I recently read The Age of Anxiety, a novel by Pete Townshend. It combines some of his meditations on how the vibration of sounds in the atmosphere can lead certain chosen ones to hear music wherever they go, with a narrative structure straight out of a Joanna Trollope novel: marriages fail, affairs are pondered, long-lost children are rediscovered etc. A Twitter thread I saw some time before reading the book reckoned it was one of the worst novels ever written. I don’t agree with that, it’s not a bad book. The symphony of sounds which afflict the lead character are quite evocatively described, but it feels as though Townshend felt that the book would be impenetrable if it was hooked purely around a form of extreme synesthesia, so sought to ground the story by basing it within marriage, family and friendship groups. Unfortunately, Townshend can’t really pull off the Aga saga elements. There are contrivances, red herrings and coincidences which Trollope would have binned after completing her first draft. As a result, the book walks a tightrope between sense and nonsense, which it just about manages to avoid falling off.
The vessel through which these sounds are transposed into music is through rhythm & blues singer, Walter Watts. Walter is the singer with a moderately successful pub-rock band and becomes a wealthy man off the back of a song he writes which is used in a Ford commercial, which is fortunate given that his band don’t appear to be playing venues any larger than Dingwalls in Camden. With its mid-90s setting, Townshend seems to be trying to imagine how the lead singer of Ocean Colour Scene would cope if he became so attuned to everyday sound that he could hear music in any of it.
Walter’s band features a guitarist called Crow, who we are told: Whenever creative matters came up, for example prior to recording sessions, he would simply pull out the same six vinyl albums. “Let me remind you lot what our mantra is here - What we do.” Then he would yank his shabby army-surplus bag open and lift out several old vinyl albums. “This is the pinnacle. This is the White Cliffs of Dover we jump from. This is where we start. We are a pub rock band, we do not play fucking jazz.The albums were Booker T. and the M.G.s Greatest Hits, Jimmy Reed at Carnegie Hall, The Everly Brothers Greatest Hits (two albums), a white label collection of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates singles, The Best of Little Walter (on Chess Records) and Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. (Townshend, The Age of Anxiety, pages 48-49, 2019, Coronet). Reading that, you have to conclude that if Crow took those records and a couple of bottles of red wine to Peel Acres, then he and John Peel would have had a wonderful evening together.
I thought of Crow when listening to Peel playing Stranger Blues, one side of a 1962 single by Elmore James, imbued as it is with those very qualities that feel like music stripped down to its basic core elements. When you can sing as well as James does and hit the kind of groove that the guitar and brass manage, the idea of over-decorating music sounds like an offence against nature and culture which should be punishable by firing squad. And as Peel told his audience, seeing or not seeing Elmore James live, was enough to drive a man to consider deceit. I toyed for a very long time, this is shocking, with the idea of pretending that I’d seen Elmore James live. ‘Cause I know that, I mean none of you have, and I’ve never met anybody who did see him live. Because he must have played in Dallas - I mean he died in 1963 - but he must have played in Dallas or in that area, while I was living there. And I’ve often thought, ‘Shall I tell...’ because no-one would be able to say, ‘You never did, you fat twerp’ but I’ve often thought of telling people, ‘Yes, I only saw him once, but my God, he was incredible live!’ But my natural honesty and goodness won out in the end.
Video courtesy of Glendoras//DJ Mean Mojo Mathias
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