We hate it, as Morrissey so rightly observed, when our friends become successful, but we'd also like them to remain friends, writes John Waters.
My dilemma: when a friend, a fellow scribe, publishes a book that is, shall we say, very good, how far does friendship stretch? Should I praise the book and risk setting in train a sequence of recognition and approbation, resulting perhaps in losing my friend to unprecedented success and untold wealth?
Should I criticise his work and explain that I seek merely to avoid accusations of bias? The Ethics in Public Office Acts (1995 and 2001) fails to offer a way out. A close reading of the legislation suggests that, unless this friend has bought me more than €650 worth of drink, without reciprocation, the law as it stands offers no valid excuse for not praising his work in public.
It is relatively easy when the book is bad or merely good, enabling one to retreat behind words like "interesting", "promising", even "rollicking". The difficulty arises when the book is more than good.
When, a year ago, I read my friend Declan Lynch's first novel, All the People All the Time, I felt it was very good, in places even rollicking. It had, for example, one of the best opening sentences in all of literature: "They stopped talking to Victor after he got the plate in his head". But the reassuring problem I found was that the picaresque enormity of the main character, Victor Bartley, tended to overwhelm everything else.
A year later, Lynch has produced another novel, Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me (TownHouse), the title borrowed from a Duke Ellington tune. It is, I'm afraid, superb. It is the story of two men and a young woman who is the daughter of one of them. Beyond that, it is the story of a generation that came close to realising its own dreams of freedom by transplanting its faith in the transcendent on to the transcendent capacity of music.
Lynch tells of the grief that occurs when the dreams break the sound barrier and confront the dreamers with the limits of life and death. This novel breaks into uncharted waters in depicting the awesome weight of everyday responsibilities as they fall on the shoulders of one who never thought he would grow up.
Paul Morley is not a friend of mine, but I have, over the past 26 years, often felt closer to him than anybody.
He emerged in the late 1970s, in the NME, the Matthew - among post- punk chroniclers of pop's mutant sensibility - to Ian Penman's Mark, Nick Kent's Luke and Charles Shaar Murray's John.
His name on a magazine cover held a promise close to intimacy. Uniquely among rock scribes, he sought to transcend analysis or classification or vitriol or hipness, to create a music on the page.
It seems appropriate, then, that his new book is called Words and Music: a History of Pop in the Shape of a City (Bloomsbury) and that it is a work of musical genius. At one level, it is a book about Kylie Minogue, but only just.
It is also a history of pop from the Big Bang to the Bangles and a little beyond, a search, to borrow Morley's own words, for "the missing link between Adam and Eve's first orgasm and Frank Zappa's death rattle".
Actually, it's pretty much a history of everything as mediated through the sounds that have insinuated themselves into the music of the ages. But then again, it's a kind of novel and a kind of poem, a list of prejudices and a book of lists.
Morley, like Lynch, has a profound sense of music as moral universe. I dare not summarise his central thesis, but one of the things that I take him to mean is that the radical possibilities of popular music have shifted in the present generation from rock to pop. Rock has become jaded, flat-earthist and self-referential, while pop "carries on as always, blasting the past into the present, caring only about the thrill of sound and the speed of fashion".
Kylie, he starkly argues, is more interesting than Coldplay, which seems, at first, controversial. But Morley has a way of dropping his prejudices like gauntlets, wandering off at some tangent or another, leaving you to nurse doubts forward from the back of your mind.
Morley, to mint a Morley anorakism, is the missing link between Nick Hornby and Jean Baudrillard and Words and Music is the missing link between Watt and Lipstick Traces. Together, Lynch and Morley represent the 11th- hour coming-of-age of a counter-culture that for decades seemed like it had burned itself out in the superficiality of hip. Both write free of heaviness about the heaviest things on Earth.
Buy one of each of their books for everyone in your audience.