David Stubbs (2) (1962–)

As a volunteer DJ for a local community radio station (Richmond’s WRIR 97.3), I often go headlong into a music genre. This is no different for me when reading. Both come together nicely in this amazing history of West German rock music in the late 20th century. Future Days covers a lot of what you would expect, with creative biographies on groups like Kraftwerk and Can, but it also delves into the culture, politics, and day-to-day life of these post–World War II children. They sought to show more define themselves as entirely independent of their recent history, as well as of American and English music influences. This is a fascinating look into a type of music that has had an impact on a lot of what we hear, even today. More pictures would have been nice, but a solid read. show less

Any history of comedy with an introduction entitled ‘How political correctness saved British comedy’ is clearly coming out fighting. Before the advent of alternative comedy in the late 1970s, with its ‘non-racist, non-sexist’ agenda, a great deal of British comedy, including the gold as well as the dross, was casually littered with attitudes that are now unacceptable and should have been unacceptable then: racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. For much of the 20th century British comedy show more was dominated by white men to such an extent that, as David Stubbs observes, it ‘was not so much about the human condition as the white, male condition’. Stubbs grew up in Britain during the 1960s and ‘70s, watched a huge amount of comedy on TV, contemporary stuff and old films, and fell in love with much of it. The tension between his continuing love of the comedy and contempt for the attitudes too often threaded through it drives much of this book and makes for fascinating reading. ‘Sometimes it’s just single moments’, he writes, ‘but they jar like a bone in an otherwise tasty fish supper’.

Stubbs is not an advocate of cancel culture. He believes that comedy from previous times can still speak to us in the present and make us laugh. He is dismayed by the fact that even the best of the old comedy shows and films are now rarely shown on mainstream television and many young people are growing up with a severely limited knowledge of comedy history. Nor is it a matter of imposing contemporary values on the comedy of a previous age. His concern, rather, is to analyse comedy to show what it reveals of the attitudes prevalent in the era(s) in which it was made.

He recognises that what seems hopelessly stereotypical now might have been refreshingly novel and even liberating in its day. Julian and Sandy were an exuberantly camp couple given to erupting noisily into the 1960s radio comedy Round the Horne, baffling their urbane host Kenneth Horne - a straight man in more senses than one - with their gay innuendo and liberal employment of Polari. The fact that they were played by gay actors, Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, lent their characterisations authenticity. In a Britain that was still busy putting gay men in prison, Julian and Sandy were bold, impossible to dislike and outrageously funny. They were the agents of the joke, rather than the butt of it, and remain among my all-time favourite comedy characters. Unfortunately, the template was then endlessly repeated to tiresome, increasingly unfunny and ultimately repressive effect, in the work of subsequent lesser comedians and scriptwriters in countless sitcoms and sketch shows throughout the 1970s.

Before the revolution of alternative comedy, and with honourable exceptions, British comedy was populated by such stock characters, as if culled from a mandatory comedy writing manual issued to all comedy writing hacks: gay men, husbands, wives, vicars, the elderly… the comedy writing manual had a stereotype for all of them. Racial stereotypes were commonplace and went largely unremarked. Once the stereotypes had been swept away the path was clear for the inventive and idiosyncratic characters of the sketch series The Fast Show, the credible gay hero of the sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, the feminist inflected comedy of French and Saunders and Jo Brand, and the well-observed comedy of the Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me.

Particularly when discussing old-school comedy, Stubbs walks a tightrope between celebration and censure. Just occasionally he falls off it. He sounds uncharacteristically humourless and puritanical when berating a perfectly innocuous Morecambe and Wise sketch. Similarly, although he’s right about the reactionary politics of the Carry On films, he might have acknowledged that, in the context of a 1950s British film comedy culture in which sex seemed not to have been invented, their saucy seaside postcard humour might justifiably have been seen as a step forward.

Stubbs certainly does have his blind spots. Surprisingly, for a comedy buff who is also a music critic, he is not a fan of the comic song. Without wishing to sound chauvinistic, Britain has been rather good at funny songs: Noel Coward, Flanders and Swann, Jake Thackray, the Bonzo Dog Band, Victoria Wood. Stubbs, however, dismisses an entire and eclectic tradition in a few casual sentences.

For the most part, though, his analysis is perceptive, nuanced and scrupulously even-handed. There is much to admire and enjoy about this book. Stubbs draws attention to some brilliantly talented mid-twentieth century female comedians who work has been marginalised by history, including Joyce Grenfell and Eleanor Bron. He has the honesty to admit that he has never found the humour of Spike Milligan, that sacred cow of British comedy, remotely funny. He writes well about how TV comedy helped to bind the nation together in the 1970s (the 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas show was watched by an estimated audience of up to twenty eight million). He’s very good on the limitations, and even self-deceiving smugness, of television and radio political satire. And I cheered when he put the boot into the tired notion that comedy should be ‘edgy’ (in the 21st century ‘edgy’ comedy has largely degenerated into an excuse for comedians to punch down at the marginalised and persecuted).

I’m not sure how many of the comedians and shows featured in Different Times will be familiar to readers outside of Britain (some of them might not be familiar to anyone at all under the age of fifty). Some British comedians have enjoyed international success (Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Benny Hill, Monty Python, Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean) but many, including some of the best (Tony Hancock is just one great name from the past that springs to mind), have remained largely unknown beyond their own country. Stubbs concentrates on film and, particularly, TV comedy, bypassing stand-up almost entirely. He admits that, almost necessarily, his history is incomplete. It is, nonetheless, a comprehensive account of the main players and trends in 20th century British comedy, and the ways in which it reflected, and often failed to adequately reflect, the nation.

He makes some observations on the disappearance of a tradition of sheer silliness from British comedy. Silliness is what I personally miss most in contemporary comedy, which tends towards naturalism and truthfully observed characters. It once ran through all strands of British comedy from the comparatively left-field (The Goon Show, Monty Python, Vivian Stanshall, Ivor Cutler) to the mainstream variety comedians (Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper, Ken Dodd). There is, at least, the consolation of the sublimely silly Count Arthur Strong, whose wonderfully funny work combines the traditional and the post-modern (inexplicably, Stubbs mentions him only once in passing). Sadly, he seems like an increasingly atypical and even anachronistic figure.

Different Times ends on a positive note. Following an outbreak of cynicism and cruelty in comedy in the noughties, Stubbs argues that the keyword for the best of current British comedy is ‘kindness’. It is also more inclusive, diverse and multicultural than ever before. This won’t, in my view at least, automatically make it funnier. Truly great comedy will always be a rarity as most people simply lack the peculiar concatenation of qualities required to achieve it (a sort of intense intellectual rigour combined with an ability to take a sidelong look at everything). Most of the time we have to settle for being moderately amused. Still, a diverse and thoughtful comedy based on our shared humanity is something to be welcomed without reservation.

And the greatest living British comedian, according to Stubbs? Stewart Lee. No argument from me on that one, either. show less

Despite being subtitled "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen", Fear of Music doesn't actually address the question of "why modern [read: avant garde] art is embraced and understood while modern [as above] music is ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated and listened to by the inexplicably crazed", as the blurb puts it, until its conclusion - a mere 26 pages out of 137. Rather, the first 111 pages set out the parallel histories of the show more two beasts.

The answers eventually proffered are: because the megabucks associated with modern art have familiarised the public with it; because modern music can feel like an infliction; because music more powerfully depicts the future, and the future is bleak; because humans are inherently more tolerant of visual than auditory chaos; and, a more general repetition of the first, because people aren't used to modern music.

Of these, I give most credence to the infliction and tolerance suggestions. To take the latter first, modern music much more commonly causes physical pain through sheer extent (in its case, volume) than modern art when experienced live, and auditory chaos also much more readily causes headaches (even at reasonable volume).

The infliction point is related. Although modern art often aims to challenge, it doesn't generally aim to cause as much unpleasantness to its audience as possible, whereas this does seem to be the aim of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Napalm Death and Sunn O))). A more appropriate comparison to these more extreme avant garde bands than the sublime (in an artistic sense) works of Rothko would be images of violence such as those force-fed to Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

The very premise of the book is on shaky ground in this respect. In setting out the history of avant garde music, Stubbs includes such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Brian Eno and Radiohead - hardly musicians that lacked a popular following. Furthermore, he states that millions of people already do embrace avant garde music (albeit calling this "a tiny fragment of the overall demographic"). Most damagingly, he even says "it's hard to conceive that Duke Ellington's music was once considered 'dissonant' or to recapture just what a fissure the joyful peal of Louis Armstrong's trumpet represented" - i.e., that in these cases at least the avant garde has been wholly accepted by and subsumed into the mainstream.

Likewise, although Rothko is indeed extremely popular, the same cannot be said of all avant garde art. The Tate Modern may receive millions of visitors per year, but this is due more to its cannily having been established as a symbol of trendy London and to the monumentalism of the building itself than to its housing works by the likes of Giacometti, which are barely glanced at by the incessantly shuffling crowds, despite a Giacometti having sold for $141m this year. The public much prefers shows of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo or impressionists like Monet to the Futurists or conceptualists.

Having said all that, I like the premise of the book even if it's a false one, simply because it gives Stubbs the chance to provide his parallel histories of these two fascinating movements. And I like the book itself: Stubbs writes well and with a keen eye for what to cover from what must have been a wealth of material, and includes just enough of himself to add an extra dimension without being intrusive. I read it in one day, fighting to keep going through straining eyes.

The book is also a fantastic way of discovering new music, and I recommend having access to Spotify or similar when reading it so that you can appreciate what's being discussed as you go along. show less

This was an interesting but ultimately disappointing book. It purports to explain why ‘people get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen (that is, why crowds worship at the great gallery sanctuaries of modern art but do not listen to modern music).

In fact, it is a fairly unsophisticated polemic from a journalist that, in the end, rather fails to do much more than whimper about the current state of affairs.

Yet at times, like all good journalism, I found it hard to put the book down and it was show more only when I asked for and failed to get analysis and some depth that the book lost its fifth star.

This is not to say that Stubbs is not insightful on aspects of the state of music - he is good on the forward drive in black music, the role of the BBC and the elaborate economic con trick called conceptual art, the perfect art for the age of derivatives and the art we deserved at the time.

However, the book introduces us to the key names and works of alternative traditions in Western music. For that reason alone, it is worth buying and (if you live in London) wandering around the more recherché record shops in and around Berwick Street in Soho to pick up something different.

I shall get my own theory out of the way which has nothing to do with capitalism or power but simply is about time.

We can take in a picture at a glance and then choose to go back for more when we have sufficient time. The glance allows us to ‘fake it’ until we do so and can help create a shared cultural illusion that we all 'get it'. Music takes time, even in YouTube gobbets.

You either experience it in some extended time or you do not experience it at all. If it is difficult or you are not in the mood, there is less incentive to get enough of it to park it for later and, of course, it is not easy to point at this ‘it’ to another as if you understood it.

Because our culture pours over us so many opportunities to see art in an instant and because we are used to the two or three minute quick fix single or track, it takes proportionally greater effort to experiment with sound – so we don’t. Life is too short in a very meaningful sense.

There is also a psychological issue that Stubbs only skims, referring at the end to David Reynolds on the problem of ‘noise music’. Art and music is seen to be, perhaps required to be, a soother of anxieties or an expression of adolescent feeling. It forms the mind in youth and comforts later.

Music is not, for most people, a thing-in-itself. It cannot have a discomfiting purpose, one designed, as Throbbing Gristle clearly intended it to have, to change consciousness through disrupting perception.

The population are not elite tantrics but rather are stressed out survivors of a demanding capitalist democracy. They simply cannot cope with Anonymous, let alone Sun Ra.

This exhausted population wants meaning on a plate rather than to be faced with anything that simply exists in and for itself, meaning that soothes and endorses identities that are constructed not in accordance with reality but in defiance of it.

Nevertheless, as a guide to various corners of ‘difficult music’, this book can be read with profit. The musicians and composers named by Stubbs and not previously known to me will now be searched out over the coming years.

If others do this perhaps advanced music will become more popular. As someone who discovered Stockhausen early and preferred ‘Gesang der Junglinge’ to the bleatings of the late romantics, perhaps I have a nose for ‘noise’.

But there are treasures out there for anyone, most of which can be found with only a little effort on YouTube and then put it in a Playlist for when time is available.

One major complaint is that the proofreading of this book is, in places, dire.

The idea that an ‘ethical and distinctive publishing company’ [Zero Books] might be permitted more latitude in this respect than evil capitalists is absurd. It rather confirms the prejudice that lefties find it difficult to organise a whelk stall. show less