I am back on a reading roll, and having a run of good books, which is a nice feeling. Life has been quite stressful, so having something diverting has been a blessed relief.
23 Tenement Kid by Bobby Gillespie
I really do enjoy a good rock memoir, though actually this was more about what happens before you become a huge star, as it ends on the day Screamadelica was released. Which was the same day Nevermind came out, and I remember the indie dance kids and the rock kids heading down together to Our Price in town after school to pick up their respective records. I was much more of an indie dance kid and Screamadelica was a huge part of my formative musical experience.
There’s obviously some drug taking (though less than you’d expect), a massive amount of chat about Gillespie’s musical influences (which could get a little dull if that’s not your thing – I remember some of his NME interviews around that time where he’d always talk passionately about musicians and bands I’d never heard of, which is how I develop a love of some bands I still love today such as Big Star. So I didn’t mind that) and obviously he’s at pains to remind us how trailblazing he was at all times (I mean, you didn’t expect Gillespie’s memoir to be self-effacing and humble did you?). And I really really loved the Jesus and Mary Chain though was too young to have attended their gigs while Gillespie was their drummer (probably no bad thing, they sound like they were mostly just pitched battles between the audience and the band) so I really that part of the story.
What was really interesting to me was his account of his childhood – it’s a really good account of growing up under Thatcher in a socialist household, and his admiration and love for his parents comes through really strongly. And some of it is very moving indeed, particularly when he stops trying to convince us he’s the coolest person ever and is a bit more honest about his relationships.
This got lots of really positive reviews from people when it came out, and I can see why - if it wasn’t ghost written then Gillespie is a very talented writer indeed, because the story flowed and the way it was written was extremely good.
24 We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins
Bellingcat is the open source intelligence agency that uses available data (social media posts, Google Earth, and leaked documents in the public domain) to carry out intelligence investigations into human rights abuses and corruption around the world. It’s the very definition of disruptive – taking something that has gone on behind closed doors in service of a nation’s own interests and putting it out there in an entirely transparent way that is – as far as is possible – in support of public interest. How that interest is defined is a really knotty question, and this book which explores how it came about and what it has achieved is never really explained satisfactorily by the author who is also the founder of Bellingcat.
He goes into a lot of detail about their investigation into the crash of MH17 in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, and how their methods contributed to the conclusive unmasking of Russian controlled forces as the cause of the crash, and the use of chemical weapons in Syria. I found myself skipping some of the more forensic details of geolocation and photo matching, because I was more interested in the theory than practice.
I’d have liked even more reflections on what accountability looks like when you’re not acting in the clear and focused interests of a nation state – who decides where they focus? Who checks what they are doing? I am fairly sure they are on the right side of history, but it is clear there is plenty of scope for their ambition to be subverted by bad actors, so I would have liked more analysis of that. But nonetheless this was really interesting.
25 The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond by Chris Blackwell
This was so interesting – even if you don’t have much of an interest in the music industry, chances are there’s at least one artist who has been signed to Island Records at some point who you are keen on, and it was hugely influential in its day as one of the largest independent record labels. Blackwell, who set it up, really did pull it up by its bootstraps, going back and forth between London and Jamaica (where he was born), selling records out of the back of his car, and hanging out in dodgy London pubs to hear Irish bands that no other record label wanted to sign. That’s how Island ended up with U2, but they had a huge and really impressive rosta of artists – Bob Marley, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Robert Palmer, Cat Stevens.
Blackwell grew up in Jamaica surrounded by people like Noel Coward, Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming and his childhood memories are a real contrast between the vibrant warmth of Jamaica and the misery of post war English boarding schools. There was some really interesting history of Jamaica in here as well, which I found fascinating, and some reflections on the end of the British Empire and Jamaican independence from someone whose perspective, as a white man with Jamaican roots, is a unique one.
He's relatively discrete in terms of music industry gossip, though he’s very funny when writing about Grace Jones, who he clearly adores and fears in equal measure. It’s much more focused on the music industry and the structural shifts that took place over the period from the 1960s when it was just starting to become a thing and the 1980s, when it became a place he no longer wanted to be part of.
The audiobook is narrated by Bill Nye and my word, it makes a difference when someone who knows what they are doing reads a book. It was very well done.
26 The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson
I always thought Ibbotson was a children’s author as I’m sure my children read books of hers at primary school. This isn’t a children’s book but could well be a young adult one, though a very good and very readable one if so. Ruth is a Hungarian Jew, escaping (by the skin of her teeth) from Budapest as the Nazis sweep across Europe with the help of Quin Somerville, a zoology professor and English aristocrat. It’s a love story, with some complicating factors, and is very funny in places. Ruth is a delight and her love rival Verena is a predictable horror. This was a wonderful, escapist read and I’m going to buy it for friends who are in need of a pick me up. I felt both comforted and intelligent while I was reading it, which I think is quite an achievement for a novel.
27 The Cloisters by Katy Hays
I believe it was @noodlezoodle who hated this. But as I had borrowed it from the library and someone else had requested it, I thought I’d give it a go. And while it’s no Secret History, I have learned to manage my expectations in that regard so it was a pleasant surprise to find this was not terrible. As murder mysteries set among privileged and beautiful young people on the East Coast who are intensely clever and interested in researching arcane parts of history that are slightly sinister, it was one of the better ones.
I quite liked the detailed court stuff, and would have liked even more of that. And I really liked the hot summer in New York vibe – I’m not at all a fan of New York but found myself wanting to go back just to visit the Cloisters in summer.
The characters had a really annoying tendency to tell each other stuff that they would have known already – I thought she could have exploited the museum setting to be a bit more creative in the way she imparted information necessary to the plot. And Rachel was a deeply annoying two dimensional character, who didn’t really make a lot of sense. And I didn’t really think the ending was well managed – it was all a bit undramatic and should have been a lot better handled, and I don’t know whether the reason I ended up being unclear about various people’s motives was because I wasn’t paying enough attention or it wasn’t properly explained. That said, it passed the time very pleasantly and while I’m very confident people won’t still be reading it in 30 years time (which I discover to my horror is when The Secret History was published) and I’m glad I didn’t pay for it, I don’t regret it. It would be a good holiday read.