blog

Not dead (yet)

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 13:47:19 +0100

It's now over 2 years since my last blog post. I've been a bit distracted trying to help my parents, both in their eighties and experiencing various health problems. That led to a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between London, where I live, and Exeter, where they live. They were both (eventually) diagnosed with dementia and had to go into a care home. My Dad died peacefully in August this year. I may have a bit more to say about all that in due course. But this is just a short post to show that I haven't entirely given up on this website.

The site hadn't had much attention for a while, so I've given it a bit of a facelift. In particular, I've tried to improve how it looks on mobile devices. As for future blog posts, I'll try to get back to doing some more book reviews, in amongst the odd digression onto other topics (I did manage to read some books during my absence from here – so there's no shortage of material there).

But mainly what I want to do is make some progress with my writing. I have about 30,000 words of what started out as a long short story - although it is now looking like it will be at least a novella (if not a short novel).

One of the problems with self-publishing is that you don't have a commissioning editor badgering you about when you are going to finish the damn thing (and threatening to terminate your contract). And that lack of pressure is certainly one reason for my exceedingly slothful progress. So I suppose that by announcing it here, I'm trying to shame myself into making headway with it.

But unless you're a fan of watching paint dry, you could check back again in say, 6-12 months' time to see if I have anything to report.

In the meantime, there's a fair amount of other content on this site to randomly browse, to while away the time. If you like books and want some suggestions for what to read next, try here – hopefully, you'll find something that piques your interest.

Micro-reviews (September 2023)

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 11:21:59 +0100

Bad Traffic, Indelible City, The Bandit Queens

Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis

This novel is a really engaging and unusual twist on the crime thriller genre. Inspector Jian, a tough cop from the “Life on Mars” school of policing, travels from China to the UK to look for his daughter, Wei Wei, who’s disappeared after getting involved with some rather unsavoury characters. It’s also the story of Ding Ming, an illegal migrant from a dirt poor part of China who’s been trafficked to the UK hoping to earn his fortune - but finds that the reality is very far from what was promised. As well as being a page-turner, it conveys a great sense of what it feels like to be a Chinese person coming to the UK for the first time. Whilst the people-smuggling aspect may sound grim, there are moments of humour - I particularly liked the way that the police inspector psychs himself up to go into action with the bad guys by reciting passages from Mao’s Little Red Book under this breath, such as “The contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat can only be resolved through the method of socialist revolution.” A sequel - “No Exit” - is due to be published next year.

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim

I’ve read several books about Hong Kong’s recent history and the Democracy movement, but this is the best one so far, by quite some distance. Lim combines her own personal experience with some serious journalism - for example, using previously embargoed interviews with various characters involved in negotiating the return of the territory to China, she uncovers some really interesting material. In particular, she reveals how the British Government largely ignored the views of a committee of Hong Kong citizens that was supposed to provide input on what the people of the territory actually wanted. She also outlines how Hong Kong’s development has been influenced by both the West and Mainland China, but its people don’t wholly identify with either and feel that they occupy a space somewhere between the two. Lim suggests that the Democracy movement, although triggered by concern over loss of Hong Kong’s freedoms, was also motivated on a desire to preserve that unique sense of Hong Kong identity against an overbearing Chinese state (and that rather like the British for most of the time that they were in charge, China prefers to ignore what Hong Kong’s people actually want)

The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

The rumour in Geeta’s village in India is that her husband disappeared because she murdered him using some kind of black magic (in fact, he just left - although Geeta's actually quite relieved about that and finds that many aspects of life without him are better). But although she tries to convince herself that she doesn’t care about her outsider status in the village, she’s actually quite lonely. So when another woman from her micro-finance loan group asks for help knocking off her husband (who’s an absolute sh*t), she decides to help out. This was a book group read and I enjoyed it (it’s very funny in parts), although not everyone at the group felt the same - and it’s fair to say that there are some problems. For example, it’s a bit uneven in tone - is it meant to be serious and largely realistic but with funny bits? Or is it more in the nature of a black comedy, which you’re meant to take with a pinch of salt, but along the way it’s making some serious points? I think ultimately the author was probably aiming for the latter, but it veers around a bit at times. All that said, I thought it had some interesting things to say about women’s position in a very patriarchal society, the caste system in India and also how women (or perhaps more accurately, human beings in general) don’t always help one another out, even when they're facing much the same problems or challenges. In what is (in more ways than one) perhaps a slightly left-field analogy, some of the moral dilemmas also reminded me of Brecht's Good Person of Szechwan, which essentially asks whether you sometimes need to be bad to be good - or whether the "system" effectively forces people into making those choices. Anyway, if your literary sensibilities are so refined that you’ll just get annoyed by some of the stylistic problems, then this probably isn’t for you - but otherwise, I’d say it’s worth a try (despite the problems, I felt that the author has definitely got talent).

Micro-Reviews (May 2023)

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 20:57:33 +0100

Assembly by Natasha Brown, Johnson At 10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell

Assembly by Natasha Brown

This is a short work - barely even a novella - which contains some quite striking and at times challenging writing. And it’s encouraging to see something like this being given a big marketing push by a major publisher. But I’m still not quite sure what I think of it and whether it actually works.

Our narrator is a high flyer at a City bank. She’s also black - but the bank’s approach to diversity leaves her feeling as if her success is down to her race rather than her merits as an individual employee. She’s in a relationship with a white guy from an upper middle class family - but it’s suggested that he’s just going out with her to burnish his liberal credentials.

The thing I struggled with most is that no one ever seems to get the benefit of the doubt. For example, I think that at least some employers in fields like banking and law have now recognised that there’s a serious problem with diversity and genuinely want to do better, but struggle with it in practice. I would’ve liked to see the author take us inside the head of someone at the bank in charge of diversity and show how, despite being well-intentioned, they were still managing to screw it up. But we remain confined to the narrator’s head, who seems totally ground down by her existence - and the bank's efforts are portrayed as largely cynical and empty (which may be the case at some employers, but I don't think it's true of all - even if many are guilty of not doing enough and misdirecting their efforts). And as a result, what I came away with was a sense of hopelessness - of a society where racism in its most overt, blatant forms is largely (although not entirely) suppressed, but a rather more insidious, structural form of racism remains, gnawing away at the narrator, because our society has been built largely by white people to favour white people. The implication is that it is so ingrained, no improvement is possible - but personally, I find it hard to share that conclusion.

This is difficult territory because I am white, therefore I benefit from those structures and so perhaps I am pre-disposed to be defensive about it, which may be the real reason why I didn't feel that Assembly quite worked (but I don't want to admit it). So perhaps I don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt either. But as you can probably tell, it certainly made me think, which is always a good thing - so why not give it a try (it will probably be the shortest thing you read this year).

Johnson at Ten by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell

This book manages to pull off two somewhat unlikely feats. First, it manages to somehow be both quite analytical and quite gossipy, sometimes at more or less the same time. Second, it made me have a modicum of sympathy for, of all people, Gavin Williamson- which is something I never expected to happen. This is because it recounts an episode where Williamson (then Education Secretary) and his aides had gone to meet the PM expecting to discuss what they thought was Johnson’s preferred solution to a particular issue. But Johnson had other ideas and wanted to discuss another approach to the problem entirely. So they had to talk about something they hadn’t worked up at all and all their preparation for the meeting was wasted. Afterwards, Williamson and his aides asked Johnson’s aides - “Why on earth didn’t you tell us he was more keen on what we just discussed than the solution we told you we were working on?”. To which they responded “Because we had no idea until we got in the room with you and the PM.” This encapsulates one of the key reasons why Johnson was such a bad PM; he had no focus, kept changing his mind all the time and kept telling people what he thought they wanted to hear (which was often the opposite of what he had just said to someone else earlier the same day). As a result, when his aides told people that “the PM wants X”, people just stopped believing it. If it was something they didn’t really want to do or it was difficult, they just sat on their hands. It’s really no wonder the country is in such a mess.

Micro-reviews (March 2023)

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 21:46:30 +0100

The Anomaly, The Animals In That Country, In A Good Light

The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier

This was a really enjoyable high concept literary thriller. The plot revolves around a duplicate of Air France Flight AF0006 suddenly appearing 3 months after its first version landed in the US - so now there are 2 versions of the same plane and 2 versions of each individual who was on board. How can something so unlikely have happened? This is where the high concept comes in, because it emerges that the most probable explanation is that the world we live in is one of possibly millions of simulations being run by super-intelligent beings for their own amusement. Sounds utterly mad at first but try reading this article and you might change your mind.

Anyway, the first half of the novel introduces us to some of the characters on the plane, whilst dropping in various snippets of information about how something weird seems to have happened in connection with the flight. In lesser hands, the degree of jumping around between characters and the amount of withholding of information could have tended to frustrate the reader - but I certainly found myself quite engaged by all the characters and keen to find out what happens to them (and their doppelgängers). The second half takes us more into the high concept stuff that I’ve outlined above. Here there was potentially a risk that the big ideas overshadow everything else, but again, the novel never loses its focus on how those ideas affect its human characters.

I was particularly impressed with it because Le Tellier is first and foremost a literary author - and in my experience, such writers aren’t always 100% convincing when they tackle sci-fi concepts (see my discussion of r ecent efforts by Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro). But Le Tellier does a great job of merging the two. I wonder if this is because the French literary tradition is a bit more comfortable with big ideas - but who knows? I have since read another of his books, Electrico W, and although I enjoyed it, it’s very much more in litfic territory (so don’t go into it expecting something more like The Anomaly).

The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay

This was another one of those books which I felt I should’ve liked based on the blurb (and all the super-enthusiastic 5 star reviews), but didn’t. A virus is on the loose which makes humans think they can understand what animals are saying. It turns out that what animals are saying (or possibly, what the virus makes us think they are saying) is pretty disconcerting. Predictably, society starts to disintegrate as the virus drives people slightly mad and it all seemed to be heading off in a JG Ballard-style post-apocalyptic direction. At first, I quite enjoyed the plain-speaking central character, an alcoholic grandma called Jean, but not enough that I wanted to spend an entire novel with her - and I have to confess I gave up at around the 60% mark. Other reviewers have said that the animal stuff made them think about animals in a new way . And to the author’s credit, she does not anthropomorphise them; there is a strong sense of sharing the planet with beings which are actually quite alien to our way of thinking and with whom meaningful communication is difficult, if not impossible. However, for me, all this would’ve been fine at short story or possibly novella length- an entire novel of it was too much.

In a Good Light by Clare Chambers

Esther works a dead-end job as a waitress whilst also freelancing part-time as an illustrator of children’s books (but not with any great success). She’s also in a relationship with an older man that seems to be going nowhere. We know that something awful happened to her elder brother, Christian, putting him in a wheelchair - and much of the driving force of the narrative is your desire to find out what exactly that was. Various events in the present prompt Esther to start thinking about their upbringing, as children of parents obsessed with helping the less fortunate - and this is where the book really comes into its own with its amusing and well observed depiction of growing up in 1970s and 80s Britain, especially the acute embarrassment of having parents who won’t fork out for e.g. even moderately fashionable clothes for their children etc. Quite a few reviewers have criticised it for implausible plot developments towards the end of the novel, suggesting that it relies too heavily on coincidence. Whilst I can see where they’re coming from, I’m not sure that’s fair - because in fact all the characters from the past who suddenly resurface in the novel’s present have strong and plausible motivations for doing so. Even if you end up disagreeing with me on that, the novel is still well worth reading for the material about Esther and Christian’s childhood (which takes up most of the book). It's a really enjoyable read and whilst it's all done with a fairly light touch, it does tackle some serious issues along the way. I also enjoyed The Editor's Wife and Learning to Swim by the same author.

More London street libraries

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 23:01:45 +0100

This is another in a series of occasional posts about London street libraries, following on from this one (about a street library and secret garden at London Bridge) and this one (about another street library at Cambria Road, which is close to where I live in Herne Hill). I found all these via this excellent map produced by The Londonist.

The one pictured above is in an old red telephone box in Lewisham. It was quite well stocked but also looked reasonably well-used, presumably because of its fairly prominent position on a main road.

Aspinall Road

Other street libraries can be a bit more off the beaten track, like this one at Aspinall Road (NB it's a bit difficult to find - you need to cross over the railway line). It looked like it didn't attract much passing traffic and had been used more as a dumping ground for unwanted books (including a fine collection of literary works by the awful Nadine Dorries).

Part of its problem is that the books are hidden in a large storage unit with opaque doors and apart from the tiny sign above it, you wouldn't know it was a street library unless you were actually looking for it.

Brixton

This one in Brixton consists of several large makeshift book cupboards like this one, so it's a good one to visit if you want a reasonably broad selection to choose from. It's on Somerleyton Road.

Clapham

And then you get some really quite compact and bijou numbers like this one, outside someone's house in Clapham (it's on Park Hill, outside No.8).

Anyway, as explained in previous posts, I have been using these to distribute paperback copies of my novel - which, to be perfectly honest, are probably the only copies of them actually in circulation. This seems to work reasonably well, because when I've revisited the library, the book has often disappeared. But does that mean someone is actually going to read it? Well, hopefully - but sadly, possibly not always...

Why do I say that? Well, I've noticed that one or two copies of my novel have popped up on second hand book sites - and since I've barely sold any copies via Amazon, it's a pretty fair bet that whoever put it up for sale got hold of it from a street library (probably along with a bunch of other books they thought they could flog). Maybe they read it and thought it was crap - but in that case, why not just put it back where you found it or deposit it in another street library for someone else to read? Sadly in the case of my novel, they were as deluded as these dastardly ebook pirates if they thought they were going to actually make any money out of it...

Micro-Reviews (October 2022)

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 21:25:25 +0100

Educated, The Paper Menagerie and A Ghost in the Throat

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts (the last one was a year ago, which is hardly the level of regularity I was aiming for). That’s partly because I’ve been busy with other things, including trying to make some more progress with a story about China that I started ages ago (I’ve got about 25K words so far and it’s not like I’ve got stuck with the plot or anything - it’s just finding the time to write that’s the problem, especially given my glacial pace…).

The other reason for not having done any reviews lately is that I prefer to pick books that I was quite enthused about and/or are by lesser known authors. But just lately, I don’t seem to have read all that many books which met those criteria. I sometimes also pick books that I thought were rather overrated - and I could easily have filled a post with those (but I don’t want to be negative the whole time, so I usually confine myself to one book in that category per post - see the third book below). Aside from that, there were also a lot of books that I quite enjoyed, but not enough to feel motivated to really enthuse over them here.

Educated by Tara Westover

This is an utterly compelling memoir about the author’s upbringing in a patriarchal, ultra-conservative, ultra-religious family in the US. They've largely opted out of normal society, so she doesn’t get to go to school, despite being super-bright - instead she’s put to work with her siblings in the family scrap yard/death trap, which her father runs with a quite spectacular disregard for rules about health and safety, to say nothing of prohibitions on child labour etc (producing some fairly horrific results at times). Sounds grim? Well, it is, in parts - but she eventually manages to escape and get herself the proper education that she ought to have been entitled to in the first place. What particularly struck me was the hold that her family managed to exert, not only over her but over almost all of her siblings, despite an appalling level of mostly mental but sometimes also physical abuse. It’s an extraordinary story which is very well told. Couldn’t put it down.

The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

I’m not normally that keen on “if you like X, you’ll like Y” sales pitches because they just lead to consuming “more of the same”. But the pitch here was that if you like the stories of Ted Chiang, you might like Ken Liu’s work - and being a big fan of Ted Chiang, who I think is an exceptional writer, I succumbed. There are some really good stories here and if you read nothing else, try The Man Who Ended History, which is about time travel, Unit 731 (a part of the Japanese army which committed atrocities on Chinese civilians in WWII) and Japan’s failure to offer a proper acknowledgement and apology for this (you can download it free here). For me, that one definitely stands comparisons with Ted Chiang’s work, especially in its thoughtful and though-provoking treatment of a difficult and sensitive topics. Several other stories also come reasonably close. However, I wasn’t 100% convinced by the comparison. It’s also unfair to the author, as he’s got his own style and preoccupations which are quite different from Ted Chiang. For example, quite a few of the other stories in the collection were more fantasy than sci-fi, often drawing on (for me unfamiliar) aspects of Chinese culture, which was quite interesting. Whilst I liked some of these, a fair few just weren’t really my cup of tea (but I shouldn’t complain - it was worth buying the whole collection just to have read The Man Who Ended History). Ken Liu is also the translator of The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, which I reviewed a few years back.

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

This is essentially a memoir that interweaves various episodes in the author’s life (traumatic premature birth of fourth child, breast cancer scare etc) with her obsession with the Irish poetess Eibhlin Dubh. I found some of the personal episodes quite compelling but as the book goes on, it focusses increasingly on the poetess obsession - which failed to hold my interest. I could admire the quality of the prose - but that wasn’t enough for me. Slightly longer review on LibraryThing here.

Patriots by Peter Morgan: a review

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 21:25:17 +0100

Patriots by Peter Morgan (author of Netflix series The Crown) depicts the rise and fall from grace of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. I saw it at the Almeida Theatre where it’s just finished its run, but it's now transferring to the West End. It’s an interesting play with excellent performances from Tom Hollander as Berezovksy, Luke Thallon as Roman Abramovich and Will Keen - who is well worth seeing for his uncannily accurate and rather chilling impersonation of Putin (especially his peculiarly stiff body language).

Rise and fall

In the first half, Berezovsky is shown rising almost effortlessly through the gangster capitalism of post-Soviet economy to become an influential adviser to the court of President Boris Yeltsin. Meanwhile, his growing power and influence allow him to attract courtiers of his own. Roman Abramovich (referred to as “the Kid”) seeks his help and influence in acquiring oil company Sibneft. And a certain Vladimir Putin — having fallen on hard times - requests Berezovsky’s help in becoming a politician. This ultimately leads to Berezovsky’s fatal mistake - encouraging Yeltsin’s inner circle to make Putin his successor in the belief that the latter would just do as he was told by Berezovsky and others.

In the second half, the tables are turned as Putin decides that he needs to bring Berezovsky and the other oligarchs to heel. Abramovich doesn’t exactly turn against Berezovsky but realises that the latter can no longer protect him and, somewhat reluctantly, switches his allegiance to Putin.

Berezovsky and Putin - different, yet the same?

Obviously Berezovsky wasn’t the only oligarch to fall foul of Putin - and the play rather glosses over others, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who attempted to stand up to him (and unlike Berezovsky, spent time in prison for doing so - whereas Berezovsky escaped to London and obtained asylum in the UK). But some degree of simplification and loss of historical nuance is probably inevitable when turning something like this into a two and half hour play.

The most interesting aspect for me was the parallel drawn between Berezovsky and Putin, despite their ultimately antagonistic relationship. Both feel they are men of destiny, responding to a call to “save Russia” (and both believe that only they can save it) - but both are also manipulative sociopaths and hypocrites. In Berezovsky’s defence, though, he never comes across as someone who would have shared the grandiose, backward-looking vision of imperial Russia that seems to have prompted Putin to invade Ukraine.

But there is definitely a further parallel in terms of hubris. At the height of his powers, Berezovsky seems to have felt that he could almost control the future - hence his belief that Putin would do as he was told by the oligarchs. Similarly, after 20 years in power, Putin seems to have believed that his own power was such that crushing Ukraine would be swift and that its population could easily be brought to heel.

The court case

The play also briefly covers the 2012 judgment of the English High Court in the dispute between Berezovsky and Abramovich over who owned Sibneft - which prompted me to take a look at the judgment. I’ve only dipped into it (it’s a massive document, over 1200 paragraphs long - although there's a summary of it here), but parts of it are a fascinating read - see for example paragraphs 51-57 on the need that most businessmen had for a “krysha”, or Godfather type protector figure, which also surfaces in the play. Berezovsky was initially both Abramovich’s and Putin’s krysha - but it’s pretty clear who’s the big krysha now. The really depressing thing is that you suspect that the most likely way for Putin’s reign to end is when some person for whom Putin was initially a krysha decides that it’s time to turn the tables and become the big krysha himself - and so it goes on.

Why was a Russian dispute heard in an English court?

If you are wondering how a dispute over an alleged Russian law agreement could be considered by an English court, it seems that Abramovich chose not to dispute the jurisdiction of the English court - although as the judge remarked, “[i]n circumstances where Mr Berezovsky was unable to return to Russia without facing arrest, and.. the difficulties facing [him] in obtaining a fair trial… that was no doubt a realistic decision”. This implies that the court would have accepted jurisdiction even if Abramovich had disputed it. It might also seem odd that the court was asked to rule on Russian law. But it’s not uncommon for agreements governed by foreign law to come before the English courts; usually expert evidence is provided on the relevant principles of foreign law and that’s what happened here (see paragraph 527).

Berezovsky claimed ownership of 50% of Sibneft but this was never reduced to writing and the judge clearly felt that he was a seriously unreliable witness, constantly changing the facts to suit his own objectives - so it’s perhaps not too surprising that he lost. His unreliability as a narrator of his own life isn’t really explored in the play - but perhaps that would be asking too much of the form. Maybe it’s better suited to a novel, where the reader would have more time to consider inconsistencies between different accounts. At any rate, good though it is as a play, I don’t think Patriots is going to be the last word on the post-Soviet oligarchs and the rise of Putin.

Still the hardest word

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 12:38:14 +0100

Well, it took over 50 resignations from his own government but he's finally agreed to go. So goodbye and good riddance, Boris Johnson. Your many, many brazen lies have finally caught up with you. I always thought you were a lazy, arrogant **** who was only interested in his own advancement. Now it's finally dawned on your erstwhile supporters too.

And did we get an apology or even any hint of contrition or regret for his own actions in his resignation speech? No. It's much the same as bankers after the financial crash. We never really got a "sorry" from them either - or even a "thank you" for bailing them out. And now people see the same thing again from a morally bankrupt politician.

I think most people accept that their leaders - both in business and politics - will make mistakes. It's a complex world out there and no one gets everything right. But what is really corrosive of public trust is the unwillingness to recognise that a serious mistake has been made and to take responsibility for it.

You can probably trace this back to the Iraq war, where Tony Blair may not exactly have lied about the intelligence, but he implied strongly that it was way more convincing than it actually was - and looking back on it, lots of people felt misled (I include myself in that - it looks naive after Johnson, but at the time, I genuinely didn't think a Prime Minister would be prepared to mislead the country on something as important as that, especially as it was almost certain to come out that you'd misled everyone, as it eventually did). Subsequently, he's refused to admit it was a mistake (and that is still his position, I think). Then we had the financial crisis (where bankers never really owned their own mistakes). And now we have all the promises that Johnson made about the positive effects of Brexit and levelling up on the country (almost all lies and, in the case of Brexit, a massive strategic mistake that will take us years to recover from).

Johnson has made it all worse by demonstrating on numerous occasions that he couldn't give two hoots about ethics or propriety in government. He got away with it for years, up until the point when the cumulative effect of all the lies just became too much, even for his own supporters.

No doubt other narcissistic sociopaths will have taken note of how long he got away with it for - and how he is probably now going to swan off into a world of lucrative opportunities involving speeches for £100K a go. Like the bankers, he's not only failed to own his own mistakes, he's not going to suffer any meaningful penalty for making them either.

What sort of message does that send?

PS judging from the pitches being made by most of the Conservative leadership contenders to replace Johnson, it's looking like they're as addicted to making undeliverable promises as he is. Which further underlines the scale of the damage he's done.

Vangelis: an appreciation

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 15:13:18 +0100

This rather long post is about Greek musician Vangelis, who died last month. I’m writing it partly because, having read a reasonable number of the obituaries, I felt that there were some things that they missed (although who knows if anyone else will read this.… ). I should also point out that I’m not a fan of everything he’s ever done - all told, I reckon that I only really like about 20-25% of his total output (in particular, I’m not keen on his more bombastic material, especially the choral/symphonic stuff). But some of his music from the 70s and 80s in particular was important to me when I was growing up and I still listen to it reasonably often today - which is the other reason for writing this. So what do I think other obituarists have missed?

A change in attitudes over time

Understandably, much reference was made to Vangelis’ soundtrack work, particularly the “Blade Runner” score, for which he is now perhaps best regarded. But the music from “Blade Runner” wasn’t made available until 1994 (and even then, we didn’t get all of it). Over time, that piece of work has lent him a degree of musical cachet which - unless my memory is deceiving me - I don’t feel he possessed in the early 1980s, which was when I first started listening to his material. At that point, he was better known for “Chariots of Fire” and his partnership with Jon Anderson of Yes. That particular material (though only a small part of his total output) was generally seen as a bit middle-of-the-road - and certainly not anything to brag about liking if you were trying to impress the cool kids. Whereas now, there is reams of stuff about how cool and ahead-of-its-time the music for “Blade Runner” is, which has rather eclipsed everything else.

In part, I think this is because in the 80s, in the UK at least, attitudes to music were often rather more tribal/ideological than they are now. Vangelis started off making sixties pop and then became associated with prog rock (e.g. the album 666 with Aphrodite’s Child, his auditioning to replace Rick Wakeman in Yes and a somewhat ambitious 1976 concert in the Albert Hall, complete with a large choir). In the wake of punk, none of this was particularly “cool” - it was, after all, what punk was supposed to be rebelling against. And punk was all about a back-to-basics simple guitar chords and drums approach - the polar opposite of banks of expensive synthesisers and grandiose live shows. So at that point in time, I often felt that liking Vangelis was a dirty little secret which was best kept to myself - although I dare say it also had a fair bit to do with being a rather self-conscious and insecure teenager. These days, thankfully, no one seems to have a problem if you like a more eclectic range of stuff, prog rock has (to some extent at least) been rehabilitated and punk is seen as part of the ebb and flow of musical styles (rather than an all-encompassing ideology demanding total rejection of everything went before).

So, pleased as I am that Vangelis has since received the kind of recognition that I always thought he deserved, it’s worth pointing out that not everyone saw it that way at the time. And it’s a credit to him that he just carried on making the music he wanted to make, not really caring what the cool kids at the time thought - he was quite prepared to wait that one out.

The pantheon of Synth Gods

I also didn’t see that much discussion of where Vangelis sits in what you might call (appropriately enough for a Greek musician) the “pantheon of Synth Gods”. For me, what always marked him out was his ability - even in non-soundtrack work - to evoke mood and atmosphere. For example, if I cast my mind back to pieces like Oxygene or Equinoxe by fellow synth enthusiast Jean-Michel Jarre, they don’t really make me think of anything in particular - I just remember them sounding vaguely futuristic because of the almost exclusive use of synths, but that’s about it. Whereas many of the Vangelis pieces that I particularly like evoke something rather more specific - whether it’s an icy mountainscape in Himalaya (from the album China) or micro-organisms in some kind of imaginary BBC nature documentary in Soil Festivities.

The other contrast I would draw is by comparison with an outfit like Kraftwerk. It seems to me that Kraftwerk are all about taking the emotion out of music (and whilst this clearly works for some people, I'm afraid I find that whole "cool ironic detachment" kind of thing rather soulless). As noted above, Vangelis’ use of electronics was usually aiming in the opposite direction - and although synthesisers are very much to the fore, they’re often accompanied by extensive use of contrasting acoustic instruments, especially percussion (and for me it’s often the combination of the two that really marks him out from other synth musicians).

All of the above is, of course, what made him such a good soundtrack composer - and so in that respect, the obituarists were right to focus on that. But in doing so, they’ve rather obscured the vast range of styles he worked in - from pop through to neo-classical and avant garde experimentation. For my money, this is also something that marks him out from other synth artists from around the same period (although to be fair, not all the obituaries missed this - see this one from The Guardian).

Anecdotes

Anecdotes also seemed to be in short supply in most of the obits - which was disappointing because they paint a picture of Vangelis as a somewhat eccentric, larger than life personality. Here’s a slightly wonky video of Jon Anderson recounting his first meeting with Vangelis, who was wearing a full length kaftan and wielding a bow and arrow. This is followed by another anecdote about an unintentionally hilarious audition with Yes. We then fast forward to the early eighties and the barely imaginable horror of being forced by the record company to write a hit single and promote it on Top of the Pops….

There are some more anecdotes here - including a slightly different version of the bow and arrow incident (I dare say these things get embellished over the years, but apparently it’s true that he liked archery).

Unreleased tracks

Finally, rumour has it that there is a lot of unreleased material - but again, this didn’t get much of a mention in most of the obituaries I read. The obvious dilemma here is that, if he didn’t want this material to be released, why should it be released now? For example, two early albums - The Dragon and Hypothesis - were apparently released without his permission. Having listened to them, I can see why he didn’t want them released…. On the other hand, some of the unreleased material has been aired publicly, just not released on record (e.g. certain film scores and music for ballet/dance performances etc). So you could argue that this material is in a different category. We’ll just have to wait and see.

So farewell Vangelis - the world won’t sound the same without you (and it will also be less safe, because there will be one fewer Lord of Synth to protect us all from wayward comets).

Most underrated albums: See You Later, Earth, China, Soil Festivities

Other favourites: 666 (with Aphrodite’s Child), Apocalypse des Animaux, Albedo 0.39, Spiral, Opera Sauvage, Blade Runner, The City

What does the Draft2Digital / Smashwords merger mean for authors?

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 22:05:22 +0100

What are we to make of the recent announcement that Draft2Digital is acquiring competing self-publishing outfit Smashwords? Initially, I was a bit concerned because as an author, Smashwords has been the best performing platform for me over the years - and I wouldn't want to see it go the way of others which have closed down (like Feedbooks, BookieJar and Bibliotastic).

But as I understand it, Draft2Digital primarily competes with Smashwords when it comes to helping authors create ebooks and distribute to bigger retailers (like Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Amazon etc). It doesn't seem to compete when it comes to offering its own online "retail store". So on the face of it, this lack of overlap should mean that the Smashwords website will stay. Indeed, that is my reading of the press release and other materials.

I hope I'm right about that - because whilst most authors would love to be doing well on sites run by the likes of Apple, Amazon etc, this is pretty hard to achieve in practice (for example, it seems to me that on Amazon, it is well nigh impossible to get any meaningful level of downloads without using paid-for book promo services). So from my perspective - and I suspect for a fair number of other self-published authors - the Smashwords website is an important and worthwhile distribution channel in its own right.

The only concern I have is that it looks like Smashwords will probably - in the fullness of time - switch to using Draft2Digital's software for actually creating ebooks. That could be a good thing if the software is better - which it may well be. What would be less positive, in my view, would be if the merged company looked to impose a charge for creating books in the first place and/or decided to prevent authors offering books for free.

At the moment, my understanding is that both companies only make money if you offer your book as a paid download, where they take a percentage of each sale (but you can choose to offer it for free - which is what I've done). I'd argue that having a bunch of free books available is a good thing, because it helps to draw visitors to the site who may then be prepared to spend money on paid-for offerings - so it doesn't make sense to discourage that. However, I note that Feedbooks has abandoned this model, having discontinued its self-publishing platform, whilst continuing to offer paid-for books from conventional publishers (although on Feedbooks, rather oddly, there was never any option to charge for self-published work and it was always segregated from conventionally published material - so that may explain why they decided not to continue with it).

It's probably not realistic to expect the merged company to give any assurances on this point (and even if it did, there'd be nothing to stop them changing their minds later). But let's hope they don't abandon their "free to publish" model. I am moderately hopeful this will be the case because if you look at say, Amazon KDP, that is also a free-to-publish model (so if the merged company wants to start charging for ebook creation, it will have to persuade authors why it is worth paying when you don't have to in order to be on the biggest platform of all, namely Amazon). The time to worry would be if the likes of Amazon and others start imposing a charge for ebook creation or being on their platform (or both).

In conclusion, I'm cautiously optimistic about the merger on the basis that combining the author customer base of both outfits will make for a stronger company overall, better able to invest in things like the Smashwords site (which could look a bit slicker than it does - I've always thought Feedbooks had a cleaner interface). And the need to compete with and differentiate itself from Amazon et al may be enough to deter the merged company from making radical changes to its charging structure. Finally, it's worth reading the comments from Smashwords founder, Mark Coker, at the bottom of this blog post - although you could say "well, he would say that, wouldn't he?", he is at least trying to engage with authors' concerns.