Louise Wener

While I never followed the band Sleeper, I was aware of them – their singles were fun and tuneful. However their singer, Louise Wener, did stand out from the crowd with her big brown eyes, pouty lips and great haircut – there were few other girls involved in successful Britpop bands. Reading her wonderful memoir of her life in Pop, I can say I bonded with her from the beginning, as she recounts sitting with microphone in hand taping the chart show (been there, done that), and also a show more shared love of David Cassidy – she’s only a few years younger than me, so musically I’m right at home with her all the way.

It also helps that Wener is an established novelist these days having swapped guitar for the pen some years ago. She can really write, and the result is a hugely entertaining memoir, full of wonderful stories, and self-deprecating wit – she’s not afraid to turn the spotlight on herself at all.

Born to a Jewish family in north London, Louise was the youngest by several years in her family. The first chapters recount teenaged years at school where she was geeky and introverted, and bullied by the girls with perfect skin. A gap year followed sixth form; Wener went on a Kibbutz, and had a whale of a time, but was brought back down to earth arriving in Manchester to study English, but she did meet Jon Stewart and they started a band. After uni they moved down to London and found a bass player and drummer Sleeper was born with her older brother as manager. They got their break supporting Blur, and the big-time beckoned …

There’s something about a tour itinerary that lists Barcelona, Milan and Berlin in its dates that’s making me hysterically resistant to the lowest common denominator, herd mentality of rock band touring: the endless communal meals where we have to find a cafe that serves egg and chips because half the crew is vegetarian and egg and chips is all they will eat. The living in each other’s pockets on the tour bus, smelling the tattooed roadie’s farts, listening to each other’s shitty music and filthy night-time snores.

This is my first time touring on a sleeper bus. A glorifed caravan with coffin-like compartments to sleep in and everyone huddled up on a banquette at the back, smoking and drinking and watching Spinal Tap for the 53rd time. There are rules on the tour bus. Don’t poo in the toilet; it can’t take it. Sleep with your feet facing forward, in case you crash like Bucks Fizz. Respect each other’s privacy and space. Difficult one, this: save for the sliver of curtain by your bunk there’s no real privacy to be had.
She makes it sound like so much fun! She recounts the highs and lows: the pressure to keep the band together, to write new songs, always being considered the front of the band because she’s a woman, splitting up with Jon, then falling in love with drummer Andy. They had the sense to bow out on a relative high, before the singles failed to chart. She obviously got a lot out of it even with all the stresses and strains.

This is an intelligent and witty memoir which I would heartily recommend to anyone who enjoyed Britpop – I loved it. I’ll definitely check out some of her novels – if they’re anything like this book in style, they’ll be fun too. (9/10) show less

I first saw Sleeper at the Shepherds Bush Empire in May 1994, where they were supporting Blur on their Parklife tour. Their performance left more of an impression on me than the headliners': Louise Wener in her wide-eyed, breathy-voiced splendour, slashing at her Telecaster and singing punky songs about libido. The music press loved her, of course, continually sticking her on front covers and asking her how she felt about teenagers masturbating over her posters – a question that was rarely show more put, one noted, to Liam Gallagher or Thom Yorke.

Her Britpop memoir is smartly written and very easy to read; funnily enough, my favourite bits were actually the early parts, before she was famous, where she evokes the experience of growing up in the suburbs in the 80s and 90s really well. When she finally gets into the band stuff, she is somewhat light on details – we hear that she is touring with Elvis Costello, or going on Top of the Pops, but it's all a bit detached, and there are no details of, for instance, how particular songs were written, or where they came from.

Sleeper, despite their media-friendly exposure, were never quite a top-tier band, but perhaps that helped them avoid the worst depredations of heroin-based debauchery that seemed to overtake a lot of their compeers. ‘Fame,’ Wener concludes succinctly, ‘is a fiefdom of wank,’ and, as in The Last Party, one senses the nakedly aggressive competition that obtained between a lot of these Britpop groups. ‘We all loathe each other beyond redemption,’ she says, only half-joking.

Sleeper's own decline and fall was exacerbated by inter-band tensions – Wener was originally dating the guitarist, Jon Stewart, but left him for drummer Andy Maclure while touring – and when their tenth single went in at number 28, it was all over. By that point, only three years after I saw them on stage, Britpop had become mainstream business and there was no room left for mid-list underperformers. Surveying the landscape of the British music industry in the late 90s, Wener is understandably downbeat about how the movement worked out:

What happened to that battle? That slice of rock and roll sexual equality that we came for? It started with an attempt to level the playing field, but ended up in something altogether tamer and more dilute. You wake up one morning in the midst of the beer-swilling, coke-fuelled, self-important, macho parody that is Britpop's death rattle and say, haven't we been here before? Justine aping Christine Keeler on the cover of Select, Sonya Echobelly falling out of her shirt in i-D, Cerys Catatonia pouting half naked on the cover of a lads' mag, and how the hell did I end up being photographed in a wet-look PVC catsuit carrying a gun? I look ridiculous. Like sexy liquorice.

Wener is still married to Maclure – they have kids and live in a little terraced house in the suburbs. She sounds quite sanguine about the celebrity merry-go-round having left her behind – although, as she puts it: ‘the further pop life recedes into the distance, the more I think I didn't grab it and snog it nearly hard enough.’ Sleeper actually reformed last year for a few special gigs, so it's nice to think she managed to slip 'em the tongue a few more times, in the strange Britpop afterlife that this engaging book evokes so well. show less

Good stuff. The first, pre-fame half is only ok (I tend to read recollections of teen years with the indignation of the once-miserable teen - "you call that an uncomfortable/geeky/miserable adolescence, that's nothing let me tell you"), but it's entertaining enough and well told - the whole thing zips along at a great pace. I was obsessed with music too and she grew up not far from me, so I get a lot of what she's talking about, even if her 80s reference points are different to mine. For me show more the book really swings into life in the second half, where Sleeper get together and become part of the mid-90s Britpop party. Three remarkably decadent years later, it all comes to a crashing and abrupt end, and, as small fish in the Britpop pond, Sleeper are thrown out to die on the lawn by their management. It's a really enjoyable read - Wener is a good writer, and comes across as a grounded and ordinary person. As a light, fun read, loaded with nostalgia for the likes of me, this is tough to beat. If you liked Britpop enough to remember Sleeper & their fellows with great fondness, then I recommend this heartily. show less

So I bought this book because I thought it would be about poker. And it was, kind of, but mainly that cover and blurb is doing some serious bluffing because it's about much more.

Audrey Ungar should be satisfied with her life--she's in her early thirties, she's traveled the world, she's a math genius, and she has steady employment, loyal friends, and the perfect-for-her boyfriend. However, for Audrey, there will forever be one thing missing: her father. Suffering from a gambling addiction, show more her father abandoned the family when Audrey was eleven years old. Audrey does everything she can to bring her wayward father's attention back to the family: she becomes a math prodigy and, when her genius gets her everyone's admiration but his, she turns to shoplifting. Because of his abandonment, the adult Audrey feels the need to obsessively control everything in her life.

Audrey's world is shaken, however, when her step-father reveals that her father tried to keep in touch with her long ago, but her step-father discouraged him because he felt the impact on Audrey could only be a negative one. This admission causes Audrey to seek out her father through the only thing he loved: the game of poker. Doing so brings Audrey into contact with Big Louie, an agoraphobic, obese, former card hustler who promises to teach Audrey the game and use his tournament connections to help Audrey track down the man who gambled away her childhood happiness. Such help doesn't come freely and Audrey finds that she has an impossible debt to pay for Big Louie's help.

The Perfect Play has very little to do with the game of poker and is more about the chances, gambles, and fortunes that shape our own lives. In learning about poker, Audrey's really seeking to understand the man who left her behind. But the danger in doing so is that Audrey probably already understands her father better than she realizes: both are mathematical geniuses, both have obsessive personalities, and both have a laser-like focus that shuts everyone else out. As Audrey becomes better at the game, we begin to wonder if Audrey realizes how precariously close she's coming to living out the sins of her father and risking everything and everyone she should value.

Louise Wener also sets up some clever bluffs throughout the narrative. Some things that seem a little cliche or implausible are turned on their head by the novel's end and a few of the plot lines that I scoffed at as predictably heading toward a particular end cleverly dodge in a different direction. Her strongest suit is creating believably flawed, yet incredibly likable characters. I really, truly like Audrey--something I can rarely say of women in fiction. The dialogue is often witty and funny, in a day-to-day sort of way. These conversations sound like those real people with genuine senses of humor and close relationships would have.

If the novel has a flaw, it may be that the poker game we all knew the novel would eventually be heading towards happens at the very end and seems somewhat rushed, lacking any real sense of tension. But, really, in the end, the novel isn't about the game anyway. It's about the players.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder show less