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Posts from the ‘Literature’ Category

Mar 31

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Ishiguro, long ago

A typical day in the A&R department at Island Records’ London headquarters in November 1975. Four or five people coming in to play their demo tapes to me or my assistant, Howard Thompson, in the semi-basement office in a beautiful stucco house in St Peter’s Square, W6. A lunchtime meeting with Phil Collins, a familiar face from the early days of Brand X, before they went off to sign with Charisma. The early evening rehearsal of a band called the Rockits, evidently a Muff Winwood project. And a note to go and see the still-unsigned Roogalator, with their great American guitarist Danny Adler, at the Kensington pub near the Olympia exhibition halls.

At four o’clock that day there was an appointment with “Ishiguro, K”, bringing a tape for us to hear, evidently from Guildford. Sadly, I have no clear memory of the man or his songs. What I do know is that he would go on publish the first of his eight novels, A Pale View of Hills, in 1982, win the Whitbread Prize for An Artist of the Floating World in 1986, the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day in 1989, and the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, all of this topped by a knighthood in 2018. So I think one could say that, just a couple of weeks past his 21st birthday and a couple of months into the first year of his undergraduate studies at the University of Kent, Kazuo Ishiguro negotiated what is nowadays known as a sliding-doors moment with some success.

I found that diary entry a couple of years ago, while looking for something else. It came back into my mind while reading the introduction to The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, a book of Ishiguro’s lyrics, written over the last couple of decades for the London-based American jazz singer Stacey Kent.

“I’ve built a reputation as a writer of stories, but I started out writing songs,” he writes, before going on to describe an apprenticeship influenced by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Webb, Tom Jobim, Hank Williams, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter and many others. He failed in his original ambition to become a successful singer-songwriter, but what’s interesting is the degree to which he believes his eventual mastery of writing fiction was shaped by his early efforts with music, which led him to think that the trick was not to prioritise getting a grip on his readers but rather to find a way of engaging their interest at a different and perhaps more lasting level.

“A song lasts only a few minutes,” he writes. “Its impact can’t afford to reside just in what happens during the moment of direct contact. A song lives or dies by its ability to infiltrate the listener’s emotions and memory, and, like a parasite, take up long-term residence, ready to come to the fore in moments of joy, grief, exhilaration, heartbrteak, whatever. No one aspires to write a song that catches the attention only while it’s being heard, then gets forgotten. That’s not how songs work.”

What he identifies is “something in the unresolved, incomplete quality of so many well-loved songs that’s significant here. In the world of prose fiction, there’s a strong impulse to achieve completeness; to tie every knot, answer every question, to leave no loose ends hanging. By contrast, in the world of songs, there’s a much lower bar when it comes to literal sense-making. The tiny amount of words available, the internal logic of the melody, the emotional content imposed by chords and chord sequences mean that the ability of a song to connect had little to do with, say, convincing psychological back stories or even the clear readability of the songs unfolding before us. It occurs to me that good songs may haunt the mind not despite their incompleteness, but because of it…”

The whole thing is worth reading, as are the 16 lyrics reproduced in the book, beautifully illustrated by the Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli in a bande dessinée style. If the occasional specificity of places and film references recalls Clive James’s efforts in a similar direction (mentions of Casablanca and Indochine, Les Invalides, “some tango in Macao”, “Gabin / Hooded eyes / A slow Gitanes / Weary deserter on the run”), the subtlety of the emotional engagement is closer to that of Fran Landesman, the writer of “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men” and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”. Ishiguro’s lyrics are sophisticated without being smart, precise but leaving intriguing gaps; they bear reading on the page, and their effect — like that of his mature prose — can linger in the mind.

As I said, I have no real memory of what happened on that Wednesday in 1975 when “Ishiguro, K” came by. It can’t have had any effect on his destiny. But I hope we were nice to him.

* Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain is published by Faber & Faber. Stacey Kent’s albums Breakfast on the Morning Tram and The Changing Lights, which contained some of the early fruits of their collaboration, set to music by Kent’s husband, the saxophonist and flautist Jim Tomlinson, were released in 2007 and 2013 respectively on the Blue Note label.

Aug 29

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A man of wealth and taste

It’s rather charming when someone who spent most of his life signing autographs for fans turns out to have been a collector of famous signatures himself. In Charlie Watts’s case, they’re a bit different from the one he signed for me on a paper napkin in 1964. They’re the signatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Tennessee Williams, H.G. Wells and Raymond Chandler on their own first editions (including, respectively, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Waiting for Godot, Ulysses, A Streetcar Named Desire, The War of the Worlds, The Lady in the Lake), of Charlie Parker on a pleading letter to the American Federation of Musicians and menu cards from Birdland and the Royal Roost, of John Coltrane on the front cover of a copy of Giant Steps, of Duke Ellington on a set of acetates containing the premiere of Black Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall in 1943.

All these, and much, much more of the same, are included in the catalogue for Christie’s aucxtion of some of Charlie’s possessions, due to take place in London on 28 September. The £40, 200-page catalogue is a lovely thing in itself: if you want to know what Dean Benedetti’s acetates of Parker recorded at the Hi-De-Ho club in Los Angeles in 1947 look like, or the ones Boris Rose recorded in 1950 that became Bird at St Nick’s, here they are, along with notes scribbled by Parker to Chan Richardson, his partner. Here are an autograph lyric (“Looking at You”) by Cole Porter, a letter from George Gershwin to his music teacher and autographed copies of the piano scores of An American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue, a first edition of Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues inscribed to Gershwin, and a first edition of a book of Picasso engravings dedicated by the artist to the jazz impresario Norman Granz (with added caricature of the dedicatee).

I could go on, and on, and on. Agatha Christie first editions by the dozen. Ditto Dashiell Hammett. Hemingway. Waugh, Waugh and more Waugh. Ditto Wodehouse. Orwell. Dylan Thomas’s first book of poems. All signed. John and Alan Lomax’s Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, signed by Huddie Ledbetter himself. A Miles Davis doodle and a first edition of trumpeter’s autobiography, with a lengthy dedication to a cousin.

Charlie was a collector who could indulge all his desires. Now he’s gone and other people will have the pleasure of owning the precious objects he so lovingly assembled — people in a position to contemplate the estimates ranging from £200,000-£300,000 for the signed first edition of Gatsby, dedicated to a fellow screenwriter at MGM, down to £1,000-£1,500 for a signed photograph of Chet Baker in 1956.

If you saw his episode of the recent TV series of profiles of the individual Rolling Stones (My Life As a Rolling Stone, 2022), you’ll know that this catalogue doesn’t tell the whole story. Where is the beautiful pre-war Lagonda, kept in perfect running order despite the fact that Charlie couldn’t drive? Where are the 78s that he bought in bulk but never played? Where are the kits of famous drummers from the swing and bop eras? Where are the Savile Row suits and the handmade shirts and shoes?

Anyway, Charlie deserved it all, and much joy it must have given him. He also deserved a catalogue editor capable of spelling “Thelonious”, but that’s another matter.