Filthy Euros 2012, Quarter Finals

1. Czech vs Portugal

Brief introduction From now till the end of the Euros, I will be running my own parallel competition: if footballs were replaced with swears, who would win Euro 2012?

I will use the most careful and rigorous analytic techniques to weigh the rivals in each match and from this make a scientific prediction as to who will win*.

This does, of course, effectively pre-suppose some kind of correlation between national swearing and football prowess. Well, as the author of Filthy English, I do regularly find myself being asked by interviewers: so which country does the best swearing?

My answer is always the same: the final would be between England and Bosnia and England would shade it. As Bosnia aren’t in these finals, that leaves England with a clear run. In my gag world, anyway.

In the real — well, you know what I mean — we have today’s quarter final, a west vs east match-off. (Though I’m fairly sure, actually, that Czechs think of themselves as in the west. So don’t tell them what I’ve written.) So how do the two national swearing corpuses add up?

Czech first. This being a contest based on nationality, I offer in evidence a selection of national slurs. To Czechs, a Hungarian is a uher (pimple), an Italian is a makaróni and an Australian is a protino_cí (someone with legs which go opposite ways - it's a reference to that country being on the reverse side of the world).

Now Portugal. The national favourite swear is filho de puta — the direct equivalent of hijo de puta in Spanish. Son of a whore. I quote myself, page 139 of Filthy English.
 

It's used all the time but can be either very strong or almost friendly. In English, ‘you cunt’ is similar - context and tone are all. In 2007, Jose Mourinho, then manager of Chelsea, tried to explain why he'd informed an official that he was a son of a whore. He found himself tripped up by the way the phrase's strength varies according to context and intent. 'The word can be abusive if you perceive it to be abusive,' he said. 'I say it to myself. I say it to my players, that word which I don't want to repeat.' 

So who’s the winner there? Who will be the first team to make it through to the Euro Swear 2012 semis?

I reckon the Czech swears indicate a breadth and depth of talent, mostly focussed on elevating the self above the others. (Czech antipathies also focus on the Russians. So, having triumphed over them already by getting out of the group, it’s probable that their animus/anima has been diluted.) The Portuguese insult, while simple, shows a capacity for innovation and variation from a very narrow base.

Prediction: Portugal to go through to the next round.

* To put it another way, I’ll be giving national examples of swearing and cracking gags and generally winging it.

Tomorrow The second quarter final: Germany vs Greece

A place of memory and desire, part six

On being Irish. In my dreams, anyway . . .

As I was later friends with Phil Chevron and much of the rest of the Camden Town Irish music business murphia, I suppose I got to dream that dream in a refracted but real way. Which leads me back to the Radiators’ Sound City Beat. For the first time, substance has been placed in that part of my dreamworld. I now really do have a feel for what it might have been like for me if my family had stayed in Ireland and I’d grown up in Dublin rather than London and its satellite towns.

It’s now as if I actually got to see all the bands that Phil hymns in his sleevenotes. Oh, the Hootenannys, now they were grand. And the showbands, some of your men there were real players . . .*

As fictitious as all that is, it feels like a genuine sense of completion. Thanks Phil etc. If it weren’t for you, I’d have had to consider employing the services of Rekall Incorporated. You know, the ones who guarantee they will remember it for you wholesale.

Which still, though, leaves another genuine alternative past for me, constructed from a mix of historical truths and imagined possibilities. In this one, I grow up in Liverpool, see the Beatles play the Cavern, go to the same school as Lennon and McCartney. Really, honestly, I’m not joking. It could have happened. Easily. A little decision here, a little change of mind there and that could have been my teenage life.

Also, if things had turned out a little different, I could even have grown up in Bray and, instead of being flown in from London to see the Radiators, I would have already been there, twenty-four years old and enthused about this bunch of Dublin punks coming down for a Sunday afternoon seaside show. So maybe when I did see the Radiators that day, they were also creating for me a memory I could have had. Only I didn’t yet know that.

Memory and desire. Who would want to move beyond them? Why?

* Actually, I did get to see a showband play, at a marquee show in Monstarevin. If you never got to see a showband in a country marquee show, you missed something, believe. Another band played that night, too, for the younger people. Maybe it was the Horslips, maybe Thin Lizzy. I can’t be sure. But I am sure that, myself aside, they were the only ones there with shoulder-length hair. Such things mattered, of course.

Next My cursed contribution to the Euro championships. I pose and answer the question: if Euro 2012 was based not on football but swearing prowess, who would win? Later today, the first quarter final: Czech vs Portugal.

A place of memory and desire, part five

Those further memories . . .

Last Saturday having been Bloomsday, I got to thinking about Dublin and me and how that might relate to the matter at hand, Sound City Beat, a new album by the Radiators from Space, a Dublin punk band.

(As I write this, I’m listening to another memory of Dublin, a live performance by Glen Hansard — who has just, of course, had his own fairytale of New York, winning Tonys for Once.)

Now, faced with forms requesting my religion and/or nationality, I do one of two things. If it’s in person, I have a teasing habit of putting myself down as a transgendering black woman and seeing how the official reacts. If they demur, I’ll say something like: well, inside, I’ve always felt like Aretha Franklin and isn’t this meant to be about self-description? Plus aren’t you looking to boost your minorities quota? Put me down in the loopy-loo column, too, if it’s any help.

If I am filling in the form at home, though, I tend to write something like: Jewish-ish* Catholic atheist north Londoner**. If I’m feeling frisky/facetious, I’ll add the old (but accurate) Nik Cohn line: and typical of the sort.

The fact is, though, I’m as much Irish by descent as anything else. Yet I didn’t actually visit the place till I was at university. I arrived in Dublin on the Liverpool night ferry with a head full of two versions of the city.

One was from my reading — Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien etc etc. I didn’t expect to actually meet them but I did expect to encounter memory traces of them. So I was disappointed there.

The other Dublin in my head was my grandmother’s. She’d left there before the first world war — when the English were still in power. Though she’d been back since, she still saw the city through the eyes of a poverty-blighted young girl just up from the boglands. To her, Dublin was a city of lights. So I was disappointed there, too.

Still, I know that at some level I had a fantasy of what it would be like to have grown up Irish in Ireland. As a Dubliner in Dublin perhaps, rather than an East End overspiller in the Home Counties, with ties to north London Irishness. In dreams begin possibilities . . .

* By marriage and, therefore, parenthood.

** Serious moment. In all the discussion of Scottish independence and English identity, I think a big point is missed. There are no English in England. Rather there are a variety of sometimes overlapping regional/local identities. Yorkshireman/woman. Cornish. Scouse. Sarf Landahner. Etc etc. I think that’s why it’s so hard to pin down an English identity. It’s simply not there to pin. The Milibands are not just neighbours of mine. They come from a similar cultural and social and historical place/space. And that’s identity. Class comes into it, of course. But that’s another bucket of memories and desires.

Next (and last of this series) My other lives.

A place of memory and desire, part four

First the memory bit . . .

(Recap for newcomers: I’m writing about Sound City Beat, a new album by the Radiators from Space, a Dublin punk band.)

I was one of the first people to write about the Radiators From Space. Certainly the first in England. They’d been signed to Chiswick records. I was a journalist on Sounds magazine. I was friends with Roger Armstrong and Ted Carroll of Chiswick records. They flew me out to Dublin so I would write about the Radiators.

Corrupt? Well, yes, in a way. But, no, not at all really. Music journalists — in those days, anyway — prided themselves on being able to take the hand that fed them and chew it right off, up to the elbow and beyond.

I wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t thought it was worth going and the magazine wouldn’t have agreed to it if they didn’t think it was worth a shot.

So I saw the Radiators play at . . . well, I think it was in Bray but I can’t quite remember where in that seaside town. I do remember, though, that it was a Sunday afternoon gig and I’m fairly certain it was arranged entirely for my benefit.

Or rather for the benefit of someone who was representing a London music paper that could — and did — regularly transform the careers and lives of pop musicians. We didn’t create their talent but we did turn a light on them. Sometimes we were right. Sometimes we were wrong. Sometimes the public agreed with us. Sometimes they disagreed with us. Sometimes the public was wrong. Sometimes they were right.

I wrote enthusiastically about the Radiators. Economists put incentives at the heart of human motivation. So, however right I might think (and still do think) my judgment was, it would be wrong of me not to acknowledge that such positivity was also a logical response to incentives. Simply, if you enthused about a band, you had more chance of it being a big story in the paper, maybe even a cover story.

I meant what I wrote, though. They really were worth enthusing over. They were one of the first Irish punk/new wave bands. At this distance, I can’t remember for certain whether this was before or after I saw the Boomtown Rats play in, I think, the basement that became the Arts Theatre — drawn there by their quite wonderful PR BP Fallon*. The timings were close, though. And I’m sure I’ll be corrected by someone.

The Radiators made one lively punk album which didn’t really sell what they’d hoped. Probably, it was neither simplistic nor arty enough for the contemporary market. It wasn’t yet another Ramones-based thrash or suburban rant. Punk’s first rank aside, that is pretty much what was selling then.

So they did a poppier and smarter record with Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti but that didn’t work either. I remember being in the studio and feeling there was something wrong with it but I couldn’t say what. I just knew that it would be lucky to find much a wide audience. I couldn’t explain why — then or now. So I shut up. For once.

Then things fell apart. I don’t know how or exactly why. Though I’d become friends with Phil Chevron, we didn’t see each other much around this time. Most of the band, I think, drifted back to Ireland. He stayed around and, in time, took a place at the heart of the Pogues — and, by extension, in the hearts of Pogues fans.

* Former Led Zeppelin PR, semi-professional Irishmen (only semi because it was mostly instinctive rather than considered — mostly anyway), he later took to walking up behind you in a club, hooking an arm round your neck, causing you to gasp in surprise and sniff up the popper he’d just cracked under your nose. Now there’s charm for you. He’s not a big fella, either.

Next More memory. Some desire, too.

A place of memory and desire, part three

Surely, being beyond memory and desire is to cease being human. Dead, that is. To nick a line from — to nick a Bob Dylan encomium — def poet Andrew Marvell, it might well be a fine and private place but none, I think, do there embrace.

At the very least, the only route to that place beyond memory and desire is via memory and desire. Or, to put it another way, the only possible way to frame and explore what you might see or hear or smell in that place beyond memory and desire is through the prism of your memory and desire — if not necessarily in that order.

And so — obviously — to Sound City Beat by the Radiators From Space. It’s an album on Chiswick Records and, to declare an interest, I offered to part fund it. Or rather when they were looking for part-funders, I put my hand up, modestly. They didn’t call in the cash, though. They found another way to raise the money.

Some questions you might want to see answered . . .

Who are the Radiators From Space? An Irish punk-period pop band. They made a couple of albums then . . . well, you know how things go.

Should I know anything else about them? Guitarist and songwriter Philip Chevron was an important Pogue.

What’s so special about Sound City Beat? It’s a collection of their versions of tracks made by Irish groups in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Isn’t that rather dull sounding, academic even? I understand your worries, of course, but actually it’s wonderful. None of the tracks are recreations. They are all re-creations.

Er? Take the first track. It’s one of the best, of course. First tracks always are. They take the Movement’s Head For The Sun — no, I’d never heard of band or song, either — and they dip it in a pond of Ramonesness. So you have a 1970s punk group some 35 years on looking back at 1960s Dublin through the prism of mid-1970s Manhattan — and mid-1970s Dublin visions of that American dream.

A mix of memory and desire? Exactly.

Other examples? Rory Gallagher’s It’s Happened Before stripped of its progressive framing and recast as a beat group song. Thin Lizzy’s Dublin — which highlights Phil Lynott’s real, if modest, qualities as a poet — is given new poignancy with the words read by someone whose name I can’t recall for the moment . . . I left the CD in another part of the country so, in writing this, I’m relying on those two trusted tools, memory and desire. But sometimes, of course, particularly as you get older, they can’t help but let you down.

Any songs on the album that I might actually know? Yes. Them’s Gloria. It’s not an original take on it or anything but, cut live, it does reflect something of the younger Radiators. There is also, their take on Ian Whitcomb & Bluesville’s You Turn Me On. Though it doesn’t mean much to English listeners, it was a big hit in the US — number eight in 1965, I’m informed. The Radiators refract it through their memories of Whitcomb’s true desires. Or, at least through their knowledge of Whitcomb’s true love, early 20th century music — I have a CD of his recreations of what the bands would have been playing on the Titanic. So they play Whitcomb’s US rocker hit on a ukulele — as an imaginative leap of how he might himself have first played it in his rooms at Trinity College, Dublin.

Again, doesn’t that sound somewhat academic? Trust me, it isn’t. Like I said, it’s a wonderful record, not just in its imaginative re-imagining of a lost world of 1960s Dublin popsters but in its own right. Plus everything is so capably explained and explored in sleeve notes by Phil Chevron (qv) and Ted Carroll.

Aren’t they friends of yours? Er, yes. But don’t hold that against them. Or set that fact against my judgment of the record.

Is that, as Leiber & Stoller had it, all there is? No . . .

Next up The Radiators, my memories and my desires

A place of memory and desire, part two

What is this place of memory and desire? Dublin in the 1960s.

But I’ll leave that for a moment and make a couple of points about the phrase itself. Bion’s version anyway. That’s the one about entering a place between memory and desire.

Point one Not that it should stop anyone using or abusing the phrase — that’s democracy, progress and fun — but Bion was using it in a very specific technical sense. He was describing the ideal mental and emotional stance of a psychoanalyst towards his/her patient/client. It was effectively the same thing Freud called free-floating attention or reverie. The idea is that then, quite simply, you are freed to notice stuff you wouldn’t normally notice — essentially, by putting off structuring it or analysing it. Bion wasn’t suggesting that we spend our whole lives in a place beyond memory and desire.

Point two Actually, maybe he was saying — or, at least, thinking — exactly that. The more I read/heard about Bion, the more I became convinced/concerned that he was part of the mystical wing of psychoanalysis. There is, isn’t there, something inherently, well, puffed-up about the phrase ‘beyond memory or desire’. Bit too mystical and eastern and, yeeeeugh, holistic for me. I’m all for a bit of yoga and that but, honestly, frankly, aren’t emptied heads nearly always empty heads.

Next I turn Bion upside down — and steal what falls out of his pockets.

A place of memory and desire, part one . . .

One of pop’s small but consistent pleasures is the way intellectual/academic concepts have been grist for its self-regard mill.

The Rolling Stones recasting Bulgakov’s Master & Margarita. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark flipping David Watkin’s 1977 book Morality & Architecture for the title of their second album. Just about anything Green did for/with Scritti Politti — starting with nicking the band name from the collected writings of the Italian neo-Marxist Gramsci.

Or the NME right through the 1980s when it was a rare article that didn’t quote some French structuralist thinker or other. Honestly, there was often as much about Derrida or Kristeva as there was about, say, the Smiths. Now I am far from being an expert on such philosophising but on the few occasions when I did know of what they were writing about, they generally got it somewhat — to drop into technical language, for a moment — arse about face.

Some, therefore, might call these intellectual references as specious or pretentious even. I wouldn’t, though. To me, they were as much a part of the pop game as, say, gold lamé jackets. Not dissimilar, either, in a way. It was a showing-off thing, a peacock display. And all the more wonderful for it. Pop without dumb display would be . . . well, it wouldn’t be pop.

The fact that it was almost invariably done by young men who hadn’t actually done any formal or thorough study of these matters only added to the piquancy of their appropriations. Building songs on a fine-grained appreciation of, say, Lacan’s mirror stage would, frankly, have a limited audience. However, saying that’s what you were doing but — because you’ve never actually really, like, you know, read more than a page or two of Lacan — then just writing a song about your ex-girlfriend and how she liked to look in the mirror, well, that makes sense.

Fine artists get away with that kind of stuff all the time. Read their notes on their shows. It’s like they’ve eaten an intellectual text then regurgitated and put the upthrowings down on paper. Again, I wholeheartedly approve. Just because a joke is on its cracker doesn’t mean it’s not genuinely funny.

Which is all by way of saying that I miss these intellectual sprayings on pop’s simple self. And also by way of justifying the heading for this posting.

I know it’s a misappropriation of something said by Bion — British psychoanalyst who first learned his trade as a WW1 tank officer and went a little Kalifornia kookie in the 1960s. I also know he got it from TS Eliot: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding. Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. Memory and desire, stirring . . .’

I also know that it has a history of popular appropriation. Stephen Duffy — once known as Tin Tin, now resident of Falmouth — called his (kind of) greatest hits collection Memory and Desire: Thirty Years in the Wilderness. (Duffy’s band, Lilac Time, didn’t, it seems take their name from that Eliot fragment but from a phrase in Nick Drake’s River Man — though it’s also possible that Drake was himself referencing Eliot.)

Which is . . . pretty much the introduction to my introduction. That’s what happens when I don’t post too often. It’s all too easy to write too much.

Next (and soon) The actual introduction to this posting, followed by the posting itself. And what’s that about? A new record by the Radiators. Come back tomorrow.