How fast things change! 

My quickfire indie education 

Well, to bring it back to me again, I started university in 1990. I spent my first two years of university living at a college on campus. I was in for a special kind of musical edumacation during those first heady months. My friend D.—whom I hadn’t seen since primary schol—had a formidable collection of music, all on cassette.

Some of what he played me was from the United States. The first time I heard Pixies’ Doolittle I almost shat myself. Music was not supposed to sound like this. FM radio had conditioned my ears to receive Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2U’. A song like ‘Tame’ was like a bottle of industrial toilet cleaner to the head. 

Sonic Youth’s music had a similar effect. Goo, when you think about it, is a terrifying album. Especially its second side. A song like ‘Mote’ or ‘Mildred Pierce’ would never get airplay on commercial FM radio. At first I wondered why a record company would even agree to release such music. 

Sonic Youth performing ‘Mildred Pierce’ from their 1990 album, Goo.

By the time I figured out where Triple J was on the FM dial that summer, it was all I listened to. But a lot of the local indie I listened to on Triple J was less aggresive. Ratcat and the Hummingbirds. Falling Joys, Clouds, the Fauves, Ripe. From across the Tasman, The Bats and Straitjacket Fits. 

Even so, UK indie had the biggest impact on me. Radio DJs spoke of these bands in hushed, even reverential tones. My Bloody Valentine, Ride, the Charlatans, the Wedding Present, and on and on and on. But what was 1990s UK indie anyway? 

And when did it end?

Definitely defining early-1990s UK indie

Definitions are annoying. But when you’re trying to be specific about something they can also be quite useful. Even when you’re trying to define a concept as slippery as early-1990s UK indie. The big question raised by such a concept, of course, is that of time. When did the early-1990s begin? And when did they end? But here are some more questions.

When did the early 1990s begin?

I define the early-1990s as starting in January 1990. We can argue all day about when a decade begins and ends. This kind of technical pedantry is not important to me. January 1990 is when I enrolled at university. So that’s when it started. 1990 was also the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so that’ll do me for significance.

The cover from Ride’s debut LP, Nowhere (1991). Not a Gallagher in sight.

What’s indie music?

I define ‘indie’ as independent. That means music issued independent of mainstream record labels. Or else via small, non-mainstream labels. This can be problematic. Many mainstream record labels own indie subsidiaries. But I don’t think it’s that big a deal. If it looks indie, sounds indie and feels indie, it’s indie.

What’s the United Kingdom?

I define the UK as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. At least for now. The Republic of Ireland is thus excluded from this definition. But bands featuring Irish-born musicians are okay. As long as they signed to a UK-based record label in the early 1990s and sounded indie.

Okay, ‘early-1990s UK indie’ what? 

Good question. In this post I’m referring, in the main, to indie rock, or guitar-based indie pop and/or rock. I also have a special  fondness for bands who issued EP records rather than singles. Although, as you can no doubt imagine, this is not a hard and fast rule.

When did the early 1990s end, then?

The early-1990s ended when Creation Records released Oasis’ Definitely Maybe in 1994. Which may sound harsh but write your own post if you disagree. Regardless, we’re talking about a very brief window in time. Needless to say, I do not regard Oasis as being an early-1990s UK indie band, in any shape or form.

Oasis’ Definitely Maybe and the end of early-1990s UK indie

But why? I hear you ask. What’s wrong with Oasis, anyway? Well, I need to back up a little and clarify a few things. Even so, Oasis fans are not going to like any of these clarifications, either. So let me state it straight: I dislike Oasis’ style of music. And the rest of this post will be about the reasons why I dislike it. 

Okay. The end of the early-1990s came not with a bang but a whimper. This whimper took the form of Oasis’ first single, ‘Supersonic’. But do you know what else happened in April 1994? Kurt Cobain shot himself, that’s what. The fact that he did so six days before the release of ‘Supersonic’ is irrelevant. 

Oasis' Definitely Maybe album was preceded by a number of singles, including Supersonic.
The cover of Oasis’ ‘Supersonic’ single, from 1994. Artwork by Brian Cannon/Microdot.

By the time Definitely Maybe came out on 29 August 1994, early-1990s indie was dead. You might say the era had been on life support ever since the release of Ride’s third album, Carnival of Light, on 20 June. Definitely Maybe amounted to indie’s grieving relatives flicking off the switch.

To be clear: I don’t mind driving guitar rock, as long as there’s an attitude that comes with it I can also stomach. That’s why I can listen to Bob Mould excoriate himself on the harrowing Sugar EP Beaster. It’s also why Swervedriver are so choice. But I cannot bear the Gallagher brothers’ whining swagger. I can’t stand it.

The casualties of Oasis’ war on indie

The fascinating thing about Oasis is the way they managed to kill off many of their predecessors. Take Ride, for instance. Although Oasis waited until 1999 to recruit Andy Bell, the damage was already done. Many indie bands either disbanded or reinvented themselves around 1994. And for that I also blame Oasis. 

Verve were doing great until 17 May 1994. That was when they released the b-sides album No Come Down under the moniker The Verve. Sure, they’d changed their name to head off a legal battle with Verve Records. But when Definitely Maybe came out three months later, Verve were yesterday’s news. 

The cover for Oasis' definitely Maybe was designed by Brian Cannon, who also produced Verve's album and EP covers.
The cover of Verve’s ‘She’s a Superstar’ single, from 1992. Artwork also by Brian Cannon/Microdot. Do you see a pattern emerging here?

Lush, another of the great early-1990s indie bands, released some top EPs and albums. Then, on 13 June 1994, came Split, a mish-mash of melancholy in search of a pulse. It marked the end of the band’s indie sound. The Britpop style evident on the 1996 follow-up, Lovelife, said it all. Oasis was to blame. 

I could go on. Is it a coincidence that My Bloody Valentine failed to release anything at all between 1992 and 2013? Or might Oasis have been to blame for that as well? And why did The La’s find it impossible to release anything after their 1990 debut? Because Noel Gallagher gave them the kiss of death, that’s why. 

Remembering (and letting go of) Oasis and the early 1990s 

Nostalgia is a complex beast. It makes us long for whatever was good about the past, while shielding us from what was crap. I’ll be the first to admit that my feelings about the early 1990s as a cultural moment remain compromised. I can still conjure up the emotions evoked by the music of that time. But I’ve forgotten the time itself. 

This is inevitable, of course. Many people who grew up in the 1990s now find themselves contemplating mortality. We should be so lucky to have lived so long, unlike some of our heroes at the time. I count myself lucky to have seen some bands at the height of their powers. And to have avoided a real run-in with death. 

Because death is never far away when you contemplate the end of a specific era. In my case, the death is metaphorical—it’s a letting-go, or an acceptance of time passing. It won’t stop me from slagging off Oasis, or writing blog posts about early-1990s bands I love. But maybe—erm, I mean, definitely—that’s what life’s all about. 

People standing on a shoreline at sunset
Photo by Vishal Davde on Unsplash.
9 May 2020

Flygskam be damned: my flight-free year

It’s now been over a year since I was last inside an aeroplane. This doesn’t feel like a major milestone at all. Which may have something to do with the fact that most people can’t go inside an aeroplane at the moment either. But I’m writing this post as an act of celebration. Because my flight-free year was an active choice. A choice I’m anything but ashamed of. Flygskam be damned!

Flygskam: pronunciation, definition, translation

You may have heard of a certain buzzword doing the rounds: flygskam. It’s a Swedish word (pronounced fleegh-scamm) that’s often translated as ‘flight-shame’. Not that there’s any real doubt about what it means. But translation can be problematic. Take the Danish word hygge. Something ephemeral gets lost in the English approximation of ‘coziness’. 

The same may be true for flygskam. That could be because the specific type of shame alluded to is Swedish in origin. I don’t mean in the way that an IKEA shelf or Stefan Edberg is Swedish in origin. But does shame operate in a peculiar way in Sweden? What does flygskam means to a Swede? And does that matter? As Mette Kahlin Mcveigh points out:

. . . it is not just Swedes who feel guilty about their carbon footprints: the Finnish have invented lentohapea, the Dutch say vliegschaamte, and the Germans use flugscham.

—Mette Kahlin Mcveigh, foreword to Beyond Flygskam

Staffan Lindberg may have coined (paywalled and in Swedish) the term flygskam in 2017. Greta Thunberg has also used the term as part of her worldwide school strike for climate. Last year flygskam began to attract attention in the usual English-language news outlets. In fact, a simple web search returns thousands of articles on the subject. But few interrogate the ‘Swedishness’ of flight shame. 

So, as I’m also Swedish—yes, hard to imagine, but true—I figure it’s okay if I try to put into words what flygskam means to me. This may be more useful than arguing about the environmental impacts of air travel. And less stressful than doing so in online, below-the-line forums. Not that I’ve had time to do either of those things now that I’m living in a Zen, post-flygskam paradigm. 

The pre-flygskam paradigm: business as usual

This is the part where I run the risk of coming across as either a climate evangelist or a clueless carbon hog. Or both. I’m quite capable of seeing the contradictions in what I’m about to tell you. They no doubt sound familiar to anyone who’s spent a lot of time in crowded departure lounges. Or standing in long security screening queues. Or waiting at baggage carousels.

The thing is, the pre-flygskam me liked to think that the act of flying was a time saver and a great convenience. And in some ways, that’s quite true. It goes without saying that Stockholm–Sydney is a journey that’s quicker by plane. But a whole bunch of other things about that journey tend to go unsaid, too. And if you’ve ever flown, I have no doubt that you know what they are. 

The stress of packing. The night without sleep because you were afraid you might not hear your alarm. The one, two, three or five-hours spent getting to the airport. The queue to check in your luggage. The even longer queues in the security screening area. The guard rummaging through your hand luggage. The abomination that is the only route through a duty-free shop. 

That’s on a good day. On a bad day you can add the flight delayed by a ‘weather event’, or an ‘engine malfunction’ (never good). The departure time you misread because you were in too much of a hurry. Then the sprint to passport control. The mind-numbing idiocy of passport checks. Arriving at the gate, drenched in sweat. Yet another delayed flight. Your child who defecates at the gate. 

Do I sound like I’m whining? Trust me, I’m only getting warmed up. We haven’t even stepped into the plane yet. My point is that I used to think of all this as business as usual. But there’s a problem with that kind of thinking. It discounts or ignores the amount of thinking it takes to get yourself onto that plane. The effort required to not think about how crap it all is. 

George Carlin said it better than I ever could. A ‘near miss’ is a near hit!

Interrogating the in-flight ‘experience’

Because the in-flight experience is garbage. If you’re tall, you’ll do things to your legs even a gymnast wouldn’t try. If you’re short, or small, you’ll end up surrounded by extra-tall people who’ll take your space. And if your bum happens to be even one inch wider than the width of the seat, well, good luck with that. Don’t even get me started on hand luggage or overhead bins.  

Cramming humans into miniature ‘seats’ is an extension of the business-as-usual approach. It’s another one of those things that go without saying. Which means it still needs saying. Otherwise, why are we even here? What’s the upside of this ‘experience’? The time savings? What is your time even worth? Do you have a personal daily rate, based on your own inherent value? 

That coprolitic—but complimentary!—coffee served up by your cheerful cabin attendant? It is not worth your precious time. That in-flight magazine? An advertising fatberg only redeemed by its lack of activity trackers. That plastic-wrapped ‘cookie’ you munched while gazing at the landscape thirty-thousand feet below? Is this what you paid for? Are you enjoying your flight yet?

I’m yet to see the logical end-game of the budget airline philosophy but it can’t be far off. A fuselage interior stripped of all artifice, including seats, overhead bins and toilets. Passengers wearing parachutes, strapped to the walls, watched over by defence force personnel. I’m not sure if it is possible to remove all oxygen from the fuselage, but it would be worth a shot. 

In this scenario, there would no longer be any need for the traditional captain’s address. Flight times, atmospheric conditions—irrelevant. Get me to my destination. Make it quick and cheap. Well, you wanted it; you got it. Now, leap out via a side door into the radiant atmosphere, somewhere over central London. Hope to see you again. Thanks for flying with us. 

Three abandoned aeroplanes covered with illustrative art. Do they feel flygskam too?
Avion De Los Muertos. Photo by AJ Yorio on Unsplash.

The unseen power of guilt and shame 

Here’s another thing that often goes without saying. Shame is a powerful and damaging emotion. Pretty much everyone experiences it at some stage. Quite a few of us also manage to spend a fair bit of time shaming other people during our all-too-brief lifespans. Yeah, shaming is a thing, all right. Flight shaming. Parent shaming. Online shaming. Fat shaming. 

When parents travel with babies on planes, this can provoke the first two types of shaming. If that shaming occurs in an online forum, you might call that the shaming trifecta. And if either or both parents’ bums are too big to fit in the Economy Class seats, well, you’ve come away with the quinella. Go you. Recline that seat of yours as far as you can. We’ll be here all night. Screaming. 

The thing is, I didn’t feel ashamed about flying at all until I had children. Which seems odd, in hindsight. Because I’d spent the previous decade burning through my lifetime personal carbon allocation. And the allocations of quite a few other people who had not yet had an opportunity to step onto an aeroplane. I didn’t feel bad about it at the time. I like to tell myself I had no idea. 

But stepping from the jetway and into a plane with a baby for the first time was a whole new experience. It felt like I was holding a miniature foghorn with no silent mode. Sure, much of the shame I felt was imaginary, or self-inflicted. Why had I even agreed to have this baby in the first place? But as I continued to travel in planes, with one and then two children, that shit started to get real. 

Passengers with infants on long-haul flights are already at a disadvantage. They cannot choose where to sit; the airline allocates their seats for them. In this high-pressure environment, shame is only centimetres away at any given time. Those pensioners who thought they were getting a good seat with extra legroom? Oh no, they’re sitting next to a baby. Why weren’t they warned? 

It’s the dirty looks. The rolling eyes. Do they have to sit here? The drunk concern-troll ‘congratulating’ you after a 14-hour flight sans screaming. Feel free to foul up the cabin with your complimentary alcohol, mouth-breather! Meanwhile we’re flat out making sure a miniature person doesn’t spoil your ‘journey’. No, don’t thank me. Congratulate me instead. Thank you for flying with us. 

Interrogating shame, parenthood and personal responsibility

This is the sort of shame that once made me feel glad about my own decision to stop flying. At the time, that decision had everything to do with feelings of guilt and shame. Guilt that I was contributing to an environmental catastrophe. Shame that I was implicating my children in it. And a dirty combo of guilty shame about having kids at all. I myself was to blame. For everything.

At first, this made it quite easy to honour my commitment to a flight-free year. I consulted online carbon calculators and managed to survive a long train trip. I delved into the train-based travel writings of Paul Theroux. But then my guilt and shame began to wane. In their place, anger and frustration emerged. Two emotions which, if not resolved, can lead to a form of depression. 

My anger and frustration stemmed from many issues. Only one of these was the supreme selfishness of my airline travel. But I began to feel that my guilt and shame may not have been necessary or useful at all. Did my emotions lead me to make that decision for the wrong reasons? Why beat myself up about my past actions, when I’d already made a decision to act in a different way? 

To be clear: I’ve chosen to have children and to reduce my reliance on air travel. I’m still grappling with the contradictory dynamics of such a choice. Because one aspect of parent shaming is the argument that having kids is bad for the environment. And that it’s much worse than anything else you might ‘do’. In this context, choosing not to travel in aeroplanes becomes irrelevant.  

So, what am I trying to say? That I don’t need to feel bad about my personal choices? That merely attempting to justify my own actions absolves me of responsibility? That the world isn’t overpopulated? That there is no climate emergency? That I’m all right Jack, and get off my lawn? Oh, and by the way, screw everybody who doesn’t think the same way as me on any issue?

Well, if you’ve read this far, you’ve also (I hope) realised that I’m not saying any of those things. What I’m saying is that complex notions of shame and guilt have affected a lot of what I do. Not to mention my feelings about a lot of what I cannot undo. I’m not going to continue making personal decisions based on guilt. But to own these decisions I first need to destroy my shame. 

People standing on a shoreline at sunset. No flygskam here.
Photo by Vishal Davde on Unsplash.

Flygskam be damned: celebrating a flight-free life

At the beginning of this post I wondered how shame operates in Sweden. I don’t know enough to generalise but I suspect it operates the same here as it does everywhere else. Someone does or says something (or else exists). Someone else responds to that. They don’t like it. They want that first person to know that. Then the first person feels bad. This creates shame, which then circulates. 

I’m simplifying, of course. But one could see this process in action on the aningslösa influencers Instagram account. The account (now inactive) called out ‘clueless’ celebrities for their flight emissions. This, of course, generated debate within the Swedish media about the power of shame. In other words, about shame’s usefulness when it comes to changing behaviour. 

A lot of this power, as far as I can see, is imaginary. We hold celebrities to standards we’d never apply to ourselves. And celebrities, in turn, use that freedom in bizarre ways. Thus demonstrating how little attention we should be paying to them in the first place. But we humans are strange beasts. We’ll shame anyone as long as we don’t need to interrogate ourselves. 

I don’t want to make anyone feel good or bad about the decisions I’ve made in my life. I also don’t appreciate anyone attempting to make me feel bad, based on their own decisions. But shame is such an insidious emotion. Even when people try to make me feel good about myself I’m often unsure whether I should believe them. But there’s an easy way out of that miserable labyrinth. 

I’m looking forward to celebrating my flight-free year. I’ll do so in a way that’s appropriate to the scale of the achievement. I plan on not thinking about airlines and flying at all. I don’t need a hashtag to prove I’m right. And when my baby boy—who has never flown on an aeroplane—turns one, I’ll celebrate it all over again. Happy to be, if not grounded, then at the very least on the ground. 

Postscript

How I got through over 2,000 words without mentioning Covid-19 is a mystery to me. But it’s one I’m happy not to bother solving. None of what I have written has anything to do with Covid-19. I do feel for the millions of people now forced to interrogate the value of their own air travel. But I’m pretty sure once this is all over most of us won’t give a shit. Even so, thank you for not flying.  

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