Jez Fielder2013-05-25T09:25:05-04:00Jez Fielderhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=jez-fielderCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jez FielderGood old fashioned elbow grease.London's Burning - With Enthusiasmtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17602272012-08-09T11:19:26-04:002012-10-09T05:12:04-04:00Jez Fielderhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jez-fielder/
The sky was bleeding, the winds were howling through the most horrendous summer in history, the taxi drivers were livid, the tubes didn't work, G4S spazzed up their operation, Beckham didn't get selected, I got thrush.
Then it happened.
The Olympic Games in London happened. And they're still happening. And it's like a dream.
Team GB have inspired not just the next generation of British sportsmen and women but the existing generations of runners, cyclists, judokas, showjumpers, drinkers, smokers, architects, comedians, midwives etc. Never have I seen excitement, happiness and pleasant-spiritedness pervade an entire city, and what a city in which to see that occur.
London has forever been extraordinary. The vastly sprawling former head of Empire with it's 600 square miles of magic, violence, history and the Thames artery - shit filled in Victorian times and now resplendent, London was always something to behold, to be amazed by, but it was missing something essential, missing something human. And now it seems we have it. Whether we keep it or not remains to be seen but London has, in 2012, done something it has never done before. It has discovered how to love itself, to be proud of itself, and it is tangible. I can feel it everywhere I go. I screamed in Hyde Park yesterday as I saw super-Olympian Sir Chris Hoy, swimmer Rebecca Adlington and Triathlon siblings Alistair and Jonny Brownlee - everyone else screamed too and the athletes were overwhelmed, at that made us all cry a bit.
There's been a lot of crying. And crying at the sort of thing you would have hitherto thought highly unlikely. I cried as Gemma Gibbons won her Judo semi-final, when Peter Wilson sank to his knees winning the shooting, when Victoria Pendleton retired - and all of those things were connected to relief. And I think I've cried partly because I'm sharing in their feelings and am moved by them but also because I'm relieved that it's okay to be British. I was geeing on the dressage team earlier because, for the first time in living memory, the Olympics have become a team sport. If Charlotte Dujardin wins the dressage it'll mean one more gold for Great Britain, plus the commentator on the BBC (another thing we can be proud of) was on the verge of tears during Charlotte's ride as the Britishness of the music took him to an emotional place he did not expect to be. It's where many of us are, and it feels wonderful.
London 2012 has been, in the British popular consciousness anyway, the opposite of the outpouring of grief that many of us experienced as a nation in 1997, upon the death of Princess Diana. These Olympics have been an outpouring of joy. And as Charlotte DuJardin romps towards the 23rd Team GB gold medal as I write this I can feel another little tear coming on. I think I might go to the pub.]]>Album Review: It Bites - Map of the Pasttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14094552012-04-06T22:41:55-04:002012-06-06T05:12:01-04:00Jez Fielderhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jez-fielder/It Bites I have had to utilise the same gambit. "You know, from the 80's (then sings) Calling All the Heroes...Shooting up the town boys..."
The response is mostly on the positive side if the retort "oh, hang on, yes, vaguely" can be deemed positive. Which I reckon it can.
The new album Map of the Past is their fifth official studio album, not counting the Best of... in 2003, and the Map of It Bites' past makes interesting reading.
The new record is about "going back through the past and fixing everything that ever went wrong
in a person's life," say the band, who launched way back in '84 and hailed from a part of the country not normally the spawn of famous rock bands - Cumbria.
After an initial surge, cult rather than commercial success became the hallmark of a band of fine musicians whose eclectic style square pegged them in the eyes of the market. A shift towards the more prescribed style (that of the hard rock trend at the time) of their third album (1989's Eat Me in St. Louis) did little to swell the coffers and the end was nigh.
A mega-hiatus ensued between 1991's live record Thank you and Goodnight and their 2008 renaissance with new lead singer and guitarist John Mitchell, The Tall Ships. Here, the sometimes disparate pop/rock/prog elements seemed to harmonise under the freedom of not being dictated to by a record company (as had been the case in the 80's). There is also the feeling that they are making the music they like for its own sake. And why not. After all, no record company is going to thunder great sums of money into a band whose members are all wildly over 25.
But remove yourself entirely from the idea that It Bites are mere hobbyists. They wrote thought-provoking songs with stunning modulations 25 years ago and they still do now.
The opener, Man in the Photograph, takes back through time by the turning of a radio tuner. This is going to be a concept album, I can smell it (I suppose it's been a long time coming for a band which were not only mentioned in the same breath as Marillion but also toured with them in the late eighties). It is also strangely reminiscent of an episode of Sapphire and Steel, but I digress...
The past is being seen through a series of old photographs but the corking riff that hammers us into the second track, Wallflower, reassures us that the jazz organ war requiem of the previous song is not setting the tone for the duration.
Mitchell's journeyman voice tears rapaciously through the title track which has possibly the niftiest common time syncopation I have ever heard. The opening lines
"I've got wild eyes and chemistry, undying sense of loyalty/and all these things you won't believe right now"
show off Mitchell and songwriting compatriot (keyboardist John) Beck's impressive lyrical juxtaposition of intelligence and cool.
Another highlight is The Big Machine, a melodic hard rock epic for a while until the familiar dynamics of the It Bites fabric kick in to add both texture and fine instrumental solos from both Beck and Mitchell. Mitchell, particularly, is an outstanding instrumentalist. Add to that the fact that he also produced this record and you have quite a formidable musician. His production is enormous without being absurd and the mixing is quite, quite gifted. Everything sits in perfectly. Hats off.
Not inconsistent but diverse, It Bites are probably sick of seeing the words "should be huge" but they probably should be huge. They are, moreover, a powerful and exact live act. You can catch them on tour in May where they will be showcasing this new record.
Map of the Past is out now on Inside Out records. ]]>Book Review - Waiting For Sunrise by William Boydtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12688982012-02-10T13:30:06-05:002012-04-11T05:12:01-04:00Jez Fielderhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jez-fielder/
Fresh from a Bafta-winning adaptation of his 2002 novel Any Human Heart, and midway through adapting his 2006 novel Restless for the BBC, the Boyd factory fabricates another tale, which will, no doubt in time, add to his growing list of adaptations for the screen.
His latest work, Waiting For Sunrise, is, like many of Boyd's novels, set largely in wartime. And, again not unusually, features a young male protagonist in some form of flight.
Along with previous works such as A Good Man in Africa, Armadillo, Stars and Bars and Ordinary Thunderstorms, this new offering is firmly in the camp of what screenwriters like to call 'Dude with a problem.'
Here, the not instantly likeable Lysander Rief has left the trappings of the London stage for Austria in order to find 'the Viennese cure' for his psycho-sexual ailment. Once a cure is haphazardly discovered, his real problems begin. His world is turned upside down after a chance meeting with the enigmatic and elfin Hettie Bull who first takes his clothes, then his liberty.
At that point, the tale suddenly takes off into Tinker Tailor territory via Measure for Measure, and even has an Edwardian version of Bruce Robinson's Uncle Monty.
Waiting For Sunrise examines the idea that we may control our lives more exactly by re-capitulating certain important memories or key moments which shaped the current self. Where Julian Barnes' latest protagonist (and unwitting villain) Tony Webster finds himself duped by an unrealistically constructed history, Rief is encouraged by the avuncular Dr. Bensimon to re-construct a flashpoint in his life in order to cancel the cause of his trauma.
In the psychiatrist's chair, Rief, fittingly an actor (Stanislavski's emotion memory ideas were in full flight by 1913), is instructed to re-imagine a traumatic childhood scene and then, through replaying it in the memory, come to believe that the re-write is the true version. Dr. Bensimon calls this Parallelism, a reworking of Henri Bergson's fabulation function.
"Let's say that the world is in essence neutral - flat, empty, bereft of meaning and significance. It's us, our imaginations, that make it vivid, fill it with colour, feeling, purpose and emotion. Once we understand this we can shape our world in any way we want."
Boyd is on home turf here. The world being one part nature, one part human perception is a concept exalted by the Romantic poets, not least Percy Bysshe Shelley, himself the subject of Boyd's unfinished PhD. But where the romantic perception gave power to the subject viewed, Parallelism seeks to deny the truth of the past and remove its effect. From the way they wrote about the human mind, one could view the Romantic poets as early psychologists who simply lacked a framework. The ability to prove their suspicions eluded them. Had they possessed the tools of Freudian psychoanalysis, matters may have been clearer. And who should make an amusingly understated cameo in the novel? Freud himself; begging the question: is this a psychological novel? Yes. No. Aren't they all?
Psychoanalysis exists within the novel as a part of the plot and serves to highlight the function of a personal diary, but it isn't a subtext any more than it is with any novel involving humans and emotions. It provides the occasion for analysis and, in fact, goes some way to suggest that may be the limit of its utility. Some readers will no doubt get a sniff of Freud and expect all manner of theory-based tangents and in jokes (well, there is one with the mother, to be fair) but there is no real value attached to it.
The diary has become a common Boydean (surely he is prolific enough to be attributed his own adjective?) device and is the perfect expression of self-fictionalisation. You can re-remember something far more easily if you write it down. The written word is documented history, after all.
The narrative switches between these 'Autobiographical Investigations' and 3rd person prose. Rief tries to understand the effect that his foil, Hettie, has on him by writing a short treatise on personal attraction, but in the prose we come to understand that the real effect she has is that of a catalyst. They are in many ways opposites - he drifts as she develops. Yet they are both sexless in their own way - he anorgasmic and she barren. But soon circumstances see him thrown from the well-lit, modern art studio to a place of darkness and solitude, to a place more psychological than emotional, a place where rescue only thrusts him deeper into obscurity.
As the novel's timeline edges into war, masquerade becomes at once necessary and deadly. The actor plies his trade when forced by obligation into working for British Intelligence, but he doesn't know who to trust on his own side, as a selection of shadowy authority figures run Rief as a field investigator in a particularly serious case of treason. All the while, the eerily symbolic Bas-relief in Bensimon's office hangs over the story, objectifying a surplus of surface and asking us how much we can truly understand a world where everyone has something to hide.
War has long preoccupied Boyd, the horrors of which served as a ghoulish watermark to his formative years in Africa where censorship of graphic television images did not exist. Reportage of the Biafran war in the late 60's and early 70's was beamed into his home without the courtesy of editorial restraint. Lysander Rief experiences his own wartime horror image, a memory that clings to his retina and makes him fear the playback function he doesn't control - his dreams. Seeing remorse and sadness in the central character is something of a relief. Many of Boyd's characters have an edge of cold about them, possibly due to the amount of calculation they have to do. His protagonists, however, with the help of the diary device, are often able to offer a refreshingly honest account of the human condition. The culmination of these elements is bleakness. Are we to never know the truth about any other person? Are we continually, fruitlessly waiting to be enlightened? Waiting, like Rief in his cell, for the sun to come up?
War and truth are unlikely bedfellows. One thinks of Baudrillard and his notion of the Gulf War only having truly existed on television. Boyd's use of Hemmingway's "A thing is true at first light and a lie by noon" as an epigraph has much relation to the current and no doubt enduring preoccupation with rolling news. Facts can turn out not to be facts at all, and either way they can change.
A seeming/being dialectic is fully at work here. Rief's landlady at the pension-cum-brothel will not discuss anything that doesn't befit the adjectives "nice" and "pleasant" and yet pretence is anathema to contemporary art darling Udo, who defines the new architecture in Vienna as a bourgeois sham.
"New buildings masquerading as something ancient and venerable. Shameful."
But what of women? The "river of sex" is a constant undercurrent in all our lives, says psychoanalysis, but in this novel the river of gender is pretty shallow. Engagement is a problem (both figuratively and literally) and a depth of character is difficult to fathom in any of the female characters. Hettie, chief amongst them, is certainly an oddball, but her story is left out. They appear sketchy, like the crudely drawn sex objects of Hettie and Lysander's Viennese contemporary, Egon Schiele, or the flitty, one-dimensional gaspers of Edwardian melodrama.
It has been said of Boyd's last two works, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms, that he had ventured into genre fiction, more specifically thriller writing. Certainly, they were more of a type than anything since his unapologetically farcical Stars and Bars. Waiting For Sunrise is, in that sense, a return to form, and yet it retains a consistent intrigue and a splendidly intricate plot, making the deviation, if it be so deemed, a wholly worthwhile exercise.
The denouement plays out with characteristic suspense and masterful design, allowing Rief to half-triumph with the help of musical Uncle Hamo - whom Boyd hilariously casts as the cavalry. But it is only a momentary victory in the scheme of things. The protagonist's roundedness as a character has ended by trading spotlight for shadow.
The fact that Rief's personal problem was cured rather too quickly to be totally believable is secondary to how well the fabulation concept illuminates (albeit with stage-lighting) the novel as a whole. From self-fictionalisation to the total fiction of an alias, Rief exists in a strangely lit world, an Alpengluhen under which clarity is hard to come by.
"I do not see hope / Hope does not see me," he writes.
Although bleakness exists here on a theoretical level, it is far from the feeling a reader gets from reading Waiting For Sunrise. There is little doubt that Boyd has a whale of a time as a writer. His sense of humour is pleasantly wry and he has a marvellous talent for inventing names. The stage comedy in which Lysander stars is The Amorous Ultimatum by Kendrick Balston. This is laughably plausible. This talent is just one by-product of a truly remarkable imagination, and it may be this gift of Boyd's (to say nothing of his dedication to research) that keeps us fascinated by his novels. It's quite a canon already, long may it continue.
Waiting For Sunrise is published by Bloomsbury on 16 February.]]>