…and let’s face it, hardly anyone’s interested in. Stuff I’ve been consuming this week

After less than the first chapter, I realised I couldn’t bear to re-read Derek Raymond’s influential and epically murky crime novel I Was Dora Suarez. The repulsion it evokes – which apparently made Raymond’s publisher vomit at his desk and drop the author (real name Robin Cook, not that one) from his company – may be brilliantly Jacobean and have inspired the likes of Stuart MacBride and to some extent my own novel Guttered, but no: not even for technical research reasons. 

Fourth and final book in the Factory series of crime novels, all of which I have read and enthused about in the past, I Was Dora Suarez begins with the horrific murder of a prostitute and her neighbour. It’s not prurient, but the ornate descriptive horror is for when I was younger and more robust, or indifferent, or stupid. Especially because, as the awful details in the first few pages mount, I remembered roughly what happens later. And that’s even worse.

On then to some non-fiction, and I was transfixed by Hungry Beat: The Scottish Pop Independent Underground Movement, 1977-84, by Douglas Macintyre, Grant McPhee and Neil Cooper. I read it on Kindle as it was available for £3.99 as opposed to £15 for the hardback, but beware: it’s an ‘oral history’ which means it’s essentially transcribed interviews, many from Grant McPhee’s Big Gold Dream film, linked editorially, and the formatting is not (typically for an e-book) ideal. I’m assuming the use of bold, italic and different fonts makes the paper book much easier to follow, especially when it comes to timelines.

Despite that, for someone who kind of parachuted into the Glasgow music scene in late 1984 (first review for Melody Maker was Iron Maiden at the Apollo) Hungry Beat was revelatory. Essentially the story of Postcard Records on the west coast and Fast Product on the east, it features many movers and shakers I later came to know, if not well, and explains a lot about why they were who they were and how they got there. Two would-be svengalis, Alan Horne in Glasgow and Bob Last in Edinburgh, emerge as objects of real fascination and creative power, although the book rightly points up the enormous and less-recognised contribution to Postcard and Fast of, respectively, Edwyn Collins and Hilary Morrison. And the failures of character and action in both Horne and Last.

But the casualties fascinate me. The addictions and deaths are one thing, but there is also the less dramatic fading and flickering into glum everyday life of one-time would-be superstars, talents ruthlessly dispensed with, nearly-stars who were just unlucky or out of their time. Where are they? What happened to them? Are they married with grandbairns and National Entitlement Cards?

The story of Bourgie Bourgie and Jazzateers is (I’m sure unintentionally) a real-life Scottish Spinal Tap, told by Ian Burgoyne and Keith Band in this book with exactly the same grumpy reluctance I remember from conducting a dreadful interview with the last manifestation of Jazzateers in (I think) 1986. I mean, how many lead singers, musical styles, record contracts and names can a group go through in six months? Answers on a Postcard.

It’s a big book, full of golden anecdotes about 185 West Princes Street, chocolate guitars on Top of the Pops, and revelations such as the fact that Derek Jarman made a hilariously oiled-up homoerotic video for Orange Juice’s finest song, What Presence? Featuring, among others, Jayne County.

Hungry Beat sent me scurrying through YouTube, Tidal and Spotify to listen again to the bloodthirsty scratchiness of The Scars, the poised brilliance of the young Roddy Frame’s We Could Send Letters, the hilarious art-japes of Bob Last such as the Frank Hannaway and Michael Barclay At Home LP (electronic accordion playing standards meets icily abrasive neo-punk guitar) and much more.

All of which meant the arrival of the first seven-inch record I’ve bought for decades seemed portentous, featuring as it does Paul Haig, one of the chief figures, via Josef K, in Hungry Beat. The single Come Throw Yourself Under the Monstrous Wheels of the Rock’n’Roll Juggernaut As It Approaches Destruction, by Nigel Sleaford’s Juggernauts, has buzzed around my head all through the decades since its release in the late 1980s on Alan Campbell’s Supreme International Editions label. I believe Nigel has been teaching music in north-east Scotland for the past while. It’s crazed Edinburgh art-rockabilly perfection. Come, give yourself to the rock machine!

What else?

I’m grateful to Martha for bringing me these Spanish fried-egg flavour crisps. But, to be honest, they taste a little too accurately of elderly egg for comfort. It’s back to the sour cream and chives Pringles.

Oh, and it’s midsummer in Shetland, which means it’s dull, dreich and raining sporadically. However, there have been a few hot days, so the Ooni pizza oven and the home-made barbecue have been deployed. Here’s a couple of Island Deli smoked haddock fishcakes, which turned out extremely well.

Finally, we watched the whole of Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, the BBC documentary series which looks at ‘The Troubles’ through the individual stories of those who have lived through them. And often, as a result, had to deal with their loved ones dying in the most horrific circumstances.

Some of it was intensely moving, though I occasionally wanted more context, more timeline history. The Omagh bombing, for example, seemed to lurk, unmentioned and invisible, over the later episodes. And the mannered, post-modern showing of pre- and post-interview comments and nervous conversation by the participants grew annoying. 

Patrick Kielty, comedian and TV presenter, whose father was murdered by Protestant paramilitaries, was inevitably much more in control of the interview situation. Terri Hooley from the Good Vibrations record shop and label in Belfast wasn’t given enough time and space. If you haven’t seen the feature film Good Vibrations, it’s worth a download, even if just for Jodie Whittaker with an Ulster accent.