Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 2 Aja by Steely Dan

Here is the second album of the ten I’ve been asked to nominate that stands out for me. It will come as no surprise to some of my friends: it’s a Steely Dan album, and it’s Aja.

I was a latecomer to Steely Dan because of an odd, almost inverted, snobbery I suffer from: when Steely Dan were new and all the rage in the mid-1970s, I ignored them because they were new and all the rage. I hate being part of a crowd. But a chance purchase a few years later in the Ebbw Vale, South Wales, branch of the then Forbuoys (whatever the then current chain was called) got me hooked.

This was BCD (before CDs), and like many such stores there was a ‘going cheap’ bin of goods by the counter full of LPs and cassettes they just couldn’t shift for love or money. (It’s only just occurred to me: why would a newsagent chain selling fags, sweets, paper and stationery be selling LPs and cassettes? But they were.) They were being flogged off for just 5op each — 5op! This was in 1977/8 and that 50p is now the equivalent of £2.55, but it was still remarkably cheap.

I sifted through the bin and came across a copy of Aja. I don’t even remember consciously realising it was by Steely Dan — the name doesn’t appear on the sleeve — and thinking ‘ah, Steely Dan, OK, maybe they are worth a listen’. It was the sleeve I liked. It’s a great sleeve.

I took it home over the moor between Gwent and Powys to where I lived in Crickhowell (I was a reporter on the South Wales Argus working out of the Ebbw Vale office and Crickhowell was nicer than Ebbw Vale. Still is) and played it — and played it, and played it, and played it. And then I played it a few more times.

If you know it, and you probably do, it’s one of those rare albums where the featured band hit the top every time with every song. And being Steely Dan, the melodies, orchestration, playing and lyrics are that much more complex, so that every listen seems to reveal little nuggets you somehow previously missed. Then you get to the point where you know the tune so well, you start looking forward with pleasure to ‘where that lead solo comes in’ and ‘where there’s that subtle synth in the background you can hardly hear’.

By then I already liked soul and funk a lot more than boring old on-the-beat four/four rock, and this was a further step towards my appreciation of jazz. But Aja is not jazz and it’s not rock. Some might call it jazz-rock, but even that label is a threadbare description of the music on Aja. And Steely Dan’s music was also far more successful than the many attempts of ‘jazz-rock fusion’ in the 1970s which, to me ears (of what I heard) were usually just a forced marriage of jazz and rock which, like most forced marriages, was not a happy one. Steely Dan’s music, though, was organic: it wasn’t ‘this’ or ‘that’, it was itself and unmistakeable.

On the strength of Aja, I went on to buy, in no particular order, the rest of Steely Dan’s albums, and they are all very good and I listen to them a lot and like them all, but none quite gets to me like Aja. Aja rules supreme.

I particularly liked Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s lyrics and their sardonic take on life and ‘cool’ cynicism. So when a year or so later and by now a reporter working in Newcastle I heard they were to be interviewed on Radio 1, I tuned in. Silly me. It is never pleasant to discover your gods have feet of clay.

All I heard were two smart arse, clever-clever fuckwit Noo Yorkers, being obscure, making in-jokes and generally persuading me they were prime candidates for their own cynical mockery (‘Showbiz kids making movies ’bout themselves / they don’t give a fuck about anybody else’ — well, not quite but Fagen and Becker were getting dangerously close).

But that doesn’t matter. It never matters. The music is the music is the music. Only the music matters. Would the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony be any the less glorious if you discovered he habitually picked his nose? Of course not.

So here it is the album Aja, and the track I have chosen to play is the title track, Aja. That’s not because it is any better — all the tracks are equally good — but because it is longer and the arrangement is a little more complex and shows just how Fagen and Becker took care over every last, tiny, tiny detail. Shame they came across in that radio interview as smart arse wankers.

A few years ago I finally got to see Steely Dan live at Wembley Arena and as if to remind me that they weren’t half as cool as I had thought until that radio interview, Walter Becker kicked off with that hoary old cliche ‘Hello, London! We love your fish and chips!’ Oh, for fuck’s sake. Give me a break!

A little later Fagen asked for requests and I — quite prominent in about the fourth row from the stage — shouted back ‘Play Hotel California’. Fagen, oh so cool Noo Yorker Donald Fagen, by then I’m sure a revered darling of the Noo York art scene*, was not amused. Fuckwit.

(*I hope to Christ I never become respectable.)

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 1 A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles

As the text below (lifted from my Facebook page) tells you, one of the challenges going the rounds while everyone and her/his dog is locked down is to list ten albums which were somehow significant in your life. This was my post, plus the song I mentioned. Over the following days I shall be posting the other nine . . .

I’ve been asked by my good mate Peter Bailey to nominate ten albums (called LPs when life was still in black and white) which — not exactly changed my life, but stood out. Here they are, in no particular order.

The first is A Hard Day’s Night from The Beatles. Every generation likes to think it’s the first in everything — trying sex and drugs and in music especially (and they’re not) — but ‘Beatlemania’ was nothing new, except that The Beatles were at the centre of it and there was a new young generation.

Ten years earlier Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock had ‘shocked’ the world and caused minor mania, ten years before that it was bobbysoxers screaming for Frank Sinatra (when he still had hair), and just a few years before that it was swing music and the jitterbug. And 200 years ago it was Byron and lasses ‘swooning’, overcome by is poetry (never in private, by the way, and there was always some young chap on hand to revive and tend to them. They weren’t daft).

But I am not 90 or 80 but, - - and for me and millions the world over like me it was The Beatles, and as teen I loved them. Every song on A Hard Day’s Night hit and still hits the spot, but the one featured here, I’ll Be Back, is my favourite. It doesn’t seem to be as well-known as one or two others but there’s something wistful about it.

My love of The Beatles was so strong that I can even remember — no bullshit — my heart beating faster looking forward to the release of their then latest Revolver. But, I have to admit, after that they began to fade in my view: OK, we bought and listened to the LPs, but, for example, The White Album is testament to the illusion they now shared that everything they did was brilliant just because THEY had done it: they began to believe the bullshit. It should never have been a double album and would have been far stronger if half the songs had been cut out.

Having said that, nothing can diminish the glory (for me, at least) of With The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Help and Rubber Sole. Beatles For Sale has some classic songs, but also some also-rans, and it is obvious ‘the record company’ were working them hard, hard, hard, for money, money, money — just see how knackered they look on the album sleeve.

Of those four, though, A Hard Day’s Night comes out tops every time, and it is one of those albums which still somehow sounds fresh where others sound horribly dated.

Abbey Road? Magical Mystery Tour? Sergeant Pepper? Yes, I like them but I couldn’t love them. Maybe I was growing up, but they didn’t quite have that special zing of the early albums.

Roll up, roll up and read some short stories. Oh, and beware of shysters who are everywhere (not that I’m one, I haven’t got the nous). And a few more spoof headlines for good measure

About 15 months ago, I came across a website that I’ve found very useful. I think I was scouring the net for outlets for short stories (which is, or was, something of an irony, but more of that later). Times were when short stories were much in demand and were regularly carried by all manner of magazines, which is how F. Scott Fitzgerald made his packet (then boozed it all way and died of heart failure).

The mention of Scott Fitzgerald’s name is something of a giveaway: this was pretty much 100 years ago. At my age (sadly now 70, and that is not a piece of bullshit thrown in for a cheap laugh and count yourselves privileged that I have been honest) ‘the Twenties’ don’t seem that far away. But let’s be blunt: most of the 30-odd people who will eventually get to read this blog entry over the next few months are probably at least 20 to 30 years younger than me, and for them ‘almost 100 years’ is most certainly ’almost 100 years!’ and a long, long bloody time ago. But for us ‘silver surfers’ (other cliches are available) it is not quite that distant.

For example, when I was five (between November 21, 1954, and November 2o, 1955) ‘100 years ago’ was for a five-year-old an extraordinarily long time ago — I could hardly imagine it. It was not just before World War I/the First World War or even the Boer War, but before the Indian Mutiny (and for American readers, before the Civil War). Those were the dark ages for me, and ‘the Twenties’ were in an odd kind of way comparatively recent (my mother was born in 1920 and my father in 1923).

Not only was there no internet in the Twenties and thus no streaming services, there was no television to keep folk amused, and radio and the cinema were only slowly getting their act together. So people liked to read — novels and short stories. And as there was money to be made by the magazines by printing short stories, there was a huge demand for them from writers of all kinds.

Certainly today, in 2020, some magazines still print short stories, but far, far fewer than in the heyday before television and cinema. Women’s magazines include them (‘She wondered whether she would ever recover from the grief of her darling Peter dying’), as do the downmarket rags such as Take A Break (‘There was something odd about the couple who moved in next door’).

At the snooty end of the market there’s The New Yorker and its ilk who will still print short stories, but try getting your foot in there without being on shagging terms with the editor. So out of curiosity, I was googling who might still be wanting writers to submit short stories and came across Deadlines For Writers. As it turns out: not a great deal of publications.

. . .

There is any number of sites publicising ‘short story competitions’ but invariably — at least the ones I have come across — they are just moolah machines in literary drag: they promise ‘prizes’ for the best stories submitted, but crucially it will cost you a pretty penny to submit in the first place.

For example if you want to win the Elizabeth Jolley short story prize for 2020 — not bad at AU$6,000 for the winner, with AU$4,000 for the runner-up and AU$2,500 for bronze — you will have to cough up an AU$25 entry fee. It does get cheaper if you already pay an annual AU$75 for a print subscription to the Australian Book Review, you will only be charged AU$15. But . . .

Now I tend to be a cynical cunt, and for all I know I am being unkind to the Australian Book Review and the many, many other online short story competition organisers. Perhaps. And perhaps not. All I can say is that if — in 12 months, just 500 people cough up their entry fee, the Australian Book Review prizes are well covered. If twice that number cough up, the ABR is AU$12,500 in the clover. And 1,000 would-be writers worldwide sending in their work in 12 months is really not a lot. That’s just under 85 a month. Realistically, the figure would be 2,000 or 3,000 or even more. And for every 500 bods over and above the initial 500 needed to cover the cost of prizes who chance their luck and their AU$25 ‘entrance fee’, ABR is quids in.

It gets a little more obviously stickier with the number of publishers asking for you submissions online. They are keen for ‘new writers’ and will take a look at everything. Quite possibly they will reject some of it but that is unlikely given the nature of their game. But if you are ‘accepted for publication’, watch your wallet.

In just a few minutes I have come across two such publishers, Austin Macauley Publishers and Pegasus Press but there are many more. Austin Macauley must be big — they don’t just operate in London, but in Cambridge, New


York and Sharjah (wherever that it — I’ll look it up in a minute). Pegasus Press on the other hand operates out of Cambridge, but then as Cambridge is a famous university town — one of the world’s more famous if truth be told — they must be good, respectable and decent. Surely? I mean, surely?

Well, not quite. Pegasus Press will consider all submissions, and the chances are your luck will be in and finally becoming a published author — your dream — will soon be real. That’s if you agree — that’s only if you agree — to coughing up around £2,300 to help with costs. I don’t doubt Mr Macauley of London, Cambridge, New York and

Sharjah (it’s in the United Arab Emirates) will also want his ‘contribution’, but I can’t yet tell you what it is, but I have sent a brief email saying ‘I should like to submit a manuscript. How much will it cost me’?

There’s nothing wrong with vanity publishing, and people pay to have a novel (or a piece of non-fiction) ‘published’ for a variety of reasons. Quite possibly, in the case of non-fiction, the subject matter is too arcane and a bona-fide commercial publisher — who won’t charge you anything at all if he accepts a manuscript — simply doesn’t think it will sell in sufficient numbers to cover its costs.

As for fiction, well in just this past year I have read two commercially published novels, one of which — Time Of The Beast by Geoff Smith — was dire, and the other, The Colour, was — well, so-so.

Yet that second novel, The Colour, is by Rose Tremain, who according to her Wiki page (gasp! she has a Wiki page? She certainly does!) has won a seriously long list of awards. Well, I haven’t read her other work (and for all I know it is very good, but after The Colour I don’t really feel inclined to) but judging by what I made of The Colour that

list says more about ‘awards’ than anything else. (Note to self — if by some odd fluke you are offered a literary award: turn it down!) So even commercially published fiction is not going to ring more bells because some publisher thinks ‘it will sell’.

As for vanity publishing, well Mr Macauley of London, Cambridge, New York and Sharjah and Pegasus Press are still lurking in the darker corners of the literary world, but it was once even worse. Out of interest (in knowing quite how big the rip-off would be) in the mid-1980s — only yesterday it seems to me, but probably way, way before you were born — I was quoted a price of £6,000 to ‘help with costs’. Taking inflation into account that sum would now (in 2020) be just under £14,000. So Pegasus’s £2,300 looks modest by comparison. But it’s still a rip-off.

The good news is that even if you can’t get a commercial publisher interested but still want to see your work ‘in print’, thanks to the internet that’s possible — without the bullshit and losing shedloads of money. You can now get any manuscript printed up in any number you want in good quality and all you pay for is the printing. I had the one novel I have so far written (and plugged here till I’m blue in the face but to no avail) printed up by Amazon’s Createspace.

The same novel under a different title was previously printed up by Lulu.com. I only switched because a friend at work suggested Createspace. But with both of them that’s it: no bullshit ‘we will edit and market your book and get it reviewed by the Press.’ You submit your manuscript in the form you want it to appear as a pdf and it is printed. Basta!

NB A few years ago, being one day in the office of the books’ department of the paper I was working for, I asked how many of the books submitted by bona-fide commercial publishers each week were reviewed. They said about four or five large reviews and several more brief reviews from about 60 sent in every week. The rest were given away to anyone who wanted them. (About three or four times a year, a large pile of these books were piled up on the desk on the editorial floor for anyone to take what they wanted.)

So your Pegasus Press and Austin Macauley can go and disappear where the sun don’t shine with their promises.

. . .

The reason started this entry is because I wanted to tell how 15 months ago I came across Deadlines For Writers and why I found it very useful. How? That’s quite simple: the woman who runs it (out of South Africa) posts a monthly ‘prompt’ for a short story and stipulates a pretty strict word count (the smallest was 750 words, the longest 2,500). And that is it.

For a guy who grew up ‘wanting to be a writer’, I produced little. ‘Comparatively little’ would even be an exaggeration. Now over the past nine months — I submitted my first in January 2019, then not again until August 2019 — I have completed 15 short stories. And as the astute among you will be wondering how come that’s six more than ‘one every month’, I must confess that I created a second identity on the site so I could submit more than one story every month.

And to cut to the chase, you can (if you so wish) read them all, or just one or two, here. The site also offers prompts for poems and I have submitted several of those, too. Oh, and remember those 500 ‘entry fees’ the ABR needs every year to break even. By my count the Deadlines For Writers, looking at the number of submissions for January (prompt ‘Coalition’), 286 stories were submitted.

Extrapolating that figure, that’s just over 34,000 a year. ABR would be very happy to get that number. If each of them paid an AU$25 entry fee, ABR would up to a cool AU$837,500. And if they only pay AU$15 to enter, it’s because they have already coughed up AU$75 for subscribing to the ABR. Not bad for running a website.

Beware of shysters. They are everywhere.

NB If you do check out my novel (link above) please remember the old adage never to judge a book by its cover. Please. I’ve got to get someone interested, for Christ’s sake.

. . .

Life as we see it (through the bottom of glass of a treble gin ’n tonic)

This ’n that — Ruskies, Commies, good guys, bad guys, morons like Trump, the Cold War, Jim Crow, lynching blacks, Howard Zinn, Billie Holiday — it’s strange what occurs to you sometimes of an hour

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s - ten years old in 1960 - ‘America’, by which we meant the US, was in an odd sort of way a kind of Nirvana. It was, we were led to believe, where everything worked and worked well, everything was efficient, everyone was well off, everyone was attractive, life was glamorous. America was slick, cool, and, for us in Britain at least, but also in post-World War II Europe and especially then West Germany, somewhere to be envied. It is pertinent that, as I say, when we spoke of ‘America’ we meant, and often still do, the United States. Bugger Canada, Mexico, Central America and the several huge nations to the south, ‘America’ was the United States.

At least two things were at play here and coloured my outlook: I was very young and, like all very young folk, very impressionable; and it was the height of the Cold War in which the world, or most of it, acknowledged that there were ‘the Good Guys and the Bad Guys’. For us, ‘the West’ and ‘the Free World’, we were the Good Guys and ‘the ‘Ruskies’ and other ‘Commies’ were the Bad Guys.

Of course, for many it was the other way round: for countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America where ‘the Ruskies’ and the ‘Commies’ were seen as allies in the struggle against nasty dictatorships, they were seen as the Good Guys, and the putative ‘Free World’ which for purely venal reasons all too often bolstered and often put in place many a nasty dictatorship, they were the Bad Guys.

That gullible ten-year-old, 60-odd years down the line, has learned a lot more history and seen a lot more of life, both personally and at a distance. He no longer believes in black and white, but in infinite shades of grey, with the occasional darker and brighter shades, and the, even less occasional, almost jet-black and almost pure-white spots. This gullible ten-year-old 60-odd years (who if truth be told has had quite an easy, comfortable and happy life) somehow manages down the line to be both cynically pessimistic and agreeably optimistic.

He now knows that ‘America’s’ — and in the United States’s — 1950s outbreak of prosperity and the picture of affluence it was able to purvey throughout much of the world was almost wholly the result of the resurgence of its domestic industries because of World War II. It was a war which was, in a sense, a god-send for the United States. Until Japan — it has to be said inexplicably — attacked Pearl Harbor and the US joined the war, the nation was still largely on its uppers.

Given the vast social discrepancies between the haves and have nots, as great in ‘the land of the free’ as anywhere else despite the faux-patriot insistence than in the ‘land of the free’ anyone could make it, some, many even, were doing quite nicely thank you after a few lean years at the beginning of the 1930s. But a great many more were not and were still scrabbling around for steady work and a steady income to feed their families. For much of the 1930s a staggering one in four men was without a job. But World War II changed all that.

Almost overnight the nation’s factories would be put back to work to produce goods needed for the war effort. And folk again had jobs, a steady income and a future. Until then, though, the US was in parts as much like what we until recently — and patronisingly — referred to as ‘Third World’ countries as were those ‘Third World’ countries. The Northern eastern seaboard states were perhaps in reasonable fettle, but, for example, until ‘that socialist’ Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana, the whole state had less than 400 miles of tarmacked roads. And the dustbowl of the Mid-West was in an appalling state.

Roosevelt’s first New Deal went some way to alleviating the lives of many at the bottom of the pile, but the nation’s economy was still sluggish and he launched a second New Deal a few years later, giving manual workers rights to join trades unions. But congressional opposition slowly grews — none of the politicians were on there uppers — and the bad times dragged on and remained bad until it was kickstarted by the US entering the war. Then it all changed.

She sheen came off the ‘American Dream’ for those in the ‘free West’ who had observed the country so enviously when the Vietnam War was escalated (a war, incidentally, started by the French,  but they rarely get the blame).

Arguably however horrible war is, a case can be made for ‘a just war’. World War II was ‘a just war’. But World War I wasn’t and neither were either the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But it was the latter which really fucked the ‘America’s image’. Timing didn’t help. At the time of the Korean War the West was still in war mode and prepared to die for ‘world peace’. But the late 1960s the WWII survivors were getting on, getting comfortable and getting impatient with their sons and daughters who were as unconvinced by the US’s pious democratic sanctity was we have been ever since.

Those sons and daughters, ironically today’s reactionary generation, refused to play the game, and as more and more of their generation died completely futile deaths in the Far East, they were less and less inclined to help to perpetuate the patriotic myth — as it happened a myth that was less than 30 years old but as a rule folk have short memories — that it was the United States destiny to ‘save the world’. But that’s only one side of the coin.

The other side is a loathsome, offensive, simplistic and widespread knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and it is not restricted to the political left of any country. It is bizarrely quite common. Yet whenever some silly anti-American generalisation is aired there is usually ripply of approval. ‘The Americans are all . . . ‘ What, all of them, all 330 million of them?

On many issues I am the last man to defend many American practices and attitudes. For all its much-touted status as ‘land of the free’, the US as more six times as many of its citizens banged up in jail per head of population than does ‘Red’ China. On the other hand you have a better chance of loudly ranting against the government and staying out of jail or even alive in the US than you do in China. So what does that tell us? Very little, actually, except that the world is a complex place and it is not just stupid but dangerously stupid to try to reduce it to one or two smug certainties. Anyone who thinks she or he understands the world is deluded.

. . .

Several years ago, I read a book which most certainly did not ‘change my life’, but which most certainly did give me a wholly new perspective on the US and, as a result, on the rest of the world. It was Howard Zinn’s admirable A People’s History Of The United States. I have posted about it before and shan’t bother here to repeat myself, but, rather later in life, my eyes were opened to an extent which was long overdue. By that I mean merely that I began fully to understand the complexity of life, humankind and history.

There was much in that book which appalled me as very little had appalled me before. I could and can never again see the United States as a defender of human rights after reading Zinn’s quite sober and unsensational account of the wholesale genocide of what I as a that ten-year-old ‘red indians’ and to whom we now rather more respectfully describe as ‘native Americans’.

Then there are America’s black population. I am at the moment watching Ken Burns’s account of the American Civil War and its purported emancipation of black American slaves, and cannot forget, because of what I read in Zinn’s book, how within just 12 years of the end of the Civil War, blacks were back were they started with the first establishment of the first Jim Crow laws. And from there on — for the next 100 years — it got worse and worse. Take a look to the left. I am no sentimental liberal but since then I cannot hear Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song Strange Fruit without tears coming to my eyes. And I’m as white as chalk. For those who are unfamiliar with it, you can hear it below. And if you didn’t know — but I’m sure you will guess — the ‘strange fruit’ she sings of are  the bodies of lynched blacks hanging from the trees.



Zinn makes a very good point in his book about white working class racism. He believes — he claims, I am obliged to write, but I can only say that he makes a great deal of sense for me from what I know of the world — that whipping up hatred of the white underclass against blacks in order to suppress newly emancipated blacks (‘they’re after your jobs!’) was simply a cynical ploy by the ruling class (I can’t believe I’ve used that phrase, but, well, I have because it is true) to kill two birds with one stone.

. . .

All this came to mind — the assumed efficiency and glamour of 1950s America as much as everything else — over these past few days when I read about the complete pig’s ear Donald Trump is making of his country’s response to the coronavirus, the lies he is telling, the confusion he is sowing, the history he is re-writing. Yet apparently as much as his reputation among many in the US is falling — even if it can fall any further — in other quarters it is rising. Those who cheered along the would-be iconoclast who promised them he would ‘drain the Washington swamp’ are convinced that the growing, ever more appalled antagonism towards Trump and how unbelievably ham-fisted he is proving to be is simply more ‘proof’ that ‘they’ are out to get their man. And that thus their man, Trump, somehow must be right.

From what I know of US history the times are not, in fact, exceptionally extraordinary. But what is different is that the world in 2020 is different (as the spread of coronavirus has shown us) than what is was in 1820 or 1920. We smug Brits are half-convinced that when all is said and done those loud, whooping, classless, tacky Yanks have pretty much got a screw loose and not much else can be expected from them. What, though, all of them? All 330 million of them? My one week (!) in the US, a week’s visit to New York in June 1989, was long enough to teach me that however much we Brits think the US is ‘like us’ because we speak the same language, it just ain’t so. It is as much a foreign country as Russia or Tibet. And I suspect that in some ways there are ‘several countries’ even within the US — just how much to Texans have in common with the folk in Maine, for example?

The main difference the US makes to the world is by virtue of its size and the size of its economy. But that is a hell of a difference. And because of the impact it has the world, and not just the US, really does not need a total idiot like Trump in charge. The sad thing is there’s bugger all we can do about it.

Might I end on a plea: if you feel that despite my pious disclaimer I am also guilty of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, can I urge you to accept that I am not, that the impression is merely conveyed by this piece not being as well written as it might have been?