About Brian Wilson (four fragments)

2017, Hammersmith Apollo, London. Billed as the last time Brian would play Pet Sounds in London. Brian looks baffled, barely touches his piano, more a protective shield than an instrument. His voice is croaky and hesitant, and Matt Jardine handles the high notes. But in some ways it doesn’t much matter. This is a fan gathering, a chance for us to say thank you, one last time. In the interval, I get chatting to a hardcore devotee, who’s been following the Beach Boys since 1963. He tests me, asking if I know the names of the dogs on Pet Sounds. I pass the test.

2012, Singapore Indoor Stadium. The Beach Boys 50th Anniversary, although most of the band is from Brian’s solo outings. Mike Love is as much smarmy MC as frontman, and even he must realise most of us aren’t here to see him. Bruce offers a luscious ‘Disney Girls’ but all eyes are on the chubby guy on the left of the stage. They’ve scheduled several short breaks in the set and Brian shuffles off in a hurry, as if he’s being chased. They encore with ‘Kokomo’ and I scowl. (Review here.)

A few months later, Mike fires Brian. Or does he?

2002, Royal Festival Hall, London. The greatest gig I’ve ever attended. Two memories stand out. In the second act, the band plays the songs from Pet Sounds in sequence but instead of ‘I Know There’s An Answer’ (side two, track two), he sings ‘Hang On To Your Ego’, the original lyrics that Mike Love nixed because they were too druggy, or too anti-Maharishi, or something. And the crowd roars its approval, because we all hate Mike Love.

And then, during the encores, we’re all dancing insanely to ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and a small boy, no more than eight, seems even more possessed than us old farts and looks in serious danger of dancing over the balcony to his doom. But at least he’d die happy. No, ecstatic.

1990, Doonesbury. Andy Lippincott is the first openly gay character in an American syndicated comic strip, and the first to succumb to AIDS. In his last days, he is serenaded by the just-released CD version of Pet Sounds and after he dies, a pad is found in his hand, bearing his last, scribbled words:

“BRIAN WILSON IS GOD.”

Waiting for the Bullet: a disclaimer with a review attached

Critics are supposedly obliged, when considering a product created by someone they know, to insert a disclaimer of some kind, to make clear what the relationship is. I’m not sure how scrupulously this needs to be enforced: surely if your career’s at the level where you find yourself on panels at literary festivals and competitions and academic symposiums the chances are you’ll be in a state of at least casual nodding acquaintance with the majority of people whose books cross your desk and it would be more efficient to insert the opposite of a disclaimer (a claimer, maybe?) when you review something by someone you’ve never heard of. Do you need to announce whether you have some particular reason to dislike the person (ex-lover, bullied you at school, once spilled your pint, etc)? And what about people with whom you’ve been in purely digital contact? Does that require a flag of some kind? I remember when the blessed Patroclus reviewed one of my books on Amazon and outed herself as a friend despite the fact we’ve only ever once met in meatspace; which she neatly defined as a very Noughties kind of relationship and hence entirely appropriate to the book.

Still, better safe than sorry: I hereby declare that, yes, I know Madeleine D’Arcy, the author of the short story collection Waiting for the Bullet. Or should I say that I knew her? I worked with Madeleine in the dim and distant early 1990s, in a London office that was supposedly the location of Mrs Lovett’s pie shop in Sweeney Todd. I last saw her in about 1994, although we recently stumbled over each other via Facebook (other social media sites are available). She’s lovely. And Irish. And not very tall. And she says “aargghh” a lot, I mean, she really says it, as it’s written, sounding the Gs. Which is a bit like people actually saying “LOL” and “ROFL” but somehow more endearing.

That done, should the fact that she and I once knocked off work early to amble down Fleet Street in a vain search for hot whiskey affect my response to her book? I hope not. She’s a tough cookie and if I were to make disobliging remarks I’m sure she’d survive the experience. Although she was a criminal solicitor once, so maybe she’d just get some hard acquaintances to give me a fright. It’s academic, because I liked the book a lot. All the stories deal with the flaws and frailties of human relationships and interactions, whether between husbands and wives, parents and children or lovers who are running out of love. Death looms more than once and there’s an air of wry melancholy about most of the stories, often accentuated by the background noise of the grievously wounded Irish economy, but D’Arcy doesn’t bang a drum – her focus is always on the people, in all their bumbling, messy, imperfect glory.

So, there, it’s a good book, and I would have said that whether I’d ever known the author or not. However, there’s something deeper going on, a connection not just with the author but with the book itself. No, I’m not in it. (As far as I know, I’ve only ever featured twice in works of fiction, when my name was appropriated first for a Doctor Who novel, then for a story in the Commando comic series.) But one of the stories did strike a chord, throwing up memories – not at all pleasant ones – of a particular episode more than 20 years ago and possibly even filling in a few gaps for me. Or maybe not: when I waved the evidence under the author’s digital nose her response was simply that “of course it's fiction — only made-up stuff.” Which is of course what they all say, but to protect her sources I won’t reveal which of the stories had that effect on me.

And one day we’ll find that hot whiskey.

In dreams

Developers in Switzerland are planning a project that will house people with dementia in a mock-1950s village. Most of us who have spent time with someone suffering from Alzheimer’s or a similar condition will have noticed that long-term memories often remain clear long after the banal minutiae of today has become irreversibly fuzzy; the idea here, presumably, is that if someone thinks it’s 1952, why not create an environment that supports that illusion, free from any disturbing references to the recent. The present is a foreign country; we do things differently here.

One does wonder, though, whether the 1950s that will be created outside Berne will be an accurate replica, or one mediated through multiple subsequent representations of community life, whether it’s the wholesome innocence of Happy Days or the dark-underbelly school of David Lynch, The Truman Show or The Prisoner: carers dressed as gardeners and hairdressers will ensure that nobody leaves the village. Once again, we have a perfect simulacrum, a replica of something that never existed. I can see a small, silver-haired army shuffling across the trimmed lawns and past the hat shop, muttering “That is not what I meant at all; that is not it, at all.”

The Gaddafi/Westlife memorial blog post

...and suddenly, when I really ought to be preparing light artillery to repel looters, something leaps unbidden into my head about a piece I wrote for Careless Talk Costs Lives, about going to see the LA band The Warlocks in some smelly back room in London, and how a drunk and/or mad man singing Eddie Cochran songs (or was it Hank Williams?) on the station platform on the way home seemed to act as a sort of digestif to the whole gig, and there were discursions about the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead (both of whom had been called The Warlocks at some stage or another) and Beavis and Butt-head (who weren’t, so far as I know) and the article had 17 footnotes, and when they used it in the magazine, it appeared that the designer couldn’t really cope with that sort of thing, but in any case I can’t find a copy of it anywhere, but while I’m in that frame of mind I try to find some songs by The Warlocks and they aren’t nearly as good as I remember, and I start to doubt whether the missing article was all that great in the first place.



Every time I use footnotes, it seems that there’s someone in the publishing chain who can’t cope. They cut them back, or shove them to the end of the book, or both. They really ought to read this article, by Alexandra Horwitz.

Incidentally, thanks to everyone who has expressed concern about the flooding in Bangkok. We’ve been untouched so far, but the run-off is expected to reach the canal nearest us in the next few hours. Our luck may well continue, but if in the event that it doesn’t, we have plenty of food, water, improving reading material and other necessaries, and also the advantage of a second storey if things do get damp down below. The most likely forecast is a few days of grumbling inconvenience at worst. And if the next blog post washes up on your shore in a bottle, think of it as part of the analogue revival I was talking about last week. But in the meantime, this is pretty damn fabulous:

Hole in the head

My memory's definitely getting worse. Yesterday, I couldn't remember the name of the woman who played Victor Meldrew's wife; or the capital of Latvia. (Don't write in; they came back eventually.)

The funny thing is, it's not as if I had any need for those facts; I just suddenly became aware of their temporary absence from my mind. It's similar to that jolt of fear when you realise your keys or phone aren't in your pocket, because the weight that you're used to isn't there. A gap makes itself known, like a hole in the brain.

Maybe it's CJD.

Do not write on both sides of the paper at once

While we're on the subject of exams, an e-mail from my mother, and a comment from the fragrant Marsha Klein ("...due to boredom or lack of time..."), both in response to the post from a few days back about The Unconsoled, prompted me to recall my English Language O-level composition paper.

The prescribed theme was 'A scene of destruction', and I endeavoured to depict the aftermath of the sort of party to which I never seemed to get invited at the time, with comatose, semi-clad women sprawled among the spilt beer, scratched records, charred soft furnishings and ground-in cheesy footballs. I rather suspect the whole thing had been inspired by the TV adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, which I'd loved a couple of years before, and not just for the bosoms, and I rather hoped that university life would turn out to be like that, with elements of The Young Ones and Brideshead Revisited thrown in for good measure. (You know what? It bloody was, and all.)

So, in a way, my essay was a dream sequence of sorts, and my chosen ending was a heavy-handed variation on the cliché: 'I' (the narrator) surveyed the scene for several pages, then remembered I had to be somewhere, ran for the bus, and very shortly afterwards found myself in the exam room, confronted by an O-level composition paper, wondering through a fug of cheap cider what on earth I was going to write about... oh, you fill in the blanks...

PS: And this is how to respond to a dumping.