Love is the Drug
Edited by John Aizlewood
Penguin pbk, 301 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)
Before even the ink on Chris Roberts' collection of fan scribbles Idle Worship is dry, along comes the might of Penguin with its own bigger, brighter and, dare we say, better dig at the same ground. There are seventeen pieces between these covers, written on the whole by music journalists, giving a hint (if we need one) at the wells from which their own particular devotions sprang in adolescence, half-formed and foaming at the mouth.
Mostly journalists. Incongruously there is comedian Sean Hughes on growing up a teenage Julian Cope fan in Ireland, marked memorably by the admission that in a gig-side bout of shouting for the most obscure titles, the young Hughes simply resorted to making them up. Elsewhere Jesus Jones frontman Mike Edwards contributes a genuinely surprising, genuinely fannish essay on the joys (and pitfalls) of Arabic music that cuts through some of the more studied wasn't-I-ridiculous? 'confessions' elsewhere.
There is some real rubbish in here: David Sinclair provides an early short story about the Stones that is, by his own admission, drivel (at least he has the bare-faced cheek to admit that he's being paid for it); the tiresome legend that is Gram Parsons is again dissected by Sid Griffin, to equally tiresome effect; John Bauldie seems content just to tell us he's actually met Bob Dylan; and the Steve-Lamacq-on-tour-with-Kingmaker piece seems to have missed the plot almost entirely.
Better are two essays of the I-was-a-teenage-music-fan variety, wherein Sheryl Garratt explains, with some understanding, the pains and pleasures of being one of those screaming teengirlies (the Bay City Rollers, in her case), and Mick Houghton expounds on an almost furtive, almost guilty calling to Billy Fury as The Beatles explode all around. Both latch onto a certain melancholy as much as the self-deprecating humour that informs the bulk of this stuff. Of the latter, it's Stuart Maconie's piece on Elvis Costello and D.J. Taylor on The Jam that stand out. The former for the young Maconie's pursuit of reflected glory in Costello's band-leader father Ross McManus; and the latter for a Tory public schoolboy's full-fledged embracing of Weller's band, and complete incomprehension of their implicit irony.
Honours however (and by some distance) go to David Cavanagh's marvellous confessions of a teenage Triffids fan. Anyone who discovered the great band at a similar time (but let's face it, who did? Their main claim to fame was a Neighbours wedding song) may appreciate why a young student became so besotted with this peculiar, hypnotic blend of (the horror) country-rock. But Cavanagh's devotion went rather further -- he starts by sycophantically befriending the band, and ends in the flurry of certain belief that his flatmate is a serial killer. A fevered and charming tale.
Occasionally it's difficult to see, no matter how entertaining it all is, just what the real point of a book like this is, especially when after a while they all tend to blur into a single authorial voice. From non-fans there'll be much head-shaking, from devotees the nod of recognition, a knowing smile. And the unshakeable certainty that in another twenty years or so someone out there will be writing much the same things about Take That. And bloody Bob Dylan. Again.