… your heart out
Dora Morelenbaum performing live at the Jazz Café in November 2024 was one of the highlights of the year. It was such a joyous show, and when she sprang into her lovely interpretation of Bobby Charles’ ‘I Must Be in a Good Place Now’ I almost melted in delight. It was so gloriously unexpected and unbelievably perfect. And it was not the only cover version performed that night. Months later I haven’t stopped grinning yet.
Discovering Vera
Caspary’s fiction has been a highlight of the past few years. I suppose you
could say she wrote books that might be conveniently classed as suspense,
mystery, detective, crime, noir, or none of these. They are really psychological
studies that defy categorisation. What Vera’s books tend to have in common are strong,
independent, career women, with some unusual themes, such as PMT-related
depression. Anyway, Vera had a great way with words. To use a phrase of her
own: “To write well is to write clearly.” And she did.
Rather like her contemporary Dorothy B. Hughes with In A Lonely Place, Vera’s most well-known work Laura is available in a handsome edition as part of The Feminist Press’ Femmes Fatales series. And, yes, it is the book that spawned the classic Otto Preminger-directed film noir, memorably starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. But then Laura has been a magazine serial, a play, a novel, a film, a song. All of which suggests Lionel Blair and Una Stubbs (I nearly wrote Baines there!) effervescing in the fondly remembered Give Us A Clue.
Act One
“I put a seashell to my ear, and
it all comes back,” said Rod McKuen memorably in his poem The Gypsy Camp,
with that beautiful setting by Anita Kerr and the San Sebastien Strings. That
line, which many of us heard first via the immortal ‘Barefoot in the Head’ by the
supremely cool A Man Called Adam, has been in my thoughts recently. This was
partly through hearing ‘Night and Day’ by Everything But The Girl played very
shortly before Jessica Pratt took to the stage at the Barbican on “strange and
unsettling day” after the US election. It sounded so right, and I hope it was
Jessica’s own choice. If not, it was still an inspired selection.
Coincidentally, or not, I had been thinking about that song, and how it was a huge part of the summer of 1982 for me, just as Jessica’s Here in the Pitch was this year. But also, how Tracey and Ben, largely because of that song, performed a handful of numbers with Paul Weller onstage at the ICA right at the start of 1983, only a few weeks after The Jam’s last concert. And I am still wondering why I wasn’t there at the ICA. I was, however, there to see Speakers Corner Quartet a few days before Jessica’s Barbican show. Both of these recent performances were pretty incredible. Maybe just as incredibly it had been 38 years since I had seen a live show at the ICA.
Things fall apart. Oh yes. The old fabric is torn away, or disintegrates, and all that. But, sometimes, when you least expect it, things fall into place, and new patterns and stories emerge. So, towards the end of January this year, things were looking pretty grim. It was a tough time, but one bright spot was the Pauline Boty exhibition at the Gazelli Art House in Mayfair, which was a revelation. I went early one Monday morning, soon after opening time, and was the only one there. It felt a privilege to be there, alone with Pauline’s now famous works of art, at a time when her reputation’s at a high. This being, as her evangelist Ali Smith argues in her Autumn, part of the cycle where cultural figures are ignored, lost, rediscovered, and so on.
“It is odd what you
remember and what you forget.” – Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General
In the bedroom of Frank Pierson, the wealthy young American boy who followed Ripley, in the fourth novel in Patricia Highsmith’s series, “pop singer posters were tacked to a vast green pin-up board above the brown table, the Ramones slouching in blue jeans”. I have recently revisited the book, one I read 20-odd years ago, and was delighted to find that mention of Joey, Dee Dee, and co. was there, being the thing that stuck in my mind down the years. Oddly, though, I didn’t think they were named. Instead, I thought there was simply a reference to four brothers in leather jackets and ripped jeans. I got that bit wrong. Nevertheless, for a book published in April 1980, though set in the summer and early autumn of 1978, the Ramones mention is a lovely incidental musical detail, and a pretty cool one too. I can’t remember, can’t recall, as a lovely old June Brides song goes, any other contemporaneous nods to the band by a major author. I could be wrong.
If you are a fellow aficionado of cheap and cheerful Northern Soul compilations you will know one of the downsides is that certain tracks crop up again and again, which is often a price worth paying to get unexpected or lost gems. One of the repeat offenders is Laura Greene’s ‘Music, Moonlight and You’, which is fine by me as I am incredibly fond of the spoken introduction, where Laura asks: “Oh, by the way, did you bring your guitar?” It is so gloriously incongruous: just that one mention of a guitar. And, being built that way, one day when Laura’s song was on my mind, I got to thinking about other compositions where guitars are mentioned incidentally. I was surprised that, of the ones that sprang to mind, a lot of them were by favourite artists. I really am not quite sure what that proves.
You know that thing where your memory starts playing tricks on you? Yeah? Well, recently I was playing a 2CD compilation, Northern Soul Underground. It’s a great set, with the focus on the early ‘soul’ years, and I love the fact that the cover proclaims that the ’50 Soulful Rarities’ include The Profiles, Squires, Drapers and Laddins. I bet that got people rushing to the shops. Anyway, the second CD starts with The Valentinos’ 1962 SAR single, ‘Lookin’ for a Love’. For some reason I have been thinking a lot about that track . I knew Barry Gifford had mentioned it more than once in his books, but I couldn’t recall where I first came across him doing so. So I decided to cheat, as you do. There are plenty of mentions of Barry and ‘Lookin’ for a Love’ out there, but they nearly all bring us back to … well, here, sort of, in a tangential sense, which is nice but not helpful.
