Anywhere I Lay My Head - Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Johansson - Falling Down

When I was a wee lad my Uncle, who worked abroad and so was often coming home with curiosities, stuck a tape on our stereo (ah, tapes). It was the Tom Waits album Blue Valentine which opens with a lushly orchestrated version of Somewhere from the musical West Side Story. When that unmistakable lisping growl intoned the first line 'There's a place for usssssss' I burst out laughing. Surely this was a joke. Quite a few years later I am a great admirer of Tom Waits, one of the preeminent songwriters and a man who can tell a story in song like no other.

Maybe this is why Hollywood starlet Scarlett Johansson has chosen to perform an album of Waits cover versions as her musical debut (apart from a version of Summertime which I heard a while back). Maybe she felt that as an actress she could bring her skills to song interpretation. She's even enlisted backing vocals from showbiz chum David Bowie and top production values from Dave Sitek. There's just one problem with that. Actually there's more than one problem with this album.

It opens with Fawn, an instrumental which begins with an organ before big horns come in; it's a fanfare of a start but we're waiting for the voice. Town With No Cheer has an extended intro before slow keyboards reminiscent of Twin Peaks bring in Scarlett's entrance. But wait; is that her? Is that a her, it sounds like a him. I'm experiencing that same shock again. She sounds flat. Why have they set the song too low even for her alto voice? Oh dear, not good, and no amount of over production can hide it (and they've tried). Falling Down has more wall of sound production but there's that voice again. She is flat. I know Nico made a career out of it but that doesn't mean we'll accept it another time. Bowie makes his first appearance, just, he's very low in the mix. The title track begins with a drum machine from a Bontempi organ by the sounds of things and then, a little clearer this time, Scarlett struggling again. Bowie comes to help her again on Fannin' Street by warbling like he's in pain or having a nightmare, perhaps he was. Song For Jo is the only original track on the album and its, well, not bad just a bit dull really.

The production is impressive, in fact in many ways this is Sitek's album especially as Scarlett's voice is often only just audible under the booming soundscape. There are hints of the Cocteau Twins, and even a New Order style I Don't Want To Grow Up but it doesn't matter how hard he tries if you keep smirking or wincing at the vocal. I could be wrong, I was very wrong about Tom Waits, perhaps this album is destined to be a classic. But I don't think so.

Tom Waits - Falling Down

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loose lips sink ships

Darkness Falls From The Air
by Nigel Balchin

I'm always up for a 'lost classic' or a book which deserves a wider audience. The author Patrick McGrath in a recent interview on the Asylum site mentioned this wartime novel by Nigel Balchin who enjoyed great critical and comercial success in his day (and also incidentally penned the terms boffin and backroom boy). McGrath mentioned that it has the most perfect ending. I can't tell you how many times the ending of a novel has left me feeling let down, so naturally I couldn't wait.

I felt unseated almost immediately by the tone which was far less gritty Brits during the Blitz and more Brits thinking it's damned inconvenient now getting to the Ritz. There's lots of talk of getting tight, talking bunkum and people being a pip. But this isn't upper class guff, Balchin's novel is located firmly in the middle classes (with their unique withering take on everything, even war) with solid civil servant Bill Sarrat at the centre. Bill is frustrated at work where the dithering of colleagues and especially superiors is moving from Yes Minister territory into a far more serious area which he feels could decide whether the war is won or lost. He faces a different battle at home where his wife, Marcia, is having an affair with which Sarrat is being terribly accommodating, especially when, or perhaps because he thinks her lover Stephen is 'a perfect specimen of a spoilt child grown up'. Taking the moral high ground he thinks it is up to Marcia to decide how and when and even if to end her affair but with her caring nature she finds it almost impossible to resist those very demonstrations of childish emotion which Stephen is so keen on; the tears, the dramatic gesture, the talk of suicide. This leads to a building intensity to Bill's confrontations with his wife and after one particular scene where he is driven to slap her hard across the face and then breaks down we have this thoroughly English conclusion: '..."But anyhow I must go to the office now. It's damned late." It was well after nine.'

Balchin's descriptions of London under the Blitz aren't what I expected either. The book was actually written whilst the bombs fell and shows events from a unique humourous perspective.

They had hauled down a barrage balloon. It was a bit deflated and the tail fins were flopping down. End on, the whole thing looked exactly like an elephant in a vile temper flapping its ears. I remembered that the people who ran barrage balloons were said to get very fond of their own balloon. You could see that they would. This particular one had a lot of personality.

Or this exchange after an incendiary bomb has fallen and been quickly doused by men with sandbags.

'It was a feeble little bomb, wasn't it?'
'It didn't get much of a chance,' I said
'No. I felt quite sorry for it in a way.'

The civil service plotline isn't hugely engaging and the tone of the rest of the novel is confusing to say the least. It felt at times more like pastiche than a novel being written at the time. It isn't until nearer the end that Balchin uses his obvious skill to create a far more dangerous sounding London, one familiar to anyone who has lived there through any form of terror there in the last 60 years. I won't say too much of the ending of which McGrath is so impressed and we'll ignore the idea of a perfect conclusion but Balchin certainly wields his authority. This tale of life during wartime has its moments but its alienating tone makes it difficult to care too much about anyone.

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Sun Giant EP - Fleet Foxes

Fleet Foxes - Mykonos

How can you ignore a five star rave review? I can't, but I am nearly always disappointed. People tend to rave about things which are very particular to them, who knows what sets it off; something very personal usually which doesn't quite click with you. Also, if I had a pound for every glowing music review which mentions Brian Wilson or The Beach Boys I'd be, well, able to finance these deflating musical forays.

But this five track EP from Seattle five piece Fleet Foxes is worth everyone of those five stars (and a little alliteration too). The title track opens with close-set acapella harmonies which echo as if they're being sung in a church and there is something religious about the melody too. Just voices singing but there is a grandeur to the music as they sing ' What a life I lead when the sun breaks free/As a giant torn from the clouds'. There's accompaniment and a much bigger sound to Drops In The River and English House continues with the guitars and ukulele underpinning more fantastic harmonies. The sun comes out again on the mournful sounding Mykonos, 'And you will go to Mykonos/With a vision of a gentle coast/And a sun to maybe dissipate/Shadows of the mess you made.' Halfway through it changes tack with more choral vocals which reach out to lead the track somewhere else. It's just lead vocalist Robin Pecknold and guitar on the last track Innocent Son and it's a voice with surprising range even on this short selection. There are inevitable comparisons to Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Beach Boys and some more recent alt country outfits but I'll leave it to the band themselves to describe what they do: "We'd call this stuff baroque harmonic pop jams". Well, there you go. An album will follow in June. Can't wait.

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running scared

Child Of All Nations
by Irmgard Keun

Kully is a nine year old girl growing up in 1930's Europe. Along with her father and mother the family move from country to country as exiles because;

...we can't return to Germany, because then the government would lock us up, ever since my father told the French newspapers and other newspapers, and he even wrote it in a book, about how much he hates the government.

Kully's narrative voice (and Michael Hoffman's excellent translation) moves this novel along at quite a pace. As you can see it is a voice of innocence and experience at the same time. Not only is she a child living in dangerous times but her parents a far from model. Her father in particular is not to be relied upon. A writer constantly in search of the next publisher, borrowing money from all and sundry and dragging his wife and daughter around to leave as surety when he needs to borrow more. Kully remembers vividly a time when he almost forget to come back for her, an episode which captures strikingly the trust a child places in their parents. And so often in this story Kully and her mother are left waiting, suffering the indignity of the changing attitudes of hotel staff as telegrams and letters keep them posted on the progress of earning enough to pay the hotel bill.

A young narrator is a risk but Keun hits just the right note, avoiding sentimentality and often cutting to the heart of the matter. She has a unique way of looking at the adult world.

A border has nowhere for you to set your foot. It's a drama that happens in the middle of a train, with help from actors who are called border guards.

She is also very funny, her unique take on things often throwing up hilarious observations.


She ordered bouillabaisse, which is a kind of soup that's made out of the Mediterranean; all the creatures in the Mediterranean float around it in a hard-to-identify way, and some of them of course are poisonous. When people have had enough of life, they can choose to die either by mushrooms or bouillabaisse, but in either case I think they have to order it specially from the hotel kitchen.


Keun's novel was first published in 1938, before war broke out and certainly before the true scale of Nazi atrocities would be known. It is amazing therefore with the benefit of hindsight to see the prescience of this novel. Not so much in foretelling the scale of destruction but in showing with an observer's eye the impact of diaspora on any community. What do you call home if it isn't a place and it isn't your family?

Michael Hoffman's excellent afterword explains a little more about Keun, who was the partner of Joseph Roth in the last years of his life (and may have provided inspiration for the character of Kully's father), as well as correctly identifying the weakness of the ending. As soon as Kully boards the boat to America there is a dissipation of tension from which the novel never quite recovers. It's charting of their nomadic existence in Europe is finely observed however and makes a compelling case for Keun to emerge from the shadow of her partner and hopefully for more of her work to become available in English.

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Baise mon tchou!

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
by G B Edwards

Sometimes the story behind a novel serves not only to intrigue but to feedback and increase the magic of the work itself. There is a particular poignancy to novels published posthumously which go on to achieve great success, such as A Confederacy of Dunces, that leaves us wondering what else might have been. Gerald Basil Edwards was a civil servant for most of his life and died at the age of 77 living as a virtual recluse in Dorset. Near the end of his life he had been befriended by Edward Chaney who encouraged him to complete a novel he was working on (part of a projected trilogy of works set on his home isle of Guernsey). Unfortunately for us he only completed the first (burning what remained) but we are lucky that Hamish Hamilton published it originally and that New York Review of Books Classics have reprinted a new edition. It is a masterpiece of character fiction, a definitive novel about Guernsey and a particular time and a must read for any self respecting reader.

Ebenezer Le Page is a Guernsey man, a donkey, as the Jersey islanders would call him and as stubborn as that animal in many ways. His is an uncompromising voice and from the first page it is a voice which is utterly convincing. Speaking in the Anglo-French patois of the island the novel comes to us from three notebooks he has purchased from the local post office and which he has filled with his life. Edwards achievement is total; as you read you have to remind yourself that the notebooks aren't real, he isn't actually writing this in his home at Les Moulins. Take this paragraph:


I thought a lot of myself when I was a young chap. I wasn't bad looking for a Guernsey boy. I was dark with a round museau of a face and thick lips, and a pug nose and high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes and a bush of black hair. I haven't got much of that black hair left now, and what there is of it is white. I've still got got enough teeth to eat with and I can hear all right and have never had to put spectacles on my nose, though I have to look through a magnifying glass to read the Births, Deaths and Marriages in the Press, and I write big in this book so as to be able to see what I'm saying. I didn't grow very tall and wished I was taller: but I had broad shoulders and a good chest which I used to go round with stuck out like a pigeon. I was given fine strong legs, but they was a trifle bandy even then, and have got bandier and bandier the older I've got. I wish now I could straighten them out a bit; but I can still get along on them all right. With a stick.

What this shows is how skillfully Edwards describes to us not only the man now but the man back then too and crucially how the physical deterioration has done nothing to dim the spirit. The chest stuck out like a pigeon, the pride in not needing spectacles, the admission to needing to write big in his book (the kind of detail that makes the book real) and that hilarious punchline to finish it off. In spite of his cantankerous nature Ebenezer provokes many laughs, not always intentionally.

I said the book he ought to read is Robinson Crusoe. It is a good book. It show how if you go gallivanting all over the world instead of stopping at home where you belong, you only land yourself with a load of trouble. Raymond couldn't stop laughing when I said that. I don't know for why.

No man is an island, but if ever a man could be seen to represent one it is Ebenezer. Having left its shores only once to play in the football match against Jersey, and lived through two World Wars, an island occupation, the arrival of the motor car and a visit from the King he is Guernsey, an embodiment of the way things were. When Dudley Waine ('with an "e"') comes to interview him as part of his research into the island he calls Ebenezer an anachronism.

'Say that word again', I said. He said it. I said 'Spell it.' He spelt it. 'Now what do it mean please?' I said. 'Out of its due time,' he said, 'in your case, belonging to a bygone age.' 'I thought you was interested in old things,' I said. 'So I am, so I am,' he said. 'I find you immensely interesting. As an object of study.' He was looking at me through his thick round spectacles, as if I was something come out of a hole in the ground. For a minute, I felt so small...but I wasn't going to give in to goggle-eyes, even if he did know everything. After all, he wasn't so wonderful himself. 'Baise mon tchou!' I said.

The framing device for the novel is Ebenezer's legacy. With no immediate family but half the island 'cousins and the cousins of my cousins' he has to decide who to leave his stash of golden sovereigns to. This allows him to introduce us to several of the island's characters. Important amongst these are his old pal Jim Mahy, his cousin Raymond Martell and the woman of his life Liza Queripel. His friendship with Jim is written with beautiful frankness; their closeness typified by a night they spend marooned on the isle of Lihou huddling together for warmth. Ebenezer knows that he can tell Jim anything and 'he would have liked me just the same.' His relationship with his cousin Raymond is far more complicated, but then so is Raymond. His struggles with faith and love make his life a misery and there is real pain in Ebenezer's inability to help him. It is a tempestuous relationship he enjoys, or endures, with Liza Queripel. From their flirtatious youth to the angry exchanges later in life the two of them are more like sparring partners than lovers but it is a relationship that endures whilst others are tragically ended; history takes its toll on a life as long as Ebenezer's. At the centre always is the man himself;

I doubt everything I hear, even if I say it myself; and, after the things I have been through and seen happen to other people on this island and known to have happened in the world, I sometimes wonder about the existence of God: but I know I am Ebenezer Le Page.

There is another important character of course: Guernsey itself. My copy of the book included a map of the island but Edwards writes with such knowledge that you don't need it. Not so much sketching as painting the landscape, it is a portrait filled with great affection. Edwards himself was unable to return to Guernsey when his father remarried and left their home to his new family so it is no wonder that legacy plays such an important role in his novel. Some have criticised the novel for its happy ending but it is hard to begrudge Ebenezer his resolution; finding a worthy recipient of not only his stash but the three notebooks, bought for 18/6, which make up the book of Ebenezer Le Page. As a final quotation (I could happily copy out vast chunks) I'll leave you with another example of Edwards' love for Guernsey.

...we sat and watched the big sun sink lower and lower until there was only a tip showing; when suddenly, it dipped under, and was gone! Then it happened. I don't know what. The great rocks was not rocks, nor the sea sea, yet they was real as real; and the clouds was gates of glory, and every way I turned my eyes the view was waves of joy and golden light. 'God, that's magnificent!' said Neville. I had no words but Raymond's. 'It is a glimpse of the world as God made it,' I said, 'on the first evening of the first day.' He gave me a funny look. 'I'd love to paint it!' he said. 'It can never be painted,' I said.

Don't be so sure. In his unique work G B Edwards has done exactly that.

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