How to end an album and start a decade

Someone was asking about favourite song endings recently, and I couldn't get further than the somewhat obscure Hard Lovin' Man. Why? Because it makes a statement not just about the band that recorded it but about a whole decade.

Cacophonous guitar noise and heavy rock were still new when Deep Purple recorded this song on the first day of a new decade: 1 January 1970. Woodstock was only four months in the past, Hendrix was still alive and The Beatles had yet to record their final song. But the 60s were over, and the 70s were to be a very different decade.

Deep Purple were cheifly known in Britain at the time as the band that had recorded Concerto For Group And Orchestra with the London Philharmonic, a piece of experimentation that epitomised the limitless ambition of the 60s when there seemed no boundaries to what popular music could do in a world that could only get better. The disillusionment of the 70s prompted a tougher attitude that found its musical apogee (or nadir, according to your taste) in punk rock. The roots of that descent into anarchy are planted here.

Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore hated the Concerto and wanted the band (complete with new singer Ian Gillan and new bassist Roger Glover) to show that hard rock was the way forward. That statement was encapsulated in the title of the album, which also gave someone a wickedly simple yet memorable idea for the cover. "If this fails," Blackmore promised, "I'll play with orchestras for the rest of my life." In Rock was his rebellion, blasting in with a surge of electrical noise that kicked into 'Speed King'. The last track, 'Hard Lovin' Man', ended the same way, bookending the album perfectly.

'Hard Lovin' Man' gallops along, with a thumping drumbeat and driving bassline, overlaid by screamed vocals and searing guitar. Jon Lord, composer of the earlier Concerto, plays his organ barely in tune, as if any kind of melody would be an insult during such a brutal sonic assault.

After five-and-a-half minutes, the band sounds like it's going for a fade-out to a fast, heavy song, but Blackmore suddenly veers off on his own. Eventually the band stops but Blackmore carries on with some screeching, tuneless guitar noise. The band comes back in again, trying to corral the guitarist, but he's having none of it. Chaos triumphs over order and the band is pulled under, like the second Terminator briefly re-emerging in agony before sinking back into the molten steel . The fun new toy that was stereo enabled the guitar to tear from speaker to speaker like a victorious gladiator doing a lap of honour.

The track (and album) finally ends as the unaccompanied guitar screams, howls and eventually subsides into squeaks and pops, like the sound of tinkling glass that follows a catastrophic car crash. Blackmore has made his statement.

The worst writer on Fleet Street

I have plenty of bad habits, but self-deprecation is one of the worst. But if I'm honest with myself, I'm actually a good editor, which is lucky, since that's what I'm paid for. The downside is that it does strange things to one's brain, such that even now I'm worrying about the second comma in that last sentence. Or should that be 'past sentence'? Still, at least I know that the question mark goes outside the quote marks. And so on. And don't ask whether I should allow myself a verbless sentence like the last one. Or whether I should start a sentence with 'and'. Or 'but'. Or 'or'. Want a fight about it? Bring it on. I'm good at this. Being a good editor doesn't mean I'm any good at writing of course, but if you've got this far then you're probably prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt.

One rule of editing is that any piece can be improved by deleting the first paragraph and the first sentence of the next, so you can ignore all that preamble and start here. My job means dealing with 80,000-word screeds by experts who know everything about their business but next to nothing about communicating in English. I edit their work, I suggest ways to improve it and I warn the ambitious ones against trying to produce great literature, but I don't expect much. However, I do expect much from professional writers, which brings me to Kevin McCarra of The Guardian.

In a world where talented journalists can't find work, it offends me that one of the best newspapers in the land employs, on staff, a chief sports writer who cannot write.

I don't want to be an internet troll here. I have two friends who write for the same paper as freelances, one of whom has just been subjected to a virulent piece of abuse from a blogger who has made nasty and inaccurate assumptions about her based purely on her name. I'm sure McCarra is a nice guy who knows his subject and I don't want to upset him beyond saying he should go on a writing course. And I can't believe I'm the first person to have suggested this. Look at the opening paragraph of his report on Birmingham City's victory over Arsenal in the Carling Cup final on Sunday:

If Birmingham City held one advantage over Arsenal it lay in the art of endurance. A side striving not to fall out of the Premier League reached a peak in their history by defeating opponents who took far too long to discover impetus in this Carling Cup final. After 89 minutes, the substitute Obafemi Martins thrived on hapless defending to notch the winner. Alex McLeish's side had brought the club their first trophy since taking this prize in 1963.

This is not a paragraph. It's a vaguely related set of sentences that bear little or no relation to each other. It could almost be written as bullet points, the flow is so lacking, and yet it's the first paragraph of the paper's main report. It might be forgiveable if McCarra had been attempting a stylistic opening (albeit a botched one), but all his writing is like this.

Not having a thread is bad enough, but losing it half-way through a sentence is simply incompetent. Let's see how McCarra handles the winning goal in a major cup competition:

Koscielny moved as if to kick a long ball from Foster and distracted his goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny. He then let possession spill to the Nigerian Martins, who…

Well, we're getting really excited here, since this is a rare description of a goal (Robin Van Persie scored a terrific equaliser for Arsenal, but his name is not even mentioned in McCarra's report). We're so excited, we can almost ignore the missing comma or the fact that we don't know whether "he" refers to Koscielny or Szczesny (readers will assume it's the defender, but anyone who saw it knows he must be talking about the goalkeeper). We just want to know what Martins did. Did he…

pounce on the loose ball and stroke it into an empty net

react fastest with a striker's instinct to follow up and score

charge into the penalty area to punish the mistake, tearing the Gunners' dreams to tatters and sending the Birmingham fans into raptures

Any of those standard football-reporter clichés would do, but no, this is McCarra's effort:

He then let possession spill to the Nigerian Martins, who came to Birmingham last month on loan from the Russian club Rubin Kazan.

And that's the complete description. There really is no excuse for this. It's not a case of bad sub-editing. Heaven knows, I've been a sub-editor and I've fouled up enough good pieces with inept subbing, and bad subbing doesn't look like that, unless The Guardian employs a sub whose only task is to squeeze the rhythm and logic out of all McCarra's work. Maybe the same sub also inserted the nonsensical word "co-conspirators", to distinguish those who conspire together from one who conspires alone.

This rant isn't part of a personal grudge. Do you think I do unpaid, fantasy subbing on every article I read? That's what Wikipedia is for. McCarra only caught my attention because Guardian sports reports became so difficult to read that I felt compelled to ask, "Who wrote this?" And the same name kept cropping up. Look for yourself.

I stopped reading the BBC's website at the end of last year when its standards began plummeting. I started buying (yes, buying!) The Guardian because I like quality and I care about football. I can find (and sometimes supply) amateurish, opinionated drivel for free online. That's what the internet is for. A national newspaper should do better.

Fly me to the moon or Basingstoke (Valentine's Day special)

It’s the time of year when Valentine’s Day sidles up to me with her sweet smile, whispers in my ear and then vomits on my shoes before grabbing an unshaven amateur poet by the crotch, gargling a Sambuca and staggering to another club where people who are more fun than me go to have a good time.

It’s ten years (to the day!) since I last celebrated Valentine’s Day in any meaningful way (apart from the notorious Grapefruit Incident of 2007, but that’s another story). I have some talents in other areas, but my love life resembles the Bognor Birdman contest: year after year of launching myself hopefully, followed very shortly by a predictable drenching. It’s a record of under-achievement that would put the England football team to shame. And I’ve only got time to write this blog because of the following text message:

“Sorry for the late notice but i wont be able to make it tonight … deadlines … items delayed …wont be an early finish … postpone until next week? Sorry about that. Thanks.”

A-----  13:17

But I’m not here to grumble, nor to name any of the unfortunate women involved (don’t worry Angelina, our secret is safe). And the characters mentioned earlier are not based on anyone I know but are entirely the product of my deranged imagination (I, on the other hand, am entirely the product of my ex-wife’s deranged imagination).

February 14 is the one day of the year when I’m truly, blissfully, heart-leapingly happy to be single. Why? Because I’m a bit of a romantic, and today is far and away the least romantic day of the year. It’s the day when the most tender, considerate and loving of men turn into scheming liars. In their hearts, their faces and their deeds they will lie more desperately and miserably than they have ever lied before. Why? Because they have to pretend that they’re enjoying it too.

Men hate Valentine’s Day. No sooner has the pressure of Christmas been banished, with the presents bought and given and the drinks cabinet emptied, than the looming storm-cloud of February 14 darkens the horizon. Her favourite restaurant? Best ring up now, because this is the only night of the year (except Mother’s Day) when every restaurant is fully booked, and you don’t want to take her down the kebab shop or you’ll be in danger of getting skewered yourself. And if it’s a romantic weekend away, then you’re probably too late already. The best hotels in the most beautiful locations took their first bookings on February 15 last year and by mid-January there’s only the Holiday Inn in Basingstoke left*. Are the flowers big enough? Did you remember that she hates fondant centres? Should you buy a present as well? Will those earrings match? A man can’t enjoy Valentine’s Day. The best he can hope for is to survive.

Valentine’s Day explodes the myth that women are romantic and men aren’t. Men do dumb things like arrange surprise weekends away or buy chocolates when they’re not feeling guilty and their loved one isn’t feeling hungry. Men try to conquer the Antarctic and defeat tyrants, fly to the moon or cross the Channel in a bathtub. Almost always they do this to impress women (or occasionally to get away from them – I admit the argument doesn’t hold every time). If a woman wants to impress a man, all she has to do is wear a slightly redder lipstick and leave the top three buttons of her blouse undone. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to discourage that. I like to think I’m as shallow as the next man.

At its heart, romance is about letting your emotions inspire you to do stupid things on a whim. If women did that, the kids wouldn’t get fed and the laundry would start to pile up. Even if gender roles are changing and some men know how to operate a vacuum cleaner, the mindset is still there: women are fundamentally more organised than men. Romance has its place, and its place is February 14, which is why this is the one day when it is impossible to do anything romantic. When romance is organised, diarised and pigeon-holed, it loses everything that made it romantic in the first place. In short, it becomes sterile and emasculated. 

So I’ll wish you all a happy Valentine’s Day. Me, I’ve got to go. My Pot Noodle is getting cold.

* At the time of writing, the Holiday Inn in Basingstoke had three double rooms available from £135 plus breakfast. 

 

Our reporter makes his excuses

Paige seems a very nice girl. I'm a bit drunker than she is, but she doesn't seem to mind. Even though we've only just met, we're getting along famously, talking about this and that, including her home town of Fremantle, just outside Perth in Western Australia. I'm one of the few people she's met in London who has even heard of the place, and suddenly there's a real moment of human contact between us. She spots the danger quickly and offers to take her clothes off.

How did I get here? Well, we had been saying goodbye, adieu and dobradyn to two colleagues, drinking wine and watching the drizzly haze descend on London from the balcony of the almost secret Pan Peninsula cocktail bar, where you're eye to eye with the top of Canary Wharf and your fag butts have burned out before they reach the ground.

We leave while still sober enough to operate a lift and then perform the delicate "left-right-left-right" footwork required to get ourselves to the next destination. A colleague, who for the sake of modesty I shall call Rafael, fancies some 'afters', and knows "a place". "Oh, that place," I think as he leads the way up the steps.

Admittedly, six hours on red wine have blunted my acumen slightly, but I get the idea: several very attractive and very scantily clad young women, plus a small dancing area with a pole. The clientèle is exclusively male, most dressed in business suits and none under 30. If they are drunker than us, they don't show it. This is the moment of truth.

I have always said (when the subject comes up, which admittedly it doesn't very often) that I'm not interested in lap-dancing or strip clubs. I don't get it. But Raf has paid for the entrance and the drinks, so it would be churlish to walk out. This might be my only chance to find out what the fuss is about. So I stay.

The drinks arrive with two free (up to a point) girls. As our drinks land on the table, Andrea lands on my thigh, her left arm round my shoulder, the fingers of her right hand in my open collar and her smile all over me. And I don't care what you think about the situation; there is not a straight man alive who will not enjoy this. Probably a few gay ones too, but they can speak for themselves.

Andrea has curly, dark hair and dark brown eyes, and comes from a town in northern Mexico, near the US border. She works in what the Americans call "real estate" and is spending three months in the UK while business back home recovers. She enjoys what she does here (not that she'd say otherwise to a customer) but admits that she hasn't told her parents what she's up to and she's sure they wouldn't approve.

I'm enjoying this conversation, but fine words butter no parsnips and, what with a recession and a drugs war, Andrea's parsnips need buttering and quick. Raf already seems to have disappeared with his partner. "Would you like a …?" she asks. I'm not sure what a "…" is (either she said it quietly or left it to my imagination), but I'm here to learn, sooo…

She leads me along the bar to a partitioned area, which is not exactly sealed off but is safe from the gaze of those who haven't paid to see what goes on there. It's a bit like the family dining area of a small pub, only here you won't get fish fingers and there'll definitely be no mayonnaise.

And this is it. One of those life-defining moments: your first kiss, the first time you slept with someone you loved, the first time you slept with someone and hated yourself, the first time you got distracted by an irrelevant hyperlink, your first striptease.

I'm pushed gently into an armchair and Andrea steps backwards. She waves her finger at me. "No touch." Cheeky, for someone who was playing with my chest hair before she'd even told me her name. I wonder if she remembers mine. The she starts dancing. It's the sort of gyrating groove you'd expect, as her already meagre clothing is dispatched while she pushes the more interesting parts of her body as close to me as she can without contact. It takes about a minute for the Full Monty before she offers me a trip to the "consulting room". Here my spirit of adventure wilts (the only part of me that was in a position to do so). The music stops and she gathers up her clothes, pausing only to add my credit card to her bundle. Now she knows my name. The card is returned £20 lighter as part of a smooth and efficient operation. She's pleasant, professional and moves well, but this remains the most sexless public performance I've seen since I last sat through a junior nativity play.

We stay till they close at 3.30. By then I've declined Paige's offer but I still get dragged up at the end for another 'dance' by a Polish girl who won't give me her name but who I think says she comes from Szczecin. She succeeds largely because I have probably been asleep for an hour or more and am in the chair before I really know what's happening. It's the same deal, of course. And then we're out of the door, cards intact apart from the voluntary spending because this is a 'classy place', once you accept the dodgy premise of the whole business. And now, how to get home?

I've got a bit of time to think about this, since I'm not joining Raf's negotiations to get a cab for under £50. I walk to Island Gardens but the Thames Tunnel is shut, so I have to get a night bus back to Trafalgar Square and then another night bus out to Orpington. I get home at 6am, but it was all included in the £9 Travelcard I'd bought 22 hours before. Time to reflect.

It's not that Andrea does it badly; I find this entire operation fundamentally sexless. It seeks to flick as many random switches of male desire as it can without, of course, engaging any of the deeper feelings that make love and sex so wonderful. Effectively, it's live pornography while denying the observer the conclusion that is the only purpose of pornography.

I looked at another blog, The Male Brain at Work, and although I don't agree with it all I can't disagree with the assertion that this lowers a man's self-esteem. It's as if my emotions and urges are so shallow that my reactions can be controlled and manipulated in the most humiliatingly perfunctory ways. It reduces us all to the level of satyrs and whores, without teaching me anything. It will never turn me into the former, but nor will it make me any better at spotting the latter next time she shows up.

Will I go to another "gentleman's club", or whatever the euphemism is? Never. It's degrading to everyone involved and I want no part of it. But the business world being what it is, you sometimes have to entertain or be entertained by the MD of Iron Ore or the Senior Vice President of Coal or the Global Executive of Tiny Pellets Made From Ocelot Droppings. If I go again, it will be with gritted teeth under the most extreme duress. I'd rather take them to Love Never Dies*.

My 18-year-old, who stayed out till the trains started running, was back at seven in the morning, for which I duly chided her. As a single father of teenage girls, you've got to set an example, haven't you?

* You didn't seriously think I'd link to Andrew Lloyd Webber, did you?

Pulping fiction: Franzen's London nightmare

Novelist Jonathan Franzen has had about the worst trip to Europe of any American artist since Frank Zappa in 1971. Zappa, you might or might not remember, had a nightmare. He lost all his equipment in a fire in Switzerland (although the incident did inspire Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water, which can't be a bad thing); then, when he got to London, an audience member who thought Zappa was eyeing up his girlfriend pushed him off the stage and broke his leg.

Franzen seems to have survived physically unscathed, but he must be wondering what he's done to offend his muse for so much misfortune to have befallen him in just a few days. He was late for a BBC interview because his taxi failed to show up, and then his glasses were stolen from under his very nose – well, actually on his very nose – at a literary party on Monday night. A ransom of $100,000 was demanded (but not paid, because the miscreants were caught), which might have delayed his next novel for longer than the nine years it's taken for the present one, Freedom, to come out. The prankster, caught after the police deployed a helicopter (no, really) quickly confessed all to GQ magazine.

But that wasn't the worst of it. During a reading of Freedom on TV last Thursday for the BBC's Newsnight, Franzen suddenly stopped and said, “Sorry, I'm realising to my horror that there's a mistake here that was corrected early in the galleys and it's still in the fucking hard cover of the book.” Yes, the publisher had printed an early draft of the book instead of the final version. And not just any book. This is possibly the greatest novel of the decade so far. Hands up who would have wanted to be an employee of publisher HarperCollins on Friday morning…

Now, I have to confess that I have some friends who work on the Fulham Palace Road so I can't betray any confidences, except to say that the publisher deserves less blame than you might think (and none of that blame goes to Franzen, in case you're wondering). Using the wrong version of a file is an easy mistake to make and we've all done it, but not in a way that forces a major publisher to pulp tens of thousands of copies of the greatest novel of the decade. I totally sympathise with Franzen, who reportedly will spend months agonising over a comma and the quality of whose work justifies that care, but my heart goes out to the more modestly paid people at the publisher who will carry the can for this.

But there are two wider issues that are worth considering: the difference between digital and print publishing and the nasty little business of marketing.

If physical books were dead, as many predict they soon will be, then this would hardly be a story. Download the updated version on your iPad or Kindle, and away you go. It costs the publisher next to nothing. The Franzen calamity was a big issue because the digital future isn't with us yet, and HarperCollins is now facing a monstrous bill to recall, pulp and re-issue the novel; not to mention the blow to its prestige. But it also raises questions about the permanence of the work itself. Luigi Pirandello famously did about six versions of his classic post-modernist play Six Characters In Search Of An Author (and others have tinkered with it since: I highly recommend Rupert Goold and Ben Power's new version, which even adds a new fourth act). Monet kept painting the same scenes over and over again without any being considered the definitive version. I myself write reviews on Amazon and occasional blogs on Blogger, and I can't resist going back and fiddling with them. But once a novel is published, it is considered definitive. Will this hold true in the digital age if, as many predict, the printed novel becomes extinct?

An interesting side issue is the way that novels don't change from edition to edition even when they should. In the Booker-winning Remains Of The Day, our hero Stevens sits on Weymouth pier and watches the sun set over the sea. As anyone who has been there, or has access to a map of southern England or even Google Earth can soon find out, this is impossible; just as impossible as looking to your left at the sea as you drive into Dover (Birdsong) or taking the M3 from Chichester to Cornwall (One Day). I read The Great Gatsby and The Enchanted April recently and found grammatical mistakes in both texts, and both these books were published in the early 1920s but still haven't been corrected. I'd still recommend all five of these wonderful books, by the way.

But HarperCollins is sitting on a publicity goldmine, it seems to me. Once it accepts that this is the sort of mistake that happens in every organisation from time to time, then it needs to swallow its pride and publicise its mistake to the entire world. Get the footage of Franzen discovering the mistake, add a bit of in-house content (the editors discussing 'how we fouled up", perhaps) and get it going viral. No reader cares about HarperCollins or its reputation. Can you seriously imagine yourself refusing to buy another book from the same publisher, just because you remember this snafu? Will authors remember this calamity and snub HC, or will they follow the example from How To Win Friends And Influence People – the one where a pilot who almost crashed because of a maintenance foul-up appointed the same technician for his next flight, because he of all people would make sure he never made the same mistake again?

There is also the issue of real cost. HarperCollins is offering to replace any book already sold, but how many readers will hold on to what they see as a collectors' item of the greatest novel of the decade? The company might even sell two copies of the same book to the same reader. Franzen's reputation won't be harmed, and, even if the publisher's reputation is bruised, it has a unique opportunity to get Freedom into the public eye.

I can bring it down to the more personal level. I like literary fiction, but I'm not in the business and I don't hear about everything. Hell, it's only because I've now got friends in the business that I finally got round to reading The Remains Of The Day, and that was 20 years after it was published. But now I've heard all about Franzen and about Freedom and The Corrections. I'm going to read them, whereas I might not have done so before. Aren't you?

This blog was first published on 6 October 2010 on literary agent Nathan Bransford's excellent website. Buy the book here (Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com) and prove my marketing hypothesis.