The Sound Of Youth

I’ve become fascinated over the last few years with things that capture the feeling of being young. I’ve put this down largely to the fact that I’m no longer part of the first wave of youth – I recently was in a nightclub and felt comfortably the oldest person in there, a feeling that took a bit of getting used to.

Music is the easiest way to make people feel young again, by virtue of the fact that people reminisce about the songs that they listened to when they were young. Much harder is to make songs that capture the sound of youth, in all its messed up glory and these are generally the more precious songs. I used to consider that Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys was the most perfect surmise of what it was like to grow up, with its complex and subtle themes of love – be it gained or lost but I can’t help thinking that the record is missing a fundamental ingredient.

One band that I’ve been listening to a lot recently for this reason is Nashville punk band Be Your Own Pet, who sadly crashed and burned at the end of last year. Their songs are raucous, immature, brash, loud and ultimately perfect little anthems that could only have been created by the very young. This was true of the band who released their first album aged 15, and were practically veterans by the time their second (and final) record came out three years later. When they decided to split, they still had a number of gigs in the UK that they were forced to honour and, having witnessed their penultimate performance ever in Liverpool, was slightly amazed at the drug-addled mess that they had descended into.

There is an overwhelming sense of cockiness in the grain of the music, with the loud guitars almost acting as a metaphor for the aggressive pain of adolescence. My favourite lyric on the second album is “I know what I did was pretty rotten / Now its like everything you did is forgotten / So go ahead and tell your sob story / All I have to say about it is blow me”. It covers the broad themes of youth that Pet Sounds does, but it does so in the language of the young, the residue anger of your first love gone wrong. It is the kind of language that is meant to sound stupid to older people, that is meant to create that sense of anarchy.

In a similar scenario, I recently read Richard Milward’s book Apples which tells the story of two teenagers named Adam and Eve in Middlesbrough. Milward was a student when he completed the novel, which beautifully captures the spirit of the new generation of youngsters that have access to adulthood years before previous generations. There is no doubting that this is largely unpleasant with tales of drink, drugs, rape and teenage pregnancy proliferating on the page, all nicely summed up as an allegory to the biblical story of Adam and Eve.

What Be Your Own Pet and Milward have in common is the balance of equal parts dark and light. For all of the aggressive, loud functions of both works, there is a similar amount of beauty and romance that lingers on over the long term.

It highlights that no matter how many adults tell you that you know nothing when you’re young, you arguably have a much greater power. Once that innocence, naivety and aggression is over, you can’t re-create it which is why it is imperative that Be Your Own Pet or Milward created this before they were too old. More importantly, the art of youth is perhaps more flawed than anything, but it is these extreme flaws that tend to make it so engaging.

People say that youth is wasted on the young; perhaps that’s the whole point of growing up.

Remembering Sylvia Plath

There’s something desperately sad about the news of the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

He is understood to have hung himself aged 47, following in the footsteps of his poet mother who gassed herself when Nicholas was a one year old baby. This raises the obvious debate about whether or not there is a suicidal or depressive gene which encourages this final resolution. There are previous examples of people having suicide in their families continuing the legacy – Kurt Cobain for example suffered the suicides of two of his uncles over his traumatic childhood.

No doubt there are several far better scientific studies of this phenomena than I can muster – not least in today’s Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/24/nicholas-hughes-suicide) so I’m going to instead focus on the thing that this story has reminded me of – the fantastic poetry of Sylvia Plath.

There’s a common put down of Plath’s work that it is a somewhat one dimensional version of adolescent despair. Woody Allen perhaps puts it more eloquently than most in his film Annie Hall when his character picks up a copy of Ariel and riffs at Diane Keaton: “Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality”.

While that may be true of her audience, her poetry was certainly not one dimensional. She had a way with words that blew me away when I first read them and that still have the same impact now. It is the lilting, rhythmic feel that her words drop into, with a constant sense of longing colouring each word. My favourite Plath line - the opening salvo from The Munich Mannequins - seems to sum the two clear motivations that she had in life: the quest for perfection and the love for her children. It was also a sad indictment of the fact that she couldn’t combine both.

“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children”

Away from that point, I particularly like the way in which she combines Nazi and Jewish imagery together in a way which is still slightly shocking now. She was writing these poems in the aftermath of the Holocaust at the end of 1950s, with the full terror of what had happened in Germany being felt by a world that would never be the same again. In her collection Ariel, there are German references in an overwhelming number of her poems, almost as a cut and dry way of describing the paradox of good and bad in all things.

Much is made of the poem “Daddy” in which amongst other things she describes the father figure of the work as “A man in black with a Meinkampf look” and how she “thought every German was you. And the language obscene”. This was a very specific attack on the two men in her life, designed for maximum effect and hurt. What interests me more is the way in which the German analogies continued into the less violent poems of her Ariel period. Using phrases such as “Bright as a Nazi lampshade” she made ordinary out of the extraordinary.

This gorgeous, bouncing lyrical style of writing was not just limited to her poetry. If anything, it was enhanced in her prose. This is obviously evident in her famous novel The Bell Jar, a painful study of the way that mental health was treated with in that era. What fascinates me more is to read extracts from her diaries that were published in the aftermath of her death, from which it is plain to see that this unique style was there from a very early age. Reading diary entries from her as a college girl, describing going on dates on a Saturday night somewhat forces home what a talent she actually was. The subject matter was largely dull but yet the writing sublime; anyone with the patience and perseverance to get through the 1000 pages of her collected diaries are rewarded not especially with a great insight into her life but more with the beauty of her sentence construction.

Part of me thinks that if Plath was born into the modern day, she might not have met the same end – with better health treatment and more support she could have gone on to be one of the most prolific female poets in history. More likely she would have been some kind of troubled pop star; such is the way that interest in poetry has submerged.

The sad truth is that had she been born into the modern day, Sylvia Plath would probably have ended up in the same situation. The unfortunate death of her son is a poignant reminder of the fact that we will never know.

You Could Have It So Much Better

I recently went to see the art-indie-pop band Franz Ferdinand live at the Manchester Academy. They delivered a good set, despite a few sound issues, but seemed to be a little short of momentum and energy.

Franz are a strange band to me; one that I have always liked but never really loved. They have created some of the greatest songs of the 21st century and yet at the same, have produced three largely patchy albums. All of the members are truly likeable but yet still strangely enigmatic.

This was my first time of seeing them live and I was surprised to see just how much front man Alex Kapranos controls the stage. The other three band members seem to fade into the background and Kapranos sings and plays the majority of the killer riffs - it reminded me more of the backing band for a solo act as a group that had been together for years.

Of the gig, my favourite Ferdinand song, Walk Away - which I was mildly obsessed with when it was released – was neutered into a slow-paced version which took away some of the fire and drive that made the song so infectious. They also didn’t play the coda at the end of the song; a strange aside about historical leaders that doesn’t really fit but in its idiosyncrasy was my favourite part. The song contains two of my favourite Franz lyrics too – “Mascara bleeds a blackened tear” and the beautifully elliptical “The sound of stilettos on a silent night”.

As the show went on, they chose not to play quite as many of their new songs as I would’ve expected for a band on tour in support of said record. This suggested a lack of confidence in the new album, which I can ultimately understand. In preparation for the gig, I bought the CD and put it in my car a week or so beforehand. I found that by the end, I was quite pleased to take it out and that I’d only really been focusing on two or three songs that I really liked.

For all this criticism, there is never a bad song on a Franz Ferdinand album, but what tempers this is that frequently only a few songs per album that are truly great. When it happens, there is no better indie band; certainly no one better at fusing danceable riffs with oddly eloquent lyrics.
Typically, these moments of magic only seem to come when they do something that sounds really original and fresh.

Hearing Ulysses for the first time amazed me; the weird and brooding sounds of the verses building up to the crescendo of the sing-a-long chorus is right up there as one of my songs of the year. I would love to see the band forget about their first album, experimenting with the forms of their songs and concentrating on the eccentricities that make them stand out from a crowd awash with generic indie bands.

They have the potential to be one of the great British bands – at the moment they will only be remembered as a good singles band.