Punk rock!

[imomus]

I'm relieved to have come to the end of my Creation Years re-release schedule, because I'm the kind of person who dwells more happily on the present and the future than the past. But I wanted to end with this little postscript. I friended Alan McGee on Facebook on Christmas Day, and he friended me back. Neither of us sent a message, but I think in general we have good memories of our association.

I'm not going to bother drawing the re-release program to Alan's attention -- he retired from the music industry this September, he's not on the best of terms with Sony, our contracts weren't written on paper, the albums paid for themselves long ago and are without significant commercial value anyway. What interested me was something much more general: the question of outcomes.

Alan and I are the same age, both born in the West of Scotland in 1960. We're probably distantly related -- we have the same stubborn golf ball chin, the same petulant cherry lips, a mixture of Scottish and Irish blood, and somewhat hyperactive alpha-type personalities. There's a class gap, but it's not vast -- before he started Creation Records, Alan was at British Rail, which is exactly where my Grandpa Currie worked all his life. Alan now writes music columns for The Guardian, I write design journalism for the New York Times.



But obviously there's at least one huge difference in outcomes. Alan McGee discovered Oasis and is enormously rich. This means that his Facebook page is, in a sense, a glimpse into what life might be like for me had I become an enormously successful pop star. It makes an interesting -- sometimes surprising -- contrast to the life I'm actually having.

For a start, as an enormously wealthy person I'm not spending Christmas coughing painfully in a dark Berlin flat shared with a Japanese girl and a rabbit. I'm in the Maldives, a chain of tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, staying, probably, at the Hilton, whose subaquatic restaurant you see above. I'm very glad to be here, but I'm spending more time on my beach house patio watching Fleetwood Mac and Glasvegas videos on YouTube, or Twittering updates to my Facebook page, than exploring the Buddhist and Islamic heritage of this island, or its fish, flowers and fauna. In fact, you might say that I'm treating this more as a drug high than a travel experience; a soma half-holiday.

Although my failed Berlin self looks remarkably happy in his Facebook photos, prancing around dressed as a Japanese robber or leaping for joy in front of an art museum, my successful, enormously wealthy Maldives self looks rather glum, evasive and insecure in photos. I've bought a big white mansion in Wales "only because Led Zep have one down the road". My spelling and punctuation have gone entirely to pot, which is worrying, because I'm still writing for the newspapers (but copy editors will fix that). I appear to have lost all my hair (instead of just half of it), and I keep a peculiar trilby hat on at all times, even in bed.

Photographed alongside football and music world celebrities I look awkward, paranoid, nervous. I never smile. My cellphone, keys and personal organiser are beside me at all times. There's no sign of a significant other, but that's probably because she appreciates privacy. My successful self has approximately the same number of friends as my failed self, but they're -- in general -- older, more British, more supportive, less pretty, less articulate. They seem to be doing well, but the most important thing in their life is that they know me -- a very wealthy and successful person -- and that we might, you know, hang out one day. This bores me slightly. My life is full of unfulfilled promises to meet up with people abuzz with the idea that I'll transform their lives, and make them winners.

As a restless, risk-addicted entrepreneurial type, my tycoon self isn't enjoying being retired, living off art collecting ("upcoming artists like Howard Hodgkin") and property deals. On the Maldives beach my body is incongruously white. I'm a working class Glaswegian, and it's a fucking miracle I'm here at the Hilton, but somehow that miracle, thanks to the hedonic treadmill and my own restless personality, is not quite enough to guarantee the huge happiness that the world believes belongs to the successful, and the successful alone.

Anyway, thanks, Alan, for adding me -- and thank you for giving me the chance to make these six albums. You're probably happier than you look.

I want to end with a word about Harold Pinter. The man was a colossus, both artistically and as the conscience of a West that seemed, this decade, to have abandoned its moral compass. In his plays Pinter -- the missing link between Beckett and Steptoe and Son -- hinted at "the weasel beneath the cocktail cabinet". Later, in his poetry, activism and especially his excoriating Nobel Prize talk he turned his fire on the weasels in the Cabinet Office. 2005 was a time when many were thinking these things ("I haven't heard anything about the US population saying: 'We can't do this, we are Americans,'" Pinter told The Guardian) but lacked the daring or the literary skill to say them. Pinter had both in spades.

I tutored my sister through The Homecoming to get her into drama college, and it's my favourite play of his -- an extraordinary combination of Ionesco-esque (a much clumsier word than "Pinteresque") plot audacity, the kind of Cockney music hall echoes heard in Eliot's The Wasteland, Jewish vaudeville acts, Orton, Berkoff, Freud. Pinter's poetic ear was attuned to undertones of violence and sudden switches in power. Here's a scene from the best production of The Homecoming, Peter Hall's 1973 film starring Vivien Merchant, Pinter's first wife:

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I used to listen to the box set vinyl version of this production of The Homecoming in the same listening bunker I'd play Birthday Party and PiL Records in. Nick Cave had taken the name of one of Pinter's plays for his band, John Lydon shared his taste for absurdist menace. Neither of them retained their fierceness or their fight the way Pinter did. "Punk rock!" as Alan McGee would probably say.

Comments

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

This entry's a bit brutal.

"2005 was a time when many were thinking these things but lacked the daring or the literary skill to say them. Pinter had both in spades."

Regardless of how I feel about this issue, you can't evoke Godwin's law and expect to be taken seriously. All I see in that Guardian piece is a lazy tirade of the 'Reductio ad Hitlerum' variety.



()

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Reductio ad Hitlerum was the media's reductio ad soundbitum -- you have to watch the whole Nobel address (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY2Z27Y-HJE) to get the whole argument.

[(Anonymous)]

hmm.. so this is what you mean by friendship? Can't wait for the friendship album.

cockney red

[robinsonner.livejournal.com]

I like how Channel 4 can still wheel out guys like Pinter and - on an earlier occasion - Potter when they are known to be chronically ill so we can excuse them for getting a good kick into the "weasels".

For a channel which has become hybridised with Channel 5 mentality, becoming the supposed Channel Nine while actually becoming just another cable channel, it was somewhat daring for its alternative Xmas message to the Queen to be given by the Iranian President.

I know it was just a part of his work but I admired Pinter's talking around a situation style, when two voices would prattle on inanely almost ignoring each other but somehow creating a third dialogue. Real Life.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Och, Alan, it's not un-friendly. I'm just wondering whether you're happy.

[(Anonymous)]

Unkind conjectures and bitter comparisons don't do you any favours - it's posts like these that make me wonder if you're really happy or if in fact you're gutted that you never became David Bowie...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I think it's sweet that we're all concerned about the happiness of old colleagues! It's actually very much in the Christmas Spirit, no?

I think David Bowie makes a pretty good job of being David Bowie -- I'd be rubbish at it, what with my tombstone teeth and wonky eye.

[(Anonymous)]

You know what I mean with the David Bowie comment. And this post is incredibly mean-spirited. You don't sound remotely concerned, just gloating and bitter. It makes for very uncomfortable reading, given that this is someone you consider a "friend" that you're writing about. Seriously, I suggest a rethink for the new year. You're a very talented and interesting writer but this kind of post is just ugly. Also: I'm sure you are happy - you lead a great life - but protesting too much like this suggests buried insecurities and jealousies that you'd be better off keeping to yourself.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think "incredibly mean-spirited" is way over the top. Admittedly it's been a long time, but the McGee I remember hanging out with in the 80s could absolutely have handled some teasing about how he's losing hair even faster than I am, or puts his apostrophes in the wrong place, along with words of thanks and talk of how we're essentially quite similar (restless, hyperactive) people. Being nuanced does not mean being mean.

Someone the other day said, in a comment here, "McGee seems to fuck people over". I wasn't having any of that, and said that Alan had been an honest dealer who'd given me a fair crack of the whip. His honesty came in the form of business honesty, but also in the form of the kind of honesty that doesn't hesitate to tell you when he didn't like a record, or a choice of manager, or a choice of lover you'd made. I appreciated that. The person who made me really uncomfortable at Creation was Ed Ball -- the constant positivity was positively spooky, and finally inflationary.

But I am interested in "the high-Gini question", the question of outcomes -- whether the super-rich and the poor can ever relate to each other "normally", and what that even means. We were all poor back in those days, so the question didn't arise.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Fuck Godwin's law.

After living in the U.S. for the last 8 years I've grown, to put it mildly, impatient with people who are afraid to look at the similarities between Hitler's rise to power and the neocon's power grab.

I'm a supporter of the EFF but I'm not following any "laws" made up by some internet dude.

[(Anonymous)]

I think "incredibly mean-spirited" is way over the top. Admittedly it's been a long time, but the McGee I remember hanging out with in the 80s could absolutely have handled some teasing about how he's losing hair even faster than I am, or puts his apostrophes in the wrong place, along with words of thanks and talk of how we're essentially quite similar (restless, hyperactive) people. Being nuanced does not mean being mean.

It doesn't come across as good-humoured teasing though - if that was your intention you need to think about how you phrase things.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I do have a rotten flu, a dark flat and tuppence in the bank, whereas he's in the Maldives with ten gazillion quid. C'mon! We do have a tradition in Britain of being slightly disrespectful to our overlords and celebrities. But I'm hardly being Johnny Rotten, am I?

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

i think if in the entry you'd included the character summary of mcgee as a sharp-tongued dude who gave you blunt opinions about your choices then it would've read differently, but as it read it was pretty nasty. i also think the backdrop of a facebook friending makes it an uncomfortable read (for me) because the presumed social contract for that event is "i approve sharing these details of my life with you, but i will continue to keep them out of the public google square for all to judge," and you broke that, knowingly. just one of those little slippery things you do all the time that make you an untrustworthy person. another example (may as well) was you expressly saying to me when we met in new york that you wouldn't blog the conversations we had, and then you did. of course it would (and still does) seem middling of me to bring that up, but there's just this inherent social sadism, subtle but not tender, to your nature that i don't want to ignore or abide.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh dear! This is all making me feel pretty awful now. I hope people don't think I'm indifferent to these issues -- I weigh them, costs and benefits, and take decisions. And then I worry about whether it was the right one.

I agree that there are some issues about putting things you've learned on Facebook in other arenas. McGee has unfriended me now, and I can totally understand that. As for our Meetings Monday meeting in New York, Jordan, I think I told everyone I was going to blog Meetings Monday, but there may have been a specific thing you didn't want mentioned, and perhaps I misunderstood where the boundaries of that lay. Sorry!

I think writers do risk a certain kind of treachery, because they report on inside worlds to people outside them, and there's always a division of loyalties between the people you're reporting on and the people you're reporting to. This gets complicated by the relative power of those groups to each other, your need to keep coming back to them for more information, and your own ambition or non-ambition to be an insider yourself.

I think it really is a fault of mine that sometimes my interest in ideas and in writing itself can make me insensitive to people's feelings, but I do actually get very upset when I learn I've hurt people. I'm upset now -- about McGee, about you.

[(Anonymous)]

It's possible to say such things without being mean-spirited, and even without being jealous. It's the interpretation that adds, or at least accentuates and harps upon, those emotions. However, I'd believe that you weren't being intentionally 'socially sadistic' more readily if the word 'anyway', synonymous with nonetheless, hadn't been used in the afterthought of thanks. This particular sort of error is far too often blown way out of proportion by responses, though.

RIP Pinter.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

the meetings monday blurb you wrote about me was totally fine actually. but i remember you prefacing our interaction, within a minute of us meeting, with something along the lines of "oh no, i'm not going to write about what we talk about, i'm thinking just a picture, name, and your age." seemed odd to hear, and maybe i misunderstood you, i was nervous that day, but when i read the entry the following morning, it felt like a tactic. and when i read this today, it struck a chord, and the earlier thing seemed worth mentioning. i'm not hurt, i was being overdramatic (partly in reaction to the negative energy swirling around), and i appreciate your apology and your blog. but i don't trust you.

plutonic luv

[st-ranger.livejournal.com]

I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for gazillionaires. I try, I fail. Ohwell!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think equivocation is seen as condemnation sometimes. In other words, the two meanings of "criticism" get mixed up (criticism as analysis, and criticism as blame). When Vampire Weekend sent me their album in January (http://imomus.livejournal.com/350070.html) I found some things to like about it, and some things not to like. But apparently reacting "critically" in this way wasn't seen as the appropriate response to a band who'd declared unilateral friendship, so my -- I thought -- fairly balanced account got me branded an asshole (http://stereogum.com/b-sides/momus-to-vampire-weekend-bugge-008114.html) by the band's fans. I thought I was saying "There are some good ideas here, but they all lead to things I've heard elsewhere", but the soundbite became: "Bugger off!" The band themselves, to their credit, responded much more thoughtfully, wondering what their "next level" of originality might be. I still think it was a useful conversation to have had, but I took some hits.

But I do want to say that being critical (in the non-blame way, ie equivocal and considered, praising some things, questioning others) is a much bigger thing than the jealousy it often gets mistaken for. Criticism is about caring about things-in-themselves -- more, sometimes, than the relationships between the people involved. And of course for that reason it can be risky and destructive as well as creative and constructive.

I do think it's a risk worth taking, but there's a Catch-22. If you don't have the social bonds with someone to assure them that, whatever you say, you still love them, it's likely that your criticism will be seen as blame and rejected. But if you do have those social bonds, it's hard to judge objectively, and the relationship will tend to take precedence over the criticism.

I've been thinking about this recently because I've been working with an editor on my book, and an editor is there to offer criticism. Since it's the first time I've worked with a literary editor, I've had to learn not to be touchy, snappy, defensive, possessive, or to assume that my own built-in literary editor had done the whole job already.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, that Godwin guy is a kind of Hitler, dictating whether we can or can't compare people to Hitler!

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

I just don't want to be hassled by the man.

Prank Rock

[(Anonymous)]

We are all fake. Momus and his truer self is busted again. Jealousy is an ugly head on anybody.

[(Anonymous)]

Pop-pop-pop-popocatepetl.

Re: Prank Rock

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Jealousy and bitterness are charmingly simple explanations, but strictly amateur psychology. I think we can do better: this is underachiever post-rationalisation. It goes like this:

1. What would it be like to be very wealthy?

2. Great! Much better than being poor.

3. Actually, maybe not so great. Everyone would want a piece of you, and having those houses and holidays would be a big hassle, and somewhat hollow in the end.

4. Thank god I'm just a poor post-rationalising underachiever!

There's a lot of this stuff in Christianity and Socialism, and in British people. Nietzsche and the Americans won't have any of it, of course.

Re: Prank Rock

[(Anonymous)]

It's all getting at bit am dram if you ask me. You obviously picked up some tips from your sister when you were tutoring her. Sometimes the simple explanations are the better ones. Not all success is measured in wealth. I personally hated Creation as a Label and view it as a miserable failure. How much McGee is worth is neither here nor there.

Re: Prank Rock

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps labeling criticism as jealousy is not the simple explanation, mr. Occam the Razorman, but the childish one.