Duffed up: Music and the Seven Year-Old Tough Guy

My lockdown reading includes Graham Duff's Foreground Music: A Life in Fifteen Gigs.

There's an early bit that reminds me of me:
"From a very young age, I'd loved the theme tunes to TV spy and detective shows ... To me, this is such exciting music. It suggests mystery, tension and menace. Something I don't hear in any of the pop music that comes my way." (p.2)

I remember thinking like that for what seemed like a long time, which is probably why I am rubbish at the '10 influential albums' game on social media. But I remember a time later when I was about 13 and saw this attitude to pop as being a bit weird. If memory serves, this was prompted by Smash Hits asking Todd Carty (then of Tucker's Luck) for his top 10 songs, and they were nearly all excerpts from Ennio Morricone soundtracks. (Apologies Todd, but I'm not enough of a pack rat to have kept that particular clipping.)

Prompted by the death of Dave Greenfield, I was thinking about my own musical development recently. One missing link between spy themes and pop for my prepubescent self was quite different to that of Graham Duff, who says "To be honest, with their sleazy and aggressive attitude and lyrics about sewers and shagging nubiles, I think they sound like the kind of lads I try to avoid at school. Put simply, The Stranglers sound like bullies." (p.13)

Whatever it makes me as a kid sound like now, this side of The Stranglers drew me in at the time. To my TV-obsessed ears, it was tough guy pop music. Plus with a band member older than my mum, I hoped to get her to like them too (no chance!). And with Greenfield's keyboards, I thought I'd got the musical continuity with my beloved safari-suited TV secret agents.

It would take me a few years and experiences to untangle all these conflicting sentiments personally. Foreground Music does similar work in thoughtful and touching detail.

The Black Cultural Front

My review for ATC of Brian Dolinar on black radical writers in America.

Criminal Short-cuts

Three long-forgotten fiction reviews I did for Crime Time:

Into the Fire

The Dogs Are Barking

E-Males

Some more grumpy than others.

Xanadu-little

Over at the WalkerFox Blog, I share some thoughts on the Smart House, fuelled by Davin Heckman's book A Small World. Let's build!

Fender defender

In the Times Higher Ed this week, I review Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature: The Country Poor in the Great Depression by Stephen Fender.

Exceeding 140 characters

I had a brief Twitter exchange with my old friends at Media Lens today.
The background is that Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger has locked his Twitter feed so he can't get  incoming tweets from Media Lens. I suspect locking the feed means they can't read his tweets either.

I tweeted that this hardly constitutes an infringement of democratic rights and got three replies (and maybe a Freudian slip):

Media Lens @GrahamBarnfield Graham, forget freedom of speech - do you believe in the freedom to read what people write and to send them messages?
[Er, yes. Why forget free speech?]

Media Lens @GrahamBarnfield We meant 'leaving free speech aside'. If u agree on both, it makes +no+ sense to suggest AR had good reasons for banning us?
[Here I said it was basically up to AR. But it is worth saying he didn't ban Media Lens, or even its Twitter feed; he just stopped getting their incoming tweets and hosting them in his timeline.]
Media Lens @GrahamBarnfield True (by definition), but irrelevant to what we're discussing.

Just to recap: do I believe in the freedom to read what people write and to send them messages? Yes. That said, the first one is qualified slightly, in that I don't think such freedom extends automatically to people's private correspondence. (Maybe Rushbridger is now tweeting personal stuff.) The second one is that sending messages doesn't create any obligation for people to read or host them. For instance, Media Lens' page compiling reviews of Newspeak does not link to my mixed/negative review of the book. Free speech does not oblige them to add this link.

While such colleagues as Terri Senft write about this in more depth, it's also clear that the internet is used in ways that continue to blur the boundaries between private and public. For instance, someone compiling my recent EBay purchases or listing my Facebook friends would be creepy, but it would have been me who put the information there to begin with. Getting them shut down would breach freedom of speech, but ignoring them wouldn't.

Summer snippets

Over in the August issue of that august journal Critique, you will find my book review of The New Civilisation?: Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union 1929-1941 by Paul Flewers. With my new publications appearing at such a slow rate these days, at least no-one can accuse me of being a Stakhanovite.



*Reference:
Book Reviews



Paul Flewers: The New Civilisation?: Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union 1929 1941


London, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2008


ISBN: 978-1-90342-740-8 (paperback)

Critique


Vol. 38, No. 3, August 2010, pp. 519-527


ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online)

Cobbett over here

Here's me in the THE, reconsidering William Cobbett's Rural Rides. Students of CC1500 Critical Approaches to Journalism will have heard all this already. Happy new year!

Park Hill Flats revisited

Over at the (interesting-looking) Reconstruction 9.3, I have a short review of Owen Hatherley's punchy Militant Modernism. Enjoy!

The Buddhists of Suburbia

Over at the Times Higher Education, I am reviewing the Media Lens book Newspeak. See how deftly I avoided the temptation to have a dig at the final chapter's call to replace journalism with meditation. Wisely, Brendan O'Neill started his review of Media Lens' Guardians of Power by saying he does not wish to be drawn into a lengthy correspondence after upsetting the authors; the same applies to me.

Sean to be wild?

Find out in my review of Sean McCann, A Pinnacle of Feeling, in the 26 March Times Higher Ed.

Working Doors, Dalrymple Deconstructed

The new issue of Reconstruction, a section of which I co-edited, is out today. Read on.

In the same issue is a book review of books by Simon Winlow and Theodore Dalrymple. If it seems like these books have been around for a while, that's because they have (the review having gone around the houses at one journal for donkey's years before getting rejected, while leaving me to guess this fact for myself).

What I really needed was for the bloody thing to appear at around the same time as an earlier review of a Francis Gilbert book, as with it I might have avoided a grumpy email exchange with Dr. Winlow himself. Anyway, hopefully the belated appearance of this review article might set things straight.

Cross words

My review of the new Neil Cross novel appears above (I'll add the link when the 7 Days website is a bit more stable). Despite some of the griping about Cross's writing in the Times -- at least he can spell the word "night" -- and in the Guardian, not getting the author's technique for elevating a sense of domestic menace, Human Nature is a very good book (hat tip to Chris -- pictured -- for delivering me a copy).

Tourism is not terrorism ...

... although you wouldn't think so from reading Leo Hickman's book The Final Call. Since the book was published, he seems to have softened his line on Spanish holidays, according to articles here and here.

Peace offering

This blog generally has kind words for historical crime writer David Peace. So when reviewing his Brian Clough novel The Damned Utd -- soon to be adapted into a TV movie -- for Seven Days newspaper, I continued this tradition. Whatdya want, blood?

Hanson (and Grendel)

As pointed out previously, this week's Beowulf movie has set the critics talking about digital filmmaking once again. Bang on cue, one of my own contributions on the topic rocks up on the Audacity website. Like comedy, being topical is all in the timing.

Always time for crime

On and off, I've been writing for Crime Time for over a decade now, first appearing in issue 2. (Birthdays can cause one to reflect on the passage of time in this way.) I've been through magazine, photocopy, magazine again, trade paperback - one day the font will be large enough for me to read it - and website versions. Here's to the next 10 years of Crime Time.

Going completely batshit

Regular readers will know I'm more likely to review books than restaurants. Contrary to appearances, I'm no expert on the latter. That said, I know what I like and was a bit disconcerted when trying out 3nity the other night. The theme here is healthy eating and relaxation, planned by feng shui creatives using the word "holistic", no doubt. The musak was a bit dodgy, but the main barrier to relaxation was the big screen looping a BBC wildlife documentary DVD. In a particularly appetising scene, a bat drowns in guano while being eaten alive by cockroaches. "Meal times again," as my mother would say.

On motors and mobiles

The car may be death-proof, but the film's not above criticism (see my review here). Getting a less bumpy ride from this reviewer is Cell Phone Culture by Gerard Goggin.

The Reisz stuff

Still reviewing for 7 Days newspaper. Here's the latest, albeit truncated book review.
The last paragraph would have read:
Reisz’s work tended more towards the “art house” end of the film business. When he was allowed to helm Hollywood movies – Isadora, The Gambler, Dog Soldiers – they often lost money and audiences found them hard to comprehend. Author Colin Gardner explains exactly what each of these movies is about and helps readers to appreciate the director’s interesting but uneven career.


Still mainly a factual synopsis of the book, hence my questioning of the worth of capsule reviews.