Simian Substitute Site for May 2021: Hartlepool

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR APRIL 2021

Books: Continuing with the audiobooks at bedtime, we've spent most of April listening to John Cooper Clarke's autobiography, I Wanna Be Yours. It's as ideal a candidate for being read out loud as you'd expect: Clarke's spent a lifetime honing his verbal delivery, so his memoir is a breeze to listen to. It's possible that hearing it rather than reading it makes some of his personal idiosyncrasies stand out a bit more: his tendency to compile his namedrops into huge lists, or his use of multiple catchphrases throughout the book. ("What the - huh?" "Give it a name." "Luxury. Pure, unashamed, luxury.") What's more alarming is the trajectory his life story takes: it starts out as the story of a poet who occasionally dabbles in heroin, and slowly turns into the story of a junkie who does the odd poetry gig. But he's eye-wateringly honest - not to mention bleakly funny - about the ups and downs of his later years, and that honesty keeps his story compelling throughout. Like many autobiographies, the final chapter is effectively a headlong rush through All The Things That Have Happened To Me Since I Got Bored With Writing This Book: perhaps by the end of the year we'll have found one that doesn't end like that.

Internet: Sometimes, it has to be said, a whole audiobook is a bit much to digest. For this reason, we've also recently experimented with a week-long free trial of Blinkist. They take non-fiction books and smash them down into precis form, as both written summaries and fifteen minute audio pamphlets - "the app all CEOs love," says the publicity, which confirms everything you always suspected about CEOs. (Apart from one, he said, realising that he actually quite likes his job right now.) Over the course of the week we listened to, um, 'blinks' of books by David Byrne, Henry Marsh, Chris Hadfield, Brian Krebs, Adam Kay, Richard Wiseman and William E. Paul. Our first one was the Byrne, and I was impressed by how well the summary managed to capture his writing voice. But as we made our way through the other books - notably the Hadfield, which I'd already read in its full-length form - it began to strike me that the blinks were incredibly dumbed down compared to the originals, and the tone of them was invariably simplistic and patronising. (And that's when I realised that 'simplistic and patronising' is the natural tone of David Byrne's writing anyway.) It seems to be a service aimed at people who want to say they've read books, rather than people who want to actually read books. It's possible that a week-long trial is too short to really get the measure of what Blinkist is trying to do, which is hilariously ironic when you think about it. Anyhoo, we're back on the full length audiobooks again now, so watch out for the next exciting instalment in a month's time.

Music: And to make this an entire post full of things you listen to rather than anything else (including the Simian award winner itself), a quick reminder that The Blindboy Podcast is still the single best thing you can ram into your ears on a weekly basis. A recent episode introduced me to the work of Enoch Light, which sounds like the name of a minor English racist but isn't really. Blindboy, in his usual hyperbolic style, insists Light is the equivalent of Giotto in his field: Giotto revolutionised painting by being the first artist to use perspective, while Light was one of the first musicians to use stereo recording. Up until then, people had literally been using recordings of passing trains and table-tennis matches to show off their stereo equipment. Light was a bandleader, and so already had a very specific perspective on how a group of musicians could occupy your field of hearing in two dimensions. His records in the late fifties were gimmicky as hell, with instruments panning wildly from hard left to hard right and back again, but they literally changed the way recorded music was presented after that. And his innovations didn't stop there: his sleeve notes explaining what he was trying to do with the stereo process were so detailed he had to invent the gatefold sleeve to fit them all in, and he also experimented with recording onto 35mm film when magnetic tape turned out not to be high-fidelity enough for him. What a guy! Here, have a listen to five of his earliest stereo albums. (At the very least, try out track 3, which you've probably heard a cover version of at some point.)

In the meantime, your Simian Substitute Site for May 2021 is Hartlepool, a just-released digital single by Boothby Graffoe. It's a song he's been performing for at least a decade, but the Bandcamp page explains why he's chosen to release it now: "Earlier this year, after the sudden resignation of the local MP, it was announced there would be a by-election in Hartlepool. With just a short time until the vote, Boothby Graffoe realised, if he were to release a single called Hartlepool he’d be able to use the media’s constant use of the name, Hartlepool, to promote it. Yes. He really is that cheap."

Experts in Simian lore will already know why a song about Hartlepool is worthy of mention here: the rest of you, prepare to be educated. Boothby's a nice chap - he's indirectly responsible for that one time we went to Melbourne (inspired by an email from the woman who ran his Australian fan site), and he follows me on Twitter (well, me and, um, twenty-six thousand other people) - so forking out £1.50 for a download of the song seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for you to do.

Coming up this month: a post I sort of hinted was coming last month, but got bumped in favour of a batch of Pre-Code film reviews. Plus some other stuff I haven't quite decided on yet. Things are changing all the time with regard to what we can do outside our homes, and I'll be reporting on that as and when I can. In the meantime, you've got the comments box down there to play with if you'd rather stay indoors for now.