A book and a record

1. I am finally reading 'I'm With the Band' by Groupie Extraordinaire Pamela Des Barres, thanks to a reissue and good old Polyester Books. Ah, boy crazy Pamela - stumbling headily through the sixties in garlands and see-through dresses, allowing us to piece her story together through her string of flings; whispering about boys behind her hand to us and giggling as she reclines in her pink negligee. I like her a lot - but I don't envy her, even if she did, astoundingly, rebound from Jimmy Page with Mick Jagger, and have Keith Moon as an FB. (I can hear the snorts of 'yeah right' from here).

There just seems to be an achingly long time between trysts for her. In real time, probably only two or three days; in headspace time, an eternity of agonised declarations of love (expressed with the same naive fervour for each new conquest) to her trusty diary; of aching, of yearning, of flouncing around the house feeling empty and pointless. She belongs to a time when many a woman's self image was forever indexed to her rising (and consequentially falling) stocks with the men she ran with... oh wait, we're still there. There's no doubting she enjoyed all her sexual encounters with gusto and that her subsequent nostalgia for them is real, but her heart is just as open as her mind, and the reader is forced to watch as it gets broken repeatedly. Which is not nearly as much fun as hearing the anecdotes, told with schoolgirlish glee, that precede each inevitable fall. Still, Keith Moon as a 'spare' - it wasn't a bad life!

2. I have been listening to Kate Bush's first album, The Kick Inside, over and over and over. I have always been very fond of her, and I've been listening to Hounds of Love (her later, 80s, slickly produced offering) for many years - but it is that first album, released in dim, distant 1978, that currently has me in its shamanistic spell. I can't get enough of that wild eyed, angel-voiced 19 year old channelling Emily Bronte and... well, something approaching a Chinese opera. I imagine her padding translucently through a Georgian manor to her piano, or (probably thanks to the enduring image of her limb-flailing interpretive dancing out on the moors in the 'Wuthering Heights' clip) whispering to trees in a paddock somewhere in Dorset, filled with the burgeoning desires that found expression in startlingly frank songs like 'Feel It' and 'L'amour looks something like you'. Some of the songs were written when she was only 13. She's nothing short of a musical genius and a living treasure. AND she was and still is an unutterable fox.














What does the above say about me - especially following my Bragg review? That I am culturally irrelevant? Possibly. Hopefully a trip to Golden Plains (to see, in particular, Jens Lekman, Beirut and Iron and Wine, among others) will give me the slap in the face with a wet fish I obviously need to bring my pop touchstones into the 21st century.