Exploding helicopters #10

Mark Hodkinson - The Last Mad Surge Of Youth

This was the damaged copy that I mentioned in my last post about Amazon Marketplace. The little rip is just under my thumb. I know what you’re thinking: THAT little bit of nothing is enough to warrant chucking this book onto the internet scrapheap? Apparently so.

There was, however, something more disappointing to follow. The Last Mad Surge Of Youth is interesting because each teeny tiny chapter (sometimes two or three on each page - do they even count as chapters?) jumped backwards and forwards in time, from 1980s working class England, where a group of schoolmates were forming their first bands and making their first fanzines, to retrospective wanderings from a couple of those band members later in life. One was famous, had a drink problem, and was still desperately trying to bring down the establishment from within, and the other had left the band at an early age, got married and divorced, and worked at a local paper. The pair of them were bitter and twisted old has-beens, they were just bitter and twisted about different stuff. Which is why this book was so disappointing.

Not only were the passages written about the young, anti-Thatcher Killing Stars so much funnier and more insightful, but the vitality of the characters at the beginning made the sections with Barrett getting wankered while he plays his own records all night long, or the bit where Carey has this empty, soulless shag in the back of a car after his wife’s left him, so very very pathetic. It annoys me that the pair of them are such fools, when just 500 words beforehand you’ve been reading about them standing up for their rights as a support band or slagging off employment statistics. Most of the bits I’m about to copy for you are from those early years. It’s a shame it couldn’t all be about then, but I guess the whole point is to communicate the fleeting nature of fame or the natural human need for recognition in life. It really is quite depressing stuff in the end.

“When you get good on an instrument you become a slave to the conventional.”
“Definitely,” agreed Carey. “Proficiency is a disease.”

Ian announced, his voice solemn, that he and Carl had ‘history’. They had met a week earlier at a nightclub where he had subjected Carl to a eulogy on cybernetics, the profundity of Dr Who and a painstaking, paints-peeling-off-a-my-wall dissection of Gary Numan’s lyrics. Ian’s leg had begun to feel warm and, reaching down, he discovered that Carl had pissed on him under the table.

“Let’s have it right, how can a few honkies from Slough or wherever play the blues? What do they know about rattlesnakes and sloshing about in a Mississippi swamp looking for rats to eat? Another thing: mouth organs. I fucking hate them. If you ever hear a mouth organ on one of my tracks you have my full permission to stick it up my arse, sideways.”

“Wasn’t it John Updike who said celebrity is a mask that eventually eats into your face?”
“I didn’t know you read Updike.”
I don’t. I just remember good lines and pretend to have read all these cool authors.”

Mark Hodkinson - The Last Mad Surge Of Youth
Publication date: 2009
Publisher: Pomona
Price then: £7.99
Price now: £5.54
Bought from: Amazon Marketplace