Scuffing, Slapping and Thudding

There was a  review by Terry Eagleton of Paul Morley's new book, The North (And Almost Everything In It), in this week's Guardian.  It's worth reading, especially if you still calibrate your sense of humour by the Monty Python benchmark, and have a suspicion of the Competitive Cult of Authentic Origins.  If the dismissive cry "Luxury!" brings a smile to your face, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I, and a select band of my contemporaries at university, once sat at the feet (occasionally literally) of the esteemed Dr. Eagleton.  We formed the vanguard of a literary Marxist-Deconstructionist revolutionary cadre that, like the intergalactic invasion fleet in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, prepared for war, only to vanish into the yawning maw of the small dog we call Real Life.  Ah, well.  As the other Marx pointed out, inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

But Eagleton knows his stuff, and his strictures -- sometimes good-natured, sometimes not, but always apposite, always amusing -- are worth attending to.  In this case, he shows two yellow cards to Morley.  First, over-writing:

This affectionate piece of anthropology is marred by a tiresomely rhapsodic tone. "I found it, my north," he gushes, "smoking and babbling, battling and loving, scattered and glittering, lush and brisk … rickety and plush, conspiring and crackling." Reticence is not this author's strong point. There is a compulsive use of the couplet: "brilliance and persistence, acceptance and slyness, dirt and glamour". There is also a reference to northerners who speak "with a certain sort of tough, scuffed and striven fluency", preferring the "slap, twist and thud" of their own speech to "the slur, sting and snap of near neighbours". There is certainly a glut of scuffing, slapping and thudding in these extravagantly overwritten pages, in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley become "charred, trapped scraps of frustrated northern will". It makes them sound even worse than serial killers. Liverpool, predictably, provokes Morley to a bout of severe verbal flatulence: "Liverpool, passion. Liverpool, moving, Liverpool, moving cotton, sugar, slaves, invoices, music, ideas here, there and everywhere …"

 Second, self-obsession:

Yet if some of it suffers from a rather slipshod lyricism, the auto-biographical sections are too flatly naturalistic. It is interesting to know that the Beatles were turned away from the restaurant of Manchester's Midland hotel for being inappropriately dressed, and that Les Dawson was able to pull such grotesque faces because he broke his jaw in a boxing match, but not that Morley used to catch the bus at five past eight so as to be at school by a quarter to nine. He grew up in a part of Stockport called Reddish, and the book's obsession with the place is so relentless that one begins to wonder whether it is meant to be self-parody.

Of course, what Terry doesn't know is that this portentous over-writing is the house-style of music magazines.  Paul Morley bought his media access-all-areas pass with his purple prose in the New Musical Express in the 1970s, but he seems not to have twigged that writing, like people, needs to grow up.  That self-consciously rhapsodic, allusive, swooning style works in small doses, done well, but it's far too much like hard work at book length.  What can possibly be being said that is worth that much of a reader's attention?

Also, Morley, like so many media types today, really does need to get over this obsession with the minutiae of his own upbringing, as if they were the seal on some sort of certificate of authenticity.  No-one cares about bus-stops in bloody Reddish, Paul.  You're a journalist, mate, not David Bowie.

But, hmm, purple prose and self-obsession?  We know all about those things -- and forgive them -- in Blogland!  But if the blogging money's not good enough, here's a thought, maybe he should write some songs of his own...

Vernacular, verbose; an attempt at getting close to where he came from.
In the doorway of the stars, between Blandford Street and Mars...

Ian Anderson, Baker Street Muse

The Barricades of Heaven are as easily found in Reddish as in the hills of Orange County.