a victory over ourselves – versions of 1984 in 2025

Remembering 1984 as someone who was a child then, I find that although the clocks didn’t strike thirteen, the year – as encapsulated by two specific and very different but not unconnected childhood memories, as we’ll see – is almost as alien nowadays as Orwell’s Airstrip One. Of course, I know far more now about both 1984 and Nineteen Eighty-Four than I did at the time. I was aware – thanks mostly I think to John Craven’s Newsround – of the big, defining events of the year.

Surely the greatest ever cover for Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Stuart Hughes, for the 1990 Heinemann New Windmills edition

I knew, for instance about the Miners’ Strike and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, but they didn’t have anything like the same impact on me personally as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I remember Zola Budd tripping or whatever it was at the Olympics and Prince Harry being born, but they weren’t as important to me as Strontium Dog or Judge Dredd. Even Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood made a bigger impression on me than most of the big news events, despite the fact that I didn’t like it. My favourite TV show that year was probably Grange Hill – and here we go.

Grange Hill, essentially a kids’ soap opera set in a big comprehensive high school in London, ran for 30 years and I recently discovered that the era of it that I remember most fondly – the series’ that ran from 1983-6 – is available on YouTube. When I eventually went to high school later in the 80s, my first impression of the school was that it was like Grange Hill, and now I find that despite the silliness and melodrama, Grange Hill still reflects the reality, the look and the texture of my high school experience in the 80s with surprising accuracy.

Grange Hill”s 5th formers in 1984 (back: Stewpot & Glenroy, front: Suzanne & Mr McGuffy)

But anyway, watching old Grange Hill episodes out of nostalgia, I was struck by how good it seems in the context of the 2020s, despite the obvious shortcomings of being made for children. Check out this scene from series seven, episode five, written by Margaret Simpson and aired in January of 1984. In among typical story arcs about headlice and bullying, the Fifth form class (17 year olds getting towards the end of their time at school) get the opportunity to attend a mock UN conference with representatives from other schools. In a discussion about that, the following exchange occurs between Mr McGuffy (Fraser Cains) and his pupils Suzanne Ross (Susan Tully), Christopher “Stewpot” Stewart (Mark Burdis), Claire Scott (Paula-Ann Bland) and Glenroy (seemingly of no last name) (Steven Woodcock). It’s worth noting that this was the year before Live Aid.

Suzanne: [re. the UN]:"It's about as effective as the school council."

Mr McGuffy: "Oh well I wouldn't quite say that. The UN does some excellent work - UNESCO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN Peacekeeping force..."   [...]

Claire: "What's the conference gonna be about?"


Mr McGuffy: "The world food problem. There was a real UN conference on this topic ten years ago..Glenroy: "Didn't solve much then, did they? Millions of people still starvin'"

Stewpot: ”Yeah that's cos they ain't got no political clout to do anything about it though, ain't it"

Glenroy: ”Naw man, it's because the rich countries keep them that waySuzanne: “The only chance a poor country's got is if it's got something we wantGlenroy:That's right - they got something the west wants and they'd better watch out because the west starts to mess with their government."

Mr McGuffy: "Well it's clear from what you've all said so far that you're interested in the sort of issues that will be discussed that weekend..."

Suzanne & Claire, 1984

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that that is a more mature political discussion than is often heard on Question Time in 2025. Interestingly, it’s not an argument between left and right as such, but between standard, humanitarian and more radical left-wing viewpoints. Needless to say, if it was presented on a TV show that’s popular with ten year-olds nowadays, a certain demographic would be foaming at the mouth about the BBC indoctrinating the young with “wokeness.” But as a kid this sort of discussion didn’t at all mar my enjoyment of the show – naturally there’s also a lot of comedic stuff in the series about stink bombs and money-making schemes, but one of the reasons that Grange Hill remained popular (and watchable for 8 year-olds and 15 year-olds alike) for so many years was that it refused to talk down to its audience.

The way the writers tackled the obvious big themes – racism, sexism, parents getting divorced, bullying, gangs, sex education etc – are impressive despite being, quite broad, especially when the younger pupils are the focus of the storyline, but what makes a bigger impression on me now is the background to it all. It’s a little sad – though true to Thatcher’s Britain – to see through all this period the older pupils’ low-level fretting about unemployment and whether it’s worth being in school at all.

And maybe they were right. In 1984, when Suzanne and Stewpot were 17, a fellow Londoner who could in a parallel universe have been in the year above them at Grange Hill was the 18-year-old model Samantha Fox. That year, she was The Sun newspaper’s “Page 3 Girl of the Year.” She had debuted as a topless model for the paper aged 16, which is far more mind boggling to a nostalgic middle-aged viewer of Grange Hill than it would have been to me at the time. Presumably, some parts of the anti-woke lobby would not mind Sam’s modelling as much as they would mind the Grange Hill kids’ political awareness, but who knows?

Sam Fox in (approximately) Grange Hill mode c.1986, not sure who took it

Naturally, the intended audience for Page 3 wasn’t Primary School children – but everybody knew who Sam Fox was and in the pre-internet, 4-channel TV world of 80s Britain he had a level of fame far beyond that of any porn star 40 years later (arguments about whether or not Page 3 was porn are brain-numbingly stupid, so I won’t go there; and anyway, I don’t mean porn to be a derogatory term). Anyway, Sam (she’ll always be “Sam” to people who grew up in the 80s) and her Page 3 peers made occasional accidental appearances in the classroom, to general hilarity, when the class was spreading old newspapers on our desks to prepare for art classes. It was also pretty standard then to see the “Page Three Stunnas” (as I think The Sun put it) blowing around the playground or covering a fish supper. It wasn’t like growing up with the internet, but in its own way the 80s was an era of gratuitous nudity.

a nice Yugoslav edition of 1984 from 1984

Meanwhile, on Page Three of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith – who is, shockingly, a few years younger than I am now – is trying to look back on his own childhood to discern whether things were always as they are now:

But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) P.3 – New Windmill edition, 1990

By contrast, some of the roots of 2025 are plain to see in 1984, despite the revolution of the internet that happened halfway between then and now. As the opposing poles of the Grange Hill kids and The Sun demonstrate, there were tensions in British society which would never so far be resolved, but they would come to some kind of semi-conclusion at the end of the Thatcher era when when ‘Political Correctness,’ the chimerical predecessor of the equally chimerical ‘Woke’ began to work in its unpredictable (but I think mostly positive) ways.

 

Most obviously, Page 3 became ever more controversial and was toned down (no nipples) and then vanished from the tabloids altogether for a while (though in the 90s the appearance of “lads’ mags” which mainstreamed soft porn made the death of Page 3 kind of a pyrrhic victory.) More complicatedly, the kind of confrontational storylines about topics like racism that happened in kids shows in the 80s became a little more squeamish, to the point where (for entirely understandable reasons) racist bullies on kids’ shows would rarely use actual racist language and then barely appear at all, replaced by positivity in the shape of more inclusive casting and writing. All of which became pretty quaint as soon as the internet really took off.

a very 1984-looking edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1984

So, that was part of the 1984 that I remember; what Orwell would have made of any of it I don’t know. It wasn’t his nineteen eighty-four, which might have pleased him. For me, it all looks kind of extreme but also refreshingly straightforward, though I’m sure I only think so because I was a child. It’s all very Gen-X isn’t it?

a dream itself is but a shadow

Sigmund Freud c.1885, with Freudian facial hair

Whether or not you agree with Sigmund Freud that “the dream proves to be the first of a series of abnormal psychic formations” or that “one who cannot explain the origin of the dream pictures will strive in vain to understand [the] phobias, the obsessive and delusional ideas and likewise their therapeutic importance,” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913 translated by A.A. Brill) dreams are a regular, if not daily/nightly part of human life regardless of culture, language, age etc, and so not without significance. I could go on about dreams like I did about honey in a previous post but I won’t – they are too pervasive popular culture – just everywhere in culture, in books, and plays and art and films and songs (Dreams they complicate/complement my life, as Michael Stipe wrote.) That’s enough of that.

But what about daydreams? If dreams arrive uninvited from the unconscious or subconscious mind, then surely the things we think about, or dwell on, deliberately are even more important. “Dwell on” is an interesting phrase – to dwell is “to live in a place or in a particular way” BUT ‘dwell’ has a fascinating history that makes it seem like exactly the right word in this situation – from the Old English dwellan “to lead into error, deceive, mislead,” related to dwelian “to be led into error, go wrong in belief or judgment” etc, etc, according to etymonline.com : I’ll put the whole of this in a footnote* because I think it’s fascinating, but the key point is that at some time in the medieval period it’s largely negative connotations, to “delay” become modified to mean “to stay.” But I like to think the old meaning of the word lingers in the subtext like dreams in the subconscious.

But I could say something similar about my own use of the word “deliberately” above (“Things we dwell on deliberately”) and even more so the phrase I nearly used instead, which was “on purpose” – but then this would become a ridiculously long and convoluted piece of writing, so that’s enough etymology for now.

The human mind is a powerful thing. Even for those of us who don’t believe in telekinesis or remote viewing or ‘psychic powers’ in the explicitly paranormal sense. After all, your mind controls everything you think and nearly everything you do to the point where separating the mind from the body, as western culture tends to do, becomes almost untenable. Even though the euphemism “unresponsive wakefulness syndrome” has gained some traction in recent years, that’s because the dysphemism (had to look that word up) “persistent vegetative state” is something we fear and therefore that loss of self, or of humanity offends us. It’s preferable for most of us, as fiction frequently demonstrates, to believe that even in that state, dreams of some kind continue in the mind; because as human beings we are fully our mind in a way that we are only occasionally fully our body. One of the fears connected to the loss of self is that we lose the ability to choose what to think about, which is intriguing because that takes us again into the (might as well use the pompous word) realm of dreams.

The Danish actress Asta Nielsen as Hamlet in 1921

My favourite Shakespeare quote is the last line from this scene in Hamlet (Act 2 Scene 2)

Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and
dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” seems to deny any possibility of objective morality, but its logic is undeniable. After all, you or I may think that [insert one of thousands of examples from current politics and world events] is ‘wrong’, but if [individual in position of power] doesn’t think so, and does the wrong thing, even if all of the worst possible outcomes stem from it, the most you can say is that you, and people who agree with you, think it was wrong. Hitler almost certainly believed, as he went to the grave, that he was a martyr who had failed in his grand plan only because of the betrayal and duplicity of others. I think that’s wrong, you hopefully think that’s wrong, even “history” thinks that’s wrong, but none of that matters to Hitler in his bunker in 1945, any more than Rosencrantz & Guildenstern finding Denmark to be a nice place if only their old friend Hamlet could regain his usual good humour makes any difference to Hamlet.

Anyway, daydreams or reveries (a nice word that feels a bit pretentious to say); its dictionary definitions are mostly very positive – a series of pleasant thoughts about something you would prefer to be doing or something you would like to achieve in the future.
A state of abstracted musing.
A loose or irregular train of thought occurring in musing or mediation; deep musing – and there’s a school of thought that has been around for a long time but seems even more prevalent today, which values daydreams as, not just idle thoughts, but as affirmations. Anyone who has tried to change their life through hypnosis or various kinds of therapy will find that daydreaming and visualising are supposed to be important aspects of your journey to a better you. In a way all of these self-help gurus, lifestyle coaches and therapists are saying the same thing; as Oscar Hammerstein put it, “You got to have a dream,
If you don’t have a dream, How you gonna have a dream come true?” But is making your dreams, even your daydreams, come true necessarily a good thing?

patriotic vapour trails spotted this winter

I seem to remember once reading that if you can focus all of your attention on something for 15 seconds you’ll remember it forever (not sure about the duration; if you Google stuff like this you find there are millions of people offering strategies to improve your memory, which isn’t quite what I was looking for). Whether or not that’s true, every time I see a vapour trail in an otherwise blue sky, I have the same thought/image – actually two thoughts, but “first you look so strong/then you fade away” came later and failed to replace the earlier thought, which must date from the age of 9 or 10 or so. I realise that people telling you their dreams is boring (or so people say, I never find it to be so), but you don’t have to keep reading. I can see the fluffy, white trail against the hot pale blue sky (it’s summer, the sun is incandescent and there are no clouds) and as my eye follows it from its fraying, fading tail to its source, I can see the nose cone of the plane glinting in the sun, black or red and metallic. It looks slow, leisurely even, but the object is travelling at hundreds of miles an hour. I know there’s no pilot inside that warm, clean shell (I can imagine feeling its heat, like putting your hand on the bonnet or roof of a car parked in direct sunshine; only there are rivets studding the surface of this machine). I’m shading my eyes with my hand, watching its somehow benign-looking progress, but I know that it’s on its way to the nearby airforce base and that others are simultaneously flying towards other bases and major cities and soon, everything I can see and feel will be vapourised and cease to exist. I had this daydream many times as a child, I have no idea how long it lasted but I can remember the clarity and metallic taste of it incredibly clearly. Did I want it to happen? Definitely not. Was I scared? No, although I remember an almost physical sense of shaking it off afterwards. Did I think it would happen? It’s hard to remember, maybe – but I wouldn’t have been alone in that if so. But anyway, the interesting point to me is that this wasn’t a dream that required sleep or the surrender of the conscious mind to the unconscious – I was presumably doing it “on purpose”, although what that purpose was I have no idea; nothing very nice anyway.

Childhood hero: Charles M Schulz’s Charlie Brown

Probably most of us carry around a few daydreams with us, most I’m sure far more pleasant than that one. I can remember a few from my adolescence that were almost tangible then and still feel that way now (I would swear that I can remember what a particular person’s cheek felt like against my fingertips though I definitely didn’t ever touch it. As my childhood role model, Charlie Brown would say, “Augh!” Charles M. Schulz clearly knew about these things and still felt them vividly as an adult (as, more problematically, did Egon Schiele, subject of my previous article; but let’s not go into that). Most of the daydreams we keep with us into adulthood (or create in adulthood) are probably nicer baggage to carry around than the vapour trail one, unless you’re one of those people who fantasises about smashing people’s heads in with an iron bar (who has such a thing as an iron bar? Why iron? Wouldn’t brass do the job just as well and lead even better?) beyond the teenage years when violent daydreams are almost inevitable, but hopefully fleeting.

But thinking about your daydreams is odd, they are, like your thoughts and dreams, yours and nobody else’s, but where they come from in their detail seems almost as obscure as dream-dreams. Perhaps Freud would know. I have a couple of daydreams that have been lurking around for decades, but while I don’t believe in telekinesis or even the current obsession with affirmations and ‘manifesting,’ apparently I must be a bit superstitious; because if I wrote them down they might not come true innit?

 

*Old English dwellan “to lead into error, deceive, mislead,” related to dwelian “to be led into error, go wrong in belief or judgment,” from Proto-Germanic *dwaljana “to delay, hesitate,” *dwelana “go astray” (source also of Old Norse dvelja “to retard, delay,” Danish dvæle “to linger, dwell,” Swedish dväljas “to dwell, reside;” Middle Dutch dwellen “to stun, perplex;” Old High German twellen “to hinder, delay”) from PIE *dhwel-, extended form of root *dheu- (1) “dust, cloud, vapor, smoke” (also forming words with the related notions of “defective perception or wits”).

The apparent sense evolution in Middle English was through “to procrastinate, delay, be tardy in coming” (late 12c.), to “linger, remain, stay, sojourn,” to “make a home, abide as a permanent resident” (mid-14c.). From late 14c. as “remain (in a certain condition or status),” as in phrase dwell upon “keep the attention fixed on.” Related: Dwelled; dwelt (for which see went); dwells.

It had a noun form in Old English, gedweola “error, heresy, madness.” Also compare Middle English dwale “deception, trickery,” from Old English dwala or from a Scandinavian cognate (such as Danish dvale “trance, stupor, stupefaction”); dwale survived into late Middle English as “a sleeping potion, narcotic drink, deadly nightshade.”

the book even of my secret soul (about books, again)

I love books. I want books. Post-Christmas I’m in the enviable position of having – not money, but in a way even better, virtual money that can only be spent on books. What I don’t have though, is a lot of space for books. So, periodically pruning the library (too grand a word) or book collection (worse?) or “my books” (better) is a painful necessity. But what to prune, and why? So far, every single time I’ve put together a box of books and dispersed it to charity shops I’ve almost immediately ‘needed’ one of the books I purged. On a few occasions (see here) I’ve bought back books (not the same actual copy though; I’m not that bad, yet) that I got rid of. And I’ll probably do it again, but I’m trying not to.

Why is it painful to get rid of books? Pompously, because the books you own are a reflection of yourself; of skins shed and personalities outgrown and discarded, and in a way a direct line back to your (possibly alarming) former selves with their sometimes alien tastes and enthusiasms.* Less pompously, because in general, I want more books, not fewer. I can’t think of an occasion when I got rid of a book simply because I didn’t like or just didn’t want it, though I’m sure it’s happened. And so, for decades I still owned (and may still have somewhere) the little red Gideons Bible that was given out to pupils when starting high school (do they still do that?). Its bookplate (ex-libris? Both terms seem very archaic) hints strongly at the typical kind of 12 year old boy that it was given to: Name: William Pinfold Form: human. Similarly, I may still have the books given to me in the street by Hare Krishna followers, which seems not to happen now but was a frequent enough thing in the early 90s that I can still remember without checking** that they were credited to and/or consisted of teachings by “His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.” They often had nice, pleasingly psychedelic cover paintings but were invariably disappointing to try to read because, even when they had amazing titles like Easy Journey to Other Planets, they were all about Krishna consciousness – who knew?. But these are books that would be impossible to replace (in a personal sense; easy enough to get hold of different copies of them). More complicatedly – and just annoyingly, with space at a premium, I have multiple copies of some favourite books and will probably buy even more copies of them, if I come across them with covers that I like but don’t have and if they are cheap.

*case in point; I had forgotten how much I liked Camille Paglia in the days before libertarianism was an essentially standard right-wing-asshole viewpoint and when her provocative/confrontational ideas didn’t yet include being disingenuously frivolous about child abuse

** I’m only human though; I spelled his name wrong until looking out a picture of the book, Possibly absorbing his teachings might have helped?

So yes, I have quite a lot of books; but although ‘book collectors’ exist, I don’t qualify as one. Collecting is deliberate and with presumably, a specific end point in view; a collection. Collecting things is fun up to a point, but ultimately a thankless and frustrating task without the required personality type. It (fleetingly) irritates me when an author I like has written four or five books and the publisher changes the cover design or size after the first few, so the mismatched chaos of a complete collection is not for me. Not to mention that there are writers – Michael Moorcock, in print since the 1950s and as far as I know still writing, is the obvious example for me – who have, over the course of decades, written a ridiculous number of books, which have appeared under countless imprints in myriad editions and countries and therefore offer an opportunity for an epic and soul-crushingly futile quest for the true completist. I am not that completist.

who wouldn’t want a beautiful Aubrey Beardsley ex-libris in all their books? But who would want to actually paste them into all their books?

On the other hand, following the old stately home-library tradition of having a personalised ex-libris/bookplate/sticker thing, with its individualistic iconography always seems like a nice idea – even if it’s essentially just a picturesque way of writing your name in a book, which I would never do. It’s nice see a decorative ex-libris in an old book, but although the thought of having one’s own books personalised in that way is nice, the reality of actually sticking them in the books – fun for maybe the first ten or twenty, but after that too tedious to consider, is not so appealing. So, not a collector; but even not a true bibliophile either, at least in the sense that sometimes is written about. I do love books, but not all or any books, I don’t contemplate, like a wine taster, the smell of old books. There are of course books with distinctive odours, some pleasant (to me) like the dry and somehow slightly spicy smell (probably best to not think too much about) of old calf-bound volumes from the 18th century and earlier, others less so, like the peculiarly vomit-like bouquet of new children’s books. And though browsing through shelves and rooms of books can be and usually is an entirely pleasant pastime, after the excitement has faded there can be something a little depressing about looking through piles of chilly, mildewy, corrugated and fat-with-damp paperbacks in the bigger, more drafty and warehouse-like charity shops or auction rooms.

the uninspiring cover that inspired me to read beyond my taste, strangely

Still; books are artifacts in themselves and not just valuable for their contents. Though judging books by their covers is frowned on, that’s kind of what the covers are for. I’ve written about this stuff in several places before so won’t go on about it here, but there’s never been a time that I’ve read as hungrily or as indiscriminately as when I was a child, and until I found authors that were trustworthy – I will try to get onto the second part of that Robert Westall feature some time this year – covers were the thing that drew me in. I loved fantasy, history and sci-fi, so covers were what made books leap off the shelves of the local library or school library. And there were somehow never enough books to read, so that when, aged 12 – 14 or so, our English teacher required pupils to take books out of the school library every week, it was a perfect opportunity to branch out. After a fairly short time the kind of books I automatically wanted to read had been exhausted and it was necessary to try something else. It’s a strange thing, reading not-for-you books, kind of like trying on other people’s clothes, but I gave it a go, as I have a few times since then*. The book that stands out in my memory – or at least its cover does – is Desmond Bagley’s Bahama Crisis (1980). Being a newcomer to men’s thrillers (still an alien world mostly) I think I was expecting, without much excitement, James Bond (never a fan)-style action, but as I very hazily remember the book was mostly a soapy kind of story about the difficulties of running a hotel in the Bahamas.(??) I didn’t mind it, but although records tell me** that I got more Desmond Bagleys out of the library – I had to get something – none of them, or their titles or even their covers stick in my mind at all.

*reading not-for-me books, not trying on other peoples’ clothes                                                                             ** there’s a list in an old school jotter which I never threw away

It’s hard to imagine, as the world has become ever-more commercially driven, but it feels like publishers nowadays underestimate the seductive power of a good cover design (though what constitutes a good one is obviously subjective). There are several authors I liked as a young adult – Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan and Truman Capote spring to mind, but so (who would have thought it?) does Jean-Paul Sartre – who I might well never have read at all if I didn’t find the covers of their books so alluring. In retrospect the late 80s/early 90s seems like a golden age of book design to me, and don’t think it’s entirely because of the age I was when I first saw them. I was still only in my early 20s a few years later when book jackets became dominated by neon, acid colours and deliberately jarring designs and those left me cold at the time and look dated now. The covers I associate with that ‘golden age’ are entirely typical of the look that much literary fiction was going for at the time.

Milan Kundera’s books are actually about 50% better when read with these covers

Have there ever been cooler looking books than the 80s Faber & Faber or “King Penguin” (whatever happened to King Penguins?) Milan Kunderas? Or Russell Mills‘ genius covers for Picador’s Ian McEwans? Is it just a coincidence that they have a lot in common Dave McKean’s graphic novel designs of the time like Violent Cases and Arkham Asylum or Bill Sienkiewicz’s Stray Toasters? And though Penguin Modern Classics still look good now have they ever looked better than the pale green spines and black and white photo covers of that period?

assorted Ian McEwans, graphic novels & Penguin Modern Classics
bilious mid-90s book design
Boris Vallejo good; John Norman bad

Of course covers can mislead too; much as Peruvian painter Boris Vallejo is some kind of genius, one quickly learned that his covers were no guarantee of quality. Everything about John Norman’s Gor series – the sub-Tolkien/Robert E Howard setting, the Vallejo (and Vallejo imitators – of whom there were many) artwork, the swords and sorcery and gratuitous violence and sex – were guaranteed to appeal to the male, teenage fantasy fan; and yet the books were bizarrely dull to read. Actually, to be fair to Norman, the sex in the Gor books is hardly gratuitous, since it’s basically the whole point of the series; but the endless, tedious essays about masculine power and the bondage fantasies that pepper his books; without the thrill of the quest or even an alleviating sense of humour, is definitely an acquired taste. It was good to read, years later, Micheal Moorcock – along with Tolkien my favourite fantasy author – writing about how boring and tacky the Gor books were. I didn’t think it could just be me. Of course, Moorcock attacked Tolkien too, but though his essay Epic Pooh is not only a good read, but also hard to argue with at times (Moorcock’s main point is that Tolkien is conservative in his worldview and reproduces the class outlook and prejudices of his generation in his fiction) somehow Tolkien’s books resist the criticism effortlessly, if you’re a fan. I think it’s because for Tolkien, the background and history and world-building (as I believe they say nowadays) was the main point of interest, whereas for most subsequent heroic fantasy authors, all that is just the window dressing, so that Middle Earth feels real and believable in a way that most fantasy “realms” don’t. I don’t think there’s any point in Lord of the Rings where the reader has a question that they feel Tolkien couldn’t answer satisfactorily. That said, I imagine sex-related questions would have made him uncomfortable, whereas John Norman might not be able to tell you the detailed history and folklore of Counter-Earth as Tolkien could with Middle Earth, but he could definitely tell you which ropes, gag or whips are favoured by which tribes.

So; looking through my books there are many different versions of myself; because you read books that reflect your interests but often you also get those interests from books themselves. From the age of 8 or so, the Fighting Fantasy role-playing game book series cut across many of my interests. But even then, those books appealed to the child-me in the first place because I loved history and mythology and legends and Asterix the Gaul. But I’ve written more about children’s books and related subjects here and here and here and here and probably elsewhere too, so will try not to repeat myself. It’s easy to think of books that had a big influence on my interests as a child – the version of me that wanted to be an archaeologist wasn’t just thanks to Indiana Jones; before I ever saw Raiders of the Lost Ark I was already fascinated by the Aztecs and Incas because of Tintin and the Romans via Asterix – but also those things plus Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Normans, medieval history and knights etc via a big book called The History of the World that I got at a Primary School “Bring & Buy Sale” when I must have been 8 or so. That book had – still has in fact – painted illustrations that I remember vividly; ancient Sumerians, Julius Caesar being stabbed to death in the forum, ancient Greek ladies in strange clothes that exposed their breasts; mysteriously exciting even to an 8 year old, Genghis Khan on his horse, Viking raiders etc, etc. The me who loved space stuff was partly thanks to excitement about the space shuttle program (admittedly that cooled off after the Challenger disaster) and Star Wars, but also 2000 AD comic and the very badly-bound but beautiful reprints of old Dan Dare comics that Paper Tiger published in the early 80s)

But all this is getting away from the point, which is that book ownership is not just about reading. Books like the Bible or Easy Journey to Other Planets are not being kept to read, any more than E.W. Hildick’s Deadline for McGurk, a towering masterpiece as a kid but probably unreadable as an adult, or the different variants of The Fellowship of the Ring or JG Ballard’s Crash that take up valuable shelf space. Getting rid of them would feel wrong, at least unless there was a good cause or if more worthy books come along and the space must reluctantly be yielded to them. That’s the not-so-great thing about having book tokens to spend; the need to consider, plan and use them wisely. I probably won’t.

Book lover’s regrets – should have bought it but didn’t! Perhaps the greatest book cover of all time

The Dead Cannot Contradict: R.I.P. M.E.S. 1957 – 2018

Mark E. Smith 1991 by Matthew R Lewis

There have been a lot of obituaries for the great Mark E. Smith in the last week. This will not be one of the better ones, but it is my one. In my experience, the bands you love in your teens are, although they have a special place in your memory, mostly not the same bands you listen to for the rest of your life (to date). But unlike most of my favourite artists from those long years between 16 and 20 or thereabouts, I never went off The Fall, I just didn’t listen to them very often. But whenever I did, they seemed just as strange and clever and funny and unique as they had the first time I heard them.

The Fall are legendarily supposed to be a hard band to like, or to get into, but I never found it to be so. The hard-to-like quality obviously has something to do with their spiky, unpredictable sound (and Mark E. Smith’s indomitable/hectoring voice) but is perhaps also due to the fact that – for the most part – their music doesn’t appeal to the emotions, it is not (hopefully) about you; nobody (as far as I know) wallows in The Fall, the way as an adolescent I wallowed in The Cure or The Smiths or the Cranes or whoever it might be. The first Fall song I heard was a snippet of then-current single ‘Telephone Thing‘ (a funky, catchy wah-wah-led pop song with a phone-tapping theme, which namechecks EastEnders actress Gretchen Franklin – i.e. as typically atypical as any Fall single) on The Chart Show, which was enough to make me buy its parent album, Extricate. As a reader of the music weeklies (Melody Maker was my favourite, but I often bought NME and Sounds as well) I was of course aware of The Fall, and specifically Mark E. Smith, at that point – as he was to remain – a figure who polarised the magazines’ writers, while – unlike say Morrissey or Robert Smith – having the (admittedly sometimes grudging) respect, seemingly, of all of them.

Extricate is in itself a classic Fall album, but it was intriguing in all kinds of ways. I liked. firstly, the tunes, but also the the mix of the un-selfconscious artiness of the abstract cover painting/assemblage by contemporary artist Anthony Frost, with the barbed humour of the lyrics (the album contains the classic ‘British People In Hot Weather‘as well as the aforementioned ‘Telephone Thing‘ and (I have the cassette version) ‘Arms Control Poseur‘). But one of the great things about coming to this – or I think any – Fall album as an introduction to the band, is that it hints at so much more than it contains. This, the reviews said, was an unusually accessible/conventional Fall album and indeed, Mark E. Smith’s sleevenote reinforced that impression:

There is no central track, as I’ve/we’ve tried to give out The Fall as it should be and not as it is perceived. Therefore, the first half of the disc reflects on things witnessed and/or sensed, while the second half is NOW. This means there’s a thin dish-up of stories and characters etc, but that format’s well flogged and pushed of recent, so hopefully EXTRICATE’s simplicity will confound all bores, imitators and anxiety mongers./ EXTRICATE! All the best from M.E.S.

This was odd. Mark E. Smith reminded me of nothing so much as Alex from A Clockwork Orange; sophisticated, articulate, menacing but not unfriendly. A few years later, when I began to read Wyndham Lewis I was reminded irresistibly of Mark E. Smith. And indeed the whole of The Fall’s early work is extremely Vorticist/BLAST-like. I didn’t know though until quite recently that Mark E. Smith was a fellow Wyndham Lewis fan (though I think MES often agreed with Lewis where I don’t) – it seems so obvious now.  And the reference to stories and characters was intriguing; if this was The Fall gone normal then what did they sound like before?? I think the next album I bought might have been the essential compilation of early material Palace Of Swords Reversed; here were ‘Marquis Cha-Cha‘, a story about a Lord Haw Haw character stranded in South America which opens

“He can never go home
Stranded in South America, nothing to go home for
Just another Brit in the bar
Hernandez Fiendish comes over to me
Offers a job as broadcaster…”

who else was writing songs like that? Or ‘Leave The Capitol‘ (“exit this Roman shell!“) or, even more peculiarly, ‘Wings‘:

“Day by day
The moon gains on me
Purchased pair of flabby wings
I took to doing some hovering”

And that’s just the lyrics; another thing about The Fall that made an impression on me early on was that, although MES was incredibly fussy and perfectionist about the band’s music, he wasn’t snobbish in the usual way; no tune, if it was catchy, was too silly for Mark E. Smith. Think of the speedy but somehow miniature-sounding rock guitar on ‘Underground Medicine‘ or loping, bouncy beat to ‘Gramme Friday‘ or the oddly jaunty, countryish ‘Fit And Working Again‘. or the kazoo on ‘The North Will Rise Again this was ‘angular’ (the definitive descriptive term for late 70s/early 80s UK indie rock) if you like, but it was not standard ‘post-punk’ music, nor was it (as it could easily have been) twee in that beloved ramshackle UK indie/C86 kind of way. Perhaps because Mark E. Smith was not (99% of the time) a melodic singer, the band could play anything behind him and it sounded right. When, at the beginning of one of my favourite songs, ‘Slates‘, MES shouts ‘this is the definitive rant‘ he’s nailing part of the charm of his work. As long as the rant was in place, no tune was too small, too jingly or too silly to make something worthwhile out of.

After Palace Of Swords Reversed I bought anything I could get my hands on. Luckily there was a lot of it, and it was mostly pretty affordable, especially the stuff from the band’s then slightly maligned, now justly celebrated mid-80s period of relative commercial success. In itself, that success was odd and underlined just how unique the band, and specifically Smith’s vision, was. I loved that Mark E. Smith saw nothing elitist or strange about working with a ballet company, or in writing for the theatre and working with ‘serious’ artists and yet the people I knew who derided Morrissey as being “poncy” never seemed to think that about MES. The fact that he refused to separate the ‘high’ arts from his work with The Fall was so powerful. Everyone knows, for example, that Brian May is an astrophysicist, but imagine if astrophysics had somehow been indivisible from his work with Queen; they would have been far a more peculiar and far less successful, but also (with no offence intended to the band or its members) probably more interesting band.

Although most of my favourite Fall albums are the early ones (especially Dragnet, Grotesque (After The Gramme) and Hex Enduction Hour) those 80s albums with the Mark and Brix-led lineup(s), especially The Wonderful and Frightening World Of The Fall are pretty unassailable and perhaps the least overtly commercial ‘commercial’ period of any band I can think of. The band stayed good though, and although I am not a Fall completist (a vocation rather than a hobby) I’ve found that any Fall record one picks up will have something great on it; and there aren’t many bands with a 40 year career you can say that about.

A few random but significant (to me) Mark E. Smith/Fall things:

  • my favourite Fall release of them all is Slates (1981); typically awkward, it is a brilliantly ungainly 6-track 10″ which Mark E. Smith was proud of as it was too long to qualify for the singles chart but too short for the album chart; not that it was likely to trouble either one. Plus, it opens with MES shouting “Pink press threat!
  • I must be impressionable; I think I got into Albert Camus because The Fall were named after one of his books.
  • I don’t remember which music paper it was in, but Mark E. Smith was a guest reviewer in one of the weeklies c.1992 and gave Morrissey’s Your Arsenal a surprisingly positive(ish) review. One phrase that stuck in my memory (perhaps incorrectly) and seems definitively MES-ish to me is “the guitar player has too much equipment”
  • When I first read (in the late 90s?) Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical novel Lions And Shadows (1938) the idea of ‘The Other Town’, the sinister unseen parallel reality accessed through various apparently ordinary gates and doorways in Cambridge reminded me irresistibly of the band, especially the bizarre, creepy but also funny narrative songs like the (actually quite Lovecraftian) ‘Impression Of J. Temperance’ :

“A never seen dog breeder
This is the tale of his replica
Name was J. Temperance
Only two did not hate him
Because peasants fear local indifference
Pet shop and the vet, Cameron…”

 

  • when I finally listened to the classic German band Can it was because the Fall song ‘I Am Damo Suzuki‘ made me curious about them
  • one of the key things about The Fall’s music is its palate-cleansing quality; their music makes almost any other comparable popular music sound sentimental in comparison. And yet on the rare occasions (‘Bill Is Dead‘, ‘Edinburgh Man‘) when MES is sentimental the songs are among his best.
  • Edinburgh Man‘ was probably the first song I heard by a band I liked that was about a place I knew
  • I have been a Fall fan for half of my life, but I’ve only met maybe 4 or 5 other people who like them (though I realise they are quite popular)
  • I never particularly wanted to meet Mark E. Smith, but I’m very sad that he’s dead.

 

 

PS – the title for this piece is from an enigmatic line in the – obviously – highly peculiar song New Face In Hell: 
The dead cannot contradict/Sometimes the living cannot