Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues: Twenty Years of Writing About Film, Music and Books Read online

  ‘Have you found an equestrian centre?’ he asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But, you know. Early days.’

  This was supposed to be a piece of comical understatement, a joke about how he was expecting an equestrian centre less than one hundred and twenty minutes after asking for one, but it was a joke that could only work if my boss and I shared the same sense of time passing. We didn’t. These were not early days to him. These were late days. I, meanwhile, had privately estimated that this job would take between six months and for ever. My plan was to leave messages with a couple of estate agents every week for a while or as long as I could be bothered, and the word would get out that, in the unlikely event of an equestrian centre coming on the market, we would snap it up. What more could be done?

  ‘So what will I say to Head Office tonight?’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘I must give a report tonight.’

  This was now officially hilarious. I was working for people who saw no reason why an equestrian centre couldn’t be located and bought in a day. And they had employed me, a man who could only just manage to locate and buy a packet of cigarettes in a day.

  ‘Tell them we’re scouring the country.’ My boss didn’t know the word ‘scouring’. He was pleased to make its acquaintance, and I went home feeling as though I’d achieved something.

  I was learning quite a lot about the company quite quickly, if only because I had to recruit local secretarial staff for the Asian sales managers. Quite often, I had conversations like this:

  ‘So … you need an assistant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What shall I say you do?’

  There would be a long sigh and a shake of the head.

  ‘Ah, very bad job. Sports shoes and pianos.’

  I stared at him, to see if he was pulling my leg, but it wasn’t a leg-pulling kind of place. He really was supposed to sell sports shoes and pianos. His competitors were Nike and Steinway, both at the same time, and he was entirely on his own, although I was about to provide him with a seventeen-year-old assistant. Once I spoke to a man who was running the company advertising agency. He was on his own, too. No creatives, no account directors, no basketball hoops, nothing, apart from a smallish desk in an open-plan office. Head Office was expecting him to poach business from Saatchi, Saatchi, Ogilvy and Mather. Back home, the company sold everything there was to sell, and it had its own chain of department stores to sell it in. The London office was beginning to make me sad: it reminded me of King Lear, robbed of his power, unable to understand quite why the entire country wouldn’t jump to attention when told to. In a way, it was good that they’d employed a can’t-do guy, because it seemed to me that they had to learn that some things can’t be done. The manager running the ad agency was as can-do as you can get, but it wasn’t going to help him.

  I phoned my half-brother, who had grown up in a different place to me, and went riding a lot when he was a kid.

  ‘I have to buy an equestrian centre,’ I told him.

  He laughed for a long time. He knew I had no interest in horses, and he also knew that I had absolutely no ability to accomplish anything that men in suits accomplished during their working days. (I wore a cheap suit to work, by the way. A cheap suit, a cheap tie and a cheap shirt.)

  ‘So what should I do?’ I asked when he had stopped laughing.

  ‘I don’t know. Phone the guy at the place where I used to ride. He probably knows about other equestrian centres.’

  So I phoned him, and he laughed too. But he was laughing, it turned out, because he’d been dreaming for years of receiving a phone call like this one. He was desperate to get rid of his establishment. By the end of the week, my employers had visited him and had an offer accepted. (A few months later, it turned out that they had bought the wrong size of equestrian centre, and they had to sell up and buy another one.)

  Once Head Office found out that I was working there, I began to receive faxes addressed to me personally. These faxes were always marked TOP URGENT, and would frequently contain a request that seemed so extraordinarily eccentric that on occasions I began to feel like a Candid Camera victim. WHAT IS DEFINITION OF DRINKING WATER IN UK? WHAT WAS SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND OF WRITER JONATHAN SWIFT? WHAT IS A GOOD SPACE IN A MUSEUM? HOW MUCH DOES AN ORPHANAGE COST? And invariably it turned out that I knew someone who knew something, just as I had done in the Hampton Court case and the equestrian centre panic. Who knew that my friend Sarah was friends with a museum consultant? Who even knew there was such a job? But we employed him, and he wrote us a report on the space that was being offered for sponsorship in a prestigious London museum. (They never read it. They looked at its thirty or forty pages with some alarm, and said to him, ‘Good space? Or bad space?’ There was never time for nuance.)

  It was all weird, and stressful, and sort of satisfying, and then, one day, there was a message on my desk that changed everything. PLEASE BUY PEDIGREE DOGS, it said. CRUFTS WINNERS ONLY. Our chairman, I discovered, was one of the most avid dog breeders in South Korea. He loved his pedigree dogs, and he wanted to buy the best. Crufts is our big dog show. In the UK, it’s proverbial. Owners groom their dogs and train them and send them to the hairdressers and put little cardigans on them and teach them to talk and the BBC puts the whole thing on TV, or used to, anyway. Now it probably has its own cable channel.

  I am not a big fan of the dog, but then, I hadn’t been a big fan of Jonathan Swift or horses or water or any of the other things I’d been doing. It didn’t matter. It was just another job. I went to the newsagent, bought a magazine about dogs, turned to the classified ads at the back and started ringing around.

  This was probably some time in 1990, a couple of years after the Seoul Olympics, and it seemed that people had retained two facts from the entire event. The first was that Ben Johnson took drugs to make him run faster; the other was that Koreans ate dogs. My conversations with owners of Crufts-pedigree puppies went like this:

  ‘Oh, hi. I’m ringing on behalf of a Korean multinational company, and we’re interested in …’

  Click.

  ‘Oh, hi, I’m ringing on behalf of a multinational company, and we’re interested in buying any puppies you might have for sale.’

  ‘What’s the name of the company?’

  (I told them the name of the company.)

  ‘Where are they from?’

  ‘South Korea.’

  Click.

  These puppies would have cost tens of thousands of pounds. And though the chairman of our company was rich, even he wasn’t going to spend that kind of money on a meal. It never did any good, though, when I tried to explain that. The dog owners were not about to let their teased and blow-dried babies go off to make soup on the other side of the world.

  Eventually, after weeks of embarrassment and pestering and calling back people who had just hung up on me, I opened a dialogue with a pedigree dog owner. He wouldn’t sell us a dog; he would, however, be interested in talking to us about what we were prepared to do to outlaw Korean dog-eating. We opened a dialogue with an animal rights organization. The animal rights organization opened a dialogue with our Head Office. Two of my superiors flew over the Arctic in a helicopter to see the work that the animal rights organization was doing in the field of seal-clubbing. (They wanted me to go with them, but I couldn’t see how a trip to the Arctic was going to fit in with my afternoon hours.) Within a few weeks of receiving the initial fax, I was overseeing an intricate web of discourse involving literally hundreds of people, animals and welfare groups. Even my can-do Koreans were daunted, seeing as they all had day jobs as well, selling microchips and sports shoes and pianos.

  Finally, after many, many hours of dinners and visits and top-urgent negotiations, we had done enough: we were allowed to buy a puppy. We collected it, put it in a little cage and sent it to Seoul. And the chairman ate it! Just kidding. But the puppy we sent did provoke in him a huge hunger for more and more and more puppies. I was no longer an all-rounder, the
guy who took care of the letters and the recruitment and the museum sponsorship; I was the full-time dog purchaser. My despair was real and profound, and ended only by an advance for my first book.

  Soon after I’d left, the company stopped trying to sell everything and concentrated on selling electronic goods; within a few years, it had earned itself a household name. It was hard to see that happening while I was there, but then, I missed all the signs: the dedication to somebody else’s cause, the hard work and discipline, the willingness to bury irritation and dissent. I just thought that everyone except me was nuts. In the meantime, my can’t-do spirit remains undimmed, although luckily I work for myself, in the field of the arts, so any tantrums I throw have to be understood, tolerated, indulged.

  And, like the business I worked for, South Korea’s economy continues to grow. It grew six per cent last year; it grew even during the global financial crisis. I’m sure there are many reasons why this should be so – most of them beyond the scope of this essay and the comprehension of the person writing it – while economies in the West lurch from crisis to crisis; I’m just as sure that one of the reasons is the recognition that, for a country to do well, its people, even those with education and ambition, have to do stuff they don’t want to do. Meanwhile, my patron paid my rent, while I trained to be someone who could do what he wanted for the rest of his life. For a couple of years back there, afternoons only, I was somebody else.

  Abbey Road

  Think of Abbey Road, and the first thing that comes to mind is … Actually, even the laziest writer in the world could not hope to complete that sentence and get away with it. Just about everyone of a certain age has one – and only one – association with Abbey Road; even the people that live there probably think of two bare feet, a blue sky and a zebra crossing before they think of their own homes, and to try and draw your attention elsewhere is probably a little like asking you to discuss the books in the Dallas Book Depository. And yet, as this exhibition shows, there is an awful lot of elsewhere to look at. Dirk Bogarde on his own cannot pull you away from the magnetism of Paul’s bare feet, perhaps. But team Bogarde up with Morecambe and Wise, Ella Fitzgerald, Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, Dudley Moore, Richard Burton, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and all the other cultural icons on display here and it’s game on, as the sports commentators say.

  The story of a recording studio, you realize when you look at these photographs, must also be the story of twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture, pretty much all of which is dependent on recorded sound. That, after all, is why Sir George Martin, who had an extraordinary talent for realizing the potential of the music that other people wanted to make, became a star in his own right. Even Sir George’s changing appearance tells a pretty interesting story. The young man in the white shirt and tie talking to the comic actor Leslie Phillips has become, by the 1970s, a rock star – handsome, long-haired, wearing a T-shirt, separate (he no longer needs a comedian or a band in the frame to justify a showbiz snapshot); he has the confident cool of a man who knows that his place in the world is now secure. Martin began his career in the BBC’s music library before becoming responsible for EMI’s classical recordings; the Beatles were interested in him partly because he’d spent much of the 1950s producing comedy records for the Goons and Peter Ustinov. Less than ten years later, he was putting vocals on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ through a rotating Leslie speaker, trying to fulfil John Lennon’s wish to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop with four thousand monks chanting in the background. The classical music and the shirt and tie, then the novelty records, then the Beatles, the Dalai Lama and the T-shirt: that’s not just George Martin’s biography. It’s a potted cultural history of post-war England, too.

  Students of British entertainment might be forgiven for wondering whether a couple of these shots have been elaborately staged simply for our benefit. Karen Dotrice, whose face is so instantly and eerily familiar from Mary Poppins, sitting next to Frankie Howerd and Harry H. Corbett of Steptoe and Son … I mean, why, other than that they sit together in the brains of those who grew up in the sixties and seventies? (That couldn’t be David Hemmings on the right, there, could it? Or would that be too much?) And of course Paul McCartney would queue up in the canteen with everyone else, looking cheerful and friendly and handsome – and of course he’d be trying to pay for his 16p lunch with a note. (It’s hard to see the denomination. I hope it’s a tenner. Or a fifty, if they had them then! A Beatle should be paying for a 16p lunch with a fifty-pound note!) A few sixties icons couldn’t be here with us today, but sent people along on their behalf. James Bond is represented by John Barry and Shirley Bassey, Taylor by Burton, Pete by Dud, Audrey Hepburn by Stanley Holloway … Only the Stones branch of the family is missing, and that’s probably as it should be. The Stones at Abbey Road wouldn’t have seemed right, and in any case, you really can’t hear Eric and Ernie anywhere in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.

  For those who still insist on thinking of Abbey Road as an album rather than a studio, it might be instructive to see that some of the Beatles’ English influences – the Goons, whose surrealism had such an impact on John Lennon, and Noël Coward, an echo of whom can be heard in McCartney’s ditties ‘Her Majesty’ and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ – recorded here, too. The Beatles grafted the Goons and Coward on to Elvis and R&B, and this also is the story of British popular culture in the twentieth century. The very first recording at Abbey Road was of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, played by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Sir Edward Elgar, and just about every session since then has complicated that very straightforward definition of Englishness. Our passion for America, for American movies and for black American music (and without black American music there would have been no white English music worth listening to these last fifty years) has changed everything about us, and it seems entirely appropriate that Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire should have come to NW6. True, they were all here at an advanced stage in their careers, but these were effectively royal visitors, emissaries sent from Hollywood and Harlem to bestow approval on our attempts to create entertainment that was beginning to match the quality of their own.

  For the last twenty-five years, Abbey Road has been used for the recording of film scores, and the studio’s technological excellence has marginalized all debate about what flavours a culture; as we have learned, contemporary technology has no real interest in national boundaries. The score for Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first in a long and spectacular list of Abbey Road productions, but we would be hard-pushed to claim that Spielberg’s blockbuster had any kind of a local accent. The most recent photograph here shows a New Zealander enthusiastically drumming on the head of an American composer; the two of them were working in Abbey Road on an adaptation of an English fictional trilogy set in an imaginary world. It was much easier to hear where Ken Dodd came from – but then, most of us would rather watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy twice over, without a toilet break, than listen to Ken Dodd singing ‘Happiness’.

  Two of the films being shown during Abbey Road’s festival season, A Hard Day’s Night and Backbeat, will not help to banish the zebra crossing from our collective memory. The second, made exactly thirty years after the first, is about the lives that the four stars of A Hard Day’s Night had been living only a couple of years previously – when they had never heard of Abbey Road, and certainly could never have dreamed that they would be recording a movie soundtrack there. And though in 1964 the Beatles were already staggering under the weight of unprecedented attention, they would surely have been astounded to learn that their spell as a house band in a dingy Hamburg club would one day be fictionalized.

  But then, none of this stuff was supposed to have lasted. The three-minute pop songs and the one-line jokes were intended for immediate consumption, but it didn’t happen like that. As it turned out, even the man who supervised the recordings of the pop singers and the comedians would find a permanent place in
the story of the foundation of modern Britain. Whoever had the idea of inviting Sir Edward Elgar to launch Abbey Road would have bet any money that it would be the one day, at least, that no one would ever forget; from where a lot of us are standing, that day in the life of the studio now looks like the dustiest and the least interesting of the lot. Very few of us who have a fascination with this place care whether we ever hear ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ again in our lives; the country I’m proudest of wasn’t even a twinkle in Elgar’s eye yet.

  Pain in My Heart

  There is an old R&B song that goes ‘I’d rather be blind, crippled, and crazy / Somewhere pushing up a daisy / Than to let you break my heart all over again.’ I used to love this song. I would listen to it uncritically, admiring the singer – the late, great and unjustly obscure O. V. Wright, who often seemed to have left his false teeth behind on recording days but who could build up a pretty terrifying head of steam despite the whistling noise – and the arrangement and all the other things that pious white twentysomethings are supposed to admire when they listen to R&B songs. But then an overanalytical and less impressionable friend killed it for me.

  ‘Why does he have to be blind, crippled, crazy and dead?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, surely just being dead would get the job done. Blind, crippled and crazy? I don’t know. It just seems a bit … de trop.’

  I couldn’t believe it. He was poking fun at a soul singer! These guys had more or less invented pain and suffering, and if O. V. Wright claimed that he needed to be a corpse with three handicaps I was willing to take his word for it. Had I been duped? Was it really possible that R&B could be funny – and, what’s more, inadvertently funny?

  I dismissed the notion from my mind. R&B was always much too important to me to be funny in that way. (It was allowed to be fun, of course, but fun is different. With fun, you laugh when you’re told to, and not before.) When you are younger, and you have no taste, you are vaguely aware that a lot of the rock music you cherish with a po-faced devotion is going to turn out to be utterly ludicrous one day. But R&B deals with sex, pain, loss, love – things that should remain serious well into your thirties, maybe even beyond.