Being there then

Eddie Robson kindly bought me Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, a history of the Beatles song by song. This was after he'd seen what I got the Dr for Christmas. Eddie's also blogging about the Fabs and is much wiser on these things than me. I've always struggled to write about music.

But MacDonald quickly explains sort of why.

“[Some, mostly US critics] expect lyrics to make a certain sense and, if not to carry significance or responsibility, then at least to have the decency to be authentically rooted in their appropriate sub-cultural contexts. The Beatles, though, like so much English pop/rock, are too given to artifice and effect to be sociologically grounded in this way. Lennon and McCartney moved from thinking hardly at all about words to treating them as collages scraps to be pasted onto their music much as Picasso placed newspaper cuttings into his paintings.”

Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, p. xxiv.

That's it exactly! I always felt literal interpretation of lyrics missed the point. Music isn't, or isn't necessarily, a poem or thought set to a tune. It can be the other way round – as the Beatles seems to do it, the name of the haunting Yesterday for a long time merely “Scrambled Egg”.

I also don't have the technical knowledge to understand the detailing of chord changes and keys, which MacDonald furnishes in some detail. Instead, my critical faculties shut down to an instinctive level: it's not what a song has to say but whether it pushes my buttons, making me want to dance or snog or even sit along, gazing at the sky. It's tied up in personal memories or experience – a time or place or person is attached to certain songs. It's not what the song means in itself but what it means to me.

So it's a bit of a surprise to find this book so engrossing as it searches for context and meaning in every one of the 188 Beatles recordings. We hear what the Beatles were doing or listening to at the time or thought of the songs afterwards, or what other people said or did. It's also good at explaining what marked the Beatles out as different – a good band who wrote their own very good music, and for years and years. As MacDonald says, only David Bowie has been able to so successfully reinvent himself and keep up with the times.

There's fascinating detail on the emergent drug culture of the Sixties, of the differences between the pop scene in the UK and US, and of the both competitive and supportive creative rivalries between the Beatles themselves and with other bands. It's an impressive and rich bit of modern history, the Beatles embracing so many modish styles and influences that the book covers a great wealth of ground.

MacDonald is good on the naivety and also the honest intentions behind hippy love, but is also good at puncturing the rose-tinted dream with the reality. At the Roundhouse, for example, Jimi Hendrix had his guitar stolen and gangsters on the door demanded protection money. I was also surprised by revelations – to me anyway – about the Beatles retreat at Rishikesh: it wasn't such the paradise of love that has sometimes been made out.

MacDonald tells the story song by song in order of recording – or at least, the first day of recording as some songs took several days to record, sometimes months apart while others are finished in between. There's overlap and re-recording of the same songs, and – famously – Let It Be was released after Abbey Road though (mostly) recorded first. MacDonald sums up each album as all its tracks are recorded, but I felt a little that he was imposing his own brackets on the work.

He is at his best when invisible, detailing facts or conflicting testimony, letting the Beatles and those around them speak for themselves. But I tired of hearing his own opinions, waspishly noting the worthy tracks and also the failures. I don't need him to tell me which songs to like. Indeed, part of the joy of the book is to hear the songs afresh with the added context. Constant reappraisal and finding new things to appreciate is the good bit of being a fan.

(Having listened to a lot of Beatles stuff over the last few months, the “new” tracks Free As A Bird and Real Love compare – I think – pretty well with most of the previous stuff. I know a few chums would consider this heresy.)

That imposition includes the structure of the book – and so of the Beatles' career. There are four chapters: “Going Up” is 140 pages from 1957 to the end of Rubber Soul (1965); “The Top” is 68 pages on Revolver and Sergeant Pepper; “Coming Down” is 118 pages to the recording of I, Me, Mine in early 1970; the coda covers the post-split bitterness, recriminations and Anthology.

As a result, there's a sourness about the last few and post-split years. MacDonald has many explanations for what happened: the Fabs' age, the money, the times, that they'd had a good innings anyway. And he also explains the context of the Beatles' return to favour in the pop scene in the late 80s, and their influence on so many modern bands. But his version sees the Beatles completing Sergeant Pepper and then tumbling from grace. It's far more remarkable, surely, that they sustained such an incredible output for so long, and were still producing amazing music even when they weren't speaking to each other.

The Beatles were, evidently, an exceptionally talented and influential group. This book rightly celebrates and explores that amazing success. But it also feels a little glass half-empty, disappointed and hurt, even so many years later, that all things must pass.

So he was Captain Birdseye all the time!

Sir Arthur C Clarke, who died yesterday, is probably best remembered for getting his physics right. This is the bloke who, for a bit of a lark, worked out the height at which something in orbit above the Earth would match the planet’s speed of rotation. He did this long before there were such things as satellites, where being in what’s essentially a fixed position over the Earth is quite useful. And, rather sweetly, he worked it out as a fun mental exercise in a sci-fi magazine.

His Space Odyssey stories (2001; 2010; 2061; 3001) are also grounded in the latest discoveries from NASA’s missions into the void, accurately spelling out the time spent travelling between planets and describing the correct mineral constitution of moons. Many of the obituaries have stressed the link between his stories and his contributions to proper, real science.

Thing is, I’ve always preferred science-fiction to be more about the fiction. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that the science isn’t important (or just that I’m not very good at it). But sci-fi is period drama, only not set in the past. The props and costumes conjure an atmosphere and lend flavour to the story but it’s the story that’s got to be the focus.

Think about the period drama on telly. It doesn’t wholly matter if your stiff-collared actors don’t shout into their candlestick telephones, or if a set designer’s decided that those phones look nicer without thick cabling like an elephant’s trunk. You don’t actively try to get it wrong and you should do your research. But period drama can easily get bogged down in the tedious detail of etiquette and sci-fi is at its most ponderous when dumping information about how its world works. Much better to get back to the gun-shoots and explosions.

Sir Arthur’s stories are often actually very good at doing just that. Like the very best writers, you don’t always notice the research that’s gone in to the engaging story. His early novel, Childhood’s End, is better known amongst my peers by two of its best rip-offs – Quatermass and the Pit and Doctor Who and the Daemons. It takes the central conceit of Joseph Campbell’s rather sloppy The Hero With 1,000 Faces – that all mankind’s religions and cultures are off-shoots of the same basic stories – and adds a twist – because early man was mentored by an alien.

The book pre-empts a lot of sci-fi of the 60s and 70s (and songs by Pink Floyd and Bowie) with it’s dawning of a new age for the teenagers which the old folk cannot dig. But its real joy is what theorists of sci-fi have sometimes called the “conceptual breakthrough”. This is the jaw-dropping, gosh-wow bit in good sci-fi where the author has spun the whole story on a massive change in your perspective. Oh blimey, you realise, our 10,000 year-old ideologies are all based on a spaceman with horns.

It leaves the reader open-mouthed like the dupe at the end of an episode of TV’s Mission: Impossible, all the sound effects and scenery revealed as a clever conjuring trick. It’s those big-concept surprises that make sci-fi so addictive.

(There’s a similar phrase from Iain M Banks’ Excession which is not entirely the same thing. An “outside context problem” – like what the Spanish were to the Mayas with their exploding fire sticks – is more total bafflement. A conceptual breakthrough is, even if just to the reader, a momentous revelation.)

Some more examples of the best conceptual breakthroughs. There’s one at the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston finds a statue on a beach. There’s one at the end of Soylent Green when Charlton Heston finds out what the special foodstuff means to people. You can see the pattern – most top sci-fi hinges on one brilliant reveal.

The four in 2001: A Space Odyssey make up the structure of the film. An alien artefact teaches the apes; an alien artefact awaits us on the Moon; Dave’s beaten HAL and goes to meet the alien artefact; and, er, something about a huge space-baby. Everything else hangs off those freaky moments. It’s not just the physics that have been got right, either; the effects are amazing; the scale constantly enormous with tiny humans in the foreground. And, quite brilliantly, the humans twitter on about nothing in particular, minuscule and mundane. It is only the observing us that finds it wondrous.

But a really good example of the importance of gosh-wow over the numbers is a short story which, annoyingly, Neil Gaiman also linked to in his Clarke post. Unlike Neil, I didn’t meet Sir Arthur but I did once have his telephone number – and that was on a copy of The Nine Billion Names of God.

Spoilers follow so click the link, read the story and come back here after for my paltry thoughts.

Done that?

Right.

How’s that for a gosh-wow ending? Can’t you see Jim Phelps just escaping in his van, his props and costumes abandoned at your feet? And yet, when I first read it, a learned chum who was much more into sci-fi for the physics had a Different View.

For him, the great brilliance of the lack of fuss in that closing line was that that’s not how physics works. The stars are millions of billions of light years away – from us and from each other. It’s not just that you shout “Go!” and they wink off one by one. They’ll have been winking off for millions of years, all in a fiendishly complex and intricate order and just so that – to a computer programmer watching from the Earth – they seem to be extinguishing one by one.

The Clever Thing, said this learned colleague, was that the stars had been going out for millions of years, it just so happened that the time taken by the light of those destructions to register on Earth all rather neatly coincided – the implication being that it is not coincidence. So the programmer, his machine and its result have all been long-expected. This, he said, proved a mechanical universe operating like clockwork; the man-made computer just a machine in a machine. He didn’t agree with my gosh-wow reading at all, that the computer was rendered nothing to the magic truth of God. And we argued long into the night.

I’m not sure what this not-entirely-interesting anecdote might mean. But I’m rather sad I missed the chance to ever share it with Sir Arthur.

Kitsch 'n' sink

Hello again. It's been a while, hasn't it? I can tell by the length of your hair.

I am almost entirely out the other side of a very busy period, and 20 pages of script from my HOLIDAY. Having not been real for months and months, I'm now getting rather excited. I've not been south of the equator before (or, I think, any further down the planet than Egypt), so 10 nights in Australia and three in Johannesburg is really An Adventure. Connections depending, I shall keep you up to date with my movements.

I am bashing out these words on my funky new MSI PR210 notebook, which I bought specially for the trip. It's a sleek and disturbingly unheavy lovely, though I find I keep missing occasional keys. The compromise was between something small and light for trekking about, but with a keyboard that still fitted my fingers.

After much fangling about, I've also got the wireless wossnames to work. (The technique seems to be to restart your computer continually for two hours until all the wossnames have loaded.) And I'd thought the laptop would latch on to the wireless thing itself, but it needs drivers and a ZyXEL router thing that looks like a USB memory stick.

This means I'm now sat in our rooftop kitchen, the unexpected sunshine rather nice on my back. As well as what remains of the as-yet-unannounced script, I've also had a chance to look over the novel that I'm intending to write while I'm away. Or at least, to break the back of.

It's a thriller that's not a tie-in to anything else, and I gamble that if I mention it here, people will ask me about it. And that pressure will mean that rather than just thinking through the clever plot mechanations, I might actually get the thing done.

Along with the wireless wossname, I've also signed us up to Virgin Media, which has all been going swimmingly. The Dr and I took great delight in watching Ashes to Ashes last night via the Telly On Demand gizmo. Laughed like fool - and was terrified by the clown! What with Torchwood and that Dot episode of EastEnders last fortnight, didn't telly get all good?

We then continued the retro 80s vibe by watching the first episode of Survival. "Weird," concluded the Dr. Though she thought the scraggy black cat (that some friends of mine till insist is called Shomi) was so like our own that I must have chosen him on purpose. Honestly, no. But we do seem to have the only cat ever who really likes having his fur brushed in the wrong direction.

If Shomi is Shaggy, asked m'colleague Scott Andrews, "Does that make Sophie Aldred Velma or Daphne?"

I think Sylvester McCoy would be Velma.

My brain hurt like a warehouse

It is five years today since I left full-time employment to leap aboard the kayak of freelancing. The me then, with his hair and cappucine and basement flat in Greenwich, wasn’t entirely sure it would all work out. And the hair and basement flat really didn’t. But the kayak is still going and things are, you know, quite good.

Blimey.

The Dr, who has been successfully kayaking for a year herself, and I are celebrating tonight with fish and chips and fizz. And then booking hols to LA and Australia.

Received my copies of Snapshots this morning, which includes my story "There’s Something About Mary". It owes something to an idea I had for a Doctor Who novel, which I sent the BBC a few months short of five years ago. But it owes something more to The Iron Giant. And the pop video Mary watches, that’s Gail Ann Dorsey in Bowie’s Dead Man Walking.

I’ve also received a copy of Malcolm Hulke’s Writing for Television, having been prompted by m’colleague Peter on my post about Harry Potter 7.

“If it’s a kids’ show, and the story includes a ship sinking at sea, save the ship’s cat.”

Malcolm Hulke, Writing for Television (1982 edition), p. 243.

Travers was really a Nazi

The Dr has a thing for travelogues from yesteryear, and somewhen I managed to find her Seven Years in Tibet. It’s a battered, well-thumbed second edition from 1953, with the price 3/ pencilled on the inside back cover, and a “Boots Booklovers’ Library” sticker on the front. The sort of book that looks like it might have had as many adventures as its author.

I read a different copy about a decade ago, having had my interest piqued by Earthling. Bowie’s own Seven Years in Tibet,

“coincided with a wave of high-profile American support for the country’s plight during the mid-1990s. Major motion pictures like Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet (a 1997 dramatization of Harrer’s memoir which had no direct connection with the Bowie track) made the subject Hollywood’s cause du jour.”

Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie, p. 138.

It begins as an escape story, unusual – at least as far as I’m concerned – because it’s teller is a German POW escaping English camps in India. We’re told that “the English took a sporting view of our bold [first] attempt” to escape (p.19). I like the swagger of the Germans’ next, more successful effort on 29 April 1944. They’re made up as Indians, with shaved heads and turbans, pretending to be a work party repairing the perimeter. (The posts setting out the barbed-wire fences were prone to attack by white ants.) In these brilliant disguises they just walk out of the camp with two colleagues in bored English uniform as escort.

“We attracted no attention and only stopped once, when the sergeant-major rode by the main gate on his bicycle. Our ‘officers’ chose that moment to inspect the wire closely. After that we passed out through the gate without causing the guard to bat an eyelid. It was comforting to see them saluting smartly and obviously suspicious of nobody. Our seventh man, Sattler, who had left his hut rather late, arrived after us. His face was black and he was swinging a tarpot energetically. The sentries let him through.”

Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet (trans. Richard Graves), p.21 (my edition, not in the one linked to!).

Once over the border into Tibet, Harrer and his fellows struggle to get food, shelter or any kind of acceptance. Tibetans living near the border, he comes to understand, are not encouraged to help or trade with foreigners. There follows a vivid, Boy’s Own account of hardship. The Germans press on into the interior, with lively adventures outwitting local dignitaries who want them deported, and brigands who’ll take even their scant few possessions. We learn of the temperament of yaks and the customs of the caravans. Though there’s no capital punishment, convicted criminals can die from the brutal state ‘revenge’.

In the last third, the book becomes something else entirely. Harrer and one other, Aufschnaiter, reach the capital, Lhasa, and suddenly find themselves accepted, so long as they’re of use to the government. They stay in Lhasa for five whole years, which Harrer glosses over rather briskly (1947 passes in a flash). Their public works include a dam and a water fountain, and eventually Harrer becomes tutor to the Dalai Lama.

Kundun (as his family call him) is barely into his teens, a rather lonely but keenly intelligent boy. He’s fascinated by telescopes and the cinema, and at one point – with Harrer’s encouragement – even makes his own film:

“He had not, of course, had a huge choice of subjects. He had done a big sweeping landscape of the valley of Lhasa, which he turned much too fast. Then came a few under-lighted long-distance pictures of mounted noblemen and caravans passing through Shö. A close-up of his cook showed that he would have liked to take film portraits. The film he had shown me was absolutely his first attempt and had been made without instructions or help. When it was over he got me to announce through the microphone that the performance was over. He then opened the door leading into the theatre, told the abbots that he did not need them any more and dismissed them with a wave of his hand. It was again clear to me that here was no animated puppet, but a clear-cut individual will capable of imposing itself on others.”

Ibid., p. 251.

For something so briefly gone into, their friendship is warm and profound. By this time, there’s also an awareness of the political context, and Harrer reports on attempted coups, infighting and the growing threat from China. It’s not, it turns out, just a threat.

Oddly, we get very little on Harrer’s own background (bar his sporting achievements) and he hardly mentions the outcome of the war – which he discovers while in Tibet – or of the hardships being suffered back home. He and Aufschnaiter concede that they’ve little in the way of ties back home anyway. We get no sense of his own politics, other than the rallying cry for a free Tibet.

Mile-high film club

Marie Antoinette is a colossal exercise in missing the whole ruddy point.

It looks nice and is stylishly played, but the emphasis of the script is all in the wrong place. We watch Marie leave one sumptuous court for another. She learns posh gossip and how to excite her husband. She dances about in the gardens and goes to some very good parties. And then some yokels turn up and she’s very brave and won't run away.

Since she’s a bit of a free spirit (no, she will go to the party!), there’s a lot of punk music and typeface. This juxtaposition of the contemporary and historical would be pretty revolutionary, if we’d not seen the same thing before. It’s Casanova, it’s A Knight’s Tale, it’s Britney in the End of the World.

But it’s also pretty dim. You have to fundamentally misconstrue history to see Marie Antoinette as a punk. Rather it’s the mob who tear down her glam lifestyle – and we hardly see them at all in the film.

The film entirely fails to deal with why the mob might have grievances. The nearest it gets is to have Marie protest that she never said, “Let them eat cake!” But this is an age of public flayings and the guillotine. The general violence offended both Casanova and de Sade.

By not dealing with that – by consciously not showing it – the film is more perverse than anything those two got up to. The French court was not merely a fatuous bubble of champagne parties: in context it was clearly offensive.

Flushed Away was fun (though not helped by DWM pointing out how the lead rat looks like David Tennant). It lacks the charm of Wallace and Gromit, and that’s not merely for being set down the toilet.

It’s fast-moving and full-of-gags enough to hide a pretty ropey plot about a posh boy falling for a working class girl. Like the singing mice in “Babe”, there are singing slugs to raise a smile whenever things get a bit unfunny. And, as S. said, it’s telling how often the slugs feature. I laughed a lot, but it’s not one to watch again.

The Prestige was probably the best of the lot, about the rivalry between two Victorian stage magicians. Leads Batman and Wolverine were as manly-tough as you’d expect. Bowie had a nice turn as Tesla, and Michael Caine was as effortless as always.

Unfortunately I sussed the various elements of the ending before we were mid-way through. This may have been due to discussing The Time Travellers all weekend, which turns a few of the same tricks. (Well, it does if you can make the cognitive leap that Hugh Jackman is playing Scott Andrews).

It’s clever and deft from the start, with all kinds of nice palming of plot device. But the real trick of magic is not merely the mechanics of the con, but of managing to disguise them. The audience has to be left mystified.