Reality, in inverted commas.

Originally published in 1965, Dr Bloodmoney (or: how we got along after the bomb) traces the story of a group of people living on the west coast of the USA in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Dick paints a strange landscape in which the post-blast radiation has produced bizarre mutations like talking dogs, intelligent rats and ‘evolved’ humans with highly developed skills.

Meanwhile, circling the earth, the lonely astronaut Walt Dangerfield is still in orbit seven years after the conflagration, growing weaker by the day but faithfully maintaining his broadcasts to the survivors. With enough supplies to last for several years, Dangerfield, with his avuncular homespun humour, is a purveyor of hope, an orbiting disc jockey /town crier, connecting the disparate and far-flung communities as he relays messages, survival tips, recipes and advice on how to rebuild civilisation.
Down on the surface, the ‘evolved’ humans are not always (or even often) tolerated, but in the case of Hoppy Harrington, the community of Marin County is prepared to overlook his 'otherness' because of his extraordinary technical skills. Born with no arms and no legs, Harrington is embittered and scarred from the discrimination he had encountered in the pre-war world, but finds his own peculiar niche after the bombs have dropped. A humble TV repair man before the conflict, he becomes a brilliant and indispensable mechanic, developing his own personalised servomechanism technology, along with his incredible gift of telekinesis. These skills and powers make him one of the most feted, then feared, people in the country. As his influence and capriciousness grows, we start to realise that his ultimate goal is to dominate first Marin County and then the rest of what remains of the United States.

When Walt Dangerfield starts to experience symptoms of an unknown medical condition, his listeners are worried, mindful of the fact that they rely on his transmissions to maintain some sense of continuity with the old world. We assume the astronaut to be ill, or perhaps a hypochondriac, until we discover that he is actually under psychic attack from the increasingly powerful Harrington, who has not only mastered Dangerfield’s voice and idiom, but has developed the ability to run the equipment in the orbiting satellite by remote control.

In a typical Dickian twist, Harrington meets his nemesis in the unlikely form of Bill Keller, a sentient foetus living inside his seven year old sister, Edie. Bill experiences life and interprets it through dialogue not only with his sibling, but with the spirit world. He can communicate with the dead, read the thoughts and feelings of others and has the ability to envisage future events. As the story develops, so does his yearning for an independent life; he begins to perfect a technique for leaving his sister’s body in order to 'occupy' living beings. After a couple of false starts, he finally gets his wish to see, hear and feel for himself when he transfers briefly into the body of an owl and then, at the climax of the novel, into another human being.

Because his mental health was not always entirely robust, it has been claimed that Philip K Dick didn't merely write about ideas that he dreamed up; perhaps, some folk believe, he wrote about things that he actually experienced, or thought he experienced, in his everyday life. For those who subscribe to that theory, the fact that he had a twin sister who died after only a few weeks will be considered significant to the plot of this novel. However we analyse it, it is clear that when Dick is on his A-game, he can cram more ideas into one book than some writers stretch over an entire career. He is a deep thinker on a variety of themes: artificial life, parallel universes, theology, metaphysics and, above all else, the illusory nature of ‘reality’.

And by that, I don’t mean reality. Philip K Dick’s ‘realities’, you see, are always in inverted commas.

Twins of Evil

The other day, I got involved in a discussion on an internet forum about unusual, exciting or unexpected stuff that people had seen on television. Some of the contributors recounted surprising tales of nudity, profanity or sexual activity; others mentioned examples that were inspiring, terrifying or sometimes downright bizarre. The conversation brought to mind an incident from my youth.

When I was about 15, I was allowed to stay up late one night to watch an old Hammer horror film called 'Twins of Evil'. Set somewhere in middle Europe in the 19th century, it starred Peter Cushing as the uptight leader of a vigilante group called The Brotherhood, whose self-appointed role seemed to be to root out witches, vampires and other unsavoury types. The legal process must have been a lot speedier in those days, because it looked like The Brotherhood didn’t have to produce much in the way of evidence to get a conviction; I suspect that, if you owned a cat or looked a bit foreign you’d have been more or less bang to rights as far as those blokes were concerned. Once they had snared these undesirables, they’d hang them, burn them, drive a stake through their hearts or do pretty much whatever took their fancy, as long as it involved extreme pain and the grisly demise of the ‘convicted’ sinner.

As I recall, the early part of the film looked to illustrate the relish that the Peter Cushing character brought to his day job of finding, accusing, torturing and then killing weird folk. As the story unfolded, however, his cosy gig with The Brotherhood got somewhat compromised when him and his missus adopted their 19-year old orphaned twin nieces (played by Mary and Madelaine Collinson). You may not be surprised, dear reader, when I tell you that by no stretch of the imagination could anyone have claimed that these girls had been beaten with the ugly stick. As a chap with a sense of familial duty that could almost be described as medieval (to say nothing of his general disposition as an all-round misery guts), Mr Cushing was naturally very keen to keep the twins out of trouble. In addition to protecting them from the ever-present threat of vampires, witches and evil spirits, he was also at pains to make sure that none of the local lads (uneducated scruff, to a man) got so much as a sniff at his buxom charges.

The director of ‘Twins of Evil’ clearly thought it was important for the development of the story to have these charming young ladies lounge around in nightdresses that were all but see-through. In fact, so revealing were these garments that, from time to time, it was obvious that the girls had been instructed to strategically 'bunch up' the material a little so that the censor would not mistake this high-concept art movie for a piece of gratuitous titillation. You may not be surprised to learn that, at various points in the film -in a certain light and viewed from certain angles- the nightdresses managed to reveal rather more flesh than would have been considered appropriate for family viewing.

Much to the chagrin of uncle Peter, one of the nieces got into a close encounter with the decadent aristocrat Count Karnstein, a thoroughly bad egg who also happened to be an actual vampire. What with some of his vampire chums having previously been cruelly dispatched by The Brotherhood, it was no surprise that the evil count couldn't resist taking a bite at some forbidden fruit at the first opportunity. Hence, Mary (or was it Madelaine?) became the 'evil' twin.

So … let’s check the key elements of this story: Shapely identical twins cavorting around in revealing nightdresses. One of them is 'good' and pure, the other one is 'bad' and clearly gagging for it, with vampire teeth and everything.

And that’s about it. It sounds rather flimsy, doesn’t it?

But ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that it is impossible to exaggerate the impact that a film like this would have on the imagination of a 15-year old boy.

The Beautiful Game?

On the weekend that a new season kicks off in the Barclays Premier League (a.k.a. ‘the greatest league in the world’), one big question hangs over the world of football. No, it’s not the one about whether Arsenal will ever make a major signing, nor the one about whether David Moyes will be able to fill the shoes of Sir Alex Ferguson. No, this one is even more baffling, namely: Why (oh why, oh why) does the BBC continue to show faith in the punditry skills of Robbie Savage?

I have long suspected that Savage must have photos of the Director General of the BBC cavorting naked with a clutch of ladyboys. How else could he have 'earned' his various broadcasting gigs and how on earth does he hold on to them? Most football phone-ins on the radio are bad enough, but Five-Live’s is rendered unlistenable by Savage’s abrasive pub-bore style. Devoid of charm or wit, he’s about as insightful as a pantomime horse and, on a bad day (there are a lot of bad days) he barely achieves coherence. His stock answer to anyone who challenges his view is: have you ever played professional football? It seems to have escaped his notice that a big part of his job is to engage with folk who haven’t played professional football. To dismiss their views because they haven’t makes his show redundant; or at least it should. The fact that he can pick up a wage for sounding like a three-pints-to-the-good taxi-driver talking out of his arse should be enough to force a public inquiry into the validity of the licence fee.

To his credit however, Savage has just offered a revealing glimpse into the ‘spoiled millionaire-throwing-toys-out-of-the-pram’ world of top flight professional football. His article on the BBC website about ‘Tricks to engineer a transfer’ is grimly illuminating and a reminder, as if we needed one, that some of our heroes have feet of clay. Among the various ‘tricks’ listed in the article are: sulking, stirring up trouble, fighting with team mates, being a bad influence, undermining the manager and using the media to promote your personal agenda. There have been so many stories of petulant and greedy footballers that, as I read the piece, I found myself putting names against each of these ‘tricks’.
By far the most interesting remarks occur when Savage speaks about ‘not trying’. It is, perhaps, the one time that you feel that he is not being entirely honest. Here’s what he says:

'It can be hard to do, but one sure way of losing the manager's backing is by not giving 100% in a match. I say it's hard to do because you're not just letting yourself down, you are letting your team-mates, fans and family down. I only did it once and I'm not proud of my actions, but it felt like it was the only avenue left open to me. That was the point at which the manager knew he had lost me and there was nothing he could do to keep me'.

His claim that there was only occasion in his career when he didn’t try has the same kind of hollow ring as someone saying that ‘I only ate one of your chocolates’ or ‘I only visited one pornographic site’ or ‘I only exaggerated one expenses claim.’ And sadly, Robbie Savage is by no means unique. If he is owning up to this stuff, we know for certain that many other footballers will have done the same things, in spades. That’s quite a concept to grasp, that professional players, often on huge salaries, might not be trying when they cross that white line.

Anyone who forks out more than they can sensibly afford on top flight football should weigh up the investment made against the enjoyment gained, offset now by the knowledge that not everyone on the field of play will necessarily be playing the game as we, the audience, think it should be played. But when we suspect, or believe, that not all of the competitors are doing their best, a knife is driven into the heart of competitive sport.

Savage has done us a favour by shining a torchlight into football’s squalid basement. It’s a dank and dismal place full of horrible creepy crawlies, grubbing around in a frenzy of greed, grievance, megalomania, petulance and a bit more greed.

Welcome to the new season.

Keep on rocking in the free market

Enchanted by an image of itself which is decades out of date, rock and pop music continues to strike a rebellious pose, in denial of the Faustian pact its dreary narcissism has allowed it to make in order to accommodate the vagaries of advertising and fashion. Where once it might have been informed by genuinely counter-cultural impulses, rock and pop’s sheer ubiquity makes it ludicrous to argue that it is, in any meaningful sense, ‘anti-establishment’. 

Yet in spite of enjoying the riches generated by its cosy niche within the capitalist machine, the rock aristocracy, ostensibly at least, has long held an overwhelmingly leftist-liberal ‘stick-it-to-the-man’ worldview, with very few willing to deviate from the stifling orthodoxies of the party line.  

It was easy (and profitable) for John Lennon to ‘imagine no possessions’; not only would he never have to worry about actually having no possessions, he knew that the sentiments expressed in that anodyne lyric would strike a chord with an audience primed to accept easy answers to complex problems. The notion that all we have to do is to ‘imagine’ a better world in order to make it happen is, at best, a tad naïve; at worst, it is a fatuous piety. But Lennon, after all, was only writing a song; it’s hardly a big deal that most rock and pop lyrics are about as profound as the kind of sentiments normally expressed on cheap greeting cards.          

The actual business of rock can be more problematic. Take Radiohead, for example. At the turn of the century, they announced that they would not be ‘promoting’ their new album -Kid A- in the sense that other big acts ‘promoted’ their work, but would instead be running a low-level campaign aimed to ‘dispel the hype’ about the new record.   

No advance copies of Kid A were circulated, but the album was showcased under strictly controlled conditions for critics and at special listening parties for selected fans. Yes, it was played in full on MTV, but apart from that (and all the clips on the internet and the articles in magazines), there was hardly any promotion; in fact, I remember seeing lots of Kid A posters in town telling me that Radiohead wouldn’t be promoting the album. In spite of their best efforts, the hype was not dispelled and the album duly shot to the top of the charts. In the summer of 2000, the band toured Europe in a custom-built tent that was smugly declared to feature no corporate logos. Having enjoyed the album (released through an obscure little cottage-run label called Parlophone-EMI) the fans could go along to the concerts, safe in the knowledge that they had not succumbed to any horrid multi-national business practices.  Lots of folk enjoyed those gigs, but some will have noted that capitalism failed to collapse in the face of Radiohead’s disdain.

Student angst is one thing, but perhaps a more egregious example of rock’s apparent hypocrisy was provided by U2. Their spokesperson Bono is fond of preaching about the crippling debt of African countries and about the developed world’s abject dereliction of moral duties, yet in 2006 his band decided to move its publishing operation from Ireland to the Netherlands in order to exploit a more lenient approach to taxing sensitive artistic types.  This in spite of the fact that Ireland’s tax regime was generally perceived to be quite favourable to artists. 

With an accumulated net worth said to be well in excess of €800m, U2 had plenty of motives to avoid paying tax, but it’s not the avoidance that grates. After all, how many people and how many businesses on the planet would volunteer to pay more tax than they have to? Their tax avoidance was merely sound business sense; what makes them deserving of opprobrium is their insouciant ability to preach one thing and practice another. U2 wanted to pay less tax into the very system that they argued should have been doing more to support poorer countries. In other words, they wanted support for African countries to increase, but just not on their dime. 

With the music business providing the perfect illustration of capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’, it seems rather odd that we’d struggle to find many examples of rock artists being brave enough to kick against the prevailing intellectual orthodoxy to actually make the case for free-market capitalism. Enter stage left (or should that be stage right?) Jean-Jacques Burnel, bass player with The Stranglers. In 1979, JJ released a solo album called ‘Euroman Cometh’. It appeared to present an argument -in as much as a rock album can present an argument for anything- for a federal United States of Europe. JJ was all kinds of wrong about that, but the single from the album did strike an unusually libertarian, pro-market note.   

‘Freddie Laker – Concorde and Eurobus’  managed to get a dig at the protectionist policies of the United States (who fought long and hard to stop the Concorde landing on their shores), but was also a celebration of the work of Freddie Laker, one of the first airline owners to adopt the ‘no-frills’ business model. Up until the mid-seventies, transatlantic air travel had been mainly the preserve of folk with a higher-than-average disposable income.  The airline industry -heavily unionised and shackled by outdated protective practices- would have kept its iron grip on transatlantic travel for decades without Laker’s determination to challenge the vested interests of the established companies. After years of legal battles (which included having his licence revoked by the Labour government in 1975) Laker finally saw his Skytrain take to the air for the first time in September 1977. It flew from London to New York, charging a fare that was about one third of the price at that time charged for a transatlantic flight by the established airlines. 

‘Freddie Laker - Concorde and Eurobus’ was released in April 1979. Sadly, it created barely a ripple in the nether regions of the pop charts, but remains, nonetheless, a bracing little slice of abrasive pop. JJ wasn’t much of a singer and you had the feeling that he was only getting to do a solo album because the record company wanted to appease the bassist in The Stranglers, who were –at that time- a very successful new wave act. 

This video captured something of the anarchic joie de vivre of the song. The use of the vocoder brought a certain ominous energy, a hint of dystopian menace. In 1979, a vocal like that sounded like it came from the future, from a strange and exciting world in which some of our key assumptions (about nationhood, about business, about art) might have been broken down. We may even have imagined that the act of singing in a band might one day be the preserve of industrially-manufactured art robots. 

So hats off to Jean-Jacques. He set his sail against the prevailing wind and made his personal statement, cocking a snook at the received orthodoxies of his peers.  

Now doesn’t that represent the authentic spirit of rock and roll?

Still fighting an old war

Last week the Sunday Herald published an article in which the Scottish Catholic Church’s Director of Communications Peter Kearney claimed that Scotland is “a hostile environment” for Catholics. Reading it, one might easily have deduced that the piece had just been dug up, having been written and then sealed in a time capsule sometime around 1954.

Starting with his conclusion and then knocking the ‘evidence’ into a shape that conveniently suited his theory, he asserted that Scotland “has an issue with anti-Catholicism”. On one level, this can be viewed merely as an amusing snapshot of an anachronistic mindset. Rather like one of those old Japanese soldiers stranded in the jungle and still believing that World War 2 was in full swing, Mr Kearney seems to have been frozen in time. In that sense, we might be tempted to have some sympathy for the old warrior, still fighting ancient battles, his besieged psyche still sensing persecution at every turn. There is, however, an altogether less palatable aspect to his outrageous assertions and his egregious talk of ‘apologists’ and ‘deniers’.

In a country where asylum seekers face actual discrimination and where only two out of 129 MSPs are from ethnic minority backgrounds, Mr Kearney’s risible claims to victimhood on behalf of Scotland’s Catholics is in extremely poor taste.
One simply can’t have the power and influence that Scotland’s Catholics have earned over the last fifty years and yet continue to claim ‘underdog’ status. We can laugh at the absurdity of Mr Kearney’s position, but it represents an affront to those in our country who genuinely are without power, status or influence, those who truly are disenfranchised. He really ought to be ashamed.

How not to not watch cricket

When I was at Headingley last year for the test match with South Africa, I blogged about a load of young men dressed up as Jimmy Saville, doing the conga around the stadium to raise money for charity. I was there again this weekend for the match with New Zealand and somehow –I don’t know, call it a weird kind of intuition- I had the feeling that those events were unlikely to be repeated. But don’t worry, cricket fans; there was still plenty of fancy dress on display, with my vote for the 'most amusing /least annoying' group going to a quite sober phalanx of Mister Bean lookalikes.

Having seen the New Zealanders dismissed for 174 in their first innings, most spectators were disappointed by Alistair Cook’s decision not to ask his shell-shocked opponents to bat again on Sunday afternoon. Predictably, a dullish passage of play ensued and some of the crowd seemed to lose focus on the cricket. As the English batsmen set to work on increasing their lead from the merely huge to the positively gargantuan, various pockets in the rowdy Western Terrace started to amuse themselves by passing empty plastic beer glasses around the ground, an activity which -for reasons mostly to do with beer consumption- has become popular at some matches. The object of the exercise is to get as many glasses as possible into one long ‘snake’ before gravity intervenes. At one point, there must have been several hundred tumblers in the ‘snake’ as it made its way from one end of the terrace to the other, accompanied by the chant: Feed the snake and it will grow. It was like an improvised version of ‘It’s a Knockout’, lacking only a bit of Euro-glamour, a complicated scoring system and perhaps Stuart Hall providing one of his famous guffawing commentaries. Although on second thoughts, perhaps we could live without the commentary.

Excessive consumption of beer can lead a person to believe many foolish things. It might, for instance, make them believe that they are quite funny and that their friends are even funnier. It might also make them forget the fact that they have paid good money to watch some highly-trained international sportsmen do their stuff, leading them to concentrate instead on watching some highly untrained beer-fuelled spectators collecting empty plastic glasses and passing them around the crowd until –guess what?- those glasses eventually fall and they have to start all over again. As the test match trundled along, many folk in the Western Terrace were focused, mobile phones in hand, on the unfolding drama of the tumbling tumblers. The cricket, at that point, may have been dull, but I had the feeling that the beer-people would have been concentrating on their beer-snake no matter what was going on out in the middle. In their defence, at least those folk were having some kind of authentic experience; they were living in their moment and that moment was all about ignoring the cricket to take sozzled delight at the attempted transportation of some empty plastic glasses around the crowd, all the while shouting: Feed the snake and it will grow.

Some folk however, had not only paid money to not watch the cricket, they were now not experiencing the beer-snake game because they were busy filming it on their mobile phones. Consequently, they were now two steps removed from the thing that they had paid money to watch. I tried to keep an eye on the cricket, but found myself distracted not only by the beer-people passing those tumblers around, but by the phone-people not watching the cricket, not passing the tumblers, not quite having that authentic, beer-fuelled experience. I was, in effect, watching other people watching other people not watching the cricket.

On some weird kind of meta-level, I think I might have been having quite a good time.

Song of the Week: 'Useless Love'

This was the first track on the 'Almost half-undressed' album. The opening line is: “If you don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know what you’re missing”. Yes, being in love can suck, but this song delights in a little misery as it talks up the pain and heartache of it all.  

Musically, the trick here was to try and make it all sound easy and relaxed in order to evoke a certain heady and wistful feeling; we ended up with quite a delicate arrangement, as befits the subject matter. Stuart MacLeod does some rather fine bottleneck work amid the lush textures, while the strings -for those interested in that sort of thing- are actually sampled vocals. Once we’d finished the recording, this track just seemed like the natural choice to open the album. Wallowing in the sweet pain of infatuation, it floats dreamily along, sounding like a slightly tipsy Beautiful South trying to impersonate XTC. 

Useless Love