Bon and Off

Two Sides to Every Glory: AC/DC: The Complete Biography, Paul Stenning (Chrome Dreams 2005)

Like AC/DC’s music, this bigraphy is down-to-earth and easy to appreciate. Unlike AC/DC’s music, it doesn’t take a turn for the worse part-way through. That’s because the author stays the same. In AC/DC, one of the authors changed: the lead singer and lyricist Bon Scott died and Brian Johnson replaced him.

That’s when AC/DC took a turn for the worse. Much worse. In the past year, I began listening to AC/DC properly again – that is, listening to full albums. Indeed, full albums one-after-another. But only the ones with Bon on. He was the soul of AC/DC, mixing macho with melancholy. And if the macho was tongue-in-cheek, the melancholy was real. That’s why I no longer regret his early death: as I explained in a review of Highway to Hell: The Life and Times of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott (2006), I think he’d had enough and wanted to go.

AC/DC were on the verge of really big success when he died, but that was probably another reason for him to drink so recklessly. Two Sides to Every Glory devotes a full chapter to the night-and-aftermath of his passing, but doesn’t really deliver what the back cover promises: “revelations never previously published.” Yes, the full truth will probably never be known, but nothing sinister seems to have gone on and the main story won’t change. One night Bon Scott drank too much, pushed his body too far, and died in his sleep.

AC/DC effectively died with him: with Bon, the light was on. Without him, it was off. Angus and Malcolm Young carried on writing catchy music, but Brian Johnson turned the band into what it had always claimed not to be: heavy metal. Crude and witless heavy metal. There’s no melancholy in songs like “Shake the Foundations” and “What Do You Do for Money, Honey?” There’s a lot of macho, though, and it isn’t tongue-in-cheek. I wondered whether I’d be able to carry on reading into the Brian-Johnson era. I was. The book was still easy and enjoyable to read, and it was still finding good quotes from Angus. Early on, he described AC/DC like this: “Five dwarves that make a big racket.” He also said: “Bon’s always been of no fixed abode and I’m in the flat above.”

That’s a clever line. So, in a different way, is this from well into the Brian-Johnson era: “I am sick to death of people saying that we’ve made 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.” Here’s another one: “I’m not going bald: my head’s just getting higher.” But, alas, none of that clever humor was being matched in AC/DC’s lyrics by then. Bon could both write and deliver subtle lyrics, creating complete stories in single songs. Johnson stamped out the subtlety and the stories. But if he wrecked AC/DC as a band, he didn’t stop their story being interesting, so I read on to the end. For one thing, the AC/DC story is also, in part, the story of popular music and their reaction to what is taking place around them. Or rather, their lack of reaction. This isn’t a clever or amusing quote from the band-breaker himself, but it does explain the appeal of AC/DC: “Our music doesn’t go out of fashion because it isn’t about fashion. I hear about all these different kinds of music: grunge, hardcore, death metal. And all it is is rock’n’roll.”

AC/DC have always captured the energy and excitement of rock’n’roll. Early on, with Bon, they combined those things with cleverness and charisma. Later, with Brian, they said balls to all that. And with Bon, energy, excitement and macho posturing weren’t the be-and-end-all of their music. “Ride On” isn’t a raucous rocker. It’s about a drifter who’s booked himself a permanent stay at the Heartbreak Hotel. Scott’s delivery is understated but evocative: he sings the drifter into life. By doing that, he foreshadowed his own death. And with it, the death of AC/DC. But they picked up most of their fans post mortem and most of this book is about the Brian-Johnson era.

How could it not be? They’ve been going for nearly fifty years and Scott was with them only for the first ten. This book was first published in 2005, but I won’t be hunting down any updated editions. This is all the detail I want. And some I didn’t want but found interesting anyway, like the detailed appendixes on everything from AC/DC promo material – “SPRAY CAN AND PLASTIC FLY … made to promote the Fly on the Wall album” – to “AC/DC songs recorded or performed by other artists,” from Metallica and Henry Rollins to Tiny Tim and Céline Dion by way of “obscure industrialists” Birmingham6. Plus, there’s an index and a comprehensive discography of both official albums and bootlegs. This is a good book about what was once a very good band.

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Manchester’s Mozzerabilist Messiah

Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, Gavin Hopps (Continuum Books 2012)

In a way I was an ideal reader for this book, because I was impressed by it despite myself. Gavin Hopps is described on the back cover as “the Research Council’s UK Academic Fellow in the School of Divinity at St. Mary’s College, the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.” He takes people like Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari and Žižek seriously. He uses words like “focalization” and “performative” and phrases like “the gendered subject” and “etceterizing gestures”. I thought his book would be a particularly ugly example of breaking a butterfly on the wheel.

I was wrong. I have to agree with something else on the back cover: the claim that this book is “at once erudite and accessible”. It’s highly erudite and despite the occasional intrusion of po-mo jargon it’s highly readable too. Beyond that, it does Morrissey a very great service. It proves that he is much more than a butterfly. Yes, there is shimmering beauty and tantalizing elusiveness in his work, but there’s profundity and intelligence too. And even muscularity. To adapt one of his own lyrics: the more you dismiss him, the larger he looms.

And Hopps is well-equipped to discuss all sides of his work, because he knows a lot about music, not just about literature and popular culture. When he’s discussing the chordal structure of Johnny Marr’s guitar-playing, he can drop asides like this: “The nineteenth-century musicologist Karl Meyrberger famously described the ‘Tristran chord’ – the radically ambiguous combination of F-B-D# and G# with which Tristran und Isolde begins – as a ‘Zwitterakkord’, that is, an ‘androgynous’ or ‘bisexual’ chord (see Nattiez, Music and Discourse, pp. 219-29).” (ch. 1, “Celibacy, Abstinence and Rock ’n’ Roll”, note 77, pg. 32)

But Hopps wears his learning lightly: he isn’t showing off, he’s trying to analyse Morrissey and the Smiths with the seriousness that he thinks they deserve. He doesn’t fall into the trap that he identifies in “Mark Simpson’s Saint Morrissey – which is a book about Mark Simpson that occasionally digresses to say something about Morrissey” (ch. 1, note 19, pg. 17). If you’re a fan of Morrissey and the Smiths, this book will enrich your understanding and enhance your enjoyment, sending you back to the music with new and more sensitive ears.

And unless you’re very well-read, it will introduce you to some new authors and new ideas: “The phrase Sprachskepsis or Sprachkritik refers to a radical loss of faith in language, which results in a sense of existential estrangement, the celebrated account of which is Hugo von Hoffmanstahl’s The Letter of Lord Chandos” (ch. 3, “The Art of Coyness”, note 74, pg. 163). Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin and John Betjeman won’t be new to many readers, but Hopps does a good job of explaining how Morrissey has incorporated their work into his own. Morrissey is a magpie as well as a maker. But there’s a curious omission in Hopps’ study of his influences and predecessors: A.E. Housman, who offers even more similarities than any of those three. Wilde might be Morrissey’s greatest hero, but his art was much more elaborate, artificial and upper-class than Morrissey’s or Housman’s.

Like Morrissey, Housman wrote lyrics about lads and laddish crimes, not mannered prose about rich decadents and London clubs. So why is Housman not discussed in this book? I don’t know. So much of what Hopps says about Morrissey applies to Housman too: the elusiveness, the irony, the sadness, shyness and feeling of being “a foreigner on the earth”. Housman has an entry in Simon Goddard’s Mozipedia: The Encyclopedia of Morrissey and the Smiths (2010) and although that’s not in the bibliography here, I assume Hopps has read it. Not that he needed to: Housman would be an obvious forerunner of Morrissey even if Morrissey had never been influenced by him or referred to him.

And Hopps could also have learnt from Housman how to wear learning even more lightly, because Housman was a highly learned man who wrote simple, clear prose with vigour and insight. Fortunately, the worst prose here is in the notes, as in this quotation from Matthew Bannister’s White Noise, White Boys: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Pop (2006):

New Pop discourses were mainly concerned to demonstrate how postmodernism, poststructuralism and postfeminism as manifested in MTV, Madonna, Prince and digital sampling celebrated a shiny new androgynous semiotic wonderland, where continuous self-invention through artifice and intertextual pastiche eased sexual differences, problematized authorship and created polysemic and polysexual possibilities. (note 6, pg. 14, ch. 1)

Hopps only gestures towards writing as bad as that. He doesn’t make the jaw-dropping connections that Dr Miriam B. Stimbers makes in Can the Cannibal?: Aspects of Angst, Abjection and Anthropophagy in the Music of Suzi Quatro (2004), but I assume that Morrissey has been flattered to have someone as intelligent and erudite discussing his work. Not all erudition is valuable, of course, but if you’re a fan of Morrissey and the Smiths, you should try this book and see if you agree that Hopps rocks. He has a lot to say and says it well as he explores every facet of Morrissey’s art, from falsetto and flowers to melancholy and melisma, from no-saying and nonbelonging to eccentricity and embarrassment.

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Elsewhere other-posted:

• Musings on Music

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Caveat Lector

Will This Do? The First Fifty Years of Auberon Waugh, Auberon Waugh (Century 1991)

If the Holocaust continues to increase its hold on the hearts and minds of all right-thinking folk, it seems quite possible that Auberon Waugh’s body will one day be dug up and put on trial for the disrespect shown by its former occupant, before being ritually burnt and scattered to the four winds.

Unless, that is, other professional victims get their hands on it first. AW told jokes about the most inappropriate subjects, from the “three million years of persecution” suffered by the Jews to the graves of still-born West Indian infants, and remarked of himself that his “own small gift” was for “making the comment, at any given time, which people least wish to hear” (pg. 215). Contemplating his use of this gift and “all the people I have insulted”, he later admits to being “mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist” (229).

But it is the august author of his existence who will concern more readers, and certainly no aficionado of Evelyn Waugh can afford to neglect the autobiography of his eldest son. Waugh père put on a performance for the world and even for his friends, and this book is rather like seeing behind the scenes at a play. Readers will see EW from the wings, as it were, though they should always remember that AW inherited his father’s love of fantasy as well as much of his literary talent. Of one episode from his military service AW remarks: “I have told the story so often now that I honestly can’t remember whether it started life as a lie” (105).

This may also apply to the infamous “three bananas” devoured with sugar and “almost unprocurable” cream by his father under the “anguished eyes” of his children, to whom the fabled fruit had been sent in the depths of post-war austerity (67). The story is a dramatic way of illustrating AW’s judgement that EW’s “chief defect was his greed” and of explaining why AW “never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously.” It may be untrustworthy for that very reason.

It may also have been an act of posthumous revenge, working off some of the resentment and even dislike AW felt for his father before leaving home. In 1944, dragged away from his games to meet EW, who was home on leave, AW “would gladly have swapped him for a bosun’s whistle” (30); later, he faced the problem of living with a father who set the emotional climate of his entire household:

The dejection which was liable to seize him at any moment — sparked off by little more than a bad joke, a banal sentiment, a lower-middle-class epithet — made him awkward company at times. When he was in the grips of a major depression, or melancholy as he called it, he was unendurable. (36) … He was a small man — scarcely five foot six in his socks — and only a writer, after all, but I have seen generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail in front of him. When he laughed, everyone laughed, when he was downcast, everyone tiptoed around trying to make as little noise as possible. It was not wealth or power which created this effect, merely the force of his personality. (43)

But he did not think his father could have been “pleased by the effect he produced on other people”, and concluded that he “spent his life seeking out men and women who were not frightened of him” — and then usually getting drunk with them, “as a way out of the abominable problem of human relations” (43). Their own relations were marked by “distinct cordiality” (112) in the last five years of EW’s life: after suffering a near-fatal accident on National Service in Cyprus, AW even wrote “a maudlin, deeply embarrassing letter telling him how much I admired him” and sent it to his bank to be released “in the event of my predecease” (112).

Despite this, EW’s death “lifted a great brooding awareness not only from the house but from the whole of existence” (186). That presence played encores, however, as when AW experienced misgivings about his apostasy from Catholicism:

It is hard to believe that these kindergarten assemblies bear much relation to the ancient institution of the Church as it survived through the Renaissance. The new Mickey Mouse church … is surely not a reduction of the old religion. It has nothing to do with it, being no more than an idle diversion for the communally minded. Or so it seems to me. But whenever I have doubts, it is my father’s fury rather than Divine Retribution which I dread. (pg. 187)

These passages will reinforce the image of EW that readers bring to the book; elsewhere, AW may contradict it. It’s surprising to read how EW entertained the “Stinchcombe Silver Band” every Christmas at Piers Court and got “great roars of laughter out of them as he ribbed them about their tipsiness” (49). But AW claims that while the “common touch was certainly not something he cultivated … in rather a surprising way, when he needed it, he had it”. He then defends EW against the accusation, levelled by the real-life model for “Trimmer” of the War trilogy, that EW had been “detested by the men who served under him”. Not so: the reverse was true, according to correspondence AW received after reviewing Trimmer’s autobiography for Books and Bookmen.

The mischief-making apparent in that choice of reviewer is something else that readers may find enlightening, because Will This Do? is describing a particular British class and culture. On his National Service AW saw two Wykehamists rejected by their school-fellows after failing the War Office Selection Board. He noted “the ruthlessness of the British establishment” and the “cruelty” that “flourishes in the law and wherever public school Englishmen are given power over each other”.

AW reveals the limitation of his perspective here, perhaps, because ruthlessness and cruelty are not a monopoly of public school Englishmen, but his readers’ understanding of his father’s novels may be deepened by his descriptions of those things in action, his own amongst them.

AW also offers insights into Catholic psychology. When he reveals one of his father’s secrets, he has to cover up his role after the secret finds its way into the papers:

‘It was not I who sold you to them, although I have a theory as to who did.’ Readers will observe how, with typical Catholic casuistry, there is no actual untruth in this letter, as I had not actually sold the information to Rose, merely told it to him by way of passing the time of day. (127-8)

And he muses on what might have been had he taken a different degree:

My exhibition [scholarship examination] had been in English, but my father advised me that this was a girl’s subject, unsuited to the dignity of a male. Lord David Cecil had been rather upset when I told him this, staying at Portofino before my first Oxford term. I had forgotten he was Professor of English at Oxford. … Perhaps I should have stayed the course in English, instead of finding myself lumbered with this rubbishy PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics]. (148)

For the immediate future, however, the most significant passage in the book may be a description from AW’s National Service during the Cyprus emergency of 1958, when the island’s Greek inhabitants wanted union with Greece and its Turkish inhabitants wanted secession. A party of Greeks were “dropped on the Nicosia-Kyrenia main road” to make their way home after “questioning and document-checking”. Unfortunately, they were dropped near a village of Turks, who mistook them for a war-party:

The Turks poured out of the village and quite literally hacked them to pieces. It was a very messy business. Nine Greeks were killed and many others mutilated. Hands and fingers were all over the place and one officer wandered around, rather green in the face, holding a head and asking if anyone had seen a body which might fit it. (103-4)

EW ended his preface to Alfred Duggan’s Count Bohemond (1964), set during the Crusades, with the claim that “It is highly appropriate that this, his last work, should end with the triumph of Christian arms against the infidel.” His own son saw the conflict beginning again, as predicted by Hilaire Belloc, the “terrifying old man with a huge white beard” (16) whom AW met in extreme youth in his maternal grandmother’s house at Pixton. Will AW’s maturity prove to have fallen in the sun-lit patch between the shadows of the Second World War and serious racial and religious conflict in Europe?

If it does, EW’s shade may raise a shadowy glass in Elysium. As Britons can see from its vigorous survival in Northern Ireland, religion thrives on hatred and conflict and, Machometo adiuvante, the Church may yet throw off the leaden cope of The Second Vatican Council. Despite the despair such reforms brought to his father before his death, AW’s final, objective judgment is that “Evelyn Waugh detested the modern world but did rather well out of it” (123).

He himself, blessed with a more equable temperament and unridden by the demon of “melancholy”, could be said to have done even better but to have left a less enduring mark. Nevertheless, one of the charms of his autobiography is that it preserves some Evelynian ephemera: had they not been recorded here, history might have lost the handwritten Augustan prose instructing visitors on the vagaries of a lavatory at Piers Court and the Yardley’s Lavender Hair Tonic that EW put on his head when he changed for dinner (43).

EW writes in The Loved One (1948) of how death strips “the thick pelt of mobility and intelligence” from the body, leaving it “altogether smaller than life-size”. Will This Do? preserves a few tufts of his own pelt and although as the years pass the book will, alas, be read increasingly out of an interest in the father, not the son, AW had no illusions about his own importance in the scheme of things. It’s true that he may have laid booby-traps of fantasy and exaggeration in the stories he tells about his father, but what more appropriate rite of filial pietas could he have performed?

[A review first published in 2006.]

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