Bubble Has Been Listening To . . .

Inspiral Carpets

What do you do when an old friend turns up asking to restart a relationship after a twenty year break? Is it possible to pick up where you left off? What on earth could you still have in common?

These were the questions that faced me when a new album by the Inspiral Carpets turned up, unlooked for, on my radar a few months ago. Here again were my very favourite band from my late teens and early twenties, asking me to pick up where we left off.

I truly loved the Inspiral Carpets. Of all the Madchester bands of the late eighties and early nineties they were the ones who really did it for me, providing pure pop pleasures in a chart awash with the cynical pop by numbers of Stock, Aitken and Waterman and their endless imitators.

True, the Carpets were never particularly cool despite their ‘Cool as Fuck’ slogan (if you have to insist on it, you are not cool), they looked as ugly as sin with their Peter Tork hairdos and ridiculous baggy clothing, and possessed neither the style of the Stone Roses or the street urchin charms of the Happy Mondays. Yet that was precisely what endeared them to me as a decidedly non-cool schoolboy with preposterous hair and bad clothing: they were simply my band.

Their music was brilliantly alive and curiously unique: all gothic organ shapes, hyperactive drums, minimalist guitar, grinding bass and honking singing. Their songs oozed hooks and instantly hummable melodies – once heard an Inspiral Carpets single is almost impossible to dislodge from your auditory memory centres.

They were also successful – seventeen UK charting singles in five years, four of them top twenty. Their four albums, Life, The Beast Inside, The Revenge of the Goldfish and Devil Hopping, all top twenty releases, with three making the top ten.

They were the first band I saw live, at the SECC in Glasgow in 1990 and again at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh in 1992. I can attest that they were an excellent live band and impressed me with a wonderful psychedelic light show years before I even knew what psychedelia was.

Then in 1994 they suddenly stopped, calling it a day after delivering Devil Hopping, the evergreen sixties-worshipping single ‘Saturn 5’ and the Mark E Smith destroyed ‘I Want You’. I was disappointed at the time because I thought the album was brilliant, something of a recovery from the uneven Revenge of the Goldfish, and I wanted to see where they could take it to next.

As time passed I suppose I felt grateful that they had thrown in the towel. My musical tastes were maturing quickly and I was discovering all sorts of music that made the Inspirals seem a bit, well, lightweight. Their demise meant they slipped away with dignity and honour, allowing me to retain a fond memory of their work. In my mind they settled gently into the category marked ‘Lower League Band – Good Fun But Never Contenders’.

And there they might have stayed if they had not come knocking at my door once again, looking to rekindle the love affair.

So, what are they like after twenty years? I’m looking at the band photo. I’ve mentioned already that they were an ugly band and time has not been altogether kind, although their hair, or what is left of it, is a great deal less embarrassing. I suppose I shouldn’t mock: I am, after all, older and uglier too.

The main difference I notice is the absence of Tom Hingley, the lead singer. I understand that he and the rest of the band have had something of a parting of the ways and he has been replaced on vocals for this new outing by Stephen Holt.

Curiously, Stephen Holt is a founding member of the band, who helped get the group together back in 1983 with guitarist Graham Lambert. He left in 1989 during the writing of debut album Life to found The Rainkings, and was replaced by Tom Hingley just as the Inspirals found critical and commercial success. So in essence the Carpets have come full circle to their original line-up with a singer who quit twenty-six years previously.

In the run-up to the release of the new album the band re-mastered and re-released the legendary (amongst Carpets fans) album of demos and works in progress known as Dung 4, previously only available as a roughly recorded tape cassette. This album features original versions of a few of the songs that were to be included on debut album Life, sung by Stephen Holt before his departure. In their more familiar finished versions all of these songs were re-recorded with Tom Hingley on vocals.

It is a strange experience hearing these familiar songs sung by an unfamiliar voice, but as you listen it becomes clear why the band decided to make these recordings more widely available. Stephen Holt and Tom Hingley actually have remarkably similar singing styles, the main difference being that Hingley has a much more powerful voice than Holt. That they use similar phrasings and have a similar range must have made Hingley an ideal replacement in 1989, meaning that the songs already written would not need to be extensively re-written to accommodate a singer with a different style.

The re-release of this material makes the point that it was Holt and not Hingley who helped develop the original sound and that he is an intrinsic part of the early bands DNA. It also serves as a reminder of their rough and ready garage roots, a world away from their slick and polished output of the nineties.

So, is the new album any good?

I must admit that as I slipped the CD into the music centre (CD for old times sake – it just felt wrong buying an Inspiral Carpets release as a digital download) I was worried that I would find my old favourite band something of an embarrassment, a collection of old men trying and failing to recapture old glories. With trembling and trepidation, I pressed play: two and a bit minutes later I was an excited eighteen year old all over again.

First song ‘Monochrome’ powers out of the speakers, galloping along on a monstrous and buzzing organ lick in much the same way as ‘Generations’ did from Revenge of the Goldfish, only this time with pointed lyrics that could actually mean something and which are probably a dig at Hingley and his autobiography Carpet Burns.

Next I am in pop heaven with ‘Spitfire’, surely the older brother of ‘Saturn 5’, a soaring tune of delightfully diving harmonies and exuberant choruses.

I am hooked from this point on and the album, simply called Inspiral Carpets, does not falter. ‘Flying Like a Bird’ sees them attempt something new with Beach Boys-like layered harmonies and softer textures, and sees them get away with it. ‘You’re So Good For Me’ is another killer tune and another permanent fixture in those auditory centres.

‘Forever Here’ sounds like a lost Charlatans song from back when the Charlatans still sounded like the Charlatans. ‘Let You Down’ successfully repeats the Mark E Smith trick by having punk poet John Cooper Clarke intone over a dark and claustrophobic tune. ‘A to Z of my Heart’ and ‘Calling Out to You’ weld intriguing lyrics to solid gold tunes. ‘Hey Now’ is a sprightly fifties referencing number and ‘Our Time’ could almost be a lost Carpets song from the late eighties kitted out with an infectious, sing-along chorus.

By the time epic closer ‘Human Shield’ melts away I want to go straight back to the start of the ride and take another turn. It is a blast – a fizzing, pounding, flying, uplifting, exuberant and joyous success of a record. I doubt if many bands half the age of the Carpets have as much energy as this.

The Inspirals really do seem to have recaptured their inspiration. Perhaps having Holt back in the fold has helped them to re-connect with their earlier garage incarnation and sent them back to first principles. The sound, and particularly Clint Boon’s haunted organ, is the original sound as heard on Dung 4 and the early EPs, allied with all the pop craft honed over those four previous albums.

Holt might not have as powerful a voice as Hingley, but he has a mellow, tuneful quality that carries the album with ease and presence. Graham Lambert’s guitar is as clever and minimal as ever; Martyn Walsh’s bass is as grinding and slippery as ever; and Craig Gill’s drums are as taught and precise as ever. Finally, Clint Boon’s organ playing is as wondrous a thing as it has ever been, finding those uniquely weird, gothic shapes that frame and propel the songs as only he is able.

The Carpets are definitely back: they may still not be as cool as fuck, but they are a real burst of energy and colour in these austere times. Perhaps I should have believed their new slogan – ‘Keep the Faith.’

To answer my original question: yes, it is possible to rekindle an old friendship after twenty years, if the things you once loved about that relationship still hold true for both of you.

In this case, it is as if the years had never passed.

The Rest is Silence

During my undergraduate days at Edinburgh University I liked nothing better than to walk through the endless stacks of fiction in the main library and pull out books at random.

Often these books would be very old, by authors I had never heard of, and many of these forgotten books turned out to be decidedly old fashioned. The reasons for their neglect were not very hard to fathom and they were swiftly returned to the stacks.

Yet occasionally a book would turn up among my random sampling that would be very readable, well written and interesting; and while enjoying these works in a quiet corner of a less frequented area of the library, I would wonder why it was that these authors had been lost to posterity.

What was the crime of this or that particular writer that had resulted in the loss of their hard-won reputations? Why had they slipped out of the knowledge of the general readership? What process was at work to erase them from literary history, when other writers of their era had survived intact?

Many years later I was volunteering at the National Library of Scotland in the recently acquired John Murray archive when I discovered a new name to add to my list of forgotten or almost forgotten writers: Algernon Blackwood. His work soon became a favourite of mine, but it quickly became apparent that no-one else seemed to know anything about him.

 

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) had a varied career. He was in his forties before he was first published, and the early part of his life was spent travelling the globe from one business failure to another. His travels took him to Switzerland, Germany, Canada and finally to New York, where he worked as a reporter and began writing stories. By the time he returned to England in 1899 he had acquired a wealth not of money but of the experiences that were to inform his most popular work.

Blackwood was famous for his supernatural tales. In 1906 his first collection of stories appeared, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories; followed in 1907 by a second collection, The Listener and Other Stories. But it was the third collection published in 1908 that would secure his lifetime fame and fortune: John Silence – Physician Extraordinary.

The book was a best seller, assisted by one of the largest publicity campaigns of its time. Sales of the book allowed Blackwood to become a full time writer and for six years he did not have to worry about his income at all. Success also allowed him to indulge his wanderlust and his later writings reflect the breadth of his post Silence travels: the settings for his stories range from Canada to Egypt, England to the Russian Caucasus.

So what was it about the John Silence stories that made them so successful, and why have they now been largely forgotten?

Dr John Silence is a ‘psychic doctor’, a man of independent means who has studied the mysteries of the occult in strange foreign lands and who helps people with ‘psychic’ afflictions. The five tales in the original volume involve a haunted house; a town where all the inhabitants are transformed into cats by night; a displaced and furious Egyptian fire god in the English countryside; devil worship in a German boarding school; and a werewolf on a camping trip.

As works of art they are successful on their own terms: the stories are beautifully written, genuinely enthralling, supremely unsettling and very good fun. Yet their commercial success may owe something to important superficial resemblances between the John Silence stories and those of another best selling author of the same period: Arthur Conan Doyle.

It is more than obvious that Blackwood had read and admired Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories because he borrows quite liberally from them: Sherlock Holmes and John Silence are both mysterious figures with elusive backgrounds and secretive intelligences; they both receive clients for consultation in their front rooms; they both operate outside of the official worlds of police and medicine; and they both have dedicated assistants who dutifully record their adventures. I would hazard a guess that the same people who enjoyed reading the cases of the detective were buying the adventures of the psychic doctor.

Don’t mistake Blackwood for a mere copyist or plagiarist; the differences between the two writers are subtle and instructive. Whereas Sherlock Holmes relies on logic and reason to solve cases, eliminating the impossible to arrive at the possible, Dr Silence uses psychic ability to prove the impossible to be possible. Where Sherlock Holmes can work out the identity of the sender of a letter from the watermarks, handwriting and type of paper used, John Silence can place the letter against his forehead and receive a mental picture of the sender.

John Silence is almost like a version in negative of Sherlock Holmes, mopping up the cases that are too illogical for Holmes to even consider. The characters compliment one another wonderfully well.

So why is it that you have probably never heard of Dr John Silence but are very familiar with Sherlock Holmes, who today is everywhere on your television screens, in your local cinemas and in your local libraries?

My own guess is that Blackwood was just not interested in creating an ongoing series. Such a project, while lucrative, is incredibly hard work. Conan Doyle found the pressure of writing Sherlock Holmes an almost unbearable strain, with its constant demand for original ideas told in fresh ways within a limited format.

However, Doyle was also a very astute businessman. When the public cried out for the return of Holmes after he was famously killed off at the Reichenbach Falls, Doyle was reluctant but did eventually bring Sherlock back. He knew the rewards would be enormous, despite the pain he would have to endure to keep the series alive.

Algernon Blackwood was not a businessman, and would not have indulged his audience or his bank balance. In fact, he only returned to John Silence once more in a sixth story first published in 1917, ‘A Victim of Higher Space’. To achieve the longevity and pop culture status of a Sherlock Holmes, Blackwood needed to write a dozen more volumes of Silence adventures over many years, and it seems he was not the type of writer who was capable of or interested in doing that.

The fact that he never followed up his greatest success must count against Blackwood, but could there be other problems with the writing itself that has resulted in a failure to connect with a modern audience?

It is hard to describe exactly what it is that Blackwood achieves in his writing, just as it is difficult as a reader to measure the effect his stories are having on you as you read them. They are certainly readable, and can be quite terrifying, but what it is that has terrified you can be difficult to place your finger on. His stories rarely feature explicitly described ghosts or monsters, yet the mood of his stories are haunting and the implications of his plots monstrous.

His method is to build a tale slowly, steadily layering accretions of detail one upon another until the whole becomes something quite strange and otherworldly. His pacing over the short form is meticulous, and the result of his skill is a hypnotic effect that is rather disturbing. You come away from his stories feeling that your feet are not quite in contact with solid earth.

Unfortunately, such a style does not lend itself to the long form and Blackwood’s few novels are quite difficult to read and sometimes rather boring. The short story and the novella are where he excelled, unlike Doyle who was able to master all literary forms. Blackwood’s restricted repertoire must severely have limited the prospects for his longevity – the commercial market place for collections of short stories has never been as strong as for the novel.

Also operating against him is the subject matter of the stories. At the time they were written in the early nineteen hundreds Spiritualism was becoming very popular. Conan Doyle himself was deeply involved in the movement, conducting his own investigations into such phenomena as ghosts and fairies. Blackwood was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and had taken part in séances, perhaps as a revolt against his own strict evangelical upbringing.

The John Silence stories belong to this vanished world, and to modern sensibilities these Spiritualist enthusiasms seem very odd indeed. The mania for ghostly phenomena that swept Imperial Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century has long since faded into obscurity, and they have taken John Silence with them. Ironically, Conan Doyle’s own reputation was nearly destroyed by his unwavering support for Spiritualism – it was Sherlock Holmes, that enemy of superstition and illogicality, who preserved his fame.

Algernon Blackwood was a one-off, a uniquely original writer, and his originality has perhaps contributed to his ongoing eclipse. There have been endless adaptations of Sherlock Holmes and many different writers have contributed new Holmes stories and novels; it is more difficult to imagine any writer successfully re-creating the particular magic of a John Silence story. Doyle’s style is inclusive, and provides a jumping off point for other imaginations; Blackwood is entirely of himself, and treads his own strange path of imagination along which few others can follow.

Survival also depends on a modicum of luck, and in this quality Blackwood has also been lacking. Towards the end of his career he became a prolific voice on radio and was a very early television personality, but it appears that no recordings of his works survive in either medium. During the Second World War his papers were completely destroyed in the blitz, depriving later biographers of important material.

He died with very little money in the bank, and with a few scant possessions. He never married and left no children behind to preserve and champion his literary estate. Here again Doyle was in luck; his children were vigorous in the defence and exploitation of his work, keeping his flame alive for future generations.

For all of these reasons, slowly but surely, Blackwood’s works have slipped into partial obscurity. If he is remembered at all now it is for two superb short stories that are endlessly anthologised: ‘The Willows’ and ‘The Wendigo’. Among the modern community of readers and writers of weird fiction he is remembered as one of the best of the twentieth century, but among the general readership his name is now virtually unknown.

Does it really have to be this way? In the age of the internet and Project Gutenberg it should be more than possible to keep his name, and the names of many other forgotten writers, alive. His works do deserve to survive and to be read, not just as curiosities but as accomplished works of art in their own right. In their own ways they are just as entertaining and worthwhile as anything that has ever been written; we just have to be prepared to give them a chance to work their magic on us.

Let us not return Blackwood’s books to the library stacks of oblivion just yet. Go online and download a collection of John Silence stories in time for Halloween – I guarantee you will not be disappointed.