Martin Amis died last Friday. He’s been my favourite novelist ever since, aged eighteen, I first read The Rachel Papers. Eighteen was a good age to be reading a literary novel about impending adulthood, first love and the problem of having to make life-defining decisions without the relevant experience, written by an author who was only six years older, when he wrote it, than I was when I read it. Never before had I known someone to write – to speak – in a voice that, to my innocently self-regarding sensibility, sounded so much like my own. Later, of course, I would come to realise just how pretentious the comparison was; yet, to this day, when I read Martin Amis, I don’t hear his voice in my head so much as I hear mine coming out of his.
Before you wheel away, retching, a placatory word. This isn’t some self-aggrandizing exercise in smarm dressed up as an obituary. It isn’t, even, an obituary. I’m too old and lazy – besides rather conspicuously lacking in the talent – to compete with the august hommes de lettres now rushing into print with appreciations of their late colleague (I think we can take it for granted that there won’t be many femmes). Besides, Matthew D’Ancona has already written, in the New European, pretty much the same things I should have done, even making the affective comparison with the death of David Bowie that came over me the instant I heard the news. The Amis Effect Redux, I suppose; but at least it saves me the trouble.
I came here, instead, to write a short list for a couple of friends who, implicitly or explicitly, asked me to recommend something of his for them to read. One is a lately-retired English teacher whose speciality used to be squeezing the distended spawn of well-heeled semiliterates through the needle’s eye of the GCE examinations. Appropriately enough, her literary tastes run to Thomas Hardy and Alice Walker. The other friend is also a teacher, one who struggles to impart the principles of economics to English schoolchildren (I gather that the traditional method, which involved us teaching them to one another on the playground or behind the lavatories, is no longer favoured). His bread is hard-earned and although he is spending it at the bookseller’s rather than on me, I am anxious that he should obtain full value. Having heard me mention that Amis’s own literary heroes were Bellow, Nabokov and Updike, he modestly averred that he had found the road-trip in Lolita ‘tedious’.
I was a bit shaken by this confession: one doesn’t, after all, read these people for the stories they tell – imagine reading Herzog or Pale Fire or the Rabbit novels for their plots – but for how they tell them and, beyond even that, the incomparable, unspeakable pleasure of just reading their words. When Nabokov, in one exquisite sentence, makes the sight of shit coming out of a horse beautiful, questions about where the horse is going and who is riding in the sleigh it draws after it become, temporarily at least, less germane than the words themselves, which one savours – you can retch now if you want – in isolation from the narrative in which they are functionally embedded. Nabokov’s prose is full of moments of this kind, epiphanies in which the world, under his minute scrutiny (the eye of the lepidopterist), seems on the brink of revealing the mysteries at its heart. ‘Spiritual’ is a word one hardly dares utter in connection with Nabokov, whose contempt for mumbo-jumbo of any kind was scathing; all the same, I think it is the right one to use to describe the meaning he extracts, the implied essences he distils from the translucence of a melting icicle or the bereft questing of a displaced caterpillar condemned to spend its last hours endlessly circling the rim of a picnic-table.
It’s easy to see how, if your expectations are largely primed by fiction in the plain style, by the habit of reading for the story (or, worse still, by your identity-politics), you could find Nabokov tedious, or worse. And Lolita is, of course, too notorious to be read at a first pass for anything but the story. Its infamous opening sentence, moreover, is just camouflage for the author’s intentions – his obsessions: but these are adumbrated almost immediately thereafter in that arguably even better-known sentence, perhaps the most quoted of the whole novel: ‘Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.’ Again the lepidopteristic scrutiny, the painstaking dissection with the micro-forceps and teasing-needle – though we soon learn that it is not Lolita, the butterfly, who is really being dissected, but the perverted, self-deluded pouter who has devoured her.
But I was talking about Martin Amis. He isn’t like that. His novels move at a faster clip than his heroes’ – often, in fact, at a run. Not that he isn’t capable of the parenthetical discourse, the arch stylistic excursion, the vagrant rumination wilfully extended: London Fields and, particularly, The Information, are full of that sort of thing. But he doesn’t make too much of a habit of it, and besides, there’s always the humour: anarchic, sardonic, surreal in the English manner with a thick streak of the sixth form running down it – the vrai vice Anglais to snap you back to attention when your energy or intellect begin to flag. It isn’t to everybody’s taste, this humour: if you are a prig or a propagandist of any kind, a devotee of today’s obnoxious New Puritanism, say, or some kind of authoritarian revenge-fantasist, you won’t like it at all. You will be angered or offended, and I shall laugh all the harder for knowing how much it upsets you.
I’m rambling again? Okay, down to business. To the lady whose heart’s furniture has been, by her own report, traumatically rearranged more than once by Alice Walker, I offer the novels that, in a world that had the courage of its convictions, might have won their author a Nobel Prize: House of Meetings, The Zone of Interest and, of course, Time’s Arrow. The first two are, in my opinion, nowhere near his best, but all three offer the great, terrible subjects, the nightmare settings (a Soviet slave-labour camp above the Arctic Circle in one, Auschwitz in the other two), the doomed principals with their doomed principles, the lopsided auctorial rictus registering your propensity and mine for self-deception and the bottomlessness of our common capacity for evil.
The third, however, sits high on my personal chart of The Best of Amis: a preening virtuoso piece, a showy exercise in technical contrivance that, before you quite realise what is happening, has morphed into a harrowed first-person exposition of genocide-in-progress. When she’s done with that, she’s sure to need a pick-me-up; I recommend Mart at his most generic in Night Train, with its gender-sensitivity and – gasp – likeable female narrator-protagonist. I think my friend will enjoy that one, though of course it won’t be enough, in view of what she’ll have read or heard elsewhere, to offset its author’s reputation for good old-fashioned sexism.
That accusation has, of course, been thrown at Amis so many times that it now qualifies as one of those clichés he was eternally at war against. He never really rebutted it; some things are too silly to argue about even when the consequences to yourself are as unpleasant as the consequences of this were to him. His mild response was that, as an author, he treated his male characters far worse than his female ones. I think it will more than serve (being true), but you, especially if you’re a woman with the opinion that a lot of women seem to have about men nowadays, may not. Amis’s women are, not unreasonably, women as seen through a man’s eyes. They bear no resemblance to the wax dolls and marionettes that furnished the works of male authors for most of the last century (save, of course, for Nicola Six in London Fields – the fictional fictive, the stilettoed anima, the custom-made mantrap), but they’re still women as we – we men – see them. You don’t like that, ladies, do you? You’ve apprised us as much, times without number, though your behaviour towards us often tells a different story… Then again, modern writing by women tends, more often than not, to present men as nasty, coercive, thick or just useless: male characters in ‘quality' fiction by women tend to be objects of hilarity, terror or contempt. I note this without resentment: it is simply another manifestation of the eternal conflict of interest that obtains between the sexes, a struggle in which a peaceable truce is the best we can ever hope for, and even then, the terms must be constantly renegotiated as the world changes about us.
Perhaps I should be more defensive still with my friend the economics teacher, who will surely be on the lookout for other symptoms of privilege and patriarchy besides sexism. Having lately had cause to read an awareness pamphlet published for them by HM Government, I know that such vigilance is specifically enjoined on teachers within the British school system. All the same, I shan’t bother, because – come on – art and literature at the highest level define the bloody patriarchy and, the history of the world being what it is, cannot help but do so. Besides, he’s going to find them anyway, so let’s forget about the woke stuff for a bit and just steam in.
Thus: Money is the acknowledged masterpiece, the one that caused a sensation when published, made its author rich and famous and is now regarded as the literary distillation of life in the metropolitan West during the Eighties. If my friend is planning to read only one novel by Martin Amis, this should be the one. But if he’s willing to consider making a habit of him, as I have, I would advise saving the cream till later and starting, instead, with Lionel Asbo, which is as outrageous as Money but set in a world more recognizable to a Gen X-er than the yuppie inferno in which its predecessor was forged. Or he could try Success, which I think may be Amis’s most typical novel without necessarily being among his best.
After that, I’m afraid, my questing pedagogues are on their own. Perhaps they’ll work their way up, via some of the less successful works (Yellow Dog, The Pregnant Widow) to Other People, chronologically the first open revelation of Amis’s, ah, tender and sensitive side, but unsatisfying to me because the ending remains a puzzle no matter how many times I re-read it. Most people, though, would go straight for the biggies: Time’s Arrow, The Information, or my own favourite (preferred, though only by a hair, to Money), London Fields. Some of the nonfiction is also excellent, particularly Koba the Dread, Amis’s passionate indictment of Stalin, which led to his public feud with Christopher Hitchens (reportedly it never affected their private friendship), and The War against Cliché, a brilliant collection of critical essays and reflections. Finally and perhaps best of all, we come to his personal memoir, Experience. This deals, inter alia, with such persons and matters as the author’s father, a novelist nearly as celebrated in his time as his son is now; the stingy strangeness of Philip Larkin, who (young Martin speculates) might just have been his real father; middle-aged Martin’s discovery of a son he never knew he had; his relationships with other authors, in particular the elderly, dying Saul Bellow; and, most terrible of all, a portrait-biography of his well-loved cousin Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in December 1973 and whose dismembered remains were discovered in 1994 alongside those of the other victims of the mass-murderers Fred and Rose West. The Information is dedicated to her memory.
I haven’t yet talked about the novel I started with, The Rachel Papers. I love it, as the song says, for sentimental reasons, but it is very much of its time, culturally as well as in outlook. It’s the most blatantly autobiographical of all his novels, and one of its unexpected pleasures, nowadays, is that it contains numerous scenes played out between its twenty-year-old narrator-protagonist, an obvious stand-in for Amis himself, and his best friend, a hulking ‘city bumpkin’ who, with hindsight, is a dead ringer for Christopher Hitchens.
What of the turkeys? Are there turkeys? Sure there are. Amis once wrote a book about Space Invaders, a now-defunct arcade game. It’s for obsessives and I haven’t read it. Dead Babies, the difficult second novel, is to be avoided at all costs. I don’t care for The Information, either (its protagonist is an unsuccessful author; you can see how that might put me off), but it does contain some of his most brilliant comic writing, the kind that has you laughing so hard you can’t see to read. Of the short-story collections, Heavy Water is uneven, as short-story collections as a rule tend to be, and Einstein’s Monsters is (are?) breathtakingly good.
Is that all? It’s all I care to write. Like Bowie, Amis was someone I thought of as a kind of elder sibling, hero, avatar, even scapegoat: one of those icons to whom the term ‘role model’ scarcely applies because they embody not (or not just) our aspirations but some aspect of our true selves, or perhaps just an aspect of the kind of person we think we really are. There’s no need to get sentimental about this. Still, if one has chosen well, we find that, even after they have left us, these figures not only continue to live for us, but go on paying back, with interest, the representation of ourselves that we have invested in them. I chose well with Martin Amis.
The 1979 Royal-Thomian cricket match may not actually have been the hundredth in the series, as it was proclaimed to be, but was certainly regarded, at the time, as the most important Royal-Thomian ever played. Richard Simon’s forthcoming book, STC: The Unauthorised History, captures not only the game itself but also much of the behind-the-scenes competition, lobbying, manoeuvring and occasional skulduggery that accompanied the selection of coaches, team members and other important participants. Below is part of Simon’s description of the match.
✥
Royal College, who had enjoyed a good 1979 season, were favoured to win – though the fisherfolk and market-workers of Mount Lavinia, who often ran informal books on the performance of the College First XI and First XV, loyally bet on St Thomas’s. The Royal captain, Ranjan Madugalle, was an outstanding cricketer: a star batsman with over a thousand runs already to his credit and a future Sri Lanka captain who would later serve as chief of the ICC’s panel of international match referees. Many of his teammates would also play for their country in the near future. The Thomian cohort, too, was talented, but not to the same degree; Royal, after all, was in the enviable position of being able to take its pick of gifted young players from any school within the state system. The advantage became painfully obvious when STC’s batting order suffered an embarrassing collapse with only 154 runs on the board, and by teatime on the second day Royal were able to close their innings sportingly, with two wickets still in hand, having scored 321.
St Thomas’s batted grimly all through the last day, but before teatime they were down to their tail-enders, Mahinda Halangoda and C.P. Richards, with thirty runs yet to make. Little was expected of either player. Richards was a bowler, not a batsman; Halangoda, an able bat from a cricketing family (his grandfather had coached St Thomas’s in the Thirties), was young and fairly green. Anticipation of an imminent Royal victory brought the President and half his cabinet back to the pavilion; the Royal tents were in an uproar. Richards, joining Halangoda in the middle after Umesh Iddipily was dismissed for 29, walked out to no poetic ‘breathless hush’ but to an ear-splitting din that already had in it the audible timbre of Royalist triumph. The Royal team, Halangoda noticed, had all put on their caps…
Spectators at an early Royal-Thomian (though most probably not the first)
Adapted from STC: The Unauthorised History
by Richard Simon (forthcoming)
The origins of Lanka’s oldest public sporting fixture are surprisingly obscure. The Colombo Academy had, in fact, met St Thomas’s College at cricket several times during the late 1870s, but these were irregular matches in which the respective teams were captained by masters rather than boys. Thomas Keble, the great official historian of STC, preferred to call the 1880 match, the earliest to be played by all-schoolboy teams, the ‘first Royal-Thomian’.
His opinion was eventually overruled; today, ‘the first Royal-Thomian’ is generally held to have been played in 1879. The convention is justified by a contemporary Ceylon Observer article, in which it was reported that the match ‘was instituted as an annual fixture on 15 July’ that year. By preferring the earlier date, historians of Royal may claim that the series began with a hat-trick of victories by their side.
But the teams at the 1879 game, too, were captained by masters: Ashley Walker led the Academy while the Thomian First XI was skippered by its founder, Sub-Warden Rev. Thomas Felton Falkner. It was an important fixture for the Academy, for of the two schools, St Thomas’s had, it seems, much the more formidable cricketing reputation. Academy pupils were given three half-holidays to watch the game, which their side won by a margin of 56 runs. Thomians, sadly, did not get even one afternoon off; Warden Miller, struggling to keep the College from bankruptcy in the wake of the coffee crash, had more important things on his mind than cricket.
Rev. T.F. Falkner, DSO, captained St Thomas’s in 1879
The 1880 fixture, in which the teams comprised boys only, was played, like the previous year’s, on Galle Face Green, although the precise site is disputed. It is known that the teams arrived from their respective schools by boat across the Beira Lake – then a common mode of transport in Colombo and its suburbs, which were still clustered mainly about the lake. First in to bat for the Academy, which won the toss, was Benjamin ‘Benny’ Bawa, who would later become an eminent lawyer and father of the renowned architect Geoffrey Bawa. Young Benny was given out for three runs, but despite such an inauspicious beginning, the Academy again won the game, this time with 62 runs in hand.
Much to Thomian chagrin, the boys from San Sebastian went on to repeat their winning play the following year as well. Happily, this embarrassing hat-trick was immediately matched by their Mutwal rivals, who promptly won the next three matches in a row. Then, in 1885, came the infamous Nine Runs Match, over which Royalists and Thomians have argued ever since...
I’ve been an avid David Mitchell reader ever since Ghostwritten. I loved the supernatural elements in his work as long as they were presented as mysteries that obviously contained a secret logic and backstory of their own, albeit one the reader was never privy to. That reticence on the part of the author added depth and power to his stories and the characters who appeared in them. And as Mitchell’s work matured through Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, each book more fully realised than its predecessor, I thought I had found another lifelong favourite contemporary novelist like Iain Banks, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan or Gene Wolfe.
The came the speed bumps. The Bone Clocks was a brilliant page-turner but its revelations caused that ghostly, essential backstory to lose its mystery and power, to the detriment not of the book itself but, alas, all of Mitchell’s previous writing instead. This was followed by the genuinely frightening Slade House, which in spite of its success within the limited parameters set by genre-fiction icons like Clive Barker and Stephen King, hammered the last coffin-nails into the backstory and, moreover, utterly failed to satisfy as a David Mitchell novel.
And then this. It’s been out for almost three years now, so I shan’t bother to tell you much about it. It’s set in the Sixties. London. Pop music business. The story follows a band that almost makes it, but fails to crack America. There are lots of fictitious cameos from famous real stars, but – as someone said on goodreads.com – they’re no more lifelike than their waxworks at Madame Tussauds. One exception is the infamous Don Arden, who appears here as some kind of brutal Mephistopheles, an agent of pure evil, with Steve Marriott in his thrall; good call there. Mitchell’s own invented characters are, to be fair, more rounded: but what a dull lot they are, and how tedious they are as a band. The lead guitarist provides the supernatural link with Mitchell’s earlier works, but frankly that’s all a bit tedious, too.
As a rock fan who grew up in the Seventies and who is himself a musician, Utopia Avenue should have been right up my street. And at first, I did quite like it; but that should have been a warning, since one of my favourite authors writing about my favourite subject should have been thoroughly enjoyable to read, not just likeable.
Still, it took some time for the scales to fall. The book is very easy going, written in a rather simplified and deformalized version of Mitchell’s characteristic style that seems to take aim at the young adult market. It moves along at quite a clip. It’s a pleasant enough read, almost too action-packed in places, but when it was all done with, I really had to ask myself why I’d bothered. It is only now, two years after I read it, that I have finally admitted to myself how bad a novel Utopia Avenue really is. Hence this belated review.
Here is the second part of a ramble about my favourite guitarists, inspired by a jazz-vs-rock argument with a friend. Part I is here; all the necessary preamble is in that post, so I’ll just dispense with formalities and dive right in.
Pete Townshend
This list isn’t in any real order. If it had been, Pete would have been a lot higher on it. He was the first guitar player who really inspired me, my first ‘favourite guitarist’. His music can be imaginative and exploratory, tender and confessional, yet never loses its open-handed, life-affirming impact. It slaps sense into you. As a guitarist, he was one of the electric innovators: he showed people how you could torture a guitar into making sounds it hadn’t been designed to, and thereby greatly expanded the sonic palette of rock guitar.
Jim Morrison used to talk a big game about the Dionysian spirit of rock, but The Who could show him a thing or two about that. For all that they comprised four very different and idiosyncratic personalities, the band on stage were always a collective manifestation of Pete Townshend: Roger brought the rock ’n’ roll posturing, Keith the vandal spirit, John the musical elegance; Pete himself supplied the artistry, and the brains. He wrote the songs, though John would contribute a couple now and then. Their records displayed their musical craft and his songwriting talent, but live was where The Who excelled. For all the crashing and falling about, the music never faltered. They were broke for years when they started because they had to keep replacing the instruments they smashed on stage. Fun fact: Pete had kicked Abbie Hoffman – a man who incorporated in his person all that is irritating about hippiedom – offstage minutes before they gave the performance captured below.
B.B. King
Muddy Waters was the electric blues pioneer. The other two Kings, Albert and Freddie, was each great in his own way. Buddy Guy, a bit younger than they, was a worthy contender. B.B., though, was the finished article. He was at his absolute best just before he was discovered by White listeners (check out Live at the Regal), but this 1972 clip, live at Cook County jail on his home turf of Chicago, beats any other filmed performance of his that I have ever seen and heard. Although he, too, is an improvising guitarist, his playing is the polar opposite of the Joe Pass/Howard Roberts school – it’s all in the tone, those rich and varied timbres, with every note given its own expression. There is a very real sense in which electric guitar never got any better than this. Certainly nothing B.B. himself recorded or filmed after this was much good. He’d made it by then, after a long hard career on the chitlin’ circuit, and he was milking it as he had every right to do. Fun fact: how blue can you get? Exactly this blue, and no more. Scientists have proven it.
Robert Johnson
Po’ Bobby, as I like to call him, probably never held – probably never saw – an electric guitar. He made just two recordings in his life, one in 1936 and another in 1937. Each contained the same songs as the other. A year after he made the second he was dead, killed in a fight over a woman at the rock ’n’ roll-approved age of 27.
His short, hard life distilled all the poverty, racial oppression and violence of the American South. His father abandoned his mother, fleeing Johnson’s birthplace, Hazelhurst, Mississippi, ahead of a lynch mob. Bobby himself grew up hungry and often in trouble with the law; he used at least eight surnames during his short life. Known today as the ancestral begetter of rock guitar, he was a mediocre player in his early years; he then suddenly disappeared (something he was wont to do) and reappeared a year later playing as you hear him on the recording below. Word got about that he’d sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads outside Clarksdale, Miss., for the ability to play like the Delta blues hero Son House. House, doubtless feeling the young hellhound on his trail, wasn’t shy about putting that story about himself. Johnson was the kind of man of whom you would believe it.
If you’ve don’t often listen to old, pre-WW2 recordings, you’re going to have trouble with this. Persevere, however, and the music will eventually possess you. Playing in the style of Johnson remains a challenge even for capable guitarists today; just ask Eric Clapton about that. Fun fact: when Brian Jones first played Robert Johnson’s album to Keith Richards, Keith’s first question was, ‘Who’s the other guitarist?’
Richard Thompson In Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, the rock-snob narrator reserves for Richard Thompson the ultimate rock-snob accolade. I don’t know if I would go that far, but the man’s a master. Emerging from the seminal folk-rock band Fairport Convention, he carved out a career (and a life) that was very un-rock, becoming a strict practising Muslim and divorcing his wife and musical partner, Linda Pettifer, for not being religious enough or something. His austere onstage presence does evoke the mullah, and seems wholly at odds with the wrenching, often bitter emotional storm he whips up on his guitar. His searing music is a product of deep feeling and long study; in the clip below, you’ll hear the use of drones as in mediaeval European folk music, exotic scale snippets, atonal passages and a tremolo effect like the voice of Malak Jibreel, but the result sounds anything but schooled. He’s as good, or better, on acoustic, correctly treating it as a completely different instrument from electric – but I’d have to post another video for that, wouldn’t I? Here it is. Not-so-fun fact: he walked out on Linda just after they’d had their third child; Shoot Out the Lights was written during roughly the same period.
Reeves Gabrels
Tin Machine, the hard-rock band David Bowie unaccountably decided to form at the end of the Eighties when the mainstream career he’d begun to enjoy with Let’s Dance began to pall on him, were never a very attractive proposition. The rhythm section were two born-to-privilege louts who were best known for working with Iggy Pop. Bowie himself sang and played saxophone and wore shiny pea-green suits on stage. The music, played mostly on ugly headless Steinberger guitars, was mostly terrible. The saving grace, if you can call it that, was Reeves Gabrels.
The metal boys can play microdemisemiquavers at 300bpm and use the sludgiest of distorted tones but they’re a carnival house of horrors compared with the authentically intimidating Gabrels. This now-elderly man (he wasn’t young even in the Tin Machine days) is an expert at negotiating the interface between beauty and terror. What are those notes he’s playing? What scale is that? Hell, are those even notes? It all goes by so fast the questions become moot before they’re fully formed in your head. He’s also great at layering sheets of deliciously tormented chordal sound, rich with harmonies that shimmer like the blade of a kris, over rhythm tracks. His brilliance couldn’t save Tin Machine, a concept that should have been drowned at birth, but Bowie, who knew a great guitar player when he saw one, kept him on after the band folded, relying on him as a key member of his live backing group and also to help produce and play on those terrifying albums the Dame made in the Nineties: 1.Outside, Earthling, ...hours.
I think this live performance of a classic older Bowie tune captures everything I like about this guy. Yes, of course it’s schooled brilliance. And yes, it’s exhibitionistic and over the top – it’s meant to be. But if you ever heard Bowie’s original single (with Robert Fripp on guitar) and thought its razor riffage couldn’t be improved upon – c’mon, check this out. Fun fact: the song features a guest performance by Black Francis, aka Frank Black.
Andy Summers
Reeves Gabrels is not someone you can listen to every day. This guy, on the other hand, I could listen to all day. He’s a real veteran – his career goes back to the Sixties – and he began as a jazz musician, a form he returned to in later life after his world-buggering success with The Police left him able to indulge a taste for music that makes no money.
His work with The Police owed a lot to jazz; he stole from bebop players the trick of omitting thirds from his chord voicings to create major-minor ambiguity, often filling the resulting harmonic space with suspended seconds, suspended fourths and their dominant extensions. Sting was left to insert the thirds...where he could. The two ex-jazzmen each had harmonic gifts that complemented the other’s perfectly; Sting only found his mojo as a songwriter after meeting Summers. The whole-tone bass line on Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic: Sting could never have got away with that if he didn’t have Andy to help extend those notes harmonically.
Not content with rewriting the parameters of pop-song harmony, Summers is also important in musical history for adding an entire new palette of sounds to the electric guitar. He is the master of electronic tonal effects. People like The Edge and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead are just followers in his footsteps; only Fripp and Adrian Belew, who sprang from very different roots, can really compete. The Police arrived on the scene just as digital recording and tone shaping became possible, and he made the field his own. He also invented (or at least popularised) a new rock guitar sound, relatively clean and chorus-based, which became an Eighties cliché – Prince used it on Purple Rain – and which you can still hear at any Colombo nightspot where live music is played. I was going to post my favourite guitar solo of all time – on Driven To Tears – but decided not to because it’s in the same musical jurisdiction as Gabrels on Scary Monsters. So here, instead, is the song on which I think his sonic experimentation with The Police is most clearly and expressively heard. Remember, as you listen, that drums and bass apart, there’s just on guy on stage making all those sounds. Fun fact: at home or abroad, I have never seen any cover guitarist play the guitar parts of Message In A Bottle or Every Breath You Take correctly. The five-fret stretch required for those suspended chords (or the string-skipping skills you need to avoid the stretch) are very difficult to do fluently in a live setting – unless, of course, you happen to be Andy Summers.
Warren Haynes
The Frog King comes on like an out-of-shape redneck with a face that even a mother might have trouble loving. Then he opens his mouth. Luminous honey pours out. After that he starts playing his guitar, and that honey just keeps on drippin’.
Emotive, tasteful and steeped in tradition, Haynes is not really a songwriter, although his on-and-off jam band, Gov’t Mule, do have a few original numbers. He’s really a cover artist, at his best reinterpreting classic songs from the past. He’s been in the Allman Brothers for years, playing co-lead guitar with Derek Trucks. His net is cast wide: I’ve seen him sing and play Into The Mystic, Wish You Were Here, Son House’s Death Letter Blues and even Elvis Costello’s Alison. He’s also a promiscuous collaborator, playing with everyone from John Schofield (this one’s for you, David) to, er, the Grateful Dead. Here is one of my favourite performances of him on video: Haynes covering Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer with the Dave Matthews Band.
I’ve been having an email argument about guitar players with my friend David. He, like me, plays the guitar, and has done so, I think, for rather more than fifty years. He also plays stand-up bass, organ, piano and heaven knows what else, and has received the Order of Australia for his work in choral church music. As a musician, he functions on a far higher level than the amateurish one on which I operate.
Though he is only a few years older than me, David’s musical taste and mine are a generation apart. I love all kinds of music but am basically a rock fan, and though I play a lot of different styles of guitar, rock was my departure point. His taste, I suspect, ranges as widely as my own, but his preference set barely intersects with mine. He’s a jazz lover, and the kind of jazz he loves best is the kind that was popular when his parents were courting. He’s old-fashioned in that way – and in many others too, more power to him.
David is a temperate, courtly gent of becoming humility. It is very hard to argue with him because he won’t argue back. His sweetness and tolerance are thoroughly aggravating, so one is naturally driven to provoke him ever more outrageously. Mainly the effort is futile, but not long ago I found a tiny chink in the shining armour. I told him that no jazz guitarist ever knew how to get a decent sound out of an electric guitar till rock guitarists came along and showed them how.
That fetched him. In reply, I was frostily informed (this is the only portion of our exchange that I plan to quote directly) that he was ‘happy to leave the screams, the bent strings, the fuzz, the waa-waa and the burn-out to others,’ before proceeding to explain to me what jazz guitar was all about. He illustrated his exegesis with the names of famous jazz guitarists, each exemplifying one of the particular virtues he listed.
My riposte was not pacific. I was especially scathing about two offenders, Joe Pass and Howard Roberts, whose crimes against art and the guitar I regard as particularly black. He was, as he always is, gentle and forgiving in reply. Ah, David, if you but knew how those coals of fire burn...
I hadn’t the heart to trouble him further, but I thought it a bit of a shame that, after I’d roughed up his darlings, I gave him no opportunity to belabour mine. I thought at first to do it in an email, listing my favourite guitar players for him to have a go at, but then I thought: why not write a blog post and give everyone a chance to rough them up, and me too in the process if they felt so inclined?
So here it is, folks, Notes from Ceylon’s Top Twenty guitarists, plus a few extras thrown in because, like a certain big-selling brand of artificial snack, once you pop it’s hard to stop. I compiled the list by writing names down as they occurred to me, figuring that the ones I thought of first would be the ones I liked best, or at least the ones that have influenced me most as a guitarist. That didn’t quite work out, but I’ve kept the order, more or less as it came to me. Your opinions, etc, welcome.
😎
Los Lobos
Two for the price of one. These guys, to me, exemplify really good guitar music. David Hidalgo is the virtuoso and sometimes shows off a bit, but he and his southpaw buddy César Rojas are all about playing what suits the song best. There’s rarely a superfluous note; everything fits perfectly together to manifest the music and encourage the listener to embrace it. In addition to guitars both acoustic and electric, they are also capable players on a variety of guitar-like Latin American instruments like the bajo sexto and the charangua, which add an ethnic flavour to Los Lobos’s music that has grown more pronounced over the years. Their other flavours areR&B, country and rock. Fun fact: they once complained that Paul Simon had ripped them off on songwriting credits.
Cliff Gallup
Once upon a time there was Western swing, a forgotten musical form rooted in the blues and now hopelessly confused with country-and-western, which it helped engender. But Western swing also gave rise to another form – rockabilly, whose earliest big stars were Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and, er, Johnny Cash. Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps came along right after those pioneers.
Vincent’s guitar player, Cliff Gallup, was by far the best of the old rockabilly guitarists. His playing was influenced by Western swing as well as the more urbane sounds of jazz, but he could play in just about any style of the day. Rockabilly, though, was the art that he truly made his own. Unusually, he played with all five fingers of his right hand: thumb and index to hold a flatpick, middle and ring fitted with fingerpicks and the little finger reserved for the vibrato bar. Fun fact: When Cliff died in 1988, his widow begged the press not to mention his rocking days with the Blue Caps in the obituaries, but rather that he’d been director of transport and maintenance for the Chesapeake, VA school system.
Neil Young
Maybe it’s just sour grapes, but gratuitous exhibitions of virtuosity often leave me cold. Neil, whose playing on both electric and acoustic often attains the sublime, is as far from being a virtuoso as you can get; just listen to what George Harrison had to say about his lead playing. However, it was precisely Young’s ramshackle but compelling style that encouraged me to pick up the electric guitar; if he could get away with that, I reasoned, anyone could get away with anything. On acoustic, he’s a wholly different creature: his playing is fluent, economical and evocative, carrying a haunting quality that fits his music perfectly. I love his work on both instruments.
Something the people on my list have in common is that, unlike jazz musicians most of the time, they tend to perform music that they wrote themselves. This often makes it impossible to consider their playing as an entity apart from the music as a whole. Neil Young is one of two people whose music helped get me through the worst period of my life (the other is David Bowie) and his music means a great deal to me. He would have been higher on this list if I’d deliberately set out to order it by preference. Fun fact: Neil Young is so analog he used to fit his amps with pedal-operated servos to turn the knobs.
My introduction to Albert Lee was watching him play behind Eric Clapton at Guildford Civic Hall in 1980. I don’t think I’d really heard a chicken-pickin’ guitarist before and when he got to do his party piece at the time, Country Boy, about halfway through the set, I was blown away. Later, after I’d become familiar with the likes of James Burton and had a basis for comparison, I was still hugely impressed. He’s actually an all-rounder and a veteran of the music scene, but that high-energy style of country-rock is his bag. For a guitarist, at least, it’s exciting music to listen to. I said I don’t care much for virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity, but there are exceptions. Fun fact: he can sing too, and this more or less impromptu version of Jimmy Webb’s The Highwayman is ace. Listen from 1:56:00; there’s a slight preamble which is, I think, worth hearing, before he starts.
And then there’s this.
Paco de Lucia
I don’t listen to him as often as I do some other guitarists on this list, but he stands here not just for himself but for an entire musical form, flamenco. My friend and former bandmate Pascal, who plays keyboards and whose missus is Spanish, says flamenco and rockabilly are physically the hardest styles to play, and I agree; I can’t play flamenco at all. De Lucia remains, by general acclaim, Top Flamenco Guitarist; Martin Carthy of Steeleye Span once told me that he’d watched the Guitar Trio – John McLaughlin, Al di Meola and Paco de Lucia – playing live and ‘there was only one guitarist in it.’ I don’t go in much for exhibition matches, but who am I to disagree? Have a look for yourselves and see. Fun fact: it’s a wicked lie that you can’t be a proper flamenco guitarist unless you need to shave three times a day.
Tom Verlaine
If you had those initials, what else would you call your band? Television came out of the New York punk scene that grew up around a club, CBGB's – legendary today though it was a just filthy boîte not much bigger than a coffin. The Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Blondie all came out of there. So did Television, which was a punk band who could (i) play and (ii) didn’t care who knew it. I think they only ever made two albums; their first, Marquee Moon, is the classic. The second guitarist, Richard Lloyd, is Verlaine’s ideal foil. Verlaine plays lead guitar, sings (punkily but Romantically) and, of course, wrote all the songs. His is a unique voice on guitar; no-one before or since has sounded quite like him. Fun fact: one of Television’s best songs is about falling into the arms of Venus de Milo.
Joni Mitchell
You never knew Joni Mitchell was a great guitar player? Well, listen to this: she milked the muse by tuning her guitar in strange ways (e.g. CGCEGC, or C#D#G#F#G#C#) and catching the melodies and harmonies that fell out of the instrument as she noodled about on it. She would turn them into songs, record them and play them live. In the early days, this meant this meant long pauses between songs while she retuned; later, it meant a guitar shop behind her on stage, every instrument tuned differently. Heaven knows how she kept track of them.
When you use an alternate tuning, you have to learn the fingerboard all over again. It would be, if you were playing a piano, as if some of the black and white notes suddenly had different values: the one that used to be C is now C#, the one that used to be F is now G. It’s not that hard to do if you stick to a few popular open or alternative tunings – open G or DADGAD, for instance – but imagine doing it for every tuning under the sun. Well, that was Joni. She got a lot of respect from jazz musicians (the Pat Metheny Group once served as her backing band, Jaco and all) but she transcends all musical forms. She is her very own unique amalgam of folk, jazz and Laurel Canyon Sixties hippiedom. Fun fact: she also paints, and her method is the same – slap on some paint, see what it suggests, then slap on some more to enhance the suggestion.
There’s a blurb on the back of my Penguin paperback, allegedly from the New Republic: ‘Lodge is pure dazzling style, book after book, in his fusion of form and content.’
Well, that may be true of David Lodge’s other books but it certainly isn’t true of this one, which is pretty transparently adapted from a playscript. Lodge admits this in a foreword, but you don’t need to read that to figure it out. All the action, plot and character in this novella emerge through dialogue. We never get a direct look inside the characters’ minds and the non-dialogue sentences in the text read like stage directions. If that’s a stylistic fusion of form and content, I’m Italo Calvino.
For all that, the book is readable enough, even gripping – stylishly (yes) written, tightly plotted, its four very believable (if rather stock) characters life-changingly affecting one another by their interactions. The excitement and tension rise as one reads on. And then, right at the end, comes the big, big letdown, a huge deus ex machina that dissipates all the carefully cultivated excitement, rendering everything that went before irrelevant and pointless. I really had developed an interest in Lodge’s characters and situation by that point, and the realisation that everyone was going tamely back to Square One without properly working out the consequences of the plot left me disappointed and annoyed.
The big DEM does bear a thematic relation to the action that has gone before, but affects it not a whit except to invalidate it. Chin-stroking readers and reviewers might find something to praise in the symbolic congruence, but not I. This is too much a case of an author painting himself into a corner plot-wise and calling in the cavalry because he doesn’t know what else to do.
