Review of The Last Mad Surge of Youth in The Star (South Yorkshire)
Making music with words
WRITING about music - as Elvis Costello once said - is like dancing about architecture. It's basically trying to combine two totally different art forms. However, some people are taking steps to build bridges between them. See what I did there? Steps - dancing: build - architecture. Pulitzer Prize to the usual address please.
Two recent paperback publications by similarly-surnamed authors have Sheffield connections and attempt to cover the subject in different ways.
One has a novel approach while the other took to travelling round the country in an attempt to sound out which individual styles move different regions.
The first of these, Mark Hodkinson, started off his writing career as a journalism student in the city while working for local papers but went freelance to write biographies of bands, some of whom he can now admits that he couldn't stand. Nowadays he's one of the bigger boys in the business, mainly writing for national broadsheets on a variety of subjects but especially football. He also co-founded Yorkshire-based Pomona Books five years ago and has published work by a variety of authors including Barnsley's Barry Hines and Ian McMillan.
Parallel to this, he is also a musician and veteran of several combos, none of whom quite made it - one supported The Stones Roses, another became a music magazine's tip for the top one year in the early 1990s alongside two other little-known acts - Suede and Pulp. The closest they ever got to fame was being second on the bill at a Pulp show.
His fictional work, The Last Mad Surge Of Youth, combines these two careers, telling the tale of a northern band who actually do 'make it' but without one of their founder members who bails out because of his fear of appearing on stage. The band's singer, meanwhile, goes solo, at first with massive success but as fame slips from his grasp he loses his perspective, his hair, and then the plot. This leads to the two former friends and bandmates meeting up for the first time in years. It's a well-written book with a surprising twist at the end. You see, what happens is....nah, we wouldn't be that cruel.
The second author, Will Hodgkinson, also works for national publications, has written a couple of previous books and presents Songbook, the Sky Arts channel programme where he sits in a studio talking to songwriters about their work. However he has taken a different approach to produce The Ballad Of Britain: How Music Captured The Soul Of A Nation, covering the nooks and crannies of the nation in a close-to-collapse car in a bid to 'understand how the country has represented itself through song.'
One of these stops is in Sheffield, where he meets up with two of the city's favourite sons, Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley, and also delves deep into the underground with a look at the city's incredibly obscure and extremely uncompromising improvised music scene. As the author puts it, the Freenoise and Blackest Rainbow labels/collectives are unlikely to ever appeal to any more than an extremely tiny minority, but those involved seem to get a great deal out of it. Despite the odd minor mistake which will probably only be apparent to musical trainspotters (Phil Oakey is not a Yorkshireman, Common People wasn't released in 1996, it's Freenoise not Free Noise) it's worth reading, and not only for the local bits. In Hodgkinson's travelogue he also speaks to famous musicians such as The Who's Pete Townshend, as well as those who probably aren't even household names in their own households. He even manages to make morris dancing sound interesting. If only they could find a way to get a bit of architecture in there...
The Last Mad Surge Of Youth is published by Pomona
Books, priced £7.99.