Aug 27: Music Books #7: "Good Pop, Bad Pop"

 There’s something really beautiful about using your life as raw material and making it into something that, if you do it right, it’s like a thing that’s there for ever and people can access it and it will do something for them.

Jarvis Cocker

I met Jarvis a few years ago in St. Pancras Station. I've seen him quite a few times heading to or from the Eurostar check-in with guitars and other luggage over the years.

The newspaper has an interview with Jarvis by Olivia Laing and there are plenty of mentions of the importance of the quotidian and the everyday in influencing his music, and that of others.

Jarvis' excellent book here is about his start in music and the influences of the everyday. It is similar to some of the work of Jonathan Meades.

This takes Jarvis back to his early days and is an inventory of some of the objects that remind him of different stages in his career.

There's a strong element of everyday geographies here too, and the ephemera that we collect. He shares images of items, and the design is nice as it changes from format to format throughout the book with lots of pictures e.g. early posters from familiar Sheffield venues such as the Leadmill, Hallamshire Hotel and the 1980s 'fun pubs' that I remember (avoiding).

Jarvis has been the frontman for Pulp for decades. My friend Simon saw him in New Zealand with Pulp playing live and said it was one of his favourite concerts - and he's seen Led Zeppelin and all the greats play live.

He has also worked on a couple of films with Wes Anderson.

I have a signed copy of the hardback first edition of the book and am going to get deeper into it to add something more substantial as a response to the book. I liked the memories of the hole in t' road.

Music is just organised noise.

Jun 1: A song you like with a colour in the title...

There's plenty of songs that I could have gone for here. This is an easy way in to the challenge, although the challenge is thinking of one that you particularly like or stands out in some way.

I'm going to go for quite a challenging one: 'Red Sector A' by Canadian band Rush.

The vocalist, bassist and keyboard player is Geddy Lee. 

His family was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, and survived to be liberated.

It's worth reading Geddy's autobiography: 'My Effing Life' which goes into a lot more detail on this. You can listen to it if you have Spotify.

Neil Peart, the lyricist describes the writing of the lyrics to the song:

I read a first person account of someone who had survived the whole system of trains and work camps and Bergen-Belsen and all of that (...) through first person accounts from other people who came out at the end of it, always glad to be alive, which again was the essence of grace, grace under pressure is that through all of it, these people never gave up the strong will to survive, through the utmost horror, and total physical privations of all kinds.

...I wanted to take a little bit out of being specific and, and just describe the circumstances and try to look at the way people responded to it, and another really important and to me really moving image that I got from a lot of these accounts was that at the end of it, these people of course had been totally isolated from the rest of the world, from their families, from any news at all, and they, in cases that I read, believed that they were the last people surviving.

What are your ideas for songs with colours in the title?

I've made a Google Form to capture some of your ideas.

I'll leave it up a while and share the results later in the year and update the post as well.