The Fall Live...Edinburgh 2011

Mark E Smith came on like a comparative lion, straight up to the microphone at the front of the stage, on time and in the mood it seemed.  Sober(ish), it seemed, and as we stood there with big grins on our faces, Scott even suggested he'd stayed unpissed because he loved Edinburgh more than other cities (he lived here for years and wrote the quite lovely 'Edinburgh Man' for the excellent 'Extricate' album a decade or so ago).

Fat chance.

He survived coupe of songs before he started playing with the sound levels of the guitarist's amp, and one more song before he disappeared off stage.  None of the four tracks he sang was exactly a classic, it's true, and the band aren't as tight as you might have hoped, with the guitarist (I've given up bothering to learn the names of Fall band members) particularly shaky.  But muddy is the default sound for the Fall live, so that was no worry.  But no Smith means no Fall really.

And for the fifteen minutes or so which remained of the gig, he was about as visible as a maned wolf at Edinburgh Zoo on a rainy day. 

Spot the Smith!

One minute he was there, twisted and hunched, like the Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks, Brick Heck from The Middle or James Forrest of Celtic.

Mark E Smith in a red suit,
looking for an audience

Smith singing 'Rowche Rumble'

     

Smith playing for boyhood heroes, Celtic

Then he was gone, off stage to bark his vocals from the dressing room, presumably while thudding back a bottle of vodka, because when he re-appeared he was visibly utterly steaming.  Couple of barked lines, jacket shrugged off and onto the floor, and some comedy drunken pointing, Emo Phillips-style, and he was off again, not to be seen again during the remainder of the body of the gig.  The band played a couple of tracks with keyboard player Eleni (aka Mrs Mark E Smith) singing painfully through a mic set up for backing vocals, then an instrumental, then they walked off to a chorus of boos and plastic beer glasses.  Eleni did briefly re-appear to lambast the crowd - didn't we know that Mark was too pissed to stand?  What did we want from him?

How about a tiny little bit of professionalism?  To stay sober when he's doing his job?  Not to rake in the best part of ten grand for less than a quarter of an hour's work?  To remember that he was the same guy who stopped the band on a live track from Totale's Turns because they weren't playing well enough?

IN fairness, though, I have to admit the shambles wasn't entirely unexpected.  I've seen MES in action twice in the last couple of years and he's been pissed and incapable both times.  But it's like doing the lottery - you buy a ticket hoping that this'll be the night.  Talking to a couple of guys outside afterwards, they remembered seeing the Fall being brilliant and then utterly shambolic state in the space of a couple of weeks in the early 80s.  At least they were a bit pissed off at Smith's showing tonight - unlike the people who popped up on Twitter saying what a great gig it was.  That's just pathetic: middle aged men turning up for the freakshow, not the music, pandering to Smith's alcoholism and infantile behaviour, swapping war stories of really shit performances they've seen him give, wallowing in being fans of the shittest live band in the world.

Ah well, Smith'll be dead soon enough if he continues like this, and then they can boast about being fans of what used to be the world's shittest live band...

Don't Call me a Crook - Bob Moore (Dissident Books, 2009)

Somebody sent me this book, I think, in return for a promise to review it.  But almost immediately I lost it and only found it again when shifting boxes to make space for my shiny new iMac.

And having found it, I devoured it in one sitting and find myself wishing I'd read it when it came out so I could add my voice to those praising it to the rafters.

The most obvious comparison for this rogue's autobiography is Charles Bukowski round about the time of  Post Office, but the one that occurs to me is Dugmore Boetie's brilliantly funny Apartheid era memoir Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost.  Like that book, this is the true story of a petty criminal, told in his own words, and seemingly as lacking in self-awareness.

Bob Moore is what tends to be called a loveable rogue (though only by those who've never been ripped off by him) and certainly he views himself in that sort of light - and definitely not, as the title suggests, as a crook.  And yet he's basically a disgusting human being, even for a working class Glasgow engineer kicking about the sharp end of the world in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  He steals from woman who love him and people who trust him, kills at least two, and possibly as many as four, people on his travels, deserts friends and lovers at the drop of a hat, embezzles, thieves and - in his own words - swipes anything he desires and does so with barely a regard for anyone else.  He's the sort of sentimental drunk who leans on your shoulder at the end of New Year dances and tells you how he's 'always had a lot of time for you, you prick', the sort who'll give a drinking buddy his wife's last tenner, the sort that goes out to buy a packet of cigarettes and doesn't reappear for ten years.

He's obviously bright and knows his trade, and people like him, even when they know the sort of person he appears to be.  In his sparse, almost Hemingway style, he sketches in a picture of himself while telling nothing beyond his name and place of birth, and in doing so paints an equally real portrait of the worlds he moves around in, whether in Scotland or in America or up-river in China.

And yet he doesn't seem entirely real.

Perhaps it's the style, so spare yet so effective, or the fact that he seems to have the knack of turning up in just the sorts of scrapes and situations into which an adventure writer would drop his fictional hero.  Maybe it's the way I was constantly reminded of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series, or even that Dugmore Boetie's autobiography is generally considered to be mainly fiction, but something in this book rings false.  Nobody else seems to mention this in reviews (and the publisher the editor claims printed the original version of the book back in 1935 certainly did exist, even if there seems to be no mention of the book itself prior to this (re)print).

Maybe in fact it's the footnotes that ring alarm bells in my ears.  Because while the book itself is a wonderful read (true or not) and the publisher's have done a great job in presenting it, with an interesting foreword and am afterword from James Kelman, the footnotes which the editor has liberally scattered throughout are intrusive and often surely needless.  Can any reader really not know what a mast is, or need to have the editor conjecture as to exactly what kind of cocktail Moore is describing when he lists a couple of fruits he likes in drinks?  All it does is drop the reader out of the narrative (this reader, anyway) as their eyes flick down to the bottom of the page to discover that 'pace' is another word for speed or that a steward is a person who works on a ship.  Sometimes the footnote is even incorrect (when Moore says he 'wrote [a letter] to his mother' it surely means exactly what it says not that 'wrote' means 'addressed').

To me, the footnotes feel a touch too much, but perhaps its just that they appear clumsy when arrayed beside Moore's stripped down prose.

And of course whether it's all true or not makes little difference really - except if the author did not die in 1937 of acute alcoholic gastritis then he would he please do a second book of Bob Moore's memoirs, because this one - footnotes aside - was pretty bloody splendid.

The Book of Names and Cugel's Saga

I have a bad habit of adding books to my Amazon Wish List on a less than scientific, willy nilly basis, to the extent that when I go and look at my list at Christmas, there are always several books I have no memory of whatsoever. But I must have wanted to read them once, I reason, so I leave them on and people, as people do, come along and buy me them for Christmas or my birthday.

And because it's Christmas or my birthday, these forgotten books arrive in a slew of other, more immediately appealing ones and so they usually end up dumped on top of one teetering pile of To Be Reads or another. Time passes, more books arrive and, like a layer of archaelogical sediment, the forgotten ones are pushed further and further down, untl they really are altogether forgotten.

Finally, to further muddy the (frankly a bit tenuous) analogy, I come in a bit drunk, take a bit of a stumble on the way to the bedroom and knock one pile of TBRs over, spilling the contents across the floor like fanned playing cards, ripe for discovery in the morning.

All of which havering waffle leads me to the two novels which spilled across the floor last week and which I shoved into my laptop bag for reading. One - The Book of Names by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori - I could at least remember wanting to read. It features the Jewish Lamed Vav, the 36 Just Men of Jewish tradition who were so memorably utilised by Andre Schwartz-Bart in his astonishingly moving Holocaust novel, The Last of the Just.

Sadly, that turned out to be the only thing the two books has in common and I only got about a quarter of the way through The Book of Names before being forced to put it on the Never to Be Read pile. It's not awful and I'm sure there's an audience for books where the actual writing is secondary to the convoluted (if frequently nonsensical) plot, but any novel this close to one of Dan Brown's clueless, mish-mash novels is not for me.
The second novel, though, was the middle book in Jack Vance's Dying Earth series - Cugel's Saga.  It's what posh reviews would call a picaresque, but really it's just a mish-mash of short stories nailed together by the best - and laziest - linking concept ever: Cugel has been transported across the world by a magician for no obvious reason the exact same as he was in the first book in the series! From that majestic starting point, you'd expect things could only go downhill.  In reality, though, it remains great from beginning to end, as Cugel gts involved in one implausible scheme after another as he makes his way back home.  Little of it makes any real sense and there's a very odd bit in the middle where Vance apparently couldn't even be bothered smoothing the edges of two stories together and instead has a footnote pointing out that the next few pages occur after the first few pages of the next story, but that just adds to the ramshackle charm of the book as a whole.

I don't know if I'd want to read another book like this any time soon, but I'd read it five times over in a row rather than become bogged down in the plot of The Book of Names.  Even better, I see the cover of a Dads Army annual peeking out from underneath that spilled heap of books...