There is a fairly lengthy review of The Angels of L19 in The Guardian, by Nina Allan. Though I think it is best described as 'mixed', it does have several nice things to say, e.g.: 'The book is beautifully written, making use of a low-key colloquial language that is always apposite and never intrusive or forced'.
Release date: June
Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes.
The NME and Melody Maker were not published throughout most of June and July 1984 because of a strike: I’m not sure if it involved journalists or printers, but it now seems incredible that Britain’s two major music papers just disappeared for two months (I don’t know if the strike also affected Sounds and Record Mirror, their smaller rivals: if not, surely a welcome boost for their circulation). In any case, I know why I bought this album, and it wasn’t because of the NME or Melody Maker, but because of coverage in Strait – a Christian music paper produced in association with the Greenbelt arts festival. I can barely find any mention of Strait online, let alone an archive, so I’m relying on memory alone here. I presume it was released monthly: I doubt there was a large enough potential readership to sustain a weekly. And I also presume I bought my copy in the Scripture Union bookshop in St John’s Shopping Centre in Liverpool town centre, which also sold albums released on Christian labels.
The CCM scene (Christian Contemporary Music: a term I wouldn’t have recognised at the time) was not as large in Britain as in the US, but from 1984 onwards I went to several concerts by Christian pop groups in churches, at Gordon Hall in Liverpool city centre, or at the annual Crossfire festival at Aintree racecourse, which I think began in 1985. In 1984, I bought albums from the Scripture Union shop by established American artists like Larry Norman and the Resurrection Band, but also by UK acts, e.g. Fire Coming Down by Giantkiller. This is the only trace of that last album I can find online:
Strait covered these artists, but also more mainstream acts who were on record as being believers, or who broached Christian themes, or just used Christian imagery. U2 were particularly favourites of theirs of course: they played the Greenbelt festival in 1981, the year October, their most overtly Christian album, was released. But Strait also liked The Alarm, and I remember a brief interview with Mike Scott of The Waterboys (on whom, more later), whose song ‘A Church Not Made with Hands’ opened with a CS Lewis quotation. And, more to the point here, they also interviewed Gordon Gano, the lead singer and songwriter of Violent Femmes, and the son of a Baptist pastor (he played a solo show at Greenbelt in 1986).
The Femmes’ first album is a much-beloved celebration of teenage horniness, so many listeners were no doubt non-plussed by their second record, Hallowed Ground. It also contains one horny song, ‘Black Girls’ (the lyrics are as bad as you think, though theatrically and performatively so), but also a pure gospel number, ‘Jesus Walking on the Water’, and a couple of songs on the same apocalyptic theme as the Giantkiller album: ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (narrated by a very smug Noah) and the title track, which invokes a more up-to-date nuclear version of the end of the world.
Were these supposed to be ironic, or in character? And what to make of their juxtaposition, not only with ‘Black Girls’, but also with a song about an insane farmer murdering his family (‘Country Death Song’), and another narrated by a psychotic stalker who won’t take no for an answer (‘Sweet Misery Blues’)? The music was similarly eclectic: the basic band was a three piece with acoustic guitar, acoustic bass and drums, but their hyperactive playing managed to evoke folk, blues, rockabilly, and – in the frenetic guest horn section on ‘Black Girls’ – a kind of hysterical jazz.
I don’t remember much from the Strait interview with Gano, except an introductory phrase along the lines of ‘He’s the one doing the “religious” interviews – Strait slipped in anyway’ (it’s notable that his band mates didn’t accompany him for his Greenbelt appearance a couple of years later). But the interview did establish something of Gano’s purpose: to juxtapose the sacred and profane in order to dramatise the conflict between them. Even ‘Black Girls’ interrupts itself to declaim:
You know I love the Lord of Hosts,
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.
I was so pleased to learn that He’s inside me,
In my time of trouble, He will hide me.
The same push-pull duality is at work in my novel, The Angels of L19, about evangelical teenagers in 1984: its transcendent moments spill into its abject ones, and vice versa. Maybe I learnt that trick from this album. But back in 1984, it was something of an outlier in my record collection: the Christian connection legitimised its lyrical and musical strangeness, and meant I made more of an effort to engage with it on its own terms.
Although Hallowed Ground was released in the music papers’ hiatus, Allan Jones – later editor of Uncut magazine, then newly promoted to editor of Melody Maker – was a vocal champion of the group. The following is from a 28 July concert review (the first issue after publication resumed), which sneaks in a belated album review:
On their first album, the group sang about the tortures of a terrorised adolescence; their music was a lurid orchestration of the worst kind of teenage nightmares. It was fraught, hysterical, sometimes oddly touching, often excruciatingly funny, its dense, black humour a cut and a slash above everything else around at the time. They were invariably compared to the Velvet Underground and the original Modern Lovers; but such comparisons were eventually misleading, certainly didn’t please the group and served only to obscure their originality.
Just released, “Hallowed Ground”, their second LP, should finally dismiss any remaining misconception of the Femmes … [It] synchs into a current of American music that, the occasional forays of Gram Parsons and John Fogerty apart, has rarely been tapped by the rock mainstream.
Its dark sonorities, its eerie lyricism, bug-eyed religious overtones, its compelling preoccupation with death and the devil, vividly evoke the haunting chill, the mournful vibrations of the kind of Old Testament country music played and sung by the Delmore Brothers or the Louvins, whose “Weapon of Prayer” wouldn’t be at all out of place in their current repertoire. Gano emerges from “Hallowed Ground” as an heir, apparently, not so much of Lou Reed or Jonathan Richman, as Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor whose raging deep south prophecies are echoed in songs like “Jesus Walking On The Water”, “Country Death Song” and the epic “Hallowed Ground” itself.
This sounds like the prologue to an evolving and complex career – unfortunately, for most listeners, the Femmes were forever identified with their first album: an example of an audience refusing to let a group grow despite the group’s best efforts.
The Angels of L19 takes place mainly from January to July 1984, and mainly within the titular postcode area in south Liverpool – close to where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. Like Lennon, my protagonist Robert also lives with his aunt after his mum’s death.
In 1984, the area in question had David Alton as its Liberal MP (the sole non-Labour MP in the city), and included the council wards of Saint Mary’s (Labour) and Grassendale (Conservative) – a fact mentioned in passing in the book because the uncle of one of the secondary characters is a Labour councillor. However, my two protagonists live in Grassendale ward: a relatively prosperous zone of semi-detached houses dating from the 1930s (or perhaps the immediate post-war period), part of a small right-wing island within the larger socialist sea of the city as a whole. But obviously ‘Lower Middle-Class Hero’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
The action of the novel mainly takes place within an area whose north-west corner is the junction of Rose Lane and North Mossley Hill Road, near where one of Robert’s adult friends lives. The north-east corner is somewhat lower down, at what used to be the site of the upper-school building of New Heys Comprehensive School, which Robert and his best friend Tracey both attend. New Heys doesn’t exist any more, but it was a strange hybrid of a school, split over three campuses: one was a prefab excrescence, another occupied what used to be a boy’s secondary modern (my father went there in the 1930s), and the upper school had once been a girl’s grammar.
On the west side of the map, the boundary runs down Mossley Hill Road, along which Robert walks to his friend’s house, past the fields where the Iron Marsh campus of Liverpool John Moores University now has some of its buildings. At the south-west corner, the boundary is formed by the leafy, secluded houses around Cressington railway station, where Kevin, one of Robert and Tracey’s posher church friends, lives; and then farther down, at the south-east corner, by what used to be Alfred Jones Memorial Hospital in Garston, a building now replaced by the South Liverpool NHS Treatment Centre. On the east, the marker is the cenotaph at the end of Long Lane, which is close to the church Robert, Tracey and all of their friends attend.
There are scenes outside this zones (e.g. in the city centre, at church camp in north Wales), but most of the action occurs smack bang in the middle of the map above: on South Mossley Hill Road, where Robert and Tracey live next door to one another.
I lived on this same road with my aunt and uncle from 1981–8, my secondary-school years. The borders of the map are therefore the borders of the area I regularly traversed on foot during this period. I still think this is the best way to know a place. In fact, I’ve never learned to drive. So when I’m not walking, I’m usually confined to train or bus. In Liverpool, I regularly caught the train from Cressington station into the town centre, or the 82 or 80 buses (the route of the latter passed close by my aunt’s house). So that’s also how my protagonists negotiate their environment – by bus or on foot.
1981–8 is the longest continuous period I’ve ever lived in one place. In 1988, I moved back to my dad’s house on the other side of the River Mersey, but I didn’t stay long. From there I went to Kent for a job; then very briefly back to my dad’s before fleeing to a friend’s house in Liverpool; then Glasgow for university; then Cambridge for a PhD; then back to my aunt’s in Liverpool during the summer of 1998 before moving to Swansea for a teaching job; then Cambridge again for a research post; then an inter-continental move to Sydney; then all the way back to Glasgow; then back again to Sydney, and on to Melbourne; back to Glasgow again; then Kent again for a second PhD in creative writing; and finally (so far) back to Glasgow. In total, I’ve lived in approximately thirty-nine different houses, or, more usually, rooms or flats. ‘Approximately’, because I’m not counting places I stayed on the sofa or in a spare room for a week or two between more permanent arrangements. Nor am I counting most of the places I stayed in Venice during the decade (roughly 1995–2005) when I regularly visited that city for periods of a month or two at a time to research its history in the archive.
I couldn’t wait to leave Liverpool in 1988. I felt like I’d outgrown the idea of me that everyone there seemed to have. But in the face of the relentless restlessness and insecurity that my life subsequently became, those seven years in Liverpool – even though I lived in someone else’s house – now seem the closest I have to roots.
I’ve known other cities better: I worked as a security guard and a postman in Glasgow, which took me to lots of different places there; and in Venice, I systematically photographed the whole city for a research project. But I’m not sure I’ve ever identified another territory as ‘mine’ in quite the same way as I did with the area I marked out on foot on the map above.
In The Angels of L19, Robert, who has visions and believes in an eternal Christian cosmology, thinks about his uncle in dismissive terms: ‘Robert’s world reaches up to the heavens and down into hell. Uncle Edward’s goes from the television room to the bedroom.’ But as the map makes clear, the limits of Robert’s movements are scarcely larger – and in any case, he has fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent. The juxtaposition in the novel’s title is deliberate: Robert’s visionary encounters with spiritual beings and realities do not nullify his connection to a material place. They are only possible because of that connection.
Release date: 19 October
Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Sort of.
I liked Big Country’s first album, The Crossing, but didn’t own it. I didn’t pay much attention to the release of Steeltown but encountered it a couple of years later in someone else’s record collection. I was a bit sniffy. Even in the 80s, I found romantic elegies for industrial masculinity passé and regressive – they said nothing to me about my life – and explicit politics of any kind were inherently naff (I didn’t like Billy Bragg either).
This is very definitely a rawk album, not a pop one, but it has in common with Rattlesnakes not only its Scottish connection but the fact that it’s ten bangers in a row without a duff track, and every one of them fizzing with energy. Of course Cath Carroll (again) in the NME hated it (I’m really beginning to enjoy her invective):
So strong is the crusading tone of the recorded Big Country that a stubborn image has formed in the old mind’s eye: it concerns Stuart Adamson who, each and every time he undertakes a vocal track, cannot reach the emotional peak required unless he is standing in front of a wind machine and a blinding light. … As usual Big Country here sound heroic, tempestuous, impossibly romantic. Every instrument and voice has been put through their unique ‘Cavalry Charge’ effect and still, every time Adamson opens his one mouth to sing, at least three other Stuarts are heard in varying stages of folksy harmony. Nothing has changed. The diddle-diddle solo is given plenty to do and must by now be ready to take its place in Celtic history alongside tartan-edged white parallel trousers and hung-over New Year’s Days at Balmoral.
Once again, Carroll’s review is shadowed by Steve Sutherland’s in Melody Maker. But he was a full-fledged believer:
“Steeltown” is, simply, superb, and everything Big Country ever said they were and everything we sort of hoped, with fingers crossed, they might be. There’s no ifs or buts about it – no “if only they weren’t so naïve”, no “if only we weren’t so cynical”, no “if only The Clash hadn’t cocked it up so badly for everyone else”, no “if only they didn’t wear those checked shirts”, no if anything.
The sound that emanates from this album exhilarates – the power is internal, dynamic and emotional, not external cosmetic bluster. All the rockist arguments have been defeated, we never stop to consider this passion might be posturing. Thin Lizzy doesn’t come into it, nor do those nagging doubts that the bagpipe guitars might be a gimmick. This is sheer purpose made practise, adrenalised action.
The debate whether Adamson is capable of reinvesting cliché with meaning is rendered redundant. The deed is done.
What’s interesting about this gushing is how closely it replicates the emotional arc of a Big Country song – if you’re willing to give yourself over to it – staring off into the middle distance, avoiding paying attention to inconvenient particulars under your feet.
In fact, only two of the group’s four members were Scottish (and both of them were born outside the country). In any case, the group’s fetishisation of ‘Scottishness’ might seem to contradict my generalisation that few of the albums I’m discussing here show any real commitment to place. But if one were to be unkind, one might say that Big Country’s songs are set in the same country as Braveheart: an idealised, fantasy landscape, as opposed to, say, Glasgow – or Dunfermline. Let’s call it ‘Wonderland’. Here’s a 1984 performance of a track from The Crossing:
I should clarify that ‘The Storm’ is my favourite track on the The Crossing, and seeing it played live only underlines the group’s high level of technical skill. They have fantastic chemistry together onstage – no doubt the result of a lot of practice. So I’m being unfair: the film that Big Country actually soundtracked in 1985, Restless Natives – which I went to see at the cinema, surely because of their association with it (it was probably a deserted cinema, since no one in England followed my example) – is cleverer and funnier about Scottish identity than Carroll’s review is able to imagine.
As for ‘Steeltown’, well, in the early 1990s, I did a few shifts as a security guard on the old Ravenscraig steelworks near Glasgow. That enormous site, itself as big as a village or small town, had closed, but was yet to be decommissioned or dismantled, and so it had to be patrolled – for years – to prevent thieves, and for insurance-liability reasons: that is, to stop any trespassers from injuring themselves and suing. Some of the men I worked with had once been steelworkers there, at far higher wages. Not so much the world of Steeltown then: more that of The Full Monty. I described this experience obliquely in my first novel, Five Wounds:
Everything was preserved in a sticky grease coat, to which dust stuck and was fruitful and multiplied. The uneven concrete floor was encrusted with ridges of once-molten metals and alloys, with oil and with pigeon droppings, which fanned out in pale, luminous layers under the places where the pigeons squatted in the roof. … As he grew up in these massive enclosed spaces, Cur rose from the floor onto gantries that had once moved over mysterious pits. Long-dead jokes and insults were sprayed on walls and pinned to bits of paper in the rest quarters. Cur read them with curiosity, and began to feel nostalgia for a life he had never known. He spent much of his childhood enclosed in what had once been a control booth for one of the gantries. It had scratched plastic windows and cracked leather seats. Underneath the windows, every inch of wall space was covered in pictures of naked women with spread-eagled legs.
I think the legacy of these places is more complex than clichés normally allow. So I prefer the Big Country songs that sing – very effectively – not from the point of view of the men working in these places, but the women who love them: ‘Chance’ on The Crossing, and ‘Come Back to Me’ on Steeltown:
I have your child inside me
But you will never know
I never will forget you
While I watch that child grow
Release date: 12 October
Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes. In my collection of home-taped C90 cassettes, number one had Kilimanjaro by the Teardrop Explodes on one side, and Rattlesnakes on the other. (I owned both albums on vinyl: I just didn’t have a record player.)
This was the most commercially successful among the albums I’ve looked at so far, and given that its success was arguably based on taking the Postcard Records aesthetic and smoothing off its rough edges, I expected the music press to take a dim view of its hit-friendly gloss. But for the most part this doesn’t seem to have been the case. In the NME, the review by Cath Carroll (last encountered slagging off The Pale Fountains) fortuitously sits next to the review of Spring Hill Fair by The Go-Betweens in the 6 October issue:
There have been many albums lovingly created under the working title of ‘I’ll Be Lou’s Mirror’, from the Dream Syndicate to the Blue Orchids – and that’s only in the last couple of years. Lloyd Cole’s marvellous all-purpose reptilian drawl can rescue a struggling melody, can turn re-translations of ‘O’ level French essays into testaments of suffering and the cool … Is there anyone who doesn’t like Cole and his cronies, who have made the Velvets do a part C&W album and part deep-south blues-funk – gentle, self-mocking, inoffensive and superbly balanced. Every song is instantly memorable. … The record plays like a film, heavy on limpid atmospherics and post-coital maudlinity shot through with illogical bouts of teenage exhilaration.
Admittedly Steve Sutherland in Melody Maker was rather more critical, and along the exact lines I was expecting, but my impression is that he was the outlier, not Carroll:
Like Orange Juice’s “Texas Fever” and ABC’s “Lexicon of Love”, “Rattlesnakes” is an album of cynicism masquerading as romance. It’s about past pop’s legacy to the present rather than love or hate or any of the emotions it feigns. It’s about how modes of expression haven’t moved on one iota from early Bob Dylan, how a generation bereft of its own voice falls back on playing with the language of its peers. It pretends to comment on this situation, boasts its own cleverness, preens its wit and says nothing.
This sounds more like a review of Scritti Politti than Lloyd Cole, but it’s more targeted here:
Of course, he’s really a cardboard Edwyn Collins and it’s as if he burst from nowhere to steal Edwyn’s thunder. He’s like a swot graduate from some pop school … Edwyn, an acutely sensitive and self-conscious youth, makes self-deluding records to pretend he’s wasted and reckless. … Cole, on the other hand, keeps a cool business head and seldom strays far from a settled, scholarly perspective.
But even Sutherland concludes:
I’ve been too hard here on purpose because this record’s good enough to stand it. Compared to most else around, it’s a gem ...
It’s hard to deny how polished Rattlesnakes sounds, especially for a debut – by that I mean that every song is laden with lyrical and musical hooks: there’s not a dud among them. Whereas Ian Pye damns with faint praise by describing Pacific Street as ‘very much an album’, by contrast this sounds like a greatest hits compilation (and in fact nothing Cole has done subsequently has had anything like its impact: I can only imagine how frustrating that must be). Moreover, everything is in service of the song: the only instrumental solo on the entire album is the guitar one in ‘Forest Fire’.
And whereas you have to work hard to figure out the relevance of whatever obscure allusion Paddy McAloon is making on Swoon, here the references are all wrapped up in pointed one-liners (or couplets). While this can certainly be shallow – quotations instead of emotions, or an appeal to the snobbery of those who ‘get’ the references – it’s also a lot of fun if you don’t take it too seriously (‘She’s sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan’). And there’s more specificity and deft characterisation in this quatrain than in the entirety of Pacific Street:
Jody wears a hat
Although it hasn’t rained for six days
She says a girl need a gun these days
On account of all the rattlesnakes
Many of these songs were written in a basement room at Glasgow Golf Club, where Cole’s father worked, and while Cole was as an undergraduate at Glasgow University. But the songs seemingly owe very little to that Glasgow connection. As I noted when discussing Julian Cope, this free-floating quality is shared by most of the albums I discuss. The Pale Fountains came from Liverpool and Prefab Sprout from Newcastle, as was very obvious when they spoke in interviews – but you wouldn’t know it from any of the songs on their first albums. The NME review of Rattlesnakes notes that ‘The contradiction of an English laddie groaning away in high Trans-Atlantic has become our firmest, unquestioned alternative tradition’. And most of Cole’s songs on this album also seem to be set in a fairly generic version of America (one with freeways and forest fires and the New York Times crossword). Only ‘2CV’ is explicitly set in London – and maybe ‘Charlotte Street’ since the road of that name in Fitzrovia is well-known, though that is also the song with the New York Times crossword, and a ‘union card’ (not necessarily American, but probably intended as such on an album that references On the Waterfront).*
This kind of thing is often aspirational. It not only represents a desire to speak to American audiences and therefore be successful internationally, but more symbolically, it’s a rejection of provincialism: America is the great beyond, the place you escape to – the same place represented by the Western frontier, or by LA and Hollywood, in the American imagination. And in fact Cole later married and settled in America.
The best thing I can say about this album is that it hasn’t dated at all: perhaps the fact that the allusions are all to 60s music, books and films helps in that respect.
*There is also a Charlotte Street in Glasgow, though nothing in the song suggests it’s set there.
Release date: late February
Was I listening to this in the 1980s? I had the group’s second album, … From Across the Kitchen Table (1985), but not this one, which I didn’t hear until quite recently.
With this album, we go three for three with music-press dismissals from the time of its release – in fact from the same week as the Swoon reviews quoted in my previous post, and with some of the same pejoratives. Cath Carroll in the NME liked the tracks ‘Reach’ and ‘Southbound Excursion’ and the trumpet of Andy Diagram, but little else:
Boy scout and Bacharach chic, their brave new vision many moons ago, is now (if you’ll pardon the metaphor) the stuff that chips are wrapped in. Now that the limelight has shifted to their progressors, Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout, it is safe to look upon them without being dazzled by the flare of average talent, publicity and milksoppiness. The work is still largely peopled with the thrumming of massed acoustic guitar lines which probably began blossoming in lunchtime Christian Union sing-songs at grammar school. There are a number of anonymous ‘pretty’ songs, dandy ear-fillers for the person whose ideal summer’s day is a reply to that Tracey Thorne fan letter and a lettuce sandwich. …. There are too many mannered ‘atmospherics’: somebody flicks flamenco on a Woolworth’s guitar whilst Mickey Head winds down and moans obscurely into his Horlicks before starting the song proper.
I think Carroll has her class signifiers all wrong here: just because the Fountains cited ‘Shirley Bassey, John Barry and Simon & Garfunkel’ as influences (to quote the presenter’s introduction to their 1983 Old Grey Whistle Test appearance) that doesn’t make them grammar-school boys – which in turn makes their ‘milksoppiness’ a more pointed statement.
Admittedly Ian Pye in Melody Maker was more positive than Carroll:
Rumours of a massive advance and then nothing, The Pale Fountains have already been written off as Virgin’s second Blue Rondo – a tax deductible mistake. Well not so fast. “Pacific Street” isn’t exactly “Forever Changes”, though it would dearly love to be, but it’s pop music well out of the mainstream and all the better for it. Despite the fact the Fountains have unashamedly based their whole sound around the classic acoustic guitars/Mexican horns/discreet strings of Love they still manage to appear daring in the context of mid-Eighties pop. For a start this is very much an album and not a couple of singles with a bunch of fillers. It sets a special mood of melancholic restraint and develops its themes with respect for a wider aim beyond three minutes of glory. … Just hearing real instruments (no offence intended to synths here) is refreshing but their confident blend of that seminal West Coast magic with early Brit pop – Sandie Shaw et al – is the real key to their magnificent sense of atmosphere. … at the end of the day I’ll take the quiet eloquence of The Pale Fountains in place of the Bowie and Clash clones polluting the charts without pausing for thought.
The best way I can sum up Pacific Street is to say: it’s the polar opposite of Pornography by The Cure.
One of the dynamics that makes Love’s Forever Changes so fascinating is the contrast between the upbeat, easy-listening music and the acid lyrics: the ‘cancer-in-the-sugar sensation’ Barney Hoskyns refers to in his Cope review. But here both music and lyrics have a curiously weightless quality: Pacific Street barely has a memorable lyrical phrase. Certainly the moon-in-June scenarios have no shadow of real sadness or complexity – but that also means they can’t be truly joyful.
‘Unless’ manages to be a little melancholy: ‘There was a lonely boy or should I say, He was seventeen? You went away’. But that’s as profound as it gets. ‘(Don’t Let Your Love) Start a War’ cuts a little deeper, but if the titular image is strong, its meaning is not described with any specificity. Occasionally I suspect the bathos is meant to be funny, a wink that this is a band firmly rooted in realistic expectations: 'Cause we could go for ever and ever, Abergele's not too bad this time of year’ (I would actually have welcomed more detail on Abergele, but the town's name is all we get). Only the trumpet solo that opens ‘Beyond Friday’s Field’ feels genuinely sad. And while most of the songs seem to be about romance, there’s no sense of an individual personality being summoned, just a vague feeling. Consequently, it’s also a sexless album – the one quality it shares with Pornography. But while the latter album has no libido because it exists in a deep depression, here the absence of desire just seems to be another refusal of complexity.
That seems like a more negative assessment than I intended to write: everything Ian Pye says in his review also applies. I also consider a lot of these criticisms to have been addressed in the Fountains’ second album, … From Across the Kitchen Table.
Release date: 12 March
Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes.
I remember buying this on cassette very shortly after its release and reading the lyrics on the train home from Liverpool city centre. My god, this is poetry! I knew other people who listened to the Teardrop Explodes (though not, I think, to Cope’s solo records): I didn’t know anyone who liked Prefab Sprout. I then bought the EP that compiled their two early singles and, slightly later, the 12-inch version of the first release of ‘When Love Breaks Down’. I don’t know why I took a chance on Swoon: I didn’t read the music papers regularly, and the reviews quoted below would scarcely have encouraged me to spend my pocket money even if I had seen them. Perhaps Annie Nightingale or Janice Long played a track on the radio (I listened to both more regularly than Kid Jensen or Richard Skinner – I didn’t listen to John Peel at all). But I suspect my purchase was a response to The Tube broadcasting a ‘video’ of ‘Cruel’:
I haven’t gone back into 1982–3 to check the early coverage of the Sprout in the NME and Melody Maker, but I suspect they may have been victims of music-paper syndrome: fawning early coverage, followed by bitter dismissal when they threatened to become successful. In any case, in 1984 their first album fared no better than Julian Cope’s. From Jim Shelley in the NME on 10 March:
‘Swoon’ absolutely swims in wordplay, coy clues, dumb puns, arch artificiality, smart-alec allusion in a way that is so-so, clever-clever, ham-fisted, high-handed, even half-hearted … ‘Swoon’, in rejecting simplicity and sentiment, does have a definite, caring craft to it, a self-involved craftiness, a plucky capacity for cunning. But for all its deft complication and wordiness, it never excites or excels, is wildly harmless, consistently irksome and virtually passionless. Finally, it doesn’t say much.
Or Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker on the same day:
One way and another, this is drivel, mostly of the twee and gutless variety. … it’s rambling, disjointed, strings of devious chord changes toppling into one another without any sense of urgency or consequence. … “Swoon”, apparently an acrostic from Songs Written Out Of Necessity (bullshit), is a gigantic folly, a tour de force of self indulgence. As you can tell, I’m horrified.
The group also seem to have been dogged by comparisons with Steely Dan, which seem baffling now, but this was obviously a serious black mark against them in 1984, allowing journos to dismiss them as too-clever-by-half sterile musos.
There is some force to the criticisms in these reviews – insofar as one can identify actual criticisms among the rhetorical flourishes, which are almost as baroque as those in the songs under attack. Swoon is very much a first album by a young man trying to impress: again, I’m no musicologist, but I have no doubt that it’s full of weird chords and time signatures, and many of the songs have a herky-jerky, stop-start quality, with the vocal lines overcrammed with words. As Sweeting notes, ‘Technique’ begins with a 1-2-3-4-5 count-in, seemingly just to let you know it’s in 5/4, while ‘I Couldn’t Bear to be Special’ opens with an irritating scat-line ‘Bo, bo bee, bo’, whose purpose similarly seems to be that it isn’t ‘La-la-la’. The lyrics to the album’s opener ‘Don’t Sing’ are based around an ekphrastic paraphrase of the plot to Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, about a ‘whisky priest’ hounded to his doom by revolutionaries in Mexico – as ludicrous a conceit as Scott Walker’s mariachi re-telling of The Seventh Seal fifteen years earlier. Even worse: Paddy McAloon seems to be not merely retelling the story, but using the novel’s emotional arc as a parallel for some vaguely defined personal crisis. Similarly with the summary of Bobby Fisher’s dramatic career as a chess grandmaster in ‘Cue Fanfare’.
But isn’t there something admirable about this throw-everything-at-the-wall overegging? Showing off isn’t always a fatal flaw – if one has something to show off about. And there’s real talent on show here: not a paucity of ideas, but a surplus.
A comparison with the Sprout’s second album, Steve McQueen, is instructive. The production on Swoon is relatively anonymous and, since the indie-label budget from Newcastle label Kitchenware was presumably limited, there are few flourishes, just a basic palette of sounds focused around various guitars (mainly acoustic) and keyboards (mainly electric piano). All the instruments have their own space in the mix. The band get a co-production credit with David Brewis. Conversely, Steve McQueen is very identifiably produced by Thomas Dolby, and while his presence is not as oppressive as, say, Martin Hannett’s on Joy Division’s records, the songs somehow feel simpler and more direct even among the addition of various studio effects. They have a clearer identity despite sharing the limelight with Dolby’s production.
We all know that pop songs have a Proustian quality, summoning us back to our youth – especially, perhaps those we first heard between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. But I have two later memories associated with this album. In 1994, when I hadn’t heard it for several years, I caught a crackly broadcast of ‘Cruel’ on a pirate radio station on my first visit to Italy to do a language course before starting a doctorate in Italian history – and realised I could still quote the lyrics verbatim (which I suppose makes this a memory of a memory).
I'm a liberal guy, too cool for the macho ache
With a secret tooth for the cherry on the cake
With a pious smile, a smile that changes what I say
While I waste my time in regretting
That the days went from perfect to just okay
Quite what it was about this student-union sexual-politics handwringing that appealed to my goofy, jug-eared, never-been-kissed fourteen-year-old self I don’t know. Probably only that I had so few albums that I knew the lyrics to all of them (I can also quote large chunks of Larry Norman’s Only Visiting This Planet, for example, a 1970s Christian album with a sensibility far removed from Swoon).
Another memory: in early 2015, when I’d bought the album again to immerse myself in all-things 1984 before starting to write The Angels of L19, I used to listen to it on the bus on my way to work in a call centre. So now it summons in me not just a feeling of teenage nostalgia, but also a sensation of dread and smothered panic attack.
The Angels of L19 is officially released on 19 August. On 18 August, there will be an online launch event: a conversation between Adam Roberts (author of The Thing Itself, etc.) and myself about the book. Tickets are free if you order a copy of the book from the event host, Topping & Co. (link below – they have signed copies) – and also if you've already pre-ordered the book from the publisher, Weatherglass. The info to access the Zoom meeting will be sent out by email the day before I think.
Adam is super-smart and funny – he was also the external examiner for my PhD. And I have some old photos (including one of me in a chicken suit). So it should be a fun chat.
Here's the link:
Release dates: early March and 9 November
Was I listening to these in the 1980s? Yes.
I begin my survey of 1984 music with Julian Cope’s two album releases from that year: World Shut Your Mouth and Fried. If one were to believe the critical wisdom of the time, Cope’s career peaked with the early singles by the Teardrop Explodes – the ones released on Zoo Records. These singles, ‘Sleeping Gas’ and ‘Bouncing Babies’, were, supposedly, better than the re-recorded versions on the band’s first LP Kilimanjaro, which was in turn better than the group’s second and final LP, Wilder, which was in turn better than Cope’s first solo LP, World Shut Your Mouth. All these successive releases were compared unfavourably in reviews to their immediate predecessors, so that Wilder, dismissed on release, nonetheless became a stick to beat World Shut Your Mouth with.
With Fried the critical trend changed slightly: although for the NME, it marked no improvement on World Shut Your Mouth (and indeed David Quantick’s review contains the expected unfavourable comparison to the previous record, even if he remained dismissive of both), the Melody Maker review by Steve Sutherland was far more positive. That wasn’t enough to help sales though: Cope was dropped by Polygram soon after. He seems to have taken it all to heart, to the extent that World Shut Your Mouth is currently unavailable officially, and for many people Cope’s solo career begins with Fried.
This is a pity. My own personal ranking would be: Kilimanjaro is better than the early singles, Wilder is better than Kilimanjaro, World Shut Your Mouth is as good as Wilder, and Fried is a (small) step down from both. Both of the first two solo albums traditionally suffer, not only by comparison with Cope’s earlier work, but also with Ocean Rain from the same year by his perennial Liverpool rivals, Echo & the Bunnymen. But they are very different records. Ocean Rain is a self-conscious attempt to create ‘THE GREATEST ALBUM EVER MADE’ (as the adverts described it), and if it doesn’t reach those heights, it achieved enough to intimidate its own creators out of attempting to replicate its success for another three years. By contrast, both Cope’s 1984 albums have a dashed-off, spontaneous feel – attempts to shake off the doldrums of the collapse of the Teardrops – but this gives them a real energy. Ocean Rain is stately and self-important, swaddled in strings: World Shut Your Mouth and Fried, recorded much more quickly and for a fraction of the cost, blow a raspberry in its direction.
Consider the following lyrics from ‘An Elegant Chaos’, the first few lines of which are singled out for particular scorn in Barney Hoskyn’s NME review of World Shut Your Mouth:
People I see
Just remind me mooing
Like a cow on the grass
And that’s not to say
That there’s anything wrong
With being a cow anyway
But people are people
With the added advantage
Of the spoken word
We’re getting on fine
But I feel more of a man
When I get with the herd
Sure, it’s no ‘Fate, up against your will’, but it is … well, it’s quite funny. Its silliness makes me laugh – as it's intended to. It also has some clever wordplay.
The lyrics have this kind of loose inventiveness and lack of concern with the singer’s dignity throughout, and the music and production are enlivened with all kinds of playful grace notes: Kate St John’s oboe, a sitar, samples of revving engines and children playing, backwards guitar riffs, and invented historical references in the lyrics (‘Metranil Vavin’, which pretends to be about a Russian poet and reads like a treatise on Gnostic theology). But, in contrast to the lush orchestration of Ocean Rain, the sound throughout World Shut Your Mouth has a kind of fundamental cheapness, which for me is part of its charm. The keyboards and organ are particularly unmajestic, as is the drum machine on ‘Kolly Kibber’s Birthday’.
Hoskyns was not impressed by any of this. From the NME review published on 29 February:
The problem with Cope is that he writes everything in major chords, so that there’s never the cancer-in-the-sugar sensation he demands of music. All is delivered with the same orotund enthusiasm, be it the soft Blondiesque pop of ‘Elegant Chaos’, the forced Matt Johnson-style funkiness of ‘Pussyface’, or the wistful Kevin Ayers of ‘Lunatic and Fire Pistol’. To this day, Cope is singing ‘Baa-Baa-Baa’ and meaning it.
I’m not qualified to say whether everything on the first solo album actually is in major chords, although it surely can’t be true of the mournful ballads on Fried. But I think the obvious rejoinder would be that World Shut Your Mouth is supposed to be an upbeat album – and its success in this regard was the result of some psychic effort on Cope’s part ('I hold on to beauty / If I lose my grip I might fall'). It’s certainly not the product of complacency.
Fried is more of the same from World Shut Your Mouth – except it's gloomier, with less melodic variety and fewer musical or lyrical jokes. Despite the deliberately ridiculous cover image of Cope crawling naked under a giant tortoise shell, it takes itself more seriously: the queasy antics of ‘Reynard the Fox’, which describes a character cutting his stomach open, are diagnostic here – there’s no hint of a wink to soften the horror of this image.
One of Cope’s weaknesses in this early phase of his career was his fondness for minimalism and repetition. In his first volume of memoirs, Head-On, he tells of being mesmerized by a Subway Sect performance in Liverpool in 1977:
Drums and bass started together, a slow mid-tempo beat: Boom-bum-bum-bum, Boom-bum-bum-bum, Boom-bum-bum-bum …
Then a single tiny guitar note: Bow, bow, bow, bow, bow …
For at least a minute, the riff held steady, then the lead singer carelessly turned half round, the mike in his left hand. ... There was no chorus. Just the same riff throughout. I guessed the chorus must be the bit where everyone sung the same word over and over. The song finished and there was polite applause.
The next song was the same. A kind of three-note Stooges thing. But still at 15 mph. This time the guitarist played a chord for most of the song, but when the singer muttered, ‘Solo’ into the mike, the guitarist returned to the steady Bow-bow-bow of the first song.
‘Sleeping Gas’ is an early example of a song written according to this model: the reason I find the Kilimanjaro version superior is that it mitigates the monotonous chant of the lyrics with inventive production that layers sounds to create texture (horns, a double-tracked vocal, etc.). Cope was only a co-author for this particular track, but it seems to serve as a model for too many of the compositions on Fried. I’m incapable of musicological analysis: I just know that as a listener to World Shut Your Mouth, the movement in the vocal line recalls someone excited about what they have to tell you (pace Hoskyns) – and some songs are so bursting with ideas that they change musical gears several times, e.g. ‘Sunshine Playroom’. Conversely, Fried has several songs that not only do nothing to disguise their monotony, but actually emphasise it with a none-more-basic musical arrangement, especially ‘Search Party’ and ‘Torpedo’ on the second side – but also ‘Laughing Boy’ and ‘Me Singing’ on the first: and that’s 40% of the album. ‘Sunspots’ does the same thing, but here, as in the Kilimanjaro version of ‘Sleeping Gas’, we have the clever arrangements and different layers (e.g. tuba, a recorder) that provide the variety missing from the melody.
Finally, despite the caveats above, there is something quite remarkable about ‘Reynard the Fox’ beyond its grotesque imagery (though that imagery is also part of it). Consider the passage where Cope sing-speaks:
Reynard left and went to Warwickshire, to a mound near a railway line, With canals and a freezing swamp. He climbs high up above the countryside And breathes freely. To the south he could see Polesworth, and to the North he could just make out the ruins of the priory where Joss and I Played cricket as children. …
When pop albums evoke place, they usually do so implicitly, by atmosphere or indirect allusion: think the post-industrial landscape of Manchester as mediated by the music of Joy Division. By contrast, this passage from ‘Reynard the Fox’ seems a very modest, literal account, eschewing the kind of poetic detail prized by many critics, but this level of topographical specificity is virtually unprecedented in mid-80s pop (including on the rest of Fried and World Shut Your Mouth). The obvious precedent is The Beatles, in ‘Penny Lane’ (its twin ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is actually far less specific in this regard), but I suspect many musicians deliberately avoid this kind of detail in the mistaken belief that being less specific makes their songs more ‘universal’ and thus easier for listeners to identify with. But a favourite writing maxim of mine applies to songs as much as to stories: it’s always better for a story to be set somewhere rather than nowhere. Hence The Angels of L19 is set mainly within that postcode (and, even more specifically, mainly on South Mossley Hill Road).
It’s perhaps symptomatic that Cope reverts to a speaking voice to deliver this quasi-voiceover narration in 'Reynard the Fox', which offers details from his own childhood (Joss is his brother). It also seems important that this passage immediately precedes the description of Reynard cutting his guts open: it’s establishing the setting for what might now, in the context of this precise invocation of place, be interpreted as a shamanic ritual. This interpretation is partly based on Cope’s notorious stage antics, where he cut his own stomach while singing this song, perched on a custom mic stand named after Yggdrasil, the World Tree on which Odin’s body hung after he sacrificed himself to himself (Odin is hymned directly on Fried’s ‘O King of Chaos’). So perhaps ‘Reynard the Fox’ is the foundational text for Cope’s later interest in both prehistoric archaeology and magic ritual.
My novel The Angels of L19 is officially released in August. It's set in 1984, and its protagonists are fully engaged with the music of the time. The novel therefore includes discussions of U2, New Order, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen (and, in passing, the Teardrop Explodes and Simple Minds). It is, in a sense, a story about the interpretation of texts (hermeneutics). For the characters, that mainly means the Bible, but I also wanted to show them reading and interpreting other, more contemporary texts. So I thought I would complement this aspect of the book with a series of posts on albums released in 1984, which I'll be putting up twice a week for the next two months.
This was a significant year for me. My fictional characters are 15 and 16: I was 14. But it was the year I joined an evangelical church and (perhaps not coincidentally) the year I became interested in music and films as things with a history that could be researched and excavated. One of the themes of the book is how seeing yourself in relation to eternal truths and an ancient and continuous religious tradition enlarges rather than constricts your sense of the world around you. It also makes you aware you’re part of history.
I was aware of things beyond the charts before 1984: I already liked Revolver and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club, and I'd been through a rock phase and listened to music by Deep Purple and Rainbow. But 84 was perhaps the year I began to think in terms of ‘I liked this. What else has this creator done before or since?’ Or, even more importantly, and beyond just thinking about music: ‘What has this creator been influenced by? What texts have shaped the kind of stories it is possible to tell in this tradition?’ And I pursued these lines of enquiry even when this involved some effort (i.e. beyond getting a series of books by the same author off the library shelf).
It may seem against the spirit of this sense of discovery to restrict my discussions here to a single calendar year, but of course that year has now itself become historical. In the course of writing the book, I discovered several bands I hadn’t paid any attention to at the time (e.g. The Fall, Siouxsie & the Banshees), but I think in the next post I’ll begin with two albums I was a fan of in 1984: Julian Cope’s first two solo releases, World Shut Your Mouth and Fried.
In subsequent posts I'll combine my own observations with quotations from contemporary reviews published in 1984 issues of the NME and Melody Maker, the two largest music papers at the time.
Above: 'Liverpool Groups with Stupid Names, 1976–1984' from the NME, 21 April 1984.
The gold standard:
Most angels in songs are metaphorical, but I'm not sure about this one:
Surely metaphorical:
Not sure if this is really about an angel, or a grotty bloke with wings that double as a time-travelling device. In any case, fantastic (in both sense of the word):
Also pretty obscure lyrically. But something supernatural is going on, which has to do with heavenly hierarchies:
I’ve read this book three times – in (roughly) 2012, in 2016 while I was writing The Angels of L19, and now again in 2021. My experience of it has changed significantly with each re-read. One might expect this with a book first encountered in one’s teens and re-read in middle age, but this process has taken me by surprise for a book I first read only a decade ago. Perhaps all great books do this – keep tapping us on the shoulder, challenging us to return to them.
There was a lot of buzz around this title in the SFF community when it came out – it won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards – because it is about a protagonist discovering that community as a teenager c. 1980, and in the process discovering herself. For Mor, the book's protagonist, the fellow fans she discovers in her local library’s reading group become her ‘karass’ (a word she borrows from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, meaning a group linked by an essential or true spiritual connection). And the end of the book looks forward optimistically to the expansion of this community at fan conventions, and among fellow students at university, who Mor expects to be more congenial than the games-obsessed philistines at her girls’ boarding school.
On first read, I was a little disappointed with this aspect of the book. It’s written as a diary, and some of the entries felt like mere lists of books Mor is reading (she reads very fast, over a book a day, so the novel name-checks a lot of titles). I still think it might have been better to trim some of this name-checking, even if one concedes that the novel is for fellow fans. I am about five years younger than Mor, but, while I was/am vaguely aware of many of the authors mentioned, a lot of the individual titles are unfamiliar to me. However, this doesn’t matter when the novel takes pains to explain precisely what particular books means to Mor or her fellow book-group members – on re-read, I found these more substantive discussions pitched at just the right level of detail and complexity. They’re not lit-crit evaluations. The closest the book group really gets to this is in distinguishing books that prioritise ‘style’ from those that prioritise ‘ideas’ (I’d be interested to know where this leaves Philip K Dick, who the novel largely avoids discussing). Rather, Mor uses books as ways to make sense of what’s happening to her: as models for working out and thinking through her orientation to the people and events of her life.
This phenomenological approach is of course verboten in academic criticism, where it would be regarded as hopelessly naïve, but it’s very true to teenage experience I think. All the more so in Mor’s case, given that she lives inside an SFF story: to be precise, a fantasy story with magic and fairies.
Both these aspects of the book are defamiliarised enough to seem fresh despite their centrality as themes in fantasy – but not so much that they can’t draw some of their force from the tradition the book forms part of and is frequently in direct conversation with. That’s a difficult balance to strike, and the book does it casually. One of the ways it does so – and this is part of its example for me – is to present the fantastic elements as already familiar to its protagonist. There’s no tedious ‘origin story’ in which half the book is frittered away with the protagonist trying to come to terms with an unexpectedly transformed reality. The transformation is congenital, so to speak: magic and fairies have always been part of her reality. And even when she’s obliged to try to explain this to her new boyfriend, his immersion in SFF makes it easier for him to get his head round it all (even if he keeps insisting that the fairies might be ghosts: i.e. he’s imposing a familiar, pre-existing category – though of course that is also what Mor is doing by calling them ‘fairies’).
I wanted to do something similar in The Angels of L19, where all the characters are Christians, and therefore believe a priori in the existence of angels and demons – I am about try to manage the same trick again for a new book. That whole emotional arc of ‘This can’t be real. But what if it is real? Oh my god it’s real!’ is just of no interest to me. I want to move past it as quickly as possible – or preferably omit it entirely.
Among Others has another structural innovation: its story unfolds after the climactic confrontation in which Mor’s twin sister has been killed, and Mor herself has been badly injured, during a successful attempt to prevent their mother conducting dark magic. And we never really get a full account of this confrontation – it remains slightly out of focus, even as the ache of loss and grief for the dead sister is the book's central emotion. As Mor puts it to herself via her usual habit of comparing her situation to a story – it’s as if the entire book is focussed on the Scouring of the Shire rather than the epic quest to which it forms an appendix in Lord of the Rings.
I suspect I was also disappointed with this literally anti-climactic structure on first read – the novel seems to be building throughout towards a second epic confrontation, but when this arrives, it’s over almost immediately. But this structure now seems to me both daring and interesting, and I found the book’s unusual rhythms quite satisfying on re-read. These rhythms are perhaps to do with those of adolescence: the substitution of a peer group with whom commonalities have to be discovered and constructed for a family with whom shared intimacies are taken for granted, but also ultimately limiting and even stifling. It doesn’t get more intimate than a twin sister with whom one also performs magic – and her death enacts being cast out of this charmed circle of pre-existing assumptions into a broader social universe.
I’ve seen Among Others described as YA. I don’t read enough YA to know how well it sits within that definition, but one thing it does very well is to use Mor’s teenage incomprehension of the adult world to defamiliarise that world. There’s a particularly bravura passage on class distinction as a form of magic (the latter is of course very familiar to Mor; the former, bizarre and incomprehensible).
I wonder if my initial downplaying of the book’s merits was a self-protective one: its influence on The Angels of L19 now seems very obvious to me, but writing in the direct light of that influence would have been inhibiting. For example, my novel features three scenes with characters watching films (Time Bandits, Footloose and Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc) and thinking about or discussing how these films fit (or don’t fit) with their Christian beliefs. It also includes characters thinking about music in the same terms. (I chose films and music rather than books because the former two are mass media and more likely to be familiar to readers, and because the Bible is the ur-book against which all other cultural productions are measured in my fictional world – it therefore leaves little room for other books). But Walton’s presentation of community, and of the interplay between the social and the esoteric, now seems just as important. And as I’ve mentioned above, her book’s acceptance of the fantastic as a given was also a model. Even her structural gambit of starting where most other stories would finish finds an echo in my novel’s continuation of its story past the expected climax – something I’ll discuss in more detail closer to publication with reference to Tolkien’s idea of the eucatastrophe: the undoing or reversal of a tragic ending.
Since in my book this ‘fourth act’ takes the form of a re-writing of the legend of the Harrowing of Hell, I might also note that the same legend is the basis for Walton’s more recent novel Lent (although I didn’t read her take on this until I’d finished writing my book).
There are plenty of other influences on The Angels of L19 (for example, Charles Williams), but, having just re-read Among Others, I wanted to acknowledge its importance in detail.
I write short novels (and sometimes short non-fiction). My three published books are: 1) (non-fiction) 60,000 words (plus illustrations and extensive endnotes); 2) (novel) 60,000 words (plus extensive illustrations); and 3) (forthcoming novel) 66,000 words.
I sometimes write short non-fiction pieces (and I’ve published many articles in academic journals in the past), but I never ever write short stories. I just don’t think in ways that suit that form. But I’ll also never write a novel (or, likely, a book of any kind) over 75,000 words. I’ll never write a sequel either (the novel I’m just starting now has thematic and situational links with my last one, but no continuities of plot).
All of this makes me a very marginal writer in commercial terms, irrespective of the subject or quality of my writing. Many agents or publishers won’t look at manuscripts under 75,000 words. Nonetheless, I have no intention of padding stories out to meet artificial targets if that feels wrong to me. And interestingly, my editors generally agree – generally I get pushed to make things shorter.
For my forthcoming novel The Angels of L19 I can track word counts very precisely. The longest complete draft appears to be v59, which is 76,000 words (though I think I had already removed a couple of surplus scenes from this, so there could theoretically have been an ur version of about 80,000 words). I submitted v70 for my PhD in creative writing, and that was 73,000 words. There was some discussion around this as departmental guidelines at the University of Kent suggested it should be at least 90,000 words. My position was: that’s what I’m submitting, I’m not changing it, so feel free to fail it if you have a problem with that. In the event, I passed with no corrections. I submitted v75 to Weatherglass Books, and that was 71,000 words. The published version will be 66,000.
In other words, the editorial interventions made what was already a short book into an even shorter one. The trajectory was not to bulk it up, or fill gaps, but empty it out where it was too crowded, too stuffed with complications and explanations. Make its shape clearer and simpler, but also make it more mysterious and open – fill it with silences. I think this was right – it’s the direction my writing wants to move in. For The Angels of L19 in particular, I had the cautionary example of Donnie Darko in mind (my elevator pitch is 'Donnie Darko but all the characters are evangelical Christians'). The initial release of that film is close to perfect, even with its ellipses and lacunae. The Director's Cut can't resist explaining everything, thereby reducing mystery to banality. The differences are small, but the effect is catastrophic.
A note also on ‘versions’ or ‘drafts’: 75 plus seems a lot, and probably is. But a draft isn’t what it used to be. A new draft used to require writing or typing the entire manuscript out from scratch again, and incorporating corrections added (usually by hand) to the typescript of the previous draft. A few holdouts may still do precisely this, but for most of us, word processing means we can make a potentially infinite number of alterations to any given version of a document. I work with Word, and I move the draft number up one whenever I make what feels like a significant cut or change: whenever, in other words, I feel I might conceivably need to retain or refer back to the prior version. I write individual chapters in separate files, revising these several times before I incorporate them into the master file compiling all chapters completed thus far. This explains why I can get up to v59 before I have a proper workable complete draft. Then, for The Angels of L19, there were approx. twenty more versions after that before it went to the typesetter.
How many ‘drafts’ in old-style money is that equivalent to? I don’t really know – eight to ten total? But it’s hard to say.
I wish I didn’t feel compelled to endlessly revise and dicker about. Partly this is a function of trying to figure out an original form (first two books, which are both quite experimental formally, in very different ways), and then of trying to change my working method and master a more traditional form, but dig deeper emotionally (The Angels of L19). It’s also a function of how long it took to find a publisher for all three books: I spent five years submitting the first; the second similarly took four years (I mean after completing the first draft); the third only three – which I suppose is progress of a sort. Under these circumstances, it’s hard not to constantly second-guess what the perceived problems might be and try to make it better for the next round. But if the perceived problem is word count, then I guess I'm shit out of luck for the rest of my career.
My novel The Angels of L19 is a work of Christian fantasy, according to the definition of Colin Manlove:
What we are concerned with are works [of fiction] which give substantial and unambiguous place to other worlds, angels, devils, Christ figures, miraculous or supernatural events (biblical or otherwise), objects of numinous power, and mystical relationship with some approximation of the deity; and all under the aegis of Christian belief.
This doesn’t mean that the book has any evangelical purpose. I’m not even a practising Christian, although I grew up in that world. But it does mean that the book takes Christian belief and the Christian supernatural seriously in the conviction that an engagement with Christianity is an engagement with moral and existential questions that should be of interest to anyone.
I wrote this novel for a doctorate in creative writing, and one of my arguments in my thesis is that Christian fantasy cannot be entirely orthodox in its theology. For it to work as fantasy, it must trespass beyond the bounds of orthodoxy: not necessarily by contradicting received belief, but certainly by supposing things of which canonical texts are silent (which it does not, of course, present as true). All the great historical examples of the genre do this: The Divine Comedy, Dr Faustus, Paradise Lost – even C. S. Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy.
Conversely, Christian fantasy that is committed above all else to advancing particular theological speculations as true not only commits a category error, but is usually shallow and kitsch as fiction: betraying the profundity of the truths it ostensibly tries to communicate.
Here I’d like to offer some possible comparisons to the way my book approaches the question of Christian belief. If you think the examples that follow have something to offer the Christian (or non-Christian) reader or viewer, you may find something of value in my book as well. If you think these examples are impious or blasphemous, chances are you won’t like what I’m doing either.
Not all of these examples concern the fantastic or the Christian supernatural (and the last on the list is not even literature/fiction), but they're all useful comparisons for the way I've approached questions of faith in my novel.
Charles Williams: I shall discuss Williams in more detail in a dedicated post, since he’s an important precedent for me, and my treatment of the supernatural is directly inspired by his novels. I’ll only note here that he’s been adopted by evangelicals (and others) as a respectable author largely because of his membership of the Inklings, the Oxford group in which Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were also members. His work was admired by Lewis in particular. But his actual beliefs and practice as a Christian, and the ways in which these were translated into his fiction, were rather stranger than that association implies. In particular, his interest in magic and ritual place him in a tradition going back to people like John Dee, and other Renaissance philosophers who saw no contradiction between Christianity and magic. Anyway, more on Williams later and elsewhere.
Flannery O’Connor: O’Connor is also a respectable Christian writer, in the sense that assessing her in these terms is relatively uncontroversial, perhaps in large part because she wrote about herself as such eloquently and persuasively. But if one were to read her fiction without knowing this, one might conclude that her intent was to parody and mock Christian belief. Consider ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in which the climactic revelation of divine grace appears to come at the murdering hands of a serial killer. Or 'The River', in which a character seeking the purification of baptism drowns. I haven’t read her novels, but the plot summaries similarly seem to lend themselves to skeptical interpretations. But then, how should grace manifest itself, if not through and beyond the manifold ways we attempt to debase and complicate its operations? This is, it seems to me, the central question O’Connor is trying to address. Like her, I am interested in this question – because I too am in need of grace. Which of us is not?
16 Horsepower: the songs of David Eugene Edwards, writing for the band 16 Horsepower, seem to be sung from the point of view of a series of Flannery O’Connor characters. The initial temptation might be to assume some Nick Cave–like theatricality, but this documentary reveals something quite different. In it, Edwards talks about how the music of Joy Division and other post-punk bands felt to him like just as important a way to approach and apprehend the divine as the gospel traditions he grew up with. There is an important truth here: the divine is a terrible thing (in the original sense of that word also familiar to Williams and O’Connor). It has nothing to do with piety, still less with sentimentality.
The Exorcist: I like both the book and the film, although the latter is probably the stronger, more original work. For a work denounced by many as evil, The Exorcist is likely to strike first-time viewers as surprisingly conservative. Indeed, it is quite plausible to read it as a piece of celebratory propaganda on behalf of the Jesuit order – apart, perhaps, from its troubling ending, in which Father Karras, left alone after the more experienced Father Merrick has succumbed to a heart attack, and frustrated by his apparent failure to drive out the demon Pazuzu, invites it to leave Regan and enter him, and then commits suicide to prevent it taking him over. Needless to say, this conclusion is not consistent with the beliefs and practices of contemporary exorcists, researched by Blatty before writing the book. For them, the power of Christ is more than sufficient to defeat any demon – without any misguided and arrogant assumption of personal responsibility. But this plot development is a pretty clear demonstration of how the demands of approved theology and the demands of fictional dramatization might clash: Karras’s actions make perfect sense in dramatic terms. Troubled by doubts throughout the story, this is his final declaration of faith, in which he imitates Christ by sacrificing himself. Whether one is willing to accept this as a legitimate idea for the novel and film to propose depends on accepting that fiction and theology have different purposes.
The Last Temptation of Christ: I only know the Scorsese film, not the source novel. This was of course the target of a sustained campaign of protest denouncing it as blasphemous upon its original release. The most frequently cited source of complaint was the climactic sequence in which Christ, on the cross, imagines a different fate for himself, in which he might have married Mary Magdalene and lived out a ‘normal’ life as a husband and father. This is the titular ‘Last Temptation’. But underlying this is the more troubling idea that, in the film, Jesus is not initially sure that he is the Son of God. Perhaps his call to take up this mantle is actually an act of outrageous presumption? Both these elements have no canonical justification in the Gospel texts. But they seem to me to be perfectly legitimate as fiction: as attempts to think through the meaning of incarnation. How exactly does God become man? Of course He must lay aside omnipotence. Is it really so outrageous to suppose that He lays aside omniscience as well? That just as He must struggle to overcome sin, He might also struggle to overcome doubt? There is nothing blasphemous in this. Unless fiction about God is in itself somehow blasphemous.
Piss Christ by Andres Serrano: this is a work of art of quite astonishing notoriety. Over thirty years after its creation, it is still being cited with outrage as an example of everything that is wrong with modern art, and a reason why artists should not receive public funding. It is a sculpture – although it is generally represented and reproduced via a series of photographs taken by the artist, and I'm not sure it still exists in any other form – in which a cheap plastic crucifix is depicted immersed in urine. My thoughts on this are influenced by a Twitter thread, which I can’t find now, but which I paraphrase to some extent in what follows. This work, like The Last Temptation of Christ, is about incarnation. Obviously I’ve never given birth: nor have I even been present at a birth. But I do know it is a pretty messy and excruciating event, involving a lot of bodily substances beyond the rather neutral and untroublingly transparent amniotic fluid. And Christ, moreover, was born in a stable: not places typically known for their perfect cleanliness and freedom from bodily excreta. And when Christ died on the cross, do you think that didn’t involve involuntary body functions either? God chose to become man: to subject Himself to all this: to immerse Himself in all this. To insist that it did not compromise his godhood to be vulnerable in this way. A cheap plastic crucifix presents Christ’s body as smooth and integral, as sentimental and kitsch: not as violated and broken for us. Serrano’s work is about all this: about our bad faith in sanitising what incarnation means. But if you insist on seeing Piss Christ as blasphemous, I suspect you’ll read the climax of my novel in the same way.
In that climax, I use a similar gambit to think about the relationship between abjection and transcendence: about abjection as a doorway to transcendence and the divine. In this I also follow O’Connor, and the medieval saints who kissed the sores of lepers as a way to approach God. And I follow Dante, for whom the way to heaven led through hell: down, down, all the way to the very bottom before beginning the painful ascent back up Mount Purgatory.
I'm very pleased to announce that my novel, The Angels of L19 (called Brethren in some of the posts below) will be one of the first releases from Weatherglass Books next year.
From the publisher's website:
There’s more than one way to be born again.
Liverpool, 1984. The teenagers at Garston Chapel are the same as the rest of us: The Smiths, U2, crushes, football, mates. The grimy, low-down politics of the Thatcher era casting deep shadows in this proud and broken city, but the kids have got other things on their minds … Jesus Christ Our Lord for one.
Almost normal kids, then.
But Robert isn’t at all normal. Because Robert is visited by angels - if that’s what they are. He can’t tell a soul about his secret. All anyone can see is his strange behaviour as he desperately seeks to understand what they mean, what they want from him.
As Robert’s two worlds merge, the real and the visionary intersect with increasing intensity and what is being asked of him becomes terrifyingly clear.
The Angels of L19 is a moving and entirely original story of young lives at the confluence of faith and doubt, angels and demons, life and death. And where redemption is possible, even for those we think might be lost forever.
The Angels of L19 is extraordinary: a blend of closely-observed realism and unsettling Fantasy, wonderful, tragic and absolutely unforgettable. I don’t use the word often or lightly, but this novel is a masterpiece.
Adam Roberts, author of Jack Glass and The Thing Itself
You can preorder the book here.
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