Toasted Heretic in Clogs

 

I've been having a great, nostalgia-saturated conversation with Rachel King's sister Naomi, over on the forum. Apparently Naomi's first ever gig, aged fifteen,  was Toasted Heretic in Clogs (the legendary pub in the legendary Galway Centre for the legendary Unemployed), in 1988.

That distinguished lecturer in linguistics at Trinity College Dublin,  Dr. Breffni O'Rourke, is also chatting with us on the thread. Breffni may be better known to some of you as Toasted Heretic's chiselled-featured rhythm-guitarist in those early days (and resident Sex God, till Barry Wallace, now of The Rye, joined and took over that important role). It turns out Breff has a tape of the gig. He's a fountain of knowledge, I'd totally forgotten that decade, let alone that night. Apparently the original title of the song "Charm & Arrogance" (later the title track of our second album) was "Everybody Wants To Shag Julian Gough". Who knew?

So if you're into the intimate details of a particularly obscure Toasted Heretic gig in Clogs pub off Dominic Street in Galway city in 1988 (a gig so obscure even I'd forgotten it), by golly you've come to the right place. Click HERE...

Meanwhile, as I was reading the account of the Ireland-Brazil friendly unfolding on the Guardian's minute-by-minute live report, and as I threw in the odd email pulling the Guardian journalist's Offaly leg, I read (in the 83rd minute of the live report... the match must have hit a dull patch), that I had been, em... involved with his wonderful sister a couple of decades back, in Trinity. 

As a result I am suffering an almost lethal overdose of nostalgia, and may need to do something terribly modern to get over it.

But by jingo, this is what the internet was invented for. Gathering round the global campfire, telling tales from the old days before electricity. Hurrah!

 

A Small Bomb in Mulackstrasse

 

Great excitement. They've found a World War II bomb around the corner, in Mulackstrasse, and evacuated the locality. The Rosenthaler end of Mulack Strasse has been blocked off! The dentist on the corner of Mulack and Gorman Strasse has been evacuated! Men with toothache wander about behind the barrier, disconsolate! Mighty entertainment.

 Of course, as Silvio (the gifted hairdresser who works in Denny Gehrke's of Steinstrasse) sternly points out, there's hundreds of bombs buried in Berlin, so it's not really a big deal. But for those of us not born and bred here, it's a bit of craic. 

Being around the corner, and thus protected from any potential blast, we haven't been evacuated, so we get the best of both worlds. Nothing like relaxing with a cup of coffee, with one ear cocked to hear the neighbouring flats lifted a hundred yards into the air. (Should they be so lifted.)

Ah, there’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned bombscare to add a little zing to city living. And what could be more old-fashioned than a World War II bombscare?

 
Retro, yet chic. Very Berlin.

Reviving The Markets (With A Hair Of The Dog That Bit Them)

 

This is truly the World Cup Final of international financial meltdowns! America, staring defeat in the face, brings on super-sub Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve! He's on the pitch! He's scored a hattrick! Can he win the game???

 
Well, the US Federal Reserve panicked. Ben Bernanke cut interest rates by .75% an hour before the US markets opened.

Yes, to change metaphors, Ben wields the mightiest hammer in the world, and he has just struck the problem a decisive blow.

Trouble is, the problem is not a nail. No, it won't work. Markets will be heading south again within the week. He can only cut a few more times. Markets that need to fall can fall every day God made.

To change metaphor yet again (you can tell I'm a novelist, huh?), US markets have been permanently drunk for nearly two decades.  Every time they were in danger of sobering up, the Fed poured more liquidity down their throats, to save them from a savage hangover.

That just put off the hangover, and ensured it would be worse when it came. Ben is pouring alcohol down the throat of a strong man who has finally passed out from alcohol poisoning.

Monoline Meltdown

 

Look, I've got to talk about what's happening in the financial markets or I'll burst. Feel free to ignore it, I know  almost none of you care, but I'm incredibly excited. And if you ARE into economic meltdowns,  this is going to be the World Cup Final of economic meltdowns, and Brazil are about to walk out onto the pitch...

Well, anyway, for the few of you still reading... You might remember, I made a big, fat general prediction back in February 2007. I said, in this blog:

"At some point in the next five years (but my gut feeling is much sooner, within the next two years) there will be almost simultaneous collapses in the valuations of many unrelated asset classes across much of the world."

I also said:

"By definition, an unexpected collapse will be unexpected. It's impossible to predict the trigger, and foolish to predict the timing. But if it pops, the feedback loop which pumped it up will reverse and act to deflate it. There will be a horrible drying up of liquidity, a credit crunch, and a fairly general asset crash."

Bear in mind, this was six months before August 2007, when the current credit crisis started.

I also said, (as I outlined the historical process that leads to these things):

"Step one: A great idea. You can hedge risk by buying a derivative: for example, if you own General Motors bonds, you can insure against the risk that General Motors will go bust by buying a credit default derivative for those bonds. The derivative will pay out if General Motors goes bust. Voila! You now have no risk. Ultimately, either the bonds will pay up, or the derivative will pay up."

That was the theory for the past insane decade, and a very sweet and charming theory it was. But it was bullshit, and here's why...

Somebody has to be on the other end of that bet. Someone has to sell you that credit default derivative (let's call it an insurance policy). And if the bond does default, if General Motors does go bust... That someone who sold you the insurance has to have the money to pay you. And if that someone has mispriced the risk... has sold everybody around the world cheap, cheap, cheap insurance, firmly believing the policies will never have to pay up... And suddenly has to pay up... The money isn't there. The premiums were not enough to cover the risk.

The ultra-cheap insurance made everybody (banks, companies, hedge funds, private equity firms, individual investors, your mamma) happy to take on too much risk. Taking on too much risk, they eventually collapse. Collapsing, they trigger the insurance. Which bankrupts the insurance companies.

Which wipes out everyone's insurance, which causes banks, companies, everybody, to default, collapse, implode, as they get downgraded by the ratings agencies, and investors run like rabbits for the hills.

Well it's happening, right now. There are only a few big companies who insure all the bonds issued by everyone from IBM to your local town council. They are called monolines. And, in my opinion, they have been technically insolvent (or broke, as we used to call it) for months. But the ratings agencies haven't had the guts to downgrade the monolines' ratings, for fear of the consequences. This cannot last forever: the monolines ARE broke, and they WILL go bust (unless some generous soul from outside intervenes and bails them out), and the ratings agencies cannot pretend they're OK indefinitely...

Ah, enough for tonight. (It's not like anyone reads my economics stuff anyhow.)

Read Norman Mailer. Or Get A New Tailor.

That quote is from (as many of you will know, and many more won't) the 1984 hit single "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken", by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. (Lloyd Cole, back when he found it impossibly easy, before he realised it's impossibly hard.) It was good advice. As a very young man, I read Norman Mailer. I even, years later, got a new tailor. (Chris, of  Favourbrook, Jermyn Street.)

Well, Norman Mailer, Great American Novelist, died last week, and a generation of pop lyricists who were as influenced by novels as songs are looking even more thoughtful than usual. There's a lot to think about. Norman Mailer cannot be solved. Norman Mailer cannot be neatly summed up. His vices were his virtues and his virtues were his vices and his bark was worse than his bite but his bite was worse than his bark and his love was hateful and his hate was lovely, and oh didn't you just want to punch him and kiss him, Lloyd?

He was incredibly famous for a very long time, but he isn't really, now. (He will be again, after the traditional post-death, decade-long dip. And when he is famous again, it will be for radically different things, dug out of his most forgotten books.)

I saw him read in Amsterdam a few years ago, at the Crossing Border Festival, where I was also reading. He was great. Frail, slightly deaf, tiny, walking slowly with two sticks, white hair standing up all over his electric head. He read a self-deprecating piece from  Advertisements For Myself, and answered questions with wit and charm.

When goaded to (verbally) attack Tom Wolfe (who'd recently (verbally) savaged him), Mailer refused. "I think I'm the greatest writer in America. And there's maybe twenty more think the same. Novelists are an endangered species now, and when there's only twenty elk left in the world, they mustn't start trying to knock off each other's horns." (That quote is half from memory, and half from a Guardian interview of around the same time where he said almost the same thing in almost the same words... you can't do as much promotional work as Mailer did and not recycle some of the best lines.)

I wanted to go up to him onstage afterwards, and tell him something. But he was immediately surrounded by dozens of admirers from the audience, his tiny figure vanishing behind the seven-foot tall Dutch, and the seven-foot wide Americans. And I thought, he's got enough to deal with. And I'd be doing it mainly for me, not for him. Doing it to have my Mailer story. And he must have heard all this stuff so often... No, just because it's important to me doesn't mean I've the right to inflict it on him. So I didn't go up.

But if I had gone up I would have said something like...

When I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, I was reading The Naked and the Dead, in Tipperary. And I got to a scene where one of the American soldiers on patrol finds the corpse of a Japanese soldier lying in the sun, and stares at the body. And as I read the scene, and reread it, I realised that I was going to die. That my death was inevitable, and unavoidable. The knowledge was immense, direct, entirely untheoretical. It wasn't intellectual knowledge, it was physical. (I'd known before, obviously, that I would one day die, but I hadn't felt it, it wasn't real knowledge.)

And I put the book down. And for the next couple of weeks I thought about nothing else, I hardly spoke. I examined this new knowledge from every angle, I thought about the implications, I tried to work out how I should live, now that I knew that I was going to die. I was very depressed for most of that couple of weeks. And then I came to terms with it, and worked my way past it, and incorporated the knowledge into my life, and decided how I would try to live. And how I lived was better than how I'd lived before. More satisfying. More my own. And I was pretty happy, pretty much permanently, ever after.

Something like that. 

So, Norman Mailer gave me death. And I will always be grateful.

Well, this time, although I'm still saying it mainly for me, at least I'm not bothering him...

Thanks, Norman. And goodbye.

Who Killed Tony Wilson? We Name The Guilty Men.

The splendid Tony Wilson, former head of Factory Records, died on August 10th, aged 57. The death of the man who gave the world Joy Division, New Order, and Happy Mondays, and who built the Haçienda, has been attributed to complications arising from kidney cancer.

 
Nonsense.

 
I blame Tony Wilson's sadly early demise on the sequence of ferocious blows to the head he received from my friends Gareth Allen (the artist) and Phil "The Punk" Rose (the photographer), during a Toasted Heretic gig in the Powerhaüs in London around 1990. (Tony Wilson and some heavy friends were checking us out, after Factory's A&R chief at the time, the extraordinarily nice Phil Saxe, had praised us highly.)

Sadly, only one photo survives from that night (and it's here). Phil and Gareth, to add a little class to the evening,  mingled with the crowd while wearing Roman togas (made from the curtains of their flat in Walthamstow), and fed the crowd grapes. When the grapes ran out, Gareth and Phil began to bang Tony Wilson on the head with a Charles and Di Royal Wedding full-colour souvenir teatray, tastefully adapted by Gareth with felt tip pens so that Charles and Di had swastikas for eyes. (Was a young Bobby Gillespie in the audience and taking thoughtful notes for these Primal Scream lyrics? We shall never know...)

It started out as a quite friendly tapping, and Tony was nervously amused. But soon the Romans were beating Tony Wilson like a gong, putting many dents in the tea tray, bringing him to his knees, while Wilson's extremely heavy minders looked on in tremendous confusion, unsure if this was part of the show, which was already a bit out of hand. (Maybe "out of hand" isn't quite the term. While I was singing "Lost and Found", a girl plunged a hand down the crotch of my skintight pink jumpsuit, and discovered that I wasn't wearing anything else. One of those awkward social moments, where you both hesitate, neither party quite sure what the etiquette is. I kept singing, though my voice may have briefly risen an octave.)

It ended, as did many Toasted Heretic gigs, in confusion.

We did not sign to Factory Records.

Later Gareth, while attempting to mount a bronze lion, fell into a fountain in Trafalgar Square and split his head open. Gareth and Phil wandered off, in their togas, in search of a hospital. We carried the drums and amps back to their place, and wondered would we see them again.

At dawn, Gareth, his soaked and bloodstained toga long lost, arrived home triumphant, having travelled barefoot across London wearing a backless hospital gown which revealed his bum. Protected only by his Virtue, and by Phil in a toga.

Ah yes, in those days we made our own entertainment. So anyway, Gareth and Phil murdered Tony Wilson. A long-forgotten fragment of Royal Wedding Tea-Tray must have shifted a fatal millimetre.

Biggest crash in world history coming up

None of my friends want to talk to me about economics, which is frustrating. Because I think we are in for an almighty wipeout in the financial markets, which has only barely begun to get going. And that is interesting, and worth a conversation.

As I have posted previously, I think a lot of exotic financial products, and a lot of very exotic investment strategies done with borrowed money, are about to fail spectacularly. As a side effect, a lot of perfectly solid markets (in stocks, bonds, property, commodities) are going to be cut in half, and a lot of institutions, to their intense surprise, are going to be wiped out.

More specifically, I predict the implosion of a very large number of hedge funds over the next year or two (and probably a lot sooner than that). Let's be more specific: I suspect that more than 25% of the hedge funds in existence today will not exist in two years time. (Oh come Julian, don't be shy, what do you REALLY think? Well, I really think at least half of them could vanish, but I'm trying to sound conservative and thoughtful here.)

And I think we'll lose more than one really, really big, globally known bank, insurer, and/or pension fund.

We may not lose them technically: governments and central banks will probably try to coordinate a rescue. But if they survive, they'll have been artificially resuscitated after having gone under.

Also, a lot of junk bonds will turn out to be junk. A shedload of private equity firms will go bust, and a stack of grossly overleveraged companies will collapse before 2010.

And residential property prices will fall through the floor in real terms over the next couple of years in a bunch of countries, including the USA and my dear and darling Ireland. (Put a figure on it... OK, from peak to trough, a fall of over 30 % in real terms. There. The trough may well take a lot more than a couple of years, mind you, and inflation may mask the fall, but in real terms I'd be surprised if it's less than 30% in Ireland's case. America, being vast and varied, I'll call a fall of over 30% on the coasts and large urban areas, before it eventually bottoms out. Again, I'm being conservative, and secretly think it could be more.)

Note that I think the real-world economy is in pretty good nick right now. But the financial world, across many asset classes, is about to have the biggest crash (in dollar terms) in the world's history. Bigger than the dotcom blowout? Yes. Will it wreck the real economy? Don't know. Haven't I predicted enough for ye? Don't be greedy.

Ah, sure, while we're at it, we'll lose at least one of the Big Three American car companies. 

Well, that has the potential to make me look very stupid indeed in 2010...

Anyone want to argue? 

The Loudness War

When people say that music doesn't sound as good these days, they usually just mean they aren't having as much sex these days.

But, if you liked the way pop music used to sound fifteen years ago, then the music genuinely doesn't sound as good these days, and it's for straightforward technical reasons.

For several years, record companies have been fighting a secret war, the Loudness War, and it has changed the sound of pop music. Really, "changed" is too small a word for it. It has abolished the dynamic range of pop music. The loud bits are no longer loud, and the quiet bits are no longer quiet. And here is why…

Record companies want their albums to sound louder than the other guy's album, in shops, on your hi-fi, wherever, because people tend to think that the louder of two songs is the better of two songs. That’s just the way our brains are wired.

So record companies have been boosting the overall loudness of CDs. But there's a maximum loudness limit to the digital signal on a CD. Increasing the overall loudness increases the loudness of the quiet bits: but it doesn't (it can't) increase the loudness of the bits that were already at maximum loudness.

Imagine the loudest part of a song as Mount Everest, and the quietest part as the bottom of a valley, five miles below. There is a physical upper limit on how loud the song can get on a CD: metaphorically, nothing can be taller than Mount Everest. Ten or twenty years ago, songs had a five-mile dynamic range: songs had dramatic peaks and troughs. Quiet bits whispered, and loud bits roared.

By raising the volume of the quiet bits, the Loudness War has filled in the valleys. Which makes the mountains seem much, much smaller.

The loud bits still roar: but now the quiet bits roar too. So you turn down the overall volume on your iPod or stereo or computer, to a more comfortable overall volume. Which means that, perversely, you don’t get the benefit of the “louder” album. But you do lose the dynamics which made the original song interesting.

This is why re-releases of old albums often sound strangely flat and undramatic compared to your memory of the vinyl or early CD original. They ARE less dramatic. They’ve been remastered “louder”.

It also makes them more tiring to listen to.

You know how you talk to your friends? Mostly you’re just talking away, but now and then one of you gets excited and shouts, and it’s exciting because it doesn’t happen very often? Well, if Warner Brothers reissued that conversation, YOU WOULD ALL BE SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. PASS THE SALT. THANKS. I’M GLAD IT’S RAINING, THE GARDEN NEEDS IT. WOULD ANYONE LIKE A COFFEE? SURE. ME TOO. YEAH I’LL HAVE A COFFEE, NO MILK. I LOVE YOUR HAT.

Very, very tiring. And if someone got shot in the middle of it, Jesus Christ appeared, and the world ended, you wouldn’t notice, because it would all happen at exactly the same volume as a polite request for a biscuit.

Here’s a great visual explanation of what’s been going on, in three minutes of excellent video:







More on this later maybe, if anyone cares.

Dick Cavett on comedy writing

Dick Cavett, the former gag-writer, TV host, and gold-medal pommel horse state gymnastics champion of Nebraska, has been writing about comedy in his New York Times blog. He makes a great point about comedy writing: the more of it you do, the better you get. Which is why writers who write in the tragic mode often find themselves stuck there. Even if they wanted to write comedy, they haven't built up the muscles. But here's Dick, in his own words:

"Talking about comedy writing last time, I omitted an interesting phenomenon thereto: the fact that the gag-writer’s brain often works independently of his conscious mind. Sometimes alarmingly so. Because the topical joke-writer’s livelihood depends on his ability to crank out — if the show is on daily — good, current stuff, fast and for immediate use. And after a great deal of this, there’s something that develops and takes on a life of its own.

The late Steve Allen noted that the more comedy you write, the more you can write. It happened to me. Thrown instantly into the front lines, as I was, of daily writing for Jack Paar on “The Tonight Show” — a task nothing at Yale prepares you for — it seemed that each day of the week got a bit easier. Monday hardest, Friday a breeze. Friday’s jokes seemed to write themselves. Rust set in on the weekend and again, Monday wasn’t easy."

Cavett goes on to describe the problem of having an unstoppable joke-generator running in your head at times of national tragedy. A friend of his was writing  jokes for Bob Hope on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He tells Cavett:

“There I was, stunned, driving to Bob’s house in Toluca Lake as usual, but with tears running down my face, and those unbidden jokes kept vomiting out of me. My joke-writing muscles were in tip-top shape and, to mix a metaphor, I couldn’t halt the machinery.”

 The whole piece is very interesting if you're into the psychology of writing comedy, as is Cavett's previous posting "A Life In Rim Shots", which tries to answer the question, "What does it take to be a comedy writer?"

Like many other theorists before him, Cavett ultimately has to throw up his hands:

"The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I’m not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject. The crux of the mystery is, when exactly does the ad-lib artist become aware of the spontaneous joke he has just spouted. In the case of a comic genius like Groucho, I’m convinced that the process in the speaker’s head that results in funny words spoken is somehow preconscious. Sitting next to him, I saw him be both delighted and . . . this is important . . . surprised by what he had just heard himself say. He was as much the audience to the joke as the rest of us who heard it."

Well worth a read. These guys were the poor bloody infantry of comedy, banging out hour after hour of topical jokes for the TV stars, night after night, in the age of live TV. Probably nobody in history has had to come up with more jokes than these guys. Their brains should be dissected. (After they're dead.)

The Sound Of One God Laughing

As I just mentioned in the news section, my long essay on comedy and the novel is in the current, May, issue of Prospect magazine, in All Good Newsagents. You can read it free here. (And you can read a lot of people arguing about it in the Guardian here.)

The essay sums up a lot of my thoughts on the state of the modern literary novel, and on the state of Western Culture. (That's "state" in the rather Irish sense of, "God, would you look at the state of Western Culture, hey Ted? Has it drink taken, or what?")

And given that the essay is about four and a half thousand words long, I think that's enough to be getting on with for today. Class dismissed! Go on out and play in the yard.