Philip Lynott at Ni-ni-nineteen - From the Vaults 2005

I wrote this in 2005, on the nineteenth anniversary of Philip Lynott's death. At the time, I was hugely, almost entirely consumed by the music of his band, Thin Lizzy, and of the work he had given us. This is what I felt and thought then.

Re-reading now, I miss the apparent simplicity of my feelings then. I've edited a little for clarity and length, but otherwise, this is as it appeared on my LJ (aw, bless) in January 2005.

We have now been thirty years without our Philo, but that's a post for another day.

~wavy timey-wimey lines~

No more. More.

I used to blog nearly every day. Nothing particularly good or interesting... that was the old days of Livejournal, after all. Lots of Harry Potter or whining, as I recall.

I haven't said much new for a while, except trying to fold the truth of Bowie's death into my reality. I keep thinking of things to blog about, but they don't seem to stick.

I think I stopped believing my thoughts have any particular use to the world. Not when our civilisation seems hell bent on destroying itself. My thoughts are as nothing to the world, not compared to some of the truly tremendous bloggers out there, the brave and smart women and men who are shining bright lights into the manifold ways in which society works to keep so many people oppressed in one way or another, and often more than one.

I, I, I... maybe I got sick of the absolute self-absorption that characterises the way I blog.

Nah, that can't be it.

Maybe I ran out of things to say. I can only declare and express my love for various dead musicians in so many ways, after all. I can only wallow in the stagnant puddle of self-pity a little while without people abandoning me entirely.

*

Fear keeps my voice still, too. Fear what our government is doing and what it means for me and the people I love. Fear that I really won't amount to much or get my dreams to come true. Fear that I will become the worst of myself after all. Fear that I will try and try and nothing will come of it.

Fear that everything that matters to me will be taken away. Fear that every nice, good, fun, happy moment must be followed by six more of unhappiness, pain, miz-uh-ree and whatever else it is that keeps me in the dark cage of my own devising.

I tried, after all. I did everything I was supposed to do. I finished my novel - and it's good - and I sent it out into the world. I got healthy at last, I rewired my brain, I did my very best.

I tried and... nothing. I did all the things I thought I was supposed to do and... nothing. More of the same. More waiting for my life to start, more moments of hollow, howling despair.

That's the petulant brat in my head who thinks she's entitled to everything just because she asked nicely and isn't a horrible human being.

That's the brain weasels talking, of course. That's the writer's block talking.

No more of that. Maybe there's still more to say about those dead musicians, maybe there's more for me to observe about the world as it crumbles... nobody else sees the world as I do, after all.

Not Ready To Shut The Book - From The Vault - 2010

I found this while trawling through old work and... well, it felt pretty relevant. It was actually written as 'homework' for a creative writing class I did some years ago. The idea was to get out of one's usual writing comfort zone (specific branches of Costa Coffee, in my case) and see how it went.

Writing Somewhere New

I am doomed to failure.

I probably know it from the moment I slouch into Barbican Library. I love libraries but I don't spend much time in them because I get too easily distracted from any purpose I might have had on entering. I am doomed, utterly doomed, to failure from the moment I walk aimlessly through the stacks and find myself in the Irish History section.

I spend an hour with a book about political cartoons of the Irish Question/Troubles/War and then resolve to find somewhere to sit with my computer so as to actually write. I avoid the London Collection for the same reason I should never have gone near Irish History, and have a narrow escape in the Arts Library when I skirt dangerously close to books about Flynn, Errol. Down the stairs to the Music Library in search of a table, I realise I am doomed, utterly doomed, to failure when behind the table I have staked out, I see a shelf of old rock music encyclopaedias.

Caught in the Death Star Tractor Beam, I check all the books for references to the usual suspects: Gallagher, William Rory. Lynott, Philip Parris. Morrison, James Douglas. The laptop resting in a bag slung over my shoulder is forgotten: it is not heavy enough. With viciously grotesque, simianised Irish faces still dancing in my short term memory, after an hour flicking through three hundred years of hatred towards me and my people, I am looking for love.

The Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopaedia of ROCK proves to be the specific tool of my downfall. It is from 1977. Opening the pages is the closest I can get to a dream I once had. In its pages, Rory and Philip live. More than that, they are at the height of their powers. Calling Card and Jailbreak are new, contemporary, popular.

A reference to Rory being the butt of cynicism and jokes surprises me. Much too much time and understanding has passed since then for this to be at all true now, and anyway, who speaks ill of the dead? Three entries later, Marvin Gaye hasn't been yet shot by his dad. On the next page, Gary Glitter has already staged the first of countless comebacks, but he's not the country's most notorious paedophile, not yet...

Jerry Garcia on page 96, most loved George Harrison on page 103, moustachioed Steve Marriott on page 112... they live. They are gorgeously alive. Then, my heart stops.

Oh dear God: page 139, where John Lennon lives. He lives. I will not write here, I know it. Not in a place where I am distracted into a world when Lennon lives.

Still, I know of a man...

I flick back to page 68... Morrison is already dead in the column inches for the Doors. He is in his first renaissance, and has only been gone for six years. It feels like nothing compared to thirty-nine. I am seduced right back into the dangerous daydream, but I have at least turned my computer on.

Pages 54-55 give Clapton far more attention than he deserves, the soulless old *cough*. He is with Patti Boyd by now. I know what pain there is in store for him, and I am sorry for it. Yet I know what a hypocritical bastard he is, and for a moment I am overcome by the 20-20 vision that being from the future provides.

On page 231, my Philo lives, but once I close the book he will be dead almost twenty-five years. Richard and Linda Thompson have already divorced, but on p 234, Ike and Tina are still going. I know what he does to her behind the velvet curtain, and I despise him.

Between the covers of The Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopaedia of ROCK, my heroes live. I will not write here. I am too lost in a dangerous daydream of the impossible, and I am not ready to shut the book… not just yet...

CW 2010.

A Grief of One's Own

I wasn't going to post again about Bowie for a while, but something I saw via Facebook caught my eye. A comment piece on the Daily (who else?) Mail Online, where the headline was basically “I find this hysteria a little over the top!” Of course this was on the Mail, because surely only the Mail would put together a special subsection of their website devoted to all things Dead Bowie, including (but not limited to): pictures of his teenage child, speculation about fertility treatment, the nature of his death, and even a slavering piece about a luxury house in the Caribbean, complete with luxurious photographs and vomitorious copy… and then have a columnist slating the reactions as over the top.

You could play Classic Bigotry Hypocrisy House Price Mail Bingo with this stuff… while the self-serving nonsense coming from the likes of Tony Blair and David Cameron deserves to be called out for what it is, it’s in an uncomfortably similar vein to some of the stuff said of the popular responses and the usual stuff that comes out every time someone famous dies about how fans “should” respond. How we “should” feel. How we’re allowed to feel.

‘Well it’s not like you knew him.’

‘Oh, well you’ve still got the music, so it’s fine.’

‘Why are you so upset about a celebrity?’

(I’m paraphrasing real people and keeping them anonymous, rather than sockpuppeting to make a point, I promise).

Some people speak from a genuine desire to provide some small shred of comfort. Others speak to pass judgement.

I teetered on the brink of it on Monday: in my anger at the media covering this like some fabulous special event, I sniped to my friend Rachel about the mass of fans gathered in Brixton, and the flowers in Heddon Street.

Then, gently prodded back to more level-headed thinking by Rachel, I remembered something which is true no matter who died or what they meant to you: nobody gets to tell anyone else how to grieve.

Let me be clear: fans don't trump family and friends and I can’t think of a time when they should. My last post specifically excluded any comment about the people who lost someone beyond the public figure. I can't imagine what it’s like for them, because every person is different and each individual grief is different, and I won’t insult them by trying.

But fans occupy an uncertain space in this. We're not the media, who have their own agenda, nor are we directly connected to the deceased (Bowie is just the most recent). But that doesn't stop us feeling as we do.

Some fans clearly wanted a communal experience and wanted to share in a space relevant (sort of) to Bowie. I couldn't imagine anything I'd like less, but as a Thin Lizzy and Doors fan, I've done community grief and didn't find any comfort. Mass celebration, on the other hand, can be magnificent. That’s my way, you have yours.

We fans have the right to our sorrow and our grief, and no contemptuous bystanders can take it away.

Look, some folks can use music as background colour. That's cool. Some folks can really like the music without any interest in or connection to the man himself. Some of us love him for providing music because it was not merely background. Bowie has been part of the fabric of our cultural landscape for more than 45 years (longer if you were in the London scene) and – more than most – practically formed the centre of an entire subculture. If you found a place of belonging in the world, found pals and lovers, all because of Bowie’s work, would you not feel something towards the man himself?

For some people, he has been a more constant and longstanding presence than wives, husbands, children, friends et cetera.

Bowie was there for us when we were scared children and lonely misfits; when we were falling in love and out of it; when we danced, when we laughed; when we cried; when we first felt stirrings of attraction and lust, because just look at that beautiful, terrible creature and listen to his voice…

We aspired to be like him; we crushed on him; we wondered what the fuck he was thinking sometimes (ask a Bowie fan about “Tonight”). Those who grew up at the same time are likely questioning their own mortality this week. Those teenagers now discovering him as part of their own ‘who am I and what the hell is this world?’ experience have had the man himself snatched away just as he started to mean something to them.

I can't personally say “Bowie saved my life!” as I can for other musicians did with their work. Yet, there have been days when I could face the world because his music buoyed me up just enough. When I could smile, because Bowie. When I found common ground with others, because Bowie. When I sat in a hairdresser getting the Thin White Duke haircut and feeling that I looked a little more like myself than I did before I went in.

Just watch Bowie interviews, especially 2001-onwards and I defy you not to be charmed, to not like him at least a little. Whether it's an act or not, maybe that doesn't matter so much. I say this while truly acknowledging the underage groupies and fascism stuff lurking in the background.

There are people jumping on the bandwagon, who simply must be seen to be rending their garments because they want to be seen to be sad, as if it confers some measure of cool… and there have been times over the last few days where I’ve almost felt like I should be taking a test to prove my credentials because of those folks…

They’re not helping matters, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the rest of us are entitled to feel like there's something missing, like a world is dimmer, sadder, whatever it is any of us feel… because this means something to us.

Being a fan gets short shrift at the best of times, especially when you’re female and it all gets seen through the mockery of fangirls and crushes and all that stuff which might be true and might not. We feel as we feel, for whatever reasons, and there is truth to that, whether reciprocated or not, whether healthy, or not.

Fandom is not simple hero worship (ask Bowie fans about Tin Machine) and it’s not the "break into their house" obsession. It's also a more two-way experience than you might think: the people on stage take a lot from us. It isn’t just some transactional thing: our response to them feeds their own needs and wants (sometimes too literally), but also to take inspiration, to meet, defy and exceed our expectations. And yeah, often they make huge amounts of money.

Without fans they would be incomplete, and the opposite is also true. Symbiosis, my friends. Maybe you don’t get it, and maybe you think we’re idiots, but there’s probably stuff you do that we think is odd or stupid… and if one more football fan ignores their tendency to go over the top while they mock our pain? Let’s return to the Hypocrisy Bingo card, kids!

We are entitled to our pain and loss and sorrow. Some of us will be okay tomorrow. Some of us won’t be. Speak to Michael Jackson fans and ask what their experience was; or Tupac/Kurt/Lennon fans, or… look, music has a really high mortality rate so there’s plenty to choose from. Try listening to us instead of mocking us for our reactions.

Try not to judge us. I don’t know if you’ve heard: David Bowie died, and our world is changed from the world we knew on Sunday.

David Bowie Is... gone

I've been intending to move over to blog here for literally years and I started moving some of the less-crap posts from the old days...

Well if I'm going to move platforms, it might as well be today, with this. You can find the old blog at apolla.livejournal.com.

David Bowie Is...

From the Vaults - Ava, Miss Gardner

This was originally posted on the Obsolete Blog That Is Obsolete on 12 July 2004...

I'd put money on nobody else giving a flying fuck about this, but it needs to be said

OK, so I'm off to see Grandad tomorrow to fit a new belt on his record player - it's so old the rubber perished and got loose so I bought him another one. I thought to myself that I should go to sleep nice and early. However, there was a Paul Newman film on TV: The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean which I decided to tape. Set up the video and all... waited until it started just to be sure... and then found out that Ava Gardner was in it as Lily Langtry.

So I kept watching to see what it was about - I knew it was a sort of comedy western, and you know, John Huston is one of the best directors to ever pick up a viewfinder....