Something Remains
I sit here in one of Birmingham's independent coffee-shops. This one has WiFi, and so I have brought along my laptop to which I occasionally pay attention between moves of almost-Scrabble on my phone device and ploughing through the stack of newspapers to my right (it has been a newspaper-heavy week for me. I tend to buy one newspaper a week normally, and that takes me a few days to get through because I try to read everything. Well, not the Financial Section or the Sports Supplement, obviously. Time is short, my friends. Sometimes we buy a Sunday newspaper too - last weekend I did so as a simultaneous reward to the Guardian Media Group for their efforts on the phone-hacking scandal, and a protest against the final issue of the News of the World, which sold like gold-dust. What with papers and magazines and comics and the internet - Twitter especially - books rarely get a look-in in my life nowadays. This must change. Perhaps if the news could stop being so damned interesting and important?).
I am here alone. Liz is off seeing a film with a friend. This doesn't happen very often and she'll probably need picking up soon. I hope she enjoyed the film. Meanwhile I am here alone and so laptops and newspapers and Grant Morrison's The Filth and everyone on the internet are my exclusive company.
This independent coffee-shop trapped and teased us aurally, the last time we were here. I think they tend to play Absolute Radio and the music on there varies. Last time we visited, the music lured us in with an excellent set of songs by admirable artists, before all the bilge started. I tweeted about the whole thing and included the coffee-shop in on the tweets, so the ensuing narrative would appear on the coffee-shop's Twitter-wall that they have in the corner. I drew parallels with reparations and the Treaty of Versailles. It seemed to make sense at the time.
Someone here is discussing M Night Shyamalan. Must tune it out...
I've mostly zoned out from the music they've been playing today. If I did nothing but paid attention to the music, my paper-reading would take a hit. But I recognised something they were playing and I tuned in over the sound of the refrigerator purring and the caffeine apparatus chuntering away in the background.
It was Amy Winehouse's "Tears Dry On Their Own".
I was never that big a fan of Amy; I didn't think the booze and the drugs were funny, neither did I consider so the UK tabloids' eagle-eye concentration on the issue, all too often exacerbating the problem. Liz bought her first album and I tried listening to it a few times when it came out, but it wasn't really my bag. When her second album (Back to Black) hit like a neutron-bomb I stayed away to begin with, a natural instinctive reflex to shy away from everything everyone else can't get enough of taking over my normal curiosity (and Liz's recommendations). Ask me sometime about what I think of Gavin and Stacey. Better yet, do not.
I thought "good on her" when she seemed to make an impressive stab at taking America, traditionally the hurdle over which many UK top artists stumble and collapse upon like a sacrificial lamb before returning to Britain and licking their wounds. There aren't many that took America. You can count them on one hand if you've lost a few fingers.
Eventually the radioactive half-life of popularity wore off a little with me and I listened a bit more. I never managed to become the hugest fan - maybe I still will, maybe I won't - but you can't deny the brilliance of that second album in places. Much of that may be down to Mark Ronson but he can't take all the credit, even he wanted to. But it's out there now, this work of brilliance, this legacy, untainted by whatever else she chose to do in her life or things that were done to her.
It felt important to listen after hearing about her unnaturally young death yesterday, at this time still unexplained but assumed by most (probably correctly) to be drink and/or drug-related. The song was a black echo in the air, like some last trace of her hanging around for a few minutes to remind people of the things she had done before she departed.
I heard recently that The Verve owe a lot of their continued success with the Urban Hymns album to the death of Princess Diana. For a few months (though it seemed a lot longer), the whole country descended into mass hysteria and what seemed at the time like almost unanimous grief (a few columnists, in fact, have drawn parallels between then and now; then, we were as hired mourners, beating our breasts and tearing our hair at the graveside of someone none of us had ever known, who did not ask for this affection - now, we are a TwitterRage writ large, demanding more and more resignations, admittances of guilt, endless coverage of the phone-hacking scandal). We needed sad, slow, appropriately respectful music on the radio. Anything else, it would appear, would be an insult. So it was that The Verve's "The Drugs Don't Work" was deemed fitting, just mournful enough, unintrusive, at least a blessed break from Elton John's Candle In The Wind Redux (another who benefitted). So the story went, the success of the song - so needed after Bittersweet Symphony, which nicked a gimmick from an existing band - was in no insignificant part helped by the passing of this princess.
What we see now is a microcosm of that; for a few days, we must all occasionally pay tribute to Amy, in both the songs we choose to play on the radio and those we do not (massmarket songs that address Norway being mercifully thin on the ground).
It is a respectful silence as the coffin goes by.
I am here alone. Liz is off seeing a film with a friend. This doesn't happen very often and she'll probably need picking up soon. I hope she enjoyed the film. Meanwhile I am here alone and so laptops and newspapers and Grant Morrison's The Filth and everyone on the internet are my exclusive company.
This independent coffee-shop trapped and teased us aurally, the last time we were here. I think they tend to play Absolute Radio and the music on there varies. Last time we visited, the music lured us in with an excellent set of songs by admirable artists, before all the bilge started. I tweeted about the whole thing and included the coffee-shop in on the tweets, so the ensuing narrative would appear on the coffee-shop's Twitter-wall that they have in the corner. I drew parallels with reparations and the Treaty of Versailles. It seemed to make sense at the time.
Someone here is discussing M Night Shyamalan. Must tune it out...
I've mostly zoned out from the music they've been playing today. If I did nothing but paid attention to the music, my paper-reading would take a hit. But I recognised something they were playing and I tuned in over the sound of the refrigerator purring and the caffeine apparatus chuntering away in the background.
It was Amy Winehouse's "Tears Dry On Their Own".
I was never that big a fan of Amy; I didn't think the booze and the drugs were funny, neither did I consider so the UK tabloids' eagle-eye concentration on the issue, all too often exacerbating the problem. Liz bought her first album and I tried listening to it a few times when it came out, but it wasn't really my bag. When her second album (Back to Black) hit like a neutron-bomb I stayed away to begin with, a natural instinctive reflex to shy away from everything everyone else can't get enough of taking over my normal curiosity (and Liz's recommendations). Ask me sometime about what I think of Gavin and Stacey. Better yet, do not.
I thought "good on her" when she seemed to make an impressive stab at taking America, traditionally the hurdle over which many UK top artists stumble and collapse upon like a sacrificial lamb before returning to Britain and licking their wounds. There aren't many that took America. You can count them on one hand if you've lost a few fingers.
Eventually the radioactive half-life of popularity wore off a little with me and I listened a bit more. I never managed to become the hugest fan - maybe I still will, maybe I won't - but you can't deny the brilliance of that second album in places. Much of that may be down to Mark Ronson but he can't take all the credit, even he wanted to. But it's out there now, this work of brilliance, this legacy, untainted by whatever else she chose to do in her life or things that were done to her.
It felt important to listen after hearing about her unnaturally young death yesterday, at this time still unexplained but assumed by most (probably correctly) to be drink and/or drug-related. The song was a black echo in the air, like some last trace of her hanging around for a few minutes to remind people of the things she had done before she departed.
I heard recently that The Verve owe a lot of their continued success with the Urban Hymns album to the death of Princess Diana. For a few months (though it seemed a lot longer), the whole country descended into mass hysteria and what seemed at the time like almost unanimous grief (a few columnists, in fact, have drawn parallels between then and now; then, we were as hired mourners, beating our breasts and tearing our hair at the graveside of someone none of us had ever known, who did not ask for this affection - now, we are a TwitterRage writ large, demanding more and more resignations, admittances of guilt, endless coverage of the phone-hacking scandal). We needed sad, slow, appropriately respectful music on the radio. Anything else, it would appear, would be an insult. So it was that The Verve's "The Drugs Don't Work" was deemed fitting, just mournful enough, unintrusive, at least a blessed break from Elton John's Candle In The Wind Redux (another who benefitted). So the story went, the success of the song - so needed after Bittersweet Symphony, which nicked a gimmick from an existing band - was in no insignificant part helped by the passing of this princess.
What we see now is a microcosm of that; for a few days, we must all occasionally pay tribute to Amy, in both the songs we choose to play on the radio and those we do not (massmarket songs that address Norway being mercifully thin on the ground).
It is a respectful silence as the coffin goes by.