Saturday 19th April 2014. To the Hammersmith Eventim Apollo, as it’s currently known, for a concert by Adam Ant. My brother Tom is playing guitar in Mr Ant’s backing band, as he has done for the past couple of years.  Mum comes along too, making it our first family reunion in London since Dad died. Young Ms Holly also joins us, from the extended family on Tom’s side.

The Apollo is one of the largest theatre-style venues in London, and I’ve somehow never been to it until tonight. Built in the 1930s, it has a stunning Art Deco interior that has been recently refurbished. The upstairs bar looks like something from Grand Hotel: you half expect to bump into Joan Crawford as a pushy stenographer.

We have a slight panic when we get there and realise that our tickets are standing only, but Mr Ant’s crew help us to exchange them for seats in the upstairs circle (with our grateful thanks to Roy from the merchandise stall). Mum is 70, and is unlikely to be tempted to join a mosh pit. I’m 42, but increasingly prefer a seat myself.

That said, musing on the requirements of getting older is moot. Mr Ant’s main output was in the late 70s and early 80s, and many are here because they bought those records when they first came out. So they aren’t exactly spring, or even summer chickens themselves. But I look around and see a healthy amount of all ages and genders, albeit with the lion’s share in their 40s and 50s. There is indeed a mosh pit down the front – even a few people crowd surfing.

Tonight is also about one particular album: Dirk Wears White Sox, the first Adam Ant long player, which was released in 1979. Mr Ant is on top form tonight, and not only performs every song from the album in order, but goes straight into a decent amount of selections from his whole oeuvre, my favourites of the night being ‘Whip in My Valise’, ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, and ‘Wonderful’. He performs for a straight two hours. No encores, no stopping. He even has a costume change onstage, behind a vintage screen, singing as he dresses (much as I saw Grace Jones do).

Dirk Wears White Sox is by no means a catchy album: it’s more of a cult favourite from the period just before he became a pop star. Much of the material is more experimental  than post-punk: Tom confirms to me afterwards that ‘Animals and Men’ is particularly difficult to learn. It’s full of shifting, jazzy time signatures and lots of jagged stop-start moments. The more typical post-punk songs sound very Franz Ferdinand now, of course, with that familiar slurping disco beat under the spiky guitar riffs. (Or perhaps that should be ‘very 2004’, when Franz Ferdinand’s debut came out.)

The moment when ‘Cartrouble’ shifts from Part One into Part Two, and the guitars suddenly change from wiry to widescreen, is even more startling when it’s live and turned up a thousandfold, and you’re sharing the moment with a whole temple of acolytes. In the past, I’d been a little wary about the validity of ‘classic album’ run throughs like this. But tonight I realise such concerts can be a joyous celebration of music history and of being alive full stop – still being alive – for artist and audience alike. A celebration of art and life, no less.

We stick around afterwards and chat with Tom at the aftershow party (held in the circle bar). Some public faces there: Keith Lemon (who obligingly poses for a photo with Holly, who’s a fan), Bill Bailey, Mark Lamarr, Mark Moore, Kevin Rowland. Lots of dandyish, well-dressed men in suits and hats, and women in Vivienne Westwood-esque takes on punk cabaret: a few berets with little polka dot veils.

* * *

Monday 21st April 2014. The dregs of the Easter weekend. I grumpily buy a Smarties chocolate egg from Muswell Hill Sainsbury’s, mainly because they’re left overs, bumped down to 40p.

Work this week:  revising the essay on Late Victorian flâneuses, for the Fin De Siecle course. Also mopping up the last set texts of the academic year, such as Lara by Bernadine Evaristo. Glad to have finally read Jane Eyre. It didn’t quite become a personal favourite, but I can see how it’s pivotal to the general span of literature. My favourite book that the degree introduced me to this year is Vathek, closely followed by Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled.

* * *

Tuesday 22nd April 2014. I see Daisies at the ICA. It’s a 1966 cult film from Czechoslovakia, as it was called then. The director died a month ago, so the ICA are showing it as a tribute. Very of its time, like The Knack mixed with Bunuel. The story is essentially this: two childlike young women muck about in various surreal settings. There’s some moments of beauty, some of silliness, and some unnerving ones too. It definitely has its own identity – sheer psychedelic abandon.

* * *

Thursday 24th April 2004. This week’s new film is The Double, seen today at the Prince Charles Cinema. Jesse Eisenberg stars, last seen as a monotonous computer expert in The Social Network. It’s directed by Richard Ayoade, who was last seen as a monotonous computer expert in The It Crowd. So Mr Eisenberg’s character this time is, well, no surprises.

But here the computers are very different, as is the whole setting: a kind of nocturnal Orwellian world where technology seems stuck at an early 1970s level, all primitive screens and chunky beige keyboards. The architecture meanwhile evokes 1960s Eastern Europe: lifts that never work, brutal underground trains, tower blocks and wastelands. The aesthetic may owe a lot to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and indeed his short Python spin-off film, The Crimson Permanent Assurance (most of the office workers are elderly men), but it has its own original stamp. Sadly the world of the film doesn’t seem to gel with the story about doppelgangers. The aesthetic upstages the plot, while the plot doesn’t know which rules it’s meant to be following. The ending is baffling, but whether it’s meant to be baffling or has just made a mess of its own logic it’s hard to tell. It’s very nearly a great film, just not quite.

* * *

I fume at an article in the Guardian about ‘Britpop casualties’. It’s based on interviews with members of UK bands from the 1990s, whose careers were not quite as successful as Blur and Oasis. The article seems less interested in music and more interested in the failure of those who dare to make it.

I’ve seen schadenfreude-laced features like this before, the gist of which is ‘don’t ever be in a band, be a music critic, that’s better’. In this latest article, there’s a sickening sense of crowing over the misfortune of the singer from Marion (drugs, near-death) and the one from Menswear (mental illness). As Wilde said, it’s the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Well, such journalists will never, ever know what it’s like to play a gig or hear their record on the radio or see the sheer bliss on the faces of people at the front row of a concert, and know that they made those people feel that happy, for that day. I saw Menswear play the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in the 1990s. They were absolute stars, and were loved as stars. They were on bedroom walls all over the world. I knew people who were absolutely, giddily besotted with Menswear. If such fans and even former band members now look back and think it was all rubbish, or that it now sounds impossibly dated, that changes nothing. Those bands added to the amount of joy in the lives of strangers. That’s as valid a life achievement as any, and should be celebrated as such.

Rock journalists who forget this have forgotten what it’s like to be a fan. To focus instead on narratives of hubris and failure does them no favours. Music writing should be more about pop, and less about tall poppy syndrome.

Tags: adam ant, britpop, daisies, mum, the double, tom

Friday 7th February 2014.

I am approached by a charity street fundraiser on Tottenham Court Road. ‘No thanks,’ I say. ‘Are you sure?‘ he says, following me along the pavement.  I’m tempted to reply, ‘My dad’s just died, you pestering git, leave me alone’. But that would be, as they say in warfare, a disproportionate response.

Saturday 8th February 2014.

To Suffolk to visit Mum. As I get on the train to Marks Tey I recognise that the only other person in the carriage is the comedian Stewart Lee. I enjoy his work enough to know where he’s probably going – and am slightly unnerved that I know this. Earlier this week I’d read an East Anglian Daily Times interview with him online, promoting his show in Ipswich (a reminder that local news is no longer local, thanks to the Web). He told the journalist that the fact he was speaking to the newspaper at all must mean he hadn’t sold enough tickets. Typically for Mr Lee, this was both a grumpy joke and a joke about the act of daring to make that sort of grumpy joke.

Recognising someone in a train carriage requires rather different etiquette to recognising them in the street. The latter predicament always makes me think of a line from a Half Man Half Biscuit song:

‘He’s seen me / And we both realise / That we’re going to have to put into operation / That tricky manoeuvre / that is Acknowledgement Without Breaking Stride’.

It’s more complex if the person you recognise is slightly famous, and though you have chatted to them socially in the past, that had been some years ago. And in Stewart Lee’s case, that Act of Recognising Stewart Lee in Public – and his resulting irritation – is something he has put into his work. There’s one stand-up show where he reads out a long list of unkind statements from Twitter:

‘I saw that Stewart Lee on the bus,’ goes one. ‘He looked fat and depressed and fat.’

I’m too socially awkward as it is to be the one that makes the move in such scenarios, whoever the other person is, and tend to prefer people coming up to me rather than the other way round.  As it is, I think to myself, he might be well in a state of mental preparation for his show, and so shouldn’t be disturbed.

Something else I always worry about is – what if something terrible has happened to the person you’ve just recognised, and now is really not the time to bother them? A parent might just have died, for instance. That happens to people. That definitely happens to people.

So I don’t approach him during the journey. When I get off at Marks Tey, though, he sees me, recognises me and says hello.

I have to add that he looked thin and reasonably happy and thin.

***

Travelling on the little diesel train to Sudbury along the Stour Valley, I pass a line of pylons. They are standing in several feet of flood water. 

***

I spend the afternoon in Bildeston with Mum and my aunt Anne. There’s no traces of the medical equipment that cluttered up the living room last time I was here. The hospital bed, the noisy oxygen machine, the mask, the tubes and the commode have all been taken away by various medical services. No sentimental value attached to those. I’m grateful that they kept him alive, but grateful to see the back of them. Off to sustain someone else.

It turns out that Anne wasn’t intending to be in the village on the day that Dad died. The floods in the South-West had wrecked the train track for her journey back to St Ives, and staying with Mum a few more days was the only option. So Mum had the benefit of her company when she heard from the care home. In fact, it was Anne who took the call. A silver lining of some literal clouds.

* * *

Mum and Anne are convinced Dad’s handwriting closely resembled mine, and vice versa. But I like to think I can see evidence of both parents’ styles coming together in my own spidery hand. It’s as good a reason as any for varying my typing with my longhand writing. Every time I write with a pen, there he is.

***

Sunday 9th February 2014

Dad’s phrases keep coming back to me. One is ‘I have better things to do’, in response to some conversation about a national talking point. As in ‘Did you see that Benefits Street everyone’s on about?’ ‘No, I have better things to do.’ Not meaning it unkindly, but honestly. And he was usually right. It seems a mundane, even obvious piece of life advice, yet it’s one that’s so useful and so easy to ignore. Dad was a fan of silliness, but it was always intentional and purposeful silliness. Mindful Silliness, I suppose. That’s the difference.

As a habitual procrastinator I try to ask myself, ‘Is this the best thing I could be doing right now?’  Or if I’m idling full stop, I wonder ‘What’s the best thing I could be doing now?’  That the phrase comes to me in Dad’s voice helps all the more.

Wednesday 12th February 2014

I’m currently being driven crazy by some sort of facial aching, with hot-and-cold sensations around my teeth, jaw and facial muscle area. Today I see the GP, who thinks it is a flaring up of TJD (Temporomandibular Joint Disorder), which I’ve always had a touch of (my jaw clicks). This might well have been brought on the stress of the more intensive college work in January, coupled with general anxiety over my penury, and now of course, Dad’s death.

‘Do you grind your teeth in your sleep?’ she asks. I have no idea. I live alone.

Valentine’s day is close, and like many I start to think about the pros and cons of relationships. The ability of couples to detect warning signs in each other’s health is one definite advantage. Still, I have to admit I enjoy my own company, and am relieved not to have to join the ranks of all the confused-looking men in card shops this week.

 ***

Thursday 13th February 2014.

Mum has written an introduction to be read out at the funeral by the Humanist official in charge (not sure what the correct term is – certainly not priest). It explains how he was known as Bib Edwards to some, and Brian Edwards to others. He tended to prefer the more informal nickname of Bib, but answered happily to either. 

My brother Tom has been balancing his helping with the funeral, with his work as a guitarist. Today he performs in Adam Ant’s band on ITV’s This Morning.

Tom must have mentioned Dad’s passing to Mr Ant, because the singer introduces ‘Ant Music’ on national television with the phrase ‘This is for Bib’.

http://youtu.be/zA_yyBDlA0g

Tags: adam ant, ailments, anne, dad, mum, stewart lee, tjd, valentines