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You know that line Bob sings in ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’?  “You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books. You’re very well read, it’s well-known.” That one. Well, there was a time I thought I could keep up with Mr Jones, but when Michael Head released his rightly much-loved Dear Scott and mentioned that the title indirectly came from reading Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories, I thought: “Funny, I haven’t read those”.

In the Autumn 2023 edition of Detail, “the magazine for modernists”, Rob Massey makes a convincing case for F. Scott Fitzgerald being the greatest mod writer ever. It was partly this piece that reignited my interest in Fitzgerald. I recall reading Fitzgerald a lot as a young man. Perhaps in error I partly put this down to Edwyn Collins in the Postcard era citing an affection for his books. I could be wrong, but it seems to fit when you think of all those old eccentric and romantic Orange Juice songs, and perhaps it was Edwyn wanting to offset labelmates Josef K with their demob suits and their Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and all that: those Penguin Modern Classics paperbacks peeking out of their overcoat pockets.

Anyway, taking a wrong turning down an aisle in the Kindle store recently, as you can do so easily, I chanced upon a copy of the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story collection All The Sad Young Men, which came out shortly after The Great Gatsby. Again, this was all new to me, which was odd. I liked Fitzgerald. I liked short stories. I loved Damon Runyon (partly thanks to Penny Reel’s essay on ‘The Young Mod’s Forgotten Story’ and his The Citizen column in the NME, and I loved O. Henry, and enjoyed reading a collection of his stories while queuing up outside a supermarket during those early days of the pandemic when everyone else was staring at their phones.

All The Sad Young Men is a brilliant set of stories. That wasn’t a surprise, but I couldn’t get over the not-knowing, being unaware of the book when, as anyone familiar with my back pages will know, the song ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ is a bit of an obsession. Written by the then young poet Fran Landesman, with Tommy Wolf adding a gorgeous accompaniment to her words, it first appeared in the play The Nervous Set towards the end of the 1950s, being a topical satire or celebration of the newsworthy Beat Generation. All Fran’s obituaries mentioned that before this Jack Kerouac was seriously smitten with her, and perhaps unwittingly the song captures something of Ti Jean’s later infinite sadness, as the Jobim song ‘Once I Loved’ has it. I sometimes wonder if Jack got to hear Sinatra singing that before he ran out of road. Coincidentally I read a lot of Kerouac around the time I was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald as a kid, and even somehow found his name merging into that of the Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway.

And long before I got to hear ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ there was Joy Division with ‘Decades’ and Ian Curtis’ astonishingly insightful words about the young men with a weight on their shoulders, where have they been. The young men who knocked on the door of Hell’s darker chamber, and who, pushed to the limit, dragged themselves in.” All of which has echoes of Michael Farris Smith’s fantastic Nick, a sort of prequel to The Great Gatsby, offering a back story for the narrator, and the torment he went through in World War 1, or actually any of Farris Smith’s books. Still somehow ‘Decades’ in my mind merges with ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’.

What a set of words Fran wrote. I guess at the end of the 50s that sort of thing was topical:  Kerouac’s  ‘Dharma Bums’ and ‘On The Road’ (said inevitably in your best Van Morrison ‘cleaning windows’ voice), Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ and Mose Allison’s ‘Young Man Blues’ from his Back Country Suite. Quite probably I first came across ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ via Roberta Flack’s still astonishing and rich in connectivity First Take, which was one of the first CDs I bought. For some reason I can still recall Kent’s Definitive Impressions was the very first!

“All the news is bad again, kiss your dreams goodbye”. Ah, the way Roberta sings it is exquisite. And not wishing to shatter the mood, but there also seems a connection to The Chords’ ‘The British Way of Life’ and Chris Pope’s line about swallowing his dreams like his beer. It’s not as elegant perhaps as Fran’s young men at the bar with glasses of rye, but poetic in its way and a remarkable song for someone in their teens to write while caught up in a whirl of activity. It's a true kitchen sink roar of despair. Odd. And never matched. The energy quickly moved on, and prophetically the group’s debut single claimed: “We were over before we begun”.

Fitzgerald’s actual title All The Sad Young Men is shared with a 1962 Anita O’Day LP, one that has gradually become a particular favourite, with Gary McFarland early on in his career doing the arrangements, with more than a touch of the Gil Evans to these cloth ears. Anita sings a beautiful version of the ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ (or as its listed ‘Ballad of All the Sad Young Men’). I suspect by that time Anita had seen more than her fair share of “sad young men, drifting through the town, drinking up the night, trying not to drown.”

Aptly she memorably gets a glancing mention in On The Road where Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty are in Chicago and follow a gang of wild-hearted young bop musicians to Anita’s club where they encounter old God or George Shearing as he is better known. I love all those musical mentions in Jack’s books. In 1969, shortly after Jack’s death, the composer David Amram wrote: “I used to see Jack often at the old Five Spot in the beginning of 1957, when I was working there. I knew he was a writer, and all musicians knew that he loved music. You could tell by the way he sat and listened. He never tried to seem hip. He was too interested in life around him to ever think of how he appeared. Musicians understood this and were always glad to see him, because we knew that meant at least one person would be listening. Jack was on the same wavelength as we were, so it was never necessary to talk.”

David Amram would later back Jack when he was reading poetry onstage, and would compose the soundtrack for the immortal if daft beat generation Pull My Daisy film. I can’t believe the name David Amram didn’t register with me until recently, but he is quite a guy. A real must-see is a video of David Amram late last year, in his 90s, sharing a stage with David Johansen, who looks fantastic standing at a lectern in front of a giant projection of the New York Dolls 50 years before, and they perform a heartbreakingly beautiful (for all sorts of reasons) version of Phil Ochs’ ‘There But For Fortune’ at a Music & Revolution celebration at Carnegie Hall.

In 1996 David Amram provided the musical backing for an audiobook of selections from Jack’s Visions of Cody, issued on two cassettes by Penguin, with Graham Parker brilliantly reading the text. It’s available on Spotify for subscribers, and it’s one of the best things ever. Also on Spotify is the audiobook of The Dharma Bums, which is also fantastic, with Ethan Hawke uncannily becoming Jack incarnate as he reads the text. Listening to it recently the penny dropped Jack mentions a Northern Soul legend: “The current song at that time was Roy Hamilton singing ‘Everybody's Got a Home but Me’. I kept singing that as I swung along,” wrote Jack.

So, yeah, that gorgeous Rodgers & Hammerstein ballad was a hit well before Roy’s immortal Northern Soul favourite ‘Crackin’ Up Over You’. Old Kent CDs and other less lovingly put together old soul compilations have been a mainstay of recent years, and I am sure I’ve seen someone, Ady Croasdell I think, writing that as a kid he thought the song was a cash-in on the lingo of the Northern Soul scene.

But crack-ups are hardly new. Roy himself sort of had a trial run a few years earlier with his fantastic ‘Earthquake’, the same shaking inside and crackin’ up, the falling apart at the seams. It’s the opening track on a brilliant and brilliantly cheap and cheerful 4CD package by Real Gone called Northern Soul: The Early Years when it’s really pure mod R&B which you can imagine being played down at The Scene in Ham Yard.

Jack Kerouac has his own crack-up in Big Sur, which Ethan also reads but, boy, that is a tough listen. And then long before that there was F. Scott Fitzgerald with his 1936 essay for Esquire, The Crack-Up, an early and brilliant example of “confession as public spectacle”, to use Michael Bracewell’s words, a world away from the British stiff upper lip.

I think also of Michael Head’s ‘Broken Beauty’. And  I recall what John D. MacDonald wrote at the start of his Cinnamon Skin, the penultimate book in the unsurpassable Travis McGee series: “Every man can be broken when things happen to him in a certain order, with a momentum and an intensity that awaken ancient fears in the back of his mind. He knows what he must do, but suddenly the body will not obey the mind. Panic becomes like an unbearably shrill sound.” Or as Aldous Huxley put it more simply: “Every individual has his breaking point”. Please don’t ever forget that.

Talking of Jack and ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’, on his 1981 LP Bop for Kerouac, Mark Murphy’s beautiful version of the song is prefaced by the singer (and that voice is so instantly familiar to any of us with fond memories of listening to Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge way back when) reading the closing lines of On The Road. You know: “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it …” And all that. It’s a fondly nostalgic record, but given the time of its release there is a darker shadow waiting to loom over some sad young men.

Jazz and literature connections are nothing new. Fran Landesman’s other immortal song, again featured in The Nervous Set, ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most’, a number Mark Murphy sang as a young man on his wonderful Rah! LP, and which I think I first heard via the heartrendingly beautiful Betty Carter version, when Bob played it on his Theme Time Radio Hour, sometime long ago. The title is a witty hip variation on Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month’, the totemic opening line of The Waste Land. Was this the first instance of Eliot in pop? Maybe.

I seem to recall Michael Bracewell saying that The Waste Land was the single most important artefact for, well, I guess those F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about in his My Generation essay (the ones “who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved—and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Сather’s: ‘We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.’”), even if they didn’t really understand what it was about, which is still key to its appeal.

I have been thinking about Michael Bracewell a lot of late. I do not know too much about him, but I admire his writing an awful lot, and I like the way he is so well-read and can’t resist quoting in what can be a quite intimidating way. His England is Mine remains my favourite book on pop music, and his novel Perfect Tense is by some distance the best book I have read on office life and the whole thing of commuting into central London from the suburbs. When I first read it there were moments when it seemed uncannily and unnervingly close to home. Michael has his devoted fans, quite rightly, and even Mark E. Smith in Renegade acknowledged Bracewell was “one of the better cultural commentators” and added that “compared to Paul Morley and most other writers Bracewell’s an artist”.

Myself, I think England is Mine is one of the great works of pop art. Published in 1997, its strapline is “Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie”. I suppose that had a wider appeal than “from Powell & Pressburger to Omni Trio and Photek”. What I still love about the book is that Bracewell tore apart the whole linear approach to pop history and had a wonderfully erratic time juxtaposing all sorts of books, films, TV programmes and art alongside music in a wonderfully eccentric way which I am sure made perfect sense to the writer. Importantly, he brought in names hitherto ignored by cultural historians, like Virginia Astley and the Television Personalities, while ignoring nearly all the rock and pop canon. He mentioned things like Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows and Anthony Newley’s The Strange World of Gurney Slade, Pauline Boty and Beat Girl when these were in the wilderness culturally.

He is brilliant on Dexys, particularly on Don’t Stand Me Down. I have a fond memory of a later piece on Dexys Bracewell wrote. This was for the Evening Standard, and I remember reading it admiringly on my commute home from the office (which I suspect Michael would approve of) in September 2003, ahead of a comeback show at the Royal Festival Hall. “This latest outing may just ignite to astonish us all” is how Bracewell ends his full-page article. Oh, it did Michael, it really did. He is great on The Jam too, brilliantly bringing in The Soul of London by Ford Madox Ford, which it took me ages to track down. And only the best pop books contain quotes by Shena Mackay and Stevie Smith!

So, after what seemed a long, long time Bracewell’s fans have been rewarded with two new books in the past few years, courtesy of the White Rabbit imprint. The first, Souvenir, has haunted me more than other book in recent times, which is strange as in so many ways it is unsatisfying. Of late, there have been so many new books you could lose yourself in, by Sarah Winman, Rachel Joyce, Kate Atkinson, Rachel Eliott, Francis Spufford, and so on, books that were often life-changing or at least life-enhancing. Michael’s Souvenir in contrast is a slight, elusive work, but its lingering potency is extraordinary. Going back to Renegade, Mark accuses Bracewell of worrying too much about being over-pretentious. I wonder if he took that to heart? I hope it helped shape Souvenir, and allowed it to be a work that is practically impossible to pin down.

It is billed as being “a vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early ’80s – the last years prior to the rise of the digital city”. How it reads is sort of as commentary on a haphazard series of old snapshots and the memories and mental images they provoke. Thankfully he bucks the trend for including actual photos in the Sebald way, but who has any anyway from back then really? By all accounts it is what remains of a much longer text which has been savagely stripped down to a point where it barely makes sense, which makes it perfect. What it is not is a conventional memoir, thank Christ. It is an ideal antidote to the seemingly endless flood of pop biographies,

As in England is Mine, Bracewell’s modernist pantheon (Auden, Wyndham Lewis, Forster, Betjeman, Eliot, and Pound) seems to haunt the slender book, and I am reminded of lines he wrote for a DVD release of the Paul Kelly and Saint Etienne film Finisterre: “Artists inspired by the ways in which the streets and buildings become encoded with the imprint of their own history. It is a process which is at once compelling and melancholy, and for many Londoners there is always the sense that walking through the city is like walking through the chapters of one’s own autobiography.”

There are wonderful moments in the book where some of Bracewell’s lines (and he is a writer who makes you want to savour certain sentences and passages rather than the book as a whole, like I guess Jack Kerouac’s novels contain moments of illumination when they can as a complete entity grate) prompt personal recollections. So, for example, when he writes of the Elephant & Castle (do I recall he is a fellow alumni of the London College of Printing there, or have I made that up?), the space-age Faraday Memorial and dingy modern offices, and then a halting train to New Cross, and I am reminded of so many landmarks out that way, seen through grimy train windows, ghostly memories and ghost signs, from Howard Jones the Printers to the Downside Worth Fisher Boys Club (“Get there by Network SouthEast”) to the brilliantly bizarre ‘I Feel Like Alan Minter’ graffiti on the embankment between Lewisham and Blackheath. Is it still there hidden by the buddleia? Who knows. And didn’t Jim Connell write most of ‘The Red Flag’ on a train between Charing Cross and New Cross, inspired by a Socialist meeting he had just attended?

One of the great things about Souvenir is the way Bracewell uses lists within the text, and he uses them in such a way that they take on a rhythmic, poetic quality. As for music, well, there is not that much really. One fascinating bit is where he uses Prefab Sprout’s debut single, with its Edie Sedgwick cover, to characterise a change of mood in late 1982, “a fresh pop direction … less stark and elegiac; looser, from the heart, seeking the spring … the new mood unfolds, lush and young and sad,” and so on. He gets this just right. Prefab Sprout would not be my choice of example, for all sorts of aesthetic and personal reasons. Perhaps Aztec Camera, but definitely Pale Fountains.

Intriguingly I do not ever recall Bracewell mentioning Pale Fountains. I would have thought the Roxy Music connection to the name would have piqued his curiosity. He was certainly very aware of Les Disques du Crépescule, the parent company of Pale Fountains’ first label Operation Twilight, which was run by Patrick Moore (better known now as Philip Hoare). The lovely cover of Souvenir seems to show a beat girl who could easily be a Pale Fountains acolyte, but it is I believe one of Florence Henri’s portrait compositions of her friend Margarete Schall, from 1928.

I like the way Bracewell is self-referential and in his writing makes private jokes he knows few will get. At the end of Souvenir he writes of “a young woman, one quiet evening, who was wearing a smart grey jersey dress, business style, and black court shoes. She was standing at the base of this new building, almost beneath it, and pressing herself, lover-like, against one of the tall wide basement windows, twice her height, that formed half the angle of a corner.” This is surely a reference to the cover of Bracewell’s 1988 debut novella The Crypto-Amnesia Club? This and the charming author photo, where Bracewell looks wonderfully like a Factory Records minor character in 1980, were taken by Karen Knorr, who I recall gets a fleeting mention in Souvenir. It seems symbolic the book ends where Bracewell becomes a published author, and can wave goodbye to the office.

Within Souvenir there are descriptions of ‘freak shows’ I would have run a mile from, rather like Dylan’s Mr Jones. But throughout the 120-odd pages there seems verisimilitude. Bracewell has a true observer’s eye for detail, particularly when it comes to clothes, which he always describes with relish, and nowhere is this better seen than in the “dressing like a Vorticist” passage where he beautifully details a visit to Blax the tailors, run by Rosamond Black, who specialised in vintage fashion. Based in Sicilian Avenue, sharing the thoroughfare with the second-hand book shop Skoob, it is easy to see the appeal for Bracewell as a young man exploring this unfashionable part of London.

Souvenir seemed swiftly followed by his short novel Unfinished Business, his first book of fiction in over 20 years. It is another beautiful, slight work, which has great depth nevertheless. There is, for example, a depiction of grief near the end of the book which seems horribly and uncomfortably accurate. The Conclave by Michael Bracewell, first published in 1992, tells the story of the first 30 years in the life of aspirational aesthete Martin Knight, a young man in love with beauty and in love with wealth. Unfinished Business takes up the tale, and when we meet Martin again he is 57, perhaps disappointed, and it is early 2017: “His ageing dark suit, black lace-up shoes, white shirt and nondescript tie pronounced him a lifer in the service of office work.”

The Conclave was quite weighty, a document of its time, while Unfinished Business (and that title works so well in so many ways) is ostensibly featherweight, but contains so much somehow as it zigzags back and forth in time. And there is that conundrum of what is factual, drawn from a writer’s own life and times, and where does fiction start. It is that same thing that is intriguing about Jeremy Cooper’s excellent and provocatively troubling Fitzcarraldo Editions novels, Ash Before Oak and Brian. Does it even matter? No.

The essential Bracewellian themes are present and correct. Martin’s claim to be invisible, “part boast, part incantation”, will resonate with many people in their late 50s and beyond. It has its advantages, sometimes. There are only a small number of musical mentions, but these are exquisitely placed and smartly done. She is not named, but there is a wonderful reference to a memory of Poly Styrene singing ‘I Am A Cliché’. Oddly it was the second unexpected mention of X-Ray Spex I had read by a favourite writer in a short space of time. Nik Cohn was the other one.

I thought I had read all of Nik Cohn’s books. I was wrong. There is a tantalising brief collection of vignettes, The Noise from the Streets, published by No Exit Press digitally in 2014. I had no idea. And it is wonderful. It’s Nik on music’s “possibilities…seductions… mysteries”. Some of it is very familiar. But it is Nik Cohn, and he can conjure up beauty out of nothing. He does. He writes briefly about punk. I don’t ever recall Nik writing about punk before. I could be wrong. He claims he didn’t like punks, but he loved “the rage, the volume, the crudeness, those two-minute explosions of absolute venom.” He would, apparently, shout along with the lyrics and hit the walls whenever ‘Anarchy in the UK’ or anything by the Damned or X-Ray Spex or the Slits came on”. So, there you go.

The other totally brilliant musical mention in Unfinished Business is (an again unnamed) Joy Division, which sort of echoes the start of Paul Rambali’s classic August 1979 NME cover story:  “In front of the intimate stage, though, a gaggle of about a dozen or so modern boys staked out their territorial rights like there was some sort of conspiracy afoot. Minions were dispatched to fetch the pints. The space stage front was jealously guarded. Their spick and span muted green tribal colours set them apart from the otherwise dowdy crowd. They had come, heaven knows where from, for Joy Division.” Again, in the wonderful passage in Unfinished Business, Bracewell is superb at detailing clothes that worn on that occasion: “Reactionary was the new radical; to look exaggeratedly conformist but remote – that was the idea; and the modern should be laced with nostalgia for archaic visions of the future.”

He goes on: “Martin, then not quite twenty years old, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, took strength from suburban order”. This, by the time of England is Mine and Perfect Tense, became a central part of Bracewell’s schtick. Since then he has been excellent on affectionately and affectedly using the suburban base as something of a safe place from which to commute and from where you can head off to explore London’s secrets, which is also how Finisterre the film begins. Importantly, Shena Mackay wrote about the suburbs by basing her stories and characters there, while Michael uses the suburbs as a springboard from which to fly into the city’s mystery, doomed to be an eternal outsider, damned to be forever an observer.

Coincidentally, recently, I came across, a beautiful book put out by Ridinghouse in 2012, featuring selected The Space Between writings on art by Michael Bracewell. Again, I had no idea it had even been published. I am sure I have heard Michael self-deprecatingly claim to be an art tourist with no qualifications to write on the subject. But he writes very well on the subject, or at least in a way that is appealing to an imposter like me, out of their comfort zone in such a rarified atmosphere. Then again, the dizzying unknown can be intoxicating, something I have felt ever since reading that 1979 essay by Penny Reel on his mod past which it took me years to decode.

Through a lovely quirk of fate I found The Space Between shortly after reading Jeremy Cooper’s book Bolt from the Blue which is based on the erratic correspondence between ‘young British artist’ Lynn Gallagher and her mum back home in the Birmingham suburbs. And that correspondence was mostly in the form of postcards, which seems something of an obsession of Cooper’s. I have a gorgeous book he put together of artists’ postcards from 1960 to the present day for a British Museum exhibition. Anyway, I half expected Lynn to turn up in Bracewell’s book too. She doesn’t, but it covers a lot of ground, from Stuart Sutcliffe and Astrid Kirchherr to Gilbert and George.

Michael’s beautifully illustrated and very diverse pieces on art are fascinatingly bookended. The text starts with a revealing interview with Bracewell, conducted by editor Doro Globus. The book ends with some sort of experimental, fragmentary autobiographical essays. One takes the form of an unfinished letter to W. H. Auden, in the spirit of Auden’s own letter to Lord Byron, which I seem to remember was partly quoted in The Conclave. Bracewell says he nearly wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald instead (I guess ‘Dear Scott’ would have been rather too informal for that?). In the book’s opening interview Michael claims: “Cut me and I bleed Fitzgerald”. He expresses to Lord Byron a love of Scott’s autobiographical essays, ‘My Lost City’, ‘Early Success’ and ‘The Crack-Up’.

One thing that strikes me about The Space Between is how much I have a fondness for the way Bracewell revisits ideas, text, quotes, very suitable if you “dig repetition”. So, for example, there is a passage from Flaubert’s letters which goes: “You must be regular and natural in your habits, like a bourgeois, that you may be violent and original in your work.” It is a great quote, undoubtedly, and I suspect Michael has it tattooed on his heart. He has certainly used it a number of times, one way and another, from Perfect Tense to pieces about Bridget Riley and Gilbert and George.

Then in those closing autobiographical essays, the one about college days, there is a fleeting appearance by “an olive-skinned young man with neatly cut black hair, who was wearing a white shirt, a thin, claret-coloured tie, and a green jacket of light tweed.” The same youth reappears, elusive as ever, in Unfinished Business, when Martin reflects on his days at polytechnic in Liverpool in the late 1970s. Oddly, perhaps, there is no mention of Martin going to Eric’s or ever encountering any of the city’s characters in a tearoom, or later in Plato’s Ballroom.

In The Space Between there is a great piece about the paintings of Ged Quinn, but (and this is refreshing) there are no biographical details and certainly no mention of the artist’s time in the Wild Swans. Somehow you get to the stage where you assume everyone is familiar with the records that have changed your life (like the Wild Swans’ ‘Revolutionary Spirit’). There is no reason why they should be. But I suspect Bracewell would have shared plenty of common ground with Paul Simpson and Ged Quinn when it came to books and films and clothes. There was shared interest in the young men of the 1920s and the 1930s, and their clothes and haircuts. Did Martin ever get his hair cut at Victor’s? These things matter.

For those of us who seem to end up in the dusty, forgotten corners wherever we go, can I recommend Play What’s Not There, a Michael Bracewell talk or presentation which is on Spotify, and which tied-in with a 2014 exhibition at Raven Row. What it is doing on Spotify, I have no idea, but it’s great. There are all sorts of familiar Bracewellian themes, tropes, tenets, and it meanders all over the place wonderfully. I like the title: from the Debussy of The Space Between to the Miles Davis of Play What’s Not There. Is Bracewell a fan of Miles? Does he dwell on the corner of Miles and Gil? I can imagine him being a big fan of Gil somehow.

Gil, incidentally, did a very early instrumental version of ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ in 1959 for his Great Jazz Standards LP (there is an irony there somewhere), a classic record, and this version is slow and sombre and stately and sad and weary, with the trombone taking the lead, like it would do a little later with ‘Where Flamingos Fly’ on Gil’s Out of the Cool, a record you can imagine Bracewell admiring immensely, if only for the way Gil appears on the cover, 50-ish, extremely dapper in his exquisitely cut black suit, white shirt, nondescript tie, with hair neatly parted, the artistic setting where it looks as though a screen has been ripped apart and Gil exposed, caught in the act.