wot i red on my hols by alan robson (canticus bestiola)

A Beatle in my Soup

Probably the last thing the world needs is yet another biography of Paul McCartney. I’m sure that over the years I must have read at least half a dozen of them – two of them written by Philip Norman! And now that I’ve read Fab – An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes I’ve added one more to the list.

Most McCartney biographies tend towards the hagiographical, glossing over the man’s more egregious stupidities and arrogant attitudes. Howard Sounes book, by contrast, is not afraid to approach these things head on and while he freely admits his admiration for Paul’s musical genius he refuses to let that admiration cloud his judgement of Paul’s character. The result is a refreshingly honest examination of Paul’s life from his birth to the present day, warts and all. Even the music does not escape unscathed. Much of Paul’s output is shown to be second rate (at best) and Sounes analyses the reasons for this with a biting, critical and insightful wit.

The first part of the book is a little dull for those of us who grew up with the Beatles. It’s an oft told tale, which is now part of our cultural history. In 1942 Paul is born in Liverpool, he goes to school, he meets John Lennon and George Harrison, they play in a band called the Quarrymen which morphs into the Beatles. The Beatles play the Cavern club and Hamburg’s red light district. They meet Brian Epstein who gets them a contract with Parlophone where they come under the influence of music producer George Martin. They sack Pete Best (their drummer) and Ringo Starr joins them. Fame and fortune follow. The Beatles break up in a blaze of acrimonious publicity and they all go their separate ways.

Amazingly, Howard Sounes manages to brighten even this familiar chronicle of events by including several pruriently interesting tales of Paul’s sexual escapades in Hamburg, some of which came back to bite him on the bum in later life and which ended up costing him quite a lot of money in disputed paternity cases.

After the Beatles broke up, the quality of Paul’s song writing took a bit of a nose dive for a while. Both his solo efforts and the songs he composed with his new band Wings were often mediocre and sometimes saccharine – perhaps he was missing the discipline and hardness of character that John Lennon had brought to their collaborations. The political naivety of Give Ireland Back to the Irish and the mawkish (and vaguely racist) sentimentality of Ebony and Ivory being particularly notable examples of Paul’s musical decline. Though having said that, Wings’ album Band on the Run was an absolutely superb piece of music. Unfortunately the follow up album, Venus and Mars was rather poor and Howard Sounes spends a lot of time analysing the reasons for this.

Wings eventually disbanded, due in no small measure to Paul’s arrogant and sometimes bullying treatment of the band members. Denny Laine stayed with him the longest but even he eventually grew fed up with Paul’s attitude, and left him to himself. Probably the straw that broke the camel’s back was McCartney’s mega-hit Mull of Kintyre. The music and the arrangement of the song was quite brilliant (Paul was, and is, hugely talented in that department) and for once the lyrics meshed perfectly with the lush sounds of the music. By any standards, it was a brilliant composition. But, Sounes reveals, the lyrics were actually mostly written by Denny Laine, and not by Paul. However Paul refused to acknowledge Laine's contribution to the song and denied him his share of the money from the record sales. Laine walked away in disgust, and who can blame him?

This selfishness and arrogance has always been a defining characteristic of Paul’s, and Howard Sounes returns to it time after time as he tries to come to grips with just what it is that makes Paul McCartney tick. His selfishness is almost self evident in the sense that it is common knowledge that Paul has always put himself first – my way or the highway as the saying goes. That attitude was a direct cause of the Beatles’ break up (though, to be fair, Lennon and Harrison were also having similar misgivings about the future of the band). But, in Paul’s mind, his own (sometimes hedonistic) desires have always taken precedence over everything and everyone else. Consequently, he seems to find it difficult to appreciate the scope of other people’s feelings and so he tends not to take account of them when they conflict with his own. As a result, he is not at all an empathic person.

For example, he showed little or no remorse when his constant sexual dalliances broke up his engagement to Jane Asher. He just found her reaction puzzling. And of course there was his notorious attempt to smuggle a huge stash of marijuana into Japan which saw him banged up in a Japanese jail for a while and then ignominiously deported. He simply couldn’t conceive that anyone would try to stop him from indulging in his favourite pastime – in his own mind, laws didn’t apply to Paul McCartney so he saw nothing risky about wandering through Japanese customs with a suitcase full of dope. His fellow band members were furious with him. Because the Japanese tour was cancelled, they all lost a lot of money which some of them desperately needed to pay tax bills. But Paul didn’t care about that or about them…

Over the years, Paul starred in and was closely involved with the production of, two movies – Magical Mystery Tour during his Beatle years and Give My Regards to Broad Street, a later solo project in 1984. Both films were absolutely dire though the soundtrack albums were quite brilliant. Howard Sounes spends a lot of time analysing the reasons for the failure of the movies and comes to the conclusion that much of the blame lies directly with Paul. He had absolutely no idea about how movies should be made. He went into both projects with only the very vaguest ideas as to what he wanted the films to be, and he ignored all the advice he was given by more knowledgeable people, insisting that he knew what he was doing when he clearly didn’t have a clue. Both films ended up as randomly unstructured collages that made little sense at all. One critic claimed that Give My Regards to Broad Street was actually a nonmovie! But of course Paul, in his arrogance, knew better...

In 1999, less than a year after the death of his wife Linda Eastman who had been the great love of his life, Paul rebounded into an affair with Heather Mills, a model and animal rights activist. Heather had undergone an amputation of he left leg following a traffic accident. Nevertheless she courageously continued with her modelling career, appearing on the catwalk wearing a prosthetic leg.

Paul’s relationship with Heather was notoriously tempestuous – their arguments were legendary and widely reported in the world’s press. Despite this, they eventually married in 2002. The marriage did not last long, and after living apart for some time they officially separated in 2006. During the divorce proceedings that followed their separation Heather tried hard to take Paul to the (financial) cleaners and she walked away with a settlement in excess of twenty four million pounds. However the judge who heard the case based his judgement on Paul’s financial worth rather than on the merits of Heather’s claims against him. He remarked in his judgement that:

I am driven to the conclusion that much of [Heather Mills] evidence, both written and oral, was not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid. Overall, she was a less than impressive witness.

One journalist who was covering the case noted that Heather told so many lies in court that he would not be at all surprised to find out that she actually had two legs after all!

Following his divorce Paul embarked on a world concert tour and, Howard Sounes informs us, quickly recouped the money he had been forced to pay Heather. Easy go, easy come. His marriage had been a typically bad decision by Paul but his (musical) ability to pour money back into his bank account had rescued him, as it always seemed to do. One wonders if he learned anything from the experience. Probably not.

Of all the biographies of Paul McCartney that I’ve read, I think Howard Sounes book is by far and away the very best. It is thoughtful, analytical and well balanced, presenting both the rough and the smooth highlights and lowlights of Paul’s life. It emphasises the good and the bad aspects of Paul McCartney the man, Paul McCartney the loving father, Paul McCartney the brilliant songwriter, and Paul McCartney the generally terrible businessman. I’m not at all sure that I’d like or respect the person that the book portrays if I met him in the pub but I am absolutely sure that Howard Sounes has done a brilliant job of putting that person’s life into perspective.

* * * *

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is a hugely entertaining and enormously informative discussion about the history of the periodic table of the elements. Along the way, the book tells us what elements actually are and discusses how each element was discovered, how (and why) it was named and what it can be used for. The stories behind the discovery of the elements are many and varied, amusing and sad, often involving eccentric obsessives and frighteningly intense intellectuals – clowns and con artists, professors and peasants, braggarts and bigots. I’ve got a degree in chemistry, I’m supposed to know all this stuff, and to a certain extent I did (and do). But I learned lots of new stuff as well. This is a fascinating, fascinating book.

We’ve all seen the periodic table of the elements hanging on the wall in school (and possibly university and maybe even industrial) laboratories. Small squares are arranged in rows and columns. Each square contains a cryptic initialism representing the name of the element it defines together with numbers that presumably mean something rather significant…

Elements are the basic building blocks of matter, of stuff – you can’t break an element down into anything simpler. Well, actually you can, but if you do it isn’t an element any more, it’s just a handful of electrons, protons and neutrons looking for a new home. The smallest amount of an element that can exist is a single atom. In other words everything in the world that you can poke with a stick is, when you get right down to basics, made up of atoms which are themselves made up of electrons, protons and neutrons in various proportions and combinations. The periodic table tells us how many of each of these so-called elementary particles make up every individual element.

The table neatly defines the borderline between physics and chemistry – chemistry is what happens when electrons from different elements play with each other and physics is what happens when all the other bits and pieces do their thing. That’s a little bit of an over-simplification, but its a useful enough definition to allow us finally to understand what is going on in our test tubes when we shake them.

Before the periodic table existed science in general and chemistry in particular was largely empirical, somewhat akin to witchcraft. Certainly people noticed that stuff happened when they mixed things together and if they heated them up in various ways and in different combinations more stuff happened and the results were often very useful in the sense that you could use what you ended up with to kill people or paint pictures or construct buildings or brew refreshing drinks. But there was little or no rhyme nor reason to it all. We knew what happened but we had absolutely no real idea at all about why it happened.

The periodic table changed all that. In 1869 the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, building on ideas first suggested by Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner and John Newlands, arranged the known elements in the order of the weight of an individual atom of each element. This so-called atomic weight was a figure that chemists had learned how to (approximately) calculate, though they weren’t any too sure about what the figure meant, or indeed if it meant anything at all. But when Mendeleev arranged the elements in this way he found that they fell naturally into families with very similar properties. However sometimes the patterns of similarity broke down almost as if there was something missing...

Rather arrogantly, Mendeleev suggested that these gaps represented elements that had not yet been discovered and he predicted what their properties must be, based on the patterns that he had found. Eventually the missing elements were discovered and their properties did indeed exactly match what Mendeleev had predicted they would be. It was clear that he had discovered a fundamental tool for describing and predicting elemental structures and their properties. Over the next century or so scientists refined his ideas and used them to explain much that had been mysterious before Mendeleev’s huge intellectual breakthrough.

It only remains to discover why spoons disappear. If you really want to know the answer, read the section of the book that talks about the properties of the element Gallium…

* * * *

Until I read Ben Elton’s autobiography What Have I Done? I didn’t realise how much we both had in common. We are both English and we both fell in love with and married a lady from Perth in Western Australia (not the same lady, I hasten to add). Clearly Ben and I are soul mates.

Ben spends much of the first part of the book talking about how much he loves and admires his fellow comic the late Rik Mayall, and then, rather paradoxically, he goes on to detail several significant occasions when Rik treated him like an absolute shit. And yet Ben still kept coming back for more. I’m really not sure how that works. It certainly wouldn’t work for me, but it seems to have worked for Ben. Maybe we aren’t so similar after all.

Ben’s name first came to my attention as the writer of the gloriously anarchic comedy The Young Ones which had me in fits of laughter. He discusses the show quite extensively, analysing the bits he feels didn’t really work and contrasting them with the bits that did. He remains dissatisfied with it – apparently his scripts were sometimes heavily re-written after he submitted them (the talking rats were not his idea and he hates them). He also felt that the actor who played Mike was badly cast (not the actor’s fault, Ben concedes that he did a marvellous job with the lines that were handed to him, but he just wasn’t right for the part). He also reveals in passing that Alexei Sayle absolutely detests him which makes me wonder why Alexei ever agreed to appear in the show at all…

After that, I started seeing Ben’s name everywhere. I caught various snippets of his stand up act on the television. I listened to him hop madly from topic to topic seemingly free associating in a rambling stream of consciousness style which gave the impression that he was just making stuff up as he went along. He, just like everybody else in the audience, couldn’t wait to find out what he was going to say next. On one such occasion I saw him fall into an abrupt silence and an expression of absolute horror spread across his face as he suddenly realised that he’d just said something so amazingly filthy that he’d managed to shock even himself! But he swallowed nervously and managed to recover himself. Well done that man, what a professional!

Ben’s next big TV triumph was to rescue the show Blackadder from mediocrity. The first season of the programme had been largely written by Rowan Atkinson (the star – if that’s the right word) and it really wasn’t very good at all. Rowan Atkinson is many things, but he isn’t much of a writer. Ben was called in to fix what was starting to be seen as a little bit of a disaster and the result was three magnificent seasons of perhaps the funniest and yet at the same time the most serious show ever seen on television. The final season – Blackadder Goes Forth – was an absolute tour de force and if its closing scene doesn’t bring tears to your eyes then you simply aren’t human. And those tears won’t be, and certainly shouldn’t be, tears of laughter – that final gut-wrenching scene is so poignant and so gloriously inevitable in its tragic portrayal of the stupidity and futility of life in the trenches of the first world war that the comedy that led up to it is seen in a whole new and perhaps rather bitter light. The show is completely and perfectly brilliant and Ben’s thoughts about what he felt he was doing with the Blackadder scripts are perhaps the very best part of this book.

The literary device of using comedy to make a serious point about the human condition is very much a characteristic of Ben Elton’s approach to his material. It is perhaps best seen in his novels (fifteen of them to date with, hopefully, a lot more still to come), but it also lies behind the success of his television shows..

In between writing for television, performing in his stand up shows and producing his novels (he’s nothing if not prolific), Ben somehow also found time to turn his talents to musical theatre by writing something he called a juke box musical. We Will Rock You used songs written by the rock band Queen to tell the story of a renegade rock group struggling against the constraints imposed by a vaguely Orwellian society. The critics absolutely hated it, but nevertheless it played to packed houses in the West End for more than a dozen years. Clearly Ben Elton had struck a very successful chord (pun not intended).

Ben Elton has perhaps received more than his fair share of critical complaint over the years and again he spends a lot of time discussing the reasons for this and the effect it has had on both his personal and his professional life.

His latest foray into the world of television humour is the Shakespearean sitcom Upstart Crow. – three very successful seasons, to date.

What Have I done? Is a massive door stopper of a tome, largely because Ben Elton insists on dotting every imaginable ‘i’ and crossing every imaginable ‘t’. And then he does it all over again with the unimaginable ‘i’s and ‘t’s. Fortunately this excessive attention to detail is never dull – I’m not sure if he knows how to be dull – and the book is a rollicking yarn, fascinating and fun and full of jolly (and some not so jolly) anecdotes.

* * * *

Since I was born in what was then called the West Riding of Yorkshire (now just West Yorkshire) I felt it was my patriotic duty to read Mark Richards’ novels about Detective Chief Inspector Mike Brady because the books are all set in Yorkshire.

Unfortunately the people in Mark Richards’ novels all live in North Yorkshire, a hateful place which, as far as I am concerned, is full of nasty foreigners. But you can’t have everything, I suppose and at least the people of North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire do agree about one thing. They are united in their hatred of the foreigners who live in East Yorkshire because they all talk funny over there. So that’s a plus.

But no matter what internal squabbles they may have, the people of North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and East Yorkshire all align with each other in their hatred of the Lancastrians from over the other side of the Pennines because those people are just plain weird. They grow red roses for heaven’s sake! No good can come of that, you mark my words.

But what about South Yorkshire, I hear you ask? Trust me on this, there is no such place. North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and East Yorkshire were originally the North Riding, West Riding and East Riding of Yorkshire – the word Riding derives from the Anglo-Saxon thridding meaning a third part. When you’ve got three parts making up the whole thing, you can’t possibly have room left over for a fourth part. Therefore South Yorkshire simply doesn’t exist, there’s nowhere to put it. It never has existed except in the fevered imaginations of some extremely bored bureaucrats who made it up out of nothing at all one dull Friday afternoon in 1974 when they had nothing better to do other than to divide Yorkshire up into four imaginary parts that nobody believes in.

Where was I? Oh yes…

Salt in the Wounds is the first novel in an ongoing series about Detective Chief Inspector Michael (Mike) Brady. About a year or so before the novel opens, Mike Brady’s wife had been run over by a car and killed leaving Mike alone with his daughter Ash and his Springer Spaniel Archie. Since his wife died Mike has been on an extended compassionate leave and as long as that leave continues he is, for all intents and purposes, a private citizen rather than a policeman. He likes it that way and he has pretty much made up his mind to leave his old profession behind. But them his oldest and closest friend is murdered.

Initially Mike leaves it to the police to investigate the murder but he gets annoyed when they take the easy way out and arrest his friend’s wife for the killing. After all, everybody knows that most murders are committed by family members, so who else could it possibly have been? Mike is absolutely certain that his friend’s wife had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder and so, rather against his better judgement, he finds himself involved in the investigation. Of course he eventually tracks down the real murderer, thus forcing the police to admit that they made a mistake with the original arrest.

The investigation re-awakens something in Mike and at the end of the novel we find him preparing to resume his old occupation. The second and subsequent novels see him back in the police force.

The novels are shot through with humour as well as with tragedy. Mike is a sensitive souls, scarred by his experiences and by the things he finds other people experiencing. His relationship with his daughter Ash and his dog Archie lie at the heart of everything he does – Ash is a precocious thirteen year old whose relentless teasing of her father is a constant delight. And of course Archie, like all dogs, is the best dog ever though his habit of rolling in dead fish sometimes puts a strain on that relationship. Ash and Mike squabble over whose turn it is to wash him...

My only real complaint about the books is the author’s insistence on ending each of the investigations with some kind of violent confrontation – a confrontation that would never have needed to take place if Mike (and the police) had used a little bit of common sense. Perhaps its a publishing thing – maybe editors feel that books which are primarily a slow moving intellectual exercise in which the hero just wanders around, meets people, asks them questions and gains some kind of insight into their lives, need some contrasting "action" to liven them up. I don’t agree with that. Personally I get a lot more fun out of the character development and the deductions made from the (sometimes incomplete and sometimes quite misleading) evidence than I do from pointless action for the sake of action. I tend to flip over the boring fight description pages...

But what do I know? I’ve never written a novel.

Suffice it to say that I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Richards’ stories about Detective Chief Inspector Mike Brady. I hope there are many more to come.