Soundtrack to the City

Are there any people who have lives where music doesn’t play? Check any high street and there you’ll find scores of shoppers with headphones in their ears. Same with cyclists, dog walkers, people on trains, runners and park bench sitters. Our lives have soundtracks. Several years ago I stopped people on Queen Street in Cardiff to ask them what they were listening to. This caused consternation among some who thought I was from the local authority out to impose a new Health and Safety regulation. But when I told them it was research for a book all was okay. What they were listening to turned out to be dance music mostly. Lots of Michael Jackson. Whitney Houston. Mariah Carey. Rap. Guy on a skateboard playing reggae. No one listening to classical, no spoken word, not one person willing to own up to playing the bachelor boy, Cliff.

Many people can’t work without a soundtrack. Depends on your job but if you can manage it then you’ll have the player going or the radio on. Bankers might not but dentists, surgeons, mechanics, designers, and architects – they all listen. Martin Scorsese’s films display this to perfection – music seeps through the pores of his characters, rock belts through every scene. In New York Stories where Scorsese has Nick Nolte playing one of the Abstract Expressionist painters smashing paint onto giant canvases the soundtrack roars. The painter just can’t function without high decibel rock coming at him out of his speakers. The streaks and swirls of colour he manipulates are done in time to whatever is beating from his boombox. Couldn’t paint in silence. Without the beat there’d only be a canvas of empty white.

The novelist Nick Hornby has taken this idea one stage further and written his life soundtrack up as a book. Everything from Bruce Springsteen to Rufus Wainwright gets a mention with Teenage Fanclub appearing twice. You can download this set onto your mp3 player and listen while you read. Doing anything in silence is now antique.

Cities themselves have soundtracks. What sounds well in Rio doesn’t somehow work in Barry. Samba along the sands, Bossa Nova among the chips at the Codfather of Sole. This is how I think Cardiff sounds – a soundtrack for the city from the past fifty years: Twist and Shout – The Beatles. Cardiff Born – Frank Hennessy. Green Onions – Booker T. Cardiff Rose – Roger McGuinn. Do The Ayatollah – Cardiff City Fans. The Grangetown Whale – The Hennessys. Delilah – Tom Jones. Red Red Wine – Red Beans and Rice. The Brokedown Cardiff Blues – Cripple Hard-Armed Davies. A Design For Life – Manic Street Preachers. Siwgr Siwgr Siwgr – Euros Childs. Cardiff In The Sun – Super Furry Animals. Do you have a better selection? Let me know.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 6th February, 2010

Just When You Think They Are Finishing They Carry On

Jaci Stephen had this right ages ago in The Evening Standard when she dryly remarked about poetry readings – “just when you think they are finishing they go on…” And go on some of them do. Tell the poets they have a fifteen minute slot and inevitably they’ll attempt to read for forty. How much poetry read out loud does the world need?

I’ve been on the road recently promoting my new book, Real Cardiff Three, which ostensibly is not poetry. This is travel writing, history, memoir, psychogeography, story. I get onto the platform and talk about the city’s history, my take on how it has come into being and why it looks like it does. I discuss Cardiff’s peculiarities – the lost watercourses, the vanished holy wells, the ways in which the place has got itself named after metals, precious stones and the shires of England. I talk about its tall buildings, its sophistication, its hidden tunnels, its all-white cityscape, its place as Wales’ heart, stuck out like a fist, here on the south east border. My audience listens. Then I read one of Real Cardiff’s poems. The books have just a few. I do the one about the Russell Goodway Memorial Roundabout or list the books people never borrow from the new Central Library. A History of Minor Roads in Wales. The Joy of Splott. Highlights in the History of Concrete. Bombproof Your Horse. Did Lewis Carroll Visit Llanrumney? Caerphilly Cheese Problems Solved. The audience wakes up and falls about. Poetry gets to places where prose never can.

At the biennial John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry the other month the level of sophistication, invention and sheer linguistic verve proved once again that good verse could still thoroughly entertain. The place was packed. I don’t think I’ve seen a poetry audience enjoy themselves so much in years. Dafydd Wyn, the west Wales winner, gave us Anglo-Welsh poetry like it used be but with added oomph. Liam Johnson made the air flicker with his verbal virtuosity. Thaer Al-Shayei came on dressed as a gorilla and had the entire place falling off their chairs. Sally Spedding managed the same trick with her tales of medical misdemeanours. There were top end performances that embraced everything from football to fighting demons. Live poetry still does it. In two and a half hours I spotted not one yawn.

And if you look about you’ll see that this reading thing is going through a revival. Mab Jones and Ivy Alvarez rock at the Promised Land. The Absurd in Mold mashes music and bi-lingual verse into an entertaining whole. Seren take the high ground with their First Thursday series. John Williams works lit and music at Chapter this month. There are rumours of new poetry and music series starting up elsewere in the city. Poetry certainly has a future.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 16th January, 2010