No Alarms and No Surprises

Various locations, Scotland.

Today started, surprisingly, with the hotel fire alarm going off. Having gathered the things I really couldn't do without (trousers, wallet, glasses) I venture out into the corridor where the alarm was incredibly loud, where a member of staff shouted 'False Alarm!' at me and I retreated to my room. False? It certainly made the kind of noise you would expect from a real one.

The alarm went on for 20 minutes, while I washed, dressed, packed and drank tea. It was set off, apparently, by someone using an aerosol in Room 16. So! It's not a fire alarm, it's an antisocial product alarm. Splendid.

3 Caffe Nero branches later I headed out to a small and, I have to admit, entirely godforesaken town. I feel genuinely sorry for people who have to live in such places - though I don't suppose they'd welcome my pity and would probably write me off as a Champagne Socialist. But walking back through the shopping centre to the bus station (as you must in these places - the bus station is always stuck onto/inside/underneath a shopping centre) I noticed that the piped music was piping Radiohead's No Alarms and No Surprises - an apt song for the town if ever there was one, as well as some kind of personal jibe at this morning's wake-up call. And at least, if this is any consolation, the good people of that sad town turn out to be aware of their fate, and of Radiohead. Do they want to change the record? Do they have a choice? Can we ever pretend to sustainability while people are living in places they know are crap?

Back in a proper city now. God's probably already at the bar.....

City Daydream Songs

You’ve all been there. You’re sitting or otherwise loitering in a public place, and one of your favourite songs starts to ooze out of invisible speakers. Your first reaction is a twitch of a smile and a languorous intake of breath, preparing yourself for the enjoyment to come. Ah, the excellence of your musical taste! Who is the kindred spirit who chose the music? Now comes a suspending of time, as you decide to ignore your companion or even miss your train in order to get the song in that special context. Then a disappointment when the next song reverts to unrecognisable muzak. And finally a nagging worry that, because you’re in a chain coffee shop, your favourite tune has been selected by an accountant, thereby dismissing your musical moment as a droplet in the oceanic, corporate, easy-listening soundtrack to our working days.

What grips you about this experience is that it isn’t so much a highlight of your day as a gap in it. It’s like a very short siesta. For roughly three minutes everything around you, the work worries, the phone calls, the office politics, the self-important lawyers talking too loudly at the next table…..all melts away and you go into a sweet, indulgent reverie. Unless your companion won’t stop talking, in which case you make a mental to kill them later, when they aren’t expecting it.

That gap is your chance to manipulate time. No matter what else is happening, that song is your excuse to make time stand still, or to spend those few minutes at another moment in time altogether. Maybe the song was on when you first made love, or when your lover told you they were leaving. Maybe the song has been through enough experiences with you that it means everything and nothing.

Recently Mick Jagger was quoted as saying that the three and a half minute pop song is an absurdity, but one that seems to be standing the test of time. Mick, I have news for you: it is not an absurdity, it is an increment of time. You know how long it is going to last from the moment you hear the first chord. Your next 250 heartbeats are accounted for. The predictable flow from intro to verse to chorus, and so on, is a rock on which you can stand and safely watch the chaos around you. It’s long enough to let you catch your breath, short enough not to outstay your attention span.

So there’s nothing worse, is there, than when that song comes bursting out of your radio, or leaping spontaneously from the walls of a supermarket, only to be amputated in full flow by some idiot DJ who thinks we’d rather hear his self-satisfied prattle, or by Janet beckoning Darren to the checkout, or –worst of all – by a newsflash that rudely smashes the inherent shittiness of the world through the brittle privacy of your daydream.

All of which leads me to think that it’s high time for an answer to Desert Island Discs. Sure, if you were left alone on a sunny island for weeks or months on end, with ten songs, a pack of cards and a Bible, you’d probably pick the longest pieces of music you know, to give you chance to listen to them all the way through, time and again, without Kirsty Younge cutting in and sexily, but – let’s face it – annoyingly, stopping Bach’s B Minor Mass after 25 seconds to ask you about the time you took LSD with a gigolo. Besides, it’s a surefire way to become sick to death of music you’ve always held dear, and that, if nothing else, would probably make you want to end your time on the island by getting extremely drunk and then going for a snorkel with the stingrays.

Remember those charity adverts? Give a poor family a bag of flour and they can eat for a week. Give them a bag of seed and they can eat for a lifetime. Or something like that – and it’s true. Well, Desert Island Discs is a bit like that, isn’t it? Marooned on an island with ten songs you know inside out, and love like old friends, and after two days you’ve grown to hate them and you contemplate a watery grave with the bleak emptiness of a religious zealot who has lost their faith. No. Do not be tempted. Forget those songs. Leave them behind waiting for a triumphant homecoming if you survive your ordeal. Instead, take a harp and learn to play.

No, no, what we need is Fleeting City Daydream Songs. You are given a chance to pick ten songs that you may not own or, even if you do, haven’t heard for ages, but they do have a knack of changing your mood and shaping your day when you hear them coming out of the pores of the city. Here’s one for starters: Beck’s Devil’s Haircut. My ex who owned Odelay but I confess I never really got it. The muso in me feels I really should get Beck, but it doesn’t happen. What I do remember vividly is seeing Beck on Later….with Jools Holland, where he was trying, and failing, to teach the wooden boogie-woogie hero how to pronounce ‘Odelay’. So I am trudging heavily down Chain Pub Drag, and sneak a shortcut down Binge Drinker’s Walk. Half way along is a Goth shop selling clunky boots and things, and oozing joyously from its open door is Devil’s Haircut. The daydream begins….

Jenny was a Goth, about 19. She dreamed of being a hairdresser, doing those full-on punk-goth jobs on nice blokes with metallic faces. She noticed how hairdressing salons all have puns for names, like Curl up and Dye, Headmaster, Hairforce. One day, she said, I’m going to own a salon, and walking in will be like getting on a Ghost Train. Maybe there could actually be a Ghost Train, and it spirals up to a really light, white attic room with a huge mirror, and that’s where you get your hair done, and then when you’re finished you get back on the Ghost Train and you go all the way down to the cellar, where there’s a really, really dark tea bar. And the front of the shop will have these huge periscopes, so that passers-by will see the white salon and the dark tea bar, and it’ll attract my ideal customers and frighten the hell out everyone else. And I’m going to call it Devil’s Haircut……

That's how cities work.

Dickensian Walkways

London is going downhill.

There is a temptation to blame this on Boris the Buffoon, but I think that would be unfair since I don't believe he can have reached these crooks and nannies yet.

My stays in London are normally characterised by the following extra-curricular activities to pass the time admirably between the end of one working day and the start of the next: a London beer to gaze into; a Bangladeshi curry to warm the inner self; and - following a night of deep, dreamless sleep - the delights of the classic B&B breakfast experience. Anyone who has stayed in a London B&B will know the form: a flask of stewed tea and an English breakfast served by a stern Eastern European matron under the watchful but benificent eye of Pope John Paul II. 

I knew I was off to a bad start when I checked in to the B&B and found that the reception was a superficially glitzy affair (what happened to tired wood panelling and a stack of receipts piled on top of the computer?) - but my room was 'across the road in that building over there'. Have the absentee hoteliers now started buying up whole streets and turning them into MDF dormitories? My room featured a range of cheap-chic fittings last seen in the bargain bin at the Woolworth closing down sale, a telly perched on a fridge laden, inexplicably, with single-portion cartons of UHT milk (now there's a waste of energy), a pedestal fan that appeared to have just staggered back from a hard night in Soho, a washbasin with the plug stuck firmly in and a booby-trapped towel rail that gave way and deposited all the towels into the toilet.

Then came the curry: good food, I cannot deny. But why wouldn't the staff eject the two drunks who were shouting and swearing at each other and disturbing the rest of the clientele? Answer: because they are their most loyal customers. Hmmm...When all others have gone elsewhere 'because the food's nice but there are always those two damned offensive drunks', those two damned offensive drunks will still be bawling and brawling their way through the popadums. Will someone call a small business adviser? Well, he needn't be that small, so long as he knows his stuff.

But my God, the breakfast. It's official: B&B breakfast has attained new lows of DIY lovelessness.

"Good morning. Please sign in." This was the limit of my entire conversation with the waitress.

Having signed in, I put a teabag in a cup, filled it from an urn, filled a glass of juice from another urn, picked up two slices of VAL-U bread from a plastic-roofed plate, and a long-since boiled egg, slid the bread into the perpetual toasting machine, avoided the vacant glares of my fellow guests, sloshed it all down in about 4 minutes.... and that was that.

Come on, London, this is breakfast we're dealing with. I want to be glowered at in Polish, told off in Portugese, kicked into life by soupy Italian coffee and brought to within an inch of explosion by burnt Danish bacon and stodgy Irish sausages.  My day is ruined.

Oh yes, and the buskers on the Tube: why must they play along to backing tracks? It's awful.

Mind you, the Smoke did redeem itself gloriously this morning, thanks to a big green thing called Hyde Park, and a big yellow thing called the Sun. Proof that the environment matters!

AW.