It's Just About Christmas ...

I have a little bit of a thing - an obsession. I collect Christmas albums, and the odder the better. The XFM indie collection "It's a cool, cool, christmas" is probably my favourite but at the moment I am loving the great Sufjan Stevens' masterpiece of 5 eps in a box "Songs for Christmas". Build around a banjo, woodwind and softly breathed voices this is a reworking of original hymns coupled with nely written Christmas pop. Nothing gets me more in the mood.

Les Miserables

Never shy of a challenge I have bitten off a chunk of French literature and begun Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. So far, despite it being very discursive and vague (imagine Thackery with a french accent and twice as many words) it is really rather good and the good stuff is just beginning - Fantine has been abandoned, Jean Valjean's soul claimed for God, etc. When I put the book by the bedside last night and switched out the light Fantine had just come across the Thenadier's inn and been fooled by the apparrent domesticity. A quick listen to the soundtrack of the musical tells me this is not a good idea. Don't leave Cosette there, for Pete's sake!

I'll tape it for you

What was once the future is now the past but I have an oblong place in my heart for the humble tape. We used to argue about whether chrome or metal was any good and if anti-noise or hiss-reduction actually did anything. Any bag or satchel I had usually had three or four scummy old cassettes in them and there was a skill to spooling up unwound specimens with a biro. We soon discovered that 120 min tapes sagged in the middle and 60 mins could not fit an LP.
The D90 was the king of cassettes and it's apotheosis, the compilation or "mix" tape. We spent hours labelling the things in tipp-ex and felt-pen, making intricate collages to decorate the box. No adolescent relationship every bore fruit without the exchange of home-made tapes labelled things like "Groovy Tunes" and "Wierd Stuff, Vol II".
It's true. The best album is the one you make yourself.

Jango

This, my dear hearts, is the best thing in the world. Pack it like an i-pod with your favourite artists and bask in the honey. Free and joyful.

As Blessed as Sleep Itself

My good friend Tom introduced me to this soft, felt-and-cellophane gem of a movie directed by the french enfant-mirable Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). It is a soft-centred but bittersweet exploration of creativity, child-like states, responsibility and the double-edged sword that is the world of dreams. Imagine a Woody Allen Film made by Truffaut drunk on Bailey's Irish Cream and you would be nowhere near. It is intensely french yet has the whimsy of a Belle & Sebastian Album. Indulge and dream.

Mingus Ah Um

I haven't felt this way about a Jazz album since I bought "Blue Trane" 10 years ago. The opening track "Better Git It In Your Soul" is a thundering mash of gospel and blues with handclaps and primal shouts. Why can't all Jazz sound like this? Mingus is an obese, pugnacious genius, singing on the double bass and like an immense lark, leading his sidesmen up into a ragged, melodious heaven.

Pickle

At the weekend, Autumn acolyte that I am, I made my own breed of chutney, a kind of mutant branston I call "Bramley-Balsamic Pickle"

Take 500g (peeled and cored) of english cooking apples and chop roughly. Put in a large pan. Add a roughly chopped medium onion, 50g sultanas, 250g brown sugar, 250 ml dark balsamic vinegar and 100ml water. Pinch of salt and pepper and 1/2 a deseeded chilli. Add spice to taste (teaspoon of cinnamon and clove should do it) and bring to the boil. When the mix boils turn down the heat, cover 3/4 with a lid and simmer for 40 mins on medium. When it is pretty gooey reduce until a sticky, chutney like consistency is reached. Add scalding to pre-sterilised jars (i.e., wash, scald then dry in a warm 140 degree oven - lids too!) Lid immediately without touching the inside and invert to scald the lid. These will be perfect in 3-4 weeks. Keep in the fridge once open and eat with english cheeses, apples and celery.

Tweed for Breakfast?

Noah and the Whale are the new sound of my autumn and I'm having a pretty shitty autumn. I have been ill, my son has been ill, my car was hit by a van, the exhaust fell off, my boiler has broken (£60 call out!) the gas sent us a triple bill, I still have no renewal documents from my car insurance and the building society cocked up our remortgage.

However, the sweet melodies of this fine mess of sods from Twickenham is getting me through. Listen and love.

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Pioneers of otherly music the Penguin Cafe combine minimalist folk with baroque classical to produce a kind of baggy-trousered music of the spheres. The joy of discovering a band like this cannot be described.

Adem - for the child in all of us.

Adem makes joyous music with odd clusters of instruments. His records are perfect for cozy days baking bread or soring out the button box with rain on the windows.

The Real Deal

After Susan Hill's rather unsatisfying straightforward The Woman In Black (saw the ending coming a mile off) I had to give myself the willies properly with the daddy of them all: M R James. James is the master of place and detail and his suspenseful accrual of horror is second to none. His ghosts are rarely ghosts; more often agents of supernatural malevolence - things which should have been left well alone, but (fortunately for the reader) were not. The illustration on the jacket of this new Penguin reissue is from the creepy and horrifying "Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad", one of the high points of the genre. I cannot recommend enough spending 1/2 an hour in the eerie company of this skilled technician and frightmaster.

It's Autumn, Therefore I Read Ghost Stories...

Every year when the mists descend and the evenings draw in I turn to ghost stories. I can't help myself. I usually wallow in the master of the form M R James. James is unimpeachably the king of the genre, but this year I have tried Susan Hill's The Woman in Black. As a modern literary novel it does little more than tell a spooky story well, but at the moment, this is enough. For me, the experience of reading Susan Hill's fiction is rather like swimming on Hastings beach. Her opening chapters are often clumsily and lumpily written as if she wishes to defer the main event with necessary preliminaries - these always feel forced and a bolt-on chore. It is like hirpling (it's a word!) over pebbles barefoot to get to the ocean. Once into the plot it is all sweet swimming and no more lumps. Unfortunately for me the last Susan Hill I read was the execrable Mist in the Mirror (last years spook-fest). This was all pebbles and no sea. Pitiful. Still, as I type this at work I am looking forward to drawing the curtains and getting into bed with the mysteriously emaciated and malevolently purposeful Woman in Black.

Christening

This is my son Joe being baptised two weeks ago. The priest is called David Morphy, and that's me and my wife Sam. Joe is struggling behind the font. We followed this with a picnic in the park and lollies all round.

More Sax Please, We're British

To celebrate my love of all things Jazz and to showcase the gimlet eye of this outstanding young photographer, I am posting this picture by rising star Sophie Borazanian. There is a link to her excellent blog, left.

Isn't this picture just a piece of class?

Beyond Black

I have just finished this acclaimed novel by Hilary Mantel. Its premise is an intriguing one, that a very gifted psychic cannot bring herself to share the terrible realities of the afterlife with her clients, so flimflams them in the usual manner whilst enduring the tortures of characters from her abused past who she referrs to as "the Fiends".

It is a dark and harrowing book, but the psychic, scars-of-childhood sections are pointlessly lightened by long sections of suburban satire which are tepid and aimed at easy targets (neighbourhood watch - new build estates).

It could do with being half the length and twice as creepy, but I finished it, which is something. Another Murakami next. Huzzah.

Amazing Characters

I found this on the Paris Review website. It is the first manuscript page of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. Isn't it amazing? It blows my mind that anyone can make literature in such alien characters.It is so far from my own comfort zone. There is so little I can really call my skills. This gave me a warm feeling inside.

To a Japanese blogger I will seem very naive and innocent but I find this a beautiful and uncanny object and want to celebrate it.

This Bird Has Flown

I have just finished reading probably the best known Japanese-language book of the last fifty years, Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. It is a coming-of-age tale of sorts, told in Murakami's trademark flat, almost naive style. I don't know what I love so much about Murakami. Any attempt to describe why I find his work compelling sounds lame - but I could name the likeably flawed, cultured and fragile central characters, the accumulation of quotidian detail about coffee, cigarettes and so many bowls of miso and noodles, the obsession with jazz and hip sixties pop or the blossomings of explicit sex dotted innocently throughout the narrative.


Close reading of the book shows that the lyrics of Lennon & McCartney's classic song resonate throughout the plot which tells of a young boy whose life is blighted by the early suicide of a best friend who then finds himself tied emotionally, erotically and metaphysically to the friend's ethereal and brittle lover Naoko. His attempts to live in the world of the living and not just exist in the world of the dead form the main drive of the narrative. The most refreshing and loveable character for me is Midori (Japanese for green), a sexually adventurous and fun-loving girl who has her own share of pain but stands in the book for the pert, fickle, unquenchable flame of life.

YouTube - Breathless

A Year Today

It's my wedding anniversary this weekend. A year ago today Sam and I were motoring over the border into Wales with our best suits in cellophane and butterflies in our tummies. It was a lovely weekend. We stayed in a gorgeous country house hotel overlooking the exquisite 10th century church of St Andrews where we were married. This is the view (bathed in sunlight and birdsong) which greeted us when we woke that morning. The guys and myself treated Sam to a rendition of Nick Cave's "Breathless" after the service. See it on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQDMZMjAhG0

Astral Weeks

My towpath travails are being augmented this week by the amazing sixties masterpiece Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. It is a quite indescribable mix of celtic folk, baggy-assed sixties jazz and white soul and it has made the canal bank vibrate beneath my cycle with colour and rhythym this week. We are featuring it on our show, The Classic Albums Podcast this issue, along with Oasis' execrable Definitelly Maybe.

Wordsworth's "Exquisite" Sister

Despite being very happily married I am finding myself falling for another woman. Mercifully she is long dead, but I have been reading the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, the sister and lifelong companion of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. They are wonderful pieces of writing, less so the Alfoxden Journal of 1798, but the Grasmere Journal, written between 1800 and 1803 when Dorothy was in her early thirties and living with William at Dove Cottage (above, today) are remarkable, an understated poetic joy written by an individual, loveable young woman. What a sad loss that she never married (not that one must marry, but that she never knew the sustenance of reciprocal erotic love). Her favourite word seems to be "soft" but others spoke of her "wild eyes", a living example of Cathy, perhaps.

This sentence is not true.

Wow. Last night I finished Ishiguro's pretty much undisputed masterpiece, The Remains of the Day, which many will know through the excellent film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. It is an exquisite novel with once more, as ever with Ishiguro, a deluded, unreliable narrator in Stevens, an ageing Butler looking back over his life, who lies to himself and in the process lies to the reader. The construction of the novel is excellent, its dialogue diamond hard and honed to crystalline perfection and the gradual dawning of the truth, romantic or political, is absolutely devestating. I have read 5 out of Ishiguro's 6 novels so far (4 this year) and although they are all subtle, high quality works, this is without a shadow of a doubt his finest achievement: a meditation on class, love, free will and dignity that will make you question your own motives and make you make the most of the remains of your day.

Welcome Joe

This is me and my newborn son Joe. He's the most perfect thing I have ever seen.

A Pale View of Hills

I got this for my birthday (35 last week!) and finished it in the wee small hours last night. I love Ishiguro's work. His central idea is that his narrators lie - through their teeth - and do such a good job of it that it is easy to read a story and wonder where the story is. This creepy and compelling book concerns a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England who is ostensibly recovering from the suicide of her daughter. Her memories take her back to the hot summer of 1946 when Japan was recovering from the fallout of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. All the trauma, shell-shock and horror is subsumed into an icy narrative where lies, self-delusion and even hallucination draw a veil over confusing and terrible events. Ishiguro is a brave and original writer and I adored this book.

Time Gentlemen Please

Finished Last Orders, the story of four ageing cockney geezers taking their friend Jack's ashes to Margate to be scattered and ruminating on life, war and misery along the way. Based loosely on Faulkner's far more satisfying As I Lay Dying it deals with mortality, truth and lies and the secrets which lie in every heart.

I found it pretty good. I feel the novel took a while to get going and for a while Swift's attempts to reproduce the voices of embittered, sozzled, working-class Bermondsey men is an act of ventriloquism rather than of characterisation and at the beginning, I can see his lips moving.

That said, the novel does have strength, although whether the convoluted time-structure was needed to tell what is essentially a simple story is unclear. Like many very male books it comes to life when the women finally get their chance to speak. Amy's sections are illuminating and tender and one feels that for all the talk about Jack it is Amy's tale, and maybe June's. One thinks of the way that Molly Bloom's monologue sets light to all that has come before in Ulysses or how Addie Bundren, speaking from her coffin in As I Lay Dying, opens up can after can of tender, heartbreaking worms.

I have now received and begun Chatterton, which so far is rather mannered and baroque but I like a good literary puzzler so shall persist.

Remember Ride?

I was a bit of an indie kid in my youth and in many ways still am. The sun came out this weekend, co-inciding with my purchase of "Waves", the BBC sessions buy one of my favourite bands of the nineties, Ride. Ride started as a melodic, white-noise outfit (kind of Sonic Youth meets The Smiths) and progressed to more and more hippy, trippy, 60s influences until imploding in the second half of the decade.

On "Waves", a great selection for fans, I came across a hitherto unknown and joyous cover of The Pale Saints' Sight of You which has put a grin on my face which a day at work has not yet rubbed off. Beautiful. The BBC session of Like a Daydream is luscious too. Ah, indie, what has become of you?

The Orphanage

I love a good scare and last week my friend Simon and I went to see the new Spanish shocker The Orphanage (El Orphanato). It is highly recommended and one of the more frightening ghost-type films I have seen, like a scarier The Others or a more intricate Sixth Sense. The central set-piece with Geraldine Chaplin in green-screen infra-red light is truly pant wetting and I think Simon and I watched most of it through parted fingers, popcorn forgotten.

Early in the Morning

I generally cycle anywhere I can. I have a Black traditional style Giant bike and favour the towpath of the Worcester canal as a route to work. I have quite a stressful job and that 15 minute trundle calms me down and sets me up for the day.

Last year I would generally have Nick Drake or Belle & Sebastian on the old MP3 player but since spring has come I am finding just the birdsong to be enough. There are chiff-chaffs everywhere at the moment and as I pass this bridge (not my photo, but the real bridge) there is a thrush imitating a mobile phone. I have heard it two mornings in a row. You can't beat the sound of birds on a spring morning, nor the sight of the mist rising from the water while the denizens of the boats and launches are still fast asleep.

YouTube - Richard Thompson - Bright Lights Tonight - Videowest 81

YouTube - Richard Thompson - Bright Lights Tonight - Videowest 81
Song of the week for me! I bought the LP last week and as lovely as it is, nothing touches this central song with its wintery glamour and Linda Thompson's luscious voice. What tips it over the edge of greatness is the spinechilling silver band offering backup, something I've never heard before and matched only by The Pale Saints' limited 7" of "A Thousand Stars Burst Open" covered by a colliery band. That was somthing else.

This cut isn't the original of course but flip, can that guy play?

A Bit Of Ackroyd

Too lazy to keep a diary I thought I would blog. Visitors are welcome to the site and I would love to recieve messages but this is as much for me to record the things which make me feel life is worth living as to share it with others. I am on a bit of a Peter Ackroyd Kick at the moment, having just finished his excellent novel "The Fall of Troy".
As this is based on the life of the real archaeologist Heinrich Schlielmann it sent me scurrying to Wikipedia for some welcome innacuracies. I am waiting on a dirt-cheap internet-bought "Chatterton" by Ackroyd and in the meantime am keeping myself busy with Graham Swift's '96 Booker Winner "Last Orders" which is just getting good. Last night I stuck on Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto and got lost in the book.