Nice Celebrity of the Week in my books: Mr Steve Coogan.
My brother Tom has recorded a demo solo CD under the name Son of Kong. Samples, instrumentals, breakbeats (whatever they are). He was always the technically astute member of the family. One track is based around samples from the series “I’m Alan Partridge”. It’s called “Norwich is an Attitude”. To trounce this, the track after that is an answering machine message from Steve Coogan, thanking him both in character as Alan P, and as himself, after Tom sent him a copy.
And so I’m shamefacedly reminded of all the letters and emails I have still yet to reply to, some of them months old. I’m really, really, really sorry, about this, everyone. Steve Coogan, proper celebrity, thanks my brother personally and there’s me, hardly a household name, hardly hard at it every night on a West End stage, and I’m too hopeless to reply to all of them. Please write again if you are out there expecting a reply. I’m trying to be better, honest.
You can buy the Son of Kong CD (which also won Demo of the Month in Mix Magazine) by writing c/o 27 Woodbridge Road, Ipswich, Suffolk IP4 4NX, UK.
I buy the new Billy Childish offering: “17% Hendrix Was Not The Only Musician”. Artwork, photos, poetry, fiction, music and manifestos, the latter about starting a war between Artists and Critics: “Only a pompous fool would de-sky a hawk, tack out its mortal guts, rummage around in its very entrails and then declare themselves to now understand beauty… The critic must be forced to his knees and made to apologise in public for his deceitfulness and the error of his ways… Under no circumstances should the artist ever strike the vile critic, even when being stroken.”
Sadly, I have a tendency to not only stroke critics, even chasing some critics with sycophantic unctuousness as if I need their approval (but I’m trying to put a stop to this particular character fault, not so much turning the other cheek but ripping it off my face and throwing it into the worldview of my detractors) but have actively befriended a few of those who have stroken my own putridly outsized head. My only defence is that I see these critics as quasi-artists in comparison to their more thick, ugly, two-faced colleagues. Certainly they’re more like artists than some of the artists they have to write about. One of my favourite writers, Dorothy Parker, was a critic. I think I’d have to part the Red Sea of Hacks here. There are two kinds: the Critics and the Basically A Good Person But Still A Critic Critics.
I understand one of the latter gaggle, Mr Andrew Mueller, formally of the IPC gang but now at the British broadsheets, reads these pages. We once appeared together on a national live radio discussion show talking about pop music. At one point he cited The Ronettes as a Motown group. I corrected him on air. “The artist should educate the critic”, after all. (Wilde). Hi, Andrew.
Actually, I tend to wince at the use of the term “artist” when describing bands and groups. Too American star-system for me. Too precious.
Billy Childish even once released a single with his band, Thee Headcoats, called “We hate the Fucking NME”. This week, he’s interviewed by the, er, NME. More proof that all you have to do to earn unconditional respect is to just not be young and new. Mitigating circumstances will always endear you to the British press and public. The Captain Scott syndrome. Such circumstances include your rhythm guitarist going missing (Manics). And being about for ages, ideally now past 30 (Pulp, Childish). And appearing to be thick and uncultured (Liam Gallagher). It’s easier to respect someone that you don’t think “sickening swine, they’ve got everyone, they’re superior, richer, better-looking, younger, more intelligent, more cultured and happier than me”. Mitigate just one of these criteria and the world is allowed to be yours.
Good interview, though.
I have only ever been an occasional critic myself, and even then only because I wanted to praise some otherwise overlooked gem. One aspect of critic life I find particularly baffling is their approach to each other. They’ll happily gossip away when artists get romantically involved with each other, but once an artist literally sleeps with the enemy, the critics close ranks around their own kind with the kind of protective furour not usually seen outside the White House. Very odd. Taylor Parkes (Melody Maker) and Lauren Laverne (Kenickie) were a fairly well-known couple in public while they lasted, but it was never mentioned in the press, only hinted at or skirted around with cowardly innuendo. Even Mr Parkes’ previous coupling with fellow critic Caitlin Moran was far more talked about in the press, not least by themselves, yet they were both in the same line of work. Just not on opposite sides of the trenches, one presumes. I’m reminded of those World War One American recruiting posters depicting the Kaiser as a savage, slavering mad-eyed ape dragging off a helpless damsel, with the slogan “Destroy This Mad Brute – Enlist”. The Kaiser and our own American-allied King George were, of course, close family cousins.
Similarly odd is the way critics will otherwise turn on each other, hating a band purely because they’re not keen on the other bands liked by the critic who likes said band. Much like me and my brother when we were growing up together: he got Frank Zappa, The Cult and Hendrix, I got New Order and the Smiths. We never crossed over territories, perish the thought. Likewise at IPC Towers, Critic A is averse to finding room in his heart for Critic B’s pet groups, and Critic B goes out of his way to slate Orlando for the same reason. This is a terrible shame to me, because I suspect Critic B, oh all right, Mr Ian Watson, has a record collection that is far similar to mine than Critic A, sorry, Mr Simon Price’s is. It’s a strange and sad set-up, but the saddest thing is it seems entirely natural and makes perfect sense. I just wish it wouldn’t. From this innate territorialism comes the dreaded Received Opinions and Not Okay To Like kind of taste-fascism that British critics swear by.
Even this week in Melody Maker, Orlando feature in a Kenickie-themed “Great Bands That Could Have Been Contenders” list. Denim, Strangelove, Northern Uproar… and Orlando are singled out by a sinister editorial comment replying to the writer (presumably Orlando-likers Peter Robinson or Ben Knowles…. oh no! I’ve outed them!) asking “you didn’t listen”. “Because they were shit – Good Taste Ed” is the addendum in parenthesis. The subtext is clear. “I don’t like them, and I forbid you to like them either”, says the anonymous oppressor of opinion, desperate to fit a square Consensus peg into a round Press hole. Spraying the room against the pestilence of Independant Thought. Why the need to go out of their way to preach such witless naysaying against one of their own kind? I can only deduce Orlando must have violently threatened their microcosmic world in some way, because we hardly threatened the real world. But isn’t that a good thing? To get a reaction? To strive for innovation? To provoke an emotion? Even a negative, inarticulate one?
Meanwhile, everyone else I know has long since wasted energy on worrying about such things: it’s just me. How hard I still reach out for the crowd-blending, ignorant Mediocrity of being Liked Across The Board! And how greatly it eludes my pariah grasp! Is it a crime to have not been born into a careful, unprovoking Embrace? Pity me on this cold Halloween night with not a press officer in sight to hurl onto the fire!
