Books and Records. I Like These.

First Comes First
Paddingtons

Punk bands sounded like this in 1978. Real punk bands, not Green Day and the like. It isn't subtle, but it is direct and honest and visceral, and a brilliant indicator of just how amazingly fun they are live. Good yelly singing, good thrash guitar, a drummer who keeps everything going forwards without any frills, and songs that do repay a bit of thinking about. They're direct, not stupid. And they're from Hull and proud of it. Love 'em lots, and the second album's a cracker as well (No Mundane Options).

The Afterglow
Anthony Cartwright

This is a brilliant book. Very small canvas, incredibly well-turned Black Country dialect, that makes Brummie poetic. And it's real, and it's convincing, and he makes you care about all the characters, even the lairy ones. Absolutely loved it.

How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher
Simon Barnes

This book is seriously good, and profoundly serious, and never ever solemn. There is a philosophy about the everyday, and paying it due attention, that is awesome (as in.. making me feel awe) and that is exemplified by paying due attention to birds. He is not, I would guess, a bad birdwatcher himself, but I am, and this book made me feel inspired. If I am a bad birdwatcher, why not become a better one? The experiences he writes about, the achievements of identification, the tiny triumphs in species preservation, aren't trivial; or if they are trivial, then it's trivial steps that are going to save the planet, as well as global ones. And my days are enriched more than I can say by the Great Crested Grebes nesting on piles of garbage on the mooring-lines of a floating Chinese restaurant were I walk my dog, and that's very trivial and very profound.
And Pied Wagtails are the bad birdwatchers friend. If you know Pied means black and white, there's a black and white bird, it has a tail, it wags it. Job done. Simon Barnes doesn't mention that one, it's a bonus for reading this.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
F. Scott Fitzgerald

So taut, so precise, so exquisite. A beautifully realised, tiny little story exploring a whimsical idea (a life lived backwards, for anyone who doesn't know) with such deftness. Anyone who has suffered through the three and a half weeks it takes to watch Brad Pitt getting made-up should read the story before reeling home. It's lovely. There's a bigger point in here somewhere. Who reads something as delicate as this and decides it is best realised at the cost of ten squillion dollars and at such unendurable length? What did they like about the story in the first place? Because the central love story isn't there at all; he meets Hildegarde Moncrieff at a dance where she mistakes him for his father's brother, she marries him because he's less flighty than her other beaux, and in ten years he's got fed up with her because she's old and boring. That's it. End of love story. All the paedophiliac nonsense with a 70 year old Brad Pitt fancying a ten year old Cate Blanchett? Not there. Tiny Brad all sad at old Cate's death bed? Not there. All the saccharine crap? Not there. Avoid the film; read the story.

Crossfire
Andy McNab

This is a thick-eared thriller, of course it is. It's for people who really enjoy talking like squaddies and think being told how to field-strip an AK47 makes them manly, so fiction for sad losers, basically. However, it is compelling, I did want to find out what happened, I was rooting for the hero, I did keep turning an awful lot (550!!) of pages, which makes this, I suppose, a 'good read'. Like Dan Brown isn't. And also..waterboarding; it is torture, it isn't acceptable, it was devised by the Yanks and the Brits, and Rumsfeld and Chaney are responsible for its use and justification. Andy McNab, human rights activist. This surprised me, which means I was prejudging Mr McNab, I was wrong, and I apologise. See, liberals can be open-minded, sometimes. A book that does what it says on the tin; if you don't want to read an action-packed roller-coaster thriller (and find out how to field-strip an AK) don't read this. If you do, do.

Public Property
Andrew Motion

Motion has a knack for making small, inconsequential, things consequential. He also works that trick the other way round, which is unfortunate. He ambles through the same terrain as Ted Hughes, but his foxes aren't thought-foxes that tear apart the veil of civility with their innate savagery, they are amusing presences observed on the lawn, while sipping a chilled Sancerre and wearing a linen suit. The best thing in this collection is a prose-poem, "While I Was Fishing", the worst is a trawl through photos of the dear-old-queen-mum, which should be burnt. And I liked "The Dog of the Light Brigade", but that's probably just me.

The Rough Guide to Led Zeppelin
Rough Guides

It's very easy to process this book. Simply reverse all the critical judgements: "The Zeps finest hour" means don't touch it with a barge-pole, and "A disappointment after their previous towering triumph" means it could be worth checking out. What an unpleasant bunch of preening, cloth-eared, plagiarising, sexist shits. They give cock-rock a bad name. In fairness to the author, Nigel Williamson, it is an efficiently ordered, comprehensive introduction to a band that quite a few people like, and it does make critical discriminations that I'm sure could be interesting. If they weren't so unspeakable. And Rolf Harris' version of "Stairway to Heaven" is wonderful.

Nick Drake's Pink Moon (33 1/3)
Amanda Petrusich

A quarter of this mercifully brief little essay is a paean of praise for the culturally sensitive and artistically brilliant corporate whores who conflated Nick Drake and car commercials. The first half of the book is a cloth-eared rehash of Patrick Humphries' excellent biography, interlaced with markedly uninformative interviews with people I've never heard of and Robyn Hitchcock. It is woeful and just a little bit evil. It gets a grudging half-star because the framing essay, discussing how Ms. Petrusich came upon "Pink Moon" and then how she listens to it less, was mildly interesting, and had she written that book, I would have read it with some interest. Not much, but some.


Been Here and Gone (Brown Thrasher Books)
Frederic Ramsey

Amazing, beautiful, evocative photographs and stories of the country that Deep Blues comes from. A desperate attempt to preserve what Ramsey identified as a dying cultural form in 1950. And it's not dead yet. I hadn't thought about Basin Street in New Orleans being so-called because it's in a flood-basin. Makes sense now. Beg borrow or steal a copy if you have the slightest interest in the Blues or Black American music and culture, this is Wonderful.