Book review: The Times, 29th March, 2008
GIG, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A ROCK-STAR FANTASIST by Simon Armitage.
Viking, £16.99, 304 pp.
The post-punk kids are all grown up now. And - hey ho, let's go - they're writing memoirs that are just as we'd hoped: knowing, brattish, off-kilter.
Simon Armitage, born in 1963, is of his age. He might stare out moodily from the covers of a million (and counting) GCSE poetry anthologies, looking for all the world a proper poet, but there's a safety pin ever stuck in his heart for the cultural insurrection that was punk.
Treading the non-mean streets of Marsden, West Yorkshire, Armitage was not, 'a proper f***-off punk with a cockatoo hairdo and DESTROY tattooed across my forehead'. No, in his replica ox-blood Doc Martens and sister's baggy jumper, Armitage rightly saw punk as Year Zero. To him, it was a movement of liberation and empowerment, a revolution where no one was hurt and everyone got home for tea. Weekday nights were spent poised over the record button hoping John Peel might play the new single by Eyeless in Gaza, Young Marble Giants or, in a more mainstream moment, The Fall.
Gig is so punk that quite a lot of it is not about punk, or even music. And the bit claiming it is 'the life and times of a rock-star fantasist' is a white lie too. Unlike All Points North, which was snugly themed, Gig is a hotchpotch of subjects, places and time switches.
''I originally had the idea of basing it around crown green bowling, which I've played with my dad,'' said Armitage. This might be a white lie, too. Instead, he writes of poetry readings in Portakabins plonked on car parks, hotels he's stayed in, trips to New Zealand and Iceland, and even a four-page list of birds he spotted on (if you're asking…) 10 June 2006. From lesser writers this might pass as trifling but with Armitage an insight or joke or a train-of-thought that chug-chugs all the way back to Marsden and his family is never far away. ''I've drawn on my family a lot down the years, especially in All Points North. I like to think I've learned what the parameters are by now,'' he said.
The Armitages have echoes of a Yorkshire-cut version of JD Salinger's mythical Glass family, where everyone is expected to take a turn at the piano or a role in Viva Mexico at the local church hall. This has made it easier for Armitage, a former choirboy - a fact most likely kept quiet during his punk years - to accept the notion of a writer as a performer. ''As a poet, you want readers,'' he says, which accounts for the peripatetic lifestyle he has maintained over many years, much the same as a rock star.
While his mother, Marjorie, is an elliptical figure throughout his writing, his father stands tall, looking down on life and his son as if a visitor to a model village, ever ready with a good-natured put-down. ''My dad has always been confident and quick witted,'' says Armitage. ''He says it there and then, right off, while I have to go away and think about it and then put it down on paper.'' The best quip in Gig is when Armitage seeks names for a band he is forming, at the age of 44. ''What about Midlife Crisis?'' suggests Peter Armitage. Braces twang, a pipe is chomped, everyone laughs.
The name settled upon is The Scaremongers, which is Armitage and his old college pal, Craig Smith, doing what they planned to do back in the early 1980s. A visit to their MySpace site reveals a 'group' (''More like a five-a-side team, whoever turns up gets a game,'' - Armitage) somewhere between The Beautiful South and former Peel favourites, The Nightingales. Armitage's reluctant, coughed-up vocals are not dissimilar to Jarvis Cocker's. Concerts are planned in the summer and Armitage writes about the whole escapade by brilliantly coalescing self-deprecating cynicism and a boyish enthusiasm that may inspire, oh dear, legions of forty-somethings to reach for their Gibsons and Fenders.
When he does turn wholly to music in Gig, Armitage is an astute observer. His musing on the enigma of Morrissey forms the best writing in the book. He describes Morrissey's increasingly peculiar physique as 'looking like a retired shire horse standing on its back legs, or something out of mythology.' He concedes a fascination with the singer. ''I actually prefer his solo material to the stuff he did with The Smiths,'' he says. ''Not once in the last two decades have I ever felt sorry for him, not for a split second. No, the person he makes me feel sorry for is myself.''
He also relates his hesitant conversion to the lyricism of Bob Dylan. Originally a contribution to Do You, Mr Jones?, a book examining Dylan's prose, the essay is a reminder of the quality of insight now all but lost to rock music. As a teenager, Armitage remembers reading coolly intelligent writers such as Charles Shaar Murray, Paul Morley and Dave McCulloch. ''They seemed to be making big philosophical statements about youth culture. I don't think I'd feel comfortable picking up the NME these days because it looks more like a comic,'' he says.
At a concert, this time viewing Simply Red in an arena, he turns his pin-sharp eye to the audience. He notices a couple fawning over each other, whooping at the start of every song. It is their 'undignified openness' that he finds most offensive. We've all seen this, of course, and felt that same nausea. The difference is that few of us can relate it so precisely and engagingly.