MEMOIR: Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-star Fantasist, By Simon Armitage, Viking, 303pp. £16.99A popular English poet revisits his music-fan youth, but the end result is frustrating and disappointing, writes Keith Ridgway.
WRITING ABOUT music is, as they say, like dancing about architecture. But the dictum is a playful one, whatever truth it contains hedged in on all sides by exceptions to the rule. Unfortunately, reading Simon Armitage's intensely frustrating and disappointing Gig actually is a little like watching a Morris dance around a fairly undistinguished regional town hall.
It presents itself as an account of the role that music has played in Armitage's life - in his childhood in West Yorkshire, in his adolescence and university years, and in his adulthood as a successful and popular professional poet. Gigs, we're led to believe, play an important part in all of this. Born in 1963, he comes of age at just the right time (and in just the right place) to see bands such as The Clash, The Fall, Echo & The Bunnymen, Joy Division, The Teardrop Explodes, The Skids and The Smiths, playing gigs that should have seared themselves onto his consciousness. Should have. He tells us he was there. that he went to see them, but it's as if he has forgotten what they were like. With a couple of unremarkable exceptions, he doesn't describe any of them. He usually mentions the hassle of getting home afterwards, or of failing to. But there is next to nothing about what the gig looked like, what happened on stage or in the crowd, what he heard, what he felt, what it did to his eardrums or his head or his heart - nothing, in other words, about what it's like to be a 16 year-old for whom music is everything, seeing The Fall or The Bunnymen for the first time and just going completely mental. Not a word.
I'm just a couple of years younger than Armitage, and his memoir covers a lot of musical territory I'm familiar with. He sees bands in Yorkshire in the early 1980s on the same tours that would have taken them to Dublin, where I saw them - in McGonagles or the SFX or the TV Club. Some of those gigs rank amongst my most cherished memories. Seeing Ian McCulloch peer myopically into the crowd, terrifying us with the intensity of Over The Wall and Show of Strength. The sheer joy of Julian Cope's angelic voice in McGonagles bursting my teenage cool and making me cry during Tiny Children. And managing somehow to chat to him afterwards - about the recently dead Ian Curtis - and how polite and charming and friendly Cope was. And giggling at the grumpy Mark E Smith as he walked off stage after two songs, also in McGonagles, because "some prick 'as knicked me tape recorder".
I remember those gigs, and so many more, with vibrant clarity - Armitage seems not to. He is tediously nostalgic about all of it, without ever communicating why it mattered then or why it matters now. The only gigs he makes any effort to describe are the ones he's been to recently. These are mostly gigs by the same bands - either still going in one way or another, or reformed. He seems to have little interest in or knowledge of new music. Defensively, he says at one point that listening to old bands doesn't bother him any more because "it doesn't bother people who listen to Beethoven". He has been to see The Arctic Monkeys though. So that's all right. He thought their crowd was a bit rough.
What does interest Armitage is Armitage himself, and his gigs. Not just that anaemic shadowing of the world of bands and singers and shows, the reading tour, but also his film making, his radio appearances, his trip to Surtsey, his trip on the last mail train, and bizarrely, a visit with his wife to a posh guesthouse-cum-restaurant where he is disgusted by the CDs in their room and leaves a copy of Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth behind him "for the benefit of future guests and their aural pleasure". This piece of self-aggrandising philanthropy comes after several pages of reviewing the food and the facilities, and sneering at the pretensions of the place, and it's apparent that Armitage thinks it makes some kind of point. Later on, he mentions that he gives up the chance to go to a Young Marble Giants gig (an incredibly rare event) on the ridiculous, nonsensical grounds that he has to attend some kind of poetry "gala". Perhaps the point is that he doesn't really like Young Marble Giants.
And there is such a lack of passion in all this, and such a curious absence of joy, that I began to suspect Armitage is actually not that keen on music at all. Not really. Why else would he have closed his ears to new stuff? Why else tell us about his grudging explorations of Dylan - which he undertakes, at least initially, because he feels he has to? And he presents himself as a kind of baffled old codger, enrolled in the Alan Bennett school of self-deprecation but without the warmth. He sneers at shop assistants, at people who organise poetry events and drive him around, at people who ask him to sign books, even at gig-goers.
Towards the end, he goes to a Simply Red gig (it seems he is not one to ever turn down a free ticket). It is appalling, as we would expect. But Armitage does not mock the band or the singer or the songs. Rather, he mocks, and sneers at, and derides, and has his stomach turned by the couple who stand next to him. They are enjoying themselves. The songs seem to mean things to them. They kiss, smile at each other, sway, cling, dance. He says " . . . it was the undignified openness of it all that got to me in the end. The sheer absence of embarrassment. The complete lack of shame". Poor Armitage hasn't understood anything. His snobbery and disdain and priggish self-involvement make for a dull read. Gigs are exactly about openness, absence of embarrassment, lack of shame. Even Simply Red fans know that.
Keith Ridgway is a novelist and short-story writer. His books include Animals, The Parts and Standard Time