2012 Book Challenge - May

Confessions of a Skinny Couch Potato

 I am a preternaturally senescent person. I love nothing better than sitting down and drinking coffee, preferably with a bar of chocolate, or cake, if there's any on the go. I love reading and listening to music, and for me, sport is far more interesting when it is watched than it is played.

A few months ago, I had a medical for work and when I got the results through I didn't read them properly, but Princess Prettygood did. There was a suspicious shadow on my chest X-ray and a slightly high cholesterol measurement.

I wasn't especially worried about the cholesterol seeing as I'm still lithe but everything seems to shift in focus and this video comes to mind.



Anyway, it wasn't cancer or tuberculosis or anything other than a dodgy development of the X-ray plate, probably. I had a CT scan and all was hunky dory apart from the cholesterol.

I promised myself I'd get myself actually healthy if the re-examination was nothing and so I have tried (with mixed results) to cut down on my snacking. I have also started exercising and I even picked up a copy of Tarzan magazine.

So while I might not be blogging about my killer abs in a few months, I hopefully won't be blogging about my killer respiratory condition either,



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I am a footnote in the history of my friends

One of my earliest ever dreams was to be a pop star. I adored music as a child and was a back seat accompaniment to any song on the radio in my grandparents' or dad's car.
This led me to form my rave band X-Eption-L in Seaham, with me on keyboard, another boy on vocals and another boy on vocals and stop/start button of my drum machine. We never played gigs but I did nick a couple of Shamen riffs and the main refrain from Felix's 'Don't You Want Me'.




It got boring because I got into guitar music. I eventually persuaded my parents to get me an electric guitar. I learned how to play from friends and from magazines. I formed another band, GiW, with me on keyboard and drum machine. We never played gigs but I wrote two songs that were absolute filth. I got chucked out because grunge bands don't have keyboards or drum machines.

"Since when are we a grunge band?" I asked

"Since yesterday. We're changing the name to Doll's Head. And not having you in it."

Instead I kept plugging away and writing songs that were, in my head, a bit like Suede, and some that were like a more lo-fi version of early Moby.


Eventually, despite having a bad case of guitar addiction I got to tertiary college and met people just as opinionated and irritating as me to start another band with. They were friends with the two lads I was in GiW with. We called ourselves Sweetly Dropt and I wrote half the lyrics and sang. This was not a good idea because I can not sing. I did have a very nice shirt and sunglasses though. And apparently I was better at singing 'I Wanna Be Adored' than Ian Brown is.


We played one gig and I kept plugging away at songs and nearly failed my A-Levels but got into University, all but failed my first year and transferred courses so as not to get chucked out. And this starts the end of the scenic route to talk about one of the best and most painful periods of my life.

I met Andy in the Communication Studies orientation. I met Jonny, Sam and Graham in the Video Editing seminar. We decided to start a band. Andy couldn't play anything so he was the singer. Graham was the only one who'd played the drums before so he was the drummer. I had songs written and fancied myself as a lead guitarist. Jonny and Sam debated who would be the bassist. It fell to Jonny and he just went to Sound World in Sunderland and bought a bass and an amp with his first instalment of his student loan. We were all Star Wars obsessives so we named the band Hoth, which has the same climate as Sunderland in winter.

Some of our best songs were written quite quickly. We decided to play a gig. We organised it and friends came and paid two pounds in to cover the PA hire and such. We had energy but maybe not talent. I don't know any more. We had people shouting "Hoth! Hoth! Hoth!" at the end of our first gig, and I thought they were shouting "Off! Off! Off!" I used a toy raygun to shoot James Jam McMahon, now editor of Kerrang! and then a promoter and singer in a band. He was a gobshite then and now. We've been friends on and off for about fifteen years now. Except he lives in London and I live in Japan, so it's internet-based now.

I used to be a lot more positive about my music. I'm not now. In those days it could have been said that I was an arrogant turd. I was convinced that I would be a pop star because I had put in the time and the research and the passion since I was at least eight years old. Reality is a cruel mistress and now I'm only writing this bloody blog post because I got a whiff of nostalgia at Hoth being mentioned in a Guardian blog post by David Brewis, in response to a crap blog post written by a bloke who didn't know what he was talking about, and then we were mentioned in another post for seemingly no reason.

I'm bitter, you see. Not at the success of friends like Dave out of Frankie & The Heartstrings, Field Music or The Futureheads. I'm just bitter that I gave it up, and my friends' success makes me think, 'Marc, what if you hadn't given up being a mediocre musician? What would life be like? Would people be wowed by your cunning musical theft of new-wave riffs and easy-listening chord progressions dressed up with funny guitar noises?'





The fact is that Hoth disintegrated in 2002 after a year of us all living together like The Monkees with drink and relationship problems. Even if I had kept up the music, instead of selling my instruments to go to LA with my ex-girlfriend, to become a part-time mediocre writer and hopeful television subtitler (another dream that fell through), I can't imagine much coming of it. There were some bloody good songs I wrote after the band fell apart that could have been liked by people but I gave up hope.

What was it like to be an aspiring musician at the turn of the Twenty-First Century? Crap, actually. A lifestyle summed up in three words: credit card debt. Sam and I spent tons on guitar stuff and Melanie bought a synth. Band practices weren't so expensive but transporting PA systems and drum kits required taxi fares or blagging lifts from Melanie (Sam's then girlfriend, soon to be our keyboard player). It got on my nerves, being poor, paying for band practice and writing songs that would only ever be heard by a realistic maximum of fifty people upstairs in The Royalty, a pub next to the University of Sunderland. I didn't have bandmates who could practice every day, due to either money or time, and so I decided instead of writing songs that nobody hears, I'd write books that nobody reads because it's just as unfulfilling but cheaper.

Actually, it's not quite right. I did have a laugh, but after a while, when things needed to get more serious if we wanted to make the band 'a success' the effort wasn't really made. And after hanging about the university for four years and playing gigs and seeing the next waves of bands that could almost be your band, it gave you a perspective that you never thought possible. People who aren't from Sunderland usually want to leave Sunderland quickly, and people who are from Sunderland often do just for economic reasons.

Not everyone gave up. Sam from Hoth plays with Two Trick Horse (who sound nothing like Hoth) in Leeds. The rest of us have proper jobs and cheaper hobbies. Hopefully this has exorcised the ghosts of unrealised ambitions like being on Top of the Pops, having Saint Etienne/Graham Massey/whichever musical obsession that week produce my debut album.

I intend to have the Hoth demos up on Soundcloud for people to download eventually, for curiosity reasons or mere boredom. It will entail digging out a CD-R from the back of the cupboard. After that, maybe I'll stop mentally revisiting the past every six months or so.
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2012 Book Challenge: April

Books planned:

Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
Jonathan Safran Foer - Eating Animals
Kotaro Isaka - Golden Slumber
Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye
Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch
Shusaku Endo - Masks (O-men, I think)

Books read and unfinished:

Shinji Ishii - Buranko Nori
Raymond Chandler - The Long Goodbye
Shusaku Endo - Scandal

Books finished:

Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
Jonathan Safran Foer - Eating Animals
Po Bronson - What Should I Do With My Life?

Last Month I mistitled a post but all three of you got the drift, I think. I also completely imagined the title of the Endo book, as Masks. I don't think there is one so I took Scandal out of the library. It's good, but the kanji are too much for me - it's even harder than Botchan.

Silent Spring ends slightly more optimistically than I expected. I did say slightly. I decided to follow it with Eating Animals though, which indicates to me that I am going to hell because I can not get myself back into full-time vegetarianism, even if I have cut down on my meat intake a lot.

The Po Bronson book is fantastic and I got it out of Shibuya Central Library at the same time as The Long Goodbye, which is nearly finished, but not quite. The Bronson book, What Should I Do With My Life? benefits from being a series of interviews. I am a big believer in the fact that everybody has an interesting life, including those who don't think they do, and this shines through Bronson's writing. He restrains himself from being judgemental and lets the interviewees riff. Lovely!

I read more than I anticipated but perhaps not as much as I should have done.

The books I know I will not get around to this month are:

George Eliot - Middlemarch
Hunter S. Thompson - Hells Angels
Shiba Ryutaro - Saka No Ue No Kumo (though I started watching the TV series)

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