Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 3 Blood On The Tracks by Bob Dylan

In 1968 when I was released from boarding school, I somehow scraped into university. It’s wondrous what two A-level poor Es (in chemistry and biology) and an — in many ways a spurious — A (in German) can achieve, though not quite as wondrous as I once thought: after not even finding a place through the clearing system, I heard somewhere it was worth simply writing to universities asking for a place.

I did just that and almost by return was offered three places (by Liverpool, Bradford and Dundee) with no questions asked, and an interview (Kings College, London, which predictably my 18-year-old self screwed up) who were a little more circumspect. It helped that unfilled places didn’t earn universities government money, so to get the full whack of public gelt all places had to be and were filled, one by me. I accepted Dundee’s offer merely because it was the first to arrive.

Nominally, I was there to study philosophy (which I did eventually, though the first year consisted of studying five subjects). Actually, I was there to — in no particular order — grow my hair as long as possible, smoke dope (which in those days was still cannabis not heroin) and lose my cherry. Did I succeed? I wonder.

Folk of my age will remember that the later years of the 1960s (the fabled ‘Sixties’ didn’t really start until 1964) did have a feel of innovation about them, especially in music, but by 1968, Bob Dylan, one of the early innovations, was already a fixture of the music scene with eight albums under his belt and — quite typically — several changes of direction.

What I like about Dylan (and Miles Davis) is that they never choose (or chose in Davis’s case) to stand still and bask in it all. They please themselves first and foremost, and move on in whatever direction they want to, and if the public comes with them, so much the better.

By 1968 Dylan the ‘folk singer’ and ‘the voice of protest/a generation’ — and, to my mind as honest as they day is long so he was never comfortable with that label and never played up to it — had ditched acoustic folk for electric guitars (which he never played at all well). Then, with Blonde On Blonde again changed direction, and soon once more with John Wesley Harding. His career then slightly went on hold until he brought out the album I am featuring today and his career took off again. That pattern has recurred again and again in his life.

Blood On The Tracks is another of those rare albums which are, in their own way and context, almost perfect. There is, though, an extraordinary bum note on one song: it’s 30 seconds into Meet Me In The Morning, and inexplicably it was left it. I can’t for the life of me think it wasn’t noticed at the time if I noticed it, but as this was still late 1974, recording was all on tape, correcting such mistakes was not easy and Dylan (who acted as his own producer) might have thought ‘what the hell’. Who knows? Who cares?

I can’t for the life of me remember how or when I first heard Blood On The Tracks or when I bought it, but I did buy it and have loved it ever since.

There is something obscurely different about this album, and while ‘researching’ on the net for this short blurb, I read that just before beginning to write the songs for what became Blood On The Tracks, Dylan had been taking art lessons and says his art tutor helped him towards a ‘new understanding of time’ which are reflected in the songs. Well, I don’t quite know how, so I can’t help you out on that score, but on, for example, Tangled Up In Blue, the ‘sequence’ of what happens does stand out. Maybe that’s what he means.

The track I have chosen to highlight is not that one, though (and Tangled Up In Blue is usually the one played on the radio if one is ever played), and it has been difficult to pick one out. But I have plumped for Shelter From The Storm which is a beautiful song (Cassandra Wilson does a lovely version, and Manfred Mann’s Earthbound do a god-awful ponderous version).

Shelter From The Storm reminds me of the woman I’ve always loved but who I’ve never met and of experiences I’ve never had. Odd, but true. But then I suppose that’s what makes a good song.

Dylan might not have had the best voice (but like Ray Davies’s and Donald Fagen’s voices I love it), but here he is right on top of his game, and his voice and singing weren’t to got to pot for many more years. Yet despite of late his voice going to pot, even the past few albums are, if you like Dylan, and I do, better than a lot of what is being put out. OK, if you are into Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish, you’ll be thinking ‘the hell they are’, but . . .

Incidentally, my theory about why he took so long to acknowledge and accept the ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’ is that he thought being awarded that particular prize was simply ludicrous (as do I). Dylan has never made any bones about the fact that at heart he is ‘a song and dance man’, and there’s bugger all wrong with that. So why the ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’? Yes, he does write great lyrics, but dragging ‘literature’ into it is more than bizarre. As a rule lyrics never hold up out of context, even the best.

The Nobel Prize, I believe, is simply another instance of ‘the Establishment’ trying their old trick of neutralising ‘the opposition’ and looking cool into the bargain. And I don’t doubt Dylan thought the same (just listen to Day Of The Locusts from New Morning, all about his discomfort about getting an honorary degree from Princeton and it’s not complimentary). But what was he to do? A hell of a quandary.

Turning it down would look terrible: ‘Dylan thinks he’s too good for Nobel Prize’ the headlines might read and who would want that. Accepting it — and he most probably didn’t want to — also went against the grain. So he bided his time and, on balance, realised accepting it was what he would have to do, like it or not.

He finally did so, but typically in his own sweet time, in a letter written some time later; and he did not attend a bunfight in Stockholm with loads of toffs of every stripe wanting in on the act. That’s why I like Dylan over and above all his music and songs and (his extraordinary gift for turning a horribly banal and corny rhyme into a telling lyric). Truly a one-off.

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)