The National

This week I had trouble thinking about what to write. The Girl and I have been watching The Good Wife round the clock and been doing little else. So deep is our obsession with the legal drama, I’ve taken to crying ‘objection your honour’ to the criticisms she casts against my beard and toe-nails, only to be disappointed when a judge isn’t there to call ‘sustained.’ I thought it wouldn’t be a problem though finding something to review because my friend Andy had recommended me a book that I intended to read. Last week I read one of Andy’s recommendations, Remains of the Day, which was both absorbing and utterly moving. This weekend I tried his other one, Dave Eggers' The Circle, which I didn't get on with. I like Eggers too: his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius memoir is as funny as the title suggests. The Circle though suffers from being of a particular time. Its satire on technology would have felt prescient in 2013, but now in 2017 feels passé. The book looks at how community has been co-opted by the internet to mean faceless, vacuous interaction. It challenges the deification of data, highlighting how online users chase approval ratings in the form of re-tweets and likes. 4 years later all of this has come to pass, meaning that Eggers’ sci-fi is now non-fiction. I put the book down after 150 pages.

This woman's life now seems intertwined with mine.

So I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I’ve been enjoying The Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4, but don’t feel I’ve seen enough to pass comment. I liked Richard Ayoade on The Crystal Maze re-boot, yet not enough to write an essay about it. I found myself in a quandary. I though about taking a week off, maybe having Stewart Lee fill in for me, like he does for David Mitchell in The Observer. Then on the TV listings I saw what I was going to write about. There on BBC 4 at 8pm were my favourite band: The National. As part of BBC’s Glastonbury coverage, they would be showing the Ohioan rockers’ performance on The Pyramid Stage.

Ayoade was great on The Crystal Maze.

 

I’ve been a fan of The National ever since my mate Jim did a compilation album for me way back in ’08. Being somewhat of a maverick when it came to mix-tapes, Jim put two tracks from the same artist – I know, it’s the kind of outlaw spirit that means he’s now training to be a school counsellor. After listening to ‘All The Wine’ and ‘Fake Empire,’ I pretty much went out and bought the whole of the band’s back catalogue. It’s not often in life where you see, hear or read something that you think was designed with you in mind. But with The National I knew that I had found my band. Listening to a lot of podcasts these days, The National along with Arctic Monkeys, are the only bands that I religiously follow. As a student I would go to gigs every week. During my twenties I bought music regularly; my CD rack standing as a symbol of defiance against a digital age. But now I don’t listen to much music. I still love how an apt song choice can elevate a scene in a movie. I still get emotional at how something so ubiquitous like a tune can be so personal to a couple at a wedding. I haven’t left music, but I feel that we’re on a break at the moment. I’m sure in years to come I’ll lay supine once more, scrutinising lyrics whilst a disc – yes, an actual physical thing – spins nearby.

I'm sure the adults of Shoreditch are late to work making these.

As it is, it’s The National and Arctic Monkeys that I look out for. Being a student of English, lyrics mean a lot to me. Matt Berninger and Alex Turner are respectively, in my mind, today’s great lyricists. (Feel free to post your favourite lyricists; I'm always on the lookout.) In five minutes both fashion the kind of character studies many novelists only dream of. The fact that they do it with a form that demands an economy of language makes them even more compelling. For all the preternatural talent of Turner, Berninger for me is the superior craftsman. Turner can do to portraiture but, unlike his peer, can't do landscape. In my favourite song of The National’s ‘The Geese of Beverly Road,’ Berninger tells a story of a pair of young lovers setting off car alarms for lols. The closing refrain of ‘Come be my waitress and serve me tonight. Serve me the sky tonight. Oh come. Serve me the sky with a big slice of lemon’ is spellbindingly beautiful. Romanticised yearning under a citrus skyline. Is there anything more evocative than that?

The reason The National were playing last night is because they’re back with a new album, Sleep Well Beast. The National have been a band on the rise for a while now: like Pulp, Blur and Elbow it took them a while to find popularity. For a few years they were in the margins on an Indie scene – that’s pretty niche. With the release of third album Alligator though, they began to generate some broadsheet buzz. To date, this is my favourite album; although for many, it’s their successor Boxer, a swooning distillation of mature songwriting. Each album since has led to incremental growth, which is why they now find themselves second to Foo Fighters on the main bill.

The Ohioans open with ‘Sea of Love,’ a cautionary tale about diving headfirst into romantic-infested waters. The protagonist of the tune is in too deep and is fading into the abyss. Meanwhile, the narrator who has destabilised the lover is left opining, ‘I see you rushing now. What did Harvard teach you?’ It appears when it comes to love it really does make fools of us all. Next is ‘Fake Empire,’ the band’s calling card. When Obama was running for Office in 2008, the song soundtracked his candidacy, being played at rallies from Seattle to Miami. It has to be one of the most gorgeous things ever put to recorded music. The piano forms a beautiful backdrop to the scene, providing a wistful vista for Berninger to paint his lyrics. Lyrics as rich as, ‘Tiptoe through our shiny city with our diamond slippers on. Do a gay ballet on ice. We’re half-awake in a Fake Empire.’ Even though the first half of these words point to elegance and finesse, the second half warn of stupefaction. It appears their city’s smile is at the expense of another country’s misery. 'Fake Empire' wasn’t so much a pro-Obama song, but an anti-Bush one, admonishing a nation that had put self-interest over world preservation. When the drums kick in, signalling the line ‘it’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky,’ images of 9/11 and Baghdad bombing spring to mind. It’s four minutes encompasses the brilliance of a band that do both rich poeticism and pummelling ire.

After these tunes, the band play four songs from their album. The first I was familiar with, the widescreen ‘The System Only Dreams in Darkness.’ It is one where the lead guitar flickers in and out like a tele on the blink, eventually coming into colour late on with a resurgent solo. After is ‘Walk it Back,’ a synth-laden tune that has Berninger challenging his own inertia. The song is punctuated by a sample of Karl Rove, George Bush’s senior consultant: 

'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' 

It appears that America’s Fake Empire is still a concern to a band that have been vehemently opposed to Donald Trump. ‘Guilty Party’ is another new one: a mournful dissection of a relationship in crisis. Berninger sings he knows he’s ‘no holiday,’ understanding why his love is in turmoil. Towards the end, catharsis is found when the vocals cede to guitar and brass, meditating perhaps on how limited words are. 'Day I Die' is a newbie that seems to sport a riff that's been plagiarised from an ice cream van. Never has a song about death seemed so upbeat.

Matt Berninger. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

Much of the rest of the set is old favourites like the elegiac ‘England’ and the propulsive ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio.’ At this point, Berninger’s inhibitions have gone the same way as his wine bottle... hurtling to the floor. Whereas earlier, he strikes a statuesque frame at the mic stand, by the end he’s a tourettic ball of rage. When he launches into ‘Mr November’ he paces the stage like a man that’s lost all his coordinates. There’s bellows, screams, yelps, hisses. His angel voice has been possessed by sinister forces, exorcism can only be found in shouting the devil dry. Finally, they end on another new one ‘Turtleneck’ that feels like something of a departure. The band either do mournful waltzes or splenetic charges, this though feels a little like Franz Ferdinand being sacrificed at the altar of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. (Is that the kind of description that can get me onto the NME staff team?)

In a week where I thought I would have nothing to write about, I found The National. Not just a band to save your blog, but a band to enrich your life.

The set is available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p05596b0/glastonbury-2017-the-national

The Remains of the Day

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final section in The Great Gatsby is a reminder that we can’t escape the past. No matter how hard we attempt to steer an onward course, the tide of memory will pull us back.

Stevens in The Remains of the Day is a man that can’t shake his past. He is the butler assigned to tell the story. Unlike the clean precision he undertakes work, his storytelling is messy, less sequential; time periods fall in and out of one another, all coalescing to tell a tale of faint hopes, of vanquished dreams.

Ishiguro’s book is ostensibly set in 1950’s post-war Britain. The 1950’s was a period where for the first time in a long while the country could ask itself, ‘Who should we be?’ The years preceding were brutal bloodbaths with The Great Depression bringing the country to its knees and the second war pistol-whipping it to the ground. With the appointment of a Labour government, the old order had been shown the door – the proletariat would rule the world. Although the Conservatives of Churchill and Eden would reclaim office, there was a sense that Britain would never be the same again. This is the context for the novel. Stevens, the butler, whom has served Lord Darlington for thirty-five years must now work for an American, Mr Faraday. New money has replaced old. Formality is off the menu; informality the new order of the day.

The electorate showed Churchill the V. (They eventually let him come back.)

With Stevens new boss being unaccustomed to the old ways, he quickly demands his butler has some time off. For Stevens this is an unusual request: under Lord Darlington he was used to working all hours of the day with little rest. In fact, any allotted period of repose was spent studying, reading books that would aid deportment and conversation. Life for Stevens was an examination that he continuosly prepared for. Although he is somewhat bemused by the American concept of vacation, he sees it as an opportunity to visit the House’s former housemaid Miss Kenton- now the married Mrs Benn. Stevens purports the visit to be merely business: the House could again benefit from Mrs Benn’s expertise, and given her letter talked of marriage troubles, it appears she would be open a return. However, over the course of the book, we find this assignation may have an ulterior motive.

So Stevens leaves the gates of Darlington House, a metaphor you feel for the prison of his mind. As he drives west towards Cornwall, the open roads unspool Stevens, gradually disclosing his thoughts on work, class and leisure. A telling incident occurs at his first stop, where he looks out on the English countryside, eulogising: “What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.” This is indicative of how Stevens sees people: he admires understatement, composure and subtlety. Anyone that offers anything more is crass, indecent, showy.

Stevens departs Darlington House.

We see Stevens’ ideal of beauty in the description of his work. Throughout the book there is the repeated noun of ‘dignity;’ Stevens sees dignity as a distinction few can claim. His father, a butler had it. He feels that he has it too. Dignity for Stevens is putting personal interest to one side in the name of service. His father’s anecdotes on great butlers have indoctrinated Stevens to believe that the people behind the curtain are as vital as the people in front. Yes, the main players get the cheers and glory, but it's the stagehands that make the performance possible. Even though they may never take a bow, the pleasure comes from providing the right conditions for the great and the good to excel. Dignity is knowing your station and maintaining it for the benefit of your superior.

This ‘dignity’ though comes at a cost. When Stevens recollects on his father’s illness, we see the human tragedy in his conditioning. Stevens recounts the story of Lord Darlington holding a conference to discuss the ‘punitive’ Treaty of Versailles. Whilst Stevens’ father lies dying in the upstairs room, a French dignitary requests assistance for a sore foot. Who Stevens attend to first is no surprise. In many ways Stevens is like Boxer, the workhouse of Orwell’s Animal Farm, embodying the mantra, “We must work harder.” Herein lies the genius of Ishiguro’s work, for Stevens isn’t working for a noble cause: the sympathy Lord Darlington holds for post-war Germany is just the start. When Stevens must sack Jewish staff and welcome Hitler’s foreign minister the maxim of a ‘dignified silence’ is put under the microscope – only Stevens refuses to look.

For Stevens everything must be 'just so.'

This rejection of self-reflection is not surprising. If you have respected someone for a large period of time, that reverence will not suddenly diminish when they're exposed. We’ve seen it recently with Louis Theroux’s Savile documentary. In it, his PA struggled to countenance Savile's crimes; to her he was a good, kind man. In the recent Bill Cosby documentary, a co-star couldn’t comprehend the star's abuses until other friends told them he did it to them. Stockholm Syndrome isn’t confined to people forced into captivity, sometimes it happens to people who walk willingly into it.

The journey Stevens takes away from Darlington House is we hope a metaphor for him getting away from a life of servitude and obedience. With Miss Kenton, a compassionate soul on the horizon, we the reader pray that Stevens is moving towards some kind of emotional liberation. Does he claim the green light like Jay Gatsby? Or is he borne back ceaselessly into the past? In these days of sun, locate the book and find out. 

The Remains of the Day is available from all good bookshops. 

The Trip

This week it was reported that Rupert Murdoch walked out of a Times Election Party after hearing Thursday's Exit Poll. Murdoch had run a corrosive campaign of hate against Jeremy Corbyn, portraying him as terrorist sympathiser, Marxist extremist and Jimmy Savile collaborator. (Ok, one of these isn't true, but what it says about The Sun is.) But that wasn’t the worst thing that happened this week to Mr Murdoch: all week I've taken advantage of my Now TV 14-day trial to take more free programmes off him. It’s not just democracy that’s given the proprietor a bloody nose, my inspired loopholing has left him short-changed.

It was The Sun that won it.

The last show that I watched using ‘Murdoch’s gift’ was The Trip. What’s funny about this is that in a recent Guardian interview, Steve Coogan remarked,  “It’s my theory that a lot of people who like The Trip are the very demographic who are resolutely non-Sky subscribers. So I think we might just be a cynical ploy by Sky to get them to adopt the platform.” You see the BBC broadcast the first two series of The Trip, but due to budgetary constraints the show moved to Sky, much to Coogan’s disappointment. You might remember that Coogan was part of Hacked Off, an organisation that represented victims of News UK's phone hacking. It’s a wonder that Murdoch, whom owns a lion’s share of Sky, would want to have a vocal opponent on his roster. I guess when it comes down to it money talks, talent walks. Unfortunately in a monopolised media, creative people will sometimes have to compromise their values to get their ideas out. It’s not just Steve Coogan that has had to leave his conscience at the Murdoch door: both Frankie Boyle and Stewart Lee, arch critics of the right-wing media, have worked on his newspapers in the past. In fact, out of all the leading humorists operating today, it’s perhaps only I that hasn’t been tempted by a job offer – you’re welcome.

Coogan the campaigner.

Needless to say, I was a bit pissed when the show moved to Sky as it was one of my favourites. Now in its third series, it’s important to remember just how daring it once was. The format really shouldn’t work: Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan playing exaggerated versions of themselves, wonder around beautiful locations whilst doing celebrity impressions in fancy restaurants. Compared to other comedies, there isn’t a multitude of characters or quick-cuts to new locations; the camera stays on the pair, allowing them to jam their skits into wondrous riffs.

The idea for The Trip was born out of a film the two previously worked on with Trip director Michael Winterbottom. A Cock and Bull Story was ostensibly about one of the first postmodern texts, the eighteenth century novel Tristram Shandy. Due to the authorial interjections and stylistic jolts, the book is often regarded as unfilmable. Winterbottom therefore chose to adopt a postmodern approach to the book by doing a film on the filming of the film. (You may look over that sentence and perceive the repetition wholly unnecessary. You may be right, but I believe it captures the playful spirit of Winterbottom’s approach.) In the film you see Coogan and Brydon in the dressing room, squabbling over their star-billing and place in the zeitgeist. Essentially then, with The Trip Winterbottom has taken the idea off the film set and planted it in the real world. It’s a triumph how such an innovative concept has been greeted by critics and fans.

It’s first series takes place in England and begins with Steve phoning Rob. Steve has been commissioned by The Observer to write a series of food reviews on t’North’s finest restaurants; he’s asked his girlfriend who can’t come; he’s asked everyone else and they won’t come, so he wonders whether Rob fancies it. The joshing has started early. Rob acquiesces, leaving our solo singer with a band to play with. Over the course of the series, the two trade blows on one another’s careers: for Steve, Rob is a populist entertainer, humorous but facile; for Rob, Steve is a victim of envy, destined to be unsatisfied with his own achievements. 

Alongside their barbed comments, there is respect as they collaborate with one another on sketches. In one hilarious moment, a hilltop panorama is the inspiration behind a sublime routine. Steve believes it would be the ideal setting for a costume drama; Rob concurs. Steve then imagines a medieval battle where the chief cries, ‘Gentlemen to bed for tomorrow we must rise at daybreak.’ The two pedants transpose modern time onto the past, imagining why it’s always daybreak and never an exact time. Steve then edits the line on Rob’s suggestions, making it into a playful routine that ends on talk of the warriors being up early for a continental breakfast. Amongst all this play though, there is sadness with Steve’s relationship and career in the doldrums. Remember the show was first aired in 2010: Coogan hadn’t revitalised Alan Partridge or screened Philomena. His career, other than some indie success, was in the wilderness. If anything Brydon at this point is the more successful of the two; his affable ease is at odds with Coogan’s restlessness, making for a testy dynamic.

In series two pair venture to Italy. Coogan, having just filmed Philomena, is a more gratified creature. Here, it’s Brydon who takes up the mantle of mid-life crisis, engaging in a fling with a tour guide. The first season had Coogan crying out for the domestic anchor Brydon had, whereas here Brydon questions stability. Is the pram in the hallway the enemy of great sex, his affair asks? Because much of the series is impression battles and friendly ribbing, these existential moments are made all the more profound. We’re not expecting a shiny panel show host to be dragged into life’s mess; the fact Brydon does it with such aplomb highlights his versatility as an actor.

Series 2.

The final series that I downloaded this week is set in Spain. Steve bills himself as Don Quixote, the eponymous dreamer of Cervantes’ comic novel. Rob is like Sancho, the character’s sidekick that follows him on the adventure. This time round Steve is having a crisis of confidence: the contentment of the second series has left him. You wonder how this can be, what with the Alan Partridge movie, Alpha Papa, and Philomena being such successes. (It’s important to add that the programme is fiction. There are times when I forget the characters are playing versions of themselves. In a recent interview, Coogan said he is much happier than his character.) Rob this time has gone back to being the comic stooge, constantly doing impressions, much to Steve’s chagrin. A lovely thing about this series is when it strays into self-referentialism. Rob tells Steve about a text from James Cordon, remarking that Carpool Karaoke has made him into a huge success. Steve is less than impressed, opining: ‘two people singing in a car. Who wants to see that?’ Later, of course, the two sing in the car.

Series 3.

 This quotation illuminates the joy of the show: it tracks two people doing utterly banal things: eating in a restaurant, talking on a walk, singing in a car; yet sprinkles it with a fairy dust, elevating it into being a mirror on life, an insight into the soul, a meditation on fame, family and friendship. The Trip is whatever you want it to be: a fun travelogue with two comic actors - or an existential amble around the psyche of middle age. Whatever your take, I recommend you take this trip.

The Trip Series 1 and 2 is available on Netflix. The Trip Series 3 is on Sky’s Now TV.