ELSIE ELSIE BE MY GIRL!
Cornwall’s contribution to wider popular music isn’t exactly notorious for the right reasons, but around 2005 – 2008, it felt as though something was happening that could finally, thankfully consign Reef, acoustic surf crustery and Thirteen Senses to history.
Out of Truro College came I Say Marvin (previously Marvin & The Gayes before a lawsuit put paid to the name), a wickedly spitty post-punk group in thrall to DFA, Test Icicles and !!!, with a frontman called Sam Power and amazing call-and-response breakdowns of “I SAY MARVIN! YOU SAY GAYE! MARVIN! GAYE! MARVIN! GAYE!” As wilfully offensive teenage spunk goes, they had it down. Crammed into tiny, shitty pubs like Truro’s The Swan week after week, tearing at the walls whilst watching this band felt incredible, like we finally had a bit of flipping culture to call our own.
Elsewhere there was Rosie & The Goldbug, who are probably still angrily brandishing their black and white stripy socks and baroque sheet music in Marina’s direction. Probably my favourite local band, however, were My Elvis Blackout, fronted by Harry Pitts (with names like these, how could Harry and Sam be anything but snotty punk frontmen?), who FINALLY put their debut album on Soundcloud yesterday.
Perhaps to you it sounds a bit dated, and it’s almost certainly about five years after they should have released it (some fool conceived the Cornish Live Music Awards, making a previously ace scene competitive and bitchy, record labels came calling to the south west, chewed up some very naive bands, and left the place in tatters for a while, basically), but listening now, it still sounds like that first thrilling, rude awakening to The Fall, The Cramps and garage rock. It reeks of snakebite and sweat and crumpled, baggy roll-ups made outside daggy local pubs.
I Say Marvin and My Elvis Blackout played one amazing show at The Swan in around 2006, 2007, which I reviewed for the local paper. “Some day they’ll scrape the sweat from the ceiling and sell it for millions,” I think I wrote (the clipping’s at home in Cornwall). Obviously I was wrong, but listening to MEB’s album now feels like drinking a heady slurp of that effervescent adolescent effluvium all over again.
I read and loved All Quiet On The Orient Express at the end of last year, and having now completed The Restraint Of Beasts, it’s not unreasonable to assume that there’s a certain formula to Magnus Mills’ novels. However, it’s one in which I imagine I’ll find a great deal of pleasure for a good few more of his tomes. Both of these darkly hilarious tales see their protagonist(s) getting stuck in the bizarre rituals of rural British locations, unable to escape, and wrought through with a sense of foreboding that makes The League Of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey look like Last Of The Summer Wine’s Holmfirth. In The Restraint Of Beasts, a pair of Scottish itinerant fencers and their foreman are sent to England in the pissy wet depths of December to erect high-tensile fences for a series of increasingly overbearing clients. They hammer in posts all day, come back to the damp caravan where the three of them sleep amid unwashed dishes and festering clothing, then spend the night in the pub, looking at women and finding their popularity waxing and waning depending on which locals they’ve been dealing with. Their lifestyle is unrelentingly bleak, but Mills’ sense of timing and dialogue induces much mirth, and never places any judgement on his characters for their lack of ambition, non-existent hygiene, or the far darker situations in which they accidentally find themselves…
I wouldn’t normally pick up a Hollywood film star’s autobiography, but despite appearing in one of the most feted films of all time as the titular Annie Hall, Diane Keaton’s isn’t your average starry memoir released just in time for Christmas. In fact, there are parts of the book where she almost seems embarrassed of her profession, blushing through the page as she admits that she and Warren Beatty once had a thing, and barely paying lip service to her involvement in Allen’s films apart from Annie Hall. As a massive fan of Father Of The Bride 1 and 2 and Baby Boom (highbrow to the max), I was sad that she didn’t go into detail about them! But it’s understandable why she doesn’t – in entirely non-self-pitying fashion, Keaton is open about the lack of success in her later years, the failure of certain projects, and puts her role as an actress secondary to that as her role as the daughter of Dorothy Hall, whose lifelong-kept diaries are included throughout to provide a counter-point of view to Diane’s. If these often ring sad or raw for the reader, it’s important to remember that that’s entirely secondary to the effect they have on her daughter, whose own recollections are equally frank – revealing that she suffered from bulimia, for example. To a certain extent, it almost doesn’t matter that Then Again was written by a famous film star – it’s fascinating as a look at the art of keeping a journal (particularly as someone who’s never kept one), and the contrast of Dorothy and Diane’s parts allows mother and daughter to exist on their own terms, not remembered through the other’s filter. The use of Dorothy’s diaries is particularly moving given that she succumbs to Alzheimers in later life, with her final hours recounted by Diane in detail that’s horrifying and heartbreaking, but told with trademark dignity.
